I'm currently experiencing a weird problem with one of my MySQL database servers:
It stopped asking for passwords when I try to access the database from local with the mysql command line tool.
I need a valid admin username. I also still need a password for remote access (i.e. from another IP). And I need a password when I - for example - access the database from a PHP script. But when I try to access the database from local host/commandline it will let me straight in to the data with my administrative users.
They (admin users) have passwords set - and as I mentioned - I still need to specify those when I try to access the data via PHP.
Changing the password didn't help.
Non-Administrative users need to specify their passwort, but that doesn't really help if they can get anywhere with "mysql -u root" (or another admin user account name).
(System Debian Linux Lenny, MySQL 5.0.51a)
Any ideas? Anything that explains this behaviour? I don't understand how this can happen.
Are you the sole admin of the system?
If not, I guess someone else has created a file named "/root/.my.cnf", containing login-credentials. Can you verify this?