I'm writing a little Ruby network client and having problems with an error of "ai_family not supported". I've got a Java program running on my SuSE machine at 192.168.69.50. It listens on port 2020 and tries to talk to my client, which is running on Ruby 1.8.2 on my Windows XP machine. Here's the irb session that shows what's happening to me. irb(main):001:0> # irb(main):002:0* # This demonstrates how I can't get Ruby on Windows irb(main):003:0* # to talk to my socket program on SuSE irb(main):004:0* # irb(main):005:0* require 'socket' => true irb(main):006:0> t = TCPSocket.new('192.168.69.50', '2020') => #<TCPSocket:0x28b8ad0> irb(main):007:0> # irb(main):008:0* # Socket connection is now up irb(main):009:0* # irb(main):010:0* data = t.recvfrom(8) SocketError: getnameinfo: ai_family not supported. from (irb):10:in `recvfrom' from (irb):10 irb(main):011:0> I did some Googling and found some references to people getting this error message over 2 years ago. But nothing more recent. For instance, http://blade.nagaokaut.ac.jp/cgi-bin/rcat.rb/ruby/ruby-talk/47887 says the following: ----clip---- According to the "Ruby Developer's Guide", page 337, the fix for this is to recompile Ruby with ./configure --enable-ipv6 --with-lookup-order-hack=INET. I tried that and it didn't work!! ----clip---- Is there anything I can do to get around this short of building Ruby from source with these options? (that's something I don't look forward to, since I dread building anything from source on Windows) And even if I did that, would it really fix the problem? Any advice? Todd.