[Ethereum] Why does truffle console work fine with testrpc but truffle serve isn’t finding accounts

personal.unlockAccount does not take a file path, it takes a password. See: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/wiki/JavaScript-Console#personalunlockaccount

On the command line, try using this:

geth --unlock 0 --password "fullpathtofile" - the unlock argument takes an index. You can see the indexes by running geth account list.

If you want to make sure that it's not a problem with the file, you can also do this:

geth --unlock 0 --password <(echo "PASSWORD_HERE")

The <(command) form executes the command inside the parenthesis and creates a named pipe that it passes to the program, acting as a file with the contents of that output. You can use this as a test for non-sensitive test accounts.

Since your example code uses truffle-contract you can specify the default values for your transactions and contract deployments like this (Conferrence is the name of your contract. I used the truffle default values):

Conferrence.defaults({
  from: account,
  gas: 4712388,
  gasPrice: 100000000000
})

I had the same problem (base fee exceeds gas limit) and browser-solidity gave me a Gas requirement of function xyz.sol:Xyz.doSomething(address) unknown or not constant. Specifying default values helped eventually.