I have done ssh tunnel to a remote machine running mysql fine before, but this time I'm having trouble getting it to work for some reason.

This time I'm running CentOS 7 and mariadb. I usually use ubuntu and mysql. The ssh port has changed to port 4445, but I can ssh into the remote machine fine and then issue the mysql -u root -p command and connect, but if I tried to ssh using work bench or navicat it says it can't connect.

Any ideas?

While I have no idea what work bench or navicat is, and what the particular issues are with the combination of mysql and ssh, some general comments.

Whenever a client can't connect, you need to know:

• Which port it wants to connect to
• Is the port open on the server
• Is something listening on the port

The two last points are easily checked on the server with tools like iptables and ss or netstat. To figure out the port, check your application's configuration (do the server and the client use the same port?) or trace packets with tools like tcpdump or wireshark.

If you are certain that somebody listens on the port and the port is open, tracing will also help you understand why the connection can't be established.

I made sure the ports were open on the firewall and I netstat and got this

sudo netstat -plutn | grep 3306
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:3306 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1997/mysqld

this is what I have for my.cnf file
[mysqld]
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
# Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks
symbolic-links=0
# Settings user and group are ignored when systemd is used.
# If you need to run mysqld under a different user or group,
# customize your systemd unit file for mariadb according to the
# instructions in http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Systemd
character-set-server=utf8

[mysqld_safe]
log-error=/var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log
pid-file=/var/run/mariadb/mariadb.pid

#
# include all files from the config directory
#
!includedir /etc/my.cnf.d

The my.conf file doesn't seem to contain anything connection-specific (as far as somebody with very little exposure to mysql can see).

You should then be able to connect to this server from a remote client, using the mysql command and a proper connection string.
I don't know why you need to ssh-tunnel to it, but what's the command and what's the error message or behaviour?

I was able to get ssh tunneling to work. I'm using ssh tunneling since this server will be facing the outside network. At first I had to use grant... @, but realized I didn't need the ssh tunnel so I revoked that and tried another grant permissions and used @ip address and that work. So from what I can tell it is bound to the ip address and just needed a grant permissions for it.