Debugging a Remote Java VM with Eclipse

I (heart) the internet. Why? Well, among other reasons, I ran across this blog post today, which totally saved me a good several hours of frustration and swearing whilst tracking down a thorny problem.

You see, at my day job, I help to develop this webapp that points to a number of Java VMs, running in various combinations of in-Eclipse/not-in-Eclipse. The not-in-Eclipse bits are not run in Eclipse for a reason (read: "I don't care to jump through the hoops necessary to force them to."); however, lamentably, sometimes I get to (read: "have no choice but to") debug those bits too. And so, on the advice of the aforementioned blog post, I added these options to my startup scripts for the to-be-remotely-debugged VMs:

-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8001,server=y,suspend=n

did some Eclipse magic ('Run | Open Debug Dialog... | (right-click) Remote Java Application | New | (fill in the details)') to point my debugger at the appropriate host and port, and I was off to the races.

The moral of the story: some days you just can get rid of a bomb.

(Author's Note: Bonus points to any commenters who can identify that seriously obscure reference!)