I am renting a dedicated server and have just finished installing MySQL on Debian (Sarge). I would like to connect to manage my databases from my computer using MYSQL Control Center. I am receiving the error below. What do I need to do to enable remote connections to my databases and does this pose a significant security threat?

Is your mysql server running on your dedicated server? Check your my.cnf to see if "skip-networking" is uncommented. Comment that line and restart your mysql instance and see if that lets you in. Check 'ps aux' to make sure it's running after the restart.

As for 'is it secure', one would hope If you haven't secured your box, you may want to secure it before opening more ports to the world. For more info on securing this type of setup, post/search in the Linux - Security forum, we really have some security guru's living over there.

Cool

Yup my mysql server is running on my dedicated server. Thank you very much for the quick reply. I checked my.cnf and this is what I found. If I comment bind-address then I receive a new error saying host is not allowed to connect to this server. Definitely is progress but I am not sure how to gain access. I would try to bind it to my IP but it is not static. Please advise.

Does your dedicted server have a private IP for that machine? Assuming you don't need things like Port-Forwarding and all traffic is sent to a specific IP, then you could bind to that private IP for that machine (not the loopback one).

IIRC you can bind to a hostname instead of an IP...

Does that provide any luck?

Cool