CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Have you checked to make sure the remote server will allow you to make remote connections?  The first thing I'd check is to make sure the data server will allow the user to connect from places other than local host.  Is there user with host permission of % or the other server's IP address?

Aaron

I would expect that if the issue was DB permissions, the installer would tell you so.

You should be able to install CiviCRM simply by installing the module code and correctly configuring civicrm.settings.php in your Drupal sites directory. If you take that route, you may not need to run the CiviCRM installer at all. (Caveat: I haven't tested the setup you describe to be sure ... but it's worth a shot!)

I think, if your webserver doesn't support InnoDB, you MAY be facing other performance issues with the site generally. I wouldn't read that as a good indication in a hosting setup myself.

CiviCRM is pretty DB intensive, and if the web and DB servers are not physically close, you might find the resulting setup ends up being grindingly slow as a result. YMMV - I haven't tried such a setup, and of course it depends how close the two machines are.

An obvious option (which you may have already rejected for reasons which you don't mention) is to move the Drupal site to your server where you can run InnoDB - or to move the entire hosting environment to one which is fully able to support CiviCRM.

Alternatively, you might consider CiviCRM standalone (if you can decouple Drupal & CiviCRM to that extent). You lose a bit of functionality this way, but you might find it does the trick if you don't require giving public access to CiviCRM.

If you do want to continue with this setup and find you must use the installer, can you paste the few lines preceding the internal server error message in your webserver's error log?