MySQL Install/Running Problem
 

Howdy guys & gals. I did a search on all forums for my problem. There are 394 threads on 16 pages for mysql. I did find several folks with the same problem but they had no answers or else they just gave up. I don't have that option. Now to my problem. I am attempting to install Snort as IDS. The instructions from the snort website address installing on RH9. So I downloaded and printed those instructions. I had done a complete install when I installed RH9 so many of the items listed were already there. But, I did not realize at the time that RH9 came with mysql as part of the install. I had downloaded and followed with their instructions on installing mysql. Now I think I may have corrupted what I didn't know I had. My question now is this: Do I need to totally remove anything that has to do with mysql and start fresh? If so, how do I go about doing that? My current issue is the old "can't connect to /tmp/mysql.sock" error. I have searched many forums and most answers reply that it has to do with permissions. I have tried following many of those to fix the problem but still get the same answer. When I try and do the old "/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql user=mysql &" it starts, runs for about five seconds and then stops. I look in the logs and it goes back to the mysql.sock issue. Can anyone give me any incite on how to fix this issue and how I should proceed from here? Much thanks in advance for any help given.:(

It sounds like a copy of mysql is already running...

The first thing I'd do is confirm this by typing this in a terminal:

netstat -tl

It will list all the servers running.

Did you compile MySQL from source ? if so the rpm database might be a little out of sync with your system, and it would probably be a good idea to uninstall all the mysql bits and set it up again, rather than risk having problems with your IDS database later.

Many thanks hob! I believe that you were correct in that it was available to run, but not actually running yet. I had posted a request for assistance in mysql.com's website and they quickly responded. One of their guys has been working with me to fix the problem. I will keep posting here as things develop to possibly help someone else in the future. So far there has been a permission problem with the data directory. We changed that to let user "mysql" have ownership and low and behold, I could start the daemon and it actually ran. I could verify this by doing a ps -ef | grep mysql and it returned various lines (this it had never done before). So that was a major break through. Now we are working on getting the signing in to work correctly. I will repost to this thread when we get past that. Thanks for everyone's help! ;)

To bring everyone who cares up to speed, my sole problem was with file permissions. I had to change the file permissions on the data directory to user "mysql" and restart. Lo and behold everything ran perfectly. So if you are having this problem check that all of your file permissions are correct. I would also like to commend mysql.com on their tech support. I have been working with automation and computers for about 26 years and their tech support has been the best by far. I'm not saying this to make everybody rush over there and clobber them with tech support requests; just saying it to once again prove that the open source community is the greatest and has me won over lock, stock and barrel.