MySQL: How to allow remote connection to mysql

That is allowed by default on MySQL.

What is disabled by default is remote root access. If you want to enable that, run this SQL command locally:

 GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'password' WITH GRANT OPTION;
 FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

And then find the following line and comment it out in your my.cnf file, which usually lives on /etc/mysql/my.cnf on Unix/OSX systems. In some cases the location for the file is /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf).

If it's a Windows system, you can find it in the MySQL installation directory, usually something like C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\ and the filename will be my.ini.

Change line

 bind-address = 127.0.0.1

to

 #bind-address = 127.0.0.1

And restart the MySQL server (Unix/OSX, and Windows) for the changes to take effect.

Just a note from my experience, you can find configuration file under this path /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf.

(I struggled for some time to find this path)

After doing all of above I still couldn't login as root remotely, but Telnetting to port 3306 confirmed that MySQL was accepting connections.

I started looking at the users in MySQL and noticed there were multiple root users with different passwords.

select user, host, password from mysql.user;

So in MySQL I set all the passwords for root again and I could finally log in remotely as root.

use mysql;
update user set password=PASSWORD('NEWPASSWORD') where User='root';
flush privileges;