ZuhaiBlog » AWS

Backing up and Restoring your MySQL RDS Instance (and other Cloud DBs)

zuhaib — Sat, 28 May 2011 05:25:33 +0000

As more and more things move to the “cloud” as a Sys Admin you might find your self tasked with managing a Database that you don’t have shell access too. That has been the case for me with my last two jobs, Laughing Squid and now as Senior Sys Admin at Oxygen Cloud. With Oxygen we needed to backup some AWS RDS Instances and wanted to do it using a server on EC2 so we don’t have the bottle next of our local internet. This same method works with Rackspace Cloud Sites which I used at Laughing Squid. Its use a little known (could not find it easily with a google search) trick with mysqldump

mysqldump -P  -h -u mysql_user -p database_name table_name > backup.sql

To restore your DB in the cloud you use a more well-known mysql technique

mysql -u mysql_user -p -h  cloud_db_name < backup.sql

Amazon Route 53

zuhaib — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 08:48:38 +0000

Just moved one of my domains to Amazon Route 53 after zoneedit cant handle the current DDoS they are under and they are not updating information very well. I know they are free so I guess you can expect crappy service but I also pay for another domain that I am going to move to Route 53 if this test goes well. But the current setup for Amazon Route 53 is a PITA unless you plan on building a script to use the API or use a 3rd party tool like cli53

Getting Twitter and Facebook Analytics

zuhaib — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:35:46 +0000

So A few weeks back someone tip me on to Thinkup, http://thinkupapp.com/, An PHP app that lets you get some basic Analytics from your twitter and facebook followers. Also as an upside it provides you a backup of your twitter and facebook feed as it stores it in a local MySQL database. You can view sample of my twitter data here: http://thinkup.zuhaib.me/. Not to useful for me as I am not a crazy twitter but I can see some interesting potential in it.

Also right now I am running it on a EC2 server from Amazon using their new Free Tier, http://aws.amazon.com/free/, so it gives me a chance to test out a few things with that. If you plan to do the same I suggest you check out my forum post about an mysql issue that wil cause performance issue and the fix: http://zuzu.pk/17n I suggest you give it a spin if you have some free webspace.