[Leaplist] Ubuntu 8.02 and MySQL 5.x

[Dan Cherry]

On Sunday 23 November 2008 12:01:57 pm Max F Lang wrote:
> After buying my son a new laptop, I took over his old one to install
> and play around with Ubuntu. Actually really been enjoying it, it
> works beautifully in almost all ways, including X and Gnome. I used
> Synaptic to install all the available MySQL ver5 server and client
> packages (and a bunch others) to play around with the system.
>
> 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.

iirc, the initial installation of mysql creates 'root' and NO password - and 
in theory you should set it immediately, and create a mysql user-admin with 
full capability (then the mysql root becomes a failsafe mechanism).

With respect to the debian-admin password, it's kept in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf 
(accessible from ubuntu root only).  You can try setting the mysql 
debian-admin password (using mysql root) back to the password you find in 
debian.cnf (or if you're really feeling froggy, you can try matching the 
debian.cnf to the password you set in the mysql debian-admin - which if you 
get working, will likely never touch again ;-) 

(I'd opt for the former - in case the debian-cnf password exists elsewhere)

If changing the debian-admin password works, you should be able to do the 
update, or remove the package, and reinstall from scratch - your choice...

hth,
Dan

>
> 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.
>
> I'm sure the MySQL server update is important, and I'd love to help
> it out. How can I go about removing the current server package to
> reinstall? And based on normal practices, how then in the future do I
> admin an Ubuntu MySQL server with the default admin and/or root users?
>
>
> Thanks!
> Max.



-- 
Dan
Finding a solution to a problem doesn't solve the problem...
Implementing the solution, solves the problem

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