I followed the instructions provided here:
Everything went well the first few steps from the instructions in the original link. I'm listing them here as well - but you can get the specifics from the link above since that's where I got the information from (thank you DigitalOcean!)
1. Get the current default data directory:
mysql
-u root -p
select
@@datadir;
2. Shutdown MariaDB:
systemctl
stop mariadb
3. Copy files from the default location to the new location - we'll call it /usr/data for example. Use the following command to preserver any permissions and symbolic links. If you include the / at the end of the new directory, it will create a mysql subfolder:
rsync
-avz /var/lib/mysql /usr/data/
4. If you are running MariaDB as another Linux user that is not mysql, then you have to make sure the new user owns the new location:
chown
-RL newuser:newuser /usr/data
5. In your /etc/my.cnf.d/server.cnf, or my.cnf, or whatever you named your .cnf file, you have to update anything that references the old location to the new location. Specifically the following:
socket
pid-file
datadir
Everything was fine ... until I tried to start up MariaDB. It failed. I checked the journctl -xe log, and saw entries similar to the following:
SELinux is preventing /usr/sbin/mysqld from write access on the
directory /usr/data
At this point I knew something was going on with SELinux, so I tried to disable it completely using the following:
setenforce 0
And was able to start up MariaDB. This isn't exactly how I wanted to leave things - so I re-enabled SELinux enforcing, and reached out to MariaDB Support. They pointed me to the following blog:
https://www.tecmint.com/change-default-mysql-mariadb-data-directory-in-linux/
Of particular interest was step 4 - basically SELinux doesn't know anything about the labels in the new data directory (unlike the default directories). We we need to update the labels and restore the connections as follows:
Once SELinux knew how to handle the new directory, start up MariaDB:
setenforce 0
And was able to start up MariaDB. This isn't exactly how I wanted to leave things - so I re-enabled SELinux enforcing, and reached out to MariaDB Support. They pointed me to the following blog:
https://www.tecmint.com/change-default-mysql-mariadb-data-directory-in-linux/
Of particular interest was step 4 - basically SELinux doesn't know anything about the labels in the new data directory (unlike the default directories). We we need to update the labels and restore the connections as follows:
semanage
fcontext -a -t mysqld_db_t "/usr/data/mysql(/.*)?"
restorecon
-R /usr/data/mysql
Once SELinux knew how to handle the new directory, start up MariaDB:
systemctl
start mariadb
You can check that the new data directory is in use here:
mysql
-u root -p
select
@@datadir;
After a few days of headache, I was able to change the default data directory. And now have to apply the same to a bunch of new servers.
Happy Day!!
