Comment 1 for bug 286996

I have also encountered this issue in mnogosearch-common_3.3.7-3 on Jaunty. What is happening is the .deb packages config script prompts you for your configuration settings, but at the very end it erases the passwords you have supplied. When the postinst script runs, it expects the passwords to be in the debconf database, but they are not. This causes all the database calls to fail when the postinst script runs '/usr/sbin/indexer -Edrop' and '/usr/sbin/indexer -Ecreate'. The call to '/usr/sbin/mnogosearchconfig' also creates the config files (indexer.conf and search.htm) with missing passwords in the DBAddr command.

The solutions seems to be to move the clearing of the passwords from the config script into the postinst script.

If the package is already installed, modifying the scripts /var/lib/dpkg/info/mnogosearch-common.config and /var/lib/dpkg/info/mnogosearch-common.postinst, then running 'dpkg-reconfigure mnogosearch-common' will setup the database and config files properly.