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• Best method to cache objects in PHP?

  - by Martin Bean

  Hi, I'm currently developing a large site that handles user registrations. A social networking website for argument's sake. However, I've noticed a lag in page loads and deciphered that it is the creation of objects on pages that's slowing things down. For example, I have a Member object, that when instantiated with an ID passed as a construct parameter, it queries the database for that members' row in the members database table. Not bad, but this is created each time a page is loaded; and called more than once when say, calling an array of that particular members' friends, as a new Member object is created for each friend. So on a single page I can have upwards of seven of the same object, but containing different properties. What I'm wanting to do is to find a way to reduce the database load, and to allow persist objects between page loads. For example, the logged in user's object to be created on login (which I can do) but then stored somewhere for retrieval so I don't have to keep re-creating the object between page loads. What is the best solution for this? I've had a look at Memcache, but with it being a third-party module I can't have the web host install it on this occasion. What are my alternatives, and/or best practices in my case? Thanks in advance.

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• Ajax to read from form

  - by Edwin

  Hello, I'm writing a store system for my game, it worked quite well until I found out that it only takes the amount of first entered Item. function pbuy(buyitem) { var amountc = "amount-"+buyitem, var amount = $("#"+amountc+"").val(); $.ajax({ type: "POST", url: "store2.php", data: "buyitem="+ buyitem+"&amount="+amount, success: function(resp){ document.getElementById('ajaxDiv').innerHTML = resp; }, error: function(e){ alert('Error: ' + e); } }); } I'm trying to give it it the Id of the form like so: function pbuy(buyitem) { var amountc = "amount-"+buyitem, var amount = $("#"+amountc+"").val(); But nothing happens. The code the creation of the forms is: <tr> <td class='items' width='80%' align='center' valign='top'><?PHP echo $itemstore->itemname;?> </td> <td width="20%"> Price:<?PHP echo $itemstore->newprice;?> <form method="post"> <input type='text' id='amount-<?PHP echo $row;?>)' /> <input name="itembid" type="button" onclick="pbuy(<?PHP echo $row;?>)" value="Buy" /></form></td> </tr> If I hardcode the amount in the ajax function it all runs fine like it should.

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• interface abstract in php real world scenario

  - by jason

  The goal is to learn whether to use abstract or interface or both... I'm designing a program which allows a user to de-duplicate all images but in the process rather then I just build classes I'd like to build a set of libraries that will allow me to re-use the code for other possible future purposes. In doing so I would like to learn interface vs abstract and was hoping someone could give me input into using either. Here is what the current program will do: recursive scan directory for all files determine file type is image type compare md5 checksum against all other files found and only keep the ones which are not duplicates Store total duplicates found at the end and display size taken up Copy files that are not duplicates into folder by date example Year, Month folder with filename is file creation date. While I could just create a bunch of classes I'd like to start learning more on interfaces and abstraction in php. So if I take the scan directory class as the first example I have several methods... ScanForFiles($path) FindMD5Checksum() FindAllImageTypes() getFileList() The scanForFiles could be public to allow anyone to access it and it stores in an object the entire directory list of files found and many details about them. example extension, size, filename, path, etc... The FindMD5Checksum runs against the fileList object created from scanForFiles and adds the md5 if needed. The FindAllImageTypes runs against the fileList object as well and adds if they are image types. The findmd5checksum and findallimagetypes are optionally run methods because the user might not intend to run these all the time or at all. The getFileList returns the fileList object itself. While I have a working copy I've revamped it a few times trying to figure out whether I need to go with an interface or abstract or both. I'd like to know how an expert OO developer would design it and why?

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• const pod and std::vector

  - by Baz

  To get this code to compile: std::vector<Foo> factory() { std::vector<Foo> data; return data; } I have to define my POD like this: struct Foo { const int i; const int j; Foo(const int _i, const int _j): i(_i), j(_j) {} Foo(Foo& foo): i(foo.i), j(foo.j){} Foo operator=(Foo& foo) { Foo f(foo.i, foo.j); return f; } }; Is this the correct approach for defining a pod where I'm not interested in changing the pod members after creation? Why am I forced to define a copy constructor and overload the assignment operator? Is this compatible for different platform implementations of std::vector? Is it wrong in your opinion to have const PODS like this? Should I just leave them as non-const?

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• What are some ways to accomplish a dynamic array?

  - by Ted

  I'm going to start working on a new game and one of the things I'd like to accomplish is a dynamic array sort of system that would hold map data. The game will be top-down 2d and made with XNA 4.0 and C#. You will begin in a randomized area which will essentially be tile based. As such a 2 dimensional array would be one way to accomplish this by holding numerical values which would correspond to a list of textures and that would be how it would draw this randomly created map. The problem is I would kind of only like to create the area around where you start and they could venture in which ever direction they wanted to. This would mean I'd have to populate the map array with more randomized data in the direction they go. I could make a really large array and use the center of it and the rest would be in anticipation of new content to be made, but that just seems very inefficient. I suppose when they start a new game I could have a one time map creation process that would go through and create a large randomly generated map array, but holding all of in memory at all times seems also inefficient. Perhaps if there was a way that I'd only hold parts of that map data in memory at one time and somehow not hold the rest in memory. In the end I only need to have a chunk of the map somewhat close to them in memory so perhaps some of you might have suggestions on good ways to approach this kind of randomized map and dynamic array problem. It wouldn't need to be a dynamic array type of thing if I made it so that it pulled in map data nearby that is needed and then once off the screen and not needed it could somehow get rid of that memory that way I wouldn't have a huge array taking up a bunch of memory.

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• Hosting the Razor Engine for Templating in Non-Web Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  Microsoft’s new Razor HTML Rendering Engine that is currently shipping with ASP.NET MVC previews can be used outside of ASP.NET. Razor is an alternative view engine that can be used instead of the ASP.NET Page engine that currently works with ASP.NET WebForms and MVC. It provides a simpler and more readable markup syntax and is much more light weight in terms of functionality than the full blown WebForms Page engine, focusing only on features that are more along the lines of a pure view engine (or classic ASP!) with focus on expression and code rendering rather than a complex control/object model. Like the Page engine though, the parser understands .NET code syntax which can be embedded into templates, and behind the scenes the engine compiles markup and script code into an executing piece of .NET code in an assembly. Although it ships as part of the ASP.NET MVC and WebMatrix the Razor Engine itself is not directly dependent on ASP.NET or IIS or HTTP in any way. And although there are some markup and rendering features that are optimized for HTML based output generation, Razor is essentially a free standing template engine. And what’s really nice is that unlike the ASP.NET Runtime, Razor is fairly easy to host inside of your own non-Web applications to provide templating functionality. Templating in non-Web Applications? Yes please! So why might you host a template engine in your non-Web application? Template rendering is useful in many places and I have a number of applications that make heavy use of it. One of my applications – West Wind Html Help Builder - exclusively uses template based rendering to merge user supplied help text content into customizable and executable HTML markup templates that provide HTML output for CHM style HTML Help. This is an older product and it’s not actually using .NET at the moment – and this is one reason I’m looking at Razor for script hosting at the moment. For a few .NET applications though I’ve actually used the ASP.NET Runtime hosting to provide templating and mail merge style functionality and while that works reasonably well it’s a very heavy handed approach. It’s very resource intensive and has potential issues with versioning in various different versions of .NET. The generic implementation I created in the article above requires a lot of fix up to mimic an HTTP request in a non-HTTP environment and there are a lot of little things that have to happen to ensure that the ASP.NET runtime works properly most of it having nothing to do with the templating aspect but just satisfying ASP.NET’s requirements. The Razor Engine on the other hand is fairly light weight and completely decoupled from the ASP.NET runtime and the HTTP processing. Rather it’s a pure template engine whose sole purpose is to render text templates. Hosting this engine in your own applications can be accomplished with a reasonable amount of code (actually just a few lines with the tools I’m about to describe) and without having to fake HTTP requests. It’s also much lighter on resource usage and you can easily attach custom properties to your base template implementation to easily pass context from the parent application into templates all of which was rather complicated with ASP.NET runtime hosting. Installing the Razor Template Engine You can get Razor as part of the MVC 3 (RC and later) or Web Matrix. Both are available as downloadable components from the Web Platform Installer Version 3.0 (!important – V2 doesn’t show these components). If you already have that version of the WPI installed just fire it up. You can get the latest version of the Web Platform Installer from here: http://www.microsoft.com/web/gallery/install.aspx Once the platform Installer 3.0 is installed install either MVC 3 or ASP.NET Web Pages. Once installed you’ll find a System.Web.Razor assembly in C:\Program Files\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET Web Pages\v1.0\Assemblies\System.Web.Razor.dll which you can add as a reference to your project. Creating a Wrapper The basic Razor Hosting API is pretty simple and you can host Razor with a (large-ish) handful of lines of code. I’ll show the basics of it later in this article. However, if you want to customize the rendering and handle assembly and namespace includes for the markup as well as deal with text and file inputs as well as forcing Razor to run in a separate AppDomain so you can unload the code-generated assemblies and deal with assembly caching for re-used templates little more work is required to create something that is more easily reusable. For this reason I created a Razor Hosting wrapper project that combines a bunch of this functionality into an easy to use hosting class, a hosting factory that can load the engine in a separate AppDomain and a couple of hosting containers that provided folder based and string based caching for templates for an easily embeddable and reusable engine with easy to use syntax. If you just want the code and play with the samples and source go grab the latest code from the Subversion Repository at: http://www.west-wind.com:8080/svn/articles/trunk/RazorHosting/ or a snapshot from: http://www.west-wind.com/files/tools/RazorHosting.zip Getting Started Before I get into how hosting with Razor works, let’s take a look at how you can get up and running quickly with the wrapper classes provided. It only takes a few lines of code. The easiest way to use these Razor Hosting Wrappers is to use one of the two HostContainers provided. One is for hosting Razor scripts in a directory and rendering them as relative paths from these script files on disk. The other HostContainer serves razor scripts from string templates… Let’s start with a very simple template that displays some simple expressions, some code blocks and demonstrates rendering some data from contextual data that you pass to the template in the form of a ‘context’. Here’s a simple Razor template: @using System.Reflection Hello @Context.FirstName! Your entry was entered on: @Context.Entered @{ // Code block: Update the host Windows Form passed in through the context Context.WinForm.Text = "Hello World from Razor at " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); } AppDomain Id: @AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FriendlyName Assembly: @Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName Code based output: @{ // Write output with Response object from code string output = string.Empty; for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { output += i.ToString() + " "; } Response.Write(output); } Pretty easy to see what’s going on here. The only unusual thing in this code is the Context object which is an arbitrary object I’m passing from the host to the template by way of the template base class. I’m also displaying the current AppDomain and the executing Assembly name so you can see how compiling and running a template actually loads up new assemblies. Also note that as part of my context I’m passing a reference to the current Windows Form down to the template and changing the title from within the script. It’s a silly example, but it demonstrates two-way communication between host and template and back which can be very powerful. The easiest way to quickly render this template is to use the RazorEngine<TTemplateBase> class. The generic parameter specifies a template base class type that is used by Razor internally to generate the class it generates from a template. The default implementation provided in my RazorHosting wrapper is RazorTemplateBase. Here’s a simple one that renders from a string and outputs a string: var engine = new RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase>(); // we can pass any object as context - here create a custom context var context = new CustomContext() { WinForm = this, FirstName = "Rick", Entered = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10) }; string output = engine.RenderTemplate(this.txtSource.Text new string[] { "System.Windows.Forms.dll" }, context); if (output == null) this.txtResult.Text = "*** ERROR:\r\n" + engine.ErrorMessage; else this.txtResult.Text = output; Simple enough. This code renders a template from a string input and returns a result back as a string. It  creates a custom context and passes that to the template which can then access the Context’s properties. Note that anything passed as ‘context’ must be serializable (or MarshalByRefObject) – otherwise you get an exception when passing the reference over AppDomain boundaries (discussed later). Passing a context is optional, but is a key feature in being able to share data between the host application and the template. Note that we use the Context object to access FirstName, Entered and even the host Windows Form object which is used in the template to change the Window caption from within the script! In the code above all the work happens in the RenderTemplate method which provide a variety of overloads to read and write to and from strings, files and TextReaders/Writers. Here’s another example that renders from a file input using a TextReader: using (reader = new StreamReader("templates\\simple.csHtml", true)) { result = host.RenderTemplate(reader, new string[] { "System.Windows.Forms.dll" }, this.CustomContext); } RenderTemplate() is fairly high level and it handles loading of the runtime, compiling into an assembly and rendering of the template. If you want more control you can use the lower level methods to control each step of the way which is important for the HostContainers I’ll discuss later. Basically for those scenarios you want to separate out loading of the engine, compiling into an assembly and then rendering the template from the assembly. Why? So we can keep assemblies cached. In the code above a new assembly is created for each template rendered which is inefficient and uses up resources. Depending on the size of your templates and how often you fire them you can chew through memory very quickly. This slighter lower level approach is only a couple of extra steps: // we can pass any object as context - here create a custom context var context = new CustomContext() { WinForm = this, FirstName = "Rick", Entered = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-10) }; var engine = new RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase>(); string assId = null; using (StringReader reader = new StringReader(this.txtSource.Text)) { assId = engine.ParseAndCompileTemplate(new string[] { "System.Windows.Forms.dll" }, reader); } string output = engine.RenderTemplateFromAssembly(assId, context); if (output == null) this.txtResult.Text = "*** ERROR:\r\n" + engine.ErrorMessage; else this.txtResult.Text = output; The difference here is that you can capture the assembly – or rather an Id to it – and potentially hold on to it to render again later assuming the template hasn’t changed. The HostContainers take advantage of this feature to cache the assemblies based on certain criteria like a filename and file time step or a string hash that if not change indicate that an assembly can be reused. Note that ParseAndCompileTemplate returns an assembly Id rather than the assembly itself. This is done so that that the assembly always stays in the host’s AppDomain and is not passed across AppDomain boundaries which would cause load failures. We’ll talk more about this in a minute but for now just realize that assemblies references are stored in a list and are accessible by this ID to allow locating and re-executing of the assembly based on that id. Reuse of the assembly avoids recompilation overhead and creation of yet another assembly that loads into the current AppDomain. You can play around with several different versions of the above code in the main sample form:   Using Hosting Containers for more Control and Caching The above examples simply render templates into assemblies each and every time they are executed. While this works and is even reasonably fast, it’s not terribly efficient. If you render templates more than once it would be nice if you could cache the generated assemblies for example to avoid re-compiling and creating of a new assembly each time. Additionally it would be nice to load template assemblies into a separate AppDomain optionally to be able to be able to unload assembli es and also to protect your host application from scripting attacks with malicious template code. Hosting containers provide also provide a wrapper around the RazorEngine<T> instance, a factory (which allows creation in separate AppDomains) and an easy way to start and stop the container ‘runtime’. The Razor Hosting samples provide two hosting containers: RazorFolderHostContainer and StringHostContainer. The folder host provides a simple runtime environment for a folder structure similar in the way that the ASP.NET runtime handles a virtual directory as it’s ‘application' root. Templates are loaded from disk in relative paths and the resulting assemblies are cached unless the template on disk is changed. The string host also caches templates based on string hashes – if the same string is passed a second time a cached version of the assembly is used. Here’s how HostContainers work. I’ll use the FolderHostContainer because it’s likely the most common way you’d use templates – from disk based templates that can be easily edited and maintained on disk. The first step is to create an instance of it and keep it around somewhere (in the example it’s attached as a property to the Form): RazorFolderHostContainer Host = new RazorFolderHostContainer(); public RazorFolderHostForm() { InitializeComponent(); // The base path for templates - templates are rendered with relative paths // based on this path. Host.TemplatePath = Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, TemplateBaseFolder); // Add any assemblies you want reference in your templates Host.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.Windows.Forms.dll"); // Start up the host container Host.Start(); } Next anytime you want to render a template you can use simple code like this: private void RenderTemplate(string fileName) { // Pass the template path via the Context var relativePath = Utilities.GetRelativePath(fileName, Host.TemplatePath); if (!Host.RenderTemplate(relativePath, this.Context, Host.RenderingOutputFile)) { MessageBox.Show("Error: " + Host.ErrorMessage); return; } this.webBrowser1.Navigate("file://" + Host.RenderingOutputFile); } You can also render the output to a string instead of to a file: string result = Host.RenderTemplateToString(relativePath,context); Finally if you want to release the engine and shut down the hosting AppDomain you can simply do: Host.Stop(); Stopping the AppDomain and restarting it (ie. calling Stop(); followed by Start()) is also a nice way to release all resources in the AppDomain. The FolderBased domain also supports partial Rendering based on root path based relative paths with the same caching characteristics as the main templates. From within a template you can call out to a partial like this: @RenderPartial(@"partials\PartialRendering.cshtml", Context) where partials\PartialRendering.cshtml is a relative to the template root folder. The folder host example lets you load up templates from disk and display the result in a Web Browser control which demonstrates using Razor HTML output from templates that contain HTML syntax which happens to me my target scenario for Html Help Builder.   The Razor Engine Wrapper Project The project I created to wrap Razor hosting has a fair bit of code and a number of classes associated with it. Most of the components are internally used and as you can see using the final RazorEngine<T> and HostContainer classes is pretty easy. The classes are extensible and I suspect developers will want to build more customized host containers for their applications. Host containers are the key to wrapping up all functionality – Engine, BaseTemplate, AppDomain Hosting, Caching etc in a logical piece that is ready to be plugged into an application. When looking at the code there are a couple of core features provided: Core Razor Engine Hosting This is the core Razor hosting which provides the basics of loading a template, compiling it into an assembly and executing it. This is fairly straightforward, but without a host container that can cache assemblies based on some criteria templates are recompiled and re-created each time which is inefficient (although pretty fast). The base engine wrapper implementation also supports hosting the Razor runtime in a separate AppDomain for security and the ability to unload it on demand. Host Containers The engine hosting itself doesn’t provide any sort of ‘runtime’ service like picking up files from disk, caching assemblies and so forth. So my implementation provides two HostContainers: RazorFolderHostContainer and RazorStringHostContainer. The FolderHost works off a base directory and loads templates based on relative paths (sort of like the ASP.NET runtime does off a virtual). The HostContainers also deal with caching of template assemblies – for the folder host the file date is tracked and checked for updates and unless the template is changed a cached assembly is reused. The StringHostContainer similiarily checks string hashes to figure out whether a particular string template was previously compiled and executed. The HostContainers also act as a simple startup environment and a single reference to easily store and reuse in an application. TemplateBase Classes The template base classes are the base classes that from which the Razor engine generates .NET code. A template is parsed into a class with an Execute() method and the class is based on this template type you can specify. RazorEngine<TBaseTemplate> can receive this type and the HostContainers default to specific templates in their base implementations. Template classes are customizable to allow you to create templates that provide application specific features and interaction from the template to your host application. How does the RazorEngine wrapper work? You can browse the source code in the links above or in the repository or download the source, but I’ll highlight some key features here. Here’s part of the RazorEngine implementation that can be used to host the runtime and that demonstrates the key code required to host the Razor runtime. The RazorEngine class is implemented as a generic class to reflect the Template base class type: public class RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> : MarshalByRefObject where TBaseTemplateType : RazorTemplateBase The generic type is used to internally provide easier access to the template type and assignments on it as part of the template processing. The class also inherits MarshalByRefObject to allow execution over AppDomain boundaries – something that all the classes discussed here need to do since there is much interaction between the host and the template. The first two key methods deal with creating a template assembly: /// <summary> /// Creates an instance of the RazorHost with various options applied. /// Applies basic namespace imports and the name of the class to generate /// </summary> /// <param name="generatedNamespace"></param> /// <param name="generatedClass"></param> /// <returns></returns> protected RazorTemplateEngine CreateHost(string generatedNamespace, string generatedClass) { Type baseClassType = typeof(TBaseTemplateType); RazorEngineHost host = new RazorEngineHost(new CSharpRazorCodeLanguage()); host.DefaultBaseClass = baseClassType.FullName; host.DefaultClassName = generatedClass; host.DefaultNamespace = generatedNamespace; host.NamespaceImports.Add("System"); host.NamespaceImports.Add("System.Text"); host.NamespaceImports.Add("System.Collections.Generic"); host.NamespaceImports.Add("System.Linq"); host.NamespaceImports.Add("System.IO"); return new RazorTemplateEngine(host); } /// <summary> /// Parses and compiles a markup template into an assembly and returns /// an assembly name. The name is an ID that can be passed to /// ExecuteTemplateByAssembly which picks up a cached instance of the /// loaded assembly. /// /// </summary> /// <param name="namespaceOfGeneratedClass">The namespace of the class to generate from the template</param> /// <param name="generatedClassName">The name of the class to generate from the template</param> /// <param name="ReferencedAssemblies">Any referenced assemblies by dll name only. Assemblies must be in execution path of host or in GAC.</param> /// <param name="templateSourceReader">Textreader that loads the template</param> /// <remarks> /// The actual assembly isn't returned here to allow for cross-AppDomain /// operation. If the assembly was returned it would fail for cross-AppDomain /// calls. /// </remarks> /// <returns>An assembly Id. The Assembly is cached in memory and can be used with RenderFromAssembly.</returns> public string ParseAndCompileTemplate( string namespaceOfGeneratedClass, string generatedClassName, string[] ReferencedAssemblies, TextReader templateSourceReader) { RazorTemplateEngine engine = CreateHost(namespaceOfGeneratedClass, generatedClassName); // Generate the template class as CodeDom GeneratorResults razorResults = engine.GenerateCode(templateSourceReader); // Create code from the codeDom and compile CSharpCodeProvider codeProvider = new CSharpCodeProvider(); CodeGeneratorOptions options = new CodeGeneratorOptions(); // Capture Code Generated as a string for error info // and debugging LastGeneratedCode = null; using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter()) { codeProvider.GenerateCodeFromCompileUnit(razorResults.GeneratedCode, writer, options); LastGeneratedCode = writer.ToString(); } CompilerParameters compilerParameters = new CompilerParameters(ReferencedAssemblies); // Standard Assembly References compilerParameters.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.dll"); compilerParameters.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.Core.dll"); compilerParameters.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("Microsoft.CSharp.dll"); // dynamic support! // Also add the current assembly so RazorTemplateBase is available compilerParameters.ReferencedAssemblies.Add(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase.Substring(8)); compilerParameters.GenerateInMemory = Configuration.CompileToMemory; if (!Configuration.CompileToMemory) compilerParameters.OutputAssembly = Path.Combine(Configuration.TempAssemblyPath, "_" + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("n") + ".dll"); CompilerResults compilerResults = codeProvider.CompileAssemblyFromDom(compilerParameters, razorResults.GeneratedCode); if (compilerResults.Errors.Count > 0) { var compileErrors = new StringBuilder(); foreach (System.CodeDom.Compiler.CompilerError compileError in compilerResults.Errors) compileErrors.Append(String.Format(Resources.LineX0TColX1TErrorX2RN, compileError.Line, compileError.Column, compileError.ErrorText)); this.SetError(compileErrors.ToString() + "\r\n" + LastGeneratedCode); return null; } AssemblyCache.Add(compilerResults.CompiledAssembly.FullName, compilerResults.CompiledAssembly); return compilerResults.CompiledAssembly.FullName; } Think of the internal CreateHost() method as setting up the assembly generated from each template. Each template compiles into a separate assembly. It sets up namespaces, and assembly references, the base class used and the name and namespace for the generated class. ParseAndCompileTemplate() then calls the CreateHost() method to receive the template engine generator which effectively generates a CodeDom from the template – the template is turned into .NET code. The code generated from our earlier example looks something like this: //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ // <auto-generated> // This code was generated by a tool. // Runtime Version:4.0.30319.1 // // Changes to this file may cause incorrect behavior and will be lost if // the code is regenerated. // </auto-generated> //------------------------------------------------------------------------------ namespace RazorTest { using System; using System.Text; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.IO; using System.Reflection; public class RazorTemplate : RazorHosting.RazorTemplateBase { #line hidden public RazorTemplate() { } public override void Execute() { WriteLiteral("Hello "); Write(Context.FirstName); WriteLiteral("! Your entry was entered on: "); Write(Context.Entered); WriteLiteral("\r\n\r\n"); // Code block: Update the host Windows Form passed in through the context Context.WinForm.Text = "Hello World from Razor at " + DateTime.Now.ToString(); WriteLiteral("\r\nAppDomain Id:\r\n "); Write(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.FriendlyName); WriteLiteral("\r\n \r\nAssembly:\r\n "); Write(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().FullName); WriteLiteral("\r\n\r\nCode based output: \r\n"); // Write output with Response object from code string output = string.Empty; for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { output += i.ToString() + " "; } } } } Basically the template’s body is turned into code in an Execute method that is called. Internally the template’s Write method is fired to actually generate the output. Note that the class inherits from RazorTemplateBase which is the generic parameter I used to specify the base class when creating an instance in my RazorEngine host: var engine = new RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase>(); This template class must be provided and it must implement an Execute() and Write() method. Beyond that you can create any class you chose and attach your own properties. My RazorTemplateBase class implementation is very simple: public class RazorTemplateBase : MarshalByRefObject, IDisposable { /// <summary> /// You can pass in a generic context object /// to use in your template code /// </summary> public dynamic Context { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Class that generates output. Currently ultra simple /// with only Response.Write() implementation. /// </summary> public RazorResponse Response { get; set; } public object HostContainer {get; set; } public object Engine { get; set; } public RazorTemplateBase() { Response = new RazorResponse(); } public virtual void Write(object value) { Response.Write(value); } public virtual void WriteLiteral(object value) { Response.Write(value); } /// <summary> /// Razor Parser implements this method /// </summary> public virtual void Execute() {} public virtual void Dispose() { if (Response != null) { Response.Dispose(); Response = null; } } } Razor fills in the Execute method when it generates its subclass and uses the Write() method to output content. As you can see I use a RazorResponse() class here to generate output. This isn’t necessary really, as you could use a StringBuilder or StringWriter() directly, but I prefer using Response object so I can extend the Response behavior as needed. The RazorResponse class is also very simple and merely acts as a wrapper around a TextWriter: public class RazorResponse : IDisposable { /// <summary> /// Internal text writer - default to StringWriter() /// </summary> public TextWriter Writer = new StringWriter(); public virtual void Write(object value) { Writer.Write(value); } public virtual void WriteLine(object value) { Write(value); Write("\r\n"); } public virtual void WriteFormat(string format, params object[] args) { Write(string.Format(format, args)); } public override string ToString() { return Writer.ToString(); } public virtual void Dispose() { Writer.Close(); } public virtual void SetTextWriter(TextWriter writer) { // Close original writer if (Writer != null) Writer.Close(); Writer = writer; } } The Rendering Methods of RazorEngine At this point I’ve talked about the assembly generation logic and the template implementation itself. What’s left is that once you’ve generated the assembly is to execute it. The code to do this is handled in the various RenderXXX methods of the RazorEngine class. Let’s look at the lowest level one of these which is RenderTemplateFromAssembly() and a couple of internal support methods that handle instantiating and invoking of the generated template method: public string RenderTemplateFromAssembly( string assemblyId, string generatedNamespace, string generatedClass, object context, TextWriter outputWriter) { this.SetError(); Assembly generatedAssembly = AssemblyCache[assemblyId]; if (generatedAssembly == null) { this.SetError(Resources.PreviouslyCompiledAssemblyNotFound); return null; } string className = generatedNamespace + "." + generatedClass; Type type; try { type = generatedAssembly.GetType(className); } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(Resources.UnableToCreateType + className + ": " + ex.Message); return null; } // Start with empty non-error response (if we use a writer) string result = string.Empty; using(TBaseTemplateType instance = InstantiateTemplateClass(type)) { if (instance == null) return null; if (outputWriter != null) instance.Response.SetTextWriter(outputWriter); if (!InvokeTemplateInstance(instance, context)) return null; // Capture string output if implemented and return // otherwise null is returned if (outputWriter == null) result = instance.Response.ToString(); } return result; } protected virtual TBaseTemplateType InstantiateTemplateClass(Type type) { TBaseTemplateType instance = Activator.CreateInstance(type) as TBaseTemplateType; if (instance == null) { SetError(Resources.CouldnTActivateTypeInstance + type.FullName); return null; } instance.Engine = this; // If a HostContainer was set pass that to the template too instance.HostContainer = this.HostContainer; return instance; } /// <summary> /// Internally executes an instance of the template, /// captures errors on execution and returns true or false /// </summary> /// <param name="instance">An instance of the generated template</param> /// <returns>true or false - check ErrorMessage for errors</returns> protected virtual bool InvokeTemplateInstance(TBaseTemplateType instance, object context) { try { instance.Context = context; instance.Execute(); } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(Resources.TemplateExecutionError + ex.Message); return false; } finally { // Must make sure Response is closed instance.Response.Dispose(); } return true; } The RenderTemplateFromAssembly method basically requires the namespace and class to instantate and creates an instance of the class using InstantiateTemplateClass(). It then invokes the method with InvokeTemplateInstance(). These two methods are broken out because they are re-used by various other rendering methods and also to allow subclassing and providing additional configuration tasks to set properties and pass values to templates at execution time. In the default mode instantiation sets the Engine and HostContainer (discussed later) so the template can call back into the template engine, and the context is set when the template method is invoked. The various RenderXXX methods use similar code although they create the assemblies first. If you’re after potentially cashing assemblies the method is the one to call and that’s exactly what the two HostContainer classes do. More on that in a minute, but before we get into HostContainers let’s talk about AppDomain hosting and the like. Running Templates in their own AppDomain With the RazorEngine class above, when a template is parsed into an assembly and executed the assembly is created (in memory or on disk – you can configure that) and cached in the current AppDomain. In .NET once an assembly has been loaded it can never be unloaded so if you’re loading lots of templates and at some time you want to release them there’s no way to do so. If however you load the assemblies in a separate AppDomain that new AppDomain can be unloaded and the assemblies loaded in it with it. In order to host the templates in a separate AppDomain the easiest thing to do is to run the entire RazorEngine in a separate AppDomain. Then all interaction occurs in the other AppDomain and no further changes have to be made. To facilitate this there is a RazorEngineFactory which has methods that can instantiate the RazorHost in a separate AppDomain as well as in the local AppDomain. The host creates the remote instance and then hangs on to it to keep it alive as well as providing methods to shut down the AppDomain and reload the engine. Sounds complicated but cross-AppDomain invocation is actually fairly easy to implement. Here’s some of the relevant code from the RazorEngineFactory class. Like the RazorEngine this class is generic and requires a template base type in the generic class name: public class RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType> where TBaseTemplateType : RazorTemplateBase Here are the key methods of interest: /// <summary> /// Creates an instance of the RazorHost in a new AppDomain. This /// version creates a static singleton that that is cached and you /// can call UnloadRazorHostInAppDomain to unload it. /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> CreateRazorHostInAppDomain() { if (Current == null) Current = new RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType>(); return Current.GetRazorHostInAppDomain(); } public static void UnloadRazorHostInAppDomain() { if (Current != null) Current.UnloadHost(); Current = null; } /// <summary> /// Instance method that creates a RazorHost in a new AppDomain. /// This method requires that you keep the Factory around in /// order to keep the AppDomain alive and be able to unload it. /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> GetRazorHostInAppDomain() { LocalAppDomain = CreateAppDomain(null); if (LocalAppDomain == null) return null; /// Create the instance inside of the new AppDomain /// Note: remote domain uses local EXE's AppBasePath!!! RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> host = null; try { Assembly ass = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); string AssemblyPath = ass.Location; host = (RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType>) LocalAppDomain.CreateInstanceFrom(AssemblyPath, typeof(RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType>).FullName).Unwrap(); } catch (Exception ex) { ErrorMessage = ex.Message; return null; } return host; } /// <summary> /// Internally creates a new AppDomain in which Razor templates can /// be run. /// </summary> /// <param name="appDomainName"></param> /// <returns></returns> private AppDomain CreateAppDomain(string appDomainName) { if (appDomainName == null) appDomainName = "RazorHost_" + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("n"); AppDomainSetup setup = new AppDomainSetup(); // *** Point at current directory setup.ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory; AppDomain localDomain = AppDomain.CreateDomain(appDomainName, null, setup); return localDomain; } /// <summary> /// Allow unloading of the created AppDomain to release resources /// All internal resources in the AppDomain are released including /// in memory compiled Razor assemblies. /// </summary> public void UnloadHost() { if (this.LocalAppDomain != null) { AppDomain.Unload(this.LocalAppDomain); this.LocalAppDomain = null; } } The static CreateRazorHostInAppDomain() is the key method that startup code usually calls. It uses a Current singleton instance to an instance of itself that is created cross AppDomain and is kept alive because it’s static. GetRazorHostInAppDomain actually creates a cross-AppDomain instance which first creates a new AppDomain and then loads the RazorEngine into it. The remote Proxy instance is returned as a result to the method and can be used the same as a local instance. The code to run with a remote AppDomain is simple: private RazorEngine<RazorTemplateBase> CreateHost() { if (this.Host != null) return this.Host; // Use Static Methods - no error message if host doesn't load this.Host = RazorEngineFactory<RazorTemplateBase>.CreateRazorHostInAppDomain(); if (this.Host == null) { MessageBox.Show("Unable to load Razor Template Host", "Razor Hosting", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Exclamation); } return this.Host; } This code relies on a local reference of the Host which is kept around for the duration of the app (in this case a form reference). To use this you’d simply do: this.Host = CreateHost(); if (host == null) return; string result = host.RenderTemplate( this.txtSource.Text, new string[] { "System.Windows.Forms.dll", "Westwind.Utilities.dll" }, this.CustomContext); if (result == null) { MessageBox.Show(host.ErrorMessage, "Template Execution Error", MessageBoxButtons.OK, MessageBoxIcon.Exclamation); return; } this.txtResult.Text = result; Now all templates run in a remote AppDomain and can be unloaded with simple code like this: RazorEngineFactory<RazorTemplateBase>.UnloadRazorHostInAppDomain(); this.Host = null; One Step further – Providing a caching ‘Runtime’ Once we can load templates in a remote AppDomain we can add some additional functionality like assembly caching based on application specific features. One of my typical scenarios is to render templates out of a scripts folder. So all templates live in a folder and they change infrequently. So a Folder based host that can compile these templates once and then only recompile them if something changes would be ideal. Enter host containers which are basically wrappers around the RazorEngine<t> and RazorEngineFactory<t>. They provide additional logic for things like file caching based on changes on disk or string hashes for string based template inputs. The folder host also provides for partial rendering logic through a custom template base implementation. There’s a base implementation in RazorBaseHostContainer, which provides the basics for hosting a RazorEngine, which includes the ability to start and stop the engine, cache assemblies and add references: public abstract class RazorBaseHostContainer<TBaseTemplateType> : MarshalByRefObject where TBaseTemplateType : RazorTemplateBase, new() { public RazorBaseHostContainer() { UseAppDomain = true; GeneratedNamespace = "__RazorHost"; } /// <summary> /// Determines whether the Container hosts Razor /// in a separate AppDomain. Seperate AppDomain /// hosting allows unloading and releasing of /// resources. /// </summary> public bool UseAppDomain { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Base folder location where the AppDomain /// is hosted. By default uses the same folder /// as the host application. /// /// Determines where binary dependencies are /// found for assembly references. /// </summary> public string BaseBinaryFolder { get; set; } /// <summary> /// List of referenced assemblies as string values. /// Must be in GAC or in the current folder of the host app/ /// base BinaryFolder /// </summary> public List<string> ReferencedAssemblies = new List<string>(); /// <summary> /// Name of the generated namespace for template classes /// </summary> public string GeneratedNamespace {get; set; } /// <summary> /// Any error messages /// </summary> public string ErrorMessage { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Cached instance of the Host. Required to keep the /// reference to the host alive for multiple uses. /// </summary> public RazorEngine<TBaseTemplateType> Engine; /// <summary> /// Cached instance of the Host Factory - so we can unload /// the host and its associated AppDomain. /// </summary> protected RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType> EngineFactory; /// <summary> /// Keep track of each compiled assembly /// and when it was compiled. /// /// Use a hash of the string to identify string /// changes. /// </summary> protected Dictionary<int, CompiledAssemblyItem> LoadedAssemblies = new Dictionary<int, CompiledAssemblyItem>(); /// <summary> /// Call to start the Host running. Follow by a calls to RenderTemplate to /// render individual templates. Call Stop when done. /// </summary> /// <returns>true or false - check ErrorMessage on false </returns> public virtual bool Start() { if (Engine == null) { if (UseAppDomain) Engine = RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType>.CreateRazorHostInAppDomain(); else Engine = RazorEngineFactory<TBaseTemplateType>.CreateRazorHost(); Engine.Configuration.CompileToMemory = true; Engine.HostContainer = this; if (Engine == null) { this.ErrorMessage = EngineFactory.ErrorMessage; return false; } } return true; } /// <summary> /// Stops the Host and releases the host AppDomain and cached /// assemblies. /// </summary> /// <returns>true or false</returns> public bool Stop() { this.LoadedAssemblies.Clear(); RazorEngineFactory<RazorTemplateBase>.UnloadRazorHostInAppDomain(); this.Engine = null; return true; } … } This base class provides most of the mechanics to host the runtime, but no application specific implementation for rendering. There are rendering functions but they just call the engine directly and provide no caching – there’s no context to decide how to cache and reuse templates. The key methods are Start and Stop and their main purpose is to start a new AppDomain (optionally) and shut it down when requested. The RazorFolderHostContainer – Folder Based Runtime Hosting Let’s look at the more application specific RazorFolderHostContainer implementation which is defined like this: public class RazorFolderHostContainer : RazorBaseHostContainer<RazorTemplateFolderHost> Note that a customized RazorTemplateFolderHost class template is used for this implementation that supports partial rendering in form of a RenderPartial() method that’s available to templates. The folder host’s features are: Render templates based on a Template Base Path (a ‘virtual’ if you will) Cache compiled assemblies based on the relative path and file time stamp File changes on templates cause templates to be recompiled into new assemblies Support for partial rendering using base folder relative pathing As shown in the startup examples earlier host containers require some startup code with a HostContainer tied to a persistent property (like a Form property): // The base path for templates - templates are rendered with relative paths // based on this path. HostContainer.TemplatePath = Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, TemplateBaseFolder); // Default output rendering disk location HostContainer.RenderingOutputFile = Path.Combine(HostContainer.TemplatePath, "__Preview.htm"); // Add any assemblies you want reference in your templates HostContainer.ReferencedAssemblies.Add("System.Windows.Forms.dll"); // Start up the host container HostContainer.Start(); Once that’s done, you can render templates with the host container: // Pass the template path for full filename seleted with OpenFile Dialog // relativepath is: subdir\file.cshtml or file.cshtml or ..\file.cshtml var relativePath = Utilities.GetRelativePath(fileName, HostContainer.TemplatePath); if (!HostContainer.RenderTemplate(relativePath, Context, HostContainer.RenderingOutputFile)) { MessageBox.Show("Error: " + HostContainer.ErrorMessage); return; } webBrowser1.Navigate("file://" + HostContainer.RenderingOutputFile); The most critical task of the RazorFolderHostContainer implementation is to retrieve a template from disk, compile and cache it and then deal with deciding whether subsequent requests need to re-compile the template or simply use a cached version. Internally the GetAssemblyFromFileAndCache() handles this task: /// <summary> /// Internally checks if a cached assembly exists and if it does uses it /// else creates and compiles one. Returns an assembly Id to be /// used with the LoadedAssembly list. /// </summary> /// <param name="relativePath"></param> /// <param name="context"></param> /// <returns></returns> protected virtual CompiledAssemblyItem GetAssemblyFromFileAndCache(string relativePath) { string fileName = Path.Combine(TemplatePath, relativePath).ToLower(); int fileNameHash = fileName.GetHashCode(); if (!File.Exists(fileName)) { this.SetError(Resources.TemplateFileDoesnTExist + fileName); return null; } CompiledAssemblyItem item = null; this.LoadedAssemblies.TryGetValue(fileNameHash, out item); string assemblyId = null; // Check for cached instance if (item != null) { var fileTime = File.GetLastWriteTimeUtc(fileName); if (fileTime <= item.CompileTimeUtc) assemblyId = item.AssemblyId; } else item = new CompiledAssemblyItem(); // No cached instance - create assembly and cache if (assemblyId == null) { string safeClassName = GetSafeClassName(fileName); StreamReader reader = null; try { reader = new StreamReader(fileName, true); } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(Resources.ErrorReadingTemplateFile + fileName); return null; } assemblyId = Engine.ParseAndCompileTemplate(this.ReferencedAssemblies.ToArray(), reader); // need to ensure reader is closed if (reader != null) reader.Close(); if (assemblyId == null) { this.SetError(Engine.ErrorMessage); return null; } item.AssemblyId = assemblyId; item.CompileTimeUtc = DateTime.UtcNow; item.FileName = fileName; item.SafeClassName = safeClassName; this.LoadedAssemblies[fileNameHash] = item; } return item; } This code uses a LoadedAssembly dictionary which is comprised of a structure that holds a reference to a compiled assembly, a full filename and file timestamp and an assembly id. LoadedAssemblies (defined on the base class shown earlier) is essentially a cache for compiled assemblies and they are identified by a hash id. In the case of files the hash is a GetHashCode() from the full filename of the template. The template is checked for in the cache and if not found the file stamp is checked. If that’s newer than the cache’s compilation date the template is recompiled otherwise the version in the cache is used. All the core work defers to a RazorEngine<T> instance to ParseAndCompileTemplate(). The three rendering specific methods then are rather simple implementations with just a few lines of code dealing with parameter and return value parsing: /// <summary> /// Renders a template to a TextWriter. Useful to write output into a stream or /// the Response object. Used for partial rendering. /// </summary> /// <param name="relativePath">Relative path to the file in the folder structure</param> /// <param name="context">Optional context object or null</param> /// <param name="writer">The textwriter to write output into</param> /// <returns></returns> public bool RenderTemplate(string relativePath, object context, TextWriter writer) { // Set configuration data that is to be passed to the template (any object) Engine.TemplatePerRequestConfigurationData = new RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration() { TemplatePath = Path.Combine(this.TemplatePath, relativePath), TemplateRelativePath = relativePath, }; CompiledAssemblyItem item = GetAssemblyFromFileAndCache(relativePath); if (item == null) { writer.Close(); return false; } try { // String result will be empty as output will be rendered into the // Response object's stream output. However a null result denotes // an error string result = Engine.RenderTemplateFromAssembly(item.AssemblyId, context, writer); if (result == null) { this.SetError(Engine.ErrorMessage); return false; } } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(ex.Message); return false; } finally { writer.Close(); } return true; } /// <summary> /// Render a template from a source file on disk to a specified outputfile. /// </summary> /// <param name="relativePath">Relative path off the template root folder. Format: path/filename.cshtml</param> /// <param name="context">Any object that will be available in the template as a dynamic of this.Context</param> /// <param name="outputFile">Optional - output file where output is written to. If not specified the /// RenderingOutputFile property is used instead /// </param> /// <returns>true if rendering succeeds, false on failure - check ErrorMessage</returns> public bool RenderTemplate(string relativePath, object context, string outputFile) { if (outputFile == null) outputFile = RenderingOutputFile; try { using (StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(outputFile, false, Engine.Configuration.OutputEncoding, Engine.Configuration.StreamBufferSize)) { return RenderTemplate(relativePath, context, writer); } } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(ex.Message); return false; } return true; } /// <summary> /// Renders a template to string. Useful for RenderTemplate /// </summary> /// <param name="relativePath"></param> /// <param name="context"></param> /// <returns></returns> public string RenderTemplateToString(string relativePath, object context) { string result = string.Empty; try { using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter()) { // String result will be empty as output will be rendered into the // Response object's stream output. However a null result denotes // an error if (!RenderTemplate(relativePath, context, writer)) { this.SetError(Engine.ErrorMessage); return null; } result = writer.ToString(); } } catch (Exception ex) { this.SetError(ex.Message); return null; } return result; } The idea is that you can create custom host container implementations that do exactly what you want fairly easily. Take a look at both the RazorFolderHostContainer and RazorStringHostContainer classes for the basic concepts you can use to create custom implementations. Notice also that you can set the engine’s PerRequestConfigurationData() from the host container: // Set configuration data that is to be passed to the template (any object) Engine.TemplatePerRequestConfigurationData = new RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration() { TemplatePath = Path.Combine(this.TemplatePath, relativePath), TemplateRelativePath = relativePath, }; which when set to a non-null value is passed to the Template’s InitializeTemplate() method. This method receives an object parameter which you can cast as needed: public override void InitializeTemplate(object configurationData) { // Pick up configuration data and stuff into Request object RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration config = configurationData as RazorFolderHostTemplateConfiguration; this.Request.TemplatePath = config.TemplatePath; this.Request.TemplateRelativePath = config.TemplateRelativePath; } With this data you can then configure any custom properties or objects on your main template class. It’s an easy way to pass data from the HostContainer all the way down into the template. The type you use is of type object so you have to cast it yourself, and it must be serializable since it will likely run in a separate AppDomain. This might seem like an ugly way to pass data around – normally I’d use an event delegate to call back from the engine to the host, but since this is running over AppDomain boundaries events get really tricky and passing a template instance back up into the host over AppDomain boundaries doesn’t work due to serialization issues. So it’s easier to pass the data from the host down into the template using this rather clumsy approach of set and forward. It’s ugly, but it’s something that can be hidden in the host container implementation as I’ve done here. It’s also not something you have to do in every implementation so this is kind of an edge case, but I know I’ll need to pass a bunch of data in some of my applications and this will be the easiest way to do so. Summing Up Hosting the Razor runtime is something I got jazzed up about quite a bit because I have an immediate need for this type of templating/merging/scripting capability in an application I’m working on. I’ve also been using templating in many apps and it’s always been a pain to deal with. The Razor engine makes this whole experience a lot cleaner and more light weight and with these wrappers I can now plug .NET based templating into my code literally with a few lines of code. That’s something to cheer about… I hope some of you will find this useful as well… Resources The examples and code require that you download the Razor runtimes. Projects are for Visual Studio 2010 running on .NET 4.0 Platform Installer 3.0 (install WebMatrix or MVC 3 for Razor Runtimes) Latest Code in Subversion Repository Download Snapshot of the Code Documentation (CHM Help File) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  .NET  

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• Is there a Telecommunications Reference Architecture?

  - by raul.goycoolea

  @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Abstract   Reference architecture provides needed architectural information that can be provided in advance to an enterprise to enable consistent architectural best practices. Enterprise Reference Architecture helps business owners to actualize their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. It evaluates the IT systems, based on Reference Architecture goals, principles, and standards. It helps to reduce IT costs by increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc. Telecom Reference Architecture provides customers with the flexibility to view bundled service bills online with the provision of multiple services. It provides real-time, flexible billing and charging systems, to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Enterprises. It lays the foundation for a Telecom Reference Architecture by articulating the requirements, drivers, and pitfalls for telecom service providers. It describes generic reference architecture for telecom enterprises and moves on to explain how to achieve Enterprise Reference Architecture by using SOA.   Introduction   A Reference Architecture provides a methodology, set of practices, template, and standards based on a set of successful solutions implemented earlier. These solutions have been generalized and structured for the depiction of both a logical and a physical architecture, based on the harvesting of a set of patterns that describe observations in a number of successful implementations. It helps as a reference for the various architectures that an enterprise can implement to solve various problems. It can be used as the starting point or the point of comparisons for various departments/business entities of a company, or for the various companies for an enterprise. It provides multiple views for multiple stakeholders.   Major artifacts of the Enterprise Reference Architecture are methodologies, standards, metadata, documents, design patterns, etc.   Purpose of Reference Architecture   In most cases, architects spend a lot of time researching, investigating, defining, and re-arguing architectural decisions. It is like reinventing the wheel as their peers in other organizations or even the same organization have already spent a lot of time and effort defining their own architectural practices. This prevents an organization from learning from its own experiences and applying that knowledge for increased effectiveness.   Reference architecture provides missing architectural information that can be provided in advance to project team members to enable consistent architectural best practices.   Enterprise Reference Architecture helps an enterprise to achieve the following at the abstract level:   ·       Reference architecture is more of a communication channel to an enterprise ·       Helps the business owners to accommodate to their strategies, vision, objectives, and principles. ·       Evaluates the IT systems based on Reference Architecture Principles ·       Reduces IT spending through increasing functionality, availability, scalability, etc ·       A Real-time Integration Model helps to reduce the latency of the data updates Is used to define a single source of Information ·       Provides a clear view on how to manage information and security ·       Defines the policy around the data ownership, product boundaries, etc. ·       Helps with cost optimization across project and solution portfolios by eliminating unused or duplicate investments and assets ·       Has a shorter implementation time and cost   Once the reference architecture is in place, the set of architectural principles, standards, reference models, and best practices ensure that the aligned investments have the greatest possible likelihood of success in both the near term and the long term (TCO).     Common pitfalls for Telecom Service Providers   Telecom Reference Architecture serves as the first step towards maturity for a telecom service provider. During the course of our assignments/experiences with telecom players, we have come across the following observations – Some of these indicate a lack of maturity of the telecom service provider:   ·       In markets that are growing and not so mature, it has been observed that telcos have a significant amount of in-house or home-grown applications. In some of these markets, the growth has been so rapid that IT has been unable to cope with business demands. Telcos have shown a tendency to come up with workarounds in their IT applications so as to meet business needs. ·       Even for core functions like provisioning or mediation, some telcos have tried to manage with home-grown applications. ·       Most of the applications do not have the required scalability or maintainability to sustain growth in volumes or functionality. ·       Applications face interoperability issues with other applications in the operator's landscape. Integrating a new application or network element requires considerable effort on the part of the other applications. ·       Application boundaries are not clear, and functionality that is not in the initial scope of that application gets pushed onto it. This results in the development of the multiple, small applications without proper boundaries. ·       Usage of Legacy OSS/BSS systems, poor Integration across Multiple COTS Products and Internal Systems. Most of the Integrations are developed on ad-hoc basis and Point-to-Point Integration. ·       Redundancy of the business functions in different applications • Fragmented data across the different applications and no integrated view of the strategic data • Lot of performance Issues due to the usage of the complex integration across OSS and BSS systems   However, this is where the maturity of the telecom industry as a whole can be of help. The collaborative efforts of telcos to overcome some of these problems have resulted in bodies like the TM Forum. They have come up with frameworks for business processes, data, applications, and technology for telecom service providers. These could be a good starting point for telcos to clean up their enterprise landscape.   Industry Trends in Telecom Reference Architecture   Telecom reference architectures are evolving rapidly because telcos are facing business and IT challenges.   “The reality is that there probably is no killer application, no silver bullet that the telcos can latch onto to carry them into a 21st Century.... Instead, there are probably hundreds – perhaps thousands – of niche applications.... And the only way to find which of these works for you is to try out lots of them, ramp up the ones that work, and discontinue the ones that fail.” – Martin Creaner President & CTO TM Forum.   The following trends have been observed in telecom reference architecture:   ·       Transformation of business structures to align with customer requirements ·       Adoption of more Internet-like technical architectures. The Web 2.0 concept is increasingly being used. ·       Virtualization of the traditional operations support system (OSS) ·       Adoption of SOA to support development of IP-based services ·       Adoption of frameworks like Service Delivery Platforms (SDPs) and IP Multimedia Subsystem ·       (IMS) to enable seamless deployment of various services over fixed and mobile networks ·       Replacement of in-house, customized, and stove-piped OSS/BSS with standards-based COTS products ·       Compliance with industry standards and frameworks like eTOM, SID, and TAM to enable seamless integration with other standards-based products   Drivers of Reference Architecture   The drivers of the Reference Architecture are Reference Architecture Goals, Principles, and Enterprise Vision and Telecom Transformation. The details are depicted below diagram. @font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Figure 1. Drivers for Reference Architecture @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Today’s telecom reference architectures should seamlessly integrate traditional legacy-based applications and transition to next-generation network technologies (e.g., IP multimedia subsystems). This has resulted in new requirements for flexible, real-time billing and OSS/BSS systems and implications on the service provider’s organizational requirements and structure.   Telecom reference architectures are today expected to:   ·       Integrate voice, messaging, email and other VAS over fixed and mobile networks, back end systems ·       Be able to provision multiple services and service bundles • Deliver converged voice, video and data services ·       Leverage the existing Network Infrastructure ·       Provide real-time, flexible billing and charging systems to handle complex promotions, discounts, and settlements with multiple parties. ·       Support charging of advanced data services such as VoIP, On-Demand, Services (e.g.  Video), IMS/SIP Services, Mobile Money, Content Services and IPTV. ·       Help in faster deployment of new services • Serve as an effective platform for collaboration between network IT and business organizations ·       Harness the potential of converging technology, networks, devices and content to develop multimedia services and solutions of ever-increasing sophistication on a single Internet Protocol (IP) ·       Ensure better service delivery and zero revenue leakage through real-time balance and credit management ·       Lower operating costs to drive profitability   Enterprise Reference Architecture   The Enterprise Reference Architecture (RA) fills the gap between the concepts and vocabulary defined by the reference model and the implementation. Reference architecture provides detailed architectural information in a common format such that solutions can be repeatedly designed and deployed in a consistent, high-quality, supportable fashion. This paper attempts to describe the Reference Architecture for the Telecom Application Usage and how to achieve the Enterprise Level Reference Architecture using SOA.   • Telecom Reference Architecture • Enterprise SOA based Reference Architecture   Telecom Reference Architecture   Tele Management Forum’s New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) is an architectural framework for organizing, integrating, and implementing telecom systems. NGOSS is a component-based framework consisting of the following elements:   ·       The enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a business process framework. ·       The Shared Information Data (SID) model provides a comprehensive information framework that may be specialized for the needs of a particular organization. ·       The Telecom Application Map (TAM) is an application framework to depict the functional footprint of applications, relative to the horizontal processes within eTOM. ·       The Technology Neutral Architecture (TNA) is an integrated framework. TNA is an architecture that is sustainable through technology changes.   NGOSS Architecture Standards are:   ·       Centralized data ·       Loosely coupled distributed systems ·       Application components/re-use  ·       A technology-neutral system framework with technology specific implementations ·       Interoperability to service provider data/processes ·       Allows more re-use of business components across multiple business scenarios ·       Workflow automation   The traditional operator systems architecture consists of four layers,   ·       Business Support System (BSS) layer, with focus toward customers and business partners. Manages order, subscriber, pricing, rating, and billing information. ·       Operations Support System (OSS) layer, built around product, service, and resource inventories. ·       Networks layer – consists of Network elements and 3rd Party Systems. ·       Integration Layer – to maximize application communication and overall solution flexibility.   Reference architecture for telecom enterprises is depicted below. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 2. Telecom Reference Architecture   The major building blocks of any Telecom Service Provider architecture are as follows:   1. Customer Relationship Management   CRM encompasses the end-to-end lifecycle of the customer: customer initiation/acquisition, sales, ordering, and service activation, customer care and support, proactive campaigns, cross sell/up sell, and retention/loyalty.   CRM also includes the collection of customer information and its application to personalize, customize, and integrate delivery of service to a customer, as well as to identify opportunities for increasing the value of the customer to the enterprise.   The key functionalities related to Customer Relationship Management are   ·       Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of a customer request for products. ·       Create and manage customer profiles. ·       Manage all interactions with customers – inquiries, requests, and responses. ·       Provide updates to Billing and other south bound systems on customer/account related updates such as customer/ account creation, deletion, modification, request bills, final bill, duplicate bills, credit limits through Middleware. ·       Work with Order Management System, Product, and Service Management components within CRM. ·       Manage customer preferences – Involve all the touch points and channels to the customer, including contact center, retail stores, dealers, self service, and field service, as well as via any media (phone, face to face, web, mobile device, chat, email, SMS, mail, the customer's bill, etc.). ·       Support single interface for customer contact details, preferences, account details, offers, customer premise equipment, bill details, bill cycle details, and customer interactions.   CRM applications interact with customers through customer touch points like portals, point-of-sale terminals, interactive voice response systems, etc. The requests by customers are sent via fulfillment/provisioning to billing system for ordering processing.   2. Billing and Revenue Management   Billing and Revenue Management handles the collection of appropriate usage records and production of timely and accurate bills – for providing pre-bill usage information and billing to customers; for processing their payments; and for performing payment collections. In addition, it handles customer inquiries about bills, provides billing inquiry status, and is responsible for resolving billing problems to the customer's satisfaction in a timely manner. This process grouping also supports prepayment for services.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       To ensure that enterprise revenue is billed and invoices delivered appropriately to customers. ·       To manage customers’ billing accounts, process their payments, perform payment collections, and monitor the status of the account balance. ·       To ensure the timely and effective fulfillment of all customer bill inquiries and complaints. ·       Collect the usage records from mediation and ensure appropriate rating and discounting of all usage and pricing. ·       Support revenue sharing; split charging where usage is guided to an account different from the service consumer. ·       Support prepaid and post-paid rating. ·       Send notification on approach / exceeding the usage thresholds as enforced by the subscribed offer, and / or as setup by the customer. ·       Support prepaid, post paid, and hybrid (where some services are prepaid and the rest of the services post paid) customers and conversion from post paid to prepaid, and vice versa. ·       Support different billing function requirements like charge prorating, promotion, discount, adjustment, waiver, write-off, account receivable, GL Interface, late payment fee, credit control, dunning, account or service suspension, re-activation, expiry, termination, contract violation penalty, etc. ·       Initiate direct debit to collect payment against an invoice outstanding. ·       Send notification to Middleware on different events; for example, payment receipt, pre-suspension, threshold exceed, etc.   Billing systems typically get usage data from mediation systems for rating and billing. They get provisioning requests from order management systems and inquiries from CRM systems. Convergent and real-time billing systems can directly get usage details from network elements.   3. Mediation   Mediation systems transform/translate the Raw or Native Usage Data Records into a general format that is acceptable to billing for their rating purposes.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Mediation system in the end-to-end solution.   ·       Collect Usage Data Records from different data sources – like network elements, routers, servers – via different protocol and interfaces. ·       Process Usage Data Records – Mediation will process Usage Data Records as per the source format. ·       Validate Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Segregates Usage Data Records coming from each source to multiple, based on the segregation requirement of end Application. ·       Aggregates Usage Data Records based on the aggregation rule if any from different sources. ·       Consolidates multiple Usage Data Records from each source. ·       Delivers formatted Usage Data Records to different end application like Billing, Interconnect, Fraud Management, etc. ·       Generates audit trail for incoming Usage Data Records and keeps track of all the Usage Data Records at various stages of mediation process. ·       Checks duplicate Usage Data Records across files for a given time window.   4. Fulfillment   This area is responsible for providing customers with their requested products in a timely and correct manner. It translates the customer's business or personal need into a solution that can be delivered using the specific products in the enterprise's portfolio. This process informs the customers of the status of their purchase order, and ensures completion on time, as well as ensuring a delighted customer. These processes are responsible for accepting and issuing orders. They deal with pre-order feasibility determination, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on customer order activities, and customer notification on order completion. Order management and provisioning applications fall into this category.   The key functionalities provided by these applications are   ·       Issuing new customer orders, modifying open customer orders, or canceling open customer orders; ·       Verifying whether specific non-standard offerings sought by customers are feasible and supportable; ·       Checking the credit worthiness of customers as part of the customer order process; ·       Testing the completed offering to ensure it is working correctly; ·       Updating of the Customer Inventory Database to reflect that the specific product offering has been allocated, modified, or cancelled; ·       Assigning and tracking customer provisioning activities; ·       Managing customer provisioning jeopardy conditions; and ·       Reporting progress on customer orders and other processes to customer.   These applications typically get orders from CRM systems. They interact with network elements and billing systems for fulfillment of orders.   5. Enterprise Management   This process area includes those processes that manage enterprise-wide activities and needs, or have application within the enterprise as a whole. They encompass all business management processes that   ·       Are necessary to support the whole of the enterprise, including processes for financial management, legal management, regulatory management, process, cost, and quality management, etc.;   ·       Are responsible for setting corporate policies, strategies, and directions, and for providing guidelines and targets for the whole of the business, including strategy development and planning for areas, such as Enterprise Architecture, that are integral to the direction and development of the business;   ·       Occur throughout the enterprise, including processes for project management, performance assessments, cost assessments, etc.     (i) Enterprise Risk Management:   Enterprise Risk Management focuses on assuring that risks and threats to the enterprise value and/or reputation are identified, and appropriate controls are in place to minimize or eliminate the identified risks. The identified risks may be physical or logical/virtual. Successful risk management ensures that the enterprise can support its mission critical operations, processes, applications, and communications in the face of serious incidents such as security threats/violations and fraud attempts. Two key areas covered in Risk Management by telecom operators are:   ·       Revenue Assurance: Revenue assurance system will be responsible for identifying revenue loss scenarios across components/systems, and will help in rectifying the problems. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Revenue Assurance system in the end-to-end solution. o   Identify all usage information dropped when networks are being upgraded. o   Interconnect bill verification. o   Identify where services are routinely provisioned but never billed. o   Identify poor sales policies that are intensifying collections problems. o   Find leakage where usage is sent to error bucket and never billed for. o   Find leakage where field service, CRM, and network build-out are not optimized.   ·       Fraud Management: Involves collecting data from different systems to identify abnormalities in traffic patterns, usage patterns, and subscription patterns to report suspicious activity that might suggest fraudulent usage of resources, resulting in revenue losses to the operator.   The key roles and responsibilities of the system component are as follows:   o   Fraud management system will capture and monitor high usage (over a certain threshold) in terms of duration, value, and number of calls for each subscriber. The threshold for each subscriber is decided by the system and fixed automatically. o   Fraud management will be able to detect the unauthorized access to services for certain subscribers. These subscribers may have been provided unauthorized services by employees. The component will raise the alert to the operator the very first time of such illegal calls or calls which are not billed. o   The solution will be to have an alarm management system that will deliver alarms to the operator/provider whenever it detects a fraud, thus minimizing fraud by catching it the first time it occurs. o   The Fraud Management system will be capable of interfacing with switches, mediation systems, and billing systems   (ii) Knowledge Management   This process focuses on knowledge management, technology research within the enterprise, and the evaluation of potential technology acquisitions.   Key responsibilities of knowledge base management are to   ·       Maintain knowledge base – Creation and updating of knowledge base on ongoing basis. ·       Search knowledge base – Search of knowledge base on keywords or category browse ·       Maintain metadata – Management of metadata on knowledge base to ensure effective management and search. ·       Run report generator. ·       Provide content – Add content to the knowledge base, e.g., user guides, operational manual, etc.   (iii) Document Management   It focuses on maintaining a repository of all electronic documents or images of paper documents relevant to the enterprise using a system.   (iv) Data Management   It manages data as a valuable resource for any enterprise. For telecom enterprises, the typical areas covered are Master Data Management, Data Warehousing, and Business Intelligence. It is also responsible for data governance, security, quality, and database management.   Key responsibilities of Data Management are   ·       Using ETL, extract the data from CRM, Billing, web content, ERP, campaign management, financial, network operations, asset management info, customer contact data, customer measures, benchmarks, process data, e.g., process inputs, outputs, and measures, into Enterprise Data Warehouse. ·       Management of data traceability with source, data related business rules/decisions, data quality, data cleansing data reconciliation, competitors data – storage for all the enterprise data (customer profiles, products, offers, revenues, etc.) ·       Get online update through night time replication or physical backup process at regular frequency. ·       Provide the data access to business intelligence and other systems for their analysis, report generation, and use.   (v) Business Intelligence   It uses the Enterprise Data to provide the various analysis and reports that contain prospects and analytics for customer retention, acquisition of new customers due to the offers, and SLAs. It will generate right and optimized plans – bolt-ons for the customers.   The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Business Intelligence system at the Enterprise Level:   ·       It will do Pattern analysis and reports problem. ·       It will do Data Analysis – Statistical analysis, data profiling, affinity analysis of data, customer segment wise usage patterns on offers, products, service and revenue generation against services and customer segments. ·       It will do Performance (business, system, and forecast) analysis, churn propensity, response time, and SLAs analysis. ·       It will support for online and offline analysis, and report drill down capability. ·       It will collect, store, and report various SLA data. ·       It will provide the necessary intelligence for marketing and working on campaigns, etc., with cost benefit analysis and predictions.   It will advise on customer promotions with additional services based on loyalty and credit history of customer   ·       It will Interface with Enterprise Data Management system for data to run reports and analysis tasks. It will interface with the campaign schedules, based on historical success evidence.   (vi) Stakeholder and External Relations Management   It manages the enterprise's relationship with stakeholders and outside entities. Stakeholders include shareholders, employee organizations, etc. Outside entities include regulators, local community, and unions. Some of the processes within this grouping are Shareholder Relations, External Affairs, Labor Relations, and Public Relations.   (vii) Enterprise Resource Planning   It is used to manage internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. Its purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the enterprise and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.   The key roles and responsibilities for Enterprise System are given below:   ·        It will handle responsibilities such as core accounting, financial, and management reporting. ·       It will interface with CRM for capturing customer account and details. ·       It will interface with billing to capture the billing revenue and other financial data. ·       It will be responsible for executing the dunning process. Billing will send the required feed to ERP for execution of dunning. ·       It will interface with the CRM and Billing through batch interfaces. Enterprise management systems are like horizontals in the enterprise and typically interact with all major telecom systems. E.g., an ERP system interacts with CRM, Fulfillment, and Billing systems for different kinds of data exchanges.   6. External Interfaces/Touch Points   The typical external parties are customers, suppliers/partners, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders. External interactions from/to a Service Provider to other parties can be achieved by a variety of mechanisms, including:   ·       Exchange of emails or faxes ·       Call Centers ·       Web Portals ·       Business-to-Business (B2B) automated transactions   These applications provide an Internet technology driven interface to external parties to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These can provide fully or partially automated service to external parties through various touch points.   Typical characteristics of these touch points are   ·       Pre-integrated self-service system, including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine ·       Self services layer exposing atomic web services/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment ·       Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application   These touch points mostly interact with the CRM systems for requests, inquiries, and responses.   7. Middleware   The component will be primarily responsible for integrating the different systems components under a common platform. It should provide a Standards-Based Platform for building Service Oriented Architecture and Composite Applications. The following lists the high-level roles and responsibilities executed by the Middleware component in the end-to-end solution.   ·       As an integration framework, covering to and fro interfaces ·       Provide a web service framework with service registry. ·       Support SOA framework with SOA service registry. ·       Each of the interfaces from / to Middleware to other components would handle data transformation, translation, and mapping of data points. ·       Receive data from the caller / activate and/or forward the data to the recipient system in XML format. ·       Use standard XML for data exchange. ·       Provide the response back to the service/call initiator. ·       Provide a tracking until the response completion. ·       Keep a store transitional data against each call/transaction. ·       Interface through Middleware to get any information that is possible and allowed from the existing systems to enterprise systems; e.g., customer profile and customer history, etc. ·       Provide the data in a common unified format to the SOA calls across systems, and follow the Enterprise Architecture directive. ·       Provide an audit trail for all transactions being handled by the component.   8. Network Elements   The term Network Element means a facility or equipment used in the provision of a telecommunications service. Such terms also includes features, functions, and capabilities that are provided by means of such facility or equipment, including subscriber numbers, databases, signaling systems, and information sufficient for billing and collection or used in the transmission, routing, or other provision of a telecommunications service.   Typical network elements in a GSM network are Home Location Register (HLR), Intelligent Network (IN), Mobile Switching Center (MSC), SMS Center (SMSC), and network elements for other value added services like Push-to-talk (PTT), Ring Back Tone (RBT), etc.   Network elements are invoked when subscribers use their telecom devices for any kind of usage. These elements generate usage data and pass it on to downstream systems like mediation and billing system for rating and billing. They also integrate with provisioning systems for order/service fulfillment.   9. 3rd Party Applications   3rd Party systems are applications like content providers, payment gateways, point of sale terminals, and databases/applications maintained by the Government.   Depending on applicability and the type of functionality provided by 3rd party applications, the integration with different telecom systems like CRM, provisioning, and billing will be done.   10. Service Delivery Platform   A service delivery platform (SDP) provides the architecture for the rapid deployment, provisioning, execution, management, and billing of value added telecom services. SDPs are based on the concept of SOA and layered architecture. They support the delivery of voice, data services, and content in network and device-independent fashion. They allow application developers to aggregate network capabilities, services, and sources of content. SDPs typically contain layers for web services exposure, service application development, and network abstraction.   SOA Reference Architecture   SOA concept is based on the principle of developing reusable business service and building applications by composing those services, instead of building monolithic applications in silos. It’s about bridging the gap between business and IT through a set of business-aligned IT services, using a set of design principles, patterns, and techniques.   In an SOA, resources are made available to participants in a value net, enterprise, line of business (typically spanning multiple applications within an enterprise or across multiple enterprises). It consists of a set of business-aligned IT services that collectively fulfill an organization’s business processes and goals. We can choreograph these services into composite applications and invoke them through standard protocols. SOA, apart from agility and reusability, enables:   ·       The business to specify processes as orchestrations of reusable services ·       Technology agnostic business design, with technology hidden behind service interface ·       A contractual-like interaction between business and IT, based on service SLAs ·       Accountability and governance, better aligned to business services ·       Applications interconnections untangling by allowing access only through service interfaces, reducing the daunting side effects of change ·       Reduced pressure to replace legacy and extended lifetime for legacy applications, through encapsulation in services   ·       A Cloud Computing paradigm, using web services technologies, that makes possible service outsourcing on an on-demand, utility-like, pay-per-usage basis   The following section represents the Reference Architecture of logical view for the Telecom Solution. The new custom built application needs to align with this logical architecture in the long run to achieve EA benefits.   Packaged implementation applications, such as ERP billing applications, need to expose their functions as service providers (as other applications consume) and interact with other applications as service consumers.   COT applications need to expose services through wrappers such as adapters to utilize existing resources and at the same time achieve Enterprise Architecture goal and objectives.   The following are the various layers for Enterprise level deployment of SOA. This diagram captures the abstract view of Enterprise SOA layers and important components of each layer. Layered architecture means decomposition of services such that most interactions occur between adjacent layers. However, there is no strict rule that top layers should not directly communicate with bottom layers.   The diagram below represents the important logical pieces that would result from overall SOA transformation. @font-face { font-family: "Arial"; }@font-face { font-family: "Courier New"; }@font-face { font-family: "Wingdings"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoCaption, li.MsoCaption, div.MsoCaption { margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt; font-size: 9pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; color: rgb(79, 129, 189); font-weight: bold; }p.MsoListParagraph, li.MsoListParagraph, div.MsoListParagraph { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, li.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast, div.MsoListParagraphCxSpLast { margin: 0cm 0cm 0.0001pt 36pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }ol { margin-bottom: 0cm; }ul { margin-bottom: 0cm; } Figure 3. Enterprise SOA Reference Architecture 1.          Operational System Layer: This layer consists of all packaged applications like CRM, ERP, custom built applications, COTS based applications like Billing, Revenue Management, Fulfilment, and the Enterprise databases that are essential and contribute directly or indirectly to the Enterprise OSS/BSS Transformation.   ERP holds the data of Asset Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain, and Advanced Procurement and Human Capital Management, etc.   CRM holds the data related to Order, Sales, and Marketing, Customer Care, Partner Relationship Management, Loyalty, etc.   Content Management handles Enterprise Search and Query. Billing application consists of the following components:   ·       Collections Management, Customer Billing Management, Invoices, Real-Time Rating, Discounting, and Applying of Charges ·       Enterprise databases will hold both the application and service data, whether structured or unstructured.   MDM - Master data majorly consists of Customer, Order, Product, and Service Data.     2.          Enterprise Component Layer:   This layer consists of the Application Services and Common Services that are responsible for realizing the functionality and maintaining the QoS of the exposed services. This layer uses container-based technologies such as application servers to implement the components, workload management, high availability, and load balancing.   Application Services: This Service Layer enables application, technology, and database abstraction so that the complex accessing logic is hidden from the other service layers. This is a basic service layer, which exposes application functionalities and data as reusable services. The three types of the Application access services are:   ·       Application Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application level functionalities as a reusable service between BSS to BSS and BSS to OSS integration. This layer is enabled using disparate technology such as Web Service, Integration Servers, and Adaptors, etc.   ·       Data Access Service: This Service Layer exposes application data services as a reusable reference data service. This is done via direct interaction with application data. and provides the federated query.   ·       Network Access Service: This Service Layer exposes provisioning layer as a reusable service from OSS to OSS integration. This integration service emphasizes the need for high performance, stateless process flows, and distributed design.   Common Services encompasses management of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as information services, portal services, interaction services, infrastructure services, and security services, etc.   3.          Integration Layer:   This consists of service infrastructure components like service bus, service gateway for partner integration, service registry, service repository, and BPEL processor. Service bus will carry the service invocation payloads/messages between consumers and providers. The other important functions expected from it are itinerary based routing, distributed caching of routing information, transformations, and all qualities of service for messaging-like reliability, scalability, and availability, etc. Service registry will hold all contracts (wsdl) of services, and it helps developers to locate or discover service during design time or runtime.   • BPEL processor would be useful in orchestrating the services to compose a complex business scenario or process. • Workflow and business rules management are also required to support manual triggering of certain activities within business process. based on the rules setup and also the state machine information. Application, data, and service mediation layer typically forms the overall composite application development framework or SOA Framework.   4.          Business Process Layer: These are typically the intermediate services layer and represent Shared Business Process Services. At Enterprise Level, these services are from Customer Management, Order Management, Billing, Finance, and Asset Management application domains.   5.          Access Layer: This layer consists of portals for Enterprise and provides a single view of Enterprise information management and dashboard services.   6.          Channel Layer: This consists of various devices; applications that form part of extended enterprise; browsers through which users access the applications.   7.          Client Layer: This designates the different types of users accessing the enterprise applications. The type of user typically would be an important factor in determining the level of access to applications.   8.          Vertical pieces like management, monitoring, security, and development cut across all horizontal layers Management and monitoring involves all aspects of SOA-like services, SLAs, and other QoS lifecycle processes for both applications and services surrounding SOA governance.     9.          EA Governance, Reference Architecture, Roadmap, Principles, and Best Practices:   EA Governance is important in terms of providing the overall direction to SOA implementation within the enterprise. This involves board-level involvement, in addition to business and IT executives. At a high level, this involves managing the SOA projects implementation, managing SOA infrastructure, and controlling the entire effort through all fine-tuned IT processes in accordance with COBIT (Control Objectives for Information Technology).   Devising tools and techniques to promote reuse culture, and the SOA way of doing things needs competency centers to be established in addition to training the workforce to take up new roles that are suited to SOA journey.   Conclusions   Reference Architectures can serve as the basis for disparate architecture efforts throughout the organization, even if they use different tools and technologies. Reference architectures provide best practices and approaches in the independent way a vendor deals with technology and standards. Reference Architectures model the abstract architectural elements for an enterprise independent of the technologies, protocols, and products that are used to implement an SOA. Telecom enterprises today are facing significant business and technology challenges due to growing competition, a multitude of services, and convergence. Adopting architectural best practices could go a long way in meeting these challenges. The use of SOA-based architecture for communication to each of the external systems like Billing, CRM, etc., in OSS/BSS system has made the architecture very loosely coupled, with greater flexibility. Any change in the external systems would be absorbed at the Integration Layer without affecting the rest of the ecosystem. The use of a Business Process Management (BPM) tool makes the management and maintenance of the business processes easy, with better performance in terms of lead time, quality, and cost. Since the Architecture is based on standards, it will lower the cost of deploying and managing OSS/BSS applications over their lifecycles.

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• Task Scheduler permissions error for some jobs

  - by MaseBase

  I have recently moved to a 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2. I setup my Scheduled Tasks to run under one user (TaskUser) specifically created for the scheduler and most run just fine. However some of them do not run under TaskUser but will for my own credentials. Here is the Event Log entry I found, which from my research points me to believe that it doesn't have permissions, but it does. It also has the option "Run with highest privileges" checked on. I have seen this particular checkbox work wonders on some tasks, but I have a number of them that it's not helping for. The error is ERROR_ELEVATION_REQUIRED but the user is a member of the administrators group and has folder/file permission and is set to "Run with highest privileges" Log Name: Microsoft-Windows-UAC/Operational Source: Microsoft-Windows-UAC Date: 4/27/2010 2:21:44 PM Event ID: 1 Task Category: (1) Level: Error Keywords: User: LIVE\TaskUser Computer: www2 Description: The process failed to handle ERROR_ELEVATION_REQUIRED during the creation of a child process. Event Xml: <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-UAC" Guid="{E7558269-3FA5-46ED-9F4D-3C6E282DDE55}" /> <EventID>1</EventID> <Version>0</Version> <Level>2</Level> <Task>1</Task> <Opcode>0</Opcode> <Keywords>0x8000000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2010-04-27T21:21:44.407053800Z" /> <EventRecordID>19</EventRecordID> <Correlation /> <Execution ProcessID="2460" ThreadID="5960" /> <Channel>Microsoft-Windows-UAC/Operational</Channel> <Computer>www2</Computer> <Security UserID="S-1-5-21-4017510424-2083581016-1307463562-1640" /> </System> <EventData></EventData> </Event> The errors shown in the Task Scheduler History tab display these results and states This operation requires an interactive window station. (0x800705B3) EventID 103 Task Scheduler failed to launch action "F:\App\Path\ConsoleApp.exe" in instance "{1a6d3450-b85a-40c0-b3db-72b98c1aa395}" of task "\taskFolder\taskName". Additional Data: Error Value: 2147943859. EventID 203 Task Scheduler failed to start instance "{1a6d3450-b85a-40c0-b3db-72b98c1aa395}" of "\taskFolder\taskName" task for user "LIVE\TaskUser" . Additional Data: Error Value: 2147943859.

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• vSphere Client vCenter Template Customization Specification Using Windows Sysprep Unattended Answer XML File

  - by Brian

  I'm trying to setup a vSphere Client vCenter v5.0.0 Build 455964 Template Customization Specification using a Windows Sysprep unattended answer XML file for Win2008R2. However I didn't know how Sysprep worked before attempting this so it was a time-consuming nightmare (even after reviewing VMware vSphere ESXi 5's documentation)! I think I've figure out what I'm supposed to be doing, but it's still not working. The biggest problem at this point is that vSphere Client vCenter Customization Specification IP address information is not sticking when I load a Sysprep XML file with just 1 basic setting! This can only be a bug. Here is the process I'm using: PROCESS for Windows - vSphere Client Install Windows OS install VM Tools customize Windows (GPOs can be used to do this after deployment) install Applications (GPOs can be used to do this after deployment too) shutdown the VM convert the VM to a template create a custom Windows Sysprep XML answer file with desired customizations View Management Customization Specifications Manager create "New" Specification for "Target Virtual Machine OS" select Windows check "Use Custom Sysprep Answer File" (ADDS: Custom Sysprep File. KEEPS: Network (IP), Operating System Options (SID, Sysprep /generalize). REPLACES: Registration Information of Owner Name & Organization, Computer Name, Windows License (Key), Administrator Password, Time Zone, Run Once, Workgroup or Domain) name it as "VMwareCS-OS####R#x32/64w/Sysprep-TEST" (CS=Customization Specification) set Description as "Created YYYY/MM/DD by FLast" NEXT import a Sysprep answer file from secure location NEXT Custom settings NEXT click "..." box to right of "Use DHCP" set "Use the following IP settings:" for "IP Address" fill out the first 2 octets set appropriate values for other 2-3 fields set DNS server addresses OK NEXT check "Generate New Security ID (SID)" ALWAYS as template is likely a domain-member computer so it can be updated occasionally NEXT Finish View Inventory VMs and Templates right-click previously completed template Deploy Virtual Machine from this Template provide the new OS name (max15char) select inventory location NEXT select Host/Cluster (wait for validation to succeed) NEXT select Resource Pool (wait for validation to succeed) NEXT select Storage location NEXT check "Power on this virtual machine after creation" select "Customize using an existing customization specification" select desired specification select "Use the Customization Wizard to temporarily adjust the specification before deployment" NEXT NEXT Custom settings? NEXT check "Generate New Security ID (SID)" ALWAYS as template is likely a domain-member computer so it can be updated occasionally NEXT Finish Finish. I know a community member named "brian" (http://serverfault.com/users/25904/brian) has worked with this scenario before, but I couldn't figure out how to contact him directly, so Brian if you see this message could you provide some information to help? Thanks, Brian

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• Failed MDADM Array With Ext.4 Partition - "e2fsck: unable to set superblock flags on /dev/md0"

  - by Matthew Hodgkins

  Had a power failure and now my mdadm array is having problems. sudo mdadm -D /dev/md0 [hodge@hodge-fs ~]$ sudo mdadm -D /dev/md0 /dev/md0: Version : 0.90 Creation Time : Sun Apr 25 01:39:25 2010 Raid Level : raid5 Array Size : 8790815232 (8383.57 GiB 9001.79 GB) Used Dev Size : 1465135872 (1397.26 GiB 1500.30 GB) Raid Devices : 7 Total Devices : 7 Preferred Minor : 0 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sat Aug 7 19:10:28 2010 State : clean, degraded, recovering Active Devices : 6 Working Devices : 7 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 1 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 128K Rebuild Status : 10% complete UUID : 44a8f730:b9bea6ea:3a28392c:12b22235 (local to host hodge-fs) Events : 0.1307608 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 81 0 active sync /dev/sdf1 1 8 97 1 active sync /dev/sdg1 2 8 113 2 active sync /dev/sdh1 3 8 65 3 active sync /dev/sde1 4 8 49 4 active sync /dev/sdd1 7 8 33 5 spare rebuilding /dev/sdc1 6 8 16 6 active sync /dev/sdb sudo mount -a [hodge@hodge-fs ~]$ sudo mount -a mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/md0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so sudo fsck.ext4 /dev/md0 [hodge@hodge-fs ~]$ sudo fsck.ext4 /dev/md0 e2fsck 1.41.12 (17-May-2010) fsck.ext4: Group descriptors look bad... trying backup blocks... /dev/md0: recovering journal fsck.ext4: unable to set superblock flags on /dev/md0 sudo dumpe2fs /dev/md0 | grep -i superblock [hodge@hodge-fs ~]$ sudo dumpe2fs /dev/md0 | grep -i superblock dumpe2fs 1.41.12 (17-May-2010) Primary superblock at 0, Group descriptors at 1-524 Backup superblock at 32768, Group descriptors at 32769-33292 Backup superblock at 98304, Group descriptors at 98305-98828 Backup superblock at 163840, Group descriptors at 163841-164364 Backup superblock at 229376, Group descriptors at 229377-229900 Backup superblock at 294912, Group descriptors at 294913-295436 Backup superblock at 819200, Group descriptors at 819201-819724 Backup superblock at 884736, Group descriptors at 884737-885260 Backup superblock at 1605632, Group descriptors at 1605633-1606156 Backup superblock at 2654208, Group descriptors at 2654209-2654732 Backup superblock at 4096000, Group descriptors at 4096001-4096524 Backup superblock at 7962624, Group descriptors at 7962625-7963148 Backup superblock at 11239424, Group descriptors at 11239425-11239948 Backup superblock at 20480000, Group descriptors at 20480001-20480524 Backup superblock at 23887872, Group descriptors at 23887873-23888396 Backup superblock at 71663616, Group descriptors at 71663617-71664140 Backup superblock at 78675968, Group descriptors at 78675969-78676492 Backup superblock at 102400000, Group descriptors at 102400001-102400524 Backup superblock at 214990848, Group descriptors at 214990849-214991372 Backup superblock at 512000000, Group descriptors at 512000001-512000524 Backup superblock at 550731776, Group descriptors at 550731777-550732300 Backup superblock at 644972544, Group descriptors at 644972545-644973068 Backup superblock at 1934917632, Group descriptors at 1934917633-1934918156 sudo e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/md0 [hodge@hodge-fs ~]$ sudo e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/md0 e2fsck 1.41.12 (17-May-2010) /dev/md0: recovering journal e2fsck: unable to set superblock flags on /dev/md0 sudo dmesg | tail [hodge@hodge-fs ~]$ sudo dmesg | tail EXT4-fs (md0): ext4_check_descriptors: Checksum for group 0 failed (59837!=29115) EXT4-fs (md0): group descriptors corrupted! EXT4-fs (md0): ext4_check_descriptors: Checksum for group 0 failed (59837!=29115) EXT4-fs (md0): group descriptors corrupted! Please Help!!!

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• How to allow local LAN access while connected to Cisco VPN?

  - by Ian Boyd

  How can I maintain local LAN access while connected to Cisco VPN? When connecting using Cisco VPN, the server has to ability to instruct the client to prevent local LAN access. Assuming this server-side option cannot be turned off, how can allow local LAN access while connected with a Cisco VPN client? I used to think it was simply a matter of routes being added that capture LAN traffic with a higher metric, for example: Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric 10.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 10.0.0.3 10.0.0.3 20 <--Local LAN 10.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 192.168.199.1 192.168.199.12 1 <--VPN Link And trying to delete the 10.0.x.x -> 192.168.199.12 route don't have any effect: >route delete 10.0.0.0 >route delete 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 >route delete 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 192.168.199.1 >route delete 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 192.168.199.1 if 192.168.199.12 >route delete 10.0.0.0 mask 255.255.0.0 192.168.199.1 if 0x3 And while it still might simply be a routing issue, attempts to add or delete routes fail. At what level is Cisco VPN client driver doing what in the networking stack that takes overrides a local administrator's ability to administer their machine? The Cisco VPN client cannot be employing magic. It's still software running on my computer. What mechanism is it using to interfere with my machine's network? What happens when an IP/ICMP packet arrives on the network? Where in the networking stack is the packet getting eaten? See also No internet connection with Cisco VPN Cisco VPN Client interrupts connectivity to my LDAP server Cisco VPN stops Windows 7 Browsing How can I prohibit the creation of a route in Windows XP upon connection to Cisco VPN? Rerouting local LAN and Internet traffic when in VPN VPN Client "Allow local LAN Access" Allow Local LAN Access for VPN Clients on the VPN 3000 Concentrator Configuration Example LAN access gone when I connect to VPN Windows XP Documentation: Route Edit: Things I've not yet tried: >route delete 10.0.* Update: Since Cisco has abandoned their old client, in favor of AnyConnect (HTTP SSL based VPN), this question, unsolved, can be left as a relic of history. Going forward, we can try to solve the same problem with their new client.

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• OS X: Finder error -36 when using SMB shares on a Samba server bound to AD

  - by Frenchie

  We're looking at deploying SMB homes on Debian (5.0.3) for our mac clients rather than purchasing four new Xserves. We've got our test servers built and functioning properly. Windows clients behave perfectly, but we've run into an issue with OS X (10.6.x and 10.5.x). We're going this route instead of Windows file servers due to a whole bunch of other issues that arise when going that way. Specifically, when mounting a SMB share with unix extensions switched on and the remote server bound to AD, the finder cannot save files on the share, instead touching the file and then bombing out with a -36 IO error, folder creation is fine. Copying files in the terminal behaves fine and the problem seems to be limited to the finder. The issue arises (I think) as the remote UID/GID is passed across when using unix extensions. OS X uses its own winbind idmap (odsam) to work out the effective UID/GID from AD users and groups whilst we're using a rid map on the server. Consequently, there is a mismatch in ownership which the finder chooses to honour. How OS X appears to handle this is to use the remote uid and gid at the file permission level (see below) and then set an OS X acl granting the local uid/gid to have the appropriate permissions on the file. I think the finder touches the file (which the kernel allows because of the ACL) and then checks the filesystem perms and drops out with the IO error. On a Client fc-003353-d:homes2 root# ls -led test/ drwx------+ 2 135978 100513 16384 Feb 3 15:14 test/ 0: user:jfrench allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit 1: group:ARTS\domain users allow 2: group:everyone allow 3: group:owner allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit,only_inherit 4: group:group allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit,only_inherit 5: group:everyone allow list,add_file,search,delete,add_subdirectory,delete_child,readattr,writeattr,readextattr,writeextattr,readsecurity,writesecurity,chown,file_inherit,directory_inherit,only_inherit We've tried the following without any luck: Setting the Linux side file owner to match the OS X GID/UID Adding ACLs on the linux filesystem which grant the OS X GID/UID perms Disabling extended attributes Setting steams=no in /etc/nsmb.conf on the client We're currently running a workaround which is to just turn off unix extensions which forces the macs to just mount the share as the local user with u=rwx perms. This works for most things but is causing a few apps that expect certain perms to break in subtle ways. Worst case scenario is that we'll continue running in this way but we would like to have the unix extensions on. Regards. Relevant SMB config below: [global] workgroup = ARTS realm = *snip* security = ADS password server = *snip* unix extensions = yes panic action = /usr/share/panic-action %d idmap backend = rid:ARTS=100000-10000000 idmap uid = 100000-10000000 idmap gid = 100000-10000000 winbind enum users = Yes winbind enum groups = Yes veto files = /lost+found/aquota.*/ hide files = /desktop.ini/$RECYCLE.BIN/.*/AppData/Library/ ea support = yes store dos attributes = yes map system = no map archive = no map readonly = no

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• which package i should choose, if i want to install virtualenv for python?

  - by hugemeow

  pip search just returns so many matches, i am confused about which package i should choose to install .. should i only install virtualenv? or i'd better also install virtualenv-commands and virtualenv-commands, etc, but i really don't know exactly what virtualenv-commands is ... mirror0@lab:~$ pip search virtualenv virtualenvwrapper - Enhancements to virtualenv virtualenv - Virtual Python Environment builder veh - virtualenv for hg pyutilib.virtualenv - PyUtilib utility for building custom virtualenv bootstrap scripts. envbuilder - A package for automatic generation of virtualenvs virtstrap-core - A bootstrapping mechanism for virtualenv+pip and shell scripts tox - virtualenv-based automation of test activities virtualenvwrapper-win - Port of Doug Hellmann's virtualenvwrapper to Windows batch scripts everyapp.bootstrap - Enhanced virtualenv bootstrap script creation. orb - pip/virtualenv shell script wrapper monupco-virtualenv-python - monupco.com registration agent for stand-alone Python virtualenv applications virtualenvwrapper-powershell - Enhancements to virtualenv (for Windows). A clone of Doug Hellmann's virtualenvwrapper RVirtualEnv - relocatable python virtual environment virtualenv-clone - script to clone virtualenvs. virtualenvcontext - switch virtualenvs with a python context manager lessrb - Wrapper for ruby less so that it's in a virtualenv. carton - make self-extracting virtualenvs virtualenv5 - Virtual Python 3 Environment builder clever-alexis - Clever redhead girl that builds and packs Python project with Virtualenv into rpm, deb, etc. kforgeinstall - Virtualenv bootstrap script for KForge pypyenv - Install PyPy in virtualenv virtualenv-distribute - Virtual Python Environment builder virtualenvwrapper.project - virtualenvwrapper plugin to manage a project work directory virtualenv-commands - Additional commands for virtualenv. rjm.recipe.venv - zc.buildout recipe to turn the entire buildout tree into a virtualenv virtualenvwrapper.bitbucket - virtualenvwrapper plugin to manage a project work directory based on a BitBucket repository tg_bootstrap - Bootstrap a TurboGears app in a VirtualEnv django-env - Automaticly manages virtualenv for django project virtual-node - Install node.js into your virtualenv django-environment - A plugin for virtualenvwrapper that makes setting up and creating new Django environments easier. vip - vip is a simple library that makes your python aware of existing virtualenv underneath. virtualenvwrapper.django - virtualenvwrapper plugin to create a Django project work directory terrarium - Package and ship relocatable python virtualenvs venv_dependencies - Easy to install any dependencies in a virtualenviroment(without making symlinks by hand and etc...) virtualenv-sh - Convenient shell interface to virtualenv virtualenvwrapper.github - Plugin for virtualenvwrapper to automatically create projects based on github repositories. virtualenvwrapper.configvar - Plugin for virtualenvwrapper to automatically export config vars found in your project level .env file. virtualenvwrapper-emacs-desktop - virtualenvwrapper plugin to control emacs desktop mode bootstrapper - Bootstrap Python projects with virtualenv and pip. virtualenv3 - Obsolete fork of virtualenv isotoma.depends.zope2_13_8 - Running zope in a virtualenv virtual-less - Install lessc into your virtualenv virtualenvwrapper.tmpenv - Temporary virtualenvs are automatically deleted when deactivated isotoma.plone.heroku - Tooling for running Plone on heroku in a virtualenv gae-virtualenv - Using virtualenv with zipimport on Google App Engine pinvenv - VirtualEnv plugins for pin isotoma.depends.plone4_1 - Running plone in a virtualenv virtualenv-tools - A set of tools for virtualenv virtualenvwrapper.npm - Plugin for virtualenvwrapper to automatically encapsulate inside the virtual environment any npm installed globaly when the venv is activated d51.django.virtualenv.test_runner - Simple package for running isolated Django tests from within virtualenv difio-virtualenv-python - Difio registration agent for stand-alone Python virtualenv applications VirtualEnvManager - A package to manage various virtual environments. virtualenvwrapper.gem - Plugin for virtualenvwrapper to automatically encapsulate inside the virtual environment any gems installed when the venv is activated

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• Automatically Applying Security Updates for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

  - by Eric Anderson

  I've been a fan of Heroku since it's earliest days. But I like the fact that AWS Elastic Beanstalk gives you more control over the characteristics of the instances. One thing I love about Heroku is the fact that I can deploy an app and not worry about managing it. I am assuming Heroku is ensuring all OS security updates are timely applied. I just need to make sure my app is secure. My initial research on Beanstalk shows that although it builds and configures the instances for you, after that it moves to a more manual management process. Security updates won't automatically be applied to the instances. It seems there are two areas of concerns: New AMI releases - As new AMI releases hit it seems we would want to run the latest (presumably most secure). But my research seems to indicate you need to manually launch a new setup to see the latest AMI version and then create a new environment to use that new version. Is there a better automated way of rotating your instances into new AMI releases? In between releases there will be security updates released for packages. Seems we want to upgrade those as well. My research seems to indicate people install commands to occasionally run a yum update. But since new instances are created/destroyed based on usage it seems that the new instances would not always have the updates (i.e. the time between the instance creation and the first yum update). So occasionally you will have instances that aren't patched. And you are also going to have instances constantly patching themselves until the new AMI release is applied. My other concern is that perhaps these security updates haven't gone through Amazon's own review (like the AMI releases do) and it might break my app to automatically update them. I know Dreamhost once had a 12 hour outage because they were applying debian updates completely automatically without any review. I want to make sure the same thing doesn't happen to me. So my question is does Amazon provide a way to offer fully managed PaaS like Heroku? Or is AWS Elastic Beanstalk really more of just a install script and after that you are on your own (other than the monitoring and deployment tools they provide)?

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• Ubuntu Newbie Needs Assistance!!

  - by Steve Greene

  New Ubuntu User Needs Help!- version 9.10 does not communicate with laptop Hello folks, Several days ago, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 onto my Acer Aspire 3100 laptop, running it alongside Widows Vista as a dual-bootable system. Creation of the Ubuntu boot CD went fine, and the installation onto my hard drive was flawless. Ubuntu opens and behaves as I would expect, except for one little problem. For reasons unknown to me, Ubuntu is not communicating with my laptop's networking hardware, and I have no internet connectivity, even when sitting directly under the wireless router at the local library (literally), which puts out a wickedly-fast signal that my Windows Vista OS auto-detects and immediately connects to. Up in the right side of the Ubuntu desktop, I click on the network icon and it does not show a wireless connection at all, even though I am only a few feet from the router. At home, where I use a dialup modem, I also see no means of getting online. My modem is an HDAUDIO Soft Data Fax Modem with Smart CP,manufactured by CXT (Conexant Systems Inc., file version 4.0.13.0, and the driver version is 7.58.0.0). I desparately wish to convert to Ubuntu. I used Mac for ten years, and then Windows for ten years. Now, after 20 years, I want to live out my days as an open-source Ubuntu fanatic. I am ready to give the old status quo the boot! I am an advanced computer user, but I am not a programmer. I seek a solution that is user-friendly for normal people, something equivalent to a driver that I can easily install or activate that will allow Ubuntu to see my hardware and get me connected. Can anyone help me over this hopefully-little glitch so that I can move on in total Ubuntu bliss? My processor is a Mobile AMD Sempron Processor 3500+ at 1.80 GHz, 1.50 GB RAM, and a 32-bit Operating System. I am running Windows Vista Home Basic, Service Pack 2. My current email is [email protected] if you have a workable solution that does not require programmer status to implement. Surely this must be a simple fix that I simply am overlooking, but being the new guy on the block, I have yet to be enlightened. Thanks for your help in coming up to speed!! Steve Wanna' be Ubuntu Fanatic "If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space."

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• Simple mdadm RAID 1 not activating spare

  - by Nick Liu

  I had created two 2TB HDD partitions (/dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdc1) in a RAID 1 array called /dev/md0 using mdadm on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin. The command sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0 used to indicate both drives as active sync. Then, for testing, I failed /dev/sdb1, removed it, then added it again with the command sudo mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdb1 watch cat /proc/mdstat showed a progress bar of the array rebuilding, but I wouldn't spend hours watching it, so I assumed that the software knew what it was doing. After the progress bar was no longer showing, cat /proc/mdstat displays: md0 : active raid1 sdb1[2](S) sdc1[1] 1953511288 blocks super 1.2 [2/1] [U_] And sudo mdadm --detail /dev/md0 shows: /dev/md0: Version : 1.2 Creation Time : Sun May 27 11:26:05 2012 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 1953511288 (1863.01 GiB 2000.40 GB) Used Dev Size : 1953511288 (1863.01 GiB 2000.40 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Mon May 28 11:16:49 2012 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 1 Name : Deltique:0 (local to host Deltique) UUID : 49733c26:dd5f67b5:13741fb7:c568bd04 Events : 32365 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 1 8 33 0 active sync /dev/sdc1 1 0 0 1 removed 2 8 17 - spare /dev/sdb1 I've been told that mdadm automatically replaces removed drives with spares, but /dev/sdb1 isn't being moved into the expected position, RaidDevice 1. UPDATE (30 May 2012): A badblocks destructive read-write test of the entire /dev/sdb yielded no errors as expected; both HDDs are new. As of the latest edit, I assembled the array with this command: sudo mdadm --assemble --force --no-degraded /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 The output was: mdadm: /dev/md0 has been started with 1 drive (out of 2) and 1 rebuilding. Rebuilding looks like it's progressing normally: md0 : active raid1 sdc1[1] sdb1[2] 1953511288 blocks super 1.2 [2/1] [U_] [>....................] recovery = 0.6% (13261504/1953511288) finish=2299.7min speed=14060K/sec unused devices: <none> I'm now waiting on this rebuild, but I'm expecting /dev/sdb1 to become a spare just like the five or six times that I've tried rebuilding before. UPDATE (31 May 2012): Yeah, it's still a spare. Ugh! UPDATE (01 June 2012): I'm trying Adrian Kelly's suggested command: sudo mdadm --assemble --update=resync /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 Waiting on the rebuild now... My questions are: Why isn't the spare drive becoming active sync? How can I make the spare drive become active?

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• Hot-swap drive got new name, can I change it on-the-fly?

  - by T.J. Crowder

  One of the HDDs in my server's RAID config failed, so I took it out of the array and had the data center hot-swap it. They've done that, but now the new drive is /dev/sdc rather than /dev/sda. I suspect — correct me if I'm wrong — that if I reboot the server, it will be /dev/sda again, so I'm hesitant to add it back to the array as /dev/sdc because I don't want to lay a trap for myself to fall into on the next reboot. I'd just as soon not reboot the server if I don't need to (if I do need to, well, too bad for me). Is there a way I can change the device name from /dev/sdc to /dev/sda without rebooting? This is on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. It's an md array ("Linux Software RAID"), where currently one of the devices (there are a couple of them) looks like this ("degraded" because I've removed the old /dev/sda from it): # mdadm --detail /dev/md0 /dev/md0: Version : 00.90.03 Creation Time : Sun Oct 11 21:07:54 2009 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 97536 (95.27 MiB 99.88 MB) Used Dev Size : 97536 (95.27 MiB 99.88 MB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 1 Preferred Minor : 0 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Thu Jun 30 09:31:16 2011 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : 496be7a5:ab9177ed:7792c71e:7dc17aa4 Events : 0.112 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 17 0 active sync /dev/sdb1 1 0 0 1 removed Thanks, Update: Reading through the kernel md documentation, I suspect that if the name changes on reboot, it won't matter. (Good design, that.) Here's why: Boot time autodetection of RAID arrays When md is compiled into the kernel (not as module), partitions of type 0xfd are scanned and automatically assembled into RAID arrays. This autodetection may be suppressed with the kernel parameter "raid=noautodetect". As of kernel 2.6.9, only drives with a type 0 superblock can be autodetected and run at boot time. The kernel parameter "raid=partitionable" (or "raid=part") means that all auto-detected arrays are assembled as partitionable. I do have md compiled into the kernel, so I'm rebuilding the array now and will do the reboot to see what happens. Even if it works, the above doesn't answer the question I actually asked, so unless someone comes along and answers that question in the meantime (I'd be interested, even if it's not necessary for what I'm doing this very moment), I'll just delete the question to keep noise down.

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• Cannot install grub to RAID1 (md0)

  - by Andrew Answer

  I have a RAID1 array on my Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and my /sda HDD has been replaced several days ago. I use this commands to replace: # go to superuser sudo bash # see RAID state mdadm -Q -D /dev/md0 # State should be "clean, degraded" # remove broken disk from RAID mdadm /dev/md0 --fail /dev/sda1 mdadm /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sda1 # see partitions fdisk -l # shutdown computer shutdown now # physically replace old disk by new # start system again # see partitions fdisk -l # copy partitions from sdb to sda sfdisk -d /dev/sdb | sfdisk /dev/sda # recreate id for sda sfdisk --change-id /dev/sda 1 fd # add sda1 to RAID mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda1 # see RAID state mdadm -Q -D /dev/md0 # State should be "clean, degraded, recovering" # to see status you can use cat /proc/mdstat This is the my mdadm output after sync: /dev/md0: Version : 0.90 Creation Time : Wed Feb 17 16:18:25 2010 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 470455360 (448.66 GiB 481.75 GB) Used Dev Size : 470455360 (448.66 GiB 481.75 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 0 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Thu Nov 1 15:19:31 2012 State : clean Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 UUID : 92e6ff4e:ed3ab4bf:fee5eb6c:d9b9cb11 Events : 0.11049560 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 1 0 active sync /dev/sda1 1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1 After bebuilding completion "fdisk -l" says what I have not valid partition table /dev/md0. This is my fdisk -l output: Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00057d19 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 940910984 470455461 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sda2 940910985 976768064 17928540 5 Extended /dev/sda5 940911048 976768064 17928508+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/sdb: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x000667ca Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 * 63 940910984 470455461 fd Linux raid autodetect /dev/sdb2 940910985 976768064 17928540 5 Extended /dev/sdb5 940911048 976768064 17928508+ 82 Linux swap / Solaris Disk /dev/md0: 481.7 GB, 481746288640 bytes 2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 117613840 cylinders, total 940910720 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Disk /dev/md0 doesn't contain a valid partition table This is my grub install output: root@answe:~# grub-install /dev/sda /usr/sbin/grub-setup: warn: Attempting to install GRUB to a disk with multiple partition labels or both partition label and filesystem. This is not supported yet.. /usr/sbin/grub-setup: error: embedding is not possible, but this is required for cross-disk install. root@answe:~# grub-install /dev/sdb Installation finished. No error reported. So 1) "update-grub" find only /sda and /sdb Linux, not /md0 2) "dpkg-reconfigure grub-pc" says "GRUB failed to install the following devices /dev/md0" I cannot load my system except from /sdb1 and /sda1, but in DEGRADED mode... Anybody can resolve this issue? I have big headache with this.

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• batch file infinite loop when parsing file

  - by Bart

  Okay, this should be a really simple task but its proving to be more complicated than I think it should be. I'm clearly doing something wrong, and would like someone else's input. What I would like to do is parse through a file containing paths to directories and set permissions on those directories. An example line of the input file. There are several lines, all formatted the same way, with a different path to a directory. E:\stuff\Things\something else (X)\ (The file in question is generated under Cygwin using find to list all directories with "(X)" in the name. The file is then passed through unix2win to make it windows compatible. I've also tried manually creating the input file from within windows to rule out the file's creation method as the problem.) Here's where I'm stuck... I wrote the following quick and dirty batch file in Windows XP and it worked without any issues at all, but it will not work in server 2k8. Batch file code to run through the file and set permissions: FOR /F "tokens=*" %%A IN (dirlist.txt) DO echo y| cacls "%%A" /T /C /G "Domain Admins":f "Some Group":f "some-security-group":f What this is SUPPOSED to do (and does in XP) is loop through the specified file (dirlist.txt) and run cacls.exe on each directory it pulls from the file. The "echo y|" is in there to automagically confirm when cacls helpfully asks "are you sure?" for every directory in the list. Unfortunately, however, what it DOES is fall into an infinite loop. I've tried surrounding everything after "DO" with quotes, which prevents the endless loop but confuses cacls so it throws an error. Interestingly, I've tried running the code from after "DO" manually (obviously replacing the variable with the full path, copied straight from the file) at a command prompt and it runs as expected. I don't think it's the file or the loop, as adding quotes to the command to be executed prevents the loop from continuing past where it's supposed to... I really have no idea at this point. Any help would be appreciated. I have a feeling it's going to be something increadibly stupid... but I'm pulling my hair out so I thought I'd ask.

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• SQL Server 2008 - Error starting service - model.mdf not found?!

  - by alex

  my SQL server 2008 was running fine. About an hour ago, it suddenly stopped - the MSSQLSERVER service had stopped I right clicked, clicked start, and it said the service had started, and stopped I looked in the event log and saw these two errors: 17207 : udopen: Operating system error 3(error not found) during the creation/opening of physical device C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\data\model.mdf. 17204 : FCB::Open failed: Could not open device C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\data\model.mdf for virtual device number (VDN) 1. The model.mdf db has NEVER been in that location - i specified drive F: to use for data / log during install. I checked the SQL Configuration Manager, to try and set startup params, but SQL Server is not listed as one of the services..... EDIT: I've now moved the db to where it was looking for: C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\data\ directory. Now if I start the service, it still does not work - i get this error message in the log: Could not find row in sysindexes for database ID 3, object ID 1, index ID 1. Run DBCC CHECKTABLE on sysindexes. Interestingly, i checked the error log - around the time users reported problems, there is this: 2010-01-08 17:11:26.44 spid51 Configuration option 'show advanced options' changed from 0 to 1. Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install. 2010-01-08 17:11:26.44 spid51 FILESTREAM: effective level = 0, configured level = 0, file system access share name = 'MSSQLSERVER'. 2010-01-08 17:11:26.44 spid51 Configuration option 'Agent XPs' changed from 1 to 0. Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install. 2010-01-08 17:11:26.44 spid51 FILESTREAM: effective level = 0, configured level = 0, file system access share name = 'MSSQLSERVER'. 2010-01-08 17:11:26.44 spid51 Configuration option 'show advanced options' changed from 1 to 0. Run the RECONFIGURE statement to install. 2010-01-08 17:11:26.44 spid51 FILESTREAM: effective level = 0, configured level = 0, file system access share name = 'MSSQLSERVER'. 2010-01-08 17:11:44.89 spid10s Service Broker manager has shut down. 2010-01-08 17:11:47.83 spid7s SQL Server is terminating in response to a 'stop' request from Service Control Manager. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-08 17:11:47.83 spid7s SQL Trace was stopped due to server shutdown. Trace ID = '1'. This is an informational message only; no user action is required.

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• How should I use LVM with Ganeti?

  - by javano

  I am building a small Ganeti cluster on some low end hardware (I only have the resources given sadly). I am confused as to the use of LVMs with DRBD. I have two instances and three nodes. What I want is instance1 replicated between node 1 & 2, and instance2 replicated between nodes 3 & 2 (so node2 is doing nothing, except waiting for either node1 or 3 to fail, is it is the secondary node for both instances). This is because node2 is a lower hardware spec than 1 and 3, so I just want it as an hot-spare. How can I achieve this? I don't want instance1 being replicated to node3 for example, nor instance2 replicated to node1. Nodes 1 & 2 have /dev/sda5 which is 150GBs (for example). Nodes 2 & 3 have /dev/sda6 which is also 75GBs (for example). Using just nodes 1 & 2, after looking at the Ganeti docs I would; vgcreate my-vg Next I would create the cluster via gnt-cluster VG = "my-vg". It is here I believe that I am missing some knowledge. I believe that what I need to do is create the same Logical Volume on nodes 1 & 2 in Volume Group "my-vg", that solely consists of /dev/sda5 and call it "lv1". Then create an Logical Volume on nodes 2 & 3 the solely consists of /dev/sda6 in "my-vg" that is called "lv2". When creating instance1 I would then use "-vg=lv1 -n node1:node2", and when creating instance2 I would use "-vg=lv2 -n node3:node2". I breifly had a go at this today and I'm dubious if this will be possible. When trying to create instance2, "lv2" wont exist on node1 (the cluster master) so I don't believe it will allow the instance creation. Could I create a 1kb parition (/dev/sda6) on node1 and put it into a LV called "lv2" or is that too flakey? Is this set up possible? Thank you.

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• Why is Windows 7 not following all routes?

  - by GigabyteProductions

  My computer is connected to my secondary router that's running the 192.168.42.0/24 network and my computer also has a route that directs anything on that network to the router, but for anything on that network other than the router itself, it get's the ICMP response of Reply from 192.168.42.194: Destination host unreachable. (with 192.168.42.194 being my computer). Every other network works, like all of the internet, or addresses on my primary router like 192.168.1.*, just not on the 192.168.42.0/24 network... route print returns: IPv4 Route Table =========================================================================== Active Routes: Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.42.1 192.168.42.194 276 127.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 192.168.42.0 255.255.255.0 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 192.168.42.194 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 192.168.42.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 =========================================================================== Persistent Routes: Network Address Netmask Gateway Address Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.42.1 Default =========================================================================== The only time anything is supposed to send an ICMP Host Unreachable response is when there's no route to it, right? So, why is my own computer sending that to ping or tracert when I have the route of 192.168.42.0 with the mask of 255.255.255.0? An IP address of 192.168.42.2 surely fits into that route. If I explicitly add a route for the IP address i am trying to access, it works, like: route add 192.168.42.2 mask 255.255.255.255 192.168.42.1 (the 192.168.42.1 right after mask is gateway, or the device to send the packet to so it can route it further), but why wont it work for the implicit route that's automatically on the table? I disabled my firewall, too (I use Comodo if anyone thinks this still serves as a problem). I'v even tried explicitly adding the gateway of 192.168.42.1 to the 192.168.42.0/24 route instead of it routing through 0.0.0.0's gateway, which is what On-link does. but that didn't work either, so it's not a gateway specification problem. If the host was really unreachable, it would be the router's IP address (192.168.42.1) sending that to me... This network is all of my creation, so there's no problem such as an administrator locking me out, because i am the administrator.

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• mdadm raid1 fails to resync

  - by JuanD

  Hello, I'm trying to solve this problem I'm having with an mdadm raid1. I have an ubuntu 9.04 server running on a software 2-drive raid1 with mdadm. Yesterday, one of the drives failed, and so I replaced it with a brand new drive of the same size. I removed the faulty drive, copied the partition from the remaining good drive to the new drive and then added it to the raid. It re-synced and the system worked fine, until the drive that hadn't failed, was also labeled failed. Now I had the raid running solely on the new drive. So I purchased another drive and repeated the procedure above. So now I had 2 brand new drives and the raid was syncing. However, after a few minutes I checked /proc/mdstat and the raid was no longer syncing. mdadm --detail /dev/md1 shows: (sdb is the first new drive, and sdc is the second new drive) root@dola:/home/jjaramillo# mdadm --detail /dev/md1 /dev/md1: Version : 00.90 Creation Time : Sat Dec 20 00:42:05 2008 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 974711680 (929.56 GiB 998.10 GB) Used Dev Size : 974711680 (929.56 GiB 998.10 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Preferred Minor : 1 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Wed Jun 2 10:09:35 2010 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 1 UUID : bba497c6:5029ba0b:bfa4f887:c0dc8f3d Events : 0.5395594 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 2 8 35 0 spare rebuilding /dev/sdc3 1 8 19 1 active sync /dev/sdb3 I've tried removing and re-adding the drive a few times, but the same thing happens. The raid fails to resync. I've looked at /var/log/messages, and found the following: Jun 2 07:57:36 dola kernel: [35708.917337] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled sense code Jun 2 07:57:36 dola kernel: [35708.917339] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Jun 2 07:57:36 dola kernel: [35708.917342] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor] Jun 2 07:57:36 dola kernel: [35708.917346] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex): Jun 2 07:57:36 dola kernel: [35708.917348] 72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00 Jun 2 07:57:36 dola kernel: [35708.917357] 00 43 9e 47 Jun 2 07:57:36 dola kernel: [35708.917360] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed So it looks like there's some kind of error on sdb (the first new drive). My question is, what would be the best approach to get the raid up and running again? I've thought about dd'ing the /dev/md1 to a blank hard drive, then re-doing the raid from scratch and loading the data back, but there could be an easier solution.. Any help would be appreciated.

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• mod_rewrite all but two files causing loop

  - by mpounsett

  I'm trying to set up a web site to allow the creation of a semaphore file to close the site. The logic I want to follow is: when the semaphore file exists and the request is not for /style.css or /favicon.icon show the content of /closed.html I have 1 and 3 working, but my exceptions for 2 result in a processing loop when style.css or favicon.ico are requested. This is my most recent attempt: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/style.css RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/favicon.ico RewriteCond /usr/local/etc/site/closed -f RewriteRule ^.*$ /closed.html [L] This is in a VirtualHost block, not in a Directory. There is no .htaccess file in play. I have also recently tried this, based on an answer I found elsewhere, but with the same (looping) result: RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/style.css [OR] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/favicon.ico RewriteRule ^.*$ - [L] RewriteCond /usr/local/etc/site/closed -f RewriteRule ^.*$ /closed.html [L] I expect a request for /style.css or /favicon.ico to fail to match one of the first two rewrite conditions, which should prevent the URI from being rewritten, which should stop the mod_rewrite iteration. However, mod_rewrite seems to think the URI has been rewritten in those cases, and iterates over the rules again (and again, and again). The above works properly in all cases except for style.css or favicon.ico. In those cases I exceed the loop limits. What am I missing here to cause the rewrite iteration to stop when someone requests style.css or favicon.ico? EDIT: Here's a loglevel 9 example of what happens using the first ruleset when a request arrives for /style.css. This is just the first two iterations.. it continues to loop identically until the limit is reached. 2001:4900:1044:0:145f:826e:6436:dc1 - - [29/May/2014:15:29:26 +0000] [host.example/sid#80c1c48b0][rid#80c1db0a0/initial] (2) init rewrite engine with requested uri /style.css 2001:4900:1044:0:145f:826e:6436:dc1 - - [29/May/2014:15:29:26 +0000] [host.example/sid#80c1c48b0][rid#80c1db0a0/initial] (3) applying pattern '^.*$' to uri '/style.css' 2001:4900:1044:0:145f:826e:6436:dc1 - - [29/May/2014:15:29:26 +0000] [host.example/sid#80c1c48b0][rid#80c1db0a0/initial] (4) RewriteCond: input='/style.css' pattern='!^/style.css' => not-matched 2001:4900:1044:0:145f:826e:6436:dc1 - - [29/May/2014:15:29:26 +0000] [host.example/sid#80c1c48b0][rid#80c1db0a0/initial] (1) pass through /style.css 2001:4900:1044:0:145f:826e:6436:dc1 - - [29/May/2014:15:29:26 +0000] [host.example/sid#80c1c48b0][rid#80c1dd0a0/initial] (2) init rewrite engine with requested uri /style.css 2001:4900:1044:0:145f:826e:6436:dc1 - - [29/May/2014:15:29:26 +0000] [host.example/sid#80c1c48b0][rid#80c1dd0a0/initial] (3) applying pattern '^.*$' to uri '/style.css' 2001:4900:1044:0:145f:826e:6436:dc1 - - [29/May/2014:15:29:26 +0000] [host.example/sid#80c1c48b0][rid#80c1dd0a0/initial] (4) RewriteCond: input='/style.css' pattern='!^/style.css' => not-matched 2001:4900:1044:0:145f:826e:6436:dc1 - - [29/May/2014:15:29:26 +0000] [host.example/sid#80c1c48b0][rid#80c1dd0a0/initial] (1) pass through /style.css

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• SQL SERVER – 2008 – Introduction to Snapshot Database – Restore From Snapshot

  - by pinaldave

  Snapshot database is one of the most interesting concepts that I have used at some places recently. Here is a quick definition of the subject from Book On Line: A Database Snapshot is a read-only, static view of a database (the source database). Multiple snapshots can exist on a source database and can always reside on the same server instance as the database. Each database snapshot is consistent, in terms of transactions, with the source database as of the moment of the snapshot’s creation. A snapshot persists until it is explicitly dropped by the database owner. If you do not know how Snapshot database work, here is a quick note on the subject. However, please refer to the official description on Book-on-Line for accuracy. Snapshot database is a read-only database created from an original database called the “source database”. This database operates at page level. When Snapshot database is created, it is produced on sparse files; in fact, it does not occupy any space (or occupies very little space) in the Operating System. When any data page is modified in the source database, that data page is copied to Snapshot database, making the sparse file size increases. When an unmodified data page is read in the Snapshot database, it actually reads the pages of the original database. In other words, the changes that happen in the source database are reflected in the Snapshot database. Let us see a simple example of Snapshot. In the following exercise, we will do a few operations. Please note that this script is for demo purposes only- there are a few considerations of CPU, DISK I/O and memory, which will be discussed in the future posts. Create Snapshot Delete Data from Original DB Restore Data from Snapshot First, let us create the first Snapshot database and observe the sparse file details. USE master GO -- Create Regular Database CREATE DATABASE RegularDB GO USE RegularDB GO -- Populate Regular Database with Sample Table CREATE TABLE FirstTable (ID INT, Value VARCHAR(10)) INSERT INTO FirstTable VALUES(1, 'First'); INSERT INTO FirstTable VALUES(2, 'Second'); INSERT INTO FirstTable VALUES(3, 'Third'); GO -- Create Snapshot Database CREATE DATABASE SnapshotDB ON (Name ='RegularDB', FileName='c:\SSDB.ss1') AS SNAPSHOT OF RegularDB; GO -- Select from Regular and Snapshot Database SELECT * FROM RegularDB.dbo.FirstTable; SELECT * FROM SnapshotDB.dbo.FirstTable; GO Now let us see the resultset for the same. Now let us do delete something from the Original DB and check the same details we checked before. -- Delete from Regular Database DELETE FROM RegularDB.dbo.FirstTable; GO -- Select from Regular and Snapshot Database SELECT * FROM RegularDB.dbo.FirstTable; SELECT * FROM SnapshotDB.dbo.FirstTable; GO When we check the details of sparse file created by Snapshot database, we will find some interesting details. The details of Regular DB remain the same. It clearly shows that when we delete data from Regular/Source DB, it copies the data pages to Snapshot database. This is the reason why the size of the snapshot DB is increased. Now let us take this small exercise to  the next level and restore our deleted data from Snapshot DB to Original Source DB. -- Restore Data from Snapshot Database USE master GO RESTORE DATABASE RegularDB FROM DATABASE_SNAPSHOT = 'SnapshotDB'; GO -- Select from Regular and Snapshot Database SELECT * FROM RegularDB.dbo.FirstTable; SELECT * FROM SnapshotDB.dbo.FirstTable; GO -- Clean up DROP DATABASE [SnapshotDB]; DROP DATABASE [RegularDB]; GO Now let us check the details of the select statement and we can see that we are successful able to restore the database from Snapshot Database. We can clearly see that this is a very useful feature in case you would encounter a good business that needs it. I would like to request the readers to suggest more details if they are using this feature in their business. Also, let me know if you think it can be potentially used to achieve any tasks. Complete Script of the afore- mentioned operation for easy reference is as follows: USE master GO -- Create Regular Database CREATE DATABASE RegularDB GO USE RegularDB GO -- Populate Regular Database with Sample Table CREATE TABLE FirstTable (ID INT, Value VARCHAR(10)) INSERT INTO FirstTable VALUES(1, 'First'); INSERT INTO FirstTable VALUES(2, 'Second'); INSERT INTO FirstTable VALUES(3, 'Third'); GO -- Create Snapshot Database CREATE DATABASE SnapshotDB ON (Name ='RegularDB', FileName='c:\SSDB.ss1') AS SNAPSHOT OF RegularDB; GO -- Select from Regular and Snapshot Database SELECT * FROM RegularDB.dbo.FirstTable; SELECT * FROM SnapshotDB.dbo.FirstTable; GO -- Delete from Regular Database DELETE FROM RegularDB.dbo.FirstTable; GO -- Select from Regular and Snapshot Database SELECT * FROM RegularDB.dbo.FirstTable; SELECT * FROM SnapshotDB.dbo.FirstTable; GO -- Restore Data from Snapshot Database USE master GO RESTORE DATABASE RegularDB FROM DATABASE_SNAPSHOT = 'SnapshotDB'; GO -- Select from Regular and Snapshot Database SELECT * FROM RegularDB.dbo.FirstTable; SELECT * FROM SnapshotDB.dbo.FirstTable; GO -- Clean up DROP DATABASE [SnapshotDB]; DROP DATABASE [RegularDB]; GO Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Data Storage, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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