Responding to various points... 1) I don't know what "Disable HTML" does. But I do know you have to use the Code button above the input box to get XML to appear correctly :) 2) What does the descriptor for your service that deploys from another directory look like? Sounds very much like the deployer for deploy-hasingleton (which is the first mbean in the deploy/deploy-hasingleton-service.xml file). So I agree - it's odd it worked differently 3) For a dependency, try jboss.jca:name=tpapps-ds,service=DataSourceBinding That's the service that actually binds your datasource in JNDI. 4) My reading of the docs and of the org.jboss.system.BarrierController code leads me to expect your create() should be called after deploy, with start() deferred until the node becomes master. Not sure why you're not seeing that. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3985068#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...