I found the odd thing, why it's not working now,
but worked before ..

I had a misconfigured 'HOSTNAME' in my /etc/hosts file,
i.e. my laptop with hostname 'ebony' had an hard entry in
/etc/hosts which was just wrong.

The plugin seems to try to make a connection to HOSTNAME,
instead of 'localhost', which would always work.

+++

kbr:
Note that the code
(src/plugin/share/classes/sun/plugin2/message/transport/SocketTransport.java)
is already using InetAddress.getLocalHost(), which must be doing this
lookup internally. I'm not sure what the correct workaround is (i.e.,
whether "127.0.0.1" is guaranteed to work, or whether we should pass in
"localhost", etc.)

+++

Seems like, getLocalHost() is not using 'localhost' ..

Well, for our purposes, using 'localhost' on all unix machines should be good enough,
since it is mandatory .. right ?

We also could use unix domain sockets .. if they are supported within Java.

Let's see ..