Documentation Contents

rmid - The Java RMI Activation System Daemon

rmid starts the activation system daemon that allows objects to be registered and activated in a virtual machine (VM).

SYNOPSIS

rmid [options]

DESCRIPTION

The rmid tool starts the activation system daemon. The activation system daemon must be started before activatable objects can be either registered with the activation system or activated in a VM. See the Java RMI Specification and Activation tutorials for details on how to write programs that use activatable remote objects.

The daemon can be started by executing the rmid command, and specifying a security policy file, as follows:

    rmid -J-Djava.security.policy=rmid.policy

Note: When running Sun's implementation of rmid, by default you will need to specify a security policy file so that rmid can verify whether or not the information in each ActivationGroupDesc is allowed to be used to launch a VM for an activation group. Specifically, the command and options specified by the CommandEnvironment and any Properties passed to an ActivationGroupDesc's constructor must now be explicitly allowed in the security policy file for rmid. The value of the sun.rmi.activation.execPolicy property dictates the policy that rmid uses to determine whether or not the information in an ActivationGroupDesc may be used to launch a VM for an activation group.

Executing rmid by default

To specify an alternate port for the registry, you must specify the -port option when starting up rmid. For example,

    rmid -J-Djava.security.policy=rmid.policy -port 1099

starts the activation system daemon and a registry on the registry's default port, 1099.

Starting rmid from inetd/xinetd

An alternative to starting rmid from the command line is to configure inetd (Solaris) or xinetd (Linux) to start rmid on demand.

When rmid starts up, it attempts to obtain an inherited channel (inherited from inetd/xinetd) by invoking the System.inheritedChannel method. If the inherited channel is null or not an instance of java.nio.channels.ServerSocketChannel, then rmid assumes that it was not started by inetd/xinetd, and it starts up as described above.

If the inherited channel is a ServerSocketChannel instance, then rmid uses the java.net.ServerSocket obtained from the ServerSocketChannel as the server socket that accepts requests for the remote objects it exports, namely the registry in which the java.rmi.activation.ActivationSystem is bound and the java.rmi.activation.Activator remote object. In this mode, rmid behaves the same as when it is started from the command line, except:

See the man pages for inetd (Solaris) or xinetd (Linux) for details on how to configure services to be started on demand.

OPTIONS

-C<someCommandLineOption>
Specifies an option that is passed as a command-line argument to each child process (activation group) of rmid when that process is created. For example, you could pass a property to each virtual machine spawned by the activation system daemon:
    rmid -C-Dsome.property=value
This ability to pass command-line arguments to child processes can be useful for debugging. For example, the following command:
    rmid -C-Djava.rmi.server.logCalls=true
will enable server-call logging in all child VMs.

-J<someCommandLineOption>
Specifies an option that is passed to the java interpreter running rmid. For example, to specify that rmid use a policy file named rmid.policy, the -J option can be used to define the java.security.policy property on rmid's command line, for example:
    rmid -J-Djava.security.policy=rmid.policy
-J-Dsun.rmi.activation.execPolicy=<policy>
Specifies the policy that rmid employs to check commands and command-line options used to launch the VM in which an activation group runs. Please note that this option exists only in Sun's implementation of the Java RMI activation daemon. If this property is not specified on the command line, the result is the same as if -J-Dsun.rmi.activation.execPolicy=default were specified. The possible values of <policy> can be default, <policyClassName>, or none:

-log dir
Specifies the name of the directory the activation system daemon uses to write its database and associated information. The log directory defaults to creating a directory, log, in the directory in which the rmid command was executed.

-port port
Specifies the port rmid's registry uses. The activation system daemon binds the ActivationSystem, with the name java.rmi.activation.ActivationSystem, in this registry. Thus, the ActivationSystem on the local machine can be obtained using the following Naming.lookup method call:
    import java.rmi.*; 
    import java.rmi.activation.*;

    ActivationSystem system; system = (ActivationSystem)
    Naming.lookup("//:port/java.rmi.activation.ActivationSystem");
-stop
Stops the current invocation of rmid, for a port specified by the -port option. If no port is specified, it will stop the rmid running on port 1098.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

CLASSPATH
Used to provide the system a path to user-defined classes. Directories are separated by colons. For example:
    .:/usr/local/java/classes

SEE ALSO

rmic, CLASSPATH, java


Oracle and/or its affiliates Copyright © 1993, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Contact Us