After fighting to get Mysql functional all yesterday evening, I came
across this article that describes a fix at about 3 am that made it all
work:

http://www.bitmechanic.com/mail-archives/mysql/Mar1998/0902.html

After I applied the two fixes described there, the database seems to act
flawlessly.

Essentially, there's a line commented out in sqfe_mysqld that sets the
ulimit on open file descriptors, that is needed for BSDs.  After I
uncommented that line and restarted mysql (and totally rebuilt the
databases) the database worked fine.

Here's a diff that will do the job (after making a copy of
scripts/safe_mysqld to scripts/safe_mysqld-orig):

--- scripts/safe_mysqld-orig   Sat Mar  8 02:58:37 2003
+++ scripts/safe_mysqld    Sat Mar  8 02:59:18 2003
@@ -229,7 +229,7 @@
 # Does this work on all systems?
 #if type ulimit | grep "shell builtin" > /dev/null
 #then
-#  ulimit -n 256 > /dev/null 2>&1              # Fix for BSD and
FreeBSD system
s
+  ulimit -n 256 > /dev/null 2>&1               # Fix for BSD and
FreeBSD system
s
 #fi

 datemsg "mysqld started"

The article also says that the user can start mysqld setting the table
cache to 32 (the default is 64) in the following manner:

safe_mysqld -O table_cache=3D32

I did both the patch and changed the mysql startup invocation; I don't
know if doing both is unnecessary or has any drawbacks.

-mike begley
spam@hell.org