[Leaplist] Ubuntu 8.02 and MySQL 5.x

[Dan Cherry]

On Sunday 23 November 2008 1:03:05 pm Jason Boxman wrote:
> 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.

the password in debian.cnf is a plain text password.  The password stored 
within mysql is encrypted.  use the passwd() function in mysql to encrypt the 
plain text string from debian.cnf, and you should be good to go.

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

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