The recent upgrades of Cpanel have been a pain because they've broken mysqlhotcopy. Not kosher. Fortunately fixing this is pretty easy, by simply downgrading the DBD module of Perl, which mysqlhotcopy relies on.

Usually the error is something like this:

To solve this, simply downgrade the DBD to version 4.001. Create a script anywhere on your root folder as, say, dbd-downgrade.sh:

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#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/src
wget -O dbd.tar.gz  "http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.001.tar.gz"
gzip -cd dbd.tar.gz | tar xf -
rm -rf dbd.tar.gz
cd DBD-mysql-4.001
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

Then of course chmod the file to executable (644) and run it:

Then try your mysqlhotcopy command again. It should work. The only thing to consider is that if your Cpanel is setup to upgrade automatically, it may rebuild DBD. You may need to downgrade the DBD again, until this thing is fixed!

If after this update, you see the error for RELOAD privileges, like this…

DBD::mysql::db do failed: Access denied; you need the RELOAD privilege for this operation at /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy line 472.

…then simply login to mysql as "root" user through the root SSH terminal, and execute the following command:

mysql>  grant all privileges on *.* to root@localhost;
mysql>  flush privileges;

Done. That should do it. Let me know if it doesn't.

A more long term fix

MySQL bug list has a couple of suggested fixes. If you are comfortable with Perl, you can edit the code in /usr/bin/mysqlhotcopy and have it solved in a better way.

Latest Cpanel updates are breaking Movable type installations, wreaking havoc with 500 Server Error messages and causing core dumps all over the place. Here's the kludgish workaround, that, well, works.

A user on MT forums suggested that downgrading to DBD::Mysql 2.9007 should do the trick. It does. Six Apart seems to be aware of it.

Here's a little script for Cpanel/WHM users to execute on their SSH shells. Save it as, say, "dbidowngrade.sh" in your root folder, CHMOD it to 755, and execute it with "./dbidowngrade.sh" at the command prompt.

Important Note:

Yes, some people will have problems with Cpanel updating their DBD::Mysql with the /upcp script, in which case you should probably set up a cron job to execute the above script on a regular basis. I have it up as hourly and it takes just a few seconds. I have commented out the lines in green because you don't need to download the file from CPAN more than once.

Please remember, this is merely a temporary solution. Movable Type should of course have an update soon, and Cpanel should shortly start providing the 3.0001 version in the near future.

Update: July 8, 2005

The latest update of DBD::Mysql, 3.0001_3, works for me. So here's the new code:

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#!/bin/sh
cd /usr/src
 
wget -O dbd.tar.gz "http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-3.0001_3.tar.gz"
gzip -cd dbd.tar.gz | tar xf -
rm -rf dbd.tar.gz
 
cd DBD-mysql-3.0001_3
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install

Update: July 6, 2005

Looks like the DBD::Mysql author has released a 3.0001_2 developer update. I haven't been able to install it, it gives me a bunch of errors but that's par for the course from 'developer' versions of software. YMMV. I'll stick with the 2.9007 for now.

Original method: Downgrading surely works

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#!/bin/sh
#---------------------------------------------
# Script to downgrade to DBD::mysql 2.9007
#---------------------------------------------
cd /usr/src
wget -O dbd.tar.gz "http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/DBD/DBD-mysql-2.9007.tar.gz"
gzip -cd dbd.tar.gz | tar xf -
rm -rf dbd.tar.gz
cd DBD-mysql-2.9007
perl Makefile.PL
make
make install
 
# Clean up
cd /usr/src
rm -rf DBD-mysql-2.9007