It’s always a good idea to setup a local firewall on hosts that are on unprotected networks. The internet “winds” blow harder and harder each day, and it’s only a matter of time before some daemon has an exploit that gets taken advantage of. I use CentOS 5 for all my web servers, and here [...]
Earlier today I had a problem with some Macs that could not establish SMB connections to our Windows File Server. There was no quick error, so the problem really “felt” like a firewall issue but strangely I was able to make a CLI connection to the file server using smbclient:
smbclient //server/share -U domain/username
Password:*******
Domain=[DOMAIN] OS=[Windows Server [...]
Rather than leave MySQL open to the world, consider firewalling it off and tunneling a connection over ssh.
This command will allow you to connect to your MySQL server on hostname.domain.com on localhost:7777.
ssh -L7777:127.0.0.1:3306 user@hostname.domain.com
