But not to MS SQL. Anyway, I have setup replication, master to one slave. Seems very straight forward, per the documentation from the MySQL website. However, when checking the slave status, Slave_IO_Running is no and the Slave_IO_State says "connecting to master". I've redone the setup several times, step by step and cannot get this to change. Google yielded little as far as a workable resolution. Anyone have any insight as to what I may be missing? As always, any help or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

can the slave server actually connect on 3306 to the master?

It's trying. I did have a firewall issue but since that was tweaked (per a Google hit), I at least two threads in the process list (didn't before). The status is still "connecting to master". I cannot get it to say connected. I've one more thing to try, and if successful, I'll report the facts.

Resolved: I did not know MySQL was case sensitive!!! The replication user that I created had an uppercase "R" but when I set up the Slave, I entered all lower case. Modifying the cnf file didn't complain so I didn't think there was an issue. Boy, was I wrong. Replication now works as designed not as I thought.