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• Microsoft Business Intelligence Seminar 2011

  - by DavidWimbush

  I was lucky enough to attend the maiden presentation of this at Microsoft Reading yesterday. It was pretty gripping stuff not only because of what was said but also because of what could only be hinted at. Here's what I took away from the day. (Disclaimer: I'm not a BI guru, just a reasonably experienced BI developer, so I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted a few things. Particularly when so much of the talk was about the vision and subtle hints of what is coming. Please comment if you think I've got anything wrong. I'm also not going to even try to cover Master Data Services as I struggled to imagine how you would actually use it.) I was a bit worried when I learned that the whole day was going to be presented by one guy but Rafal Lukawiecki is a very engaging speaker. He's going to be presenting this about 20 times around the world over the coming months. If you get a chance to hear him speak, I say go for it. No doubt some of the hints will become clearer as Denali gets closer to RTM. Firstly, things are definitely happening in the SQL Server Reporting and BI world. Traditionally IT would build a data warehouse, then cubes on top of that, and then publish them in a structured and controlled way. But, just as with many IT projects in general, by the time it's finished the business has moved on and the system no longer meets their requirements. This not sustainable and something more agile is needed but there has to be some control. Apparently we're going to be hearing the catchphrase 'Balancing agility with control' a lot. More users want more access to more data. Can they define what they want? Of course not, but they'll recognise it when they see it. It's estimated that only 28% of potential BI users have meaningful access to the data they need, so there is a real pent-up demand. The answer looks like: give them some self-service tools so they can experiment and see what works, and then IT can help to support the results. It's estimated that 32% of Excel users are comfortable with its analysis tools such as pivot tables. It's the power user's preferred tool. Why fight it? That's why PowerPivot is an Excel add-in and that's why they released a Data Mining add-in for it as well. It does appear that the strategy is going to be to use Reporting Services (in SharePoint mode), PowerPivot, and possibly something new (smiles and hints but no details) to create reports and explore data. Everything will be published and managed in SharePoint which gives users the ability to mash-up, share and socialise what they've found out. SharePoint also gives IT tools to understand what people are looking at and where to concentrate effort. If PowerPivot report X becomes widely used, it's time to check that it shows what they think it does and perhaps get it a bit more under central control. There was more SharePoint detail that went slightly over my head regarding where Excel Services and Excel Web Application fit in, the differences between them, and the suggestion that it is likely they will one day become one (but not in the immediate future). That basic pattern is set to be expanded upon by further exploiting Vertipaq (the columnar indexing engine that enables PowerPivot to store and process a lot of data fast and in a small memory footprint) to provide scalability 'from the desktop to the data centre', and some yet to be detailed advances in 'frictionless deployment' (part of which is about making the difference between local and the cloud pretty much irrelevant). Excel looks like becoming Microsoft's primary BI client. It already has: the ability to consume cubes strong visualisation tools slicers (which are part of Excel not PowerPivot) a data mining add-in PowerPivot A major hurdle for self-service BI is presenting the data in a consumable format. You can't just give users PowerPivot and a server with a copy of the OLTP database(s). Building cubes is labour intensive and doesn't always give the user what they need. This is where the BI Semantic Model (BISM) comes in. I gather it's a layer of metadata you define that can combine multiple data sources (and types of data source) into a clear 'interface' that users can work with. It comes with a new query language called DAX. SSAS cubes are unlikely to go away overnight because, with their pre-calculated results, they are still the most efficient way to work with really big data sets. A few other random titbits that came up: Reporting Services is going to get some good new stuff in Denali. Keep an eye on www.projectbotticelli.com for the slides. You can also view last year's seminar sessions which covered a lot of the same ground as far as the overall strategy is concerned. They plan to add more material as Denali's features are publicly exposed. Check out the PASS keynote address for a showing of Yahoo's SQL BI servers. Apparently they wheeled the rack out on stage still plugged in and running! Check out the Excel 2010 Data Mining Add-Ins. 32 bit only at present but 64 bit is on the way. There are lots of data sets, many of them free, at the Windows Azure Marketplace Data Market (where you can also get ESRI shape files). If you haven't already seen it, have a look at the Silverlight Pivot Viewer (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/29/silverlight-pivotviewer-now-available.aspx). The Bing Maps Data Connector is worth a look if you're into spatial stuff (http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/07/13/data-connector-sql-server-2008-spatial-amp-bing-maps.aspx).  

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• Using Sitecore RenderingContext Parameters as MVC controller action arguments

  - by Kyle Burns

  I have been working with the Technical Preview of Sitecore 6.6 on a project and have been for the most part happy with the way that Sitecore (which truly is an MVC implementation unto itself) has been expanded to support ASP.NET MVC. That said, getting up to speed with the combined platform has not been entirely without stumbles and today I want to share one area where Sitecore could have really made things shine from the "it just works" perspective. A couple days ago I was asked by a colleague about the usage of the "Parameters" field that is defined on Sitecore's Controller Rendering data template. Based on the standard way that Sitecore handles a field named Parameters, I was able to deduce that the field expected key/value pairs separated by the "&" character, but beyond that I wasn't sure and didn't see anything from a documentation perspective to guide me, so it was time to dig and find out where the data in the field was made available. My first thought was that it would be really nice if Sitecore handled the parameters in this field consistently with the way that ASP.NET MVC handles the various parameter collections on the HttpRequest object and automatically maps them to parameters of the action method executing. Being the hopeful sort, I configured a name/value pair on one of my renderings, added a parameter with matching name to the controller action and fired up the bugger to see... that the parameter was not populated. Having established that the field's value was not going to be presented to me the way that I had hoped it would, the next assumption that I would work on was that Sitecore would handle this field similar to how they handle other similar data and would plug it into some ambient object that I could reference from within the controller method. After a considerable amount of guessing, testing, and cracking code open with Redgate's Reflector (a must-have companion to Sitecore documentation), I found that the most direct way to access the parameter was through the ambient RenderingContext object using code similar to: string myArgument = string.Empty; var rc = Sitecore.Mvc.Presentation.RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull; if (rc != null) {     var parms = rc.Rendering.Parameters;     myArgument = parms["myArgument"]; } At this point, we know how this field is used out of the box from Sitecore and can provide information from Sitecore's Content Editor that will be available when the controller action is executing, but it feels a little dirty. In order to properly test the action method I would have to do a lot of setup work and possible use an isolation framework such as Pex and Moles to get at a value that my action method is dependent upon. Notice I said that my method is dependent upon the value but in order to meet that dependency I've accepted another dependency upon Sitecore's RenderingContext.  I'm a big believer in, when possible, ensuring that any piece of code explicitly advertises dependencies using the method signature, so I found myself still wanting this to work the same as if the parameters were in the request route, querystring, or form by being able to add a myArgument parameter to the action method and have this parameter populated by the framework. Lucky for us, the ASP.NET MVC framework is extremely flexible and provides some easy to grok and use extensibility points. ASP.NET MVC is able to provide information from the request as input parameters to controller actions because it uses objects which implement an interface called IValueProvider and have been registered to service the application. The most basic statement of responsibility for an IValueProvider implementation is "I know about some data which is indexed by key. If you hand me the key for a piece of data that I know about I give you that data". When preparing to invoke a controller action, the framework queries registered IValueProvider implementations with the name of each method argument to see if the ValueProvider can supply a value for the parameter. (the rest of this post will assume you're working along and make a lot more sense if you do) Let's pull Sitecore out of the equation for a second to simplify things and create an extremely simple IValueProvider implementation. For this example, I first create a new ASP.NET MVC3 project in Visual Studio, selecting "Internet Application" and otherwise taking defaults (I'm assuming that anyone reading this far in the post either already knows how to do this or will need to take a quick run through one of the many available basic MVC tutorials such as the MVC Music Store). Once the new project is created, go to the Index action of HomeController.  This action sets a Message property on the ViewBag to "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!" and invokes the View, which has been coded to display the Message. For our example, we will remove the hard coded message from this controller (although we'll leave it just as hard coded somewhere else - this is sample code). For the first step in our exercise, add a string parameter to the Index action method called welcomeMessage and use the value of this argument to set the ViewBag.Message property. The updated Index action should look like: public ActionResult Index(string welcomeMessage) {     ViewBag.Message = welcomeMessage;     return View(); } This represents the entirety of the change that you will make to either the controller or view.  If you run the application now, the home page will display and no message will be presented to the user because no value was supplied to the Action method. Let's now write a ValueProvider to ensure this parameter gets populated. We'll start by creating a new class called StaticValueProvider. When the class is created, we'll update the using statements to ensure that they include the following: using System.Collections.Specialized; using System.Globalization; using System.Web.Mvc; With the appropriate using statements in place, we'll update the StaticValueProvider class to implement the IValueProvider interface. The System.Web.Mvc library already contains a pretty flexible dictionary-like implementation called NameValueCollectionValueProvider, so we'll just wrap that and let it do most of the real work for us. The completed class looks like: public class StaticValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider;     public StaticValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var parameters = new NameValueCollection();         parameters.Add("welcomeMessage", "Hello from the value provider!");         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(parameters, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);     }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } Notice that the only entry in the collection matches the name of the argument to our HomeController's Index action.  This is the important "secret sauce" that will make things work. We've got our new value provider now, but that's not quite enough to be finished. Mvc obtains IValueProvider instances using factories that are registered when the application starts up. These factories extend the abstract ValueProviderFactory class by initializing and returning the appropriate implementation of IValueProvider from the GetValueProvider method. While I wouldn't do so in production code, for the sake of this example, I'm going to add the following class definition within the StaticValueProvider.cs source file: public class StaticValueProviderFactory : ValueProviderFactory {     public override IValueProvider GetValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         return new StaticValueProvider(controllerContext);     } } Now that we have a factory, we can register it by adding the following line to the end of the Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs: ValueProviderFactories.Factories.Add(new StaticValueProviderFactory()); If you've done everything right to this point, you should be able to run the application and be presented with the home page reading "Hello from the value provider!". Now that you have the basics of the IValueProvider down, you have everything you need to enhance your Sitecore MVC implementation by adding an IValueProvider that exposes values from the ambient RenderingContext's Parameters property. I'll provide the code for the IValueProvider implementation (which should look VERY familiar) and you can use the work we've already done as a reference to create and register the factory: public class RenderingContextValueProvider : IValueProvider {     private NameValueCollectionValueProvider _wrappedProvider = null;     public RenderingContextValueProvider(ControllerContext controllerContext)     {         var collection = new NameValueCollection();         var rc = RenderingContext.CurrentOrNull;         if (rc != null && rc.Rendering != null)         {             foreach(var parameter in rc.Rendering.Parameters)             {                 collection.Add(parameter.Key, parameter.Value);             }         }         _wrappedProvider = new NameValueCollectionValueProvider(collection, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);         }     public bool ContainsPrefix(string prefix)     {         return _wrappedProvider.ContainsPrefix(prefix);     }     public ValueProviderResult GetValue(string key)     {         return _wrappedProvider.GetValue(key);     } } In this post I've discussed the MVC IValueProvider used to map data to controller action method arguments and how this can be integrated into your Sitecore 6.6 MVC solution.

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• Azure Diagnostics: The Bad, The Ugly, and a Better Way

  - by jasont

  If you’re a .Net web developer today, no doubt you’ve enjoyed watching Windows Azure grow up over the past couple of years. The platform has scaled, stabilized (mostly), and added on a slew of great (and sometimes overdue) features. What was once just an endpoint to host a solution, developers today have tremendous flexibility and options in the platform. Organizations are building new solutions and offerings on the platform, and others have, or are in the process of, migrating existing applications out of their own data centers into the Azure cloud. Whether new application development or migrating legacy, every development shop and IT organization needs to monitor their applications in the cloud, the same as they do on premises. Azure Diagnostics has some capabilities, but what I constantly hear from users is that it’s either (a) not enough, or (b) too cumbersome to set up. Today, Stackify is happy to announce that we fully support Azure deployments, just the same as your on-premises deployments. Let’s take a look below and compare and contrast the options. Azure Diagnostics Let’s crack open the Windows Azure documentation on Azure Diagnostics and see just how easy it is to use. The high level steps are:   Step 1: Import the Diagnostics Oh, I’ve already deployed my app without the diagnostics module. Guess I can’t do anything until I do this and re-deploy. Step 2: Configure the Diagnostics (and multiple sub-steps) Do I want it all? Or just pieces of it? Whoops, forgot to include a specific performance counter, I guess I’ll have to deploy again. Wait a minute… I have to specifically code these performance counters into my role’s OnStart() method, compile and deploy again? And query and consume it myself? Step 3: (Optional) Permanently store diagnostic data Lucky for me, Azure storage has gotten pretty cheap. But how often should I move the data into storage? I want to see real-time data, so I guess that’s out now as well. Step 4: (Optional) View stored diagnostic data Optional? Of course I want to see it. Conveniently, Microsoft recommends 3 tools to do this with. Un-conveniently, none of these are web based and they all just give you access to raw data, and very little charting or real-time intelligence. Just….. data. Nevermind that one product seems to have gotten stale since a recent acquisition, and doesn’t even have screenshots!   So, let’s summarize: lots of diagnostics data is available, but think realistically. Think Dev Ops. What happens when you are in the middle of a major production performance issue and you don’t have the diagnostics you need? You are redeploying an application (and thankfully you have a great branching strategy, so you feel perfectly safe just willy-nilly launching code into prod, don’t you?) to get data, then shipping it to storage, and then digging through that data to find a needle in a haystack. Would you like to be able to troubleshoot a performance issue in the middle of the night, or on a weekend, from your iPad or home computer’s web browser? Forget it: the best you get is this spark line in the Azure portal. If it’s real pointy, you probably have an issue; but since there is no alert based on a threshold your customers have likely already let you know. And high CPU, Memory, I/O, or Network doesn’t tell you anything about where the problem is. The Better Way – Stackify Stackify supports application and server monitoring in real time, all through a great web interface. All of the things that Azure Diagnostics provides, Stackify provides for your on-premises deployments, and you don’t need to know ahead of time that you’ll need it. It’s always there, it’s always on. Azure deployments are essentially no different than on-premises. It’s a Windows Server (or Linux) in the cloud. It’s behind a different firewall than your corporate servers. That’s it. Stackify can provide the same powerful tools to your Azure deployments in two simple steps. Step 1 Add a startup task to your web or worker role and deploy. If you can’t deploy and need it right now, no worries! Remote Desktop to the Azure instance and you can execute a Powershell script to download / install Stackify.   Step 2 Log in to your account at www.stackify.com and begin monitoring as much as you want, as often as you want and see the results instantly. WMI? It’s there Event Viewer? You’ve got it. File System Access? Yes, please! Would love to make sure my web.config is correct.   IIS / App Pool Info? Yep. You can even restart it. Running Services? All of them. Start and Stop them to your heart’s content. SQL Database access? You bet’cha. Alerts and Notification? Of course! You should know before your customers let you know. … and so much more.   Conclusion Microsoft has shown, consistently, that they love developers, developers, developers. What every developer needs to realize from this is that they’ve given you a canvas, which is exactly what Azure is. It’s great infrastructure that is readily available, easy to manage, and fairly cost effective. However, the tooling is your responsibility. What you get, at best, is bare bones. App and server diagnostics should be available when you need them. While we, as developers, try to plan for and think of everything ahead of time, there will come times where we need to get data that just isn’t available. And having to go through a lot of cumbersome steps to get that data, and then have to find a friendlier way to consume it…. well, that just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I’d rather spend my time writing and developing features and completing bug fixes for my applications, than to be writing code to monitor and diagnose.

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• first install for windows eight.....da beta

  - by raysmithequip

  The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it.  I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field.  The OS took like a fish to water.  I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck sub 200g wd sata drive, a half working dvd burner and an asus fanless nvidia vid card, not a great one but Sub 50.00 on newey eggey...I did have to hunt the ms forums for a key and of course to activate the thing, if dos would of needed this outmoded ritual, we would still be on cpm and osborne would be a household name, of course little do people know that this ritual was common as far back as the seventies on att unix installs....not, but it was possible, I used to joke about when I ran a bbs, what hell would of been wrought had dos 3.2 machines been required to dial into my bbs to send fido mail to ms and wait for an acknowledgement.  All in all the thing was pushing a seven on the ms richter scale, not including the vid card, sadly it came in at just a tad over three....I wanted to evaluate it for a possible replacement on critical machines that in the past went down due to a vid card fan failure....you have no idea what a customer thinks when you show them a failed vid card fan..."you mean that little plastic piece of junk caused all this!!??!!!"...yea man.  Some production machines don't need any sort of vid, I will at least keep it on the maybe list for those, MTBF is a very important factor, some big box stores should put percentage of failure rate within 24 month estimates on the outside of the carton for sure.  And a warning that the power supplies are already at their limit.  Let's face it, today even 550w can be iffy.A few neat eye candy improvements over the earlier windows is nice, the metro screen is nice, anyone who has used a newer phone recently will intuitively drag their fingers across the screen....lot of good that was with no mouse or touch screen though.  Lucky me, I have been using windows since day one, I still have a copy of win 2.0 (and every other version) for no good reason.  Still the old ix collection of disks is much larger, recompiling any kernal is another silly ritual, same machine, different day, same recompile...argh. Rh is my all time fav, mandrake was always missing something, like it rewrote the init file or something, novell is ok as long as you stay on the beaten path and of course ubuntu normally recompiles with the same errors consistantly....makes life easy that way....no errors on windows eight, just a screen that did not match the installed hardware, natuarally I alt tabbed right out of it, then hit the flag key to find the start menu....no start button. I miss the start button already. Keyboard cowboy funnin and I was browsing the harddrive, nothing stunning there, I like that, means I can find stuff. Only I can't find what I want, the start button....the start menu is that first screen for touch tablets. No biggie for useruser, that is where they will want to be, I can see that. Admins won't want to be there, it is easy enough to get the control panel a bazzilion other ways though, just not the start button. (see a pattern here?). Personally, from the keyboard I find it fun to hit the carets along the location bar at the top of the explorer screen with tabs and arrows and choose SHOW ALL CONTROL PANEL ITEMS, or thereabouts. Bottom line, I love seven and I'll love eight even more!...very happy I did not have to follow the normal rule of thumb (a customer watching me build a system and asking questions said "oh I get it, so every piece you put in there is basically a hundred bucks, right?)...ok, sure, pretty much, more or less, well, ya dude.  It will be WAY past october till I get a real touch screen but I did pick up a pair of cheap tatungs so I can try the NEW main start screen, I parse a lot of folders and have a vision of how a pair of touch screens will be easier than landing a rover on mars.  Ok.  fine, they are way smallish, and I don't expect multitouch to work but we are talking a few percent of a new 21 inch viewsonic touch screen.  Will this OS be a game changer?  I don't know.  Bottom line with all the pads and droids in the world, it is more of a catch up move at first glance.  Not something ms is used to.  An app store?  I can see ms's motivation, the others have it.  I gather there will not be gadgets there, go ahead and see what ms did  to the once populated gadget page...go ahead, google gadgets and take a gander, used to hundreds of gadgets, they are already gone.  They replaced gadgets?  sort of, I'll drop that, it's a bit of a sore point for me.  More of interest was what happened when I downloaded stuff off codeplex and some other normal programs that I like, like orbitron, top o' my list!!...cardware it is...anyways, click on the exe, get a screen, normal for windows, this one indicated that I was not running a normal windows program and had a button for  exit the install, naw, I hit details, a hidden run program anyways came into view....great, my path to the normal windows has detected a program tha.....yea ok, acl is on, fine, moving along I got orbitron installed in record time and was tracking the iss on the newest Microsoft OS, beta of course, felt like the first time I setup bsd all those year ago...FUN!!...I suppose I gotta start to think about budgeting for the real os when it comes out in october, by then I should have a rasberry pi and be done with fedora remixed.  Of course that sounds like fun too!!  I would use this OS on a tablet or phone.  I don't like the idea of being hearded to an app store, don't like that on anything, we are americans and want real choices not marketed hype, lest you are younger with opm (other peoples money).   This os would be neat on a zune, but I suspect the zune is a gonner, I am rooting for microsoft, after all their default password is not admin anymore, nor alpine,  it's blank. Others force a password, my first fawn password was so long I could not even log into it with the password in front of me, who the heck uses %$# anyways, and if I was writing a brute force attack what the heck kinda impasse is that anyways at .00001 microseconds of a code execution cycle (just a non qualified number, not a real clock speed)....AI is where it will be before too long, MS is on that path, perhaps soon someone will sit down and write an app for the kinect that watches your eyes while you scan the new main start screen, clicking on the big E icon when you blink.....boy is that going to be fun!!!! sure. Blink,dammit,blink,dammit...... OPM no doubt.I like windows eight, we are moving forwards, better keep a close eye on ubuntu.  The real clinch comes when open source becomes paid source......don't blink, I already see plenty of very expensive 'ix apps, some even in app stores already.  more to come.......

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• Source-control 'wet-work'?

  - by Phil Factor

  When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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• PASS Summit – looking back on my first time

  - by Fatherjack

    So I was lucky enough to get my first experience of PASS Summit this year and took some time beforehand to read some blogs and reference material to get an idea on what to do and how to get the best out of my visit. Having been to other conferences – technical and non-technical – I had a reasonable idea on the routine and what to expect in general. Here is a list of a few things that I have learned/remembered as the week has gone by. Wear comfortable shoes. This actually needs to be broadened to Take several pairs of comfortable shoes. You will be spending many many hours, for several days one after another. Having comfortable feet that can literally support you for the duration will make the week in general a whole lot better. Not only at the conference but getting to and from you could well be walking. In the evenings you will be walking around town and standing talking in various bars and clubs. Looking back, on some days I was on my feet for over 20 hours. Make friends. This is a given for the long term benefits it brings but there is also an immediate reward in being at a conference with a friend or two. Some events are bigger and more popular than others and some have the type of session that every single attendee will want to be in. This is great for those that get in but if you are in the bathroom or queuing for coffee and you miss out it sucks. Having a friend that can get in to a room and reserve you a seat is a great advantage to make sure you get the content that you want to see and still have the coffee that you need. Don’t go to every session you want to see This might sound counter intuitive and it relies on the sessions being recorded in some way to guarantee you don’t totally miss out. Both PASS Summit and SQL Bits sessions are recorded (summit is audio, SQLBits is video) and this means that if you get into a good conversation with someone over a coffee you don’t have to break it up to go to a session. Obviously there is a trade-off here and you need to decide on the tipping point for yourself but a conversation at a place like this could make a big difference to the next contract or employer you have or it might simply be great catching up with some friends you don’t see so often. Go to at least one session you don’t want to Again, this will seem to be contrary to normal logic but there is no reason why you shouldn’t learn about a part of SQL Server that isn’t part of your daily routine. Not only will you learn something new but you will also pick up on the feelings and attitudes of the people in the session. So, if you are a DBA, head off to a BI session and so on. You’ll hear BI speakers speaking to a BI audience and get to understand their point of view and reasoning for making the decisions they do. You will also appreciate the way that your decisions and instructions affect the way they have to work. This will help you a lot when you are on a project, working with multiple teams and make you all more productive. Socialise While you are at the conference venue, speak to people. Ask questions, be interested in whoever you are speaking to. You get chances to talk to new friends at breakfast, dinner and every break between sessions. The only people that might not talk to you would be speakers that are about to go and give a session, in most cases speakers like peace and quiet before going on stage. Other than that the people around you are just waiting for someone to talk to them so make the first move. There is a whole lot going on outside of the conference hours and you should make an effort to join in with some of this too. At karaoke evenings or just out for a quiet drink with a few of the people you meet at the conference. Either way, don’t be a recluse and hide in your room or be alone out in the town. Don’t talk to people Once again this sounds wrong but stay with me. I have spoken to a number of speakers since Summit 2013 finished and they have all mentioned the time it has taken them to move about the conference venue due to people stopping them for a chat or to ask a question. 45 minutes to walk from a session room to the speaker room in one case. Wow. While none of the speakers were upset about this sort of delay I think delegates should take the situation into account and possibly defer their question to an email or to a time when the person they want is clearly less in demand. Give them a chance to enjoy the conference in the same way that you are, they may actually want to go to a session or just have a rest after giving their session – talking for 75 minutes is hard work, taking an extra 45 minutes right after is unbelievable. I certainly hope that they get good feedback on their sessions and perhaps if you spoke to a speaker outside a session you can give them a mention in the ‘any other comments’ part of the feedback, just to convey your gratitude for them giving up their time and expertise for free. Say thank you I just mentioned giving the speakers a clear, visible ‘thank you’ in the feedback but there are plenty of people that help make any conference the success it is that would really appreciate hearing that their efforts are valued. People on the registration desk, volunteers giving schedule guidance and directions, people on the community zone are all volunteers giving their time to help you have the best experience possible. Send an email to PASS and convey your thoughts about the work that was done. Maybe you want to be a volunteer next time so you could enquire how you get into that position at the same time. This isn’t an exclusive list and you may agree or disagree with the points I have made, please add anything you think is good advice in the comments. I’d like to finish by saying a huge thank you to all the people involved in planning, facilitating and executing the PASS Summit 2013, it was an excellent event and I know many others think it was a totally worthwhile event to attend.

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• Alcatel-Lucent: Enterprise 2.0: The Top 5 Things I would Do Over

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Happy Monday! Does anyone else feel as if the weekend went entirely too quickly? At least for those of us in the United States, we have the 4th of July Holiday next week to look forward to This week on the blog, we are going to focus on "WebCenter by Example" and highlight best practices from customers and partners. I recently came across this article and I think this is a great example of how we can learn from one another when it comes to social collaboration adoption. Do you agree with Jem? What things or best practices have you learned in your organizations?  By Jem Janik, Enterprise community manager, Alcatel-Lucent  Not so long ago, Engage, the Alcatel-Lucent employee social network and collaboration platform, celebrated its third birthday. With more than 25,000 members actively interacting each month, Engage has been a big enough success that it’s been the subject of external articles, and often those of us who helped launch it will go out and speak about what aspects contributed to that success. Hindsight is still 20/20 and what it takes to successfully launch an enterprise 2.0 community is fairly well-known now.  Today I want to tell you what I suspect you really want to know about.  As the enterprise community manager for Engage, after three years in, what are the top 5 things I wish we (and I mostly mean me) could do over? #5 Define your analytics solution from the start There is so much to do when you launch a community and initially growing it without complete chaos is quite a task.  It doesn’t take too long to get to a point where you want to focus your continued efforts in growing company collaboration.  Do people truly talk across regional boundaries or have we shifted siloed conversations to a new platform.  Is there one organization that doesn’t interact with another? If you are lucky you’ll have someone in your community team well versed in the world of databases and SQL queries, but it takes time to figure out what backend analytics data actually means. Professional support can be expensive and it may be hard to justify later as it typically has the community manager as the only main customer.  Figure out what you think you’ll want to know and how to get it early on. The sooner the better even if it doesn’t seem that critical at the time. #4 Lobbies guide you to the right places One piece of feedback that comes up more and more as we keep growing Engage is it’s hard to find stuff, or new people are not sure where to start. Something we’re doing now is defining some general topic areas of interest to be like “lobbies” into the platform and some common hashtags to go with them. I liken this to walking into a large medical or professional building for the first time.  There are hundreds of offices, and you look to a sign in the lobby to get guided to the right place for you.  We’re building that sign for members now, but again we missed the boat as the majority of the company has had their initial Engage experience. #3 Clean up, clean up, clean up Knowledge work and folksonomies are messy! The day we opened the doors to Engage I would have said we should keep everything ever created in Engage with an argument that it was a window into our collective knowledge so nothing should go.  Well, 6000+ groups and 200,000+ pieces of content later, I’ve changed my mind.  As previously mentioned, with too much “stuff” the system can be overwhelming to new members and it makes it harder to get what you’re looking for.   Do we need that help document about a tool we no longer have? NO!  Do we need that group that had 1 document and 2 discussions in the last two years? NO! Should we only have one group about a given topic instead of 4?  YES! Last fall, Engage defined a cleanup process for groups not used for a long time.  We also formed a volunteer cleaning army who are extra eyes on the hunt for “stuff” that should be updated, merged, or deleted.  It’s better late than never, but in line with what’s becoming a theme I wish these efforts had started earlier. #2 Communications & local community management One of the most important aspects of my job is to make sure people who should be talking to each other are actually doing it.  Connecting people to the other people they should know, the groups they should join, a piece of content that shouldn’t be missed.   I have worked both inside and outside of communications teams, and they are the best informed people in your company.  They know when something big is coming, how it impacts employees, how it fits with strategy, who else knows more, etc.  Having communications professionals who are power users can help scale up community management because they are already so well connected.  They also need to have the platform skills to pay attention without suffering email overload, how to grab someone’s attention, etc.  I wish I’d had figured this out much earlier.  If I had I would have groomed more communications colleagues into advocates and power members right at the start. #1 Grooming advocates vs. natural advocates I’ve just alluded to this above already. The very best advocates are those who naturally embrace your platform and automatically start to see new ways to work within it.  Those advocates seem to come out of the woodwork naturally since some of them are early adopters.  Not surprisingly, our best advocates today are those same people who were willing to come kick the tires when the community was completely empty.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get a global spread of those natural advocates.  I did ask around when we first launched for other people who might be good candidates, but didn’t push too hard as there were so many other things to get ready.  That was a mistake.  If I could get a redo I would have formally asked for people to be assigned where there were gaps and groomed them into an advocate.  Today as we find new advocates to fill the gaps, people are hesitant as the initial set has three years of practice are ahead of the curve power members; it definitely would have been easier earlier on. As fairly early adopters to corporate scale enterprise collaboration, there hasn’t been a roadmap to follow as we’ve grown Engage, which is part of the fun! It’s clear a lot of issues are more easily tackled the earlier you identify and begin to correct them, and I’ve identified the main five I wish I could redo.  In the spirit of collaboration, I hope someone else learns from my mistakes! View the original article by Jem here. 

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• BIOS upgrade lowers CPU temperature

  - by N.N.

  Setup I've got a system with an Asus P8Z68-V PRO motherboard and an Intel Core i7-2600K CPU running at stock speed (no overlocking) which I cool with a Noctua NH-U12P. On the heatsink I've got the two included fans connected via the included Low-Noise Adapters (L.N.A.) 1100 RPM, 16.9 dB(A). In the BIOS settings I've set the CPU and chassis fan profile to silent. Issue Yesterday I upgraded from BIOS version 0501 to 0606. After the upgrade I checked the temperatures in the BIOS monitor and was surprised to see that the CPU temperature was slightly ~30°C. Before the upgrade the CPU temperature was ~50°C with the same BIOS settings (see the following heading for details on temperatures). How can this be? It seems a bit odd that a BIOS upgrade can lower the CPU temperature by 20°C and it also seems odd that the CPU temperature is lower than the chassis temperature. Temperatures When I've checked temperatures the room temperature has been ~23°C. I haven't changed the placement of the computer nor the hardware or cooling setup between BIOS versions. BIOS version 0501 BIOS monitor: CPU: ~50°C Chassis: ~33°C I haven't got any temperature measures from lm-sensors or the like for version 0501 because I only discovered the issue after upgrading to version 0606 and the BIOS updater utility won't let me downgrade to version 0501 (it says "outdated image" when I try to load version 0501). BIOS version 0606 BIOS monitor: CPU: ~30°C Chassis: ~33°C lm-sensors in Ubuntu 11.04 Desktop 64-bit (sudo sensors after an uptime of 4 h 52 min and a load average of 0.22, 0.18, 0.15): coretemp-isa-0000 Adapter: ISA adapter Core 0: +32.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +98.0°C) coretemp-isa-0001 Adapter: ISA adapter Core 1: +35.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +98.0°C) coretemp-isa-0002 Adapter: ISA adapter Core 2: +29.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +98.0°C) coretemp-isa-0003 Adapter: ISA adapter Core 3: +36.0°C (high = +80.0°C, crit = +98.0°C) The BIOS monitor temperatures was checked directly after the lm-sensors temperatures was checked. BIOS version 0706, 0801, 1101 and 3203 I get the same kind of temperatures both in the BIOS monitor and with lm-sensors in BIOS version 0706, 0801, 1101 and 3203 as in 0606. Information from Asus The 0606 changelog mentions nothing explicitly about CPU temperature (but item 3., as indicated by sidran32, might affect temperatures): P8Z68-V PRO 0606 BIOS with IRST 10.6.0.1002 Enable the support of Intel Rapid Storage Technology version 10.6.0.1002 Release Improve DRAM compatibility Improve System stability Improve compatibility with some Raid card model Increase IGD share memory size to 512MB However the following FAQ might give a hint: FAQs I find that the CPU temperature reading in BIOS is about 10~20 degrees centigrade hotter than the reading in OS. Is it normal? Page Tools Solution That is normal as BIOS does not send idle command to the CPU, making most of the power saving features useless. You should be getting similar reading if you disable EIST/C1E/CPU C3 Report/CPU C6 Report in BIOS.

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• How to change SMP affinity of an IRQ on Ubuntu domU inside Xen XCP?

  - by Alexander Gladysh

  I'd like to change IRQ SMP affinity for reasons, outlined in this question: CPU0 is swamped with eth1 interrupts But I can't — I see Input/output error when I try to write to /proc/irq/*/smp_affinity. Please point me to the HOWTO on the matter. (A formal reference on /proc/irq/*/ would be cool as well.) Gory details: Note that this is a VM inside an Ubuntu-based Xen XCP host. $ uname -a Linux MYHOST 2.6.38-15-virtual #59-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 27 16:40:18 UTC 2012 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux $ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 11.04 Release: 11.04 Codename: natty $ sudo cat /proc/irq/*/smp_affinity 01 01 01 01 01 80 80 80 80 80 80 40 40 40 40 40 40 20 20 20 20 20 20 10 10 10 10 10 10 08 08 08 08 08 08 04 04 04 04 04 04 02 02 02 02 02 02 01 01 01 01 01 01 Update. The error details: $ N=$(grep -c processor /proc/cpuinfo) $ echo $N 8 $ printf %x $((2**N-1)) ff $ printf %x $((2**N-1)) | sudo tee /proc/irq/*/smp_affinity fftee: /proc/irq/288/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/289/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/290/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/291/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/292/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/293/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/294/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/295/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/296/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/297/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/298/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/299/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/300/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/301/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/302/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/303/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/304/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/305/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/306/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/307/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/308/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/309/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/310/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/311/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/312/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/313/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/314/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/315/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/316/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/317/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/318/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/319/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/320/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/321/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/322/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/323/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/324/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/325/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/326/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/327/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/328/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/329/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/330/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/331/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/332/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/333/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/334/smp_affinity: Input/output error tee: /proc/irq/335/smp_affinity: Input/output error Update. irqbalance is running: $ sudo service irqbalance status irqbalance start/running, process 560

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• Home and Small to Medium Enterprise network manufacturer choice, Netgear, Linksys or D-Link ?

  - by Kedare

  (Please don't close this post, it's a serious post so... Be cool, no trolls please, I need an answer ;p) Hello, I am looking for an alternative to Cisco (too expensive for me !) for semi-pro utilization (at home but with advanced feature (I'm studying in IT)) and in small/medium enterprises. I think I will choose between LinkSys (Including Cisco Small Business), Netgear and D-Link, but I've never really used these products, that what I need is a manufacturer that make "almost" all type of networking equipment (Like Cisco but cheaper..), here are my needs : I need almost all my products to be rackable I need a good warranty (Netgear lifetime waranty rulez!) I need an "unified" network environment I made a little comparison of the characteristics that interest me after hours of search on Internet (based on result found on many websites): (Prices are based on the ldlc-pro.com french website) Hotline/Support Quality: Netgear : Not so bad Linksys : Not so bad D-Link : Poor! Most common Warranty: Netgear : Unlimited Lifetime Warranty! Linksys : Limited 3 years warranty D-Link : Limited 5 years warranty (Unlimited in US but I'm on France :(...) VPN protocols compatibles with routers on endpoint mode: Netgear : Only IPSEC :( Linksys : IPSEC, PPTP, L2TP D-Link : IPSEC, PPTP, L2TP Cheaper 8 ports Gb switch : Netgear : 30€ Linksys : 47€ D-Link : 30€ Cheaper 48 ports + 1Gb uplink(s) administrable switch : Netgear : 263€ Linksys : 630€ D-Link : 600€ Cheaper VPN router : Netgear : 100€ Linksys : 80€ D-Link : 60€ Cheaper rackable switch : Netgear : 50€ Linksys : 87€ D-Link : 50€ Cheaper rackable and administrable switch : Netgear : 120€ Linksys : 370€ D-Link : 171€ Netgear and D-Link are in the same range of price, where Linksys is more expensives. I've searched for some other criteria ( the full comparison is here, in french with shop/source links: http://forums.jeuxonline.info/showthread.php?t=1072280 ) and made a final score for each manufacturer : SCORE including IP camera sub-score: Netgear : 6.2/10 Linksys : 7.3/10 D-Link : 7.0/10 SCORE excluding IP camera sub-score: Netgear : 6.9/10 Linksys : 7.0/10 D-Link : 6.7/10 On both case, Linksys wins. So here is my little comparison, but because I've never really used these stuffs, I need your help to make a decision on witch manufacturer choose for both my personnal and corporate use. So here are the questions : What manufacturer do you recommend me (Not cisco (except Small business)) ? Why ? Have you called the call center of the customer support of one of these manufacturer ? How it was ? Did you had problems or bad experiences with these equipments ? Any other advices ? ;) Thank you !

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• UNIX - mount: only root can do that

  - by Travesty3

  I need to allow a non-root user to mount/unmount a device. I am a total noob when it comes to UNIX, so please dumb it down for me. I've been looking all over teh interwebz to find an answer and it seems everyone is giving the same one, which is to modify /etc/fstab to include that device with the 'user' option (or 'users', tried both). Cool, well I did that and it still says "mount: only root can do that". Here are the contents of my fstab: # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 # / was on /dev/mapper/minicc-root during installation UUID=1a69f02a-a049-4411-8c57-ff4ebd8bb933 / ext3 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1 # /boot was on /dev/sda5 during installation UUID=038498fe-1267-44c4-8788-e1354d71faf5 /boot ext2 relatime 0 2 # swap was on /dev/mapper/minicc-swap_1 during installation UUID=0bb583aa-84a8-43ef-98c4-c6cb25d20715 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/scd0 /media/cdrom0 udf,iso9660 user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0 /dev/scd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0 /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdcard auto auto,user,rw,exec 0 0 My thumb drive partition shows up as /dev/sdb1. I'm pretty sure my fstab is set up OK, but everyone on the other posts seems to fail to mention how they actually call the 'mount' command once this entry is in the fstab file. I think this is where my problem may be. The command I use to mount the drive is: $ mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdcard. /bin/mount is owned by root and is in the root group and has 4755 permissions. /bin/umount is owned by root and is in the root group and has 4755 permissions. /mnt/sdcard is owned by me and is in one of my groups and has 0755 permissions. My mount command works fine if I use sudo, but I need to be able to do this without sudo (need to be able to do it from a PHP script using shell_exec). Any suggestions? Sorry for making you read so much...just trying to get as much info in the initial post as possible to preemptively answer questions about configuration stuff. If I missed anything tho, ask away. Thanks! -Travis

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• Determining the health of a Cisco switch port?

  - by ewwhite

  I've been chasing a packet-loss and network stability issue for a handful of end-users on an internal network for the past few days... These issues surfaced recently, however, the location was struck by lightning six weeks ago. I was seeing 5-10% packet loss between a stack of four Cisco 2960's and several PC's and phones on the other side of a 77-meter run. The PC's were run inline with the phones over a trunked link. We were seeing dropped calls and interruptions in client-server applications and Microsoft Exchange connectivity. I tried the usual troubleshooting steps remotely, having a local technician do the following during breaks in user and production activity: change cables between the wall jack and device. change patch cables between the patch panel and switch port(s). try different switch ports within the 2960 stack. change end-user devices with known-good equipment (new phones, different PC's). clear switch port interface counters and monitor incrementing errors closely. (Pastebin output of sh int) Pored over the device logs and Observium RRD graphs. No link up/down issues from the switch side. change power strips on the end-user side. test cable runs from the Cisco 2960 using test cable-diagnostics tdr int Gi4/0/9 (clean)* test cable runs with a Tripp-Lite cable tester. (clean) run diagnostics on the switch stack members. (clean) In the end, it took three changes of switch ports to find a stable solution. The only logical conclusion is that a few Cisco 2960 switch ports are bad or flaky... Not dead, but not consistent in behavior either. I'm not used to seeing individual ports die in this manner. What else can I test or check to determine if these devices are bad? Is it common for single ports to have problems, rather than a contiguous bank of ports? BTW - show cable-diagnostics tdr int Gi4/0/14 is very cool... Interface Speed Local pair Pair length Remote pair Pair status --------- ----- ---------- ------------------ ----------- -------------------- Gi4/0/14 1000M Pair A 79 +/- 0 meters Pair B Normal Pair B 75 +/- 0 meters Pair A Normal Pair C 77 +/- 0 meters Pair D Normal Pair D 79 +/- 0 meters Pair C Normal

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• Blank Page: wordpress on nginx+php-fpm

  - by troutwine

  Good day. While this post discusses a similar setup to mine serving blank pages occasionally after having made a successful installation, I am unable to serve anything but blank pages. My setup: Wordpress 3.0.4 nginx 0.8.54 php-fpm 5.3.5 (fpm-fcgi) Arch Linux Configuration Files php-fpm.conf: [global] pid = run/php-fpm/php-fpm.pid error_log = log/php-fpm.log log_level = notice [www] listen = 127.0.0.1:9000 listen.owner = www listen.group = www listen.mode = 0660 user = www group = www pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 50 pm.start_servers = 20 pm.min_spare_servers = 5 pm.max_spare_servers = 35 pm.max_requests = 500 nginx.conf: user www; worker_processes 1; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log notice; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; sendfile on; keepalive_timeout 65; gzip on; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*.conf; } /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/blog_sharonrhodes_us.conf: upstream php { server 127.0.0.1:9000; } server { error_log /var/log/nginx/us/sharonrhodes/blog/error.log notice; access_log /var/log/nginx/us/sharonrhodes/blog/access.log; server_name blog.sharonrhodes.us; root /srv/apps/us/sharonrhodes/blog; index index.php; location = /favicon.ico { log_not_found off; access_log off; } location = /robots.txt { allow all; log_not_found off; access_log off; } location / { # This is cool because no php is touched for static content try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; #NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_pass php; } location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ { expires max; log_not_found off; } }

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• Brand new Mac Pro tower fan suddenly runs full-tilt

  - by Caffeine Coma

  My Quad-Core Mac Pro tower is two days old. Initially, I was impressed with how quiet it was compared to my older Macbook Pro. Then on day two, for some reason it started running very loudly. It's not just a "little" loud- my wife walked into the room and asked what the noise was. At first I thought this was just because I was hitting the CPU a bit (importing my iPhone library into iLife '09, and running Eclipse). But now that that's done, Activity Monitor shows a virtually idle CPU; there's nothing running that ought to be causing this, as far as I can tell. I tried powering it off & letting it cool down for a few minutes to no avail; about 10 seconds after powering up, the box gets loud again. I took a look at it with the side cover off, and it seems to be the fan near the top middle, between the power supply and the disk drive. It can't be a dust issue, as the machine is only 2 days old (and I peeked inside anyway just to be sure- clean). I did do a software update over the past 24 hours or so, but I can't say that it occurred immediately after that. I also did a migration of my old apps and data from my MBPro, for what it's worth. Why is it suddenly so loud? How can I monitor the fan speed and various system temperatures? Here's a link to my temps and fan speeds. UPDATE 1: Took it to the Apple Store. They took it in the back (where it's presumably quieter) and ran a fan diagnostic; no problems were found. The guy also told me that it was "a little loud", but normal. I don't buy it. It was virtually silent the first 24 hours I was using it. They would not replace/service it in the store (grrr... that's why I went there, as directed by Apple Care) but said I could get a replacement from the online store, as it was just purchased. I think I will try that. UPDATE 2: Apple is letting me send it back for a replacement. Glad to see so many responses to this question mentioning that the MacPros are usually silent; it's not all just in my head. :-)

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• CPU overheating after cleaning it

  - by Roberts

  I wanted to clean my computer CPU heatsink and fan itself, because the temperature is not what I wanted. About (50C ~ 70C). I have Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 @1.8 GHz (LGA775). The heatsink wasn't so scary filled with dust but I wanted to clean it anyway. I didn't know how to get heatsink with fan from the socket. So after 25 minutes I've figured it out. But I didn't know how to get it back on so I spent a lot time getting out the motherboard from the case. The fan and heatsink... The case and all components are clear of dust. (I'm tired now). Then I put all back just the way it was, well did few things on cable management. But the problem was that I didn't know how to connect front audio connectors. I had Windows XP hibernated. So I started the PC and everything was normal, except CMOS memory was clear. I configured the BIOS just the way it was and while I was doing that I saw about 58C CPU temperature and fan at 1789 RPM. Restarted the computer with new settings applied. But Windows halted with Blue Screen (I forgot what error it was but something with KERNEL). Restarted the PC and deleted hibernation session and everything was back normal. But couldn't record any sound from front panel microphone. The problem was that I messed ground wire with mic. Again after fixing it I turned computer on. No problems. The fan currently is noisy and temperature was 78C. The temperature before was 55C - 60C at idle. Now it's about 60C. If I do something then temperature raises to 79C. While speaking in skype the temperature was 82C. Could this problem occur because of the thermal grease (it's old and never replaced)? Edit The problem wasn't in thermal paste (because I didn't touch it). The problem was that I installed heatsink wrong. Now instead of regular 60C CPU temperature the CPU is at 48C (cool).

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• Disk IO causing high load on Xen/CentOS guest

  - by Peter Lindqvist

  I'm having serious issues with a xen based server, this is on the guest partition. It's a paravirtualized CentOS 5.5. The following numbers are taken from top while copying a large file over the network. If i copy the file another time the speed decreases in relation to load average. So the second time it's half the speed of the first time. It needs some time to cool off after this. Load average slowly decreases until it's once again usable. ls / takes about 30 seconds. top - 13:26:44 up 13 days, 21:44, 2 users, load average: 7.03, 5.08, 3.15 Tasks: 134 total, 2 running, 132 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 25.3%id, 74.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.1%st Mem: 1048752k total, 1041460k used, 7292k free, 3116k buffers Swap: 2129912k total, 40k used, 2129872k free, 904740k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1506 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 0:03.94 cifsd 1 root 15 0 2172 644 556 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.08 init Meanwhile the host is ~0.5 load avg and steady over time. ~50% wait Server hardware is dual xeon, 3gb ram, 170gb scsi 320 10k rpm, and shouldn't have any problems with copying files over the network. disk = [ "tap:aio:/vm/dev01.img,xvda,w" ] I also get these in the log INFO: task syslogd:1350 blocked for more than 120 seconds. "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. syslogd D 00062E4F 2208 1350 1 1353 1312 (NOTLB) c0ef0ed0 00000286 6e71a411 00062e4f c0ef0f18 00000009 c0f20000 6e738bfd 00062e4f 0001e7ec c0f2010c c181a724 c1abd200 00000000 ffffffff c0ef0ecc c041a180 00000000 c0ef0ed8 c03d6a50 00000000 00000000 c03d6a00 00000000 Call Trace: [<c041a180>] __wake_up+0x2a/0x3d [<ee06a1ea>] log_wait_commit+0x80/0xc7 [jbd] [<c043128b>] autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x2d [<ee065661>] journal_stop+0x195/0x1ba [jbd] [<c0490a32>] __writeback_single_inode+0x1a3/0x2af [<c04568ea>] do_writepages+0x2b/0x32 [<c045239b>] __filemap_fdatawrite_range+0x66/0x72 [<c04910ce>] sync_inode+0x19/0x24 [<ee09b007>] ext3_sync_file+0xaf/0xc4 [ext3] [<c047426f>] do_fsync+0x41/0x83 [<c04742ce>] __do_fsync+0x1d/0x2b [<c0405413>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb ======================= I have tried disabling irqbalanced as suggested here but it does not seem to make any difference.

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• Installing the Newest KeePass for MacOSX from Source

  - by firebush

  I've transitioned our passwords to KeePass. LastPass looks cool, but I prefer a system where we control the database locally rather than it being kept in the cloud. I have a windows and Linux system and both are able to access our KeePass database easily. On my Linux system (Ubuntu), I simply installed KeePass via synaptic and it just worked. So everything was working great, until my wife tried to set up things on her MacBook to access the database. Huge problems. It was so easy on Linux that I didn't expect there to be issues there. In case it's helpful, she's running a fresh install of Mac OSX 10.5.8, Leopard. We simply went to the download site for KeePass: http://keepass.info/download.html Clicked on the link titled KeePass 2.x for Mac OS X from which we retrieved Mono 2.10.5 and KeePass 2.18 from that site (the packages posted there at the time of this writing). Mono installed without problems (at least, none that we saw). She opened the KeePass image and dragged it to the Application side, unpackaging it there. According to the instructions on the KeePass installation instructions, she opened a terminal, changed to the directory in /Applications containing KeePass.exe, and ran it through mono: mono KeePass.exe No application opens at all - we see a blip for it, but then it immediately goes away, indicating to us that it is crashing. Also disconcerting, I see that people are throwing fits about copy-and-paste not working for KeePass 2.18 on MacOSX. Judging from the 2.19 addresses the copy/paste issue. I'm hoping that version will solve all our issues. So here's my question: how can I try out 2.19 on her system. It doesn't seem to be packaged like the 2.18 one is. But we're not scared of building it. I see that the source for 2.19 is here (at the bottom of the page). Can I just download that to her machine somewhere and run something to build it? I'm familiar with automake but not with building .NET source, so please answer gently if this is stupidly easy. :^) btw: tomorrow's my wife's birthday, and this is getting her down. If you know how to navigate these issues, it would be a nice birthday gift for her. Thanks in advance! Update I'll post this since it might be helpful to someone else: I got KeePass 2.18 to run by updating Mono to 2.10.9 (rather than the 2.10.5 given by the site above). With the later version of Mono, it runs without crashing. And yet, I do see the copy and paste issue that others see. I can open a database on her machine, but the incorrect data get's copied. So again, can someone help me install KeePass 2.19? Thanks!

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• Connecting multiple ColdFusion 10 instances to a single Apache 2.2 server

  - by Adam Cameron

  This is on Windows 7 Home Premium edition. I have got two ColdFusion 10 (updater 2) instances: "cfusion" (the default one), and "scratch". I have got a single instance of Apache 2.2 running. Within Apache, I have set up two virtual hosts, each of which needs to be served by a different ColdFusion instance. Each of the CF instances serves files fine via Tomcat's internal web server. Apache serves vanilla HTML files fine too. So both CF instances, and both virtual hosts separately work OK. I can get wsconfig.exe to connect either one of the CF instances to the Apache server, and serve CF files via Apache & that instance. However I cannot find a way of connecting the second CF instance to Apache as well, so that both CF instances are conected, each serving one of the virtual hosts. WSConfig doesn't seem to understand the notion of "multiple CF instances", and the changes it makes to the httpd.conf (via mod_jk.conf) does not seem to be implemented in such a way as to accommodate multiple CF instances talking to a single Apache instance, or multiple virtual hosts. I freely admit to not being confident enough with how mod_jk (or even really httpd.conf) works to be able to guess if I can change stuff to make it work. If I try to add the second CF instance using WSConfig, I just get a message "the web server is already configured for ColdFusion". Be that as it may... not the instance of ColdFusion I want to connect it to! If I remove the existing connector to whichever instance is already connected, I can then connect the other one no problems. Not that this helps, but it demonstrates that the CF instance can connect to Apache. This all used to be fairly straight fwd under older versions of CF and JRun :-( The only docs I have found are on the "Connect multiple Apache virtual hosts on a web server to a single ColdFusion server" page, but that specifically only deals with a single CF instance. There is no equivalent page for multiple CF instances. I'm kinda hoping I can move some of the mod_jk config into my virtual host entries in httpd-vhosts.conf (this is how it used to work for JRun), but I've no idea what to put where. I think I've covered all the necessary info here? If not, sing out and I'll add more. Thanks. PS: tried to specifically tag this as "ColdFusion-10" as the answer will be different from previous CF versions, but it won't let me cos my rep on this site is too low (odd how it doesn't consider my rep from other S/O sites...). If someone with sufficient rep can add it, that'd be cool: it's probably a valid tag to have. Ta.

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• configuring slime in emacs

  - by CodeKingPlusPlus

  I am in the process of configuring slime for emacs. So far I have read about basic functionality for common lisp such as C-c C-q which invokes the command slime-close-parens-at-point which places the proper number of parens where your mouse is. Another command that seemed cool was invoked by C-c C-c and it would pass the code you are editing in a buffer to the REPL, and "compile" it. Why won't these commands work for me? Anyway, I have downloaded slime via M-x list-packages and do not seem to have this functionality (C-h w and then any of these commands tells me that these commands do note exist). So, I saw a bunch of other slime extensions such as slime-repl', 'slime-fuzzy' and 'hippie-expand-slime'. So I again usedM-x list-packages` and downloaded them. Still I did not have these commands. Here is the content of my emacs file relevant to slime: ;;;Common Lisp and Slime (add-to-list 'load-path "/home/s2s2/.emacs.d/elpa/slime-20130626.1151") (add-to-list 'load-path "/home/s2s2/.emacs.d/elpa/slime-repl-201000404") (add-to-list 'load-path "/home/s2s2/.emacs.d/elpa/hippie-expand-slime-20130226.1656") (add-to-list 'load-path "/home/s2s2/.emacs.d/elpa/slime-fuzzy-20100404") (require 'slime) (setq slime-lisp-implementations `((sbcl ("/usr/bin/sbcl")) (ecl ("/usr/bin/ecl")) (clisp ("/usr/bin/clisp" "-q -I")))) (require 'slime-repl) (require 'slime-fuzzy) (require 'hippie-expand-slime) When I execute M-x slime I get the following message in the inferior-lisp buffer where I can execute common lisp code (however, shouldn't this be the slime-repl since I required it?): STYLE-WARNING: redefining EMACS-INSPECT (#<BUILT-IN-CLASS T>) in DEFMETHOD STYLE-WARNING: Implicitly creating new generic function STREAM-READ-CHAR-WILL-HANG-P. WARNING: These Swank interfaces are unimplemented: (DISASSEMBLE-FRAME SLDB-BREAK-AT-START SLDB-BREAK-ON-RETURN) ;; Swank started at port: 46533. Then a slime-error buffer is created with the contents: Invalid protocol message: Symbol "CREATE-REPL" not found in the SWANK package. Line: 1, Column: 28, File-Position: 28 Stream: #<SB-IMPL::STRING-INPUT-STREAM {10056B9C33}> (:emacs-rex (swank:create-repl nil) "COMMON-LISP-USER" t 5) How should I modify my emacs file to give me the functionality of those commands? In my emacs file am I not loading the necessary files? Do I need to install an additional package? If you need more information let me know! All help is much appreciated!

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• Is my Cisco switch port bad?

  - by ewwhite

  I've been chasing a packet-loss and network stability issue for a handful of end-users on an internal network for the past few days... These issues surfaced last week, however the location was struck by lightning six weeks ago. I was seeing 5-10% packet loss between a stack of four Cisco 2960's and several PC's and phones on the other side of a 77-meter run. The PC's were run inline with the phones over a trunked link (switchport configuration pastebin). We were seeing dropped calls and interruptions in client-server applications and Microsoft Exchange connectivity. I tried the usual troubleshooting steps remotely, having a local technician do the following during breaks in user and production activity: change cables between the wall jack and device. change patch cables between the patch panel and switch port(s). try different switch ports within the 2960 stack. change end-user devices with known-good equipment (new phones, different PC's). clear switch port interface counters and monitor incrementing errors closely. (Pastebin output of sh int) Pored over the device logs and Observium RRD graphs. No link up/down issues from the switch side. change power strips on the end-user side. test cable runs from the Cisco 2960 using test cable-diagnostics tdr int Gi4/0/9 (clean)* test cable runs with a Tripp-Lite cable tester. (clean) run diagnostics on the switch stack members. (clean) In the end, it took three changes of switch ports to find a stable solution. The only logical conclusion is that a few Cisco 2960 switch ports are bad or flaky... Not dead, but not consistent in behavior either. I'm not used to seeing individual ports die in this manner. What else can I test or check to determine if these devices are bad? Is it common for single ports to have problems, rather than a contiguous bank of ports? BTW - show cable-diagnostics tdr int Gi4/0/14 is very cool... Interface Speed Local pair Pair length Remote pair Pair status --------- ----- ---------- ------------------ ----------- -------------------- Gi4/0/14 1000M Pair A 79 +/- 0 meters Pair B Normal Pair B 75 +/- 0 meters Pair A Normal Pair C 77 +/- 0 meters Pair D Normal Pair D 79 +/- 0 meters Pair C Normal

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• Dangers of Running Computers w/o Air Conditioning

  - by Daniel Bingham

  I recently moved in to an apartment with out air conditioning. This is fine most of the time as I am in upstate New York. It only ever gets above the high 70s during the hottest of the summer months. And when it does, I'm stubborn enough that I'll just deal with wearing minimal clothing around the house. However, I'm worried about my computers. I'm a software developer and gamer, so many of my machines are very high powered. And at least one of them is a server that must be left on 24/7 (not just a game server - also serves multiple websites). I've never before had to worry about the heat too much, as I always lived in buildings with central air. The in building temperature rarely got much above 70 F. All of the machines I built had good enough air cooling that I never saw a problem. Now the temperature in building is pushing 100F and I'm worried that the machines will not be able to keep themselves cool enough by simply blowing already hot air over themselves. The hottest of them I've turned off. However, the server I cannot. It's an old Dell (not custom build) that runs on a Pentium 4 (2.2GHz). It only has a single hard drive, integrated video. And it'd not running any processor intensive servers. Just basic LAMP. It used to run a MUD server, but that's off for now. So it should be idling most of the time. I haven't been able to find any sort of built in temperature sensors in the hardware... at least not any that the programs I've found in the Debian repository can read. And it's an inherited machine to which I do not have the full specs, so I don't know the tolerances anyway. How worried should I be about it melting down on me? How worried should I be about the hard drive melting or becoming corrupted? To generalize the question for other people, what are the safe temperature tolerances for most machines. How widely does it vary, and how does one go about determining when their machine is running too hot and needs to be shut down?

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• How to Setup Ubuntu Mail Server with Google Apps?

  - by Apreche

  I have a domain, let's call it foobar.com. All of the MX records for foobar.com point to Google's mail servers because I am using Google Apps for your domain to manage it. It's great because everyone gets all the advantages of GMail, but our e-mail addresses aren't @gmail.com. I also have a server. Primarily, it's a web server, but it also serves other things. One of the things it serves is the web site for foobar.com and also sites for various virtual hosts such as shop.foobar.com and forum.foobar.com. The server is running Ubuntu 8.04, because I like using LTS releases in production. The thing is, there are various applications running on the server that need the ability to send out emails. Various applications, like the cron jobs, send me e-mails in case of errors. Some of the web applications need to send e-mail to users when they forget their passwords, to confirm new registered users, etc. Lastly, it's nice to be able to send e-mail from the command line using the mail command, or mutt. How can I setup the mail on the web server to go through the Google apps mail servers? I don't need the web server to receive mail, though that would be cool. I do need it to be able to send mail as any legitimate address @foobar.com. That way the forum application can send mails with [email protected] in the from field, and the ecommerce application will have [email protected] in the from field. Also, by sending the mail through the Google servers, we can avoid a lot of the problems with the e-mails being blocked by various spam filters on the web. Google's SMTP servers are trusted a lot more than mine would be. I'm pretty good with administering Linux systems, but I am absolutely brain dead when it comes to e-mail. I need step by step directions from beginning to end on how to set this up. I need to know every thing to install, and every single change to the configuration files that is necessary. I have tried following various howtos and guides in the past, but none of them were quite right. Either they didn't work at all, or they offered a configuration that is not what I wanted. Please help. Thanks.

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• Have a server, need to figure out a method of backup

  - by PolishHurricane

  My company has an older Dell 2650 server running ArchLinux x64: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/2650_specs.pdf (2 x 2.4GHz Intel Xeon w/around 3287 RAM according to "free -m") We use it to host our internal company site and to post some information from our orders to and we'd like the ability to keep it up as much as possible. What we require: - It needs to always be functional from 8am to 4pm for our data entry person to use it and others to do other things required on it. - If it goes down, we need a quick way to get the machine running again. - If it goes down, we would like to have the data backed up. Some of the major problems include: - The servers old and it may have memory issues - We don't know when one of the hard drives could fail - Our power goes out here once in a while We have a battery backup, but that's pretty much it and it's not for long term. If the server does go down, we have another system in place to store order information that comes in while it's down and repost it when it's back, but we need it up during the day. So we're wondering, what should we get for options? These are the things we thought of, sort of: Setup RAID 1, but that would involve wiping everything right? If we do that, how would we transfer the data over without messing up the server? We could buy an extra server or 2 off eBay for $100, the same model, is that practical or should we get something else? Should we buy a PC or another better server and host off that because it is if anything easier to exchange parts? Should we keep extra parts handy incase it implodes? Should we buy/use backup software? We hear drobo's are cool, but suck. Perhaps there is a software solution to this problem that backs up to another machine or gets us up and running again quickly. Also, if we are to purchase hardware, what is decent? Does anybody know of one for ArchLinux/Linux? We both know a ton about computers but we're kind of unsure what step to take with this, especially with this type of server. Thanks

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• Cooling Server Rack with Water? Sensible? Reuse energy for small installation?

  - by TomTom

  First - this is not a shopping question, this is not so much about concrete prices but about general feasibility. Makes no sense to get looking fo ra manufacturer it the approach is bad. I am moving my company to new Offices in September, and among them we will expand and consolidate our number crunch cluster. It is so far in a data center. I have a nice room in the basement prepared now. I think about cooling. We will likely run up a power usage of around 10kw by end of the year. That is a LOT of stuff, and cooling will be expensive. I am located in south Poland, close to the German border. This is an area where water is available for relatively cheap price - "wasting water" is not a concern here. My situation is thus a lot different for example than in Spain ;) Physics tells me that to heat 1 liter of water by 1 degree I use 1 Calorie (1KCal), and a kwh power is (and we can assume 100% efficiency - water heaters are pretty efficient) 750 Calories. That means that 1 KWH is 750 liter by 1 degree. 10kw and a 20 degree heat would mean that per hour I need 375 liters. That is 6.25 liters per minute and not WHAT much ;) We talk 270 cubic meters here. Even in summer, the significant underground pipes really cool down the water a LOT more ;) Question: This such an approach feasible? Anyone done that? We talk of a 10kw installation for now. Is it feasible to reuse that heat? The alternative is a decent cooling system that WILL use around 2.5kwh for running. Dropping the water would basically (a) get me a quite cold input compared to the outside air even in summer (I.e. a lower temperature medium to drop the heat in) and (b) replace the need to actually have the outside cooling (which may b problematic - if the air is 22 degree, that is a LOT to fight off, but OTOH the water will be quite cold). I also would possibly save the investment for the outside part of the cooling circuit. Now, second question - is there a feasible way to heat a house with that? ;) After all, brutally speaking, it is a LOT of energy in that water ;) If it is a bad idea, I stop here - if it is not, I start looking for suppliers. Maybe my math is wrong?

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