2.4. Installation of RealChat Client

1. Installation

1.1. Setup

RealChat Client comes packaged as a single rcclientXXX.tar.gz or rcclientXXX.zip archive, located in the /client folder of the distribution archive. The installation procedure is the same for both UNIX® and Windows® Systems.

Extract the archive to a publicly accessible location on your web server, such as /home/username/public_html/chat/.

Important Note: Due to standard Java security restrictions, an applet can only connect to the host it was downloaded from. This means that you must run RealChat Server on the same machine on which you run your web server.



1.2. Test drive

Point your browser to the location where you installed RealChat Client, such as http://yoursite.com/chat/. Try the different example pages, log in, and chat for a while. If you encounter any trouble, please refer to the Troubleshooting section below.

That's it! You have a working chat system now.

2. Troubleshooting

2.1. The applet loads all resources and then fails: 'Could not connect to server.'

The most common reason for this is that there is no RealChat Server running on the server machine. Please install and run RealChat Server first.

It can also happen if you modified the default server port number. In this case, you must also change the PORT parameter in the HTML page of the chat client. See Client configuration section for details.

Last thing to check: Do your firewall settings block TCP port 8080? The port must be open in both directions.



2.2. The applet fails to load correctly and I get 'class not found' error.

Did you install all the files and folders from the client archive?

If you uploaded the client using FTP, try uploading again. You should always use the appropriate FTP transfer mode. In other words, *.html should be uploaded using ASCII mode, while *.jar, *.class, *.au, *.gif, and so forth should be uploaded using BINARY mode.



2.3. I am on a Windows® 2003 server and the chat client fails to load config file!

If you are installing RealChat on Windows® Server 2003 with IIS6, please note that, in IIS6, you must define a MIME type for the config files, such as RealChatClient.conf, and so forth. Please add a MIME type of .conf with attribute text/plain. This allows the applet to call the config file and read it from the server. Otherwise IIS 6 will NOT send the config file and the applet will fail.



2.4. Other Problems

When the client applet fails for some reason, the browser will often display an error message that contains important information about the source of the failure. The error message is either displayed on the status bar, the Java Console, or both. RealChat Client uses the Java Console to print out debugging information as well, so look at it to get a full description of the error. Copy and paste its contents in an e-mail and send it to us.

To open the Java Console, click the following menu items:

Internet Explorer: View -> Java Console
Netscape Navigator: Navigator -> Tools -> Java Console

To enable the Java Console of Internet Explorer, on the menu, click Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced. Scroll down to Microsoft® VM. Then check the Java Console Enabled checkbox and restart Internet Explorer.