I\'m going completely crazy:
Installed Hadoop/Hbase, all is running;
/opt/jdk1.6.0_24/bin/jps 23261 ThriftServer 22582 QuorumPeerMain 21969 NameNode 23
I had the same issue connecting to my hbase db.
Turns out I had a bad address of the db machine in my /etc/hosts.
/etc/hosts