The act of resetting a root password provides true currency for a system troubleshooter. It can happen—and yes, it does happen more times than you can imagine—but by following the next few steps, a crisis can be averted.

To begin, you will need to stop the MariaDB service like this:

# systemctl stop mariadb.service

The next step is to activate "safe mode" in the following way:

# mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables --skip-networking

Now run the following sequence to access the MySQL console and connect to the database:

# mysql -u root
# use mysql;

At this point, we now want to create a new password for the root user, flush the new privileges, and exit the MySQL console like this:

# update user set password=PASSWORD("NEW_PASSWORD") where User='root';
# flush privileges;
# exit

Having completed these steps, you can either reboot the server or simply stop and start the MariaDB service in the following way:

# systemctl stop mariadb.service
# systemctl...