sunspot config probs on local environment

[lsat12357]

Been plagued with a series of errors all stemming from this line in the vocabulary controller: Sunspot.index! Vocabulary.find(id)
An error gets raised upon trying to review a Vocabulary.
At first it was because the Sunspot.config.solr.url was being set to "localhost" and RSolr was throwing a fit that it wasn't a proper url. I tried changing this in config/solr.yml and I suspect that the system is not actually reading this file (the default is "localhost"), so if that's true, it's another issue.
Once I set solr.url manually in the console, I moved on to another error: Econn refused, which was solved by adding the port in.
Finally I have this error: RSolr::Error::Http - 404 Not Found. According to some googling, this may be from a permissions issue, whereby the system doesn't have permission to write to solr? I checked, and the solr cores are empty.