Locating older version of MySQL 4, MySQL 5, source code, binaries, rpm, etc.

Quite some time ago, we needed to move a customer’s MySQL 4 server from one location to another. In the process, we figured we’d update the server to use some moderately modern version like MySQL 5.0 at least. Also, if we were to have any chance of virtualizing and upgrading the actual server environment to something more modern like Ubuntu 10.04.LTS or 12.04.LTS, or Debian 6.0, we’d have to re-compile the sources regardless. Not taking other incompatibilities into account, that line of thinking ran into Chuck Norris because the Windows DLLs supplied with the application using the database were not compatible with anything but MySQL 4.

The particular version of MySQL 4 running on the customer’s server was self-compiled (by us), so I figured I’d at least locate the “most recent” version of MySQL 4. To my surprise, this turned out to be harder than I could possibly imagine. In a world where “nobody” forgets anything, I could not find a single trace of a source distribution for MySQL 4. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple probably know the size of shoes I wear, but they don’t know where MySQL 4 sources are located. This struck me as very odd as MySQL 4 was a) very popular, b) open source, and c) should at least reside on half a dozen servers on the Internet, or so I thought.

Like a core dump out of the blue skies, someone Skyped me a link today. The person had ran into a mirror archive and remembered that I was looking for this “eons ago”. I have now mirrored most of that archive into/onto my own cloud store. I’ll go through that in a few days and remove the things I don’t need, but this may very well turn out to he a lifesaver.

I wonder if Sun and/or Oracle decided that keeping old MySQL versions around was a bad idea …

If you, like me, need to find some odd version of MySQL, for whatever reason, here are two links that may be of good use to you:

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.mysql.com/Downloads/
http://mirror.provenscaling.com/mysql/