Configuring the Remote System Explorer Support

Note: The following only applies if you are using Visual COBOL Development Hub with Visual COBOL for Eclipse.

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.

The daemon can be run with or without parameters. If no parameters are specified, the process relies on the default values in $COBDIR/remotedev/rdo.cfg.

Use the following syntax to start the daemon (with super-user authority) on the remote host:

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

where:

<port> is the port number that the daemon should use to listen for connections from Eclipse. If no value is given, it will default to the value specified in $COBDIR/remotedev/rdo.cfg; the default value on installation is 4075.
Example: To start the daemon listening on port 4999:
```
$COBDIR/remotedev/startrdodaemon 4999
```
This command will override the default port in rdo.cfg.
<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. If no values are given, the range defaults to that specified in $COBDIR/remotedev/rdo.cfg; the default range on installation is 10000-10003.
Example: To instruct the daemon (on port 4999) to instantiate servers using a range of ports 4090-4993:
```
$COBDIR/remotedev/startrdodaemon 4999 4090-4993
```
This command will also override the default ports in rdo.cfg.

If the server has an active firewall, it is important that these ports are open in the firewall settings. You can use the configrdo utility to set the default ports in rdo.cfg to ones already open in the firewall. If you are running on Red Hat 7.2 (or later) or CentOS 7.2 (or later), you can also use the utility to open the required ports in the active firewall. See Configuring the firewall for more information.

Stopping the Daemon

To stop the daemon, type the following command with super-user authority:

$COBDIR/remotedev/stoprdodaemon <port>