Sorry for the duplicate post ( http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9720871/localhost-problems-on-mac-os-x-10-7 ), but I got the advice that this is a better place to ask my question:

I want to access a mysql server remotely over ssh. So I used port forwarding to access the remote 3306 port on my localhost as 8383. The ssh connection can established successfully. But when I want to telnet onto port 8383 on localhost I get the following error:

~: telnet 127.0.0.1 8383
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host

I tried the same on a friends Laptop (also Mac OS X 10.7) and it worked fine, so it is very unlikely that the ssh connection is the problem. I assume it has something to do with my local network configuration. I turned off IPv6, just in case. My /etc/hosts looks like this:

127.0.0.1       localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1             localhost
fe80::1%lo0     localhost

I would greatly appreciate any help.

Please point me in the right direction if this is not the right place to ask this question.