Hi,

I'm running a medical application on a local network, using MySQL as a database. The application can also connect to remote hosts, so the idea is to install it on one machine acting as a "server", and then install it on the other machines on the LAN, but configure these to use the database on the "server". I guess before doing that, I'll better try and get comfortable with connecting remotely using the MySQL monitor itself, that is, without any application or some other frontend.

Up until now, I've only configured MySQL in two situations. Either on standalone desktop workstations, or on a web server (LAMP).

After installing MySQL (yum install mysql-server), the default setup has a few accounts without any password. First thing I usually do (correct me if this is wrong) is clean up these accounts and only keep one main root@localhost account. Something like this :

[root@raymonde:~] # mysql Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 2 Server version: 5.0.77 Source distribution

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use mysql; Reading table information for completion of table and column names You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Database changed mysql> select user, host, password from user; +------+-----------+----------+ | user | host | password | +------+-----------+----------+ | root | localhost | | | root | raymonde | | | root | 127.0.0.1 | | | | localhost | | | | raymonde | | +------+-----------+----------+ 5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> delete from user where user = ''; Query OK, 2 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> delete from user where host = 'raymonde'; Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> delete from user where host = '127.0.0.1'; Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> select user, host, password from user; +------+-----------+----------+ | user | host | password | +------+-----------+----------+ | root | localhost | | +------+-----------+----------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> set password for root@localhost = password('********'); Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> select user, host, password from user; +------+-----------+------------------+ | user | host | password | +------+-----------+------------------+ | root | localhost | 2d97271980b60f82 | +------+-----------+------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> quit;

So much for the standalone setup.

Now what would be an orthodox (and somewhat secure) configuration to be able to connect to this MySQL server on 'raymonde' from another machine in the LAN ? Do I have to (re)create a root@raymonde MySQL account and eventually give it the same password than root@localhost ?

Cheers,

Niki