RMI and java.rmi.server.hostname

[Lorenz Witte]

Hello everyone,

I've been experimenting a little with RMI and GNU Classpath and ran into 
troubles when client and server were running on different machines. In 
my setup the client "hercules" is trying to access a UnicastRemoteObject 
on the server "galahad". The client is able to receive the corresponding 
stub, but it is misconfigured so that it tries to access the remote 
object on localhost instead of the real server. Using Sun's JRE on the 
server I could solve the problem by setting the system property 
"java.rmi.server.hostname" to "galahad". Unfortunately this failed when 
using GNU Classpath and Kaffe or JamVM on the server. The stubs were 
still trying to access localhost.

Currently I meet the problem by modifying the static constructor of 
gnu.java.rmi.server.UnicastConnectionManager, so that the static field 
"localhost" is initialized with the value of the 
java.rmi.server.hostname property, i.e. I replaced the line

  localhost = InetAddress.getLocalHost().getHostAddress();

with the following code:

  localhost = System.getProperty( "java.rmi.server.hostname");
  if ( localhost == null) {
     localhost = InetAddress.getLocalHost().getHostAddress();
  }

Now I can properly access the GNU Classpath based RMI server from a 
remote client, but I don't have a clue if this patch is valid by any 
means (as my knowledge on both RMI and Classpath can be described as 
shallow at best).

Any advice is welcome!

Lorenz Witte
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