How do I connect sync-gateway to couchbase running on a different server?

The ‘Trying with selected node 0’ messages are normal during connection, so I don’t think those are related. It looks like operations against the Couchbase server are timing out (the slow incr operations).

I’d expect it to fail before that if it was a port access issue, although you could try enabling additional Sync Gateway logging to see if that sheds any light on the issue.