When Best Practices Make Me Feel Stupid

So I have been messing around with JBoss recently. As with most app servers, as soon as I get it up and running on my machine, I decide to hit it from another machine (such as my VMWare Fusion instance or my other Mac).

On JRun, Tomcat, and every other app server I have ever run, this has been a non-issue; specify hostname and port, and Bob’s your uncle, you’re on the server. Not so with JBoss. When attempting to hit the server from another machine, I was unable to connect.

I couldn’t find anything on Google to assist, and then finally I linked indirectly to this FAQ posting. Turns out that they upped the security in JBoss to make the server only bind itself to a particular domain, or localhost by default if no domain is specified. Apparently a lot of people put unsecured JBoss instances out on the Internet, and the JBoss team is trying to help stop this.

So, running JBoss using run.sh -b 0.0.0.0 allows unrestricted access from various machines.

I don’t mind best practices, and I certainly should RTFM (or in this case RTFFAQ), but it wouldn’t hurt to spit this out as a hint message to the console for the uninitiated.