Cake Toolbar writing to cache, but errors reading and writing sessions

I’ve set up a new installation of Cake 2.8.9 on Ubuntu 14 where I have root access. I’ve been getting errors reading and writing sessions. However, the cake toolbar (perhaps from the DebugKit which I installed) is writing to app/tmp/cache

In order to make sure it isn’t something in my code, I’ve removed all of that and just tried the simple build in the multi-step form tutorial. The session read/writes in that tutorial produce the same errors.

$this->Session->read(‘forms.params’) results in this error:

Call to a member function read() on null

  • I have researched and made sure that I have all permissions in the app/tmp directory correct.

  • I have the configuration in core.php correct:

    Configure::write(‘Session’, array(
    ‘defaults’ => ‘cake’
    ));

All of the discussions I’ve found so far about this session read/write issue address the two bullets above.

Any insights would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance!