Last year we purchased our first xserve. Yesterday our second one arrived at our office. Today "he's" standing on my desk. Tomorrow, when we moved him to our data center, he will help encoding videos ...

There are tons of tutorials about setting up master / slave replication for MySQL. Here are my own quick notes:

1. Master: /etc/mysql/my.cnf

[mysqld]
server-id = 1
log_bin   = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log
expire_logs_days = 1
max_binlog_size  = 100M

2. Slave: /etc/mysql/my.cnf

[mysqld]
server-id = 2
log_bin   = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log
expire_logs_days = 10
max_binlog_size  = 100M

3. Master: granting privileges for slave user on database master

GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON . 
TO '<slave_username>'@'<slave_ip>' 
IDENTIFIED BY '<slave_password>';

4. Master: creating database dump

Start mysql console as database root and enter the following command:

FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;

DON'T shut down the mysql client, otherwise the table lock is lost. Open a second shell to the database master and enter the following command on commandline:

mysqldump -u root -p... --databases ... --opt > masterdump.sql

Next, switch back to your mysql console and enter the following command:

SHOW MASTER STATUS;

The output will look something like:

mysql> show master status;
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| File             | Position | Binlog_Do_DB | Binlog_Ignore_DB |
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| mysql-bin.000004 | 40140874 |              |                  | 
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> 

Write down "File" and "Position" ... you will need it later for starting replication.

Now you can unlock the tables:

UNLOCK TABLES;

5. Slave: import database dump

Copy masterdump.sql to the slave server and import the database:

mysql -u root -p... < masterdump.sql

This may take quite some time ...

6. Slave: start replication

Start mysql client on slave and enter the following commands:

CHANGE MASTER TO 
MASTER_HOST='<master_host>', 
MASTER_USER='<slave_username>', 
MASTER_PASSWORD='<slave_password>', 
MASTER_LOG_FILE='<mysql-bin file name you've written down in step 4>', 
MASTER_LOG_POS=<master position you've written down in step 4>;

START SLAVE;

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