WordPress and MySQL on OpenSolaris

The next step in the list for mov­ing my minor web­sites to OpenSol­ar­is (see the first post for the motiv­a­tion) was to set up MySQL. After I down­loaded the OpenSol­ar­is Web Stack pack­age, MySQL was installed and run­ning, so it was more a mat­ter of tweak­ing. Little things like copy­ing the /etc/mysql/5.0/my-huge.cnf to /etc/mysql/my.cnf so that the default con­fig­ur­a­tion takes advant­age of the 2 GB of RAM, for example. 

I’ve heard con­flict­ing things about wheth­er one needs a root pass­word for MySQL, giv­en that it uses the Unix root iden­tity by default. After my years in secur­ity and iden­tity I decided to set one any­way, as recom­men­ded by the MySQL post-install­a­tion setup doc­u­ment­a­tion, even if it would be hard for any­one to get into the machine to do any dam­age, since it will be behind a firewall/router.

The next step was to move the Word­Press-based sites. I decided to try the export/import facil­it­ies in Word­Press, since I haven’t tried those out before, and it meant being able to use a new MySQL data­base with no cruft in it. I set up new users for the spe­cif­ic data­bases, copied the files across with rsync, impor­ted the XML file, and voila! It all worked out pretty well, although reset­ting the vari­ous con­fig­ur­a­tion options in Word­Press took a few minutes.