Access denied for user 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost'

I wanted to get replication setup to do backups offline as recommended by this article. I did the backup and loaded it onto the slave. When I went to restart, I received:

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost'

It turns out I backed up the users table as well so it blew away the debian user. I found the fix here .

The trick is to reset the debian-sys-maint users password by looking in /etc/mysql/debian.cnf and performing the following with whatever password you find in there:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'debian-sys-maint'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '' WITH GRANT OPTION;