I have a Homestead vagrant VM setup. Xdebug is all setup for remote debugging out of the box.
I can see this in here /etc/php5/fpm/conf.d/20-xdebug.ini
and by doing a php -i | grep 'xdebug'
I've setup a breakpoint in my default index.php and clicked the 'start listening for PHP debug connections' in my IDE PHPstorm.
I have installed xdebug helper for chrome and turned it on, also setting my IDE string to PHPstorm in it's settings.
I've tried setting different ports in both my IDE and xdebug settings.
I've also tried listening to these ports with sudo nc -l 9002
on both host and guest machines, nothing connects so the problem here is definitely with xdebug settings in the PHP server.