The following instructions will help you to download, install, and run a fully functional Coral client from areas outside the lab including: desktop machines on campus, machines at your home institution/organization for non-Stanford lab members, from your home, or from your laptop. Moreover, we believe that this will run on a wide variety of platforms including Windows (95/98/NT/2000), Solaris (SPARC and x86), and Linux (RedHat 6.1 or higher). At this point it is not yet clear that this will run on Macintosh platforms as they appear to be lagging in their support of Java ... but that may change.

There are known problems with running Remote Coral that have to do with site-specific server protocols. See the Remote Coral Troubleshooting Guide for more details.

Deployment of the remote version of Coral relies on a product from Sun Microsystems called Java Web Start. Java Web Start will allow you to download and run an application from our web site (in fact, on Windows machines it will optionally place a shortcut to Remote Coral on your desktop and a Remote Coral entry on your Start menu). Java Web Start is now bundled with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Finally, when there is an new version of Remote Coral, Java Web Start will download it automatically for you.

How to download and run Remote Coral: Follow these three easy (we hope) steps ...

Step 1. Set your remote Coral password from a Coral terminal at SNF.The first thing that you have to do is run the on-site version of Coral, pull down the "Window" menu and select "Remote Password". This will give you the opportunity to set (or change) the password that you will use for remote access. A window will pop up that asks you to type in (and confirm) the password that you intend to use for your remote coral password. You may choose to use the same password that you use for on-site Coral ... or you may choose to use a different password. Remote Coral will not work, however, unless you have first set a Remote Password!

Why do we make you set your remote password for Coral using the on-site system? 1. This will help to ensure that only legitimate SNF users can run Coral remotely. 2. Remote Coral uses a different form of password encryption than the standard Unix/Solaris password encryption that you use when you log into on-site Coral ... there is no way to "copy" your on-site password so that Remote Coral can use it as well.

Step 2. Download Java WebStart.Go to the SNF web site (http://snf.stanford.edu), click on the "Labmembers" link on the left of the page, and then click on the "Remote Coral Access" link found on that page. This will take you to the page where you will ultimately download and launch Coral Remote. However, you first need to click the link that says: "Download Java Runtime Environment". This will take you to a Sun page where you will be able to ... well, download the Java Runtime Environment. (Of course, if you are reading this page on a browser, you have probably already found this location ...)

If you will be downloading to a Windows machine, life should be easy: downloading the Java Runtime Envirorment (JRE) also downloads and installs Java Web Start at the same time. Notes: many Macs and many PCs now come with an appropriate JRE and Java Web Start already installed. Second note: Coral now requires at least version 1.5.0 of the Java Runtime Environment. At Sun, this is also known as Java 5. Third note: For Macs, you need to be running OS X 10.4.5 or newer on either PowerPC-based or Intel-based hardware.

Step 3. Launch Remote Coral. Once you have installed Java Web Start, go back to the SNF web site and click on the Remote Coral Access page listed above. You should see a link that says "Launch Remote Coral". (Note: there will also be a link that says Launch Development Version of Remote Coral ... don't click this link, it is virtually guaranteed to fail.) If you only see a link that says something like: "You have to install Java Web Start first", this is an indication that Java Web Start is not properly installed on your machine and that will need to be addressed. Clicking "Launch Remote Coral" should begin to download the Remote Coral application onto your machine. It will then pop up a window asking if you wish to launch Remote Coral at that time ... if you do, click "Launch". (Note: it will also warn you that this application has asked for privileges on your machine ... and recommend that you not launch the application). We need to be able to open CORBA connections from your machine (and a log file is also written) for the application to run ... you have to trust that we aren't doing anything sneaky or malicious. The next thing that you should see is a window asking for your username and password. These should be your Coral login name and your REMOTE password, respectively. If you type these in successfully, Coral should start shortly. Well, it actually takes about 15 seconds for RSA encryption of your login name and password, transmission to us, decryption at our end, and then sending you a "ticket" identifying you as an authorized lab member. Once installed on your machine, you won't have to go to our Web site to launch Remote Coral. In particular, you can start Java Web Start, click the Remote Coral icon and then click "Launch". Alternatively, on Windows machines, the second time that you launch Remote Coral, it will ask you if you would like a desktop shortcut and/or Start Menu item added for Remote Coral. (Note: if you are connected via a 56 kb modem, download of Remote Coral either the first time or if there has been an update may take up to 2 minutes. Once it is downloaded, it should only take a few seconds to start up. Higher bandwidth network connections will, of course, experience proportionally shorter download times.)

Best of luck ... we hope that downloading and launching Remote Coral goes smoothly for you. If you have comments or suggestions related to Remote Coral, please send them to coral@snf.stanford.edu. While we are certainly hopeful that most of you will find the downloading and launching of Remote Coral a painless process, there are so many different platforms, OS versions, network configurations, etc. that we fear that some of you will encounter difficulties. We will do our best to help you to resolve these problems ... but we stop short of doing major debugging or system configuration on your machine.

Thanks for your continued support,

The Coral Development Team

p.s. Please don't leave Remote Coral running for extended periods of time when not in use. Everyone (including on-site users) should get in the habit of cleanly terminating Coral by clicking "Exit" on the "Window" pull down menu when they are done with their Coral session. Why? Each time ANYONE makes a reservation, deletes a reservation, enables equipment, shuts down equipment, etc. an appropriate event is posted that must be communicated to each and every Coral client that is running at that time. In other words, when you reserve karlsuss, for example, from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Tuesday not only is this recorded in the database, but all running clients are explicitly notified of that fact by the reservation server ... well, in truth, there is something called the event server that handles this communication. In fact, even if you are the person who made the reservation, you are treated no differently than anyone else ... your confirmation of that reservation (when you name shows up in the time block) is coming from the event server. If there are a bunch of idle versions of Remote Coral ... everyone's response time will go down. Also (and this is true in the lab as well) please try to get in the habit of using the proper Exit pull down menu item .... that way, the computer won't waste resources trying to notify Coral clients that are no longer there.

One other note: even though you originally went to a Web page to download Remote Coral ... this is not a Java Applet and doesn't have to be run from the web page. In fact, you have downloaded a fully-functional client application onto your machine. As a result, we believe that you will find that screen re-painting, for example, will happen quite quickly. Moreover, since the communication between each client and our server is rather terse and limited, we believe that you will find that the response of Remote Coral is adequate even over a 56 kb modem connection.

One final note: while we have done our best to test the functionality of Remote Coral before releasing it, there may be some bugs and/or improvements to the code over the coming few weeks. Each time there is a new version of the client software, Java Web Start will download this for you. However, particularly if you are using a low-bandwidth network connection, this will increase the startup time of Remote Coral. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause ... but felt that it was important to get Remote Coral in broad use as quickly as possible.

Good luck with Remote Coral ... comments, feedback, and suggestions should be sent to coral@snf.stanford.edu

SNF Coral Development Team