The login-config.xml has been corrputed and failed to parse as an xml file so its being treated as the sun ascii file format and failing. Look in the server.log for the original xml problem.

I followed your instructions and found that a null pointer is being thrown. The file is at the location, is readable, and parses as valid XML in Internet Explorer. Any suggestions?

2004-08-12 17:39:31,617 DEBUG [org.jboss.security.auth.login.XMLLoginConfigImpl] Try loading config as XML, url=file:/C:/jboss-3.2.5/server/default/conf/login-config.xml
2004-08-12 17:39:31,617 DEBUG [org.jboss.security.auth.login.XMLLoginConfigImpl] Failed to load config as XML
java.lang.NullPointerException
 at org.apache.crimson.parser.Parser2.parseInternal(Parser2.java:658)
 at org.apache.crimson.parser.Parser2.parse(Parser2.java:333)
 at org.apache.crimson.parser.XMLReaderImpl.parse(XMLReaderImpl.java:448)
 at org.apache.crimson.jaxp.DocumentBuilderImpl.parse(DocumentBuilderImpl.java:185)
 at javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilder.parse(DocumentBuilder.java:76)
 at org.jboss.security.auth.login.XMLLoginConfigImpl.loadURL(XMLLoginConfigImpl.java:338)
 at org.jboss.security.auth.login.XMLLoginConfigImpl.loadXMLConfig(XMLLoginConfigImpl.java:280)
 at org.jboss.security.auth.login.XMLLoginConfigImpl.loadConfig(XMLLoginConfigImpl.java:251)
 at org.jboss.security.auth.login.XMLLoginConfigImpl.loadConfig(XMLLoginConfigImpl.java:233)
 at org.jboss.security.auth.login.XMLLoginConfig.startService(XMLLoginConfig.java:152)

did you ever get that error resolved? I have the exact same problem... I am using just the standard login-config.xml . Didn't make any changes and when I look in the log i'm getting hte same null pointer exception.

Hi all,

I faced this problem too, and I have been doing some "investigations" :)

This "null pointer" exception occured only on the client side of my j2ee app. The login-config.xml was present on the server too as part of jaas authentication - {jboss}/server/default/config/, but there - no exception.
I noticed that if I put jboss.jar in the client classpath, the error misteriously dissapears... Browsing the files in jboss.jar I found some dtds, and one particullarily interesting - /org/jboss/metadata/security_config.dtd. Combined with the following snippet from XMLLoginConfigImpl.java:

 /** Local entity resolver to handle the security-policy DTD public id.
 */
 private static class LocalResolver implements EntityResolver
 {
 private static final String LOGIN_CIONFIG_PUBLIC_ID = "-//JBoss//DTD JBOSS Security Config 3.0//EN";
 private static final String LOGIN_CIONFIG_DTD_NAME = "/org/jboss/metadata/security_config.dtd";
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