Description of problem:

The mysqld service fails to start after successfully installing it via yum.

# service mysqld start

Starting mysqld (via systemctl):  Job failed. See system logs and 'systemctl status' for details.
                                                           [FAILED]


After looking at the log I see the following:

110316 20:02:39 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: Can't create/write to file '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid' (Errcode: 2)
110316 20:02:39 [ERROR] Can't start server: can't create PID file: No such file or directory

Creating the directory /var/run/mysqld with permissions for mysql user/group fixed the issue.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
$ rpm -qa mysql
mysql-5.5.9-2.fc15.x86_64