I had an issue come up recently that involved some confusion over permissions for the same user, connecting through different interfaces. For example, say you have a server with the public IP address of 192.168.0.1. You could connect to it from the local machine using the following commands:
shell> mysql -h localhost # Connects through the socket file shell> mysql -h 127.0.0.1 # Connects through the loopback interface shell> mysql -h 192.168.0.1 # Connects through the network interface
They all connect to the local server, but they can all have different permissions. Here are a couple of rules to make your life easier:
- Don’t use @127.0.0.1, unless you absolutely can’t use the socket file for some reason. Connecting through @localhost is usually faster than the loopback device, and it’s easier to type.
- Only connect through the network interface if you’re planning on moving the application to a different server later on.
That’s all. 🙂