Glassfish hangs on OS X 10.5/Java 6

Question

I want to play around with glassfish on a Mac, but I'm having trouble getting it to start.

I've followed the installation instructions and created a default domain, which seemed to go fine, but when I try to start it (asadmin start-domain domain1) it just sits there:

[kris@Macintosh-2:~/glassfish] ./bin/asadmin start-domain domain1
Starting Domain domain1, please wait.
Default Log location is /Users/kris/glassfish/domains/domain1/logs/server.log.
Redirecting output to /Users/kris/glassfish/domains/domain1/logs/server.log

The log contains nothing but the command to launch the server:

Mar 12, 2009 7:09:40 PM com.sun.enterprise.admin.servermgmt.launch.ASLauncher buildCommand
INFO:
/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home/bin/java
<crapload of system properties>
-client
-XX:+UnlockDiagnosticVMOptions
-XX:MaxPermSize=192m
-Xmx512m
-XX:NewRatio=2
-XX:+LogVMOutput
-XX:LogFile=/Users/kris/glassfish/domains/domain1/logs/jvm.log
-cp
/Users/kris/glassfish/lib/jhall.jar:/Users/kris/glassfish/lib/appserv-launch.jar
com.sun.enterprise.server.PELaunch
start

Eventually, asadmin gives up waiting:

Timeout waiting for domain domain1 to go to starting state.
CLI156 Could not start the domain domain1.

This is using glassfish v2.1, but I get similar behaviour on v3 prelude. I've also tried both java 5 and 6. I'm at a loss as to what sort of debugging to do as it doesn't seem to be even getting off the ground.

Answer 1

I was able to start my glassfish for the first time, but the second time, it just gives me that weird error message that it could not start the domain.

Googling around, there was mention of a lock file in the imq.

Check if you have a file 'lock' in "/glassfish/domains/domain1/imq/instances/imqbroker/". If there is one, delete it, and then try to start glassfish again.

Answer 2

Also on the JMS front, have you tried changing your broker from EMBED to LOCAL in your domain.xml? I seem to remember that help on OS X.