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Connecting to MySQL over SSH

Database administrators and security people know that it is good practice to open only local access to MySQL server for security reasons. However, if you want to connect any of Intelligent Converters applications to MySQL server hosted on a Linux/Unix system, it is necessary to open remote access from your local IP address on the destination server. Obviously it makes MySQL server less secure. To improve the situation you can use SSH protocol for secure data transfer between local machine running Intelligent Converters application and MySQL server.

The most easy way of connecting MySQL through SSH is to use port-forwarding through an SSH tunnel. This technique is based on creating an alias that makes any client application think it's connecting to "localhost" machine, while it's really connecting to the remote server through the tunnel.

If you are using the command line ssh, the command would look like this:

ssh -L <localport>localhost<remoteport> <username>@<servername>

If you use the standard MySQL port, both "localport" and "remoteport" must be set to 3306. You can do the same via tools having graphical user interface like Putty or SecureCRT.

Once you've got the ssh tunnel going, you can open any of Intelligent Converters application and enter in the details for remote MySQL server, using 'localhost' as the server host.

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