[Leaplist] Ubuntu 8.02 and MySQL 5.x

[Jason Boxman]

On Sunday 23 November 2008 12:01:57 Max F Lang wrote:
<snip>
> A big problem first cropped up that Ubuntu (or general Debian?) MySQL
> uses a special back-end admin user to do updates and MySQL system
> administration, along with a basically impotent root user with its
> own unknown password. This immediately left me with no way to use the
> server, as I couldn't add my own user or change the root user's
> permissions. No adding, dropping, etc databases or doing much of
> anything else. Using the normal procedure, I reset the root password
> and brought up its permissions to get stuff done, and also reset the
> special Debian admin user's password. Now I get the impression I
> shouldn't have done that last step, at least.

I don't do a ton with MySQL, but I do have an Etch install of version 5.0.x.

> Now Synaptic tells me there's an update to the server package, and
> because the admin user's password is not what the updater is
> expecting, the package update fails. Nor can I now just remove the
> server package to reinstall it back to default. The command line apt
> can't help, and I'm no apt/Synaptic expert. And Synaptic has no "just
> remove the damn package anyway" button.

You might look in:

/etc/mysql/debian.cnf

It'll define a password for debian-sys-maint which is probably the account it 
is looking for.  PostgreSQL has a similar special user configuration for 
updates on Debian.  The file's readable only by root.

I don't know if that is the actual password or if it's encrypted, though.  If 
it's the latter, your knowledge of what to actually set it to won't help that 
much.


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