I’ve seen the same thing if the install script fails to install the wasm to some of the NNS canisters. The actual error will be buried somewhere deep in the console output. Should be highlighted yellow or red, at least
Rationale: It looks like some kind of comms problem, so it is probably either a network configuration problem or a canister ID problem. Or something else I haven’t thought of yet.
Re: Changing the port. This is the default port for dfx. If you start on a clean machine, install dfx and run dfx start, it will use port :8080. To change that, I’d open a ticket on the SDK repo.
The nns code has the port compiled in, unfortunately. It would be really nice if ports, canister IDs and so on could be passed as arguments, at which point you could set that port to whatever you wanted. I think this is a better approach. We’ve wanted to do this for a while but it’s never been prioritized highly enough to be done.
Side note: this has been changed. Now the default is port 4943. Only the nns install has port and network name hardcoded in, so you have to reconfigure to use 8080 in this (admittedly common) use case