Lately I had problems configuring the JMX remote management for tomcat servers running on Ubuntu linux servers. After configuring everything necessary like the com.sun.management.jmxremote JVM parameters and the password files I still got connection errors when trying to connect from my Windows system to the server via jconsole.

I found this bug entry for the Sun Java VM with some interesting suggestions. In my case the problem was a wrong configuration of the /etc/hosts file. The command hostname -i always resolved to the loopback device 127.0.0.1 - after adapting the /etc/hosts file so that hostname -i resolved the real IP address I was able to connect my jconsole.