when installing a remote agent, if the check-for-used-port returns null, we through an NPE. We should not bomb out but keep going. Right now you just get an useless error message.

This code:

        // try to see if we can figure out what the port will be that the agent will bind to
        // this will use awk to find a line in the agent config xml that matches this:
        //    <entry key="rhq.communications.connector.bind-port" value="16163" />
        // where we use " as the field separator and the port number will be the fourth field.
        String agentPortAwkCommand = "awk '-F\"' '/key.*=.*" + AgentInstallInfo.AGENT_PORT_PROP + "/ {print $4}' "
            + "'" + agentConfigXmlFilename + "'";
        String portStr = executeCommand(agentPortAwkCommand, "Determine the agent's bind port", info);
        try {
            int port = Integer.parseInt(portStr.trim());
            info.setAgentPort(port);
        } catch (NumberFormatException nfe) {
            info.setAgentPort(0); // indicate that we don't know it
        }

Rather than just catch NumberFormatException, we should just catch Exception - that way, the NPE will get caught too - and we want to do the same thing - just indicate we don't know the port.