Peter H. Coffin wrote:
> If you're making an insane kind of telnet connection to a CLI on another
> machine to (from there) issue a connect to reach the database, you're
> out of luck. (I cannot rightly understand *why* someone would set a
> sytem up that way, but it's possible.

This is not unusual, I have done it frequently. For example, if you're
trying to reach a host behind a firewall, and telnet (or more likely
ssh) is allowed through the firewall, but MySQL's port 3306 isn't.

Another reason is bandwidth: the host to which you telnet is connected
to the database server by a nice fast network. The two hosts could be
in the same data center, connected by a gigabit switched network, for
instance. But suppose your desktop PC is connected to that network via
a much slower link. You may be in another building, or even halfway
around the world. Data loads or data dumps would be very quick between
the two proximal hosts, but very slow if you have to transfer volumes of
data that way to/from your PC. You might also be sharing the slow link
with other users, and such use of bandwidth would be interruptive to them.

Regards,
Bill K.