MySQL 5 on Mac 10.5: "problem connecting to the database"

Question

I have worked with MySQL for years but I am stuck on a seemingly trivial problem.

I installed MySQL 5.0.96 on Mac 10.5, created a database, created a user with privileges on everything, and problem:
Apache/PHP (osCommerce) installed on the same machine says:

There was a problem connecting to the database server. The following error had occured:
Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)
Please verify the connection parameters and try again.

It is my first time installing MySQL on Mac, and there might be a bug with %, so I added for all addresses I could imagine (%, localhost, 127.0.0.1, my IP) but no luck:

mysql> CREATE USER 'monty'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'some_pass';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'monty'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> CREATE USER 'monty'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'some_pass';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'monty'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> CREATE USER 'monty'@'127.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED BY 'some_pass';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'monty'@'127.0.0.1' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> CREATE USER 'monty'@'192.168.43.152' IDENTIFIED BY 'some_pass';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'monty'@'192.168.43.152' WITH GRANT OPTION;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Default install, I did not change any parameter.
skip_networking is OFF.
The Mac firewall is set to accept anything.

Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

I have found the problem:
Somehow, MySQL decided to create mysql.sock in /private/tmp rather than in /var/mysql.

So, my solution was to create a symlink:

cd /var
sudo mkdir mysql
sudo ln -s /private/tmp/mysql.sock mysql.sock

Now everything works fine.