MySQL on Windows…port connection refused

I was trying to setup MySQL + PHP + Apache on Windows individually and tried to get it work. Installations went fine and below are the versions used for Apache, PHP and MySQL,

+ httpd-2.2.22-win32-x86-openssl-0.9.8t.msi (thread safe)

+ php-5.3.16-Win32-VC9-x86.msi

+ mysql-5.5.27-win32.msi (thread safe)

However, when I tried to connect to MySQL database, PHP scripts were not able to connect MySQL database. This was strange since everything seemed to be working fine.  I thought this was a problem related to firewall. But on system inspection, I could see that MySQL port 3306 (default) was not up

C:\>netstat -na | grep 3306

C:\>

After an hour of troubleshooting, I could identify the problem.

C:\>mysqladmin variables -u root -p | egrep "network|pipe"
Enter password: ***
| named_pipe                                        | ON             |
| skip_networking                                  | ON             |

C:\>

We can see above command output states that networking is OFF. What we need to do is to edit “C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\my.ini” and set “skip_networking” flag to OFF either by commenting it in my.ini file or deleting it altogether. After saving my.ini restart MySQL service on Windows. And I could see port activated in netstat as below.

C:\>netstat -na | grep 3306
  TCP    0.0.0.0:3306           0.0.0.0:0              LISTENING

C:\>mysqladmin variables -u root -p | egrep "network|pipe"
Enter password: ***
| named_pipe                                        | ON              |
| skip_networking                                  | OFF            |

C:\>

At last the process worked for me.