…(jmeter-server.log on server machine) I could see that the connection back failed. I must add, that I am using Ubuntu in a headless mode to do these things and it looks like a Linux/Debian only issue.

The log output was:

ERROR - jmeter.JMeter: Uncaught exception: org.apache.jorphan.util.JMeterError: Could not return sample
 at org.apache.jmeter.samplers.AsynchSampleSender$Worker.run(AsynchSampleSender.java:148)
Caused by: java.rmi.ConnectException: Connection refused to host: 127.0.1.1; nested exception is:
 java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused

After searching the web for quite a bit there was little to go on. Eventually I figured out that the issue is actually on the client side and not the server-side as you would anticipate by the error log. Google didn’t quite help as much as I would have liked it to so I thought I’d just do a blog post o that others can find a clearer answer.

The solution is to go into the /etc/hosts file and find the entry that looks something like

127.0.1.1     <server-name1> <server-name2>

Comment this line out with a # or delete it completely.

Please note though that I don’t know if this has any other implications. The line was added to deal with issues in Debian when using Gnome.

I hope this helps someone else that runs into the same issue and sorry to the non technical people out there for this post.