Observed this in Mariadb 10.x versions. Despite being able to change password, it is still ignoring the password. Non-root user not affected. Explanation per https://mariadb.com/kb/en/authentication-from-mariadb-104/ Using unix_socket means that if you are the system root user, you can login as root@locahost without a …

1[root@rh icasimpan]# /usr/local/bin/automysqlbackup /etc/automysqlbackup/rh.conf 2Parsed config file "/etc/automysqlbackup/automysqlbackup.conf" 34# Checking for permissions to write to folders: 5base folder /var/lib ... exists ... ok. 6backup folder /var/lib/automysqlbackup ... exists ... writable? yes. …

For as long as you have root access to MySQL, this would work: 1UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('new-password-here') WHERE USER='user-name-here' AND Host='host-name-here'; more details from https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/mysql-change-user-password/