"127.0.0.1 refused to connect" error

[WeirdBird]

Hi, not sure if this is the place to ask this.

About 2 months ago all of a sudden my laptop stopped being able to connect to web control and then stopped getting work units entirely. At first, I thought it was a problem with my VPN (I use Nord and windows 11 for context), in the past I'd open web control and then have to disable my VPN or connect directly to get out of the waiting-to-connect screen. But now I just get the "127.0.0.1 refused to connect" when I try to connect directly. All the advice online I could find said it was a problem with the network and firewall settings but as far as I can tell I gave fah full permission. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling fah and fully disabling my VPN but neither seemed to make a difference. Did anyone else have this issue?

Any help or advice I can get with resolving this would be very helpful. Thank you.

[Joe_H]

Welcome to the folding support forum.

Failure to connect to 127.0.0.1 indicates that a local connection on your PC is being blocked. It should not be affected by VPNs except if there is a misconfiguration. FAHClient by default is set up to listen on two local ports. 36330 is for connections between it and FAHControl and the spawned FAHCoreWrapper/FAHCore_nn processes. Port 7396 is used by connections with Web Control.

There have been Windows security settings and anti-malware apps that will block local network communication between processes. Those have been mentioned by Windows users in the past, I haven't kept track of them as a macOS and Linux user. The VPN setup should not be routing localhost connections on the 127.n.n.n IP address range as that is reserved for local loopback addresses. Connections on that range should not be exiting the PC at all.

[toTOW]

What is it trying to connect to 127.0.0.1 ?

If you can't get WUs, please post FAH logs : How to provide enough info to get helpful support.

[WeirdBird]

Eventually, I was able to resolve this by administrator running the FAHClient.exe which got back into webcontrol. I also messed around with the permissions in the firewall but I don't know if that ended up being necessary.

The regular shortcut now takes me to the webcontrol but no workunits or my identity load in. It also doesn't start folding when I start my computer, only when I use the FAHClient.exe with run as administrator.

As it stands now when I start my computer I need to use run as administrator on FAHClient.exe and then access web control from the task bar widget. This takes me to the web control loading screen, then I access it directly and it logs me in with my current workunits, identity and team information. If I try to run it normally with the regular shortcut it gives me the same error screen. If I try to to run the FAHClient.exe normally it tells me access denied but still allows me to open web control, but it doesn't remember my projects, identity or team, and the projects are stuck on ready even though the task bar widget says "folding active".

This is good enough for me to work with though more inconvenient. Hopefully this will help anyone else who ever has this problem.

[toTOW]

How did you install the client (default install, custom) ? Do you have something on your computer that might apply some security policies that might interfere with FAH ?