Account password being changed

[Dominic Lepiane]

I'm running MySQL mysql-server-5.0.95-1.el5_7.1 on CentOS 5.8 (x64) and having a problem were one of the accounts which is used in many of our applications keeps having the password changed from the old (4.0) format to the newer (4.1) format. The password itself isn't changing because applications with newer client libraries still work, however legacy applications with older MySQL client libraries cannot authenticate.

This has never happened before and I've now had to reset the password 3 times.

Now I would assume that some bad client was for whatever reason setting the password and because "old-passwords" was off, it was creating newer format passwords.

HOWEVER, I looked at the transaction logs with mysqlbinlog and the only "SET PASSWORD" or "UPDATE ... PASSWORD" commands are the ones I've issued myself to correct the password. I don't see any record in the transaction log of when the password is getting incorrectly set.

How is this possible? How can I try to find the possible culprit?

Thanks in advance,
- Dominic


To answer a couple other questions, we do use replication but master > slave only (and the slave is set to read only). There's no users connecting to the system, I'm the only one who's logged in in the last 10 days so I don't think there's any funky commands being issued. We do have phpMyAdmin installed, but no other applications on the server, everything else runs on other systems and connects through normal MySQL connections. There is a varied mix of accounts using old passwords and new passwords and none of the other accounts appear to be affected.