We ran into a case where JBoss was unable to come up; it gave the following (partial) exception:
java.rmi.server.ExportException: Port already in use: 1098; nested exception is:
java.net.BindException: Cannot assign requested address
After poking around with netstat and lsof, we couldn’t find anything that was binding to the port. I’d made the assumption that it was bound, totally missing the next line. As it turns out, we were attempting to bind to a vip which, although it existed in DNS, was not defined on the host on which the error occurred. The “cannot assign requested address” was the clue.