Hi All,
After a lot of frustration, I apparently have mysql running on debian 3.0r2. I did this by first giving the command

ln -s /usr/sbin/mysqld /etc/rc2.d/S20mysql

I think this runs mysql on startup as a background process, but I am not honestly sure, all I know is that mysql works when it didn't previously???

I am curious why I don't see a process for mysql running when I type "ps au" as this should give all processes for all users, I think? The output I get is as follows:

myhost:~# ps au
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
root 215 0.0 0.7 1252 468 tty1 S 15:45 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty1
root 216 0.0 0.7 1252 468 tty2 S 15:45 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty2
root 217 0.0 0.7 1252 468 tty3 S 15:45 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty3
root 218 0.0 0.7 1252 468 tty4 S 15:45 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty4
root 219 0.0 0.7 1252 468 tty5 S 15:45 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty5
root 220 0.0 0.7 1252 468 tty6 S 15:45 0:00 /sbin/getty 38400 tty6
root 239 0.0 1.9 2204 1212 pts/1 S 15:56 0:00 -bash
root 264 0.0 1.7 2944 1092 pts/1 R 16:08 0:00 ps au

Just trying to understand this a bit better, any help is much appreciated.

-Robin

try ps -eal

according to the man pages the -u switch selects the processes by the effective user. my guess is that the effective user when not giving a user name is the user who called ps. in that case it will just show the processes owned by the user.

you could do a ps -au root and it will show all the processes started by root.

Thanks, that does the trick, unfortunately, MySQL is not working as well as I previously thought.

You have to use the mysql.server script to start and stop mysql daemon (mysqld).
So make a link to this script and not directly to mysqld.