Remote DB Error: connect ECONNREFUSED (node-mysql/UBuntu/VirtualBox) - mysql

Question

I have two separate Ubuntu VMs running on VirtualBox. I am getting the error "Remote DB Error: connect ECONNREFUSED". Here is some background information:
When co-located on same VM, NodeJS to MySQL works fine together. Problem only started after moving MySQL to its own VM.
VMs set up in VirtualBox as Internal Network. They have their own static IPs, and the two VMs can ping each other's IP addresses fine.
When I first got the error, the indication was that nodeJS was trying connection on port 3306 ("Error: connect ECONNREFUSED 192.168.1.69:3306"). Then, I added the port option when creating the connection object ("port : '3306'), but this did not fix problem.
Next, I saw a thread that suggested checking to see what port mySQL is listening on by running (netstat -ln | grep mysql), and the result I got back was "unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 1831 /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock". So, since it said it was listening on 1831, I switched my port in the connection creation code to below:
qvar connection = mysql.createConnection({
host : '192.168.1.69',
port : '1831',
user : 'root',
password : 'vinson',
database : 'pilot',
stringifyObjects: 'true'
});
, however, I was still getting the same error.
UPDATE TO MY POST:
Since my first posting of this... eh.. post, I have learned some things, and in the process made some incremental progress:
By default, MySQL only listens to localhost traffic. In order to have it listen to external traffic you have to disable the listen/bind address in it's my.cnf file. So, I did that, and then restarted MySQL.
Once I did that, I ran "netstat -tlnp", a new line dsiplayed indicating something (definitely MySQL) listening on 0.0.0.0:3306, and this was not there before I made the config change and restarted MySQL.
Then, I executed a query again from the NodeJS VM, and I got a different error (hey, I'll take this as a sign of incremental progress):
" Error: Cannot enqueue Query after fatal error."
So that is where I am now. As before, I would be grateful for any ideas as to what I might try next. Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

Ok, I figured out the rest of my issues. The error above (Error: Cannot enqueue Query after fatal error.) was due to the fact that I had not restarted my NodeJS server, so it had the old connection object. Once I restarted NodeJS server, I then got a new error:
ER_HOST_NOT_PRIVILEGED
The reason I was getting this error was simply because, for a given user, MySQL must know the host from which that user is connecting from (since a valid connection credential for MySQL is combination userId/password/host). Once I updated my user account for remote connections with the appropriated allowed remote hosts, everything worked fine!