Dreamweaver TechNote

Error when testing Dreamweaver connection to MySQL 4.1

Issue

When testing a Dreamweaver PHP database connection to MySQL 4.1, the following error occurs:

Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server; 
consider upgrading MySQL client 

Reason

In MySQL 4.1, changes were made to the authentication protocol's hashing algorithm that make it incompatible with older MySQL clients.

Note: The "client" mentioned in the error message above is the PHP application server, not Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver does not have a native MySQL client, but instead uses PHP scripts to communicate with MySQL databases.

Solution

There are a few different workarounds for this problem:

• Enable the old password format in MySQL 4.1 server so that it's compatible with older clients (i.e. older versions of PHP). See Additional information for more details on this work around.
• Users running UNIX servers can recompile PHP so it includes the newer MySQL client library. Users running Windows servers will have to wait for future versions of PHP in order to get the newer MySQL client library.
• Revert back to an earlier version of MySQL.

Additional information

The following articles on the MySQL website have more details on this issue and the work arounds:

• Client does not support authentication protocol
  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Old_client.html 
• Password Hashing in MySQL 4.1
  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Password_hashing.html