An Anti-Spam gateway #7: MySQL

(NOTE: this is part of the “An Anti-Spam gateway” series)

Time for MySQL. We’ll be using it just for storing the bayes tokens, not for per-user configuration (because, in this case, there is none) or anything else.

Note: if you already have a working MySQL on the server, being used for something else (this isn’t Windows, you can use the same machine for several different things :)), just skip to the next part.

So, go to http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/, choose the General Availability Release (it’s the top one - at this moment, it’s version 5.0), then scroll down a lot until you find the Source Downloads. Get the .tar.gz file. Uncompress it, enter the directory, and then…

export CFLAGS="-O2" export CXXFLAGS="-O2 -fno-exceptions -fno-rtti" ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --localstatedir=/var/mysql --sysconfdir=/etc --without-innodb

(note: your browser may have split the “./configure” line in two. It starts with “./configure”, and ends with “–without-innodb”.)

then do the usual

make make install

If everything went well,

mysql_install_db

and start the server with:

mysqld_safe --user=mysql &

Then assign a password to the MySQL root account (which is not the OS’s root account!):

mysqladmin -u root password "newpwd" mysqladmin -u root -h host_name password "newpwd"

Replace “host_name” with the correct one, and “newpwd” with something else, of course.

Now, for efficiency, you should have an /etc/my.cnf file with several options set manually. The MySQL sources include some examples in the support-files directory: my-small.cnf, my-medium.cnf, etc.. Copy one to /etc/my.cnf, edit it, then restart the server. Nope, I won’t give detailed instructions for that here… read the MySQL docs at http://www.mysql.com.

Next: how to create the bayes database, and how to configure SpamAssassin to use it.

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