Ok, I have an install of CentOS 5 running as a GuestOS in VirtualBox. The network card for the Cent box is bridged with that of my host OS so that the boxes can see each other. Cent has an IP of 192.168.1.108 and my Host box has an IP of .104.

Everything, with regard to networking, seems to be working properly as I can access the Drupal install that is on the Cent box from a web browser on my host box by navigating to http://192.168.1.108 however when I try to configure the database for Drupal through the Drupal install interface I am getting the Can't connect to MySQL error.

First I thought this might of been a Firewall issue so I stopped iptables but that had no effect. I thought maybe the user I had setup did not have access to the server so I tried root and that did not work. Searching on the net said that I needed to provide a bind-address parameter to my.cnf so I did that with no change. (As a side note the length of my my.cnf file was MUCH shorter than the ones presented online. In fact under mysqld all I have are datadir, socket, user, and bind-address. Is this normal or should the file be more verbose?)

After a few hours of messing with permissions and such I tried using 'localhost' as the value for the database server, from my HOST OS, and the Drupal install kicked off without a problem. So while my issue is resolved I am curious as to why 'localhost' works and why 192.168.1.108 did not? Is there something i need to do to specifically access the MySQL box via the aforementioned IP?

Thanks.