Can't Reach the WIAB from remote connection

Hi all,

I tried to set up WIAB for a high school robotics team (they relied on Google Wave before for communication) on their server. I got everything to compile and deploy without a problem. But here is the thing that confuses me.

When accessing WIAB from the server using localhost:9898, I could connect without a problem. However, when IP address is used to connect to the WIAB server (internal/external connection) server cannot be reached. IT guys and I thought it might be the firewall that is blocking the port 9898 but we still couldn't establish the connection to server using IP address. After many different approaches, we are suspecting that somewhere in the code might be blocking access to WIAB when IP address is used.

What could be the problem?

ps. We tried pinging the port with telnet but no luck. And we disabled all the firewall that we could identify.