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.

Installing Jetspeed 2.x on Windows

The Jetspeed project site says that installing the portal server is as simple as running the following command,

java -jar jetspeed-2.1-installer.jar

But things are not that simple if you are behind corporate firewall. I keep getting the following error message on my Win-XP machine which is behind proxy,

org.tp23.antinstaller.InstallException: Not able to load and read
the AntInstaller config at org.tp23.antinstaller.runtime.exe.InputStreamLoadConfigFilter
.exec(InputStreamLoadConfigFilter.java:45)
at org.tp23.antinstaller.runtime.ExecInstall.exec(ExecInstall.java:85)
at org.tp23.antinstaller.selfextract.NonExtractor.main(NonExtractor.java:59)
Caused by: java.io.IOException: DomFactory error: caused by:class java.net.ConnectException:Connection timed out: connect
at org.tp23.antinstaller.runtime.exe.LoadConfigFilter
.readConfig(LoadConfigFilter.java:179)

The installer uses few xml configuration files which are later validated using their corresponding DTDs. The program tries to load the DTDs from internet but gets blocked by the proxy. Java does not pick up proxy details automatically from the IE/FF setting. So one needs to supply the proxy details in environment. It can like,

java -Dhttp.proxyHost=<value> -Dhttp.proxyPort=<value> -jar jetspeed-2.1-installer.jar

The solution may look very trivial but it did take quite sometime to figure out the actual problem. The documentation at the Jetspeed side didn’t help much. They have this reported as a bug and it can be found in their Jira tracker. But i think this should go in as a FAQ entry or under special instructions section for windows installation guide. I am posting it here for a quick reference for others. They need not go digging in the issue tracker to solve it.