I have solved our problems today. We needed to change several things to make it work. 1) Start JBoss with the option "-b 0.0.0.0". Otherwise, JBoss only binds to localhost. This should usually give "connection refused" when doing remote JNDI through the server's real IP, but it didn't in our case, we just got naming errors. This might be due to network configuration and maybe because we're running under Linux VServer where localhost may have a differnt meaning than usual. 2) We accidentally were looking up in the java:-namespace. When doing this, the Context.PROVIDER_URL was silently ignored and generates no warnings or errors but does lookups locally. I was also told that it is a good idea to set jnp.disableDiscovery = true in the InitialContext environment to ensure that you get the server you're asking for and not a different one, if the server you asked for is unavailable. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4192984#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...