Running Selenium on an Alternate Port; Starting the Server from Ant

public void setUp() throws Exception {
    // this is the normal way
    // setUp(server_url, "*chrome");

    // this is the alternate port way
    selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 11111, "*firefox", server_url );
    selenium.start();
}

Hopefully this will save a few others some time!

Free Bonus Tip

Here's how to start and stop the Selenium server from an Ant script.

    <target name="start_server" description="Starts a Selenium Server in the background">
        <java jar="${lib}/selenium-server.jar" fork="true" spawn="true"/>
    </target>
	
    <target name="stop_server" description="Stops your local Selenium Server">
        <get taskname="selenium-shutdown" 
           src="http://localhost:4444/selenium-server/driver/?cmd=shutDown" 
           dest="result.txt" 
           ignoreerrors="true" />
    </target>

Update

The above Ant script worked for me on Linux, but seems to not work on Windows. (sigh).

Change the arg from value= to line= and it's now working on Windows.

<java jar="${lib}/selenium-server.jar" fork="true" spawn="true" >
    &ltarg line="-port 4444"/>
</java>

I've also found this useful.

<waitfor maxwait="30" maxwaitunit="second">
   <socket server="localhost" port="${selenium.server.port}"/>
</waitfor>