EDIT: I AM the one who is stupid! Arrrrgh. Just installed Galera on yet another box and saw this passing by in yum:

A RANDOM PASSWORD HAS BEEN SET FOR THE MySQL root USER !
You will find that password in '/root/.mysql_secret'.

Arrrrghhhh. Apologies to the RPM packagers. EDIT END.

Stupid RPM packagers screwed up. If you follow this how-to – http://galeracluster.com/documentation-webpages/gettingstarted.html – after a while you end up at a point where it says “In the database client, run the following query: SHOW STATUS LIKE 'wsrep_cluster_size'; …so you try “mysql -p” only to find that you don’t have access. WTF. There’s probably already a password set by the RPM packagers but we don’t know it. So, we try our usual –skip-grant-tables thing and then try SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('MyNewPass'); but this will result in: “ERROR 1290 (HY000): The MySQL server is running with the --skip-grant-tables option so it cannot execute this statement” – WTF again. When you are used to resetting MySQL root pw’s you usually first run the PW change command (SET or ALTER or UPDATE or whatever) and then you enter FLUSH PRIVILEGES. The trick here is to do the opposite. First enter

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('MyNewPass');
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Found this here after hours of troubleshooting: http://galeracluster.com/community/?place=msg%2Fcodership-team%2Fw8NEekKipwY%2FgGlkSQNOedMJ
F*CKERS!