Comment 9 for bug 958120

ran into this issue in a 12.04 upgrade, my conf is spread across include files based on usage.

I had this for 5.1 (note the two server settings):

/etc/mysql/conf.d$ cat charset.cnf
[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
character-set-server = utf8
default-character-set=utf8

[client]
default-character-set=utf8

sudo mysql service start - this would hang until sending a Ctrl+C

Changing to this allowed mysql to start, I guess the client entry is Ok.

/etc/mysql/conf.d$ cat charset.cnf
[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
character-set-server = utf8

[client]
default-character-set=utf8

Bit of a tough one, It's possible mysql (the vendor) issued notices about deprecated configuration but it would be good if the service start would not hang and instead issue a warning and die with log messages so a sysadmin knows what's happening.

I checked logs (syslog, mysql error log) and nothing showed up, thinking AppArmor was the issue - which has happened before - I uninstalled that to test but no cigar. Reinstalled and the same issue.

If you hit this issue in a 12.04 upgrade, try out the charset conf change above.