New RHEL Slave: NPE in hudson.slaves.WorkspaceList.allocate()

[Neil E. Hodges]

Hello everyone,

I've been trying to set up a new Jenkins slave on a Red Hat Enterprise
Linux VM on VMWare, but have been having a lot of trouble with getting
jobs to execute successfully there. Whenever a job starts, this error
pops up and it fails (some stuff redacted):

> Building remotely on $SLAVE ($LABELS)FATAL: null
> java.lang.NullPointerException
> at hudson.slaves.WorkspaceList.allocate(WorkspaceList.java:179)
> at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.decideWorkspace(AbstractBuild.java:484)
> at hudson.model.AbstractBuild$AbstractBuildExecution.run(AbstractBuild.java:521)
> at hudson.model.Run.execute(Run.java:1744)
> at hudson.model.FreeStyleBuild.run(FreeStyleBuild.java:43)
> at hudson.model.ResourceController.execute(ResourceController.java:98)
> at hudson.model.Executor.run(Executor.java:374)

The working directory wasn't created by the slave for some reason, so I
created it manually, but it still doesn't work. The agent is running as
root, so I can't imagine it'd be permission issues.

Has anyone else seen this? This is with Jenkins 1.617.

Thank you,

- Neil