Ok I installed Wflogs to parse my firewall log (I use shorewall) and I successfully ran wflogs and generated some html output using this command:

wflogs -i netfilter -o html /var/log/messages > /home/test.html

It worked the first time, but then when I ran it again it started bugging out on me (and yes, I tried outputting to a different file that didn't exist yet, but still got same error).

Here is the error:

connect: Connection refused
wflogs: Error: output failed.

Anyone have any ideas as to how to fix this? I removed and reinstalled the program using apt-get and I know I have the latest stable version.

It worked before, and there were no other system changes made so I am really lost as to how it could have broken.

I seem to be working out most of my problems on my own (which is actually kind of fun). Managed to figure this out by running Snort and watching to see which ports are used. I thought it would use port 53 for DNS, but infact this program uses port 43. Once I opened that up in my firewall, the error went away!