To configure a source to use binary log file position based replication, you must ensure that binary logging is enabled, and establish a unique server ID.

Each server within a replication topology must be configured with a unique server ID, which you can specify using the server_id system variable. This server ID is used to identify individual servers within the replication topology, and must be a positive integer between 1 and (2³²)−1. The default server_id value is 1; you can change this at runtime by issuing a statement like this one:

SET GLOBAL server_id = 2;

Organization and selection of the server IDs is arbitrary, as long as each server ID is different from every other server ID in use by any other server in the replication topology. Note that if a value of 0 was set previously for the server ID, you must restart the server to initialize the source with your new nonzero server ID. Otherwise, a server restart is not needed when you change the server ID, unless you make other configuration changes that require it.

Binary logging is required on the source because the binary log is the basis for replicating changes from the source to its replicas. Binary logging is enabled by default (the log_bin system variable is set to ON). The --log-bin option tells the server what base name to use for binary log files. It is recommended that you specify this option to give the binary log files a non-default base name, so that if the host name changes, you can easily continue to use the same binary log file names (see Section B.3.7, “Known Issues in MySQL”). If binary logging was previously disabled on the source using the --skip-log-bin option, you must restart the server without this option to enable it.