don't forget to register your rhel!

Damn, I haven't used the branded version of redhat enterprise linux in a while. I completely forgot that they make you register the box before you can access the package repos AT ALL. I thought they were just asking me to register for the support options... I kept trying all the usual packages with both yum and apt and though apt failed fairly silently:

apt-get install tomcat5
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package tomcat5


YUM kept saying:

yum install tomcat5 tomcat5-admin-webapps tomcat5-webapps
Loaded plugins: rhnplugin, security
This system is not registered with RHN.
RHN support will be disabled.
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
No package tomcat5 available.
No package tomcat5-admin-webapps available.
No package tomcat5-webapps available.
Nothing to do

RHN support will be disabled... not all repos will be disabled. It even disabled third party repos like DAG!

Force me to register! Damn YOU!!! anyway this is all I had to do to register... surprisingly quick and painless...

/usr/sbin/rhnreg_ks --username=**************** --password=**********

I hate registering.

$%@!#& mysql root user has no permissions error 1044

Sometimes you just can't seem to win...well at least not for 3 hours or so...

Somehow my mysql root user lost all of it's permissions. I think it might be because I moved the database files over from another harddrive that I upgraded to a larger one at somepoint and then did a re-install of mysql and then just over wrote the data directory and started mysql backup without actually setting up the new mysql instance. All the version numbers and paths were the same so I figured it would be a go. Apparently not. Here is the error I kept getting no matter what I tried:

ERROR 1044 (42000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' to database 'mysql'

I tried every database and kept getting

ERROR 1044 (42000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' to database 'blah'

DAMN!

anyway i found this stupid trick in the mysql user forums (note the date of the post!):

Posted by [name withheld] on July 30 2003 11:58pm [Delete] [Edit]
when you are simply trying to:
C:\mysql\bin>mysql -uroot -p mysql

and you get:

ERROR 1044: Access denied for user: '@127.0.0.1' to database 'mysql'

Here is what I do. The key is to supply your real ip address for the -h (host) parameter. On windows, from the command prompt type 'ipconfig' to see your ip address. Once you have that, do the following:

C:\mysql\bin>mysql -h 192.168.0.1 -u root -p mysql
Enter password: ****************

// then I explicitly add root@127.0.0.1 to the user table, so after this I can log in as you would expect

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO root@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'root-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO root@127.0.0.1 IDENTIFIED BY 'root-password' WITH GRANT OPTION;

Why would mysql care if you are connecting from an externaly available ip address on your own computer I don't know. All i do know is that it wouldn't let me grant the root user permissions via the loopback address or via sockets.

This one was a doozy!