Comment 1 for bug 551097

Aha!! After several days working on this on and off, and searching the net etc. I found and looked at the mysql.conf file in /etc/init/mysql.conf.

That is where the bug is. The file /etc/init/mysql.conf has an infinite loop in it in the post-start section. It keeps trying to run mysqladmin until it succeeds. But if mysqld is failing, mysqladmin silently (in this case) fails.

I tried running the actual start commands cited in this conf file, starting with ' install -m 755 -o mysql -g root -d /var/run/mysqld'. This install command finally put the mysqld program into /usr/sbin/. Then I ran the line starting with LC_ALL, and then I tried running /usr/bin/mysqld, and that failed with an error. I forget the particular error but it apparently didn't like some of the options - one was deprecated, one was not recognized. So I backed up my old /etc/mysql/my.cnf, copied my.cnf.dpkg-dist to my.cnf and retried. That worked. Mysqld started, and I can now use mysqladmin to stop the server. I can also use service mysql start and stop. Also, dpkg now runs without errors (well actually there is an error about linux-headers not being configured, but I think that is some other issue.)

I don't know if I should post this bug on the mysql-server. Presumably the maintainers of this package can move it.