It was my pg_hba.conf (because it only failed when host was specificed, e.g. my test php/pgsql tests did not fail until I added host=) .
Figured it out after I uncommented the logging features and restarted postmaster:
/usr/local/pgsql/data/postgresql.conf
# Syslog
syslog = 0 # range 0-2
syslog_facility = 'LOCAL0'
syslog_ident = 'postgres'
then at su - pgsql I saw errors about IP not in pg_hba.conf, which led me on the right path.