Apparently for connections to mariadb the users client host needs to be in the create user statement, in the form of:
create ‘username’@’your-host.lv.lv.cox.net’ identified by ‘Pass#_22word’;
grant all privileges on *.* to ‘username’@’yourhost.lv.lv.cox.net’ with grant option;
Not sure if there is an option to turn off this requirement – a form of database whitelisting hosts… interesting.