ejabberd cannot be controlled with ejabberdctl

[Vick Khera]

A while ago I upgraded ejabberd from 2.1.5 to 2.1.8, and also updated
erlang to r14b03 (not sure the prior version, but it was an r14
release). Running on FreeBSD 8.2/i386.

Ever since the upgrade, I cannot use the ejabberdctl program to
control it. It always says "Failed RPC connection to the node
ejabberd at lorax: nodedown".

The short host name of my server is "lorax". If I log into the web
interface, it does show node "ejabberd at lorax" is running as the only
node.

Up until this upgrade I was able to use ejabberdctl just fine to
re-open logs and do clean shutdown. I searched the forums and mailing
lists and found basically that I need to ensure that when ejabberd
starts, it uses the same node name. I checked the start scripts and it
does indeed (and always has) explicitly set the node name to
"ejabberd at lorax", so I'm pretty well stumped at this point. The only
tricky part of the config is that I bound the web interface to the
private IP of this machine, instead of the public (it has two NICs).

I'm using the FreeBSD port version of both erlang and ejabberd.

Any help would be appreciated.