Monkeying with IPv6, I discovered that globally routable addresses are what it says on the tin, so hiding behind a network appliance is not longer viable for me. An nmap scan showed the port 3306 was hanging out for all to see but I couldn't figure out how to close it off. The "--skip-networking" argument seems not to work, either in my.cnf or as an rc argument. The server just fails to start. (For some reason the socket is hard-coded to live in /tmp, regardless of what's in my.cnf but I gave up bothering about that.)
What I ended up doing was adding mysql_args="--bind-address=127.0.0.1" to /etc/rc.conf. This seems to work as netstat and sockstat no longer show port 3306 listening and database connections are happening. Is this the preferred/best way? -- Paul Beard Are you trying to win an argument or solve a problem?