GlassFish 3.1 won't start from Eclipse

Question

I'm using Linux, and I've installed GlassFish 3.1 outside of Eclipse. It starts fine with asadmin start-domain.

In Eclipse Helios I've installed the latest version of the GlassFish tools, server adapter etc. I've added a "Server" instance for my external GlassFish, but when I try to start it, the Eclipse Console says "Waiting for domain1 to start ......" – more and more dots are printed while I wait for several minutes. Eventually there's a dialog saying "Server GlassFish 3.1 at localhost failed to start."

At no point is http://localhost:8080 responding.

There is no other errors messages that I can find. The server log (glassfish/domains/domain1/server.log) prints the long startup command, and then:

Feb 28, 2011 10:48:45 PM com.sun.enterprise.admin.launcher.GFLauncherLogger info                                                                                                                                  
INFO: Successfully launched in 3 msec.

The GlassFish installation is entirely stock, with no applications loaded. It works fine when started from the command line outside of Eclipse.

I've tried to reinstall GlassFish to different locations, I've reinstalled Eclipse with no plugins except the GlassFish stuff.

The strange thing is that the "Internal GlassFish 3.1" server, which is distributed with the Eclipse plugin and lives inside eclipse/plugins, works just fine and starts up very snappily. But I'd really like to have an external GlassFish that I can easily run independently of Eclipse when I want to.

Help much appreciated!

Answer 1

You can have detailed logs about what is going on :

go to "Window -> Preferences -> Glassfish Preferences".

There you can check the "Start Glassfish Enterprise Server in Verbose Mode".

I had problems starting Glassfish 3.1 from inside eclipse too. I tried to delete the "osgi-cache/" subdirectory located in the domain directory and then i could successfully launch glassfish.

Hope it helps.

Answer 2

CLI130 Glassfish Error and Port 4848 in Use Error

Glassfish is written in Java and if the system's TCP/IP configuration isn't setup a certain way, Glassfish will choke when it makes a getLocaHost() call. A quick fix is:

1. Get the system's hostname and related IP
   • hostname
   • ifconfig -a

2. Add a line to /etc/hosts after the localhost line:

   hostname ip-address-of-hostname

A Little More Background.....

If the local hostname (value returned from the "hostname" command) does not resolve to an IP address (e.g. "nslookup my-hostname") Glassfish will fail. The following Java app will expose this:

import java.net.*;
class Testnet {
    public static void main() throws Exception {
        InetAddress host = InetAddress.getLocalHost();
        System.out.println ("host=" + host.getHostName());
        System.out.println ("addr=" + host.getHostAddress());
    }
}

The root cause could be any one of a number of issues:

• The Local hostname (value returned from "hostname" command) does not resolve to an IP or valid IP
• Misconfigured /etc/nsswitch.conf or /etc/hosts

• There have been suggestions on the web that IPV6 only addressing messes up Java in Linux. To make sure this won't befall you, it can be set on most flavors of Linux with the following command (however the above Testnet app ran for us with bindv6only set to both 1 and 0):

  sysctl -w net.ipv6.bindv6only=0

In terms of HA, having an entry for the local IP and hostname in /etc/hosts is a solid thing to do and to make sure "files" is the first entry in the list for "hosts" in /etc/nsswitch.conf. The downside to this is that each host needs to be setup with this line and it could cause problems with nodes that get their IP from DHCP or are randomly assigned when configured.

Answer 3

I've met the same problem as I was learning java web programming, but in netbeans - windows env. I've spent much time guessing what that error could mean because the log file wasn't clearly saying that.

Finally I found out that glassfish v3 was trying to run on 8080 port, which was already occupied by reportingservicesservice.exe which is sql server service.

go to (tools -> servers) add a new glassfish server instance which runs on a different, free port - that solved the problem.

Answer 4

The suggestion to delete "osgi-cache" worked for me on ONE machine (at work).

However on my home machine, neither that suggestion nor the suggestion to add my machine's hostname to the "hosts" file helped. Glassfish would start but Eclipse wouldn't recognize that...

The only thing that worked for me was:

1. go to the glassfish3/bin directory
2. execute "asadmin create-domain newdomain"
   • in this step, I was prompted for an admin username and password; I chose "admin" and "admin123" respectively
3. create a Glassfish server in Eclipse pointing to the new domain

Now I know that this may mean that the default domain (domain1) has some strange configuration, but that just doesn't seem right. Anyway, this did work for me, and now I can start Glassfish from within Eclipse - any Glassfish domain that I want.

HTH.

Answer 5

I'm using ubuntu 13.04 and had the same issue. I tried almost everything, but when i disabled IPv6 it worked. For ubuntu it's easy, just add following 3 lines to kernel parameters:

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

and run sudo sysctl -p. Good luck ;)

p.s. Don't forget to disable proxy server, set Active provider to Direct at General->Network connections.

Answer 6

Hum. Good news is that the internal server is working. For the external one, first thing to test is if the server can be started outside Eclipse. Check also the domain directory known by Eclipse (hint: server properties tab), and if the location is the one you want to use. Maybe the domain has been started with a different Glassfish Server? In this case, make sure the osgi-cache/ directory in this domain is deleted first.

Answer 7

If the server works outside Eclipse, triple check the registration data of this server (runtime +domain) in Eclipse itself. In fact, try a new eclipse workspace... Is this server secured with https?

Answer 8

I had the samere problem with Indigo + Glassfish 3.1 plug-in accessing an already working local standalone glassfish instance (with username 'admin' and my own password set). Fortunately doing the following did the trick for me:

• stop glassfish
• delete osgi-cache content ( ${GLASSFISH_3.1HOME}/glassfish/domains/domain1/osgi-cache )
• set my username ('admin' in my case) and reset passowrd (no password at all)

starting glassfish from within Indigo now works!