ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

Question

I installed LAMP on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) and then set root password on phpMyAdmin. I forgot the password and now I am unable to login. When I try to chan

Answer 1

In my case, the default port 3306 was being used by some other process and thus it was not starting. After I stopped the other service and did sudo service mysql start, it worked fine. BTW, you can use something like sudo lsof -Pn -iTCP:3306 to see who may be using the port.