podman: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it

I encountered the same problem, and I think I found a solution, at least for my case. tl;dr, run the following commands with admin privilege powershell fix the problem for me

net stop winnat
net start winnat

And here’s what I have tried.

• I tried to run SSH to localhost in podman-machine-default, and it worked, so seems like the sshd is working correctly
• Also checked the sshd service and log, didn’t see anything looks like it’s not working
• I checked my wslconfig, and it seems like localhostForwarding should be enabled by default
• I ran simple http server in a WSL instance with port like 8080, and localhostForwarding is working correctly by running a wslrelay.exe for that port
• Then I wondered, what about the port 60516 assigned by podman for the ssh connection? So I tried to shutdown sshd and run a simple http server instead, somehow the localhostForwarding feature of WSL is not working for that port (no wslrelay.exe started)

After some research, I finally found this WSL issues:

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5306

Not sure how WSL works for making the reserved ports, but somehow the port assigned by podman got reserved by WSL. I ran

netsh int ipv4 show excludedportrange protocol=tcp

and the result:

Protocol tcp Port Exclusion Ranges

Start Port    End Port
----------    --------
      5357        5357
     50000       50059     *
     56547       56646
     56647       56746
     59963       60062
     60063       60162
     60263       60362
     60363       60462
     60463       60562
     60563       60662
     60663       60762
     60763       60862
     60866       60965
     61283       61382
     61514       61613
     61614       61713
     61714       61813
     61814       61913
     61914       62013
     62014       62113
     62114       62213
     62214       62313
     62314       62413
     62414       62513
     62514       62613

* - Administered port exclusions.

As you can see my assigned port 60516 is covered by the excluded range 60463 to 60562, and probably that’s now wslrelay.exe is not started for the port.

After restarting the service:

net stop winnat
net start winnat

And see the excluded port ranges again:

netsh int ipv4 show excludedportrange protocol=tcp

Protocol tcp Port Exclusion Ranges

Start Port    End Port
----------    --------
      5357        5357
     50000       50059     *

* - Administered port exclusions.

The podman port is not in the excluded list and thus working as expected now. I didn’t dig too deep into why WSL is excluding tons of ports like that and somehow those ports covered podman’s SSH port, could be a bug. People we are interested can dig deeper into the issue I found. But I guess podman desktop might need to find a way to workaround that issue by selecting a port less likely to be excluded by WSL or maybe come up with a way to dynamically select one not from the excluded range.

After numerous different attempts fixing this issue, including reinstalling fresh podman, I finally was able to make it work. Windows 10 Podman: v4.4.4 Podman-desktop: v0.13.0

Not sure which exact step fixed the issue, or if the order made any difference, but these are the steps:

1. podman machine stop
2. wsl --unregister podman-machine-default
3. podman system connection remove --all
4. Uninstalled Podman 4.4.4
5. Uninstalled Podman Desktop
6. Manually removed folder C:\Users\user\.config\containers
7. Manually removed folder C:\Users\user\.local\share\containers
8. Manually removed both podman-machine-default files from C:\Users\user\.ssh
9. Installed Podman 4.4.4
10. Installed Podman Desktop

Paths for 6-8, I referenced from earlier podman machine inspect run command

Hope someone finds this helpful

I ran into this same issue after a Windows 10 update this week. Moving from 4.5.0 to 4.5.1 then running the following fixed it: podman machine rm podman machine init podman machine start

I ran into this same issue after a Windows 10 update this week. Moving from 4.5.0 to 4.5.1 then running the following fixed it: podman machine rm podman machine init podman machine start

This solved the issue for me. Podman v4.5.1 in W10

Hi @n1hility This is something serious on going issue, we already communicated to application team to use the podman but folks are facing lot of issues