Akom's Tech Ruminations

Various tech outbursts - code and solutions to practical problems

Code and Hacks MySQL Master-Master Replication over a Secure Stunnel Connection (SSL)

Posted by Admin • Saturday, February 7. 2009 • Category: Code and Hacks
I threw this together because I had to figure it out myself. I found info on how to setup master-master, and I found info on how to set up MySQL replication over stunnel. But master-master over stunnel turned out to be a little different. Not much, but here it is.

First of all - I won't go into the steps for setting up Master-Master itself - that's very well documented. Let's assume that you can convince one of your mysql's to slave off the other, and vice versa. (I used this page as a guide).

With that accomplished, let's assume that the boxes are not sitting next to each other but are in separate colo's or offices, and have some insecure internet to go between them (or maybe you don't even trust the local LAN). Yes, MySQL does have built-in SSL stuff, but so far the consensus is that it's rather difficult to work with. Moreover, I am more willing to trust stunnel (just my feeling on it).

Why not use ssh? Using something like ssh -n with a for loop that restarts it just doesn't sound enterprise-grade. I want something that actively reconnects when needed, based on active usage, and is actually intended for this. I still use SSH for port tunnelling all the time, but those are short-lived tunnels for my own personal use or debugging.

So our goals are: Secure transport and identity validation. Here we go.

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