We are pleased to announce that we have released an Open Source project called ShadowTail to the world at large.

Shadowtail is a Java/Spring framework for gathering numerical data (statistics) about a Java application, and writing the data to files. It is particularly useful as a source of data to feed Orca, the free tool for plotting textual data onto a directory on a Web server.

Why would you want to use Shadowtail?

Shadowtail helps you to monitor your software application or service by logging application and application container data over time. The data format is suitable for plotting or for analysis.

I wanted to move my /var/lib/mysql directory to /data/mysql (a new partition). So I copied copied them and made the appropriate change in /etc/my.cnf. On restarting mysql with /etc/init.d/mysql start, I got a failure. 

On looking in the /var/log/messages file, I found:

Nov 23 17:48:46 carpenomen kernel: [ 2714.258037] audit(1227462526.718:13): type=1503 operation="inode_create" requested_mask="w::" denied_mask="w::" name="/data/mysql/carpenomen.lower-test" pid=19659 profile="/usr/sbin/mysqld" namespace="default"
Nov 23 17:48:46 carpenomen kernel: [ 2714.310572] audit(1227462526.770:14): type=1503 operation="inode_permission" requested_mask="rw::" denied_mask="rw::" name="/data/mysql/ibdata1" pid=19659 profile="/usr/sbin/mysqld" namespace="default"