Ubuntu and Upstart and MySQL

I upgraded some servers from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04 recently and ran into some problems accessing the mysql cli. Somewhere between those versions, the mysqld package for Debian/Ubuntu was converted to Upstart, a new method of handling the start/stop of tasks and daemons. Which is fine, as long as it works. But it didn’t.

The long & short of it is, if you’re having problems getting MySQL to start on Ubuntu 10.04 (and maybe 9.x), check the following:

1. Look in /etc/init/mysql.conf for the line that reads:
   exec /usr/sbin/mysqld
   and change to:
   exec sudo -u mysql /usr/sbin/mysqld
2. Look in /etc/mysql/my.cnf for the line that reads:
   skip-bdb
   and comment it out:
   #skip-bdb
3. Start MySQL:
   sudo start mysql

I’m not strictly sure if skip-bdb needs to be commented out, and it’s a production server so I can’t go testing right now, but it’s probably good housekeeping nevertheless.