The Butt Ugly Weblog

Running JConsole through firewalls

For anyone who have tried this and failed (and most people doing sysadmin stuff for Java programs have, I think), here comes a really simple solution for running JConsole over, well, firewalls and NATs and what-have-you.

Use SSH as a SOCKS proxy.

A minor caveat - the $jconsole_host from the original article refers to the name/IP address of the host you're connecting to - NOT the machine making the connection. Especially with EC2 it needs to be the local address from the 10.x range, not the DNS name.

I can't count the hours I've tried to figure out how to do this. RMI is so deeply unusable for all situations except when you're running machines in your own intranet. It reeks bigco all over the place...