C socket: problem with connect() and/or accept() between clients. 111: Connection refused

Question

Hello ladies and gents, I'm having a bit of problem with accept(). I have a multiple clients and one server. The clients can connect and communicate just fine with server. But at one point, I need some clients to be directly connected to each other and I'm having a bit of difficulty there. The clients have bunch of threads going on, where one of them is handle_connection() and it has a while(1), looping forever to listen() and accept() whatever incoming connections. Whenever a client tries to connect() to other client, connect() returns an error, 111: Connection Refused. I know I have the right IP address and right port (I have specified a port just for between-client connections). The client that is waiting for connection doesn't notice anything, no new connection, nada. I copied some parts of the code, in hopes that someone can point out what I'm doing wrong. Thanks for any inputs!

This is all client side code. void * handle_connections(void * arg) is a thread that loops forever to accept() any incoming connections. My server has a very similar thang going on and it works very well. (not sure why it doesn't work here..) This is the part of client that is waiting for a new incoming connection. int handle_request(void * arg, struct message * msg) is called at one point during program and tries to connect to a client that is specified in struct message * msg which includes struct sockaddr_in with IP address and port number and whatever.

#define SERVER_PORT 10000
#define CLIENT_PORT     3456
#define MAX_CONNECTION  20
#define MAX_MSG     50

void * handle_connections(void * arg)
{
    struct fd_info * info;
    struct sockaddr_in client_address;
    struct timeval timeout;
    fd_set readset, copyset;

    bzero((char * ) &client_address, sizeof(client_address)); // copy zeroes into string
    client_address.sin_family = AF_INET;
    client_address.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_ANY);
    client_address.sin_port = htons(CLIENT_PORT);

    sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
    rv = listen(sockfd,MAX_CONNECTION);


    while(1)
    {
        new_sockfd = accept(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *) &client_address, &client_addr_len); //blocks

        if (new_sockfd < 0) {
            printf("C: ERROR accept() %i: %s \n", errno, strerror(errno));
            sleep(2);
        } else {
            printf("C: accepted\n");
            FD_SET(new_sockfd, &readset);   // sets bit for new_sockfd to list of sockets to watch out for
            if (maxfd < new_sockfd)
                maxfd = new_sockfd;
            if (minfd > new_sockfd)
                minfd = new_sockfd;
        }       //end if else (new_sockfd)

    }   // end of the forever while loop
}

int handle_request(void * arg, struct message * msg)
{
    char * cname, gname, payload;
    char * command[3];

    int i, rv, sockfd, client_addr_len;

    struct sockaddr_in client_address;
    struct fd_info * info;

    info = (struct fd_info *) arg;
    sockfd = info->sock_fd;


    sockfd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
    if (sockfd == -1)
    {
        printf("HR: ERROR socket() %i: %s \n", errno, strerror(errno));
        break;
    }
    else if (sockfd > 0)
    {
        printf("HR: new socks is %i \n", sockfd);
        printf("HR: sin_family is %i: %i\n", msg->peer.client_address.sin_family, msg->peer.client_address.sin_port);
        //*************************************************************
        //this is the part that returns error 111: Connection refused!!!
        //*************************************************************
        rv = connect(sockfd, (struct sockaddr *) &msg->peer.client_address, sizeof(struct sockaddr));
        if (rv == -1) 
        {
            printf("HR: ERROR: connect() %i: %s \n", errno, strerror(errno));
            printf("HR: at %li \n", msg->peer.client_address.sin_addr.s_addr);
            break;
        }
        else if (rv > 0)
        {
            info->max_fd = sockfd;
            printf("HR: connected successfully!! \n");
        }
    }   
}

Answer 1

Your problem is that you are not calling bind() before listen(), so you are listening for connections on a randomly-chosen port, not the port you want to listen on.

You need:

if (bind(sockfd, &client_address, sizeof client_address)))
{
    perror("bind");
    /* Handle this error somehow */
 }

before the listen().

Note that the sockaddr structure passed to accept() isn't the address to listen on - it's an output parameter for accept() to store the address of the client that has connected when accept() returns.