Preventing garbage-collection of a RMIRegistered server object

Question

I am developping a client/server RMI application, and keep facing occasional ObjectNotFioundException: no such object in table, when the client tries to invoke method on the server stub retrived from the RMIRegistry.
The Javadoc and online documentation say this means the server object has been GC'ed since it has been registered in the RMIRegistry.
Following the advice found at: http://www.nabble.com/java.rmi.NoSuchObjectException:-no-such-object-in-table-t260095.html,
I register the server in a RMIRegistry I obtain through LocateRegistry.getRegistry(), and not createRegistry().
But I still face these exceptions.
Assuming the issue is really due to the server object being garbage-collected, I tried to keep a static reference to the server but it didn't help (the Main class was probably garbage-collected itself).
As a last hope, I've set up a "keep-alive" thread in the server VM, that keeps a direct reference to the server object (not the stub), and regularly invokes something on it. With this mechanism I never face the exception.
This solution looks obviously clumsy.
Is there a neater way to prevent garbage collection of the server object?
Note that I use dynamic stubs (Java5-style).

Answer 1

Without seeing some code, I'm not sure what you are doing. Also the link you supplied is broken.
You always need to keep a live reference to your implementation class. How you do this is your business. Using a separate thread is over-kill.
I set a reference to the implementation class in the start up class and use a never ending wait() to make sure the start up class thread (with the main()) lives forever.