distributed load testing on aws with jmeter

I have been trying to setup aws ec2 machines for load testing of my web server using jmeter but I am stuck. I have a jmeter client on my local machine and I want to set up multiple jmeter-server nodes on ec2 to do the load testing and I am, thus far, just trying to get one server node up and running. But it hasn't worked out for me yet.

I have the same jmeter running on my local machine and the server and the java version was a little different but I don't think that is the problem. Most of the people have had problems with getting the correct ip for connecting between the client and the server nodes but I, after a lot of searching, have gotten through all those problems. I am stuck at when the server node attempts to return the result and tries to connect to the client, my local machine. The server tries to connect to the external ip address of my local machine. But it throws a connection refused error, which apparently was caused by connection timeout. I guess it's some firewall issue but I tried turning off the firewall on my local machine but it still throws the same error. I am not sure how can I get past this and it's taking way too much time then it should.

Could somebody please suggest me something to solve this? Thanks!

My local machine is a Mac OS X 10.7.5 and my server nodes are on ubuntu.
This is the error that it throws:

2013/01/29 12:23:37 ERROR - jmeter.samplers.RemoteListenerWrapper: testStarted(host) java.rmi.ConnectException: Connection refused to host: xxx.xxx.xxx.10; nested exception is:
java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused
at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPEndpoint.newSocket(TCPEndpoint.java:619)
at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPChannel.createConnection(TCPChannel.java:216)
at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPChannel.newConnection(TCPChannel.java:202)
at sun.rmi.server.UnicastRef.invoke(UnicastRef.java:128)
at org.apache.jmeter.samplers.RemoteSampleListenerImpl_Stub.testStarted(Unknown Source)
at org.apache.jmeter.samplers.RemoteListenerWrapper.testStarted(RemoteListenerWrapper.java:83)
at org.apache.jmeter.engine.StandardJMeterEngine.notifyTestListenersOfStart(StandardJMeterEngine.java:226)
at org.apache.jmeter.engine.StandardJMeterEngine.run(StandardJMeterEngine.java:349)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:636)
Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method)
at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.doConnect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:327)
at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:193)
at java.net.AbstractPlainSocketImpl.connect(AbstractPlainSocketImpl.java:180)
at java.net.SocksSocketImpl.connect(SocksSocketImpl.java:384)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:546)
at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:495)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:392)
at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:206)
at sun.rmi.transport.proxy.RMIDirectSocketFactory.createSocket(RMIDirectSocketFactory.java:40)
at sun.rmi.transport.proxy.RMIMasterSocketFactory.createSocket(RMIMasterSocketFactory.java:146)
at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPEndpoint.newSocket(TCPEndpoint.java:613)
... 8 more