Connecting to remote VMs, either over RMI or Jolokia appears to be broken in master. Based on experiments, rolling back the fix for JMC-8287 appers to fix the problem. Discussion and findings in this slack thread: 
https://jdkmissioncontrol.slack.com/archives/CGMRA4ALW/p1732171197197459

Manual tests: 

1. Start a java process and include command line switches: ` -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.autodiscovery=true -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.port=9003 -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.ssl=false -Dcom.sun.management.jmxremote.authenticate=false` - attempt to connect from JMC
2. Start a java process and include command line switches: `javaagent:jolokia-jvm<version>-agent.jar` and connect to service:jmx:jolokia://localhost:8778/jolokia from JMC.

It would be good if it was possible to also have realistic automated tests for this