Flex profiler connection problems

June 29th, 2008

There are many developers having problems getting the Flex Builder profiler to connect to their applications and unfortunately not many solutions that address the issue.

I would say that ninety nine point nine percent of the time Flex Builder cannot connect to the Flash Player Debugger because the Flash Player Debugger uses the TCP/IP protocol to connect to Flex Builder on various ports and those ports are blocked by a local firewall or security software. It is possible that you may not have the Flash Player Debugger installed but by simply installing and making sure that you have the right software is an easy enough fix. If you still cannot connect, continue reading.

Systems that are mostly affected are Windows because Mac users usually don’t run any third party security software. I have tested on a Windows Vista machine and tested against Windows Defender and the built in Windows Firewall and both do not affect Flex Builder using the default install settings. I personally use the ESET Smart Security Suite and after hours of testing by turning off various features I managed to narrow down the problem.

If you are using ESET Smart Security follow the following steps:

  1. Open Smart Security.
  2. If you are in standard mode and do not see a menu in the top right hand corner click Setup->Toggle Advanced Mode.
  3. Click on the ‘Enter entire advanced setup tree…’ link at the bottom.
  4. Click Personal Firewall->Protocol Filtering.
  5. Make sure ‘Enable application protocol content filtering’ is selected.
  6. Below that select Redirect traffic for filtering->HTTP and POP3 ports.

By doing so you are telling your firewall to only filter over the HTTP and POP3 protocols.

If you are using a different firewall system or security suite, I would recommend making absolutely sure you know what you are doing before modifying and opening ports and potentially exposing your system to the web. An easier solution and safer option would be to add your localhost (127.0.0.1) to a trusted zone.

Try contacting your security software support team, they can sometimes be quite helpful, and by doing so it also makes them aware of the problem.

You can also customise your flex profiler port number in the flex profiler connection settings. To change the port number here are the steps:

  1. Open Preferences->Flex->Profiler->Connections.
  2. Change the port number to an available port within your firewall.

If you have had any troubles with your system please leave a comment and I will try to solve your problem. I would be interested to see which other systems are affected and the reasons why.

Posted by Ryan Wild Filed in Solutions

3 Responses to “Flex profiler connection problems”

  1. G-Man Says:
    August 12th, 2008 at 9:55 pm

    Man. This one has me totally stumped.

    Look at this:

    ——————————-
    Welcome to the µTorrent Port Checker.
    A test will be performed on your computer to check if the specified port is opened.

    Checking port 20957 on 24.98.5.92…

    OK! Port 20957 is open and accepting connections.

    You will be able to receive incoming BitTorrent connections.
    ————————————
    And yet if I try to connect to the same port (set in window-preferences-profiler-connections I get a “Socket Timeout” error.

    I’ve, of course, tried it on the default port of 9999. Doesn’t work.

    I’ve verified that my settings are right in my router - they wouldn’t work for utorrent if they weren’t but I did it anyway.

    Still no love from the flex profiler. I don’t have any firewall software on my computer and I’m not using a virus scanner other than windows defender.

    Any ideas?

    G-Man

  2. Ryan Wild Says:
    August 13th, 2008 at 12:56 am

    Sounds like a flash player version issue.

    To check which version of the flash player you currently have installed go here:

    http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507

    You need to make sure that you have the debug player installed which can be found over here:

    http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html

    (You want to download the version which says “content debugger”)

    If you test and debug your flex applications using firefox as your default browser then make sure that the flash player debugger is installed within firefox.

    I want to make a note here and say that your router ports have nothing to do with flex. There are two kinds of ports on your setup.

    You have your local client ports on your computer, and you have ports on your router.

    Your ports on your router double as a firewall so basically your router has a list of ports that allow internet traffic into your network, not your computer.

    The test you ran tested your router ports to make sure that traffic on port 20957 was able to get through your network, not your computer.

    If you did manager to run bittorent on that port then yes port 20957 is probably open on your machine, but also open to the whole internet if you allowed that port through your router.

    This is important: Make sure bit torrent is not running and did not start at all before you tried to profile your flex app!!!

    I hope this helps my good man. I have been there before, just keep your eye on the goal and keep trying.

  3. Jozsef Says:
    August 14th, 2008 at 3:58 pm

    Thanks man, you just saved my life.
    I was strugling for hours and installed everything again without any success.

    Thanks again!!!

    That damn ESET!

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