FAQ - Frequently asked questions

Question: I do not see any peers except my local peer.

Answer: There could be several reasons for this problem:

• Check if your Internet connection is working
• Check if you can ping your RDV/Relay server (e.g. ping bibster.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de). If this fails you might have problems with your internet connection. Please contact your local administrator.
• Check if you can connect to your RDV/Relay server with telnet on port 9700 (e.g. telnet bibster.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de). If you cannot connect to the RDV/Relay sever you will get a connection error. Perhaps your firewall blocks the connection.

Question: Why do you log my activities?

Answer: We need to log some actions you performed to evaluate our system. For example if you sent a query to the network, we need some information of this query to see how the query was routed.

Question: Linux Users: I cannot enter a peer name longer than one character.

Answer: This may be because this character is selected. You have to unselect it, before you are able to enter more characters. (Linux SWT Bug)

If you still have any questions do not hesitate to contact us.

Question: When I tried to install Bibster it appeared to install correctly, but then it failed to launch

Answer: Please be sure that you have installed a Java Virtual Machine >= 1.4.2. In case you installed your Bibster distribution using an old virtual machine, please delete the Bibster folder and reinstal the system using Java >= 1.4.2.

Question: What do I have to do if I want to install my own RDV/Relay peer?

Answer: First of all you have to download the software for the RDV/Relay peer (JXTA.zip). Please start the "start" scripts (for Linux and Windows) and configure your peer. An exemplary config file can be found here.
Next you have to reconfigure your Bibster client. This can be done be editing the PlatformConfig file of your Bibster peer (\Bibster application\bin\.jxta\PlatformConfig). You can either add the IP of your own peer or replace the existing peers (e.g. 130.37.30.74:9700) with your own.
In case you plan to setup your own RDV/Relay peer permanently, please contact us.

Question: Bibster does not launch on Windows 9x

Answer: When you get the error message Cannot find file 'binLauncher.exe' (or one of its components) in the MS-DOS Prompt of Bibster, the system cannot find some essential start-up files and the GUI does not appear. To fix this, you have to change the start-up file bibster.bat, which is located (by default) at "C:\Program Files\Bibster application\bibster.bat". Enclose all paths in double quotes by changing the first line of this file into cd "C:\Program Files\Bibster application\bin" (note that "\bin" is added to the path as well) and the third line for the PATH variable into something like set PATH="C:\Program Files\Java\j2re1.4.2_05\bin;%PATH%". You may also need to add double quotes in the second line. Change the fourth line into call swap.bat -Xmx256M (remove the "\bin" part). After this has been changed, start Bibster again. Now the GUI should appear.

If you still have any questions do not hesitate to contact us.

Question: I have problems accessing anonymous the CVS repository.

Answer: There could be several reasons for this problem:

• We heard of clients, which doesn't handle anonymous (password-less) cvs accounts.
• It could be possible that Sourceforge is slashdotted. Please try it again a few hours later.
• Please also check the Sourceforge CVS instructions.