phpMyAdmin QueryHistoryDB

The SQL History feature of my phpMyAdmin setup wasn’t working, the history table had been configured correctly as ‘pma_history’ but there was no data being written into that table when I ran queries and the SQL History tab of the query window just showed a blank.

Eventually I figured out that in order for the pma_history table to be populated I needed to set the QueryHistoryDB setting to true. So I did that and now SQL History is working!

MySQL SSL connections not working with phpMyAdmin and mysqli

I had a problem with phpMyAdmin not using encrypted connections.

My server was correctly configured for SSL as indicated by:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%ssl%'

Which returned:

Variable_name Value
have_openssl YES
have_ssl YES
ssl_ca /etc/mysql/cacert.pem
ssl_capath
ssl_cert /etc/mysql/server-cert.pem
ssl_cipher
ssl_key /etc/mysql/server-key.pem

However when I ran:

SHOW STATUS LIKE 'Ssl_cipher'

I got back a null result, indicating that the connection was not encrypted.

Eventually I figured out that the problem was caused by using the ‘mysqli’ provider for my connections in phpMyAdmin. When I switched my connections to use ‘mysql’ instead then encryption started working and an Ssl_cipher was reported.

I’d love to know what the actual problem is, but for now I’m just happy that my connections are actually encrypted. I spent a while hacking on the mysqli dbi interface to try and get it to play nice with SSL but I didn’t make any progress.

phpMyAdmin $cfg[‘Servers’][$i][‘tracking_version_auto_create’]

I found the configuration setting in the documentation that will force phpMyAdmin to automatically track tables during and after creation. It is:

 $cfg['Servers'][$i]['tracking_version_auto_create'] boolean

And the default value is ‘false’. I updated:

 /var/www/www.progclub.org/pcma/config.inc.php

With the line:

  // JE: 2011-09-07: force tracking
  $cfg['Servers'][$i]['tracking_version_auto_create'] = true;