Localhost tricks

Hi folks, Now, this one is quite tricky (and a bit long). I have got a HP E35 machine running HP-UX 10.10 . Also I have got Online 7.20, which I have just installed and now want to set up sqlhosts to allow local TCP/IP loopback. But I do not like the idea of setting up hosts.equiv, or, God forbid, .rhosts, so what I do is foxie_tcp onsoctcp localhost 3002 #put the socket number for simplicity Apparently, if I put foxie (the machine name) instead of localhost, I would need to mess with /etc/hosts.equiv. Then I initialize the instance and it works quite happily both for local clients and those who connect from remote boxes. The good test to make sure the listener is running is to telnet to the socket and see if it accepts the connection - thats what I do: telnet localhost 3002 or telnet foxie 3002 prompts and I can see those error messages in onstat -m saying that generally it cannot interpret what is coming to the port. Fair enough,that is what I want. My instance then works happily with both local and remote clients. Now, I do the same on D350/1 machine with the very same HP-UX 10.10, same patch bundles, similar thing: rabbit_tcp onsoctcp localhost 3003 # again just socket number to simplify The instance works quite happily with local connections, but it would not accept the the remote ones. I ran my telnets and what I had is telnet localhost 3003 - prompts; telnet rabbit 3003 - returnes [ECONNREFUSED] Moreover, if I setup sqlhosts entry to rabbit_tcp onsoctcp rabbit 3003 and , oh well, put the machine name into /etc/hosts.equiv, then bring the instance down/up than telnet rabbit 3003 - prompts; telnet localhost 3003 - returnes [ECONNREFUSED] Telnet to default port (23) works OK in both cases. Also DNS have nothing to do with this . I have spent three days trying to establish, what actually causes this behaviour to be different on two OS wise similar machines, together with our Unix guys, but still do not have any clues. Any ideas will be highly appreciated . Cheers Ilya