Dave Rowe’s Blog

I use DBDesigner4 for DB modeling and ERD generation. Great tool, though the original developer went to work for MySQL (I think) to build their MySQL Workbench. Well, for Linux users, Workbench isn’t available yet, so we can still use DBDesigner4, which works great. Anyways, so I recently attempted to connect to my local MySQL 5 instance, and couldn’t connect. Consistent errors stating invalid username/password, even though I clearly typed it with no errors.

The issue is rather simple. The library used by DBDesigner4 uses an older version of the MySQL API to connect. Meaning, in between versions, MySQL changed the method by which passwords are stored, therefore the authentication would keep failing. Enter ‘OLD_PASSWORD‘. By setting your password using the ‘OLD_PASSWORD’ method, you can connect up with DBDesigner.

Example:

mysql> set password for ‘user’@’host’ to OLD_PASSWORD(‘mysecret’);