mysql not starting? check your lo

having killed a few hours on this problem, here’s the notes.

getting some problems with FlowMingle—specifically, mysql wasn’t starting, and was giving the ‘Couldn’t bind to ip address’ error. the bind-address in my.cnf was 127.0.0.1.

havoc ensues.

what precipitated this? we expanded the home slice, and restarted the server.

to make a long story short, in /etc/network/interfaces, there was a pre-up directive to reload the iptables configuration, but the iptables conf’s name had changed. so the loopback interface never got up.

ha ha. everything was broken.

long story short, make sure your loopback interface is configured correctly, or be prepared to hassle for a while trying to figure out what’s wrong.