I am trying to get Hibernate3 running in a session bean. I am using JOnas as my app server and I have all the correct jar files in JOnas's lib/ext directory. If set the Hibernate configuration properties explicitly in my code everything works fine but if I try to set the properties using the hibernate.cfg.xml file it does not work. I have read some other posts and have placed this file in the root of my jar file like they suggested to no avail. I have also tried placing it in the root of my EAR file but I is still not found. Do I have to explicitly path to the cfg file somehow in my MANIFEST file or my EAR or JAR file? What am I missing here?

The classloader loading hibernate.jar should be able to access the xml files. The best solution is to embbed H3 in your ear and declare them in the manifest of your EJBs