---
title: 'OpenProj Locks up with Blank Grey Windows'
date: 2008-06-11T11:20:02.000Z
draft: false
taxonomies:
    tags: [ "proxy"]
    categories: [ "project", "apps"]
---

The symptom is that after starting sometimes there is some blurp
dialog and afterwards the _**Tip of the Day**_ dialog appears. This
stays grey and the application accepts no more events. You need to
kill it to get out of there. 

This happens at the place which is protected by a firewall and has no
transparent proxy. At home it worked fine albeit on my Macbook and not
on my Ubuntu laptop. 

The reason  is that there is some phone home
functionality built in and with wireshark I could see the application
trying to connect to a webserver. Probably to get the tips of the
day. Behind the firewall this did not work and the application is just
hanging there. 

I suspect that sooner or later it will time out, but I
am not that patient. Since this is a regular occurence with java
applications I also immediately knew that I had to tell it where the
proxy can be found. In the file **~/.openproj/run.conf** file replace
the line : 

    JAVA\_OPTS="-Xms128m -Xmx768m" 
    
with

    JAVA\_OPTS="-Dhttp.proxyHost=proxy -Dhttp.proxyPort=3128 -Xms128m
-Xmx768m" 

This directs the java runtime library to use the proxy
**http://proxy:3128/.** And voila!  ... Openproj starts immediately
and in its full glory?