Ack, my WordPress suffers connectile dysfunction on a fresh install of RedHat 5! Not only did I get the above message, but dmesg was filling up with errors like this:
audit(1179258445.529:38): avc: denied { name_connect } for pid=3332 comm=“httpd” dest=3306 scontext=user_u:system_r:httpd_t:s0 tcontext=system_u:object_r:mysqld_port_t:s0 tclass=tcp_socket
It turns out that I was getting stung by SELinux, which is enabled by default in RedHat 5. All the extra security is probably a good idea, if I knew how to configure it, but for the moment it was breaking a live site.
So I (well, Cliffy, Al, and I), took the short cut and set SELINUX=permissive in /etc/sysconfig/selinux (we could have gone with SELINUX=disabled, but this will help us learn…while we watch it fill our log files).
None of this would be a problem, likely, if I wasn’t using a remote MySQL server, but….