phpMyAdmin hickup - #1045 - Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)

I logged into one of my moodle servers today to check on something and noticed the warning in the phpMyAdmin home page about the root user not having a password.  I know I messed with this a little in the past, but am hesitant to mess to much because I don't want to create work for myself.  On the other hand, if someone exploited a hole and accessed phpMyAdmin on the server, they could cause real problems.

I decided to close up this security hole by adding a password to the root account.

Using phpMyAdmin, I clicked on the Users tab and selected the root user and added a password.  I double checked my moodle instance that is using this server, config.php, to ensure I was not using this account to connect moodle to MySQL.

After setting the password, I reloaded phpMyAdmin and still got the error.

What the problem really is is phpMyAdmin trying to connect to the MySQL server.  I browsed to the configuration file for phpMyAdmin, at wamp/apps/phpmyadmin3.5.1/config.inc.php.

I changed / added the password for the root account and reloaded my page attempting to connect to phpmyadmin, and still got the same error.  I restarted the service, reloaded the page, still got the error.

My problem now was I could not get into phpmyadmin to edit the users!  I looked myself out by adding a password to the root user, while the root@localhost was the one being used in the config.inc.php file.

Hmmmmm.  How can I reset the password for the root or root@localhost user in phpMyAdmin, when I cannot access now?  I could try the mysql command line, where I could attempt to reset the password for the root user OR I could load MySQL workbench and use the Server Administration connection and access the accounts that way!

MySQL workbench to access the DB to change the password

These are my 4 moodle servers.









Browsing to the server allows me to update the accounts in the users table.

I reset the password for the root from localhost account to match the value I added to the
wamp/apps/phpmyadmin3.5.1/config.inc.php file, refreshed the phpmyadmin page and ......

I was back in business.

Moral of the story?  This is confusing.  Know which root user instance phpmyadmin is using to connect to the MySQL server and set it to match the value in the phpmyadmin configuration file.   Second moral?  Set a password for the root user, its a security hole that should be closed.