how to mysqldump remote db from local machine

Question

I need to do a mysqldump of a database on a remote server, but the server does not have mysqldump installed. I would like to use the mysqldump on my machine to connect to the remote database and do the dump on my machine.

I have tried to create an ssh tunnel and then do the dump, but this does not seem to work. I tried:

ssh -f -L3310:remote.server:3306 user@remote.server -N

The tunnel is created with success. If I do

telnet localhost 3310

I get some blurb which shows the correct server mysql version. However, doing the following seems to try to connect locally

mysqldump -P 3310 -h localhost -u mysql_user -p database_name table_name

Answer 1

As I haven't seen it at serverfault yet, and the answer is quite simple:

Change:

ssh -f -L3310:remote.server:3306 user@remote.server -N

To:

ssh -f -L3310:localhost:3306 user@remote.server -N

And change:

mysqldump -P 3310 -h localhost -u mysql_user -p database_name table_name

To:

mysqldump -P 3310 -h 127.0.0.1 -u mysql_user -p database_name table_name

(do not use localhost, it's one of these 'special meaning' nonsense that probably connects by socket rather then by port)

edit: well, to elaborate: if host is set to localhost, a configured (or default) --socket option is assumed. See the manual for which option files are sought / used. Under Windows, this can be a named pipe.

Answer 2

One can invoke mysqldump locally against a remote server.

Example that worked for me:

mysqldump -h hostname-of-the-server -u mysql_user -p database_name > file.sql

I followed the mysqldump documentation on connection options.