It happened, I forgot a password. I normally pride myself on my memory for things like passwords but this one was gone so I went searching for a way to reset it. I found this very concise entry at debian-administration.org that sorted me out. There were many others like it but this is the one that I followed to reset the password (it’s also written by a guy that works for the hosting company I use, Bytemark)

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/442

In short my own version of the process:

1. Stop the MySQL process.

   /etc/init.d/mysql stop

2. Start MySQL manually with the –skip-grant-tables parameter.

   /usr/bin/mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables &

3. Run MySQL from the command line, logging in as root with no password.

   mysql --user=root --pass mysql

4. Update the user table, setting the root user’s password.

   UPDATE User set Password=PASSWORD('newpass') WHERE User = 'root';

5. Flush the privileges cache.

   flush privileges;

6. Exit MySQL.

   exit;

7. Restart the MySQL service without skipping the privileges tables.

   /etc/init.d/mysql stop && /etc/init.d/mysql start