To decommission an old server running a replicated MySQL database,
I had to prevent the (master) database from writing binary logs.

I figured I would need to

• stop the slaves
• edit the master database configuration by following instructions from
  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replication-howto-masterbaseconfig.html
  as pointed out by http://stackoverflow.com/a/6323535/282073
  # in /etc/my.cnf
server-id = 0
• restart gracefully the mysql service