Basic questions on slave servers

[Andy Smith]

Hi list,


  hopefully a couple of easy to answer fundamental questions on a simple master slave
setup.

1) When a DB is in slave mode, does MySQL prevent any other updates to the DB other than
those from the master?
ie, can someone accidentally update the slave with data that doesnt match the master DB or
is this prevented, or put
another way, is the slave effectively in read-only mode whilst it is running as a slave?

2) If the master should fail and I want my slave to run as a normal standalone read/write
DB what do I have to do? Is it
just:
stop slave;
reset master;
?

thanks in advance! Andy.