MySQL root access from all hosts

I've installed MySQL server on a remote Ubuntu machine. The root user is defined in the mysql.user table this way:

mysql> SELECT host, user, password FROM user WHERE user = 'root';
+------------------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| host             | user | password                                  |
+------------------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| localhost        | root | *xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
| ip-10-48-110-188 | root | *xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
| 127.0.0.1        | root | *xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
| ::1              | root | *xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
+------------------+------+-------------------------------------------+

I can access with user root from the same remote machine command-line interface using the standard mysql client. Now I want to allow root access from every host on the internet, so I tried adding following row (it's an exact duplicate of the first row from previous dump, except for the host column):

mysql> SELECT host, user, password FROM user WHERE host = '%';
+------------------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| host             | user | password                                  |
+------------------+------+-------------------------------------------+
| %                | root | *xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx |
+------------------+------+-------------------------------------------+

But my client on my personal PC continues to tell me (I obscured the server IP):

SQL Error (2003): Can't connect to MySQL server on '46.x.x.x' (10061)

I can't tell if it's a authentication error or a network error. On the server firewall I enabled port 3306/TCP for 0.0.0.0/0, and that's ok for me...

 Answers

There's two steps in that process:

a) Grant privileges. As root user execute:

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

b) bind to all addresses:

The easiest way is to comment out the line in your my.cnf file:

#bind-address = 127.0.0.1 

and restart mysql

service mysql restart

By default it binds only to localhost, but if you comment the line it binds to all interfaces it finds. Commenting out the line is equivalent to bind-address=*.

To check where mysql service has binded execute as root:

netstat -tupan | grep mysql

Update For Ubuntu 16:

Config file is (now)

/etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf 

(at least on standard Ubuntu 16)

---

Sometimes

bind-address = 127.0.0.1

should be

bind-address = *

---

In my case the "bind-address" setting was the problem. Commenting this setting in my.cnf did not help, because in my case mysql set the default to 127.0.0.1 for some reason.

To verify what setting MySql is currently using, open the command line on your local box:

mysql -h localhost -u myname -pmypass mydb

Read out the current setting:

Show variables where variable_name like "bind%"

You should see 0.0.0.0 here if you want to allow access from all hosts. If this is not the case, edit your /etc/mysql/my.cnf and set bind-address under the [mysqld] section:

bind-address=0.0.0.0

Finally restart your MySql server to pick up the new setting:

sudo service mysql restart

Try again and check if the new setting has been picked up.