I hadn't even heard of the osgi console. Although I may remember seeing it as one of the options on the eclipse console view menu - like the git console. Is there a link you can refer me to for how to use the osgi console to check the state?

One thing I was going to try monday is switching my CDO git branch to the 4.12 release tag (?) and building it again to see if that works.

OMPlatform.INSTANCE.removeTraceHandler(PrintTraceHandler.CONSOLE);
OMPlatform.INSTANCE.addTraceHandler(new PrintTraceHandler()
{
  // ...
});

Well I do have the PrintTraceHandler setup that way in my client, but the CDO server also doesn't add timestamps to trace messages. Which is why I changed the trace setup in org.eclipse.net4j.util to add a timestamp to the front of the trace messages. e.g. in OM.java Activator.start(). The TODO note to make this configurable has been there in the source tree since CDO 4.1 :-)

Problem solved. There must be a plugin that is referencing that exact version of the org.eclipse.net4j.util plugin. When I rebuilt the plugin with the exact version and qualifier of the original plugin then it works.

As I said before, only features refer to exact plugin versions, but anyways... ;-)

You can contribute a custom IAppExtension with your server. There you can replace the trace handler just like in your client.