Having decided to set up a Master-Slave replication I found this article, which seems exactly what I want.
So I fired up the MySQL Console in Navicat to give everything a try, and the commands do nothing. So it seems one of these is the problem:
- The MySQL Console is not the tool I want
- The MySQL Console on Navicat is imperfect
- I am doing it wrong
This is the first step in the article I linked:
/sbin/ifconfig
Does nothing on the remote server connection (using the Console in Navicat) but works fine on the MySQL Console on the WAMP Server on my local machine.
UPDATE:
next day - clear head - realize what I was trying to do is probably not possible and not necessary. Web site is hosted on some rackspace servers in California, and I doubt they want me messing around with their server settings.
I was trying to set up separate databases so that the write-heavy backend did not interfere with reads in the front end. This morning I reworked the calls which were causing table locks & now the slow backend queries should not lock any table required by the front end.
So basically problem solved. This why I should only post on here in the morning, not after 8-10 hours coding.

ifconfig(probably as sudo) – DrColossos May 11 '11 at 6:13