Administration

A few tools for easier administration are provided with JBoss.

Automatic startup

For Windows NT, guidelines and examples to run JBoss as a NT Service are given in the contrib cvs module.

For linux, you can find rc.d init scripts in this message.

Remote monitoring and administration

Since JBoss is entirely JMX-based, it should be very easy to remotely manage the server and the applications deployed on it: every JMX adaptor can plug into it!

Currently, the HTML JMX adaptor provides a convenient way to monitor, inspect, and perform actions on all the mbeans started by JBoss. The HTML adaptor is started by default in jboss.jcml. To use it, surf to http://yourserver:8082. Among the things you can do with it for now:

Start, stop, and change settings for most mbeans
Deploy and undeploy applications with the J2EEDeployer mbean. On a production site, you may not want to use the AutoDeployer, but rather have direct control on the deployment process
View the whole JNDI namespace with the JNDIView mbean. The global namespace is accessible from all the clients, it will contain your beans, JMS topics and queues, as well as all the JBoss services that need to be accessible. You will also see the component namespaces for your beans: these are accessible only from within the bean, they contain mainly environmnent variables, EJB references. See the section called “External JNDI Configuration and JNDI Viewing”
Create and destroy JMS topics / queues with the JMSServer mbean
Shutdown the server!

A program is currently being developed in the “admin” CVS module to monitor JBoss, gather metrics values. It is still in BETA version. To be continued...