How can I connect to a MySQL deamon on other host?

Question

I'd like to connect to MySQL (deamon is running on my VPS) via HeidiSQL. I've created new user, commented bind-adress option and when I try to connect with it via HeidiSQL, I've got an error 2003: Can't connect to MySQL server on 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx' (10061). What should I do?

Answer 1

It could be a number of factors.

See if a firewall is blocking your traffic to the other host

Can you simply ping the host from the client machine?

Can you also open a simple telnet session to the host on port 3306 ? (If the telnet is accepted, you will probably see some characters appear and you will remain in the telnet session for a few seconds before the connection is closed. If not accepted, you will see the message Connection refused.)

Answer 2

There's a simple checklist for this:

• Is your MySQL server bound to "localhost" only? It might be listening for connections only on 127.0.0.1 or ::1 instead of any which is usually 0.0.0.0. Try connecting on your server to your server with mysql --host=host_ip where host_ip is your network IP address. I think the default is localhost-only.
• Is port 3306 firewalled? Many distributions allow only SSH by default, so you may need to open this up to your client machine. Try not to open this up to everyone on the internet as having an open MySQL port is asking for trouble. It's always best to limit access to a set of specific IPs if possible.
• Can you connect via an SSH tunnel instead? This is far more secure as it means your 3306 port is properly firewalled. There are many tools for creating SSH tunnels, but the basic principle is to forward a local port of your choosing to the remote server's port 3306.