RMI question.

[osw]

Hi again.
Still trying to understand user principal propagation. Looks like I found how it goes but due to lack of RMI experince I need confirmation from RMI gurus.
So SecurityAssociation class on the client side stores user principals and credentials inside its static InheritableThreadLocal class instances. Using InheritableThreadLocal variables ensures that the principals data within them will be also available in child threads no matter where they are: on the local JVM or created on the server side by RMI calls.

Do I get it right ?
Do inheritable Thread data propagate with RMI calls ?

Regards,
Andrew.

[ko5tik]

If oyu look at the souce:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/jboss/jboss/src/main/org/jboss/ejb/plugins/jrmp/interfaces/GenericProxy.java?rev=1.14&content-type=text/vnd.viewcvs-markup

You will notice that this proxy pulls principal and credential out of SecurityAssotiation
( look in the invokeContainer() method )

[osw]

Right, and there would be no question if both client and server were running the same java machine. In my case they are not.
So I can rephrase my question: how remote client SecurityAssociation class shares its static data with SecurityAssociation class on the server side ?

[ko5tik]

If yo look in the same file:

------
protected MarshalledObject createMarshalledObject(final Object id,
final Method method,
final Object[] args)
throws SystemException, IOException
{
RemoteMethodInvocation rmi =
new RemoteMethodInvocation(id, method, args);

// Set the transaction propagation context
rmi.setTransactionPropagationContext(getTransactionPropagationContext());

// Set the security stuff
// MF fixme this will need to use "thread local" and therefore same construct as above
// rmi.setPrincipal(sm != null? sm.getPrincipal() : null);
// rmi.setCredential(sm != null? sm.getCredential() : null);
// is the credential thread local? (don't think so... but...)
rmi.setPrincipal(getPrincipal());
rmi.setCredential(getCredential());

return new MarshalledObject(rmi);
}
------

Your questions would suddently dissapear. I assume
principal & credential are serialized and transported to server.

[osw]

Thank you very much.

Regards,
Andrew.