I have been waiting a long time on MySQL 5.1 on Debian Lenny. Now I do not want to wait any longer so I installed MySQL 5.0. The installation went smoothly like everything else on Debian. After the installation I gave root the right to connect from my LAN with the same rights as from the server itself. Unfortunatelly I could not connect from my LAN. In the MySQL documentation I came upon some tests that I could do:
shell> mysqladmin --password version shell> mysqladmin --password variables shell> mysqladmin --password -h `hostname` version variables shell> mysqladmin --password -h `hostname` --port=3306 version shell> mysqladmin --password -h host_ip version shell> mysqladmin --password --protocol=SOCKET --socket=/tmp/mysql.sock version
I could only connect without the -h parameter. The parameters that could be responsible for this were not present in the commandline. Then I googled with debian lenny mysql remote connections and found that Debian disables by default the access from the network. You just need to put the line bind-address = 127.0.0.1 in the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file as a comment and restarted MySQL. They prefer this approach to the command line parameter skip-networking.