Somebody in the thread at some point said:
Probably you may need to give perms to the user, in this scenary, root, with something like:
grant all on *.* to 'root'@'IPBOXA' identified by 'whatever';
You're quite right, but also because Azeem didn't paste the actual error message, it can additionally be that he needs to open the server box firewall
# iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 3306 -j ACCEPT # service iptables save
-Andy