Java.rmi.UnmarshalException after some time without a process restart.

Question

Hello,
I am having a problem when I use RMI connection. I run a process which creates its own RMI registry and binds to it in the following way:
    private void registerRmi() throws Exception {
        // Register an instance of RunServices with the
        // RMI Naming service
        // Install a security manager that can handle remote stubs
        System.setSecurityManager(new RMISecurityManager());
        String serviceName = IScannerRmiCommands.RMI_NAME;
        log.infoF("General.Info.RegisteringRMIService", serviceName);
        try {
            if (s_registry == null) {
                s_registry = LocateRegistry.createRegistry(IScannerRmiCommands.RMI_PORT);
            s_registry.rebind(serviceName, this);
            s_registredRmi = true;
            log.infoF("General.Info.RMIServiceRegistered");
        } catch (RemoteException e) {
            log.fatalF(e, "General.Fatal.RMIServiceRegistrationFailed");
    }The client applications are able to connect to this process, but after some time clients start to receive the following exceptions:
java.rmi.UnmarshalException: error unmarshalling return; nested exception is:
     java.io.EOFException
     at sun.rmi.registry.RegistryImpl_Stub.lookup(Unknown Source)
     at java.rmi.Naming.lookup(Unknown Source)
     at com.x1.util.RMIHelper.doLookup(RMIHelper.java:23)
     at com.x1.util.RMIHelper.lookup(RMIHelper.java:83)
     at com.x1.setup.admin.Administration.lookupRemoteScanner(Administration.java:123)
     at com.x1.infrastructure.statistics.StatisticResponseHandler.createMPResponse(StatisticsProvider.java:1337)
     at com.x1.infrastructure.statistics.StatisticResponseHandler.run(StatisticsProvider.java:157)
     at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
Caused by: java.io.EOFException
     at java.io.ObjectInputStream$BlockDataInputStream.peekByte(Unknown Source)
     at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject0(Unknown Source)
     at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject(Unknown Source)
     ... 8 moreI can't reproduce this on my dev environment but a customer experiences this quite often. They don't have any firewall running or antivirus software on these machines.
Any help will be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Edited by: rossenv on Oct 2, 2009 2:18 PM

Answer 1

No, I don't see any errors at server's site and this is the most strange thing. It seems that server operates normally except it stopped execute RMI commands until it is restarted. After that it responds properly and after some time stops again with the same client exception.