How to fix "Unable to connect to database: Your password has expired"
A "Your password has expired. To log in you must change it using a client that supports expired passwords" error is generated by your MySQL server, rather than by your MIDAS room booking system itself.
It is caused as a result of a password expiration policy configured on your MySQL server which automatically expires MySQL user account passwords on a recurring basis, forcing you to routinely change them.
MIDAS cannot change MySQL account passwords for you. You will therefore need to log in to your MySQL server and manually update the expired MySQL account password accordingly.
To change your MySQL password, login to your MySQL server as the MySQL user account that your MIDAS system uses and issue the following SQL command:
ALTER USER 'midas'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'new-password';
(Where 'midas' is your MySQL user account, and 'new-password' is the new password you wish to set for this account)
Once you've set a new password for the MySQL user account that your MIDAS room booking system is configured to use, you'll then need to use our online Self Service tool to update your MIDAS settings accordingly to reflect the new password for the MySQL user account.
Forcing arbitrary password expiration actually harms, rather than improves security, therefore, we'd also strongly advise that you disable the password expiration policy of your MySQL server to prevent a recurrence of this issue again in the future.
To do this, simply set the following in your MySQL configuration file, and then restart your MySQL server:
default_password_lifetime=0
(The default MySQL server configuration ships with no password expiration policy enforced, so you can also simply delete the "default_password_lifetime" line from your MySQL configuration file to ensure that MySQL passwords never expire)
