I am coming from riak and redis where I never had an issue with this services starting, or to interact.
This is a pervasive problem with mongo and am rather clueless
This error is what you would see if the mongo shell was not able to talk to the mongod server.
This could be because the address was wrong (host or IP) or that it was not running. One thing to note is the log trace provided does not cover the "Fri Nov 9 16:44:06" of your mongo timestamp.
Can you: