Socket IO reconnect?

Well, you have an option here ...

The first time you initialize the socket value you should connect with io.connect,

The next time ( after you've called disconnect once ), you should connect back with socket.socket.connect().

So your initSocket, should be something like

function initSocket(__bool){                    
    if(__bool == true){          
        if ( !socket ) {   
            socket = io.connect('http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8081', {secure:false});     
            socket.on('connect', function(){console.log('connected')});                                 
            socket.on('disconnect', function (){console.log('disconnected')});
        } else {
            socket.socket.connect(); // Yep, socket.socket ( 2 times )
        }
    }else{
        socket.disconnect();
        // socket = null; <<< We don't need this anymore
    }
} 

I know you already have an answer, but I arrived here because the socket.IO client reconnection feature is broken in node at the moment.

Active bugs on the github repo show that lots of people aren't getting events on connect failure, and reconnect isn't happening automatically.

To work around this, you can create a manual reconnect loop as follows:

var socketClient = socketioClient.connect(socketHost)

var tryReconnect = function(){

    if (socketClient.socket.connected === false &&
        socketClient.socket.connecting === false) {
        // use a connect() or reconnect() here if you want
        socketClient.socket.connect()
   }
}

var intervalID = setInterval(tryReconnect, 2000)

socketClient.on('connect', function () {
    // once client connects, clear the reconnection interval function
    clearInterval(intervalID)
    //... do other stuff
})

You can reconnect by following client side config.

// 0.9  socket.io version
io.connect(SERVER_IP,{'force new connection':true });

// 1.0 socket.io version
io.connect(SERVER_IP,{'forceNew':true });