An update to the problem. "netstat" shows that the port isn't even listening, so it's most likely a TCP/IP problem. Joel suggested that my.cnf wasn't properly configured, so I'm looking at some examples.
And for what it's worth, here is my my.cnf file *********************************************************** [mysqld] datadir=/var/lib/mysql socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock # Default to using old password format for compatibility with mysql 3.x # clients (those using the mysqlclient10 compatibility package). old_passwords=1 [mysql.server] user=mysql basedir=/var/lib [mysqld_safe] err-log=/var/log/mysqld.log pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid ***********************************************************
