ERROR 1130 (HY000): Host '' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server

Why oh why can I not connect to mysql? mysql -u root -ptest101 -h xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ERROR 1130 (HY000): Host 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server In my.cnf I have the below # Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on # localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure. bind-address = 0.0.0.0 I also ran the below... 'UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = PASSWORD('test101') WHERE User = 'root'; FLUSH PRIVILEGES; I can access on the host machine using mysql -u root -ptest101 but not using mysql -u root -ptest101 -h xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Wow...why is this happening? I am n ubuntj 12.04 mysql> SELECT host FROM mysql.user WHERE User = 'root'; +---------------------------------------------+ | host | +---------------------------------------------+ | % | | 127.0.0.1 | | ::1 | | | localhost | +---------------------------------------------+ 5 rows in set (0.00 sec)