Windchill System Administrator's Guide

RMI
Server Hostname Property
• From outside the corporate intranet, such as from a partner extranet or the
Internet, this name can resolve to a reverse proxy on an external service
network.
By using a DNS alias, access to the system remains location independent. The
physical location of the user does not affect bookmarks, e-mail, or saved HTML
pages. This is important for mobile users.
Many existing Windchill applets and applications use Java RMI to invoke server
transactions. There is a continuing shift of focus from this form of communication
towards HTTP and XML. But for now, the Windchill development environment
continues to support code generation of classes that use RMI to invoke remote
service methods.
RMI is a Java-centric remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism implemented on
sockets. RMI stub objects perform a remote method invocation between an RMI
client and an RMI server. These stub objects contain a host name and port number
to which a TCP/IP connection is opened by the client. Windchill exposes only two
RMI objects to clients: a server manager object and a method server object. Other
RMI objects are used server-to-server to coordinate cached information, but these
are not important for client connectivity.
Each RMI stub contains a server host name. The value serialized into stub objects
is controlled by the java.rmi.server.hostname property of the RMI server.
Although this is a Java system property, it can be set in the Windchill
wt.properties file, because values in that file are used as Java system properties by
the Windchill servers.
Use the xconfmanager utility to set the java.rmi.server.hostname property to a
symbolic name that all clients are able to resolve to a server address. Because Java
applets can connect only to their codebase hosts, it should be the same symbolic
name used in the wt.server.codebase property, which is used as the document base
for Windchill HTML pages.
If a Windchill server host name alias is used, and it does not resolve to the local
server (such as an alias for an IP load balancing server cluster), the name must be
forced to resolve locally to the loopback address, 127.0.0.1. This is because the
RMI stubs can contain only one host name, which will be used by all clients, both
local and remote. However, to remain local, some local communication between
the server manager and method servers must be guaranteed. If you give the system
its own host name alias, as recommended above (rather than using actual host
names), then you can safely override the local name resolution (in the /etc/hosts
file) for this alias.
B-8 Windchill System Administrator’s Guide