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Host ‘patheticcockroach.com’ is blocked because of many connection errors; unblock with ‘mysqladmin flush-hosts’

Just got this pretty annoying error on a setup where the database isn’t on the same machine as the web server. As mentioned in the error message, running this flush-hosts command works (although you actually have to add connection parameters, resulting in a command such as mysqladmin -u root -p flush-hosts). BUT, apparently, if you do nothing (for instance, if you don’t notice the error), your server remains locked, which can be quite problematic, to say the least.

I didn’t really have the time to dig into the possible reasons for this problem yet, but a first fix is simply to increase MySQL’s tolerance to connection errors. To do this, you just need to edit the configuration file (on Debian 6, /etc/mysql/conf.d/my.cnf) to add something like max_connect_errors = 500 under the [mysqld] section. This is the maximum number of connection errors that the server will accept before locking itself (default: 10). I’m still wondering whether or not this is a grand total or a per day/hour/something count, though.

After that, don’t forget to apply the configuration changes:
/etc/init.d/mysql reload

(on a side note, to see the current mysql version: mysql --version)

Sources:

Posted in MySQL.


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