The immediate cause of your problems is that if you start geronimo with specific configurations listed on the command line you get only those configurations and their ancestors. The runtime deployer is not an ancestor of the DebugConsole, so you managed to start a geronimo configuration that you cannot deploy anything to.
I don't have any good ideas at the moment how to make this more user friendly.
As backgound, the reason for this is to allow a administrator to restart a broken server by specifying the exact configuration set to run. Specifying the configs is really a disaster recovery option not meant for daily use.
One thing we could do is allow you to specify a file containing the configs - that way we could include a couple of known-good configuration lists in the distro making it a little easier to recover. Any patch for this would be appreciated.
The normal way to start a server is simply not to specify any configurations at all; it then starts the last-known-good config list (currently that's what was running when it was last shut down cleanly).
-- Jeremy
