Pythian Group

Welcome to another edition of Blogrotate. This has been an interesting week in the IT world, with Microsoft security issues being the major focus of attention.

Security

Once again, security flaws in Microsoft Operating Systems caused major problems for system administrators this past week. It began with Microsoft’s Security Response Center’s posting of February’s security bulletin.

Microsoft’s attempt’s to fix a 17-year-old bug resulted in a large number of computers having problems restarting. More information can be found here Restart issues after installing MS10-015 and Security patch results in BSOD, stops Windows from booting. It appear that this issue may have been caused by machines being previously infected by a rootkit

Another patch from Microsoft, the reliability update for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, turned out to be not so… reliable.

But what was of most concern to many system administrators was Microsoft’s security advisory concerning a vulnerability in the TLS and SSL protocols, since this affects not only the Microsoft Windows operating system but as TLS/SSL are an Internet standard, multiple vendors. Emil Protalinski at Ars Technica provides full coverage of the TLS/SSL flaw in Windows.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

The other day we began to encounter weird and random errors on small and innocent queries that shouldn’t give any errors at all. It all lead to one of our most basic health checks failing for no apparent reason.

The first clue that popped into our minds was related to case-sensitivity, since the failing check was looking for the column names of the only table in the schema with UPPER CASE name. This symptom was especially weird since all of this was happening on MySQL setups running on Windows, and so we’re not sure if this was being caused by some internal code library, MySQL, or Windows itself.

Since that was the only clue we then had, it seemed obvious that we should start fiddling with the lower_case_table_names system variable. After a couple of restarts, this approach was leading us nowhere, so we finally gave up on it.

Then, we had the brilliant idea of actually executing that statement by hand on the command line to see what happened:

C:\pythian>mysql -uXXXX -p XXXX -e "desc TABLE_NAME"
Enter password: *****
ERROR 1 (HY000) at line 1: Can't create/write to file 'C:\MySQL      mp\#sql_634_0.MYI' (Errcode: 22)

C:\pythian>perror 22
OS error code  22:  Invalid argument

C:\pythian>

None of us remembered seeing this one before, so we stared at the monitor for a few moments, not realizing the meaning of this message. I guess our focus on the case-sensitivity was driving us away a from the real cause. So . . .  time to check the my.ini file. Read the rest of this entry . . .