Immediately following the download of new packages for the upgrade to Karmic Koala, I noticed it had hung up while attempting to turn off services which were going to be upgraded.

<pre>
mysql stopping...
</pre>

It happened that MySQL was the hold up, and because killing the upgrade process seemed like a risky operation – I needed to find a way to move it along.

I wasn’t able to turn up any other posts from the community about this issue – so I decided to take the usual approach: Start killing process with fingers crossed and blog the outcome!

Just so happens I nailed it on the first try:

<pre>
$ ps aux | grep mysql
<snip />
root      3624  0.0  0.0   5452  1744 pts/7    S+   09:05   0:00 /usr/bin/mysqladmin --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf shutdown

$ sudo kill -9 3624 #your pid would be different...
</pre>

The upgrader picked up and moved right along at that point. Hurray!