Re: HELP! mysql-server broken on FreeBSD 13 Release p12

> On Apr 27, 2026, at 1:10 PM, William Dudley <wfdudley@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> During a recent pkg upgrade, pkg uninstalled my mysql server.  I saw that, but I figured
> that some other thing had happened so I'd still have mysql running.  HAH!
> I rebooted the machine last night, and the running instance of mysql80-server
> obviously disappeared.
> 
> I installed mysql84-server, but it fails, and mysql-client complains:
> ERROR 1524 (HY000): Plugin 'mysql_native_password' is not loaded
> The fix for this seems to involve having a running mysql server.

This is a version of password authentication that's going away in future versions of MySQL and did not survive the fork to MariaDB, and is presently off by default.  If you don't have your database passwords and cannot re-password them, at least mysql84 and earlier have this option you can set in my.cnf, but this is a compatibility shim and you should move to something newer as soon as you can.

Try this, and see what's in your error log after?

[mysqld]
mysql_native_password=ON

-Dan