MySQL remote connection fails with “unknown authentication method”

Question

I am trying to remotely connect to MySQL server online from my local machine, but I am getting the following error:

Warning: PDO::__construct(): The server r         


        

Answer 1

I overcame the challenge. I found out that my remote MySQL database host still uses the old MySQL password hash which is 16-byte, while my localhost database server uses 41-byte password hash. I used the following query to find the password length:

SELECT PASSWORD('mypass') 

I changed my localhost database server password hash to 16-byte by running the following query

SET GLOBAL old_passwords = 1;

Then I edited my.ini file, and set the old_password=1 to ensure that when the server restarts, it won't revert to the new password system. But that didn't solve my problem.

I figured out that it was PHP that handles the authentication, since I was using PHP's MySQL API, so I downgraded to PHP 5.2.8 and I was able to make the remote connection successfully.

I hope this helps someone.