Description of problem: The statement in the /etc/init.d/mysqld requires a significant time to execute on every startup on servers with many mysql databases, and seems to not be required unless there is a problem with items being created as another user: chown -R mysql:mysql "$datadir" Is this really necessary? Should we not fix the underlying problem (if there is one) of items not being created by the proper user, rather than the shotgun approach of just changing everything at every startup? The following bug was filed in the CentOS bugs database detailing this issue as well: http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=1630
Seems like it ought to be sufficient from a security perspective to chmod the top directory, rather than -R every time. Will fix in next turn (but I'm not sure when that will be for the base RHEL4 mysql release).
In addition, what happens if you are not running the server as mysql:mysql but some other user. This causes a problem in my environment because the init script needs to be modified to prevent this from happening. Maybe it should be a seperate bug to read the mysql user from a config file?
If you try to run it as some other user, you'll doubtless find that everything breaks --- for one thing the SELinux policy for mysqld will certainly not allow that. I'm uninterested in trying to support such a case.
I don't use selinux as it's not a requirement to run the OS. I imagine selinux would break if apache ran as some other user too, but there are certainly implementations that require it in large enterprises. In particular in development environments we run various processes as different users. I'll accept that not a lot of people don't do this and "uninterested" means not worth the effort.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion, but this component is not scheduled to be updated in the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. If you would like this request to be reviewed for the next minor release, ask your support representative to set the next rhel-x.y flag to "?".
An advisory has been issued which should help the problem described in this bug report. This report is therefore being closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information on therefore solution and/or where to find the updated files, please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report if the solution does not work for you. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2008-0768.html