Question

Yes, this is a common issue – I found a Stack Overflow ticket that is perfect for this:

Cannot connect to MySQL 4.1+ using old authentication

Except… I don’t have the privileges to run those MySQL commands on my shared hosting provider (Site5). When I asked them, they told me to screw off since I was accessing it from my local computer (which I do only to test web applications before committing/deploying my code). I am using the newest build of XAMPP on Windows 7 and it has PHP 5.3.5.

At any rate, I do not have root access and cannot change the password. They will not run these commands for me. What can I do?

EDIT: Also, when I enable PHP 5.3.5 on my shared host, the database connections work fine despite the old MySQL version and old_passwords file. I did this by adding a handler in .htaccess and confirmed it through phpinfo(). Is this a remote connection issue?

Answer 1

Here’s what I did: I conceded by replicating the database on my local machine and changing the connection string to “localhost” rather than pointing at the shared server specifically.