I had the similar problem. Turns out my firewall is blocking the RMI / SOAP port on WP, thus RAD can't communicate with WP.

Try turning off the firewall and test.

Thanks for your reply.
I don't have have a personal firewall installed on either computer and the ports are open. I can e.g. "telnet localhost 10033" after WP started.

I had the same problem the first time I rum portal from rad7:
portal started but rad didn't know about it.
However when I tried a second time rad7 recognized that portal started (in Servers tab portal server had status started).
I tried the 3rd time and it even logged me in automatically .
So I guess you have to let it 'burn in'
Seriously this sounds like problem we had with 5.1 when we had to increase creation timout and server launch timeouts (Window->Prefs->Server->WebSphere).

There are many causes to it, one being the port being blocked at the server.

Others include a self creation of a WAS 6.1 in the server view, if this server type exists, delete this server type, close RAD and then reopen it and voila the WPS 6 is detected by the server.
One may additionally try to right click on the WPS 6 server and action "initialize server status" option.
If it is a remote server, make sure that the installed runtimes are pointing to the stub and havent been changed to the directory mapped for the remoted server.

Hope this helps,
Kapil.

We experienced this exact same problem and opened up a PMR with IBM.
This is a known issue and the next, and first, fix pack of RAD7 will
supposedly fix the problem.

In addition to the work-arounds mentioned however, one additional thing
we discovered was to place a specific xmlaccess script into the
directory of the project, specifically "/Servers/WebSphere Portal v6.0
Server @ localhost-config". This xmlaccess script has a series of
"xmldelegate" tags that call out specific RAD7 classes with associated
attributes. After placing this file there (in additional to some of
things mentioned), we could start up Portal 6 through RAD7 without the
starting problem.

Good luck,

Dan

Kaga wrote:
> There are many causes to it, one being the port being blocked at the server.
>
> Others include a self creation of a WAS 6.1 in the server view, if this server type exists, delete this server type, close RAD and then reopen it and voila the WPS 6 is detected by the server.
> One may additionally try to right click on the WPS 6 server and action "initialize server status" option.
> If it is a remote server, make sure that the installed runtimes are pointing to the stub and havent been changed to the directory mapped for the remoted server.
>
> Hope this helps,
> Kapil.

Thank you all for your tips,

it works. Here's what i did:
* started the portal
* 1st rad session: created portal6 server
* 2nd rad session: created portlet project; deleted was6.1 server
* 3rd rad session: "initialize server status" on portal server
portal is now recognized.

I do need a much bigger machine though; Still "Publishing..."

Publishing does take some time but if u r not changing things frequently and want to manually trigger off the publishing process, options are avaiable in the server configuration editor to specify "Never automatically publish" or u can reduce the frequency of auto publish, default is i think 5 sec ( u can use a higher value).

Hope it helps,
Kapil.