Amazon AWS database connection error with valid settings

I’m running both a wordpress site as well as a mediawiki off of the same web servers. The mediawiki site works great! The wordpress site, meh. Not so much. I keep getting the common database connection error:

Error establishing a database connection

And as far as I can tell the settings between the mediawiki site and the wordpress site are nearly identical.

Here’s the media wiki config first since that one’s working:

## Database settings
$wgLBFactoryConf['class'] = 'LBFactorySimple';
$wgDBtype = "mysql";
$wgDBservers = '';
$wgDBserver = "db.example.com";
$wgDBssl    =  true;
$wgDBname = "jfwiki";
$wgDBuser = "admin_ssl";
$wgDBpassword = "secret";

And here’s what the wordpress database connection settings look like since they are not:

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_NAME', 'jokefire');

define('DB_USER', 'admin_ssl');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'secret');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'db.example.com');

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

/** Contact the database over a secure connection */
define('DB_SSL', true);

I realize that they’re not exactly the same. But I think you can make an easy correlation between the mediawiki settings and the settings for wordpress. And they look similar enough to think that wordpress should be working. Right?

The only real other difference is the name of the database each site is using, which I guess makes sense.

But the fact that medawiki works fine tells me that the user and password set for both sites has access to the database.

Just for laughs I use the account settings from the wordpress config to demonstrate that I can connect to the DB on the command line. Again, it’s the same account info that I have in the wik site:

#mysql -uadmin_ssl -p -h db.example.com -D jokefire  -e "show tables" | head -5
Enter password:
Tables_in_jokefire
wp_bp_activity
wp_bp_activity_meta
wp_bp_chat_channel_users
wp_bp_chat_channels

Also, I created a basic php script to see if it could connect to the database

<?php
$link = mysql_connect('db.example.com', 'admin_ssl', 'secret');
if (!$link) {
die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
}
echo 'Connected successfully';
mysql_close($link);
?>

And to my surprise it can’t connect!

php testconnect.php
Could not connect: Access denied for user 'admin_ssl'@'ec2-54-86-143-49.compute-1.amazonaws.com' (using password: YES)

Why am I surprised that it can’t? Because again 1) the wiki can connect to the database no problem. And 2) I can connect to the db on the command line using the same credentials.

My API MySQL Client version is:

Client API version  mysqlnd 5.0.10 - 20111026 - $Id: c85105d7c6f7d70d609bb4c000257868a40840ab $

Hope this helps narrow down the problem. Thanks!