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Bruce Martin

This is the "bootstrapping" problem. CORBA provides location transparent object references and a typical way of getting an object reference is from the name service, but then how does one find the name service?

Different ORBs support different mechanisms.

To do this in the Java 2 ORB, set these parameters:

-ORBInitialHost
-ORBInitialPort

and then start the name service:

tnameserv -ORBInitialPort tnameservport

Start your CORBA server on the different machine:

java yourCORBAServer -ORBInitialHost tnameservhost -ORBInitialPort tnameservport

ORBIX and VisiBroker provide agents that will locate objects for you according to some policy. Thus you can simply call

bind

to locate the name service.

Alternatively, to accomplish this in a portable fashion, you can pass the stringified IOR of the name service to the client program. The client program "destringifies" the object reference and uses it to talk to the name service. This will work with any CORBA compliant ORB and name service.