Recently when migrating from one server to another, my Java apps using an old version of Connector/J failed with this error:

java.sql.SQLException: Unknown initial character set index '192' received from server.
Initial client character set can be forced via the 'characterEncoding' property.

No changes were made in the apps, so it had to do with MySQL.

The offending lines in my.cnf are

 
[mysqld]
character_set_server=utf8
collation_server=utf8_unicode_ci

Commenting them out fixes the problem.

 
[mysqld]
;character_set_server=utf8
;collation_server=utf8_unicode_ci

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