Xtrabackup is now asking for the root password

MySQL & MariaDB Percona XtraBackup
1

I’ve run backups several times on our production server with:
xtrabackup --backup --datadir=/var/lib/mysql/ --target-dir=/root/backups

and it worked fine, but now it’s demanding a password:

230316 12:38:49 version_check Connecting to MySQL server with DSN ‘dbi:mysql:;mysql_read_default_group=xtrabackup’ (using password: NO).
Failed to connect to MySQL server: DBI connect(‘;mysql_read_default_group=xtrabackup’,‘’,…) failed: Access denied for user ‘root’@‘localhost’ (using password: NO) at - line 1315.
230316 12:38:49 Connecting to MySQL server host: localhost, user: not set, password: not set, port: not set, socket: not set

I’m certain that the database always had a root password set. How can this have happened ?

George

2

@graythomp,
PXB will first attempt to read the config file located at ~/.my.cnf Perhaps this file existed in the past with the root password saved, and now the file doesn’t exist, or perhaps the password was removed from this file.

3

Mystery solved, thanks. Found the file in roots home directory. I run Xtrabackup as root, but my colleague, I believe, runs it using sudo from a different user and he is the one who started having issues. I didn’t know about this file as the system was built by a consulting company.

4

If your colleague is not running sudo with the correct flags, then root’s home directory won’t be considered/loaded when running xtrabackup.