joe added a comment - 14/Jan/2013 1:50 AM (Yes, to be clear, the actual hostname of the machine is shown.) Agreed, the setup process could be improved to offer more information. I've opened CWD-3061 to avoid scope-creep on this issue, and to allow for some more general improvements at the same time.

martin_paulo added a comment - 11/Jan/2013 5:31 AM Um: just to be clear - 'crowd-trial' in the message is the actual hostname of the machine I was trying to install onto. What about sneaking a little more info into the message? eg: Unable to resolve this machine's hostname into an IP address. Thus Crowd cannot complete its installation. Please ensure [hostname] resolves to an IP address then reload this web page to continue the installation. For more see https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CWD-2665 . Where [hostname] is the machines actual hostname... Again, thanks for the fast turn around

joe added a comment - 11/Jan/2013 4:56 AM Fair point. The message is now: Unable to resolve this machine's hostname. Please ensure 'crowd-trial' resolves to an IP address.

martin_paulo added a comment - 11/Jan/2013 3:49 AM I appreciate the prompt turnaround. Mind you, 'cryptic error' doesn't fill my heart with joy I think that Alan Cooper's dictum of if you have to issue an error message then tell the user 1) what went wrong 2) how they are affected 3) what they can do to solve the problem 4) where they can go for more information is a good one to follow: especially in an installation wizard that is the first view a user has of the product.

joe added a comment - 11/Jan/2013 3:24 AM Thanks for the clear report. We've fixed this so the hostname is looked up before creating the user and group. It will still fail with a cryptic error, but you can repeat that stage after editing /etc/hosts and it won't leave you stuck at a stage you can't complete.

martin_paulo added a comment - 11/Jan/2013 12:44 AM Well, this was a pain. I ran into this when trying to install an evaluation version of Crowd. I have now have a vast number of unwanted evaluation licenses as a result I think that this is a bug that you really need to fix: the error message is singularly unhelpful to most people and leaves Crowd hung at an installation step that you can't progress beyond: you are in some sort of crazy catch 22 where the group is already defined but you can't step forward to add the user to it [Crowd 2.5.3] A look at the log file reveals that this exception is reported and ignored multiple times before you get to the catch 22 situation: Log file extracts 2013-01-10 05:57:48,352 http-8095-2 INFO [ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/crowd]] Initializing Spring root WebApplicationContext 2013-01-10 05:57:50,478 http-8095-2 ERROR [net.sf.ehcache.Cache] Unable to set localhost. This prevents creation of a GUID. Cause was: crowd-trial: crowd-trial: Name or service not known java.net.UnknownHostException: crowd-trial: crowd-trial: Name or service not known 2013-01-10 05:57:51,574 http-8095-2 INFO [v2.c3p0.impl.C3P0ImplUtils] Failed to get local InetAddress for VMID. This is unlikely to matter. At all. We'll add some extra randomness java.net.UnknownHostException: crowd-trial: crowd-trial: Name or service not known 2013-01-10 05:59:13,794 http-8095-2 INFO [console.action.setup.SelectSetupStep] Current setup step is /console/setup/defaultadministrator.action 2013-01-10 05:59:50,154 http-8095-3 ERROR [console.action.setup.DefaultAdministrator] crowd-trial: crowd-trial: Name or service not known java.net.UnknownHostException: crowd-trial: crowd-trial: Name or service not known The work around I came up with to install Crowd on Ubuntu 12.10 (AMD 64) was as follows: 1) I wrote a micky mouse java class to replicate the error. InetTester.java import java.net.InetAddress; import java.net.UnknownHostException; public class InetTester { public static void main( String [] args) { try { InetAddress localHost = InetAddress.getLocalHost(); System .out.println( "Local host is: " + localHost); } catch (UnknownHostException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } } 2) Added [IP number] [machine name] in my /etc/hosts file: sudo vi /etc/hosts so it looked something like: Hosts File 127.0.0.1 localhost 172.16.62.152 crowd-trial 3) Confirmed that the micky mouse java class now reported the machine hostname correctly 4) Installed Crowd. This was a seriously annoying problem: have you thought Crowds error handling through properly? Please fix it!