> Or when you do a "service mysql start" and it dies, but there is no output anywhere of what went wrong, and you have to guess that you have a typo in your "my

> Or when you do a "service mysql start" and it dies, but there is no output anywhere of what went wrong, and you have to guess that you have a typo in your "my.cnf". First of all, it's systemctl you want, not service. Service is (was) part of Upstart, which Ubuntu doesn't officially use any more but they still have a bunch of compatibility layers in for it. Second, do the following not give you the information you need? systemctl status unit-name journalctl -u unit-name