Cactifywar - Failed to open WAR

Hi,
  I'm a newbie to Cactus. I was attempting the following build
snippet(pls scroll below) to cactify my war application. I get the
exception message: "Failed to open WAR". I have cactus-web.xml and
web.xml inside my /WEB-INF folder. Also eem.war file is read-write
permissions. I use Ant 1.6.2 and cactus-13-1.7.2. The nested cause for
this exception reported is: Caused by: java.net.ConnectException:
Connection refused: connect

Build.xml snippet.....

	<!-- Create the Cactus classpath -->
	<path id="cactus.classpath">
		<fileset dir="${lib.dir}">
			<include name="cactus-1.7.2.jar"/>
			<include name="cactus-ant-1.7.2.jar"/>
			<include name="commons-httpclient-2.0.2.jar"/>
			<include name="commons-logging-1.0.4.jar"/>
			<include name="aspectjrt-1.2.1.jar"/>
			<include name="cargo-0.5.jar"/>
		</fileset>
	</path>
 	<property name="cactus.classpathString"
refid="cactus.classpath"/>

	<!-- Define the Cactus tasks -->
	<taskdef resource="cactus.tasks"
classpathref="cactus.classpath"/>

	<target name="prepare.cactus" depends="init" >
    	<echo message="Cactifying the Web Application..."/>
   		<echo message="Using Cactus CLASSPATH      =
${cactus.classpathString} "/>

 		<!-- Cactify the web-app archive -->
  		<cactifywar srcfile="${build.dir}/eem.war" 
  			mergewebxml="${web.dir}/WEB-INF/cactus-web.xml"
      		destfile="${build.dir}/test.war">
      		
    		<classes dir="${classes.dir}"/>
    		
    		<!-- Adding httpunit.jar for HttpUnit integration  -->
    		<lib file="${lib.dir}/httpunit-1.6.jar"/>
  		</cactifywar>

 	</target>

I searched this forum but couldn't find how to resolve this. Anything
obvious that i'm missing here?

Best regards,
Vikram