Upgrade on debian squeeze fail leaving package in half-configured state

[Steven Williamson]

When upgrading via apt-get on debian squeeze from 5.1.63 to the latest percona-server 5.1.70 the upgrade failed leaving the package in a half configured state.

Installs of further packages would then trigger an attempt to configure percona-server causing it to restart and fail the configure step again.

The reason for the failure is the mysql init script only waiting 14 seconds for the ping check to succeed. In my specific case the server takes 15 seconds to start ( 156GB InnoDB buffer pool ).

I have worked around the issue by modifying the init script to wait 30 seconds instead of the current 14. This resolves the issue.

No one value is appropriate for all environments, i would propose that there be a configurable time-out that can be set so the start/stop sequence can be tuned for individual environments.

For example the init script could source /etc/default/mysql where a time-out can be specified for the stop or start operation.
This allows for customisation without having to modify the package provided init script.

Example logs showing the problem:
Aug 21 00:28:44 db-mis-5 mysqld_safe: Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /home/mysql/data
Aug 21 00:28:44 db-mis-5 mysqld: 130821 0:28:44 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled.
Aug 21 00:28:44 db-mis-5 mysqld: InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled
Aug 21 00:28:44 db-mis-5 mysqld: InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins
Aug 21 00:28:44 db-mis-5 mysqld: InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.3.4
Aug 21 00:28:44 db-mis-5 mysqld: 130821 0:28:44 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 156.0G
Aug 21 00:28:52 db-mis-5 mysqld: 130821 0:28:52 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool
Aug 21 00:28:52 db-mis-5 mysqld: 130821 0:28:52 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda.
Aug 21 00:28:58 db-mis-5 /etc/init.d/mysql[11372]: 0 processes alive and '/usr/bin/mysqladmin --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf ping' resulted in
Aug 21 00:28:58 db-mis-5 /etc/init.d/mysql[11372]: #007/usr/bin/mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
Aug 21 00:28:58 db-mis-5 /etc/init.d/mysql[11372]: error: 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)'
Aug 21 00:28:58 db-mis-5 /etc/init.d/mysql[11372]: Check that mysqld is running and that the socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' exists!
Aug 21 00:28:58 db-mis-5 /etc/init.d/mysql[11372]:
Aug 21 00:28:59 db-mis-5 mysqld: 130821 0:28:59 Percona XtraDB (http://www.percona.com) 5.1.70-14.8 started; log sequence number 36115287802832