No connection could be made because the target mac

Question

Sometimes I get the following error while I was doing HttpWebRequest to a WebService. I copied my code below too.

---

System.Net.WebException: Unable to connect to the remote server ---> System.Net.Sockets.SocketException: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it 127.0.0.1:80
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.DoConnect(EndPoint endPointSnapshot, SocketAddress socketAddress)
   at System.Net.Sockets.Socket.InternalConnect(EndPoint remoteEP)
   at System.Net.ServicePoint.ConnectSocketInternal(Boolean connectFailure, Socket s4, Socket s6, Socket& socket, IPAddress& address, ConnectSocketState state, IAsyncResult asyncResult, Int32 timeout, Exception& exception)
   --- End of inner exception stack trace ---
   at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetRequestStream()

---

ServicePointManager.CertificatePolicy = new TrustAllCertificatePolicy();
HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);

request.PreAuthenticate = true;
request.Credentials = networkCredential(sla);
request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Post;
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
request.Timeout = v_Timeout * 1000;

if (url.IndexOf("asmx") > 0 && parStartIndex > 0)
{
    AppHelper.Logger.Append("#############" + sla.ServiceName);

    using (StreamWriter reqWriter = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream()))
    {                        
        while (true)
        {
            int index01 = parList.Length;
            int index02 = parList.IndexOf("=");

            if (parList.IndexOf("&") > 0)
                index01 = parList.IndexOf("&");

            string parName = parList.Substring(0, index02);
            string parValue = parList.Substring(index02 + 1, index01 - index02 - 1);

            reqWriter.Write("{0}={1}", HttpUtility.UrlEncode(parName), HttpUtility.UrlEncode(parValue));

             if (index01 == parList.Length)
                 break;

             reqWriter.Write("&");
             parList = parList.Substring(index01 + 1);
         }
     }
 }
 else
 {
     request.ContentLength = 0;
 }

 response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

Answer 1

Using WampServer 64bit on Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit I encountered this exact problem. After hours and hours of experimentation it became apparent that all that was needed was in my.ini to comment out one line. Then it worked fine.

commented out 1 line socket=mysql

If you put your old /data/ files in the appropriate location, WampServer will accept all of them except for the /mysql/ folder which it over writes. So then I simply imported a backup of the /mysql/ user data from my prior development environment and ran FLUSH PRIVILEGES in a phpMyAdmin SQL window. Works great. Something must be wrong because things shouldn't be this easy.

Answer 2

I would like to share this answer I found because the cause of the problem was not the firewall or the process not listening correctly, it was the code sample provided from Microsoft that I used.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.sockets.socket%28v=vs.110%29.aspx

I implemented this function almost exactly as written, but what happened is I got this error:

2016-01-05 12:00:48,075 [10] ERROR - The error is: System.Net.Sockets.SocketException (0x80004005): No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it [fe80::caa:745:a1da:e6f1%11]:4080

This code would say the socket is connected, but not under the correct IP address actually needed for proper communication. (Provided by Microsoft)

private static Socket ConnectSocket(string server, int port)
    {
        Socket s = null;
        IPHostEntry hostEntry = null;

        // Get host related information.
        hostEntry = Dns.GetHostEntry(server);

        // Loop through the AddressList to obtain the supported AddressFamily. This is to avoid
        // an exception that occurs when the host IP Address is not compatible with the address family
        // (typical in the IPv6 case).
        foreach(IPAddress address in hostEntry.AddressList)
        {
            IPEndPoint ipe = new IPEndPoint(address, port);
            Socket tempSocket = 
                new Socket(ipe.AddressFamily, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);

            tempSocket.Connect(ipe);

            if(tempSocket.Connected)
            {
                s = tempSocket;
                break;
            }
            else
            {
                continue;
            }
        }
        return s;
    }

I re-wrote the code to just use the first valid IP it finds. I am only concerned with IPV4 using this, but it works with localhost, 127.0.0.1, and the actually IP address of you network card, where the example provided by Microsoft failed!

    private Socket ConnectSocket(string server, int port)
    {
        Socket s = null;

        try
        {
            // Get host related information.
            IPAddress[] ips;
            ips = Dns.GetHostAddresses(server);

            Socket tempSocket = null;
            IPEndPoint ipe = null;

            ipe = new IPEndPoint((IPAddress)ips.GetValue(0), port);
            tempSocket = new Socket(ipe.AddressFamily, SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);

            Platform.Log(LogLevel.Info, "Attempting socket connection to " + ips.GetValue(0).ToString() + " on port " + port.ToString());
            tempSocket.Connect(ipe);

            if (tempSocket.Connected)
            {
                s = tempSocket;
                s.SendTimeout = Coordinate.HL7SendTimeout;
                s.ReceiveTimeout = Coordinate.HL7ReceiveTimeout;
            }
            else
            {
                return null;
            }

            return s;
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            Platform.Log(LogLevel.Error, "Error creating socket connection to " + server + " on port " + port.ToString());
            Platform.Log(LogLevel.Error, "The error is: " + e.ToString());
            if (g_NoOutputForThreading == false)
                rtbResponse.AppendText("Error creating socket connection to " + server + " on port " + port.ToString());
            return null;
        }
    }

Answer 3

I think, you need to check your proxy settings in "internet options". If you are using proxy/'hide ip' applications, this problem may be occurs.

Answer 4

I got this error in an application that uses AppFabric. The clue was getting a DataCacheException [1] in the stack trace. To see if this is the issue for you, run the following PowerShell command:

@("AppFabricCachingService","RemoteRegistry") | % { get-service $_ }

If either of these two services are stopped, then you will get this error.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/microsoft.applicationserver.caching.datacacheexception.aspx

Answer 5

If this happens always, it literally means that the machine exists but that it has no services listening on the specified port, or there is a firewall stopping you.

If it happens occasionally - you used the word "sometimes" - and retrying succeeds, it is likely because the server has a full 'backlog'.

When you are waiting to be accepted on a listening socket, you are placed in a backlog. This backlog is finite and quite short - values of 1, 2 or 3 are not unusual - and so the OS might be unable to queue your request for the 'accept' to consume.

The backlog is a parameter on the listen function - all languages and platforms have basically the same API in this regard, even the C# one. This parameter is often configurable if you control the server, and is likely read from some settings file or the registry. Investigate how to configure your server.

If you wrote the server, you might have heavy processing in the accept of your socket, and this can be better moved to a separate worker-thread so your accept is always ready to receive connections. There are various architecture choices you can explore that mitigate queuing up clients and processing them sequentially.

Regardless of whether you can increase the server backlog, you do need retry logic in your client code to cope with this issue - as even with a long backlog the server might be receiving lots of other requests on that port at that time.

There is a rare possibility where a NAT router would give this error should its ports for mappings be exhausted. I think we can discard this possibility as too much of a long shot though, since the router has 64K simultaneous connections to the same destination address/port before exhaustion.

Answer 6

There is a service called "SQL Server Browser" that provides SQL Server connection information to clients.

In my case, none of the existing solutions worked because this service was not running. I resumed it and everything went back to working perfectly.