The lookup code is in a client application, and the client application is on the same machine as JBoss. The /etc/hosts file contains the correct IP address of the machine with the simple & full hostname. If I remove the addToEnvironment, the client app is unable to figure out what JNDI info to use, so it throws the javax.naming.NoInitialContextException exception. I will attempt to replace the addEnvironment calls to a "new Properties(...)" call to see if that helps. In the meantime, have you encountered the "lookup()" call not returning before? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3989065#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...