SOLVED - See bottom of post
Firstly, I will state that I have read all the existing posts regarding this problem and none of the suggested solutions have worked.
After upgrading eclipse to Indigo SR2 and to java 7, I was not able to start Glassfish, either embedded or separate installation.
After a week of this and because my PC was getting sluggish, I decided a full rebuild of my PC was required, so I reset the PC back to factory settings and started again. My spec now looks like this...
Windows XP SP3 - Firewall Disabled as 3rd Party solution installed Java 7 - jdk1.7.0_03 + jre Eclipse Indigo SR2
hosts file... 127.0.0.1 localhost
I installed the latest Glassfish Plugin from: http://download.java.net/glassfish/eclipse/indigo However, just as before the rebuild, when I try and start the server, I get the CREDENTIAL_ERROR. I'm now super frustrated as I would have expected this completely clean install to just work.
I disabled the firewall, but that made no difference.
I then tried to start the embedded server manually. e.g. asadmin start-domain, and it started fine. I can stop it from Eclipse, but as soon as I try and start it again I get the CREDENTIAL_ERROR. Grrrrhhh!!!
I also spotted this entry in the eclipse .log file...
!MESSAGE GlassFish: error reading one jmx portjava.lang.NumberFormatException: For input string: "${JMX_SYSTEM_CONNECTOR_PORT}"
...which may be relevant as the final line of a verbose manual startup of the server looks like this... [#|2012-04-09T15:33:16.625+0100|INFO|glassfish3.1.2|javax.enterprise.system.jmx.org.glassfish.admin.mbeanserver|_ThreadID=41;_Thre adName=Thread-23;|JMX005: JMXStartupService had Started JMXConnector on JMXService URL service:jmx:rmi://HOME:8686/jndi/rmi://HOME :8686/jmxrmi|#]
Many thanks Chris
SOLVED
Darn it. Just after posting this, I stumbled upon this link... http://java.net/jira/browse/GLASSFISHPLUGINS-72 ...which suggested that the Anti-Virus (not the firewall) being the culprit and lo and behold, it was. I removed port 8080 from scanning and the server fired up without a problem. Now I need to work out if I've opened up a security hole.
UPDATE
I decided to install a separate Glassfish instance and the problem started over again. In then end I discovered that I had to disable the NOD32 HTTP Scanner entirely to allow the server to start. Re-enabling it got the CREDENTIAL_ERROR again. There didn't seem to be any configuration setting that would get around this. I'll have to fire an email off to ESET to see what they suggest.
