Database Connection or Authentication errors with Movable Type

There are a few common errors that may occur when dealing with MySQL and Movable Type installations:  Authentication and Connection errors.  

 

Authentication occurs when the Movable Type application is attempting to communicate to the MYSQL database with a user name and password.  The three factors involved in the authentication are:  user name, database name, and password.  If any of these are mis-typed or incorrect, then you may see the following errors:

 

The error message above indicates shows “Connection error:  Access denied for user ‘whhsup5_mt257@’localhost’ to database ‘whhsup5_mt2577″.  This indicates that access is not being allowed by the server because of either an incorrect user name, database or password.  Here is another possible error message:

Communication Error (200)
Movable Type: An error occurred Connection error: Access denied for user ‘whhsup5_mt257’@’localhost’ to database ‘whhsup5_mt2577’

Again, this error relates to the authentication of the database with the user name, database name or password used to access the database from Movable Type. 

 

Troubleshooting steps – Double-check the user name, password, and database name and then try the connection again.  If necessary, you may need to access the database manually in order to update the password.  

 

 

The other type of errors that you may see are database connection errors.  This is different from authentication errors in that Movable Type simply cannot communicate with the database server. The error message you may see generated from Movable Type may look like the following:

Got an error: Connection error: Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock’ (2)

 

This error can be cause a wide number of reasons.  It can be caused by a loss in internet connectivity, network issues between the sever and database, and database errors causing the database to be inoperable.  It can also be caused by the database server simply not being active.  

 

Troubleshooting steps – many of these problems may require that you contact Technical Support so that they can check the database for you.  Use the article on Database Connection Errors to help troubleshoot your connection issues.

 

 

Configuration File

 

If you need to edit the parameters for the Database Connection, you can find them in the mt-config.cgi file located within the cgi-bin folder where the Movable Type has installed its files. The configuration file may appear as follows:

 
## Movable Type Configuration File
##
## This file defines system-wide
## settings for Movable Type. In 
## total, there are over a hundred 
## options, but only those 
## critical for everyone are listed 
## below.
##
## Information on all others can be 
## found at:
## https://www.movabletype.org/documentation/config
 
#======== REQUIRED SETTINGS ==========
 
CGIPath /cgi-bin/movable/
StaticWebPath /mvtype/mt-static/
StaticFilePath /home/whhsup5/public_html/mvtype/mt-static
 
#======== DATABASE SETTINGS ==========
 
ObjectDriver DBI::mysql
Database whhsup5_mt2477
DBUser whhsup5_mt2474
DBPassword SmP4dfdf3
DBHost localhost