For 1.5 JVMs and other JVM vendors, you have to pass the VM parameter -Djprofiler.jmxServerPort=[port] to the profiled JVM. An MBean server will be published on that port and you can specify the chosen port as an argument to jpcontroller. With the additional VM parameter -Djprofiler.jmxPasswordFile=[file] you can specify a properties file with key value pairs of the form user=password to set up authentication. Note that these VM parameters are overridden by the default com.sun.management.jmxremote.port VM parameter.
With the explicit setup of the JMX server, you can use the command line controller to connect to a remote server. Invoking jpcontroller host:port will try to make a connection to the remote host host. If the remote computer is only reachable via an IP address, please add -Djava.rmi.server.hostname=[IP address] as a VM parameter to the remote VM, otherwise the connection cannot be established.