If you didn't comment it, you won't be able to connect to mysql server.... The message about it(skip-networking) appears when you install mysql-server, it prompts you to look for it after installation with apt-get.

mysql won;t start.. not that i can't connect.

Doesn't have anything to do with the current problem.

When i try restart mysql i get this message:
# /etc/init.d/mysql restart
Stopping MySQL database server: mysqld.
Starting MySQL database server: mysqld...failed.
Please take a look at the syslog.
/usr/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
error: 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)'
Check that mysqld is running and that the socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' exists!


and that is directly after reinstall. skip networking relates to allowing connections from other machines?

try as root

apt-get install mysql-server

thats what i did to sort out the problem

I figured it out.. i'm an idiot.

Early yesterday i accidently changed the permissions of the /tmp directory to 755 when i was trying to change the permissions of a differnt tmp directory... changed it back to 777 and walla!

agh!!!! so annoying wasted 3 hours on that.

hehe easily done, i wiped out my mysql backup yesterday by putting a > instead of a < when I was dumping data (meant having to switch backt to my Windows PC and ripping the database of there)

libmysqlclient is used (AFAIK) by other programs that need to connect to a MySQL database. Remember that you can access databases across a network, and potentially may need to access several different servers each of which runs a different version of MySQL, hence requiring different client libraries. This is not dangerous; you should observe no conflicts as far as I can tell.

As far as database backups go, you may wish to look into using the mysql-backup script (http://worldcommunity.com/opensource...ql_backup.html) to do automated unattended backups at standard intervals, thus avoiding the whole "I blew away my only database" problem.

Finally, if you lose your root password, the proper way to restore it (without bungling the configuration) is to become root (i.e. "su") and run:

mysqladmin -u root password '[NEW PASSWORD]'

where you replace [NEW PASSWORD] with a password of your choosing. Be careful if you are doing this on a publically accessible server, especially in a high security environment. Since your password is written on the terminal it will be briefly accessible to all users on the system who have a degree of techical sophistication, and depending on your shell it may be cached elsewhere (e.g. .bash_history).

Haha, you can replace passwords that way? I thought you could only use that method when a user has no password, D'oh! BTW, this is a fresh install of debian, which is why I only had that backup on my harddisk drive (I have plenty dotted round the house after I got paranoid one night) but I am going to look at that automated database backup tool (words useful and lazy come to mind).

Currently, amaroK (v.1.2.3) is storing band details in its own database on my mysql server, and this is proving to be a pretty cool feature. Can you use mySQL as a server like msSQL to store user login's for the network etc? Not that I need this, but I read on www.webmonkey.com that mySQL is limitted because it is optimised for speed aposed to features.

MySQL has (especially in older versions) been faulted for lack of features, transactioning being a prime example. But I can't believe that anyone trusts security to Microsoft, certainly not handling distributed authentication!

Whether one can use MySQL to perform network authentication is a function of the authentication agent, not the database (it just stores and reports information, it doesn't control logins). I believe it is possible to use MySQL as a backend, but I have never done so. Much more common (and better-suited for the job) is use an LDAP server to control authentication. LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) was written from the ground up to handle large numbers of read requests (with comparatively few writes) for directory-categorized information - this is _perfect_ for authentication, shared email address books, etc.

LDAP can be used to, for example, setup a company directory that servers authenticate to, contains photos of employees for security purposes, and is used by email clients as a distributed address book.

The article I read from webmonkey was about transactions and how it is possible to achieve this in MySQL but you cant use the standard MySQL tables. The article is here if you want to look at it. From what I know, msSQL is the slowest SQL server, which I have noticed (look at a shopping cart using .asp pages, these are often slow, where as php pages are fast)