© Copyright Robert Vasvari, 1993-1998.
RELEASE NOTES for version 2.51
If you send feedback to rbrowser@ddrummer.comp please do not forget to include the version of RBrowser you are runnig, and the OS name and version.
Platform availability:
RBrowser is now available for MacOSX Server (PPC and Intel), MACH (i386,M68K,Sparc), WINDOWS NT 4.0 (OpenStep 4.2 and YellowBox)
WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING
Do not run RBrowser as root, do not connect to the remote
host as root!!!!
WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING
Things to be aware of:
On MacOSX, you should have OmniWeb installed before you can use the built in help.
RBrowser is very dependent on the amount of bandwith you have. If you are sitting on a 10MBit/sec Ethernet link, you can pretty much do as you please. Start as many operations as you want, copy lots of files at the same time. However, if you have ppp on a 33K baud modem or even less, you have to be careful not to do too many things at once. If you do, the underlying network connection can get overloaded, and the app can hang.
abort loading large directories:
On some systems, there are large user directories that hold more than 10,000 entries. If your homedirectory sits in one of these large directories, RBrowser will automatically load this directory when you log in. Use the KILL button in the Processes panel to abort loading this directory. The rest of the directories
will load just fine.
SOCKS support:
RBrowser now has support for SOCKS version 4. If your company is firewalled, you can use the SOCKS proxy server to enable RBrowser to connect to machines outside the firewall. For now, RBrowser only supports one proxyserver. Use the Global Preferences Panel to enter the ip address of the proxy server. Then, for each connection that needs SOCKS turn on the switch in the Connection Preferences Panel.
FTP notes:
Some ISP's allow you access only to your own directory by making their FTP server think that your home directory is root. Because of that, the user/group info displayed in the browser is false, usually just numbers like 182673:20005 and alikes.. This keeps RBrowser from recognizing ownership of your files, so upon saving them you might get messages like "File xxx may not be readable", etc.. In this case you can ignore the message and click "Try Anyway".
Document opening:
All documents belonging to all apps are monitored and saved back if they changed (no more ObjectSourceLinksApps...) You can double click on an executable file (at your own risk, of course) and the file will be opened. Exercise caution about testing large executable files this way. This feature should to make it easy to edit scriptfiles.
File Copying:
It is possible that copying will fail and there is no error message. The file simply does not appear in the target directory. This could happen if some of the files being copied are not readable or writable. Depending on the implementation of tar on the target machine tar might just silently fail in this situation.
Progress Bar:
The progress bar is only accurate on large file transfers.
International character support:
In general these files will appear in the browser correctly, provided that the remote host uses one of the character encodings known to OPENSTEP. The most common one used by Solaris and HP-UX is ISO Latin-1. If you copy a file like this onto another host (or the local host) the filename may appear different due to a different encoding.
UNIX only:
File operations, including loading the directory WILL FAIL for sure if the remote shell is not eight bit clean. It is encouraged to use ksh or zsh which are eight bit clean.
When the UNIX protocol is used, by default, permissions are not preserved when a file is copied between hosts. This includes the SaveBack operations after editing. The reason is that RBrowser depends on the remote host's implementation of tar, which may not be compatible with the one on your local host. If you want to make RBrowser try to maintain permissions during filetransfer, do the following in your terminal:
>defaults write RBrowser UNIXShouldPreservePermissions YES
WINDOWS NT Notes:
RBrowser interacts with the NT File Explorer the following way:
Dragging from RBrowser Local File Viewer -> NT File Explorer: *ALWAYS* a move
Dragging from NT File Explorer -> RBrowser Local File Viewer: *ALWAYS* a copy
Dragging from NT File Explorer -> RBrowser Remote File Viewer: *ALWAYS* a copy
Dragging from RBrowser Remote File Viewer -> NT File Explorer: DO NOT DO THIS! In this case NT Explorer will look for the file on the local system and try to move it to the target directory. If you are lucky it will not find the file. If you are not lucky, the file also exists on the local system in which case NT Explorer *WILL* move it, which is probably not what you want.
Creating shortcuts is not yet implemented
RBrowser ® is a product of Different Drummer Software.