Wake up and smell the java

More experimenting with struts. So I got ambitious, downloaded MySQL and tried to wire a database into my simple struts app. Setting up MySQL was a breeze, although it was my first time, except that some time was wasted googling for user account creation etc.
So, I set up a datasource in Tomcat, which could be looked up by JNDI. I added this in server.xml.
But was getting errors with Context.lookup, indicating there was no “java:comp/env/jdbc” in the Context. Realized I forgot to add the resource-ref in my web descriptor.
This done, I was getting a different error.
Access denied for user ‘blah’: (Using password: YES).
What the …, I didn’t set the password as YES, what the heck was going on?
So googled again (one of these days, when someone asks me what tools, IDE I use for development, I will be sure to add ‘Google’ in there, in fact this should come integrated with the IDE, any Exception or Error message should be linked to Google search), anyway I digress.
So this seems to be a common problem. I tweak the user account a bit in MySQL, apparently the host shouldn’t be set as ‘%’, you are better off setting it to ‘localhost’. I also deleted the default user account ”, which is an empty string. So either of these fixed it for me and I am on my way.

Since I am seeing a lot of searches to this post and one of the commentors (Tyler) rightfully indicates that: The “YES” doesn’t mean that you are using the password “Yes” it simply means “Yes” you are using a password. If the password was blank it would have said “No”

That’s what I thought the issue was to start with (that somehow the password was set to ‘Yes’) or atleast that’s what the MySQL message led me to believe, but later when I tweaked the User Account to set the host, I realized what it was trying to tell me.