If you use Oracle’s Glassfish Application Server and cannot login to your admin Web Console (server loads forever after entering credentials), here’s what’s going on:
The Admin Web Application loads the available module updates from java.net upon login… however, if java.net is down (like right now), or if your internet connection died or is slow, your admin console won’t load. No, they didn’t build in a timeout and yes, this is the default behavior. Thanks, Oracle!
Fortunately, there’s a workaround (you might want to apply in any case…). There are two steps to get your Glassfish Server internet-independent:
- Disable Automatic Update Checks
Rename $GLASSFISH_INST/glassfish/modules/console-updatecenter-plugin.jar to console-updatecenter-plugin.jar.disabled - Disable News and other Internet-Dependent Admin GUI Features
Set the following System Property (you can do that in the Admin GUI -provided that you can open it- in Configuration > JVM Settings > JVM Options):
-Dcom.sun.enterprise.tools.admingui.NO_NETWORK=true
That’s it! Now go out and enjoy your independent server 🙂
Raise the fooBar 
thx, ill check back later, have bookmarked you for now.
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Great ! This saved some time to me 😉 I was looking into the server.log, and not seeing anything interesting…
Thank you !
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it works, by the way, was there any side-effects? I am using glassfish v3.0.1, THANKS!
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No, Mark, no side effects at all for us. In the meantime, we’re also using these settings in production since there, of course, we don’t have direct internet connectivity.
Besides, as a developer / operator I don’t want my Application Server to automatically update itself, loading some new JARs that may kill my applications. Anti-feature imho…
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Great thanks
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Thank you, it save a lots of time to me !.
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Thnx! That spinning loading chrome whirl was a nightmare
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Hi Mike,
Thanks a lot.
Please advise where to change the second setting?
Dcom.sun.enterprise.tools.admingui.NO_NETWORK=true
it is there somewhere in domain/config file?
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Hi rahul,
I don’t know about current versions of Glassfish (It’s been a while since I last used it ;)), but back in the days, it was configurable in the Admin GUI where the post says: Configuration > JVM Settings > JVM Options. It’s basically a Java System Property set at JVM Startup time, but I don’t know from the top of my head where Glassfish stores these settings.
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