See here on how you (or at least someone with database admin access) can allow remote access. 'localhost' means access from the same machine, while '%' means access from anywhere on the internet who can reach the machine (as a firewall might still block it). I think it must be possible to specify a specific host, or even an intranet mask, like '192.168.%', so remote login access is automatically limited even if the firewall allows access; but I've not ever actually tried it, nor have I read anywhere that it is possible. It just looks like a very database-like behaviour to do it like that.

Update Whoops. At the bottom of the same page that I linked to, it clearly describes that it does indeed work as I suspected. I quote:

To create a user who has access from all machines in a given domain (for example, mydomain.com), you can use the “%” wildcard character in the host part of the account name:

mysql> CREATE USER 'myname'@'%.mydomain.com' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypass';
[download]

To do the same thing by modifying the grant tables directly, do this:

mysql> INSERT INTO user (Host,User,Password,...)
    ->     VALUES('%.mydomain.com','myname',PASSWORD('mypass'),...);
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
[download]

If you set your MySQL server up correctly the same script will run on either platform without change. I have dozens of scripts that do just that using DBI and DBD::mysql.

I presume you are talking about running MySQL and Perl on different servers, or maybe on VMs? :-). In any event, your Perl program will be perfectly happy as a DBI database connection doesn't care where the server is or what operating system the database is running on as long as you configure it correctly.

You can even run MySQL in Windows - I wouldn't normally suggest this but it may be helpful in your case.