Thanks for the follow-up and clarification, you are correct linking php4 against the newer mysql libraries should have worked too.

Terry

-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l- bounces@wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Brion Vibber Sent: Wednesday, March 02, 2005 2:24 AM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] installation problem: ... cannot contactthe databaseserver

Terry Lalonde wrote:

...

Sarcastic tone on -> Thanks for the help!

Congratulations on solving your problem on your own; less than 10

hours

elapsed between your first post and your follow-up.

...

Since I figured it out...I'll share.

In this case the problem was the fact that I was using PHP4.x.x and mysql4.1.10. There is a basic incompatability between the two in terms of password authentication.

If you were to search the mailing list archives for "MySQL 4.1" you'd see a number of previous notes on this with pointers to the help pages on dev.mysql.com. This is also mentioned in the release notes for all 1.4 beta releases.

Note that there is not actually a basic incompatibility between PHP

4.x

and MySQL 4.1; PHP 4.x will work fine with MySQL 4.1 if you link it against the MySQL 4.1 client libraries. Most precompiled binary distributions however are linked against older, incompatible

libraries.

If you received both PHP and MySQL distributions from the same vendor, you should let them know they're shipping incompatible versions.

If you're using MySQL 4.1, you should also be aware that mysqldump may corrupt your data if it performs character set conversion. Use the

same

charset setting for dumping as the database is set to (eg, latin1 for both).

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)