The miner works perfect. It’s the node that isn’t working.

I'm getting this error.

ECONREFUSED 127.0.0.1:4028

I've turned on port forwarding. Port 9333 (port forwarding works on a server I'm running with Litecoin core Node.)
I've turned on UPnP.
Ive flashed the operating system twice.
I've formatted the usb drive twice and set it up with the Litecoin directory and contents.

When I start the node, the gear just spins and never starts the node.

Any Ideas?

I finally got minera up and running after days of trying (the SD card i was using was corrupted). WISH I HAD DONE THIS EARLIER!

Now I am running into a problem which I don't know is actually a problem or me just being a n00b pl3b, but as the subject line reads, my gekko's are not being recognized by minera.

My current set-up is Raspberry Pi 3 (B), 12-port usb hub, 3 Antminer U2's (all running as expected) and 2 Gekkoscience rev2.
I'm currently using cgminer with options "--anu-freq 250 --compaq-freq 150 --retries=1"
The 2 Gekko's don't even show under the devices. There was 1 instance where ONE of the Gekko's showed up (I'm assuming it was the Gekko with device # AMU0 (as opposed to Antminer ANU#)) but it was running at around ~220 MH/s...
I unplugged and plugged back in the both of them, and then it was back to square one with none of them showing up. I've tried using every possible usb slot I have as well. Both devices light up green when plugged in but that's it. Any suggestions??

I wanted to install cgminer-gekko but I'm not too comfortable with the custom stuff yet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. In the meantime I luckily bought an extra RPi for sand box testing so I'll just install Raspbian on that for now for my Gekko's.