It's not clear that this is the problem, but it's possible given the symptoms you describe.
Your GlassFish installation includes all the Java EE (and older J2EE) DTDs and XML schemas in local directories, and it should be resolving references to such things there. If, though, one of your descriptors specifies a DTD or schema that is not in the local GlassFish directories (misspellings in the descriptors have been known to cause this) then GlassFish will try to resolve the reference over the network.
If the network is down when it tries to do this, then the XML parsing of the descriptor will fail.
You could be seeing something similar to this. Look in the server.log file to see if there is more information there.
- Tim
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