Have you ever forgotten your MySQL root password? It’s one of those things that just happens despite the numerous precautions one might take. As a result, you are locked out of your database server. You can’t create new databases and are left with little control over the state of your database server. In such situations knowing how to regain root access to your database server comes in handy. So here’s what you can do to reset the password for the root user in MySQL on both Windows and Linux. [click to continue...]

Apart from video games one of the great advantages of using computers is that they don’t seem to mind doing boring and repetitive tasks that we would rather not do. For monotonous tasks such as running daily backups we are better off scheduling them to run at a certain time every day, and do more interesting stuff with our time. Linux and UNIX usually come with the utility “crontab” by default. This very useful command allows you to schedule tasks to run at a specified time and repeat as configured. A task scheduled using “crontab” is called a “cron job”.

“A stitch in time saves nine”, goes an old saying. In the world of computers we refer to that stitch as backups. When running a production IT infrastructure, it is imperative that we achieve an uptime on our servers and applications of as close to a hundred percent as possible. While there are a number of ways to make an IT infrastructure solid, it is impossible to make it failure proof. So we make a plan B.