Problem running startxwin.bat in Cygwin/X on windows

Nowadays more and more graphical tools like jconsole , jvisualvm are shipped with java and several other tools like tda-Thread Dump Analyzer , IBM HeapAnalyzer , etc are available for download to analyze and debug problems, hence it seems like you need to have some kind of graphical terminal like Xserver or VNC to manage your environment. Since most of the production environments are UNIX/Linux based and more commonly connected through windows desktop, you might need to have a windows based Xserver or VNC client. VNC Servers are not very common in the enterprise as they deemed to be insecure compared to X and needed additional installation and configuration while X comes with the OS. One such windows based open source free XServer is Cygwin/X which i decided to give it a try and ran into some problems before i made it to work, hence i wanted to write about it to avoid the same problem by someone else. The installer is little different where it lists you different packages of Cygwin along with Cygwin/X packages so you just need to select X11 if that's what you needed.

Once installed you just have to goto the c:\cygwin\bin in a cmd prompt and run startxwin.bat ,which should start the Xserver, but i my case the batch file was giving some issues,

startxwin.bat - Starting on Windows NT/2000/XP/2003'c:\cygwin\bin\run' is not recognized as an internal or external command,operable program or batch file.'c:\cygwin\bin\run' is not recognized as an internal or external command,operable program or batch file.

So in order to make it work i had to change the one line in the startxwin.bat file as shown below,

SET RUN=%CYGWIN_ROOT%\bin\run -p /usr/bin

replace with,

SET RUN=run -p /usr/bin

Now you should be able to connect with your favorite SSH client like putty or secureCRT with X11 Forwarding.

VisualVM remote application monitoring through SSH proxy

As many of you might already know Java VisualVM an all in one Java troubleshooting tool is available as a JDK tool in Sun JDK distributions starting from JDK 6 update 7 and Apple's Java for Mac OS X 10.5 Update 4. Also VisualVM a stand alone separately downloadable tool is also available at visualvm.dev.java.net. It's a visual tool enhances the capability of performance and monitoring analysis for Java SE platform for both production and development environments. You can find more detailed information in the VisualVM product site.

But our topic is how to make visualvm work through SSH Tunnel specifically in production systems where it's a normal practice to allow only SSH access on port 22 for the users or administrators, hence visualvm will not work with the default settings as it uses port 1099 to communicate to remote host via jstatd. For some reason, VisualVM doesn't seem to work through SSH Port Forwarding or SSH Proxy which seems to be a big blocker for many people which wish yo use this tool in this similar kind of setup.

The only way i came up so far to make the VisualVM work is to use to use a system proxifier like WideCap (Free) or ProxyCap (Shareware) and was able to connect to remotely a running java process over ssh proxy. Here are the steps detailing on how to configure ,

1) Download WideCap and install.
2)Open WideCap control panel and click on new proxy , provide hostname as localhost, port
8333, and select the socks version of your SSH that your client and server uses.





3)Add a new application and point to the location of java.exe and create new rule to get triggered when the java is started.




4) Enable WideCap.
5) run putty or any ssh client as SSH proxy daemon. (e.g) putty -D 8333 username@server or ssh -D 8333 user@host
6) Start VisualVM and add remote host and now you should be able to see the java process running on the remote server and you should be able to connect and monitor.



On a cautious note that widecap is not very consistent and it crashes outlook (at least for me ) and IE sometimes but on the other hand proxycap seem to work fine along with other standard windows applications without problems.

Also if you run into problems make sure all the instructions are followed in this link