Installer: asadmin start-domain fails with Glassfish 4.1 on OS X Yosemite 10.10.3

[pdurbin]

This morning I updated my laptop to OS X Yosemite 10.10.3 and was surprised to discover that Glassfish 4.1 wouldn't start:

murphy:~ pdurbin$ cd /Applications/NetBeans/glassfish4
murphy:glassfish4 pdurbin$ glassfish/bin/asadmin start-domain
JVM failed to start: com.sun.enterprise.admin.launcher.GFLauncherException: The server exited prematurely with exit code 1.
Before it died, it produced the following output:


Command start-domain failed.
murphy:glassfish4 pdurbin$ 

I'm found two bugs filed about this and a Stackoverflow post:

• https://java.net/jira/browse/GLASSFISH-21343
• https://java.net/jira/browse/GLASSFISH-21346
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29481479/glassfish-wont-start-from-intellij-unless-i-run-intellij-with-sudo

Other projects are reporting problems as well:

• Brackets install - Error: Broken pipe Homebrew/homebrew-cask#9448

It sounds like bsexec may now require root privileges. I'm seeing it called on line 448 of https://java.net/projects/glassfish/sources/svn/content/tags/4.1-b12/nucleus/admin/launcher/src/main/java/com/sun/enterprise/admin/launcher/GFLauncher.java

A workaround for me at the moment is to use asadmin start-domain --verbose=true

We may need to adjust our installer that gets new developers set up:

murphy:dataverse pdurbin$ grep start-domain scripts/installer/glassfish-setup.sh 
    ./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS start-domain $GLASSFISH_DOMAIN
./asadmin $ASADMIN_OPTS restart-domain $GLASSFISH_DOMAIN

[pdurbin]

I wonder if this is related: https://truesecdev.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/hidden-backdoor-api-to-root-privileges-in-apple-os-x/

A number of CVE's are listed at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204659

[pdurbin]

It looks like a fix might be coming at payara/Payara@8ac9e7089855f2f79d54f14

Via http://javabot.evanchooly.com/logs/%23glassfish/2015-04-30

[admix]

Any updates or workarounds ?

[pdurbin]

@admix in practice, for now, I'm letting Netbeans start Glassfish for me on my Mac.

https://java.net/jira/browse/GLASSFISH-21343 suggests it will be fixed in Glassfish 4.2.

If you can't wait, maybe try a recent Payara. This bug is on their minds:

• payara/Payara@8ac9e7089855f2f79d54f14
• Incorporate patch for GLASSFISH-21343 payara/Payara#263

[pdurbin]

@abidart Glassfish 4.1.1 is out per #2628 if you'd like to try it out and report back on this issue if helps. :)

https://java.net/jira/browse/GLASSFISH-21343 now says 4.1.1 as the fix version at least.

[pdurbin]

Bah, that last comment was for @admix

Sorry to spam you @abidart and sorry I missed you the other day. :)

[pdurbin]

@bmckinney is looking into using launchctl as part of Ansible playbooks (#2443 is related).

[bmckinney]

I've found that adding --verbose=true is a decent workaround. Here is a plist I've used for launchctl on yosemite:

`

Label glassfish ProgramArguments /usr/local/glassfish4/bin/asadmin start-domain --verbose=true domain1 ServiceDescription Glassfish 4 Server WorkingDirectory /usr/local/glassfish4/bin OnDemand AbandonProcessGroup `

[pdurbin]

This problem will go away when we get off Glassfish 4.1, which is what #2628 is about. Closing.

[pdurbin]

I just wanted to note for the record that getting off Glassfish 4.1 is not necessary for start-domain to work again. I recently upgraded to OS X 10.14 and start-domain just works now. (I'm not sure which version fixed it.) Now that I have my Mac in sync with the phoenix server in terms of where I put Glassfish, I can run the same scripts/deploy/phoenix.dataverse.org/deploy script on my Mac to drop the database and get set up again.