Can't connect to a remote server using phpMyAdmin I tried with two different servers, one had no issue but the other gave me this error:

MySQL said:
Cannot connect: invalid settings.
mysqli_real_connect(): The server requested authentication method unknown to the client [sha256_password]
mysqli_real_connect(): (HY000/2054): The server requested authentication method unknown to the client
phpMyAdmin tried to connect to the MySQL server, and the server rejected the connection. You should check the host, username and password in your configuration and make sure that they correspond to the information given by the administrator of the MySQL server.

Screenshot:
Check your PHP version (and in particular, your PHP MySQL connector version), it may not have support of the newer authentication plugin. If for some reason you cannot upgrade you client PHP installation, you can change the user you are using to connect on the server to revert back to the more insecure native authentication so it works with older connectors, but try to upgrade the client first.

More info:


http://blog.ulf-wendel.de/2012/mysql-5-6-sha256-secure-password-support-for-php-mysqlnd/
https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/sha256-pluggable-authentication.html
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30710146/php-mysqlnd-sha256-password-plugin-access-denied-user-works-from-cli-mysql