wotaskd is very sensitive to what host name is used. There are a couple of things that can cause problems.

Each machine has a canonical name and IP address; one that reverse DNS will lookup. To find this name, open a Terminal and type hostname. The result (which should not be a localhost or machine.local name) is what you want to use as the ServerName in the Apache httpd.conf configuration and as the Host in JavaMonitor.

This name may not match the host name that you are serving your application under. That does not matter, it needs to be this name for the WO infrastructure,

If this is the name you are using, your server is probably too fast. On newer servers, wotaskd can get started before the networking services are fully initialized. This can lead to IP address confusion. A solution to this is used by wotaskd in WO 5.4 under Leopard but that should work under Tiger as well.

Edit

/System/Library/WebObjects/JavaApplications/wotaskd.woa/wotaskd

#
# Verify network services are intialized before starting
#
echo Checking network services....
/usr/sbin/ipconfig waitall

If that doesn't work, edit the same script and add

#
# Verify network services are intialized before starting
#
echo Waiting for network services....
sleep 5