This answer is unlikely to help in most cases, however, I was getting this error on my local laptop (lab) where I had Splunk Enterprise (Deployment server) and Splunk Universal Forwarder (UF) running with the UF's targetUri setting in deploymentclient.conf pointing to localhost (local machine's IP actually). The issue of course was they were both using 8089 for mgmt port. By changing the port on my Enterprise instance to 8091 and restarting the enterprise instance running the deployment server, issue was resolved. Use ./splunk set splunkd-port 8091 on my DS Restart DS instance ... View more