MySQL Bugs: #1878: cannot change root password.

Bug #1878	cannot change root password.
Submitted:	18 Nov 2003 16:37	Modified:	19 Nov 2003 7:02
Reporter:	William Brown	Email Updates:
Status:	Not a Bug	Impact on me:	None
Category:	MySQL Server: Installing	Severity:	S1 (Critical)
Version:	4.0.16-standard	OS:	Linux (Fedora Core 1)
Assigned to:	Dean Ellis	CPU Architecture:	Any

Description:
Greetings:

I cannot perform any mysqladmin functions as 'root' including changing the password after installing: 

MySQL-server-4.0.16-0
MySQL-client-4.0.16-0

The error message for every command tried is: 

mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
error: 'Access denied for user: 'root@localhost' (Using password: NO)'

How to repeat:
1) install MySQL-server-4.0.16-0 and MySQL-client-4.0.16-0 rpms on Fedora (Redhat 9+)

2) attempt to run:
mysqladmin -u root password <my_password>
mysqladmin -u root -h localhost password <my_password>
or any other command as root.

3) the error message is:

mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
error: 'Access denied for user: 'root@localhost' (Using password: NO)'

Suggested fix:
I recommend to have the rpm's set up mysql as the root user.

Thank you for taking the time to write to us, but this is not
a bug. Please double-check the documentation available at
http://www.mysql.com/documentation/ and the instructions on
how to report a bug at http://bugs.mysql.com/how-to-report.php

The root@localhost login has a password which you are not providing.

Thank you.