Configuring Authentication and Security - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 27

Testing the MySQL connection
Now it's time to start phpMyAdmin and try connecting to it with the values we
configured. This will test the following:
• The values we entered in the config file or on the web-based setup
• The setup of the PHP component inside the web server, if we did a
manual configuration
• Communication between web and MySQL servers
We start our browser and point it to the directory where we installed phpMyAdmin,
as in http://www.mydomain.com/phpMyAdmin/ . If this does not work, we try
http://www.mydomain.com/phpMyAdmin/index.php . (This would mean that our
web server is not configured to interpret index.php as the default starting document.)
If you still get an error, refer to the Appendix for troubleshooting and support. We
should now see phpMyAdmin's home page. Chapter 3 gives an overview of the
panels seen now.
Authenticating multiple users
We might want to allow a single copy of phpMyAdmin to be used by a group of
persons, each having their own MySQL username and password, and seeing only the
databases they have rights to. Or we might prefer to avoid having our username and
password in clear text in config.inc.php .
Instead of relying on a username and password stored in config.inc.php ,
phpMyAdmin will communicate with the browser and get authentication data from
it. This enables true login for all users defined in a specific MySQL server, without
having to define them in the configuration file. There are three modes offered that
allow a controlled login to MySQL via phpMyAdmin— http , cookie , and signon .
We will have to choose the one that suits our specific situation and environment
(more on this in a moment). The http and cookie modes may require that we first
define a control user, as covered in Chapter 1 .
Authenticating with HTTP
This mode— http —is the traditional mode offered in HTTP, in which the browser
asks for the username and password, sends them to phpMyAdmin, and keeps
sending them until all the browser windows are closed.
To enable this mode, we simply use the following line:
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'http';