remote login with phpmyadmin

for phpmyadmin to be able to log in to a remote db, the remote server needs to be added to the config file (says stackoverflow ;)) like so:

$i++;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'HostName:port'; //provide hostname and port if other than default
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'userName';   //user name for your remote server
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'Password';  //password
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';       // keep it as config

and of course the official phpmyadmin doc says the same, if in a slightly more verbose manner.
I guess there are ways to do this without having the password in the file in plaintext, but for now...

config file location (gentoo)

the above stackoverflow solution doesn't state exactly which file to edit as far as the path is concerned. a comment there says that /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php would be the location.
which is true for most systems, I guess, but didn't work for me (that dir did not exist - manually creating dir and file didn't change anything).
google search for the filepath did not turn up much apart from the above.

gentoo paths

so after some more reading, I found out that (assuming a plain installation via '''emerge phpmyadmin''') the default config path would be:

/var/www/localhost/htdocs/phpmyadmin/

it might differ, according to your http server config. every file that ends on inc.php is considered a config filed and parsed by phpmyadmin