With every new release of Mac OS X, the need to re-install Perl's MySQL driver "DBD::mysql" arises again. And every single time it does not work out of the box (i.e. using cpan). Since I'm giving up using Perl and write my new scripts (yes, also the Shell scripts) in PHP, partially because of problems like this, I was able to postpone dealing with this problem, which arised after installing Snow Leopard - up until today.

If you have the problem it is most likely (and has always been) due to wrong paths to MySQL's header files. The fix is simple, and if you google for it people were complaining about the same problem even under OS X 10.2. Here's the solution: Build the thing manually, giving the right paths to Makefile.PL:

I needed to backup the contents of a file sharing directory of a server in our LAN to the shiny new mirrored 1 TB RAID inside my Mac Pro. Having a simple backup is nice, but it's even better to have snapshots, with the possibility to jump back to any date and have the exact representation of the disk as it was back then (TimeMachine also does this pretty well for Macs).

Always creating a complete backup would be a waste of disk space par excellence and in my case - backup via LAN - also pretty hard on the network. Fortunately there is rsync, and there's our friends ssh and launchd. rsync takes advantage of *NIX file system hardlinks and when called with the right arguments only backs up new files since the last backup, pointing to the older copy of a file if the file has not changed in the meantime. Mike Rubel has written up a nice article covering these aspects of rsync, check it out.