With my recent efforts into lifestreaming, this is no longer the case. My content now comes in whenever I post content on any website. I’m a fairly frequent user of the internet services that feed my lifestream (Twitter, Delicious, Flickr, etc), and keeping the content on my local version up to date was turned into a troublesome task, forcing manual, tedious syncing each time I went to work.

Without further explanation, here are the steps I took to make a one line MySQL database syncing command. There may be better ways to do this and if you know them, please comment.

1. Setup a MySQL “dump” user. Mine is cleverly named “dump” and is passwordless, although if you are more security conscious than I am, you can add a password of your choosing. On the server, log into mysql and issue this GRANT statement from a user with the proper permissions.

2. Create a bash alias
~/.bashrc :

Notes: For this example, you need to replace a few things.

1. dbname = the remote database name
2. hostname = the remote hostname
3. dbname_local = the local database name
4. clone_lifestream = the name of the alias, can be anything.

I had a hell of a time wondering what was going wrong with my webserver under load and finally found the answer here.

Turns out that Apache Bench takes the first pulled request and compares the length to all subsequent requests. Makes sense for a purely static page, but when you have a random image cropping up, you’re sure to see at least a couple bits difference in length.

So if you’re serving straight, hand coded HTML, enjoy the feeling of knowing that you’re getting the same length content each and every time… but if you’re like the rest of us (and anyone who would actually be using Apache Bench) feel free to rage that there’s no command line switch to turn off that silly notification.