Hi Yes I know putting ALL : ALL in my hosts.allow file is very risky, this was done in desparation. Once I've got it working I will reduce the access. One thing I did try last night was to put the full host.network name in the user table of the mysql database rather than just the host worked (hooray) whereas it didn't before. I can now connect into the database from the local machine not using localhost as the hostname but rather the full host.network name. At this stage I have tried to copy this process to our server at school and it works except remote machines still have problems connecting. I have had no chance to test remote connections on system at home as it was getting very late. As for the Red Hat problem, does anyone know if the version supplied with SuSE 8.1 have similar problems? Regards Bill