Configuring the Remote System Explorer Support

The remote development support from the Eclipse IDE relies upon Visual COBOL Development Hub running on the UNIX machine and handling all requests from the IDE for building and debugging programs. Visual COBOL Development Hub provides a UNIX daemon, the Remote Development Option (RDO) daemon, which initiates the RDO as Eclipse clients connect to it. Whichever environment is used to start the RDO daemon will be inherited for all servers and hence all build and debug sessions.

Configuring the Environment

You may need to configure some aspects of the environment before you start the daemon. This is because when a build or debug session is initiated on the Development Hub from one of the Eclipse clients, the environment used will be inherited from whatever was used to start the daemon. A typical example of the kind of environment that might need to be set up would include database locations and settings for SQL access at build/run time.

Starting the Daemon

Important: Before starting the daemon you must have the following on your UNIX machine:

A version of Perl.
A version of Java 8 or later.
The as (assembler) and ld (linking) programs on the path, as specified by the PATH environment variable.

To start the daemon on the default port (4075) as a background process, perform this command with superuser authority:

$COBDIR/remotedev/startrdodaemon

The daemon will now listen for any Eclipse client processes connecting to that machine on port 4075. If you want to use another port, specify another port number on the startrdodaemon command.

The daemon can also be configured to instantiate the servers on a specified port or range of ports. This is particularly relevant when you want to only open certain ports through a firewall. To do this, perform this command with superuser authority:

$COBDIR/remotedev/startrdodaemon [<port> | <low port>-<high port>]

where:

<port> is the port number the daemon should use to listen for connections from Eclipse on the client machine. If no value is given, it will be assigned a default value of 4075. This value matches the value assigned within the Eclipse installation.
For example,
```
$COBDIR/remotedev/startrdodaemon 4999
```
This command will start a daemon listening on port 4999 and will use random server ports.
<low port>-<high port> is the range of ports on which the servers (launched by the daemon) should use to communicate with Eclipse on the client machine.
For example,
```
$COBDIR/remotedev/startrdodaemon 4080 4090-4999
```
This command will start a daemon listening on port 4080 and server ports will be in the range 4090 to 4999.

Stopping the Daemon

To stop the daemon, type the following command with superuser authority:

$COBDIR/remotedev/stoprdodaemon <port>