Java Enterprise in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Name

rmid: The RMI Activation Daemon — JDK 1.2 and later

Synopsis

rmid [ options ]

Description

The rmid command starts an RMI activation daemon on the local host. The activation daemon services all requests to register activatable objects and is responsible for activating objects due to client requests to invoke methods on them.

If no port option is given, the activation daemon runs on a default port of 1098. Internally, the activation daemon creates a java.rmi.activation.Activator and its own RMI naming registry (listening to port 1098). The daemon binds a java.rmi.activation.ActivationSystem object to the name java.rmi.activation.ActivationSystem in its internal registry.

As of JDK 1.3, the rmid daemon provided by Sun requires you to specify a security policy file on the command line, using the -J option:

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

This policy file determines what operations are allowed when launching JVMs for activation groups. For example, a policy file for rmid might include permissions such as the following:

grant {
  permission com.sun.rmi.rmid.ExecPermission
    "/opt/rmid/bin/*";
  permission com.sun.rmi.rmid.ExecOptionPermission
    "-Djava.security.policy=/usr/rmi-app/act-group.policy";
};

This allows rmid to execute any commands in the /opt/rmid/bin directory and to start any activation groups using the command-line option to invoke the security policy file act-group.policy. When registering activation groups, you can specify what commands to use to start the group’s ...