Mick's World

Introduction

After reading a few posts on a forum about people having problems connecting to their MySQL account using various applications I decided that I’d check out each one and see if I could get it to work.

There were two application people were having trouble with, so I’ve covered them and added another so that there’s a bit of choice.

The programs covered in this tutorial are:

• MySql-Front
• Dreamweaver
• MySQL Administrator

In this guide cPanel is also used, however the same sort of techniques can most likely be used in other control panel applications.

Initial Setup

Finding your IP
Before you start setting up the application of choice there are a couple of things that need to be done.

In order to connect to your MySQL server via the internet you’ll need to allow the IP address you are connected to the internet with to connect to the MySQL server.

To find out your current IP (a.k.a. True IP) visit whatismyip.org.

In some cases you may be accessing the internet through a proxy of some sort. If this is the case you will need to allow this address as well.

To find out the IP of your proxy, have a look through your ISP’s site, information, support, etc. The method I use to find this information is to log into the domain I’m using through SSH. If you do not have SSH access you may need to request it. To ensure you are getting the most update information through SSH you can connect and login, disconnect, then reconnect and login, you may get a screen similar to the following.

Figure 1

Now that you have your True IP, and possibly your Proxy IP, you can set them to be allowed.

Granting access to the IP
To do this login to your cPanel account for the domain that you are wanting to connect to MySQL. Once logged in got to the “MySQL Databases”.

Now go to the “Access Hosts” section. Then in the form field “Host (% wildcard is allowed):”, enter your True IP. This may work as is, but to be sure you can add the first 2 parts of the IP and then a wildcard.

Example: 192.168.%

If you are accessing the internet through a proxy, and you were able to find the Proxy IP then you can add this to the list of allowed hosts as well. This can be added as is.

Setup Details

In order to connect to your MySQL server you’ll need a few details, here’s a list of what you’ll need:

• Hostname (the domain name you are connecting to) (it will be "localhost" if using the SSH Tunnel method)
• Username (will be in the form of “username_” followed by the MySQL username)
• Password
• Table name (optional) (sometimes called database name, but is the name of the table you’ll be accessing, in the form of “username_” followed by the name of that table)

Once you’ve got these details you can proceed to setup your application of choice.