The downside of a development server is … it’s for development.

It is  not always cost effective to have the exact same setup as you you have in your production environment …

Especially if you have a multi server setup.

So I find myself today moving /var/lib/mysql … being as the OS drive is very small, and pulling down a near 20GB database backup and then trying to rebuild the database on the same drive … well as you can imagine caused a few problems doh

/etc/init.d/mysql stop
mv /var/lib/mysql /raid_5/

So surely you just symlink … right?

ln -s /raid_5/mysql /var/lib/mysql
/etc/init.d/mysql start

Well then answer would be no … upon importing the backup

mysql < backup.sql
Can't create table './database/table.frm' (errno: 121)

A nice errorno: 121

/etc/init.d/mysql stop
rm -rf /var/lib/mysql
mkdir /var/lib/mysql
chown mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql
mount --bind /raid_5/mysql /var/lib/mysql
/etc/init.d/mysql start

et voila …

Data directory is relocated and the import working smoothly. Feel free to suggest any “cleaner” methods.

UPDATE: Please rememeber to add the ‘mount’ line into your rc.local otherwise when you reboot this mount will be gone!