Upgrade to 5.5.53-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 fails to start daemon, due to missing secure_file_priv directory

[Lonnie Olson]

Ubuntu 14.04.1
MySQL 5.5.52-0ubuntu0.14.04.1

MySQL Version 5.5.53-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 changed the default for secure_files_priv from not set to /var/lib/mysql-files
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mysql-5.5/5.5.53-0ubuntu0.14.04.1

This new directory doesn't exist, therefore the daemon will not start.

161027 12:51:30 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql
/usr/sbin/mysqld: Error on realpath() on '/var/lib/mysql-files' (Error 2)
161027 12:51:30 [ERROR] Failed to access directory for --secure-file-priv. Please make sure that directory exists and is accessible by MySQL Server. Supplied
 value : /var/lib/mysql-files
161027 12:51:30 [ERROR] Aborting

The upgrade should create the new directory required to run the daemon in order to prevent killing the service. Alternatively, this default should not have changed for a minor upgrade in an LTS.

[Mauro (mauromol)]

Same problem here. To make MySQL start again, I had to manually type the following commands:

sudo mkdir /var/lib/mysql-files
sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql-files/
sudo chmod 700 /var/lib/mysql-files/

For some reason, updating does not trigger that code in mysql-server-5.5-postinst.

I also tried:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server-core-5.5
and
sudo aptitude reinstall mysql-sever-core-5.5

with no success.

This was not that easy to find out, because when "sudo service mysql start" is run, no output at all is produced in either of these files:
/var/log/mysql.err
/var/log/mysql.log
/var/log/mysql/error.log
Just the following is printed in /var/log/syslog:

kernel: [ 5613.296491] init: mysql main process (14542) terminated with status 1
kernel: [ 5613.296500] init: mysql main process ended, respawning
kernel: [ 5613.302257] init: mysql post-start process (14543) terminated with status 1
kernel: [ 5613.315931] init: mysql main process (14569) terminated with status 1
kernel: [ 5613.315940] init: mysql main process ended, respawning
kernel: [ 5613.317918] init: mysql post-start process (14570) terminated with status 1
kernel: [ 5613.331260] init: mysql main process (14596) terminated with status 1
kernel: [ 5613.331268] init: mysql respawning too fast, stopped

And to find the actual cause I had to type: sudo mysqld start

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Nish Aravamudan (nacc)]

Hello, and thank you for filing this bug! I will contact the security team to determine if there should be additional changes in the debian scripts to handle the directory creation step.

[Marc Deslauriers (mdeslaur)]

I can't seem to reproduce the upgrade issue. The postinst is being run correctly in my case.

Is there anything special in your environment that would cause the postinst to fail?

[Mauro (mauromol)]

Nothing I'm aware of. Apart from the fact that I disabled the MySQL auto-start at boot, so I start it on demand with "service mysql start". Apart from this, I didn't customize anything in my MySQL installation. As I said, I even tried to reconfigure or reinstall it, but that directory was not created.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[black (blackborn)]

We have had this bug also. The strange part was that we had a staging and production server set up with chef and only one server had this problem, while everything was identical.

After further checking, we noticed the /var/lib/mysql-files folder was missing from the server with erratic behaviour. As chef didn't deployed a new version, we think the automatic updates did something erratic.

[black (blackborn)]

btw. manually creating the folder with mysql:mysql ownership resolved our problem (or adding secure_file_priv="" in the my.cnf)

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

The Precise Pangolin has reached end of life, so this bug will not be fixed for that release