Red Hat :: Rhel 4.8 - Nc: Connecting - Cannot Get The Tripwire Server To Talk To The Agent On The Red Hat Machine

I have tripwire enterprise (not open source) agent running on one of my rhel4.8 web servers (I have actually tried with two servers with same results). The agent is a simple install rpm bin file and appears to be running as it should and the server for tripwire enterprise is set up accordingly. A windows tripwire enterprise agent is also on a windows machine that works perfectly well. But I cannot seem to get the tripwire server to talk to the agent on the red hat machine.

I can connect to port 9898 on the server, but the agent who also talks over the same port doesn't appear to be responding to the server on this port. There are no iptables set up to block the requests, there is no firewall set up (disabled) . Network team can see the packet requests being sent over the routers fine... So can't see why there would be a problem. So i reverted to the use of net cat.

Nc -l 9898 (on the agent machine)
Telnet <agent> 9898

But I get connection refused. Is there anything I could be missing here? Redhat is not my Linux of preference and it may be something obvious!