Having recently recovered from an horrendous network crash and subsequently having to retrieve our internal Intranet, I've learnt quite a bit about MySQL and it's integration with Xoops.

An issue that has come to light is the issue of enhanced security in MySQL 4.1.11 where plain text passwords have been scrapped in favour of their 48-bit MD5 hash value that is used for authentication to the MySQL server from the web browser. You can read about this more fully in this link titled 'Client does not support authentication protocol' :

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/old-client.html

This problem would appear to effect XOOPS 2.0.9.3 and below (not sure if it effects the latest?) because that is the version we run. It also effects phpMyAdmin and any other PHP based systems. I wonder though....I expect this is more related to issues of PHP 4 as opposed to XOOPS itself which happens to be written in PHP 4?

There is a fix though, and that is described in the link above. I used the command line fix, where, basically, you tell MySQL to use the old 16-bit password rules for password storage rather than the newer 48-bit way. It worked a treat for me and now, thank god, our Intranet is back up and running. But what a 3 days it's been!

The point? Just to make people who are considering upgrading MySQL to be aware of these issues before doing so.