MyEclipse: Unable to open any online help documentation
pauluzee - Apr 30, 2009 - 08:59 PM
Post subject: Unable to open any online help documentation
None of the members of my team (we have a MyEclipse group license) are able to access any of the MyEclipse/Eclipse online help documentation, including the stuff referenced on the main menu (e.g., Help/Help Contents) as well as the Welcome Page. We all work through a proxy, but putting our proxy settings into the Network Connections dialog doesn't seem to work. Also, I've noticed on my installation that my Network Connections settings seem to have become "frozen": every time I change them to something else, they revert back to a set of changes I put in yesterday. In other words, anytime I change my Network Connections settings, my changes don't seem to take effect.
I have not checked if any of my colleagues who are using MyEclipse are having the same "frozen network settings" problem, but I do know that none of them have ever been able to open any help file on their installations of Eclipse (all but one of us is using MyEclipse 7.1; one of us is using "bare" Gannymead, and he's not able to access help either).
The problem manifests itself whenever a help window is opened: it appears to be looking on the local machine for help files (the browser either displays 127.0.01 or whatever the machine's actual IP address is at the bottom of the window), but it eventually times out and puts up the error message, "Network Error: A communication error occurred: 'Connection refused'..."
I can use the browser inside of MyEclipse to access external websites without any trouble. Also, automated software updates that look to the Internet for things appear to work as well.
Could it be that the documentation files don't exist on the local machines? Or could the the links to them broken? I checked the link URLs for several of the opened help windows and they all had stuff in them that looked like this" "http://10.87.8.224/" or "http://127.0.0.1/".
support-rkalla - May 01, 2009 - 05:30 PM
Post subject: RE: Unable to open any online help documentation
pauluzee,

Let me try and clear up a few things:

1. The reason your Preferences > General > Network Connection settings keep resetting is because Pulse (Preferences > Pulse > Network Settings) is resetting them to the operating-system's detected network settings. You noted that updates and other network operations are behaving correctly, which means that the network settings are correct. That's definitely a good thing. We will be changing this in 7.5 so you can modify 1 group of settings independent of the other, and 1 will effect the platform's network connectivity and the other will effect Pulse's, but for now we forcibly keep them in sync.

2. It sounds like with a MyEclipse install and even a plain Ganymede install, the infocenter (Help System) cannot be launched -- what happens when you open help is a very tiny version of the Jetty application server is spun up, to host the help infocenter locally (localhost, 127.0.0.1 or the full hostname, all the same thing). On all these machines that is failing, your network's configuration isn't going to be effecting that because it's a local connection, most likely what is happening is some security software you guys have installed locally is blocking that port 80 on the local machine from being opened to listen for incoming connections to the app server.

I would start looking at that first and see if you can figure out what's blocking it.
pauluzee - May 01, 2009 - 06:18 PM
Post subject: Re: RE: Unable to open any online help documentation
support-rkalla wrote:
pauluzee,

Let me try and clear up a few things:

1. The reason your Preferences > General > Network Connection settings keep resetting is because Pulse (Preferences > Pulse > Network Settings) is resetting them to the operating-system's detected network settings. You noted that updates and other network operations are behaving correctly, which means that the network settings are correct. That's definitely a good thing. We will be changing this in 7.5 so you can modify 1 group of settings independent of the other, and 1 will effect the platform's network connectivity and the other will effect Pulse's, but for now we forcibly keep them in sync.

2. It sounds like with a MyEclipse install and even a plain Ganymede install, the infocenter (Help System) cannot be launched -- what happens when you open help is a very tiny version of the Jetty application server is spun up, to host the help infocenter locally (localhost, 127.0.0.1 or the full hostname, all the same thing). On all these machines that is failing, your network's configuration isn't going to be effecting that because it's a local connection, most likely what is happening is some security software you guys have installed locally is blocking that port 80 on the local machine from being opened to listen for incoming connections to the app server.

I would start looking at that first and see if you can figure out what's blocking it.


If it turns out to be something our security software is doing---blocking port 80---then we are probably stuck with it. And I wouldn't be surprised if that turns out to be the case (although I haven't yet determined if it is indeed blocking port 80; none of the various properties pages associated with it give any indication that it is blocking or even listening to any port). The security app that runs on our PCs is installed, configured and controlled by our network security team and we have no control over it whatsoever (and it runs even when we're not connected to the network). So, unless we can change the port that the help system listens on, the Eclipse help system is unusable on our PCs.

Do you know of some command (or 3rd party software) I can run that can reaveal what is listening to particular ports on our (Windows) PCs? Also, is the port that the help system listens to configurable?

Thanks for you help...
rmcvay - May 01, 2009 - 08:42 PM
Post subject: RE: Re: RE: Unable to open any online help documentation
Quote:

Do you know of some command (or 3rd party software) I can run that can reaveal what is listening to particular ports on our (Windows) PCs?

netstat
pauluzee - May 01, 2009 - 09:33 PM
Post subject: Re: RE: Re: RE: Unable to open any online help documentation
rmcvay wrote:
Quote:

Do you know of some command (or 3rd party software) I can run that can reaveal what is listening to particular ports on our (Windows) PCs?

netstat


I ran netstat and here's the output (which I cleaned up a bit; all of the entries refered to TCP and I shortented the names of the hosts):

Code:
Local Address Foreign Address              State
eu9195:1067   localhost:62514              ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1489   localhost:1490               ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1490   localhost:1489               ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1493   localhost:1494               ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1494   localhost:1493               ESTABLISHED
eu9195:62514  localhost:1067               ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1432   s30004d023643:1025           ESTABLISHED
eu9195:mssqlm s30004d023643:1025           ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1435   s30004d023643:1025           ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1436   s30004d023643:1025           ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1438   wwdcexch27:24536             ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1440   wwdcexch27:24536             ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1441   wwdcexch27:24536             ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1442   wwdcexch27:24536             ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1495   mlph076:9004                 ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1668   dsqidds01:22                 ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1670   p2eds1c1:22                  ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1673   dsqidds01:22                 ESTABLISHED
eu9195:1750   ftpproxy:8080                CLOSE_WAIT
eu9195:2323   s30004d023643:1025           ESTABLISHED
eu9195:2409   casndg1dcafil01:microsoft-ds ESTABLISHED
eu9195:2412   ftpproxy:8080                TIME_WAIT
eu9195:2420   ftpproxy:8080                ESTABLISHED
eu9195:2421   ftpproxy:8080                ESTABLISHED


As best I can tell, it doesn't look like port 80 is being hooked. So, maybe there's something else going on here....?
rmcvay - May 05, 2009 - 08:12 PM
Post subject: RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: Unable to open any online help documenta
That doesn't indicate any listeners. You'll need "netstat /a" for that and if you're on XP or newer then "netstat /a /b" will give you the names of the various programs/processes IIRC.
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