M'kay, so I've got my RH9 box setup and running fairly well. I elected to have MySQL installed with the system when I installed so I could learn some SQL/PHP scripting. But when I try to run mysql, it retuns:

ERROR 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

I did some research on that error message, both here and abroad, and found that the mysqld daemon might not be starting up at boot time. So I check out /etc/rc3.d and sure enough i've got Kxxmysqld in there, which, I assume means it's not set to start at boot time.

I then try to run ./mysqld start, which returns:

Initializing MySQL database: Sorry, the host 'Trane' could not be looked up.
Please configure the 'hostname' command to return a correct hostname.
If you want to solve this at a later stage, restart this script with
the --force option
[FAILED]

And now I'm left completely scratching my head. Any ideas on how I may rectify this situation? Did I improperly set my hostname? I'm at a loss for ideas.

You might want to use 'localhost' as the host name (security reasons)... else check that you have an entry in /etc/hosts for 'Trane'.

~godzuki

Changing the hostname back to "localhost" did the trick -- thanks!