Today, I had to fix an installation of MySQL.

There were several problems, and I finally got it to work. Somehow, I had to run some commands manually to cleanly shutdown the cluster server and then re-run the configuration script with dpkg:

   sudo mysqladmin shutdown

   dpkg --configure mysql-server-5.1

Once the dpkg command succeeded, I finally started to have a database that was working again. FYI, it broke when I tried to install phpmyadmin to manage the database from a website. That wanted to downgrade the database and the initialization script (/etc/init.d/mysql) failed.

Anyway... there was an error and I was forced to clean the cluster once. That worked nicely.

   mysql_upgrade -u root -h localhost -p --verbose

I have no clue what that really does, but at the end, when I restarted my cluster it did not generate an error.

Then I could create a new user (the error was in link with the loss of the user I had created earlier.)

Testing, again, more, quit the console, come back, nope... the user seems invisible. It is there, but I cannot connect using that user. Search around real quick and Google finds a page were they say that you should just try to restart your database...

Did that, it worked!?

I'm wondering now! Do I need to restart my database each time I want to add a new user in there???

I thought that was real weird. Anyway, it works now 8-)