MySQL Performance without Authentication

Question

Is there any way to grant permission to a MySQL Server based on the host and not the username/password. So whitelisted hosts can connect to the MySQL server without using a username or password.

Would doing so improve performance at all?

(the servers are on a LAN that's not connected to the internet at all, security is of no concern for this setup, only performance)

Answer 1

Yes - that'd be possible to configure. Check out the documentation for the GRANT command.

I'm not sure you'd get any notable performance gain from that. I think that the most potentially time consuming element of authentication is the reverse mapping of IP addresses.

All of the doc is here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/privilege-system.html

Answer 2

It's not going to help performance, but you can try playing around with allowing any user from your given host or IP range:

e.g. mysql> GRANT SELECT ON test.* TO '%'@'some_host_or_ip' IDENTIFIED BY '';