"Why doesn't Remote Coral work at my office?"

If you have already carefully followed the instructions to:

• Set your remote Coral password from a Coral terminal at SNF.
• Download Java WebStart.
• Launch remote Coral from the SNF website.

.. and yet you still can't get Remote Coral to work, the problem likely has to do with the firewall on your server, and you may need to talk with your system administrator.

Background: Remote Coral is a Java based client server application. For the client (the member's computer) to communicate with the server at Stanford, something called CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture, rapidly becoming the industry standard) is used. CORBA handles all the messages or traffic between the client and server required by Remote Coral. To do this CORBA uses a communications protocol called IIOP (Internet Inter-ORB Protocol). This is where the problem occurs.

Most firewalls are designed to let only certain protocols through and only on specific ports. IIOP unfortunately does not use the same ports consistently and, because IIOP is fairly new, it is often not supported by current firewall products. While we expect firewall products to catch-up over time, in the short term this means that if you have a computer behind a firewall you will most likely not be able to run Remote Coral directly.

Solutions: We suggest two relatively simple ways to work around this problem:

1. Ask your system administrator set up a computer outside your system firewall.
2. Install a modem on your PC and use an internet service provider (one that can handle CORBA) to connect to SNF.

Your institution would, of course, need to assess the costs and possible security issues raised by either approach. But, as CORBA becomes increasingly popular it will be supported by more firewall products, and this should become less of a problem with our labmembers with time.