tds: unable connect to SQL Server using servername specified in freetds.conf file

I am using freetds to connect to SQL Server from ubuntu. First, the SQL Server is running at port 1433 currently. I can telnet it. The following command also works. I can query table data using it, sqsh -H 192.168.10.249 -p 1433 -H xx -P xxxxxx however, this command does not work, and consequently making my ror app crash. sqsh -S developer -U xxx -P xxxxxxxxx this is error inside freetds.log 1:24:59.068648 5010 (log.c:190):Starting log file for FreeTDS 0.82 on 2012-06-04 11:24:59 with debug flags 0xffff. 11:24:59.069259 5010 (iconv.c:197):names for ISO-8859-1: ISO-8859-1 11:24:59.069298 5010 (iconv.c:197):names for UTF-8: UTF-8 11:24:59.069317 5010 (iconv.c:197):names for UCS-2LE: UCS-2LE 11:24:59.069335 5010 (iconv.c:197):names for UCS-2BE: UCS-2BE 11:24:59.069352 5010 (iconv.c:363):iconv to convert client-side data to the "UTF-8" character set 11:24:59.069394 5010 (iconv.c:516):tds_iconv_info_init: converting "UTF-8"->"UCS-2LE" 11:24:59.069461 5010 (iconv.c:516):tds_iconv_info_init: converting "ISO-8859-1"->"UCS-2LE" 11:24:59.069492 5010 (net.c:836):tds7_get_instance_port(192.168.10.249, MSSQLSERVER) 11:25:00.070784 5010 (net.c:905):tds7_get_instance_port: timed out on try 0 of 16 11:25:01.072121 5010 (net.c:905):tds7_get_instance_port: timed out on try 1 of 16 11:25:02.073441 5010 (net.c:905):tds7_get_instance_port: timed out on try 2 of 16 11:25:03.074756 5010 (net.c:905):tds7_get_instance_port: timed out on try 3 of 16 ... 11:25:15.095377 5010 (net.c:905):tds7_get_instance_port: timed out on try 15 of 16 11:25:15.095480 5010 (net.c:974):instance port is 0 11:25:15.095506 5010 (login.c:418):invalid port number 11:25:15.095532 5010 (mem.c:563):tds_free_all_results() 11:25:15.095580 5010 (ct.c:630):leaving ct_connect() returning 0 11:25:15.095605 5010 (ct.c:334):ct_con_props() action = CS_GET property = 9143 11:25:15.095630 5010 (ct.c:1865):ct_con_drop() 11:25:15.095652 5010 (ct.c:242):ct_exit() this is my freetds.conf file [global] ; tds version = 4.2 # Whether to write a TDSDUMP file for diagnostic purposes # (setting this to /tmp is insecure on a multi-user system) ; dump file = /tmp/freetds.log ; debug flags = 0xffff # Command and connection timeouts ; timeout = 10 ; connect timeout = 10 text size = 64512 [egServer50] host = symachine.domain.com port = 5000 tds version = 5.0 [developer] host = 192.168.10.249 port = 1433 #instance = MSSQLSERVER tds version = 8.0 client charset = UTF-8 dump file = /home/daisy/freetds.log dump file append = yes debug flags = 0xffff From the log output, I can see the program does not read the SQL Server port correctly in this case, it reads 0 which is wrong. It also outputs some information relating to encoding. so I guess it may relate to the translation issue.