Thomas Hackert <thackert@nexgo.de> writes:
I am not sure, how (and if) I can upload to f.a.o., so I will attach it to this mail. Sorry for the inconvenience ... :(
No inconvenience at all, mail is perfect. And indeed, the strace was illuminating. I think the issue is right here: [pid 32673] bind(14, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(3306), sin_addr=inet_addr("127.0.0.1")}, 16) = -1 EADDRNOTAVAIL (Cannot assign requested address) The server fails to start, because it cannot setup a socket to listen on the loopback interface on 127.0.0.1 The manpage for bind(2) says: EADDRNOTAVAIL A nonexistent interface was requested or the requested address was not local. I get the same error on my machine if I try to bind a socket to a non-existing interface. You can try this netcat command to do the same bind, it will probably fail in the same way: nc -l -s 127.0.0.1 -p 3306 So the problem most likely is that your system has a non-standard networking setup, with the normal loopback address 127.0.0.1 not configured. The default configuration file has this line: bind-address = 127.0.0.1 This will fail if the address 127.0.0.1 is not available on the system (normally it is). So I think you can edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf and change this line to use a valid IP address, or replace it with skip-networking to not use any IP address. Then try starting the server and see if it works. If it does, `apt-get install -f` might fix the installation. Can you confirm that your system has no 127.0.0.1 address? (It is somewhat annoying that the install fails in this case, but it does seem a rather rare setup). The second question is why you did not get any error log output with messages about this problem. I suppose this might be because you had no syslog installed. Elena gave you suggestions for how to resolve/investigate this further. But let me know if you have more problems with this. Thanks for your persistence in helping me get to the bottom of this! - Kristian.