ERROR 1396 (HY000): Operation CREATE USER failed for 'jack'@'localhost'

Question

I seem to be unable to re-create a simple user I've deleted, even as root in MySQL.

My case: user 'jack' existed before, but I deleted it from mysql.user in order to recreate it. I see no vestiges of this in that table. If I execute this command for some other, random username, say 'jimmy', it works fine (just as it originally did for 'jack').

What have I done to corrupt user 'jack' and how can I undo that corruption in order to re-create 'jack' as a valid user for this installation of MySQL?

See example below. (Of course, originally, there was much time between the creation of 'jack' and his removal.)

mysql> CREATE USER 'jack'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'test123';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select user,host from user;
+------------------+-----------------+
| user             | host            |
+------------------+-----------------+
| root             | 127.0.0.1       |
| debian-sys-maint | localhost       |
| jack             | localhost       |
| root             | localhost       |
| root             | russ-elite-book |
+------------------+-----------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> delete from user where user = 'jack';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select user,host from user;
+------------------+-----------------+
| user             | host            |
+------------------+-----------------+
| root             | 127.0.0.1       |
| debian-sys-maint | localhost       |
| root             | localhost       |
| root             | russ-elite-book |
+------------------+-----------------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> CREATE USER 'jack'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'test123';
ERROR 1396 (HY000): Operation CREATE USER failed for 'jack'@'localhost'
mysql> CREATE USER 'jimmy'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'test123';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select user,host from user;
+------------------+-----------------+
| user             | host            |
+------------------+-----------------+
| root             | 127.0.0.1       |
| debian-sys-maint | localhost       |
| jimmy            | localhost       |
| root             | localhost       |
| root             | russ-elite-book |
+------------------+-----------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Answer 1

yes this bug is there. However, I found a small workaround.

• Assume the user is there, so drop the user
• After deleting the user, there is need to flush the mysql privileges
• Now create the user.

That should solve it. Assuming we want to create the user admin @ localhost, these would be the commands:

drop user admin@localhost;
flush privileges;
create user admin@localhost identified by 'admins_password'

Cheers

Answer 2

Try doing a FLUSH PRIVILEGES;. This MySQL bug post on that error code appears to report some success in a case similar to yours after flushing privs.