Management Portlet problem on JBoss portal

I get the following problem when i go to the admin page of a fresh Jboss portal 2.4 installation and try to access the Management Portlet.

/WEB-INF/jsp/management/index.xhtml @41,58 rendered="#{!empty node.children}": Exception getting value of property children of base of type : org.jboss.portal.core.portlet.management.LazyPortalObjectTreeNode

The problem has been reported already in Jboss forums. See the link. But no response as usual.

Aparently its an issue with the jre version used to start the Jboss instance. You must use jre 1.4.x or 1.5 to see everything working correctly in portal 2.4. I was on jsk 6.0 and hence the problem. Now wondering, what about backword compatibility? Is it the problem with JRE or JBoss?

Running JBoss Portal on Windows

Installation of JBoss on Windows is as simple as unzipping the download bundle into a folder. And to run the JBoss server, you just need to goto the bin folder and execute run.bat. It should run fine as long as you have appropriate JRE installed on your machine.

However it didn’t work fine for me and i could see the JBoss server console scrolling endless with error messages logged in it. They were JVM_BIND error messages for a specific port. (1098 to be specific).


java.rmi.server.ExportException: Port already in use: 1098; nested exception is:
java.net.BindException: Address already in use: JVM_Bind
at sun.rmi.transport.tcp.TCPTransport.listen(TCPTransport.java:310)

Solution:

Obviously some process on my machine is occupying that port. How do i know? Use the following command,

netstat -o

It should list down all the processes and port numbers currently being used by them. You can pick up the process id, go to task manager and kill the process. Now restart the server and it wouldn’t complain.

But killing processes on Windows is not advisable unless you are absolutely sure about the utility of the process, which i guess nobody other than M$ guys know. So whats the solution?

The other way to solve it would be to reconfigure JBoss to use the ports numbers which are free in your system. Find out all the config files where port 1098 (in my example) is configured and replace it with a port number which is free. The above netstat command will help identify free port numbers.