First, /etc/init.rd in my SME 9 beta 3 is a link to /etc/rc.d/init.d. That was a little disorienting, but the file to change was there.
I didn't see any instructions to add a group "mariadb". When I tried, it rejected mariadb as being already used as a user name and I had to use a different name and make the appropriate changes in the instructions.
Also, testing access with,
mysql -e "SELECT VERSION();" --port=3307 --protocol=TCP -p
didn't work until I did a reboot. And, it did not need an actual password to work, you just a get a prompt for a password and hit "enter" and that should do it. Same for the example version check. My SME did not ship with a password for MySQL's root and we are not advised anywhere to add one.
Thanks for testing things out!
/etc/init.rd vs etc/rc.d/init.d:Since they're symlinked, it doesn't really matter which one you create your new file in.
Group 'mariadb':When you create a user in server-manager, SME also creates a group of the same name.
MySQL root password:SME doesn't make you enter a password for mysql, but it does use a root password for mysql that was generated randomly on your server during installation and can be found in /var/service/mysqld/set.password . You don't need to enter the password when running 'mysql' or 'mysqladmin' at the command line because SME uses some sort of magic to enter the password for you.
When connecting to mariadb, this randomly generated password is also supplied-- but mariadb really does have an empty root password by default. Until I added "-p" to my mariadb mysql command after first installing mariadb I got an authentication error.
You can see your randomly generated mysql root password in this file: /var/service/mysqld/set.password
Reboot:I somehow managed to shutdown mysql while trying to get mariadb to run before I figured out that I was having permission issues with the the pid file creation in /var/run/mariadb. I rebooted to fix mysql, but I may have needed to reboot for some other reason.
[edits]
root password section edited slightly.