[Errno 111] Connection Refused After Recent Update

I’m sure people are probably tired of seeing this error, but from googling this, it seems to come up a lot and has various (inconclusive) solutions, but nothing I’ve come across so far has been able to resolve the issue.

I’ve had a ESP8266 board running for about a year without any issues; decided to do an update to catch up with the development of the component and ran into connection issues. I thought that if I went back to the previous code, it would resolve itself. Unfortunately, it did not and even that old code would not connect back to esphome. I’m currently running latest ESPHom (version 2024.9.2) and the static IP it is setup to connect to has not changed (verified it is connected to the same IP through router).

But back to the new/updated code … everything compiles, it tells me it took so and so many seconds to complete, and then when it comes to connecting to esphome, it throws an error. I’ll get to the error shortly.

After trying multiple times to update via OTA, I decide to pull the esp8266 from where it is installed and connect and flash via esp web using a USB cable. Everything works fine and I can see that it all connects properly to the network and esphome.

The moment I put her back into the wild, I get the same connection errors again but I can see the device connected to my home network.

When I try to connect to log, this is what I receive:

Error connecting to [AddrInfo(family=<AddressFamily.AF_INET: 2>, type=<SocketKind.SOCK_STREAM: 1>, proto=6, sockaddr=IPv4Sockaddr(address='10.0.63.187', port=6053))]: [Errno 111] Connect call failed ('10.0.63.187', 6053) (SocketAPIError)
INFO Trying to connect to vistaalarm @ 10.0.63.187 in the background

When I try to “re-install” OTA, this is the error I receive

ERROR Connecting to 10.0.63.187:8266 failed: [Errno 111] Connection refused 

Anyone have any thoughts?