I'm the admin for a small Minecraft server hosted by Apex Minecraft Hosting. Most of my players can connect fine, but 2 are unable to connect (that I'm aware of). I can get more details from one of them; I was just trying to help the second troubleshoot. They're getting the io.netty.channel.AbstractChannel$AnnotatedConnectException: Connection refused: no further information error – but only when trying to connect to this server. [Edit: the other player is getting a slightly different error, Connection timed out rather than Connection refused] They seem to be able to connect to other servers without issue, so I'm not sure where to start looking. They have the server address correct, the firewall must be fine if they can reach other servers, they're on the whitelist (and would have had a different error message if that was the problem anyway)… what else could be playing up?
The server is lightly modded (1.16.2 Fabric) but fully compatible with the vanilla client, happy to grab more specifics if needed!
Best Answer
Both of these errors seem to be a firewall issue on the side of the server. To confirm this you might want to take down the firewall altogether (temporarily of course) and have them connect while it's down. If they are then able to connect, then check your firewall settings and make sure that activity that you want isn't being filtered. I can't give specifics because I don't use Apex hosting.