problems connecting to an emacs daemon on RHEL

Question

I am running into problems creating and connecting to an Emacs daemon on RHEL 6. I am using Emacs 23.1.1.

The daemon starts correctly:

emacs --daemon=foo
...
Starting Emacs daemon.

… but when I try to launch a client against it I get:

$ emacsclient -f foo -t
emacsclient: connected to remote socket at 255.255.255.255
emacsclient: connect: Network is unreachable
...
Starting Emacs daemon.
Unable to start the daemon.
Another instance of Emacs is running the server, either as daemon or interactively.
You can use emacsclient to connect to that Emacs process.
Error: server did not start correctly

Error: Could not start the Emacs daemon

I tried to find the port Emacs listens to by way of lsof:

$ ps aux | grep -i emacs | grep -v grep
mperdike 19396  0.3  0.4 259832 17596 ?        Ss   18:21   0:00 emacs -nw --daemon=foo
$ lsof -Pan -p 19396 -i
$

… but as can be seen in the screen above lsof didn't produce any output (maybe that's because I am not a sudoer).

Answer 1

Use this command to invoke the client:

emacsclient -s foo -t

-s is for giving a server name in contrast to -f that specifies the server file and that's a socket with full path.

Emacs starts the server on a local socket (represented by a file) if available -- and with linux it is. So, no TCP socket is opened.