phpmyadmin always using web user

I hate asking for help on configuration issues, but I've been searching and hacking on this for two days with no joy. I apologize in advance if this is the incorrect forum; I don't think the problem falls obviously in any other category.

I've built a router for my home network out of a Debian stable (Sarge) distribution. I'm installing osCommerce, so I can try various customizations before my wife's web store switches.

I've installed Apache 1.3.33, mysql 4.1.11-Debian_4-log, and phpmyadmin 2.6.2.

I can access mysql from the command line (mysql -u root -p, mysql -u adminuser -p).

I wanted to secure the mysql server, but I couldn't really find anything to do in the file. However, when I logged into phpmyadmin, I noticed that it was using 'root' with no password. The install scripts also warned me to create a password for root ASAP, so I did.

I restarted mysql, and suddenly started getting an error on the phpmyadmin page:

I tried changing the phpmyadmin authentication mode to cookies, http, and config; no joy. I tried setting the user name and password; still no joy.

I got tired of having the phpmyadmin scripts installed as root:root, so I chown'd them to www-data:www-data. My error changed to


Aha! So phpmyadmin is always using the web user for its login! I added a www-data user to sqladmin, with only select privileges. Now I can log in to phpmyadmin, but no matter what I enter (in any authorization mode), it always uses www-data@localhost.

Not much I can do with that.

So, any ideas? How do I make this thing use a realy user (instead of the script owner) so I can get on with the real work?

Thanks,
Judebert