Introducing MySQL 5 Replication Playground

As promised when I talked about the MySQL Sandbox and as mentioned in this (very) recent article on replication, I have released a testing environment for replication, called the MySQL 5 Replication Playground.
It's a package that creates in one single server an array of four replicating nodes using MySQL 5.0 or 5.1. The purpose of this package is to help developers and administrators when they need to test applications involving replication. You don't need to use several boxes. One machine is enough. With just one instance of MySQL installed, the Replication Playground will install four data directories and it will create the necessary scripts to start, stop, and using the nodes.
The installation comes in two flavors: standard (i.e. one master and three slaves, as usual) and circular (where each node is at once master and slave, as explained in the above mentioned article).
Once you install it, you can play with it and test your failover procedures, without worrying about your valuable production data. The playground works with separated ports and sockets, and it's completely independent from any other MySQL installation.

The docs in the distribution package contain also some sample sessions with both the standard and the circular installation.

The package requires:

• Linux, or FreeBSD (theoretically, it should work with any Unix flavor, but it has been tested only with Linux and FreeBSD)
• MySQL 5.0 or 5.1
• bash
• tar
• gzip
• Perl (for the installation)
• Optionally, you need the Perl DBI and DBD::mysql to run some test tools