Java 1.7.0u45 redirects connections to localhost

Question

It seems that with the latest Java update, 1.7.0u45, my JNLP application that is supposed to connect to a server is instead forced to try and connect to localhost for some reason that I cannot quite seem to figure out.

I know that some other changes have been made, such as requiring the Permissions attribute in the manifest and some such things, which I'm currently trying to figure out a reasonable way to comply to, but I cannot find anything that ought to cause this behavior.

My code just does an ordinary Socket.connect call to a specific server, but what happens is that the connection is instead made to localhost. This only happens when the code is running in the JNLP client; not when I run it "manually" by starting the VM on it.

Does anyone know why this is?

Answer 1

At last, I managed to figure out what was happening. It was not, in fact, that connections as such were being redirected, but rather that the JNLP client has started blocking JNLP files that are not signed from setting system properties with certain names. Particularly, only properties whose names begin with jnlp are, it seems, guaranteed to be configurable by unsigned JNLP files.

The problem, therefore, was that I specified what server to connect to via a system property whose name did not begin with jnlp, and it then being blocked (since my JNLP file isn't signed) led to my program using its default server specification instead, being localhost.