It always takes a good night of sleep for me to get things working in FreeBSD. I usually tend to start these tasks too late when I’m not completely with it anymore and things go wrong often right from the start.
The day after I’m usually able to complete what I set out to do and this time, installing MySQL on FreeBSD, it was no different. I kept getting “Couldn’t not connect to bla bla socket bla localhost etc.” errors and mysqld would not run no matter how bad I wanted it to.
Tonight, I read the manual a little more carefully and tried changing the owner of the mysql data directories (/var/db/mysql) to my own username before running mysqld manually and the thing finally started. Then I looked a little better at the mysql-server.sh script in /usr/local/etc/rc.d and there it was:
To enable mysql you need to add mysql_enable=”YES” to your rc.conf. Well, I changed owner of the /var/db/mysql directory back to mysql, added mysql_enable=”YES” to rc.conf, rebooted and voila. It was working perfectly after all… The only thing missing was that line in rc.conf.
Ah well, maybe I can run mysql 5.0 after all. I started with this version but after it seemed to fail I tried 4.1. Now I deinstalled 4.1 (again) and as I’m typing this 5.0 is compiling. I’m hoping things will work right after the reboot because that line is still there.