Jini is advertised as being "network plug and play," which carries with it the idea of zero administration, where you buy a device or install a software service, switch it on, and voila!—it is there and available. Well, this may happen in the future, but right now there are a number of backroom games that you have to succeed at. Once you have won these games, "network plug and play" does work, but if you lose at any stage, you have an uphill battle to fight.

The difficult parts are getting the right files in the right places with the right permissions. About 50 percent of the messages in the Jini mailing list relate to these configuration problems, which shouldn't occur.

This chapter looks at some of the problems that can arise in a Jini system, most of which are configuration issues of some kind. Each of the early sections contains step-by-step instructions on what to do to get the example programs working. Because this is only the second chapter in this book, and right now you shouldn't have managed to fail at anything, feel free to skip to the next chapters, but do come back here when things go wrong.