MySQL stopped working after update

After an upgrade from Ubuntu Server 9.04 to 9.10, mysql stopped working.

In /var/log/messages, I got a lot of these errors:

Nov 10 22:07:50 eee-box kernel: [ 6223.686375] type=1503 audit(1257887270.326:66): operation="open" pid=3345 parent=3344 profile="/usr/sbin/mysqld" requested_mask="r::" denied_mask="r::" fsuid=0 ouid=0 name="/sys/devices/system/cpu/"

After google-ing a little bit, I stumbled upon a page that described this error quite in length; bottom line to fix this was the following:

First, I deleted the my.cnf file in /etc/mysql (i. e. I moved it to a backup folder). I also moved away all files in /etc/mysql/conf.d. Now, there was a file in /etc/mysql that was named my.cnf.dpkg-dist or something – I copied it to my.cnf

Now, mysql started again properly. Also, funnily enough, my mediawiki envirnonment works flawlessly – although I was under the impression that I had to tweak my mysql environment quite a bit (see this post).

Anyway – the only thing left to do was setting the bind_address in my.cnf to my server’s ip, because this is the way it used to be configured all the time and a lot of webapps depend on this.