On a when the hosts file does not have the hostname listed, ORBD fails to startup as the DNS resolution fails (this problem can be recreated as documented in sunbug 4769128).

ORBD failure diagnostic states the following:

    Failed to start ORBD because of an Internal Exception.
    Possible Causes:
    1. Specified ORBInitialPort or ORBActivationPort is already in use
    2. No Write Permission to write orb.db

The error diagnostic is insufficient and misleading. In a recent situation involving a complex setup with mutiple HA servers, this message caused us significant delays in diagnosing the root cause.

An improvement would be to also point to the possibility of the hostname not being present in /etc/hosts, for example:

    Check name resolution: CORBA.LocalHost

or

    CORBA.ORBInitialHost can not resolve hostname

or

    address does not match value returned by gethostbyname() and
    gethostbyaddr()

It would also be useful for the error message to print the parameter values returned.
Bug Workaround