How to Allow remote MySQL Client to Connect to MySQL server

By default, MySQL does not allow remote clients to connect to the MySQL database.

If you try to connect to a remote MySQL database from your client system, you will get “ERROR 1130: Host is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server” message as shown below.

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$ mysql -h 192.168.1.8 -u root -p
Enter password:
ERROR 1130: Host '192.168.1.4' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server

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You can also validate this by doing telnet to 3306 mysql port as shown below, which will also give the same “host is not allowed to connect to this mysql server” error message as shown below.

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$ telnet 192.168.1.8 3306
host 192.168.1.4 is not allowed to connect to this mysql server

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If you want to allow a specific client ip-address (for example: 192.168.1.4) to access the mysql database running on a server, you should execute the following command on the server that is running the mysql database.

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$ mysql -u root -p
Enter password:

mysql> use mysql

mysql> GRANT ALL ON *.* to root@'192.168.1.4' IDENTIFIED BY 'your-root-password';

mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

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Also, update firewall rules to make sure port# 3306 is open on the server that is running the mysql database.

After the above changes, when you try to connect to the mysql database from a remote client, you’ll not get the “Host is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server” error message anymore.

I have to mention that this method is UNSECURE , because the transmission of the data is made in plain text format . For a secure method a SSH tunel must be implemented .But this is a subject for a future article .