Question

I have MySQL 5 with this defined:

CREATE DATABASE foo DEFAULT CHARACTER SET = 'utf8';
GRANT ALL ON foo.* TO foo@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'foo';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

However, when accessing with user foo, pass foo, connection is refused.
When I change it to

GRANT ALL ON foo.* TO foo@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'foo';

MySQL lets me in.
Why the first doesn’t work? AFAIK, % should match anything.

Update: found this, may be related http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?30,158830,158830

Manual references: (no answer found there)

• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/account-names.html
• http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/adding-users.html

Answer 1

From mysql documentation :

A very common error is to insert a new entry with Host=’%’ and User=’some_user’, thinking that this enables you to specify localhost to connect from the same machine. The reason that this does not work is that the default privileges include an entry with Host=’localhost’ and User=”. Because that entry has a Host value ‘localhost’ that is more specific than ‘%’, it is used in preference to the new entry when connecting from localhost! The correct procedure is to insert a second entry with Host=’localhost’ and User=’some_user’, or to delete the entry with Host=’localhost’ and User=”. After deleting the entry, remember to issue a FLUSH PRIVILEGES statement to reload the grant tables. See also Section 6.2.4, “Access Control, Stage 1: Connection Verification”.

Check mysql.user table after executing your first commands

CREATE DATABASE foo DEFAULT CHARACTER SET = 'utf8';
GRANT ALL ON foo.* TO foo@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'foo';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
select * from mysql.user where User='foo';