Ok, what finally worked was doing a chmod g+x on my domains folder (mine happened to be in my home folder) and then specifying --domaindir when I fired it up. I had been trying something like
asadmin start-domain ~/.workspace/domains/defaultDomain
but what I needed was
asadmin start-domain --domaindir ~/.workspace/domains/ defaultDomain
and then having write permissions on ~/.workspace/domains/. I just gave myself permissions recursively, but it would be cool to know exactly what I need permissions for. I suppose that if/when I deploy to the web it won't matter because it should just be uploading a .jar via the server interface where it has all the permissions it needs...hopefully.
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