I have been trying to port an application of mine to JBoss 6, and managed to get there from JBoss 5.1.0.CR1 without too much hassle. However my MBeans did not show up...

I could find no information as to why this is broken on the wonderful internet. I tried posting on JBoss' forums but as usual, I was ignored on there. Never get any responses. Guess you have to pay for that. I am digressing.

Eventually I figured it out. Here are the details:

About 6 years ago I created a web based application using J2EE, a DAO layer using JDBC to a PostgreSQL database. The J2EE application container ran on its own server, and the PostgreSQL on a dedicated server as well. The two servers were connected with fast gigabit ethernet. The DB is located on a SAN attached to the database server using Fibre Channel.

The main database size has since grown, and is now 110GB. The largest table has about 180 million rows, and there are about 136 tables. When I wrote it originally, multicored CPU's did not exist. Servers with multiple CPU's did, but the system was never deployed on such a configuration.

There is a process that runs once a month that performs a lot of reads on the database, perform some calculations and then writes the data to several tables. This process recently took 491 minutes to complete.

My setup was as follows. I had Ubuntu 9.04 x64 installed on a single 1TB SATA drive. Everything worked fine - I think I had Grub as boot loader. I since upgraded to 10.04. At some stage my hard drive broke and I had to fall back on a backup I had. So I bought two new 1TB drives, connected them to my Gigabyte X58A-UD3R motherboard's SATA2 ports and configured RAID1 in the BIOS.

I do know that the RAID controller(s) on this motherboard does not really implement hardware RAID, but it is the only way I could get the machine to dual boot with Windows and still have RAID. So I configured dmraid in Ubuntu, and set up a LVM. This is called FakeRAID. Everything worked fine. However when I upgraded then to 11.04 I decided to upgrade grub to grub2. That was a fatal mistake. My machine did not boot anymore. I got the grub boot loader, but nothing listed. When I type in exit, it chain loads to another grub instance showing me some bootable OS entries. 1 / 10 times it would boot. This was NOT ideal. But I left the issue as is.

Couple of days ago I added an awesome OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD to the SATA3 port on the motherboard. That device was detected as /dev/sdc, with the two FakeRAID HDD's as /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, as before. However this time the system refused to boot at all. I would get the initial grub screen, type in exit, then see a purple screen and nada - nothing boots.

I recently had to fiddle with my Ubuntu Linux 11.04 machine to get it working after breaking my FakeRAID mirror. Unfortunately when I tried to launch Disk Utility, it showed a blank canvas - no drives were listed. Long story short, my specific problem turned out to be permission related. Once I changed the file below like this:

-rwsr-xr-- 1 root messagebus 47528 2011-03-20 15:36 /lib/dbus-1.0/dbus-daemon-launch-helper

all was good again.