I had some trouble getting Rekall to work with my MySQL server, but in the end I succeeded. Here’s what I needed:

The short road installing just the binaries lead to an error:

dlcompat: Library not loaded:
/usr/local/lib/mysql/libmysqlclient.14.dylib

The reason is that the original MySQL binaries are built with the --disable-shared flag and contain only the static libraries instead of the dynamic ones.

I had to build the dynamic libraries (actually it’s only one library: libmysqlclient) myself from source, then Rekall started to work with MySQL:

$ tar xzf mysql-4.1.14.tar.gz
$ cd mysql-4.1.14
$ ./configure --enable-shared --without-server
$ make
$ cd libmysql
$ sudo make install

Update: There are a few pages out there that deal with this issue in some ways. See for yourself if you need more information:

  • Lenz Grimmer (on the MySQL Internals list) explains how to build the shared libraries.
  • pamalite, developing his own application, solved the problem linking the static library.
  • Note: there is no need to replace a running installation when compiling from source. All you need is libmysqlclient.dylib.