Few days back, I was asked by Tushar Mishra if we both could host his blog alongside my blog. His blog is based on WordPress platform which meant repeating the whole process (OMGDebugging.com was earlier running on WordPress as well) of installing WordPress along with it's dependencies like MySQL, PHP etc.

The installation process was butter smooth and we got the blog up and running fairly easily. The blog was running perfect but after a reboot, when I ran apt-get update , I got the following error -

E: dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run 'sudo dpkg --configure -a' to correct the problem.

Hmm strange. That was not supposed to happen. On running the above command, I found that the MySQL server is causing all this trouble. After the above command went ahead a bit, it got stuck at the following line -

Setting up mysql-server-5.7 (5.7.13-0ubuntu0.16.04.2) ... Renaming removed key_buffer and myisam-recover options (if present)

As per the above line, the MYSQL Post Installation script replaced the key_buffer and myisam-recover keywords in the MYSQL configuration file (my.cnf) since they are deprecated.

On searching around, I found that this was a known bug since from version 5.7, several of the deprecated settings (inside my.cnf) have been removed. Also, there are bugs with the installation script & invoke-rc.d . You can find more information over here - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mysql-5.7/+bug/1571865

But, still the problem was there. One of the person on the above link mentioned that killing the spawned MYSQL processes would make the install script proceed ahead. So, I ran ps aux | grep mysql which gave me the following output -

root 3830 0.0 0.9 20888 4832 pts/0 S+ 09:21 0:00 dpkg --configure mysql-server-5.7

root 3831 0.7 3.4 62828 17272 pts/0 S+ 09:21 0:00 /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/share/debconf/frontend /var/lib/dpkg/info/mysql-server-5.7.postinst configure

root 3840 0.0 0.6 12972 3316 pts/0 S+ 09:21 0:00 /bin/bash /var/lib/dpkg/info/mysql-server-5.7.postinst configure

mysql 4063 0.6 35.0 1141400 175376 pts/0 Sl+ 09:21 0:00 mysqld --user=mysql --init-file=/var/lib/mysql-files/tmp.4E2Sdu9DQ3 --socket=/tmp/tmp.CInFSccVPv/mysqld.sock --pid-file=/tmp/tmp.CInFSccVPv/mysqld.pid

root 4093 0.0 0.2 14512 1032 pts/2 S+ 09:22 0:00 grep --color=auto mysql

I killed the 2 highlighted MYSQL processes (I killed them randomly and it worked the first time :0) and the setup proceeded ahead normally and completed successfully.

==Motto of the story = Always read comments till the end ;) ==