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Manually Installing MySQL on Windows 2003 Server

Posted on 09/02/2009 at 12:02 pm by Kevin Wentworth
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I have been trying to install MySQL on a web server running Windows 2003 for quite a while now.  I was finally successful! Here's how I did it...

Does your server have a hard-coded IP address?

If so, you need to make localhost refer to the manually assigned IP address in your hosts file.  This file is located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc.

Default hosts file will say:

Modify your hosts file to reflect the binded IP address (be sure to save your changes!):

This is the most important step.  This is why MySQL didn't work for out of the box.

It took me a while before I tried this.  If you keep getting 'Can't connect to MySQL server on localhost" errors and you don't have a firewall blocking port 3306, this is probably what's going on.  MySQL comes default with access granted to localhost.  However, if you've manually assigned an IP address to your server, MySQL WILL NOT WORK!

To test if this is working, go to the command prompt and type in "ping localhost".  You should see the IP address you entered above getting pinged, not 127.0.0.1.

Now the MySQL instructions should work as proscribed

The installation instructions at mysql.com will now work.