Archive for May, 2005

So what does Packets out of order: 1<>3: mean when in shows up in your Rails log? It means DreamHost has upgraded to MySQL 4.1.x, which has a new password hashing technique, but you’re still using the old one, and the pure Ruby MySQL driver only has support for the new one.

Basically Rails can no longer connect to MySQL because it’s failing on the password authentication. There are a few fixes, the easiest would be to update your passwords for MySQL 4.1 but I can’t do this on DreamHost because you don’t have permissions when logging in via console and the web interface only creates the old style ones. The other way is to install the C bindings for the MySQL driver, which does support the old password style:

gem install mysql

It also looks like DreamHost is getting closer to supporting Ruby on Rails. They’ve installed a copy of Ruby 1.8.x and testing FastCGI internally. Hopefully this means I won’t have to manage my own install for much longer!