If I understand the internals of WebSphere correctly, when the Application
Server stops, it sends a notification over TCP to who stopped it.

And that message is not received in a timely fashion.

I seem to remember having seen similar problem with a dual-homed DMZ server
hardenned with TCP filtering on the external network adapter.

Part of the resolution was to verify the hostname resolution to make the TCP
connection successful.

Are there no problem to start the server ? Are there shutdown messages in
the SystemOut.log ? Does the Java process really stop or does it keep
running ?

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