Unlike mpg123's bug 11184, runing xmms with strace you can see that the connection is correct, but I don't know why it will not work. I can use one of the esd tools to play something on a remote ESD daemon, so the protocol works. Thank you, Avi
I can't reproduce this here; with the proper .esd_auth file in place, using xmms with the esound plugin configured to talk to a remote host works OK.