Troubleshooting

1. The installer for Unix platforms erroneously prompts for installation of a new Java interpreter

   This is a bug in the installer; InstallShield has been contacted and knows about the problem. A good workaround is to install using the Other Platforms option.

2. When starting WebReader, the message

   Error opening connection to SMTP server: java.net.UnknownHostException: 
   mailhost
   

   is displayed
   You need to identify the host system which handles your mail, i.e., you must edit the mail_host resource in the Properties file to identify the mailhost.

   To edit the mail_host resource, open the Properties file, using your favorite text editor, and specify the fully-qualified host name, e.g., fractals.fractals.com. If you don't know the name of your mailhost, contact your system administrator.

   After you have made the above change, restart WebReader.

3. WebReader throws an OutOfMemoryError
   Restart WebReader using the -ms command line option to the Java interpreter, e.g.,

   	java -ms32m WebReader <NNTP-server>
   

   This increases the initial heap size to 32MB. If you don't have sufficient memory, increasing heap size may cause disk thrashing and performance degradation.

4. When starting WebReader in offline mode, the following message is displayed:

   Error opening connection to local host: java.net.SocketException: Connection refused
   

   Start the offline news server, using the command

   	java OfflineServer
   

   at the windows or shell command prompt. OfflineServer connects to a privileged port, so if you are on a Unix-based system you will need to start OfflineServer as root, e.g.,

   	sparc5% su
   	Password: 
   	sparc5# java OfflineServer
   

   etc.

5. When starting WebReader in offline mode, you get messages like

   Error calling getGroup: sun.net.nntp.UnknownNewsgroupException: <group_name>
   

   where <group_name> is the name of a newsgroup.
   This usually indicates that you didn't download articles for <group_name> while online; you may still post articles to the group in offline mode, but you may not read any. To remedy this problem, restart WebReader in online mode, download the articles for the group in question and then restart WebReader in offline mode.

6. WebReader, under Windows 95, consumes huge amounts of disk space when downloading new groups and may display an error message like

   	Error building file <group-name>
   

   where <group-name> is the name of a group.
   This is due to a clustering issue with Windows 95. In addition to the file size, Windows 95 normally allocates 32,768 bytes for each file created whose length is greater than 0. Since there are many files created during a download (at the present writing, there are 25,000+ newsgroups), file requirements can be in the gigabyte range.

   One solution is to repartition your drive into smaller partitions. For example, partitions sized between 500MB and 1GB use clusters sized at 16KB while partitions sized smaller than 128MB use clusters sized at 2KB. Another option is to install the MS-PLUS add-on package, which includes the DriveSpace 3 compression utility. DriveSpace 3 will support drives sized up to 2 GB and can be set to use a "zero" compression factor. The benefit to you is that DriveSpace 3 clusters are all sized at 512 bytes. Finally, if you upgrade to Windows 98 and use the FAT32 option, you will also utilize smaller sized clusters and get more efficient data/file storage. Contact Microsoft Corp. for details.

7. When WebReader is started, the following messages get displayed:

   sparc5% java.lang.NullPointerException
   	at sun.awt.motif.MFramePeer.setIconImage(MFramePeer.java:91)
   	at sun.awt.motif.MFramePeer.(MFramePeer.java:74)
   	at sun.awt.motif.MToolkit.createFrame(MToolkit.java:122)
   	at java.awt.Frame.addNotify(Frame.java:201)
   	at java.awt.Window.pack(Window.java:122)
   

   and WebReader fails to start.
   This setIconImage() error message means that the Java interpreter couldn't find the WebReader frame icon, and can happen if the file WR_icon.gif wasn't copied to the WebReader directory, or if you tried to start WebReader from a directory other than the directory it was installed into.

   To fix this problem, first make sure that you are starting WebReader from the same directory you installed it into. If this is the case, check that WR_icon.gif exists in the WebReader directory.

8. When attempting to subscribe to a group, the message Seek error for group names file... gets displayed in a dialog box.
   This can happen if you had built your Groups directory on one system and moved it over to another. For example, you may have used the newsrc2webreader utility on a Solaris system to create the Groups directory and its associated files, and then copied the directory to a Windows NT system. The problem is that WebReader assumes that the files use the target system's line break character, which will be different on the two systems.

   To remedy this problem, you must build, either via the newsrc2webreader utility or the View groups->New groups menu option, the Groups directory on a system whose line break character is the same as that of the system on which you will be running WebReader on; if you're not sure, build Groups on the target system.

9. Downloading newsgroups for the first time may fail to retrieve all groups.
   One way this might happen is if you have checked the box Fetch group descriptions in the Properties dialog and the NNTP server which you are connected to does not, for some reason, transmit its entire list of newsgroups.

   The news command which WebReader sends to the news server to fetch all newsgroups depends on whether or not the group descriptions are to be fetched as well. In the first case, the command LIST NEWSGROUPS is sent; otherwise, a simple LIST command is used. Some news servers, upon receiving a LIST NEWSGROUPS command will, for some reason, send only a small subset of their supported newsgroups. To test if this is the problem, first uncheck the Fetch group descriptions box in the Properties dialog window and save the current settings. Next, remove the directory Groups.<NNTP-server>, where <NNTP-server> is the name of your news server. Finally, quit and restart WebReader and reattempt to download all newsgroups. This usually works.

If the problem you're having is not listed above, check out the list of known bugs. If you still need help, e-mail us at support@fractals.com so we can update this page. We have tried to make WebReader easy to install and use, but unless we hear about problems, we can't improve the product. Your input is crucial, so please tell us about any problems you're having with WebReader.