mysql error 2002 "cannot connect to socket"

Hi. I am having trouble with the server I'm running my trac on. I accidentally had the nightly back up going to the internal hard drive instead of the external. So it filled up, I erased the new files, deleted everything, and rebooted. I'm still getting this error when I try to connect to trac:

OperationalError: (2002, "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)")

I've tried stopping and starting mysql. I'm assuming this is a mysql problem and not a trac problem since "$ mysql -u -root -p" returns the same problem. I'd like to reemphasize that this was working before so my config files should be fine. Any thoughts?

From serverfault dustinechos

• The mysql server is not running, take a look at the log files to determine what is the issue

  dustinechos : Okay, fixed it. First off my log was /var/log/mysql/error.log while /var/log/mysql.log and mysql.err were blank. The error was that the plugin FEDERATED was disabled. So I started with "mysqld -u root --federated"
  From topdog

• The location where the MySQL named pipe is created can be specified in the my.cnf with socket= or via the --socket flag on server start up.

  If your socket is not located in /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock, which is the location that was specified for the client when MySQL was compiled, you can specify an alternate location with the -S flag.

  Otherwise, if skip-networking is not specified in your my.cnf, you can connect using TCP/IP instead of the named pipe by using the -h flag and then the IP address with the MySQL client.

  From Warner