The Coral software system is a suite of software tools that is designed to help with the management and operation of advanced laboratories such as micro- and nanofabrication facilities found in a number of universities.
From the end-user point of view, it includes the following key capabilities:
Without Using Coral, a fab user cannot operate equipment in the lab.
There are two versions of Coral. Local Coral is a client/server version that can be run from within the MTL network. We will call it Coral in our documentation. Remote Coral is a version of Coral that can be used from anywhere on the Internet Using a web browser that supports Java Web Start. We will call it Remote Coral in our documentation. To make it easier on users, MTL has created a Remote Coral bundle for Windows that you can download and install onto your computer in order to run Remote Coral. These versions do not require you to use a web browser or download anything else. Please see the Coral install documentation for more details.
The easiest way to see your requirements is to check your MUMMS service page and see what the status of your FAB related services are. You must have an approved MTL account and you must have met all your prerequisites for your FAB services in order to use Coral and the fabrication facilities.
Please email us at coral-problems@mtl.mit.edu.
There are two possibilities here. First, if you are Using Local Coral, it's probably because the Coral servers are down. They are shutdown each night for about 10 minutes at ~2am for maintenance. During this time, Coral is not available. Second, if you are Using Remote Coral, you probably have a firewall issue. Remote Coral uses the IIOP protocol and most ISPs will support it. However, there are some ISPs with stricter firewall rules that do not allow IIOP traffic. In addition, if you have a personal firewall installed on your remote computer or a router with a built-in firewall, this may present the same problems and you'll need to configure them to allow Remote Coral to operate correctly. Please contact the Coral Team and we will try our best to accomodate your situation and give you any help we can.