In MySQL you can use the GRANT statement to create users and assign privileges to them at the same time. It is extremely convenient and beats create user or directly hacking the mysql.user table. I learned few things about GRANT the hard way.

I learned it the hard way. Our gateway machine with firewall (shorewall) has multiple ADSL connections configured with load balancing for more bandwidth and transparent fail-over. Today I faced an unenviable problem where one or other of the ADSL connections were going down sometime after a network restart. It was unique because the ADSL modems (configured as router) were accessible via telnet or ping and displayed perfect connectivity. However I was unable to use them as gateway to connect to a server on the internet. They were working fine before. With our non-trivial setup there were many suspects including the shorewall firewall and iptables (dropping certain packets?), network adapter, routing issue etc.