Just to follow up on this thread with a potential solution. It appears that mysql's resolveip is fragile (to the point of returning an answer 1 time out of 5) and it is not easy to get the --force option in the right place for mysql_install_db. The correct fix for the Zimbra project (IMHO) is to use Unix Domain Sockets exclusively, but that needs to be corrected in Tomcat as well (my earlier suggestion to remove the networking support from my.cnf does not work).
I wound up as one of the earlier posters suggested and commented out the call to zmmyinit and hardcoded the appropriate IP address in my.cnf, then changed mysql/scripts/mysql_install_db to assume --force was passed in. It's incredibly hacky, but I don't think there is another way around it. I have no idea why this only affects SLES 9 (possibly having to do with the dual CPU's).
John |