Howto: Netbeans not starting up

After I installed a new plugin and restarted Netbeans (6.5), it flashed me with this error

Netbeans startup error

I believe the plugin file was corrupt and/or the xml-file with the respective settings turned to be corrupt. An expert might be able to judge from the error (see end of this entry for full error error message). After closing the error message I got a complete empty Netbeans screen.

Netbeans startup error

After investigating about remedies or similar cases, the only solution I found, is to delete (rename) the userdir (see link for more info).

Remarks:

• There should be a safemode mode to start up Netbeans (is there one?)
• Deleting the userdir is not a satisfying solution because you throw away all your personalized settings.
• Submitted as error 164329 (link)

Full error message:

Glassfish hit the fan

While changing the JMS setting in Glassfish V2 from embedded to local, the whole box (XP PRO) crashed with a nice screen showing the color of the sky. After restarting Windows, Glassfish complains..

Starting Domain domain1, please wait.
Log redirected to E:\Program Files\glassfish-v2ur2\domains\domain1\logs\server.log.
Error refreshing ConfigContext:E:\Program Files\glassfish-v2ur2\domains\domain1\config\domain.xml
cause: Failed to create the XML-DOM Document.  Check your XML to make sure it is correct.
Content is not allowed in prolog.
Error refreshing ConfigContext:E:\Program Files\glassfish-v2ur2\domains\domain1\config\domain.xml
cause: Failed to create the XML-DOM Document.  Check your XML to make sure it is correct.
Content is not allowed in prolog.

It seems the crash (which I not suspect to be caused by Glassfish) corrupted the domain.xml settings file which normally show something like

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE domain PUBLIC “-//Sun Microsystems Inc.//DTD Application Server 9.1 Domain//EN” “http://www.sun.com/software/appserver/dtds/sun-domain_1_3.dtd”>
<!– Generated from default-domain.xml.template –>
<!– Avoid manual edits of this file. Run “asadmin verify-domain-xml” otherwise.–>
<domain application-root=”${com.sun.aas.instanceRoot}/applications” log-root=”${com.sun.aas.instanceRoot}/logs”>
<applications>
<j2ee-application availability-enabled=”false” directory-deplo…

turned into some 30kb rubbish.

Trying to asadamin verify-domain-xml obviously shows the same result.

A asadmin restore-domain I cant do because I never asadmin backup-domain before.

Either you re-install glassfish or just copy a domain.xml from a similar (!) installation. It worked for me since only very few applications were running on the other box which I took the file from. Replacing the binary rubbish and Glassfish started again.

Conclusion: Make backups of your application server, even dev box. It cost me 1 hour to get it running again without backup.

Correction 03.01.2009: Copying the domain.xml does not work. I try to make changes in the settings with the admin console and get strange error messages. I still ended up re-installing Glassfish.

Note: Glassfish, if  installed together with Netbeans, has a separate de-installer, so you dont need to de-install everything !

Talk back and Feedback

As an IT company you know feedback is vital and can be crucial to maintain a level of quality. Either you collect feedback a) directly from your users (person to person, email, phone, ticket system,..) or b) let the deployed software talk to you directly.  How many time some piece of software crashed or did something wrong and you – as in case a) – dont bother to do anything and just restart the application and continue your work ? Many times I guess, only if the software really does not wok anymore, we would feedback and complain. So all these valuable small (and lost) incidents that appear isolated to a enduser would help to increase the quality of the software if we just would feedback (manually).

But most of us are also not happy if the software talks back to its vendor directly because we either fear it would transfer personal data or just would tell the vendor that you are using some pirated version of its application.

My recommendation/wish:

Producer: Display it clearly and ask for approval to transmit bug data to a central server. Show what you going to transmit. Make it optional.

Consumer: Let the software talk back. It will not help you this time, but with truckloads of bug reports flowing back the software, it will ultimately gets better and benefits everyone.

Sample (what Thunderbird sends back after crashing)

Application Launch Time
9/6/2008 2:33 PM
Build Identifier
2008070808
Deployment Identifier
MozillaOrgThunderbird2Win322008070808
Interface Version
8 (0×00000008)
Monitor Configuration Version
3 (0×00000003)
Platform Identifier
Win32
Product Identifier
Thunderbird2
Talkback Configuration Version
3 (0×00000003)

[..]

Event Description
32-bit Windows exception
Event Type
1 (0×00000001)
Information Collection Time
9/6/2008 2:47 PM
Memory Status
[   0] 20 00 00 00 2B 00 00 00 00 C0 5F 5F 00 B0 44 36 [ ...+.....__..D6]
[  10] 00 80 2A D6 00 A0 0C B5 00 00 FE 7F 00 C0 6B 79 [..*...........ky]

[..]