Help! Moving Server Issue

[privateland]

Hi,
I am moving a vBulletin 3.84 installation to a dedicated server running Win 2008 Web Server with a new hosting company.
The original location is http://forum.mnetv.tv/
The new location is www.mnetv.tv/forums/index.php.

I followed all of the migration instructions to the letter, and at first when I tried to open the index page, I received a Database error as follows;

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Database error in vBulletin :

mysql_connect() [<a href='function.mysql-connect'>function.mysql-connect</a>]: [2002] A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not (trying to connect via tcp://localhost:3306) D:\websites\mne\forums\includes\class_core.php on line 311

MySQL Error :
Error Number :
Request Date : Saturday, December 18th 2010 @ 07:34:15 PM
Error Date : Saturday, December 18th 2010 @ 07:35:15 PM
Script : http://www.mnetv.tv/forums/index.php
Referrer :
IP Address : 109.108.145.108
Username :
Classname : vB_Database
MySQL Version :
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I spent two days trying to find an answer to this problem, including trawling around on this forum and elsewhere, and found that the problem may have been caused by Win 2008 Server's inability to resolve hostname 'localhost' to 127.0.0.1.
I therefore uncommented the dns entry in my hosts file to reolve this. Now, I am getting a non-specific http500 error.

I then attempted to upgrade the installation suing the upgrade script, however although I can complete upgrade steps 1 to 4, when I attempt to complete Step 5, I am again presented with the http500 error.

I have tried to use the server's public IP address, I have flushed out and re-assigned the permissions on the MySQL DB table - all to no avail. PHP is running okay with phpMyAdmin, so I can't see that this could be the problem.

Ticket support - for which I am not apparently entitled, merely said cryptically that 'this is a server issue'. I have hunted down all MySQL and PHP errors in the server logs, but nothing jumps out here as a possible cause.

These are two days of my life I will never get back I'm afraid

I am contacting you guys as a last resort in the hope of finding an answer, since I have only a few days in which to have this server move completed for a customer.

Cheers
John

[bigwater]

I hate troubleshooting Windows server problems, but it sounds to me like you've got port 3306 clamped down either through the server software or a firewall. Check that, and open the port. If that doesn't fix it, I'm out of my league. I'm a Linux administrator with very limited Windows server knowledge.

[privateland]

Thanks for the input Bigwater. Thing is, if it's a firewall issue, I shouldn't be able to connect to MySQL at all, but I can. My best guess up to yesterday was that the MySQL db table permissions had got scrambled. This 'localhost' being differentiated from '127.0.0.1' issue had me rewriting permissions from the localhost ip address instead of the server name - but nothing doing there.

However thanks anyway. Tech support don't have a clue either it seems - and yet it is a recurring issue I see all over the web. The bright side is that I have three clients who want a forum - and I ALMOST bought them a vB install. Obviously that is on the back burner for now.

Cheers
John