Funny that in one day, I will be posting on two different errors that do not seem to be covered.

When you are installing unixodbc 2.2 and myODBC 3.51 (mySQL product), be aware that the environment needs to have an ODBCINI value with the path to your ODBC.ini file.

The unixodbc will find the file okay without this but mySQL seems to have left this precious little hint out of their documentation.

If you do not do this, you will get the following error:

[08S01][unixODBC][MySQL][ODBC 3.51 Driver]Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

You do this by running the following command and then editing your /etc/profile to fix it permanently:

EXPORT ODBCINI="/usr/local/etc/odbc.ini"

Then, when you actually create a DSN for mySQL, don't listen to unixodbc when they tell you that the host should be host={name/IP}, myODBC requires this parameter to be server={name/IP}.

Oh, did I mention that this only occurs when you are trying to connect to a mySQL server at a remote location. If you are connecting to localhost, this all works just fine without these changes.