Changes to my.cnf don't take effect (Ubuntu 16.04, mysql 5.6)

Question

Changes I make to my.cnf don\'t seem to have any effect on the mysql environment. Here\'s a summary of what\'s happened...

I installed mysql 5.7 on Ubuntu 16.04 but

Answer 1

Obviously my.cnf.fallback is not the correct configuration file.

If you try this commands you can get output for possible my.cnf locations:

$ which mysqld
/usr/sbin/mysqld

$ /usr/sbin/mysqld --verbose --help | grep -A 1 "Default options"
Default options are read from the following files in the given order:
/etc/mysql/my.cnf ~/.my.cnf /usr/etc/my.cnf

It means mysql will check those locations for my.cnf file. Simply rename /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback as /etc/mysql/my.cnf:

mv /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback /etc/mysql/my.cnf