more SSH troubles (SEC: UNCLASSIFIED)

[Lisman, FLGOFF Jarrad]

Back again, just trying to do some simple port forwarding using SSH and have
gone through some howtos that say use
$ ssh -L port:hots:host_port ....
That is all well and good, I get the screen to log into the hots machine and
log on etc. But what I want to do is forward some data to my remote mysql
database without me having to log on everytime and enter it manually. I
really just dont get how this is meant to be done.
In verbose mode the ssh initialisation tells me that local port 3306 (mysql)
is being forwarded to 192.168.10.2:3306 but when I try to log to the dbase I
get cannot connect to the mysql socket. Knowing that the server is running
on 192.168.10.2 I start up a server on the local machine and that is all
that the local machine will connect to. I know that I can use the -h switch
in mysql but I would like to do this over a secure tunnel.
Can anyone explain where it is that I am going wrong... thanks

Jarrad