To find out where the MySQL configuration (my.cnf) is stored, you can use the strace command: $> strace mysql “;” 2>&1 | grep my.cnf You will get an output showing all the paths the MySQL deamon searches for the my.cnf upon startup like that: stat(“/etc/my.cnf”, 0x7fffecb75210) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat(“/etc/mysql/my.cnf”, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=3505, […]