authentication from .cgi scripts

[Alan Dunwell]

Howdy Gang,
New forum user here so let me know if I do anything off protocol.

I'm migrating some perl scripts from a CentOS7 machine to Alma9 and of course mysql/mariadb is a more recent version (10.5.22) and uses the new non-password type logins. Many of the .pl scripts are called from
/var/spool/cron/root
so of course they run even though the original scripts reference root@localhost and give a password. Since it is root runing the script it just ignores the PW bit.

However I also have .cgi scripts that use the same sort of DBI->connect type line for DB login. These script are getting run from a web page that runs the script and now it isn't root running the script and the login fails. In
/var/log/httpd/error_log I see lines like

[cgid:error] [pid 33953:tid 34123] [client 192.168.1.10:62362] DBI connect('xantrex:localhost','root',...) failed: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' at /usr/local/solar-web_monitor/cgi-bin/power_graph.cgi line 26.: /usr/local/solar-web_monitor/cgi-bin/power_graph.cgi

{I did not see a way to post code in a box here, please advise on that}

Line 26 is the DBI->connect line with the creds. Does anyone know the proper way to configure mysql/mariadb to be able to pass login credentials? I saw some references to mods to my.cnf to do
skip-networking+0
skip-bind-address
but was leery of that for maybe security reasons, not sure.

Please advise,
Alan D.