TW Blog :: Archives for January 2005

Inexplicable Takeover

Relates to MySQL and Security

This week has been full of mind boggling puzzles no more so than the apparant take over of my machine by the Outpost Firewall! I run MySQL 3.23 Daemon on request and mid-week for no apparant reason I could no longer connect to the server after booting up. After running a few diagnostics, I concluded that somehow MySQL had corrupted, so since I had a zipped copy of MySQL 4.0.21 on disc I gave this a spin - same problem. At a loss, and concern growing due to total dependency for current work, I tried reinstalling the TCP/IP software. No joy. So I decided to take a peek on the web for similar problems. This entailed booting up the Outpost Firewall, which I have been test driving the past few weeks. To my surprise, once the firewall was running, I could connect to the MySQL server as normal! This was bewildering to me. I boot my system with no services running and the minimal Windows programs, so it would seem somehow MySQL had become inextricably dependant on Outpost!? Eventually I managed to restore normality by cleaning out the shared components in Outpost, but why this worked I can not explain.

So, now I am at a loss on a choice of firewall. Since removing Norton, I have tried numerous firewalls over the past few months - BitDefender, Kerio, Sygate, ZoneAlarm and now Outpost. Prior to this mishap, Outpost had actually been the first one that had not burdened me with conflicts, crashes or reduction in performance. Most frustrating is I would go back to BitDefender immediately if they could only resolve the Windows 98 bugs.

The one positive outcome from this puzzle is that I now have access to MySQL 4 on demand. I generally build on 3.23 to match the live servers I use. Using the datadir parameter in two option files, and booting the daemon from a batch file I can switch between each version as I please. Add to this the three versions of PHP4 and latest PHP5 I currently choose from when booting Apache, and Windows 98 is really not all that bad for development!

Posted on Sunday, Jan 30, 2005 at 21:37:21.