Why am I getting the error "connection refused" in Python? (Sockets)

This error means that for whatever reason the client cannot connect to the port on the computer running server script. This can be caused by few things, like lack of routing to the destination, but since you can ping the server, it should not be the case. The other reason might be that you have a firewall somewhere between your client and the server - it could be on server itself or on the client. Given your network addressing, I assume both server and client are on the same LAN, so there shouldn't be any router/firewall involved that could block the traffic. In this case, I'd try the following:

• check if you really have that port listening on the server (this should tell you if your code does what you think it should): based on your OS, but on linux you could do something like netstat -ntulp
• check from the server, if you're accepting the connections to the server: again based on your OS, but telnet LISTENING_IP LISTENING_PORT should do the job
• check if you can access the port of the server from the client, but not using the code: just us the telnet (or appropriate command for your OS) from the client

and then let us know the findings.

Instead of

host = socket.gethostname() #Get the local machine name
port = 12397 # Reserve a port for your service
s.bind((host,port)) #Bind to the port

you should try

port = 12397 # Reserve a port for your service
s.bind(('', port)) #Bind to the port

so that the listening socket isn't too restricted. Maybe otherwise the listening only occurs on one interface which, in turn, isn't related with the local network.

One example could be that it only listens to 127.0.0.1, which makes connecting from a different host impossible.