In a post way back in January of 2005, I discussed the software MyTop for monitoring connections on your MySQL server. I’ve had it installed and use it semi-regularly – however, it doesn’t always work – often I am greeted with the following error:

Cannot connect to MySQL server. Please check the:

* database you specified “test” (default is “test”)
* username you specified “root” (default is “root”)
* password you specified “” (default is “”)
* hostname you specified “localhost” (default is “localhost”)
* port you specified “3306″ (default is 3306)
* socket you specified “” (default is “”)

The options my be specified on the command-line or in a ~/.mytop
config file. See the manual (perldoc mytop) for details.

Here’s the exact error from DBI. It might help you debug:

Unknown database ‘test’

A pain in the butt, as I get it quite regularly and normally get one of the techs to tinker with it… Here’s the fix!

Simply enter the following command:

echo “db=mysql” > ~/.mytop