MySQL: How to allow remote connection to mysql

Question

I have installed MySQL Community Edition 5.5 on my local machine and I want to allow remote connections so that I can connect from external source.

How can I do that

Answer 1

After doing all of above I still couldn't login as root remotely, but Telnetting to port 3306 confirmed that MySQL was accepting connections.

I started looking at the users in MySQL and noticed there were multiple root users with different passwords.

select user, host, password from mysql.user;

So in MySQL I set all the passwords for root again and I could finally log in remotely as root.

use mysql;
update user set password=PASSWORD('NEWPASSWORD') where User='root';
flush privileges;