Re: mysql_secure_installation Does Not Work, and Fails Silently

[Lars Tangvald]

Hi,

This is a known issue with some of our utilities; When used to set the password they don't change the authentication _method_.
Ubuntu packages by default don't use password authentication, but unix socket authentication (so you need to be system root to log in as mysql root).

Note that in general, mysql_secure_installation is no longer needed. MySQL 5.7 and 8.0 are meant to be secure by default (no testing database or anonymous users, no non-localhost root user, etc).

As a workaround if you want password auth, you can log in as root and run:
alter user 'root'@'localhost 'identified with 'caching_sha2_password' by 'mypassword';