Upgrading MySQL on Red Hat Linux Despite Dependency Conflicts

Recently I needed to upgrade MySQL from version 4.1 to 5.0 on Red Hat. I was having some dependency conflicts that were vexing me. After searching around the Web I figured out how to do it. Because I’m a Linux novice, I’m sure there are more details I don’t understand, so if anyone wants to provide insight, that would be great.

Here are the basic steps I performed:

1. Downloaded the .rpm files from the MySQL site (server, client, shared libraries, shared compatibility libraries) for my O/S version to a single folder on the server.
2. Tried the basic install (from the directory with the .rpm files): rpm -ivh MySQL-*
3. That gave me errors about dependency conflicts with previously installed MySQL packages. I used this command to find out which packages were installed: rpm -qa | grep mysql
4. I went through one by one trying to uninstall them (rpm -e <package name>). However, I ran into problems because there were some duplicates. For the duplicates I ran the following command: rpm -e –nodeps –allmatches <package name>.
5. Then I reran the install command from step 2, and it worked!

This page has some helpful tips on starting up the MySQL service and setting the root password, etc.

Python GMail SMTP Example

(Note: Please see my latest posts at my new blog!)

I need to be able to send an email from my python script, and I wanted to be able to use my GMail for the outgoing SMTP server. It becomes a little tricky because the GMail servers require authentication. I searched around and found some good examples on the Internet and then fine tuned them a bit.

import os
import smtplib
import mimetypes
from email.MIMEMultipart import MIMEMultipart
from email.MIMEBase import MIMEBase
from email.MIMEText import MIMEText
from email.MIMEAudio import MIMEAudio
from email.MIMEImage import MIMEImage
from email.Encoders import encode_base64

def sendMail(subject, text, *attachmentFilePaths):
  gmailUser = 'yo.mama@gmail.com'
  gmailPassword = 'bogus!'
  recipient = 'test@test.com'

  msg = MIMEMultipart()
  msg['From'] = gmailUser
  msg['To'] = recipient
  msg['Subject'] = subject
  msg.attach(MIMEText(text))

  for attachmentFilePath in attachmentFilePaths:
    msg.attach(getAttachment(attachmentFilePath))

  mailServer = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 587)
  mailServer.ehlo()
  mailServer.starttls()
  mailServer.ehlo()
  mailServer.login(gmailUser, gmailPassword)
  mailServer.sendmail(gmailUser, recipient, msg.as_string())
  mailServer.close()

  print('Sent email to %s' % recipient)

def getAttachment(attachmentFilePath):
  contentType, encoding = mimetypes.guess_type(attachmentFilePath)

  if contentType is None or encoding is not None:
    contentType = 'application/octet-stream'

  mainType, subType = contentType.split('/', 1)
  file = open(attachmentFilePath, 'rb')

  if mainType == 'text':
    attachment = MIMEText(file.read())
  elif mainType == 'message':
    attachment = email.message_from_file(file)
  elif mainType == 'image':
    attachment = MIMEImage(file.read(),_subType=subType)
  elif mainType == 'audio':
    attachment = MIMEAudio(file.read(),_subType=subType)
  else:
    attachment = MIMEBase(mainType, subType)
  attachment.set_payload(file.read())
  encode_base64(attachment)

  file.close()

  attachment.add_header('Content-Disposition', 'attachment',   filename=os.path.basename(attachmentFilePath))
  return attachment

Derived from: http://kutuma.blogspot.com/2007/08/sending-emails-via-gmail-with-python.html and http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2003-September/225540.html