SocketError: getnameinfo: ai_family not supported.

[Bradley, Todd]

I'm writing a little Ruby network client and having problems
with an error of "ai_family not supported". I've got a Java
program running on my SuSE machine at 192.168.69.50. It listens
on port 2020 and tries to talk to my client, which is running
on Ruby 1.8.2 on my Windows XP machine.

Here's the irb session that shows what's happening to me.

irb(main):001:0> #
irb(main):002:0* # This demonstrates how I can't get Ruby on Windows
irb(main):003:0* # to talk to my socket program on SuSE
irb(main):004:0* #
irb(main):005:0* require 'socket'
=> true
irb(main):006:0> t = TCPSocket.new('192.168.69.50', '2020')
=> #<TCPSocket:0x28b8ad0>
irb(main):007:0> #
irb(main):008:0* # Socket connection is now up
irb(main):009:0* #
irb(main):010:0* data = t.recvfrom(8)
SocketError: getnameinfo: ai_family not supported.
from (irb):10:in `recvfrom'
from (irb):10
irb(main):011:0>

I did some Googling and found some references to people getting this
error message over 2 years ago. But nothing more recent.

For instance,
http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/rcat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/47887
says the following:


----clip----
According to the "Ruby Developer's Guide", page 337, the fix
for this is to recompile Ruby with
/configure --enable-ipv6 --with-lookup-order-hack=INET.
I tried that and it didn't work!!
----clip----


Is there anything I can do to get around this short of building
Ruby from source with these options? (that's something I don't
look forward to, since I dread building anything from source on
Windows) And even if I did that, would it really fix the problem?
Any advice?


Todd.