Reaching a remote MySQL database via DSN?

[Commodore640]

Hi All,

I have a problem that is probably a very simple one for those who use it in their daily work, however I could not find a good answer yet.
We have an ASP program that runs a project management software under MySQL database and Windows 2003. We have clients who have concerns to keep their private business information on our server and since they have their own machines, they want to host the application as well. We do not want to give out our program source code either, plus it makes updates really hard if we have a couple different hosts.

So I figured the best way to resolve this: We let the sensitive business information kept on our client's server, while we keep our software on our machine and just reach out remotely to the client whenever data is needed or changed. I thought it is easy to do by configuring a DNS on the server we have the program pointing to the remote machine and use the DNS to connect... BUT it does not work for me. Probabaly because of some security settings on MySQL? Does anybody have a generic, step by step instruction how I can get this to work? As I am setting up a DSN, it let me type in an IP address as well, but I can not test the database and I have no clue what password it would expect...
Is this something that I should use a VPN, so the data transactions between the servers are safe?

Any help would be appreciated...

 

[ChrisHirst]

The MySQL server username will have to be set to allow connections from the client IPs or from wildcard hosts and wildcard is NOT recommended as something you should do.

But surely as an ASP program the clients connect using a browser and simply get a HTML page with the data.

If you want to encrypt the communications and data transfer all you need to do is create a self-signed SSL certificate and the clients access the data via https.


Chris.

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