‘Cannot edit LocalServerPort:
Error writing the value’s new contents’

As usual, when something I don’t like happens on my computer or on other parts of my life, I ask my friend Google about it, the suggested solutions were :

• Open the Registry Editor using the command “Regedt32.exe”
• Set or review permissions (Edit->Permissions…)

Of course none of these worked for me, all I had to do is to close the anti-virus program, or to be more specific unload server/client security agent (lol).

I’m not much on Windows, so I can’t explain that behavior, if you know something about it, please share it on the comments section, I will be very pleased to add it here on this very same post.

In order to complete these steps faster, we will prefer using SSH to download or edit files and to create folder instead of using FTP, FTP will take a lot of time compared to SSH… Let’s start.

1 – Download and Install Symfony

Login to your account using SSH, if you are already logged in make sure your current working directory is your home directory (~), then create a “php” folder where you will download the symfony package, we will use the same directory structure used on the Symfony documentation, this will allow you to follow the documentation examples without changing directory names etc.

Before issuing the following commands, grab the link of the latest symfony version from Symfony website, for the purposes of this tutorial you will have to download the  source .tgz file, the text  written in red font will be different depending on the Symfony version:

you@yourdomain.com [/tmp]# cd
you@yourdomain.com [~]# mkdir php
you@yourdomain.com [~]# mkdir php/lib
you@yourdomain.com [~]# mkdir php/lib/vendor
you@yourdomain.com [~]# cd php/lib/vendor
you@yourdomain.com [~/vendor]# wget http://www.symfony-project.org/get/symfony-1.4.1.tgz
--06:15:44-- http://www.symfony-project.org/get/symfony-1.4.1.tgz
=> `symfony-1.4.1.tgz.2'
Resolving www.symfony-project.org... 217.174.222.79
Connecting to www.symfony-project.org|217.174.222.79|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 3,210,838 (3.1M) [application/x-gzip]100%[===================================================================>] 3,210,838 1.34M/s
06:15:48 (1.34 MB/s) - `symfony-1.4.1.tgz.2' saved [3210838/3210838]
you@yourdomain.com [~/vendor]# tar zxpf symfony-1.4.1.tgz
you@yourdomain.com [~/vendor]# mv symfony-1.4.1 symfony
you@yourdomain.com [~/vendor]# rm -fr symfony-*


2 – Test your Symfony installation

You can test your installation and display the symfony version:

you@yourdomain.com [~]# php -q  php/lib/vendor/symfony/data/bin/symfony -V
symfony version 1.4.1 (/home/you/php/lib/vendor/symfony/lib)

3 – Tell PHP where to find Symfony files

Symfony files are now available in your server, but you still need to tell php where to find them easily. For that you need to modify your PHP include_path and add the “php” folder.

We need to know the php folder absolute path, for this we will “cd” to the “php” directory and issue the “pwd” command:

you@yourdomain.com [~]# cd ~/php
you@yourdomain.com [~]# pwd
/home3/you/php


-or-

you@yourdomain.com [~]# find ~/php -name php
/home3/you/php


There are different solutions for altering your PHP include_path, you will choose the one that meets your needs.
[See: How to modify PHP include_path]

In this tutorial, I will assume that you are relying on a global php.ini file .

Open you php.ini file for edit

you@yourdomain.com [~]# nano /x/y/z/php.ini


Look for the include_path directive setting, something like this:

include_path = ".:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php"


you can find it easily by using nano’s search featrure:

• Press CTRL+W
• Type the search string and press RETURN, we are interested in the string include_path
• Press CTRL+W then RETURN until you find something that resembles the code above.

Add the php absolute path to your php include_path like this

include_path = ".:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/home3/you/php"

Conclusion

At this point you can use symphony almost as if you installed it using the PEAR pear command. You can use the same method to install other PEAR packages. One more thing you can do is to alter your (most likely) shell PATH to add the symfony command:

Open .bash_profile add the following line AT THE END OF THE FILE:

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/php/lib/vendor/symfony/data/bin/
export PATH

Sending a crash report to complain about my issue won’t help me (specially), and won’t help Mozilla people too much, unless they know more about my system (OS, FF version, installed extensions, latest visited websites), so I’d better try to solve this issue by myself.

1st try

I restarted Firefox, it still crashes when i type the first letter of my search string…

2nd try

I rebooted my computer… I wasted 2 minutes for nothing.

3rd try

I scanned my computer using Avira Antivir Personal, nothing found as usual.

4th try, what I should have done from the beginning

I started firefox in safe mode and disabled all installed extensions (more than 15).
By the way, the command for starting Firefox in safe mode is:

firefox -safe-mode

Guess what, it worked now, I can use the search function again, but all my extensions are disabled, I enabled them 3 or 4 at a time, restarted Firefox, and tested the search function at each time until I spotted the bogus extensions which was nothing but YSlow 2.0.5.

So what?

Now I can send a descent report to Mozilla and be helpful, I will have to wait until YSlow is updated again or I will install the extension Google Speed which is very similar and even better than YSlow IMO.

You can clear Firefox cache by following these three steps:

1. Press Ctrl+Shift+Del
2. Choose the time range and tick the part of your history you wanna get rid of (Browsing and Download History, Forms & Search Data, etc…), you may need to click the arrow to show those details
3. Click “Clear Now”

After doing your first experiment, you will see that it takes only a few seconds to clear firefox cache.

The Gimp is available on UNIX, Windows and Mac OS and can be downloaded for free at http://www.gimp.org/downloads/.