This is a weird problem and I'm not sure what's going on. I installed MySQL on a linux box I have running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. I can access mysql via SSH mysql -p and perform all my commands that way. I added a user, and I can use AddedUser to connect remotely from my machine, but not from the local machine. It makes no sense to me...

SELECT host, user FROM mysql.user Yields:

+-----------+------------------+
| host      | user             |
+-----------+------------------+
| %         | AddedUser        |
| 127.0.0.1 | root             |
| li241-255 | root             |
| localhost | debian-sys-maint |
| localhost | root             |
+-----------+------------------+

Problem is I'm developing on this machine using Node.js, and I can't connect locally from the server using the same username. I've tried FLUSH PRIVILEGES but that seems to have no effect.

I know it's not Node.js because I'm using the same code on another database and it's working in that environment.

Edit

This is the error node is giving me.

node.js:50
    throw e; // process.nextTick error, or 'error' event on first tick
    ^
Error: ECONNREFUSED, Connection refused
    at Stream._onConnect (net.js:687:18)
    at IOWatcher.onWritable [as callback] (net.js:284:12)

Edit 2

I have the right port & server as best I can tell. My /etc/mysql/my.cnf contains this:

port            = 3306
socket          = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

My MySQL object contains:

{ host: 'localhost',
  port: 3306,
  user: 'removed',
  password: 'removed',
  database: '',
  typeCast: true,
  flags: 260047,
  maxPacketSize: 16777216,
  charsetNumber: 192,
  debug: false,
  ending: false,
  connected: false,
  _greeting: null,
  _queue: [],
  _connection: null,
  _parser: null,
  server: 'ExternalIpAddress' }

Possibly useful?

netstat -ln | grep mysql
unix  2      [ ACC ]     STREAM     LISTENING     1016418  /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock