I have run into a problem with Eclipse Indigo, attempting to start up my Tomcat v6.0 server. I’ll start my server, the console will report that the server has started up (after so many milliseconds), and the server console will look fine and the server will accept requests correctly. But then 45 seconds later (or whatever the default timeout is set to), Eclipse will shut down the server and say that the server encounted a problem and was unable to start.
One way to get around the problem is to change the server timeout time to 9999 seconds instead of the default 45, but obviously this is not ideal.
It took me some Googling but I discovered the resolution to this issue at http://dsamuel.kodingen.com/_writeit/wordpress/?p=18. What you have to do is just change your host name to something (anything) other than the default name of “localhost”, and this will actually fix the problem. You can change host name by double-clicking your server and editing it in the “General Information” area.
No idea why this fixes the problem, but it does. It appears to be a bug with Eclipse Indigo particularly because it doesn’t happen for Helios.