Question 1: How do I reply to a person's posting?
For example, in reply to "basic GAST configuration" : and the statement, "I can't get past the initial GAST configuration panel", I had a similar issue until l learnt that to run GAST in had to be in a particular folder to start with (the geonetwork web app folder). In my linux installation, it was;
/usr/local/geonetwork/web/geonetwork# java –jar /user/local/geonetwork/gast/gast.jar
Apologies if my comment is not at all what you were referring to.