HowTo: MySQL Workbench to Remote Ubuntu Production Server Using SSH Port Forwarding

Before starting, I'm totally not the Linux command line guru, unfortunately. It feels like years of just using Windows base OS makes you a wizard-click-through guy ;). My recent (well, a year ago) acquisition of a MacBook Pro made this a little better, but still I feel quite naked when it comes to good old command line knowledge.

Yesterday I was about setting up my Linux Ubuntu based production server which was kindly provided to me by the university to deploy my MSc thesis project. Actually theres not much to set up, a Tomcat webserver and an according MySQL database server. The university admin gave me a VPN client and credentials to get access over SSH. After installing Tomcat and MySQL I tried to get access from the MySQL workbench installed on my local OSX machine to the remote Ubuntu MySQL server. I mean, this is not strictly necessary, but nevertheless very comfortable for synchronizing your database model based on your ER schema design.

After hours of reading me through tutorials and serverfault posts I got it to work, and actually it turned out to be pretty simple - after you understood the mechanics behind. Open a ssh connection, by typing the following in your shell

ssh -L 3310:127.0.0.1:3306 [email protected]

Then start your MySQL workbench (v 5.2) and click on the appropriate link to create a new server instance.

It should work now.

Related links:
http://serverfault.com/questions/128923/forwarding-port-3306-on-mac-os-x-in-order-to-connect-to-a-remote-mysql-database

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