InnoDB: The error means mysqld does not have the access rights to

I’m migrating my CentOS 6.4 Desktop to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on this week as I found that CentOS 7 was not much Great that I expected. It does not support aged hardwares.

While I’m changing MySQL data directory to a different location and initializing the server. I got a strange error like this “InnoDB: The error means mysqld does not have the access rights to”. I tried all my ways to fix such kinds of permission errors assuming that it can be fixed it easily. But gradually I did recognize that it is something NOT with Permission issue with MySQL even though I have granted full permission to MySQL user to new data directory.

See the error I got.

After googling, I found that there are many people having the same issue which is due to “apparmor” MySQL profile security issue. That forum gives me new information about Ubuntu system security like SE-Linux does.

Following are the information Which I got,

There is now an apparmor profile enabled by default for mysql that will prevent mysql to access non standard area of the file system. Putting the mysql profile in complain mode using “sudo aa-complain” as described in the server guide should show you this in the logs. To fix this, you will need to add /mnt/fastdata/var/lib/mysql (or whatever non standard path you are using) to the list of authorized paths in the apparmor mysql profile you will find in /etc/apparmor.d/.

in this scenario I uses “/home/mysqldata” location as MySQL data directory.

Solution

You may need add the following lines in /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld inside the curly brace declared for apparmor syntax and then restart the apparmor daemon to take effect.

/home/mysqldata/ r,
/home/mysqldata/** rwk,
/home/mysqldata/mysql/plugin r,
/home/mysqldata/mysql/plugin/*.so* mr

Then restart the apparmor service.

After that I can initiate new mysql repository by executing the command “mysql_install_db”

Then start the MySQL service

Pretty easy and simple !! 🙂