Getting 'Connection refused (111),' but only for anonymous site access

I've found a couple other sites seem to have similar problems (maybe related, maybe not...):

http://www.wecanmakesandwiches.com/
New York Public Library (google's cache)

A google search brings up a large list of people with memcache seemingly misconfigured...

Well, I updated my settings.php to include memcache's session.inc file, so my new $conf array is as follows:

    $conf = array (
        // The path to memcache.inc, inside the memcache module folder
      'cache_inc' => './sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache.db.inc',
      'session_inc' => './sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache-session.inc',
      'memcache_servers' => array('localhost:11211' => 'default',
                                  'localhost:11212' => 'pages'),
      'memcache_bins' => array('cache_page' => 'pages'),
    );

And now the error goes away... I couldn't find anywhere in the docs a requirement (or even directions) for using the memcache-session.inc file; maybe this could be added in the readme, or in the project page?

It was never working for me until I added the session_inc...

I'm having the same problem on another server now - both are running CentOS 5.5, one uses Web Host Manager, the other is a plain-vanilla CentOS server...

I've also tried with another custom memcache connection script, and it's getting the same error. It must be configuration on the server—perhaps something in iptables...

Still looking into this problem, and I can't find a solution. I would rather not use memcache's session handling, as it causes problems with a few other modules I'm using, but without it, I get a lot of these connection refused notices, causing my logs to fill up pretty quickly.

[Edit - more research...]

I found this thread on Server Fault, which asks if selinux is enabled (in my case, it's not) - selinux could cause this problem.

I also found this thread, and this prompted me to look up CentOS's iptables wiki page, and I'm now working on reconfiguring iptables on my machine to accept traffic to that port from the local machine...

Well, after a bit more research, it seems that connections are refused when a user tries accessing a page on the site that is already cached - for instance, if a user tries accessing /node/9, but is not logged in (thus, access is denied), then the user is directed to my custom login page, and memcache throws the access denied warning.

This was confusing me mostly because my custom module redirects all users to / if they're not logged in, and I didn't notice that the memcache warnings are likely generated before the redirect happens.

Marking as fixed, but I still wish I could suppress these warnings :)