Jenkins + Selenium: Selenium Configuration won't start on slave

[Astou Sene]

Hello!

I have Jenkins with Selenium plugin setup on a Linux server (Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.6 (Santiago) Linux 2.6.32-504.8.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Dec 19 12:09:25 EST 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux) and I am trying to connect some Windows 7 slaves to it.

The slaves are configured to be launched via SSH ( I had to setup them up with Cygwin since they are Windows).

I see them connected as Jenkins nodes but when I try to start their Selenium configuration, nothing happens. In the Jenkins log, the following message appears every time I try to start a configuration.

Unable to determine node's hostname. Skipping

It should be noted that this setup used to work until a recent move to a more locked down data center. I looked up what this message means and one explanation was that it could be due to the fact that the master and the slave are in different private networks. This is similar to my current situation. Another explanation was that the Java implementation of ping for *nix machines requires root permissions to run properly (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jenkinsci-users/JwdvUSIe1MI), so a solution would be to install xinetd and enable the echo service. Now I've hit a wall because as mentioned, the data center is more secure so there's no way this request will be approved.

I guess my question is, has someone experienced this issue before and did they find an alternative solution for it? But any help really will be very much appreciated.

Thank you!

Astou Sene

[Astou Sene]

Or I guess I could ask has anybody run into this error message "Unable to determine node's hostname. Skipping" before and what did it mean for them?