Cloning MySQL 5.6 instances

A tip for all those cloud users that like cloning database servers (as reported in my book Effective MySQL – Replication Techniques in Depth).

Starting with MySQL 5.6, MySQL instances have a UUID. Cloning servers to quickly create slaves will result in the following error message.

mysql> SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G
...
  Last_IO_Error: Fatal error: The slave I/O thread stops because master and slave have equal MySQL server UUIDs; these UUIDs must be different for replication to work.
...

The solution is simple. Clear our the file based configuration file (located in the MySQL datadir) and restart the MySQL instance.

$ rm -f /mysql/data/auto.cnf
$ service mysql restart