Oracle glassfish admin page not working.... what?

Q. The glassfish admin web page isn't working

Me. what's the url?(me thinking what is this to do with me....)

Q https://server:4848

Me (still thinking what is this to do with me but finds out glassfish has red logos saying oracle on it) let me take a look then....

And this is how the story starts...

Glassfish is seems is something oracle inherited when they gobbled up Sun a few years back, it's yet another java application server (along with loads of others). I've no idea what the merits of any of these but Im sure the oracle one is the best of course......

Here is some more info glassfish

Anyhow sure enough the url didn't work

First up lets check if anythign is listening at all on that port on that server

netstat -an |grep 4848

and

lsof |grep 4848

and 

lsof |grep appserv-http

all return nothing (note appserv-http is the friendly name for 4848 from /etc/services and this is what usually shows up in lsof output - you can define any name you like in this file)

So definitely not running then.....

Now what?

I can see that everything is installed as glassfish and something seems to be running (some java thingy)

Lets try and restart it and see what happens

right how do we do that, no idea.....

10 mins later after asking google....

login as glassfish and run

asadmin restart-domain

stuff restarts but still no https page, but whats this there is now something running on port 4848.

Lets try http - and sure enough we get a login page back - looking good now - lets try and login.

"secure admin must be enabled to access DAS remotely"

What?

Ask google again...

10 mins later....

Right we need to run some command to enable the ssl version of the admin web page to give remote access

asadmin> enable-secure-admin-principal "CN=system.amer.oracle.com,OU=GlassFish,O=Oracle Corporation,L=Santa Clara,ST=California,C=US"

Enter admin user name>  admin
Enter admin password for user "admin">

asadmi> 

asadmin> enable-secure-admin
Enter admin user name>  admin
Enter admin password for user "admin">
You must restart all running servers for the change in secure admin to take effect.
Command enable-secure-admin executed successfully.
asadmin>

asadmin> restart-domain
Successfully restarted the domain
Command restart-domain executed successfully.
asadmin>

Now the website works and we can login remotely.

So something new learnt today

Name of the commands is too similar to asmadmin for my liking though.......