Heiko reported this a month or so ago on #rhq. After he had made a bunch of big changes in the AS7 plugin descriptor, he tried to update the plugin via "plugins update" and the RHQ Server completely hung while trying to update the metadata in the DB. IIRC, the workaround was to Ctrl-C the Server and then do a dbsetup.

To try to reproduce this, we should try these steps:

1) dbsetup
2) install the preview version of the AS7 plugin that was released to JON customers
3) try to update to the current version of the AS7 plugin from master

If this doesn't work, we may need to replace step 2 with some intermediate version of the AS7 plugin (e.g. by checking out a revision of master from around 2 or 3 months ago and building the AS7 plugin from that)