Hello,

I'm trying to connect to my MySQL database through telnet but I'm not having much success.

I open a command prompt, type

telnet

and at the telnet prompt, I type

open xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

to which it says

Connecting To xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx...Could not open connection to the host, on port 23: Connect failed

I've setup port forwarding on my router so that telnet routes to port 23 on my server's local IP address.

I don't know why the connection is failing. Does anyone else?

PS - This probably doesn't make a difference, but I encounter the same problem whether connecting with my WAN IP address or LAN (both the client and server computers are on the same network).

I think you may be confused here. Telnet is an old and insecure way of accessing a Linux/UNIX server. The modern equivalent is SSH. The telnet server is not installed by default and I would not install it either. Installed the sshd server instead and access the server with the ssh client.

However, you should note again that this only gives you access to the Linux/UNIX server and not to the database directly.

A standard install of MySQL allows the database to be accessed on port 3306.

I see.

I going by this: Backing Up and Restoring Your MySQL Database - MySQL which tells me that I should be able to telnet or SSH into my server and use mysqldump in order to make a backup of my database. If I can't use telnet, I'll have to use SSH I suppose, but SSH doesn't seem to be a recognized command from a standard command prompt. Is it some other keyword? Do I have to download and install SSH?

I'm told that mysqldump will only work through a shell, not through MySQL directly. I certainly know it doesn't work with the latter, so I'm trying to the former.

Any suggestions?

Problem solved. I just wasn't in the MySQL bin folder. I assumed the path would be set in the environment variables to mysqldump.exe, but it wasn't.h