Hi I'm buildind a MySQL server and I've been following a tutorial to help me building it.

At certain point of that tutorial, after the server installation part, it is said:

I didn't understand quite well what is that for. Isn't my server get vulnerable by doing that?

Do I really have to do that? And what is it for?

MySQL is intended to be a database for many uses including some very intensive network ones where it may be connected to from many other machines.

If you are going to use it on a single machine then I would doubt there is any need to alter that line.

In fact, the whole line bind-address doesn't occur in my "my.cnf" and it works very well.

Depends I suppose where you got your mysql from. I've found that if you get a version that is in the repositories of your distribution - you don't say which you are using but I assume yours does - then the database is usually compiled to only work on one machine unless you have a need to specifically to open it up further.

As you rightly surmise, the more you open up the greater the risk.

Thanks,

the MySQL server is being created to run a forum database. And yes, I have used the MySQL server on my repositories, I'm using Debian.

So I think it won't be necessary to do that, because the forum users are not going to access the database itself from outside, they just post and the forum (which will be hosted on the same machine) will write on the database, am I right?

Thanks for your help

Hello Fill

That's beyond my level of expertise, but I would have thought that with a forum members are going to be logged into your web server and interacting with the database through forum software - unless you are doing the whole thing yourself with php.

That may well mean only the local machine accessing the database but you'll have a whole lot of very limited mysql users to cater for.

I'd be interested to hear sometime if that surmise is right.

Hi,

I read this on the conf file of MySQL

# Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on
# localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure.
bind-address = 127.0.0.1

I think I'm not going to change it.

And yes, I am thinking like you: Users will login to my webserver and interact with the database via the forum software. No, I'm not doing php by myself, I'm using phpBB3. But in practice, what is going to access the database is the phpBB itself, and that is installed on the local machine, so the database access will only be local. It is even more secure.

See ya