PHP 4 & MySQL 4.1.x - Be warned!

Shorty

If you upgrade your MySQL to a 4.1.x and are not using PHP5.... (PHP5 has updated MySQL library files for connection)....

MySQL 4.1 and up uses an authentication protocol based on a password hashing algorithm that is incompatible with that used by older clients. If you upgrade the server to 4.1, attempts to connect to it with an older client may fail with the following message:

shell> mysql
Client does not support authentication protocol requested
by server; consider upgrading MySQL client

To solve this problem, you should use one of the following approaches:

* Upgrade all client programs to use a 4.1.1 or newer client library.
* When connecting to the server with a pre-4.1 client program, use an account that still has a pre-4.1-style password.
* Reset the password to pre-4.1 style for each user that needs to use a pre-4.1 client program. This can be done using the SET PASSWORD statement and the OLD_PASSWORD() function:

mysql> SET PASSWORD FOR
-> 'some_user'@'some_host' = OLD_PASSWORD('newpwd');

Alternatively, use UPDATE and FLUSH PRIVILEGES:

mysql> UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = OLD_PASSWORD('newpwd')
-> WHERE Host = 'some_host' AND User = 'some_user';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Substitute the password you want to use for ``newpwd'' in the preceding examples. MySQL cannot tell you what the original password was, so you'll need to pick a new one.
* Tell the server to use the older password hashing algorithm:
1. Start mysqld with the --old-passwords option.
2. Assign an old-format password to each account that has had its password updated to the longer 4.1 format. You can identify these accounts with the following query:

mysql> SELECT Host, User, Password FROM mysql.user
-> WHERE LENGTH(Password) > 16;

For each account record displayed by the query, use the Host and User values and assign a password using the OLD_PASSWORD() function and either SET PASSWORD or UPDATE, as described earlier.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Old_client.html

Killed my dev server earlier and now I've gotta mess around with the install to get it accept old passwords for old tables.

Thrax

Wow, crappy

MediaMan

No wonder I got all those funny database connection errors. FINALLY...it wasn't me that borked it.

Shorty

Nope. I had to upgrade MySQL as my version didn't support the UNION syntax I need for several queries. In doing so, this happened.

A quick google reveals I am far from the only person to have had this problem, it's only mentioned in one change note (and not for the latest version). Wish I had known.

:bawling:

My personal code is PHP5 compliant (it's commented heavily to allow me to convert it to PHP5 with very little effort) but VBulletin is not supported to run under PHP5 yet, so I have to make my code backwards compatible (which sucks as PHP5 rocks!!!).