cannot start sinatra process – eventmachine “no acceptor”-open source projects eventmachine/eventmachine

I have a Sinatra app that I run as a daemon, using Apache port-forwarding to mediate between port 80 and port 7655. This has been working fine in the past. Today, not so well. I cannot figure out why.

Problem: sudo ruby my_process.rb returns:

/var/lib/gems/1.9.1/gems/eventmachine-1.0.0/lib/eventmachine.rb:526:in `start_tcp_server': no acceptor (port is in use or requires root privileges) (RuntimeError)

Tried: updating all system packages, updating all gems. No help (except for the more clear error message from eventmachine).

When I run sudo lsof -i :7655 I get nothing back. When I run sudo ps aux I don’t see any Ruby processes at all. Which I find highly irregular, given the nature of the error message!

So is there something I’m missing in finding out why the port is unavailable?

Also:

Tried changing ports, nothing. I wonder if it is related to “localhost”? When I ping localhost I get all dropped packets. That doesn’t seem normal.