Remote access and logging

Hi mariadb community

I have just spent all day trying to remotely log in to my mariadb server with no luck. Its mariadb Ver 15.1 running under Ubuntu 22.04.

I can successfully login to mariadb as either root or a normal user locally but not remotely. When I try logging in remotely using a command like

mariadb -u username -p

It prompts me for the password, I enter a password and then... nothing I can't see any login realted errors in the logs either but we'll come back to that.

We have opened port 3306 on the external and the Ubuntu software (firewalld). I have checked the GRANT permissions for the user and database and it looks like they have suitable permissions and I have set the database to be accessible from anywhere (%). I have also run mysql_secure_installation but I still cannot login remotely.

Logs is another issue. It would seem that mariadb defaults to using journalctl for its logs but I want to redirect access and error logs into separate log files so that we can use fail2ban to stop brute force hacking attempts. I presume mariadb still supports logging access attempts into a separate plain text file?

Thanks