Yesterday I ran sudo apt autoremove, which uninstalled some “unused” plugins like
mariadb-plugin-provider-lz4
This morning I was greeted with this error webpage:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator if this error reappears multiple times, please include the technical details below in your report.
More details can be found in the server log.
Trying to put Nextcloud into maintenance mode via the terminal showed me this error:
An unhandled exception has been thrown:
Doctrine\DBAL\Exception: Failed to connect to the database: An exception occurred in the driver: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory in /var/www/nextcloud/lib/private/DB/Connection.php:238
So I ran sudo systemctl status mariadb and got this output:
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com mariadbd\[944\]: 2025-11-28 7:13:53 0 \[Note\] Plugin 'wsrep-provider' is disabled.
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com mariadbd\[944\]: 2025-11-28 7:13:53 0 \[ERROR\] /usr/sbin/mariadbd: unknown variable 'provider_bzip2=force_plus_permanent'
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com mariadbd\[944\]: 2025-11-28 7:13:53 0 \[ERROR\] /usr/sbin/mariadbd: unknown variable 'provider_lz4=force_plus_permanent'
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com mariadbd\[944\]: 2025-11-28 7:13:53 0 \[ERROR\] /usr/sbin/mariadbd: unknown variable 'provider_lzma=force_plus_permanent'
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com mariadbd\[944\]: 2025-11-28 7:13:53 0 \[ERROR\] /usr/sbin/mariadbd: unknown variable 'provider_lzo=force_plus_permanent'
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com mariadbd\[944\]: 2025-11-28 7:13:53 0 \[ERROR\] /usr/sbin/mariadbd: unknown variable 'provider_snappy=force_plus_permanent'
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com mariadbd\[944\]: 2025-11-28 7:13:53 0 \[ERROR\] Aborting
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com systemd\[1\]: mariadb.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=7/NOTRUNNING
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com systemd\[1\]: mariadb.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Nov 28 07:13:53 cloud.mydomain.com systemd\[1\]: Failed to start mariadb.service - MariaDB 11.4.9 database server.
To be 100% honest with you guys, I am not sure how that happened. This is just a guess:
I had MariaDB from Debian installed. Later on I switched to the apt sources of MariaDB themselves. Apparently Debian had some provider_lz4.cnf and the likes under /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/but now that autoremove has deleted these unused plugins, MariaDB throws an error.
So that is why I removed all the debian configs by running:
sudo rm /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/provider_*
and also removed debian.cnf.old and debian-start. But now I got a new error
`Process: 2267 ExecStartPost=/etc/mysql/debian-start (code=exited, status=203/EXEC)`
because the debian-start folder is missing but still referenced in systemd.
So I uninstalled mariadb (but kept the DB by selecting “no” when asked to delete the DBs!)
sudo apt remove --purge mariadb-server mariadb-server-10.* mariadb-client mariadb-client-10.* mariadb-common
and reinstalled version 11 with
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client
contrary to what I read online, MariaDB does create a debian-start folder and this is not something only the Debian packages do.
I hope this might help someone else running into the same issues.
Also open to criticism, they are probably better ways to handle this.
This is not really a tutorial, but I thought that this category still fits better than the Support category, when I am not asking for help. @mods, feel free to move this.