Recently, we were affected by an ignored configuration option introduced in MySQL 5.6. This incident caused us to perform extended planning of downtime and the rebuilding of the slave. In this post, we’ll discuss our encounter with binlog_error_action and likely bad default.

The incident started with an alert from our monitoring platform that a check failed to verify a MySQL master’s binary log coordinates. My colleague working from the other side of the globe observed the following:

mysql> show master status;
    Empty set (0.00 sec)
    mysql> show binary logs;
    ERROR 1381 (HY000): You are not using binary logging

Interestingly, the MySQL slave was still reporting that everything was okay!

mysql> show slave status\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
               Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event
                  Master_Host: master
                  Master_User: replicator
                  Master_Port: 3306
                Connect_Retry: 60
              Master_Log_File: mysql-bin.000186
          Read_Master_Log_Pos: 1069066810
               Relay_Log_File: mysqld-relay-bin.000245
                Relay_Log_Pos: 1069067004
        Relay_Master_Log_File: mysql-bin.000186
             Slave_IO_Running: Yes
            Slave_SQL_Running: Yes
              Replicate_Do_DB:
          Replicate_Ignore_DB:
           Replicate_Do_Table:
       Replicate_Ignore_Table:
      Replicate_Wild_Do_Table:
  Replicate_Wild_Ignore_Table:
                   Last_Errno: 0
                   Last_Error:
                 Skip_Counter: 0
          Exec_Master_Log_Pos: 1069066810
              Relay_Log_Space: 1069067296
              Until_Condition: None
               Until_Log_File:
                Until_Log_Pos: 0
           Master_SSL_Allowed: No
           Master_SSL_CA_File:
           Master_SSL_CA_Path:
              Master_SSL_Cert:
            Master_SSL_Cipher:
               Master_SSL_Key:
        Seconds_Behind_Master: 0
Master_SSL_Verify_Server_Cert: No
                Last_IO_Errno: 0
                Last_IO_Error:
               Last_SQL_Errno: 0
               Last_SQL_Error:
  Replicate_Ignore_Server_Ids:
             Master_Server_Id: 23294781
                  Master_UUID: 7e2e60eb-39fb-11ea-a248-005056b589fd
             Master_Info_File: mysql.slave_master_info
                    SQL_Delay: 0
          SQL_Remaining_Delay: NULL
      Slave_SQL_Running_State: Slave has read all relay log; waiting for the slave I/O thread to update it
           Master_Retry_Count: 86400
                  Master_Bind:
      Last_IO_Error_Timestamp:
     Last_SQL_Error_Timestamp:
               Master_SSL_Crl:
           Master_SSL_Crlpath:
           Retrieved_Gtid_Set: 7e2e60eb-39fb-11ea-a248-005056b589fd:50961813-81101493
            Executed_Gtid_Set: 2366bbb5-39fb-11ea-a246-005056b5f82f:1-818,
7e2e60eb-39fb-11ea-a248-005056b589fd:1-81101493
                Auto_Position: 1
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Guess what my colleague saw in the error log?