“Host is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server” over network

Question

I am attempting to connect Tableau on a client (Windows 7) to a MySQL Server 5.6 (on Windows Server 2012 R2) that is hosting my data warehouse. This server is hosted on my university's network. Here is what I have done so far:

• created a user that has privileges it needs (I ran GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON the user with FLUSH PRIVILEDGES, based on some other stack overflow posts)
• made sure the host specified in the user table is "%"
• made sure there was nothing in the my.cnf file that would prevent external connections (again based on another stackoverflow post)
• ensured that the edition of MySQL running on the server is 64 bit, like the version of Tableau I'm running

I still get the "[MySQL][ODBC 5.3(w) Driver]Host 'vpn240-74.vpn.utah.edu' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server" error. This same error is thrown when I try to telnet to the port on the server MySQL is listening on.

I have found that this error persists whether I am connected via a vpn or on campus. I can RDP to the server in question, ping it, and found the firewall rule for the port I am using, so I don't think there is anything network related that is stopping me.

All my stackoverflow research says that error means MySQL is convinced that the user is not allowed to connect from that specific hostname, but I get the same error whether I change the entry in the user table to be "%" or the specific hostname from the error message.

Also I see that the Tableau MySQL driver I installed is a lower version number than the MySQL instance I'm trying to hit (5.3 vs 5.6) but that is the newest driver on the Tableau site that I can find.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Have you tried making an ODBC connection in your computer to your MySQL server and testing it that way?

Tableau can then connect via an ODBC connection made rather than the explicit Tableau MySQL driver. In Tableau under More Servers... Other Databases (ODBC) shows up at the very bottom.