Saturday, 19 May 2012

Administrating a mySQL database with phpMyAdmin

Just a quick gotcha for OSX, mySQL and phpMyAdmin.

I had successfully set up mySQL and secured the default accounts with passwords. Although shipping a product without passwords may be thought of as a security hole, it is just as bad as shipping with a default password.

Downloaded and installed phpMyAdmin onto the macbook and configured according to instructions. 

Did it work? Did it heck! 

After a while googling for answers, I read through another install guide (although for Lion not Snow Leopard) and found this gem: 

Edit config.inc.php using your favorite editor (I prefer vi) and change$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = ‘localhost’; to $cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = ’127.0.0.1′;*Well it sounds stupid because localhost and 127.0.0.1 are same in networking world but phpMyAdmin won’t let you (At least me) log in without this change and keeps throwing error “#2002 Cannot log in to the MySQL server
This is one of the classic IT gotcha's: two things that are supposed to give the same result don't. I'm almost tempted to see if it is the same on a linux machine, but don't want to get diverted.

Next steps will be to start reading up seriously on PHP MVC frameworks - I'm currently looking at cakePHP.

I really can't remember how we did this stuff before the internet was available, and many of the younger developers probably can't imagine the idea. Perhaps that is why I have a largish collection of computing books going back to VB5 and Access 2 in my bookshelves. Although that could just be because I hate to get rid of books.

No comments:

Post a Comment