You need to pin down why the server is failing as the diagnostics you are seeing just indicate that something bad happened. I hit the same problem the other day and used tcpmon to see the server response, which was a HTTP internal server error in the Tomcat servlet engine. Running the server with log4j enabled showed, in my case, a class loading failure. (The fix to my problem was to put various jars in Tomcat's classpath by editing one of its setup scripts. See [1] for a few more details.)
However, assuming your problem is different you'll need to get better server diagnostics. The approach is to define a couple of system properties on the relevant java invocation that starts the server: java -Dlog4j.debug -Dlog4j.configuration=ax.prop ... where ax.prop, in the current directory, is like this: (See attached file: ax.prop) Hope that gets you further. Glyn [1] http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=axis-dev&m=101344004615394&w=2
ax.prop
Description: Binary data
