Common Errors When Using MySQL Programs Note the use of backticks rather than forward quotation marks with the  hostname  command; these cause the output of  hostname  (that is, the current host name) to be substituted into the  mysqladmin  command. If you have no  hostname  command or are running on Windows, you can manually type the host name of your machine (without backticks) following the  -h  option. You can also try  -h 127.0.0.1  to connect with TCP/IP to the local host. Make sure that the server has not been configured to ignore network connections or (if you are attempting to connect remotely) that it has not been configured to listen only locally on its network interfaces. If the server was started with the  skip_networking  system variable enabled, it cannot accept TCP/IP connections at all. If the server was started with the  bind_address  system variable set to  127.0.0.1 , it listens for TCP/IP connections only locally on the loopback interface and does not accept remote connections. Check to make sure that there is no firewall blocking access to MySQL. Your firewall may be configured on the basis of the application being executed, or the port number used by MySQL for communication (3306 by default). Under Linux or Unix, check your IP tables (or similar) configuration to ensure that the port has not been blocked. Under Windows, applications such as ZoneAlarm or Windows Firewall may need to be configured not to block the MySQL port. Here are some reasons the  Can’t connect to local MySQL server  error might occur: See Section B.3.3.6, “How to Protect or Change the MySQL Unix Socket File” . If you get the error message  Can’t connect to MySQL server on some_host , you can try the following things to find out what the problem is: 5288 •The server or client program might not have the proper access privileges for the directory that holds the Unix socket file or the socket file itself. In this case, you must either change the access privileges for the directory or socket file so that the server and clients can access them, or restart  mysqld  with a  -- socket  option that specifies a socket file name in a directory where the server can create it and where client programs can access it. •You are using Linux and one server thread has died (dumped core). In this case, you must kill the other  mysqld  threads (for example, with  kill ) before you can restart the MySQL server. See Section B.3.3.3, “What to Do If MySQL Keeps Crashing” . shell>  netstat -ln | grep mysql •You have started the  mysqld  server with the  --socket=/path/to/socket  option, but forgotten to tell client programs the new name of the socket file. If you change the socket path name for the server, you must also notify the MySQL clients. You can do this by providing the same  --socket  option when you run client programs. You also need to ensure that clients have permission to access the mysql.sock  file. To find out where the socket file is, you can do: •Someone has removed the Unix socket file that  mysqld  uses ( /tmp/mysql.sock  by default). For example, you might have a  cron  job that removes old files from the  /tmp  directory. You can always run mysqladmin version  to check whether the Unix socket file that  mysqladmin  is trying to use really exists. The fix in this case is to change the  cron  job to not remove  mysql.sock  or to place the socket file somewhere else. See Section B.3.3.6, “How to Protect or Change the MySQL Unix Socket File” . •You’re running a MySQL server on Windows with many TCP/IP connections to it. If you’re experiencing that quite often your clients get that error, you can find a workaround here: Connection to MySQL Server Failing on Windows. • mysqld  is not running on the local host. Check your operating system’s process list to ensure the mysqld  process is present.