Kerika lets you connect with your friends and colleagues, no matter where you are: at home, at work, on campus or in a coffee shop. That's because we use JXTA, an open-source peer-to-peer technology that helps you hook up with other Kerika users even when you are hidden behind a firewall.

Here's how it works: whenever you start up Kerika, your computer automatically tries to contact a rendezvous server that is located at Kerika's data center. The rendezvous server acts as a kind of matchmaker: it tells your computer whether any other Kerika users are online at the same time, and how your computer can directly talk to these folks. At the same time, your computer tells the rendezvous server know how you can be reached.

The rendezvous server is a critical component in the Kerika network because it also helps you hook up with the storage server, and, if you are have set up a private network it helps you connect to your private storage server.

Your Kerika software uses ports 10421 and 10422 on your computer to reach the rendezvous server, Most of the time this works just fine, but there may be situations, like when you are at work, when your network's firewall may not let Kerika use those ports, which means your computer cannot check in with the rendezvous server. (And there may not be much you can do about it if your corporate IT folks simply refuse to open up ports 10421 and 10422 on the firewall.)

That's when the relay server at Kerika's data center kicks in: it helps you talk to the rendezvous server by using port 80 on your computer instead, which you can be pretty sure will always open because that's what your browser uses to access the Web. (If port 80 were closed as well, even your browser wouldn't work and then your firewall would be more like a brick wall!)

So if you are working at a company with a locked-down firewall, you can still hook up with other Kerika users worldwide!