Glassfish: starting node agents in clustered setup fails with ExceptionInInitializerError

We're starting to use glassfish as our application server. The major reason going from Tomcat was that we needed more fully-fledged appserver with JMS functionality. We have had some issues regarding configuring glassfish - especially for cluster support.

I started with a fresh glassfish 2.1 install and headed for a clustered setup. I've seen a few blog post regarding this which made it look simple enough. So I started out with the following commands:


lib/ant/bin/ant -f setup-cluster.xml -Ddomain.name=myDomain -Dadmin.user=admin
-Dadmin.password=password -Dmaster.password=password
bin/asadmin start-domain myDomain
bin/asadmin create-node-agent --host localhost --port 4848 --user admin
--passwordfile /home/glassfish/passfile agentOnFirst
bin/asadmin create-cluster --host localhost --port 4848 --user admin
--passwordfile /home/glassfish/passfile myCluster
bin/asadmin create-instance --host localhost --port 4848 --user admin
--passwordfile /home/glassfish/passfile --nodeagent agentOnFirst --cluster
myCluster instance1


The passfile contained

AS_ADMIN_PASSWORD=password
AS_ADMIN_MASTERPASSWORD=password


Which is what I issued to the setup-cluster.xml ANT build script. When I tried to run the node-agent I got an ExceptionInInitializerError. I tried many different combination - like supplying password when requested instead of providing this as parameters, but it still seems to fail.

I was not able to get the node-agent to start until I tried without changing the admin/master password. If I rather just used the standard passwords, the nodeagent started just fine. Here the commands:


lib/ant/bin/ant -f setup-cluster.xml -Ddomain.name=myDomain
bin/asadmin start-domain myDomain
bin/asadmin create-node-agent --host localhost --port 4848 --savemasterpassword agentOnFirst
bin/asadmin create-cluster --host localhost --port 4848 myCluster
bin/asadmin create-instance --host localhost --port 4848 --nodeagent agentOnFirst --cluster myCluster instance1
bin/asadmin start-node-agent agentOnFirst


I've reported this as a bug as I still consider the original commands or variants of them to be correct.