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• installing windows XP in Samsung SENS 145 plus notebook (no CD drive)

  - by user13267

  Hi I was trying to install Windows XP in a Samsung SENS 145 plus Notebook. It does not have a cd drive and I already managed to format it and semi install Windows XP, so now it does not even boot up either. This is what I did: Since it supports USB booting, I first made a bootable USB of Windows XP (Korean version; SP2 I think, may be SP 3) using Novicorp WinToFlash enter link description here. It managed to boot up at first and I was able to format the C driveand get Windows install to start up. It took forever to copy all the files from the USB and after the first reboot, before installation started, I cancelled the reboot from windows install, went to BIOS and changed the boot device priority from USB to internal hard drive. But now on bootup it showed me a list with two options for booting windows XP (much like in the case of a multi OS system) so I assumed that I had formatted drive D by mistake and installed XP there, instead of on C drive. Anyway, I chose one of them and it continued my Windows installation. I got the blue installation screen that shows ads about Windows XP on the right frame and estimated remaining time on the left. However, after completing the process, after the first reboot, instead of showing the Windows XP logo, it says \system32\hall.dll is missing (or corrupted I'm not sure, I needed to install the Korean version of windows and I could not exactly read the error message, however it was one that I have already seen in an English version installation, and I am sure it says either missing or corrupted). The problem is, now it shows the same error again when I try to reboot it from the USB drive as well. I tried to boot a portable version of Linux I made in another USB, but the computer does not boot up from that USB, and it shows hal.dll error when I try to boot it using the WIN XP installation USB I made, as well as when I try to boot it from the hard drive, where I suppose Win XP is now semiinstalled. So now I can't get the computer to start up at all, except going to the BIOS. What else can I try to solve this? Also, would it be possible to install XP on this computer by connecting it to another one running Windows 7 ultimate, through the ethernet card? That is, network just the two computers together, then install windows XP on the notebook from the desktop running windows 7? Please help, I'm running out of ideas on this one. If Korean version of windows XP is the problem then I am willing to install English version as well. (but I need to make sure if that is the real cause of the problem)

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• AWS EC2 instance not pingable or available in browser

  - by Slimmons

  I've seen this questions asked other places, but now I've run through every fix proposed in other questions so I'm re asking it here, in hopes that someone will have a different solution. Problem: I have a EC2 instance, and I can ssh into it and work on it, and I have a Elastic ip set to it. I am unable to ping this machine, or log in to it using my browser. Solutions mentioned and tried: service httpd start i. response I get is "unrecognized service" ii. when I run apache2ctl -k start, it shows "httpd already running", so I'm assuming httpd is not the problem, it's just possibly named something else because of apache2, or for whatever reason. I went into EC2-Security Group- Default (which is the one I used.)-inbound, and everything there is set up correctly (I'm assuming). There it shows 80(HTTP) 0.0.0.0/0. 443(HTTPS) 0.0.0.0/0, and various other servies with their ports and 0.0.0.0/0 next to them. I also enabled a rule for enabling ICMP Request All on 0.0.0.0/0 temporarily for testing purposes I've tried disabling the iptables with "service ufw stop" Just in case I'm doing something really stupid, because I'm not all that used to connecting to web servers that I've spun up, I'm typing in the address to the machine into the url like this (assuming my ip address was ip.address). i. http:/(slash)ip.address/ ii. ip.address iii. https:/(slash)ip.address/ iv. ip.address/webFolderName/ v. http:/(slash)ip.address/webFolderName/ None of the attempts worked, and the only thing I haven't tried that i've seen is to start wireshark on the machine, and see if the requests are reaching it, and it's just ignoring them. I'm not sure I want to do that yet, since A). I'm not 100% positive how to use wireshark without the gui, since it's the only way I've ever used it (I really should get used to it in terminal, but I didn't even know you could). B). It really seems like I'm missing something simple in getting this to work. Thanks in advance for any help.

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• Pinning based on origin of a reprepro repository.

  - by Shtééf

  I'm on Ubuntu 10.04, and trying to set up a repository using reprepro. I'd also like the pin everything in that repository to be preferred over anything else, even if packages are older versions. (It will only contain a select set of packages.) However, I cannot seem to get the pinning to work, and believe it has something to do with the repository side of things, rather than the apt configuration on the client. I've taken the following steps to set up my repository Installed a web server (my personal choice here is Cherokee), Created the directory /var/www/apt/, Created the file conf/distributions, like so: Origin: Shteef Label: Shteef Suite: lucid Version: 10.04 Codename: lucid Architectures: i386 amd64 source Components: main Description: My personal repository Ran reprepro export from the /var/www/apt/ directory. Now on any other machine, I can add this (empty) repository over HTTP to my /etc/apt/sources.list, and run apt-get update without any errors: Ign http://archive.lan lucid Release.gpg Ign http://archive.lan/apt/ lucid/main Translation-en_US Get:1 http://archive.lan lucid Release [2,244B] Ign http://archive.lan lucid/main Packages Ign http://archive.lan lucid/main Sources Ign http://archive.lan lucid/main Packages Ign http://archive.lan lucid/main Sources Hit http://archive.lan lucid/main Packages Hit http://archive.lan lucid/main Sources In my case, now I want to use an old version of Asterisk, namely Asterisk 1.4. I rebuilt the asterisk-1:1.4.21.2~dfsg-3ubuntu2.1 package from Ubuntu 9.04 (with some small changes to fix dependencies) and uploaded it to my repository. At this point I can see the new package in aptitude, but it naturally prefers the newer Asterisk 1.6 currently in the Ubuntu 10.04 repositories. To try and fix that, I have created /etc/apt/preferences.d/personal like so: Package: * Pin: release o=Shteef Pin-Priority: 1000 But when I try to install the asterisk package, it will still prefer the 1.6 version over my own 1.4 version. This is what apt-cache policy asterisk shows: asterisk: Installed: (none) Candidate: 1:1.6.2.5-0ubuntu1 Version table: 1:1.6.2.5-0ubuntu1 0 500 http://nl.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid/universe Packages 1:1.4.21.2~dfsg-3ubuntu2.1shteef1 0 500 http://archive.lan/apt/ lucid/main Packages Clearly, it is not picking up my pin. In fact, when I run just apt-cache policy, I get the following: Package files: 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status release a=now 500 http://archive.lan/apt/ lucid/main Packages origin archive.lan 500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-security/multiverse Packages release v=10.04,o=Ubuntu,a=lucid-security,n=lucid,l=Ubuntu,c=multiverse origin security.ubuntu.com [...] Unlike Ubuntu's repository, apt doesn't seem to pick up a release-line at all for my own repository. I'm suspecting this is the cause why I can't pin on release o=Shteef in my preferences file. But I can't find any noticable difference between my repository's Release files and Ubuntu's that would cause this. Is there a step I've missed or mistake I've made in setting up my repository?

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• Rsync: windows 7, synology: login error and permission denied error

  - by loonboon

  Good day to all of you all, I'm running into strange/stupid errors, and I hope anybody would be so kind to help me out. I have to admit, I am by no means a guru, so please bear with me :-) Situation: -Synology NAS (runs Linux), and Windows 7 desktop (1 normal/restricted user Lisa and 1 admin user). - Data from W7 desktop to be rsynced to synology: /volume1/home/Lisa/Backup - Rsync command: c:\cygwin\bin\rsync -avz /cygdrive/e/Lisa/ [email protected]:/volume1/homes/Lisa/Backup - I've set up ssh per these two threads: a. http://www.cesareriva.com/archives/102 b. http://www.cesareriva.com/archives/112 Now the horrors begin: - root is allowed to run the rsync succesfully, however, he doesn't login automatically (so I can not use rsync in W7 batchscripts, which is of course required). - Lisa is allowed to login automatically but he can not succesfully finish the rsync command because of permission errors: rsync change dir /volume1/homes/Lisa/Backup failed: permissions denied. This happens for each and every file and subdir rsync tries to create. However, the main directory (Backup) is created. When I try to copy files from windows explorer to the directory 'Backup' using the very same user Lisa everything goes smoothly. So, obviously, there is a permission problem somewhere; either my rsync-command isn't correct, or the folder permissions for homes/Lisa aren't correct (but, then again, Windows 7 copies files to that folder without any problems, so that does make me believe the homes/Lisa-permissions don't appear to be the problem). I also tried adding: --chmod=Dugo+x --chmod=ugo+r which I found somewhere on the web, to the rsync-command, but this didn't solve any problem and gave the exact errors. Would anybody please please help me on how to fix this? I am utterly frustrated about this, because I have been trying for 1 month to get everything to work and it simply doesn't work. I bought the big Synology to end the horrors of 20 external USB-disks for once and for all (we have many pictures and home vids of our deceased dogs and want to watch these, the horrors being 'what material is on what disk'). I'll gladly return the favour of somebody helping me out by buying you a nice beer (paypal), if you could end my misery. I am not extremely skilled on Linux (not at all :-( ) so if you could give an extra word when possible so I understand what to do, I'd be very grateful. I really hope somebody can help me out, Thank you in advance, Lisa

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• Changing Physical Path gives blank homepage

  - by Julie

  I have two websites ASP Classic - www.company.com and www.companytesting.com. At this time of year, company.com is pointed to a folder called website2012 and companytesting.com is pointing to a folder called website2013. The contents of those two folders are almost identical, just minor changes for our season change (which I was supposed to do today - lol). Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was running Windows Server 2003. To update the "live" website, I'd make a copy of the test site folder, and rename it website2013R1, and point the test site there, then point the live site at website2012. We now have Windows Server 2008 R2 64. (I had someone migrate the websites to the new server for me.) The companytesting.com site, when I pointed it to website2013R1, worked fine. The company.com site, when I pointed it to website2013 (which worked just before, for the companytesting.com site) gives an empty page. (i.e. view source = nothing there.) There is nothing in the failed request log when this happens. I can use the Explore button/link (upper right) in IIS7.5 and see all of the files there. If I use the browse button (either in general or on the index.asp page) I get the blank page again. One weirdness about how these are set up is that companytesting.com uses a login (which I think is windows authentication - it's simply a single username and password for staff, and to keep the GoogleBots out of it). Obviously, company.com does not. But redirecting the to website2013r1 kept the login in place. (So I'm not absolutely clear whether that's attached to the folder or to the site. Hitting the company.com site after changing the path did not yield a password request.) The permissions on the folders all seem to be the same, but obviously, I'm missing something. Why isn't changing the physical path working? As is probably obvious, I'm not knowledgeable about servers. I did OK in 2003, but since it's not my main task and I'm buried right now, I have barely looked at 2008. So I may have really stupid questions when you ask me to check something.

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• DNS settings for resolving Host name to IP not working?

  - by Hasas Ali Khan

  I want to access my IIS hosted application over LAN. First I installed a DNS server. The DNS configuration steps are: Go to DNS Manager - right click on System Name - click on configure a DNS Server. DNS Server wizard open -, click on next button - Select radio button "forward lookup zone" click on next button. In the second window. click on radio button "The server maintains the zone" and then click next. Give the zone name "example.com" Click on radio button, "Do Not allow dynamic updates". and then click next button. In the next window, click on radio button "No it should not forward query" and then click next button. Complete the configure a DNS server wizard and then click on finish button. After it is managing the DNS records: In DNS server wizard. open tree of forward lookup zone and right click on the new zone name "example.com" - properties and click on "Start of authority" and write values on text boxes serial number=1 primary server=systemname.domainname responsible person=hostmaster.domainname Click on server name, highlight domain name, click on edit button and enter IP address of the server where I host my application. Highlight new zone name and right click on it and click "New Host" option. In this window there are three text boxes: Name(user parent name if blank)=scoring Fully Qualified Domain Name=scoring.example.com IP Address= My IP Address and check on "Create associated pointer(PTR) record" and click on "Add Host" Host button and then click done button. I have host header for my application is "scoring" on port 80 and its working fine on server my application setting are I have change its, Advance setting --> Application Pool Identity --> Local System application can access on server with host name "scoring" but it can not access on machines on LAN. When I change LAN machine host file that is under, C:/windows/system32/driver/etc/host and edit it and enter host name with hosted machine IP like this: scoring 192.168.1.20 By making these changes I can run the application over LAN machines as I mentioned above DNS setting by which I can run App over LAN with out editing the client's host file. What mistake am I doing in this configuration?

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• PTR Record Troubles

  - by Physikal

  I am having a hell of a time getting our PTR record right. Our current PTR zone looks like this: $ttl 38400 @ IN SOA ns1.domain.com. admin.domain.com. ( 1268669139 10800 3600 604800 38400 ) xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa. IN NS ns2.domain.com. xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa. IN NS ns1.domain.com. 97 IN PTR mail.domain.com. xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa. IN PTR mail.domain.com. 97.96/28. IN PTR mail.domain.com For some reason the only thing that works is the 97.96/28. When this line is in there it actually says I have a PTR record when reporting from intodns.com. If I remove that line, it says I have no PTR. I have followed instructions from http://www.philchen.com/2007/04/04/configuring-reverse-dns and when I follow those instructions intodns.com says I have no PTR. When it does work with the line 97.96/28., the PTR kicks back as (from intodns.com) : 97.xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa -> mail.domain.com.xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa Which is, to my knowledge, an incorrect PTR. I want it to just kick back as mail.domain.com, without the xxx.xxx.xxx.in-addr.arpa extension. I have tried everything I can think of but I can't fix it. I can't help but think it's one of those things that is so stupid and simple I'm going to do the ol'facepalm. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks! In the event that the domain zone is needed, here it is: $ttl 38400 @ IN SOA domain.com. [email protected]. ( 1265221037 10800 3600 604800 38400 ) domain.com. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx www.domain.com. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ftp.domain.com. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx m.domain.com. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx localhost.domain.com. IN A 127.0.0.1 webmail.domain.com. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx admin.domain.com. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx mail.domain.com. IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx domain.com. IN MX 5 mail.domain.com. domain.com. IN TXT "v=spf1 a mx a:domain.com ip4:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ?all" domain.com. IN NS ns1 domain.com. IN NS ns2 ns1 IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ns2 IN A xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx Any double entries in different formats were part of my troubleshooting process.

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• Intel RST accidentally selected wrong drive as system drive -- how to fix?

  - by Sean Killeen

  Question / TL;DR If Intel RST has marked a drive other than my RAID set as the system drive, how can I get it so that the RAID set is now seen as the system drive, and catch it up to my drive now? What Happened NOTE: Some perhaps unwise decisions are ahead. This is as best as I can recall the order of things. I had a 2x1TB RAID1 config. I bought the drives around the same time, and they started to die around the same time. I replaced 1st drive with a 2 TB drive before the other one's SMART errors got more serious. I waited for the RAID to replicate, then replaced the 2nd drive with a manufacturer's replacement. I got a second manufacturer's drive replacement and used it as a spare. so I now I had a 1TB/2TB drive in a RAID1 and another 1TB as a spare. The 1TB drive in the replacement set was bad from the manufacturer. Rather than mess with their refurbished stuff, I bought another 2 TB drive an upped the config to a 2x2TB RAID1 with the other, functioning manufacturer's drive as a spare. I made the mistake of trying to bring the other drive online to clean it out and the signatue clash killed my machine. When the machine rebooted, that drive was marked as the system drive. So, I have a 2x2TB RAID1 that is apparently offline, and 1 spare 1 TB refurbished drive that everything is being run from. Not a great idea. Options I'm considering Bring the 2x2TB drive back online, and then unplug the spare until I can format it in another system. This would involve some data loss, but the more I think about it, I actually think I haven't modified any data that isn't backed up or synced somewhere (go me!) Anything that isn't is likely trivial, enough that I'm willing to take the risk. One downside here is that if the 2 TB doesn't have data on it for some reason, I could be screwed trying to put the other drive back in, no? Try to somehow get the RAID1 updated with the data from the current system drive. Option 3?

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• networked storage for a research group, 10-100 TB

  - by Marc

  this is related to this post: http://serverfault.com/questions/80854/scalable-24-tb-nas-for-research-department but perhaps a little more general. Background: We're a research lab of around 10 people who do a lot of experiments that involve taking pictures at one of several lab setups and then analyzing it an one of several lab computers. Each experiment may produce 2 or 3 GB of data, and we are generating data at the rate of about 10 TB/year. Right now, we are storing the data on a 6-bay netgear readynas pro, but even with 2 TB drive, this only gives us 10 TB of storage. Also, right now we are not backing up at all. Our short term backup plan is to get a second readynas, put it in a different building and mirror the one drive onto the other. Obviously, this is somewhat non-ideal. Our options: 1) We can pay our university $400/ TB /year for "backed up" online storage. We trust them more than we trust us, but not a whole lot. 2) We can continue to buy small NASs and mirror them between offices. One limit, although stupid, is that we don't have an unlimited number of ethernet jacks. 3) We can try to implement our own data storage solution, which is why I'm asking you guys. One thing to consider is that we're a very transient population and none of us are network administration experts. I will probably be here only another year or so, and graduate students, who are here the longest, have a 5-6 year time scale. So nothing can require expert oversight. Our data transfer rates are low - most of the data will just sit on the server waiting for someone to look at it once or twice - so we don't need a really high speed system. Given these contraints, can someone recommend a fairly low-cost, scalable, more or less turn key shared data storage system with backup in a separate physical location. Does such a thing exist or should we just pay the university to take care of it for us? As a second question, our professor just got tenure and is putting together a budget. Here the goal is to ask for as much as you can and hope you get a fraction of it. So the same question, minus the low-cost. Without budget constraints, can you recommend a scalable turn-key backed up storage system. Thanks

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• How can I fix Problems with interlaced video jerking/flicking when playedback on DVD players? (Mixin

  - by Simon P Stevens

  I'm trying to make a DVD and the final DVD jerks when played on standalone DVD players. It seems to play fine on PCs. I think the problem may be to do with interlacing settings when rendering the final output, but I'll outline the whole editing process I have followed in case I've made a mistake somewhere else. Most of the footage comes from a sony handy cam (one of those mini DVD ones) so isn't great quality. It was set to "high quality" (haha) and 16:9 aspect ratio when it was recorded. I copy the files directly from the mini DVDs onto the hard drive and import them into Cinelerra. In Cinelerra I set the format to 25fps, 720x576, RGBA-8bit, 16:9, interlaced bottom fields first. When I've finished the editing, I add a Fields to frames effect (set to bottom first) to each video track. I render to audio and video separately: Audio: AC3, 128kbps Video: YUV4MPEG steam, video pipe settings: ffmpeg -f yuv4mpegpipe -i - -y -target dvd -flags +ilme+ildct mpeg2video % Cinelerra often crashes during the rendering, so I set it to generate a new video file at each label, and combine them using cat when I've got a sucesful render of each one. Once I've combined them, I use mencoder to re-index them: mencoder -forceidx -oac copy -ovc copy merged.m2v -o mergedReIndexed.m2v I combine the audio and video files using ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i AudioFile.ac3 -i VideoFile.m2v -target dvd -flags +ilme+ildct FinalMovie.mpg Then I build the menus with spumux and I create the DVD file system with dvdauthor, and finally I write it do a dvd-r like this: nice -n -20 growisofs -dvd-compat -speed=2 -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video -V VIDEO ./ && eject /dev/dvd Originally, when I did it the DVD flickered badly, so as suggested in a guide I added the fields to frames effect in cinelerra. Now it doesn't "flicker", but has become "jerky" when there is lots of motion, particularly when the camera is moving, so the whole background moves. This is what I've tried so far: Removed "mpeg2video" from cinelerra video render pipe. Removed +ilme from render pipe. Removed +ildct from render pipe. Removed +ilme from render audio/video rejoin command. Removed +ildct from render audio/video rejoin command. Added -alt to render pipe. Added -alt to render audio/video rejoin command. Tried with and without the frames to fields effect in Cinelerra. and various combinations of the above. I've also tried this: change the Cinelerra fps to 50, use fields to frames (instead of frames to fields), render to an intermediate QTforlinux jpeg video stream, re-importing that back into Cinelerra, adding a frames to fields effect and then rendering that output as normal (@25fps), and I still have the same problem. Has anyone experienced this "jerking" playback before? Can anyone give any suggestions on how to fix it? (Like I say, it plays back fine on a PC, but not on any of the standalone players I've tried)

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• System Reserved partition no longer marked as System

  - by Mark

  I recently posted a question to Super User about accidentally marking my external HDD's partition as Active and how I could undo my accidental mistake. I followed the instructions provided and they worked fine. This involved some command line magic and from what I understand, I did not have to really do this, but I just wanted to get things back to how they were originally. After making the fix things went back to normal in disk management. After I restarted my computer though i had an issue: BOOTMGR is missing Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart Rugh roh! I brought my laptop to work so I could search for a solution on my work computer and I found a nice guide on fixing the issue. To summarize the instructions, I had to reboot with my Windows 7 install disc and click the Repair button. Once there I could then repair the start-up options. One of the commenters on the site claimed you need to do this twice, as the first time the "repair" doesn't actually fix it. I found this to be true as well. I tried to repair it and it did some work, then rebooted. I then got the same error again. I booted from the CD again and repaired the start-up options then after this second time Windows started to boot up. Before the restart I got a nice info window telling me that it did make repairs to the boot info (this was promising). I've been using Windows 7 for a few days now with no problem, but I just recently noticed that I now can see the System Reserved partition in Computer: (click for full size) I immediately went to disk management to see what was up. I noticed that my System Reserved partition is no longer marked as System and instead I believe the repair operation made my C: drive the system partition. I'm not fully aware of what the System partition really is but I briefly read that its a Windows 7 thing that gets created on install of Win7 that writes some BitLocker encryption stuff to a isolated partition as well as some boot files. (click for full size) How can I undo this and make the System Partition marked as System instead of my OS C: partition? How can I make it so that I don't see this partition in Computer (I believe fixing #1 will fix this) What are the implications of what the current state is and the fact that I can now browse into this new partition? Thanks in advance.

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• batch file infinite loop when parsing file

  - by Bart

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

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• How do Windows 7 encrypted files look like?

  - by Sean Farrell

  Ok this is kind of an odd question: How do Windows 7 (Home Premium) encrypted files look like "from the outside"? Now here is the story. An acquaintance of a freind of mine got a nasty virus / scareware. So I wiped out my PC technician cap and went to work on it. What I did was remove the drive from the laptop and put drive into my external drive bay. I scanned the drive and yes it was loaded with stuff. That basically cured the infection and I could start the system back up. To check if it cured the problem I wanted to see the system while running. There where two user accounts, on with a password and one without (both admin users !?!). So I logged into the unprotected user and cleaned up the residual issues, like proxy server to localhost in the browser config. Now I wanted to do the same for the password protected user. What I noticed that from my system and the unprotected user account the files of the protected user looked garbled. The files are something like 12 random alphanum chars, but the folders looked ok. Naive as was thought this might be how encrypted files looked "from the outside". (I never use Microsoft's own security features, so how would I know. TrueCrypt is one big blob.) Since the second user could not be reached, I though sod it and removed the password from the account. (That might have been a mistake, I know.) Now I did the same clean up tasks and all nice and fine; except for the files which where still "encrypted". So I looked into many Windows Encrypted Files recovery posts and not all hope is lost, since I should be able to extract the certificate and with the password regain access to the files. Also note that windows did "only" prompt me that removing the password would be insecure, not that access to encrypted files would be lost, like it is claimed in most recovery articles. Resetting the password did not help and I gave up for the night. The question that nagged me half of the last night was, what if the files are not encrypted, but the scare-ware encrypted / destroyed the files? I don't want to spend hours of work trying to recover files that are not recoverable. The ting is that the user does not remember turning it on and aren't the files marked in blue and the filename is readable? Many thanks for input from users who have more knowledge about WEF...

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• Trouble creating FTP in Server 2008

  - by Saariko

  I have been trying to create an FTP server on my new Server 2008. I have been following both (very detailed and highly published here guides) For setting up using IIS Manager http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/321/configure-ftp-with-iis-7-manager-authentication/ and For anonymous FTP http://www.trainsignaltraining.com/windows-server-2008-ftp-iis7 I am able to log as an anonymous user. My need is to use a named user, so I need to use the IIS Manager. I get error 530 when trying to log as a user. Connected to 127.0.0.1. 220 Microsoft FTP Service User (127.0.0.1:(none)): ftpmanager 331 Password required for ftpmanager. Password: 530-User cannot log in. Win32 error: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. Error details: Filename: Error: 530 End Login failed. ftp> I can not learn from this message anything. My password is set to: 1234 (so I don't think I make a mistake here - testing purposes only ofc) Thank you. Note - I went over other posts on SE that I read, and couldn't get the result: IIS7 Windows Server 2008 FTP -> Response: 530 User cannot log in. FTP Error 530, User cannot log in, home directory inaccessible. Having trouble setting up FTP server on Windows Server 2008 EDIT I think I found some errors with the physical path. Going to Basic settings, and Test Connection on the physical path, gave me the following error: The server is configured to use pass-through authentication with a built-in account to access the specified physical path. However, IIS Manager cannot verify whether the built-in account has access. Make sure that the application pool identity has Read access to the physical path. If this server is joined to a domain, and the application pool identity is NetworkService or LocalSystem, verify that \$ has Read access to the physical path. Then test these settings again. I am not sure which/whom should get access to the Root folder !? I want to point out, I managed to login with a domain user (change authorization and authentication methods) but this is NOT the requested solution. I checked to make sure that the FTP, folders, access is working properly. I am bit lost here. ==== More tries: I have enabled another Allow rule for ALL Users. I still get the same error. It seems that it doesn't matter if i use a correct or wrong password, I still get Error 530.

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• One user sometimes gets an unknown certificate error opening Outlook

  - by Chris

  Let me clarify a little. This isn't an unknown certificate error it's an unknown certificate error in so much as I can't figure out where the certificate comes from. This happens on a Win 7 Enterprise machine connecting to Exchange 2010 with Outlook 2010. The error he gets is that the root is not trusted because it's a self-signed cert. Take a look at this screenshot because even if I had generated this myself I wouldn't have put "SomeOrganizationalUnit" or "SomeCity" or "SomeState", etc. (Red block covers our domain name.) I'm a little concerned this is a symptom of a security breach. Exchange 2010 has three certificates installed but none of them are this certificate. They all have different expiration dates (one is expired) and different meta-data. edit: There are two scenarios that I see the certificate warning and one of them I can reliably repeat. When the user leaves his computer on over night Outlook pops the Security Warning window. I don't know what time this happens. Using Outlook Anywhere if I connect to Exchange externally via a cellular USB modem the Security Warning window will appear every time I close and reopen Outlook. Whether I say Yes or No does not make a difference on whether or not I can connect to Exchange and send/receive email. In other words, I can always connect to Exchange. I've checked my two Exchange servers and my Cisco router for a certificate that matches this one and I can't find it. edit 2: Here is a screenshot of the Security Alert window. (I've been calling it Security Warning... My mistake.) edit 3: I stopped seeing this error several weeks ago but I can't tie it to any single event (because I just sort of realized that warning had stopped showing up) but I think I found the source of the certificate. Last week I found out that the certificate on our website DomainA.com was invalid. I knew that our web admin had installed a valid certificate so when I look into the problem I found out I was being presented with the invalid certificate that this posting is in regards to. The Exchange server's domain is mail.DomainA.com so I can only guess that Outlook was passing this invalid certificate through as it did some kind of check on DomainA.com. This issue is still a mystery because the certificate warning stopped appearing several weeks ago whereas the invalid certificate issue on the website was only fixed last week. It ended up being a problem with the website control panel. The valid certificate was installed but not being served for some reason and instead the self-signed cert was being served.

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• Both nginx and php5-fpm init.d startup scripts are non-functional and returning no errors..? But they used to work perfectly

  - by Ollie Treend

  I have been using nginx and php5-fpm on my Ubuntu box for a while now. Everything has been configured and setup correctly, and it ran like a charm. I have been keeping the packages updated & upgraded as usual, but haven't touched the nginx OR php5-fpm config files at all (thus I'm pretty sure this isn't my fault... ) Basically, I noticed nginx wasn't running as it should be. I ran the command sudo service nginx start, and the script did nothing. The same thing happens when trying to do anything - start, stop, restart or reload. This also happens for the "php5-fpm" init script - although all other init scripts seem to be functioning correctly. When trying to start nginx OR php5-fpm, this is what happens: root@HAL:/etc# service php5-fpm start root@HAL:/etc# I can't understand what is going wrong. The script isn't returning errors, but similarly it isn't starting the daemon or reporting success as usual. For reference, both installations are from the official nginx and php5-fpm PPAs. The fact that both started doing this at the same time has thrown me - since they are both unrelated packages. I have since purged both sets of packages from my system with apt-get purge ... and also apt-get remove --purge ... both of which have successfully removed the packages, their config files, and their init.d startup scripts. After having reinstalled nginx, I now have a functioning startup script again - I can start the web server as usual. However, php5-fpm is still experiencing the strange premature exiting of the startup script.. and I really can't figure out what's causing it. I have no idea what caused this to occur initially, but have managed to fix nginx. I now need to fix the php5-fpm startup script. If anybody could shed some light on this situation, I would be very grateful! The chances are both these issues are related - and they were caused by me doing something stupid. But now I need to fix it. This time I was lucky - because these problems are just on my development server. But I have 2 other live servers which are configured in a similar way, and I am worried the same thing will happen to these two as well! Has anybody else come across this? Do you have any words of advice? Thank you

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• Synchronize the same set of files to 2 different locations with 2 different programs for 2 different purposes

  - by Hedgetrimmer

  Because of stupid questionable IT policies at my not-to-be-named place of occupation, I have been (and will be, for the forseeable future) carrying on an external hard drive a unison-synchronized copy of all of my documents and code, including code which resides in some of my "dotfiles" and other code which resides in ~/bin (things I've made are there because ~/bin is in my $PATH) along with some cruft generated (and to be generated) by conscript and its related "giter8" templating system for Scala project boilerplates. Despite this, I do use a symlinking program to store all of my important dotfiles in a subdirectory. Thanks to that somewhat complicated setup, I have resorted to making a directory full of symlinks to every directory (or file, as is the case with stuff under ~/bin) that I want synchronized, and then follow = True is in my unison profile. It happens to be that this collection of odds and ends—plus an automatically-generated text file containing every package installed on my system—is everything under ~ that needs to be backed up to a remote (rsync-over-ssh) host with client-side encryption and signing from GPG. I already believe that duplicity is the most appropriate program to do that. What isn't as clear-cut is how to make duplicity use the exact same set of files when it runs a backup; it would be simple if duplicity would follow symlinks, but it does not and the manpage lists no option for enabling any such behavior. Comparing unison's file selection algorithm to duplicity's, I don't think I can write a program that could compute a ruleset for one program given one for the other. For the record, I would rather not keep the symlinks manually synchronized with duplicity file-selection rules, as they can change thanks to the above-mentioned complications regarding ~/bin. I don't think running duplicity on the external hard disk is such a good idea either; I usually keep that hard disk unmounted and unplugged in case of a power failure or other physical problem with the computer, plus I'm not sure about duplicity's performance given that: the hard disk is NTFS-formatted in order to be useable at my Windows-imprisoned place of occupation. despite being a USB 3.0 disk, my computer has no USB 3.0 ports so it acts as a USB 2.0 disk. How can I have duplicity (or is there a better program that I have overlooked?) back up the exact same set of files that is bidirectionally synchronized with my external hard disk?

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• Nginx not working properly on subdomains [SOLVED]

  - by javipas

  I've been trying to setup a Sugar CRM instance. I've got a domain that has its main site on a server (www.domain.com) and I've created a subdomain (sugar.domain.com), but I wnat this subdomain to be hosted on another server. This second server has nginx installed, and there's a working WordPress blog there on a virtualhost, so I would need to setup a second site. To do this I've created the directory structure, and I've created a /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/sugar.domain.com configuration file that has the following: * server { listen 80; server_name sugar.domain.com *.domain.com; access_log /var/www/sugar/log/access.log; error_log /var/www/sugar/log/error.log info; location / { root /var/www/sugar; index index.php; } location ~ .php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$; fastcgi_pass backend; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/sugar/$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string; fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method; fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type; fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_ignore_client_abort on; fastcgi_read_timeout 180; } ## Disable viewing .htaccess & .htpassword location ~ /\.ht { deny all; } } upstream backend { server 127.0.0.1:9000; } As far as I know, I need the *.domain.com parameter on the "server_name" flag, but something is crashing here: I get either a 403 Forbidden error, or I get PHP code (I can read the PHP file code in the browser, like normal text) that somehow is not executed. I've tried setting permissions to 755 inside the /var/www/sugar/ directory, and I've also set up the owner:group with a chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/sugar/ The thing is, I don't now if my mistake is in the nginx site configuration, in my folder permissions, or in other place :( Could it be because of the main domain (www.domain.com) is hosted on other server? Do they have to be together necessarily?

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• SQL Transactional Replication snapshot not applying

  - by dmch2

  Hi, I'm using SQL Transactional Replication with pull subscriptions to replicate databases (hosting their own distribution database) from several servers across a VPN to a central server. I've got the first 2 databases working fine but the 3rd one is causing me problems. My subscription server is SQL 2008, the source systems are all SQL 2005. The source databases are a few 100Mb in size and contain audit data so are simply growing slowly by adding new records at approx 1kb a second. As far as the replication monitor, Agent logs and event logs show everything is working fine - except that no data appears in my subscription database. The distribution agent doesn't seem to want to read the snapshot (and hence the initial state and schema) from the publisher. New transactions aren't applied although they do seem to be arriving OK as the replication monitor shows things like '5 transactions with 10 commands were delivered'. I would expect (as in previous times) to see statements about data being BCPed in the replication monitor. The snapshot is on the publisher on a shared folder. The subscriber can view the snapshot OK (\\repldata) and the alt snapshot folder is pointing at it. But the distribution agent doesn't seem to be making an attempt to do read it. I tried changing the snapshot path to something that's incorrect and didn't even get an error saying that it couldn't access it. After lots of googling etc I found that sp_MSget_repl_commands is called by the subscriber on the distribution database on the publisher. Running a profiler I can see that it's only called for one agent Id. After a reinit it's called for sequence number 0x0 as expected so I thought that would mean it's would look for the snapshot. However, looking on the publisher I see that there's data for two agents - the snapshot agent and the log reader agent (which is being queries). So I guess I need to tell the distribution agent to get the data for both. But how? and more importantly - why? It worked fine on the other two servers I've replicated. I'm not an SQL novice but this is pretty much my first go at replication so don't be afraid to accuse me of missing something obvious/stupid! I can get log files (eg from the distribution agent) if you want but they don't seem to have any errors in them - it just starts up and starts applying log reader agent changes. Cheers Dave

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• Nginx not working properly on subdomains

  - by javipas

  I've been trying to setup a Sugar CRM instance. I've got a domain that has its main site on a server (www.domain.com) and I've created a subdomain (sugar.domain.com), but I wnat this subdomain to be hosted on another server. This second server has nginx installed, and there's a working WordPress blog there on a virtualhost, so I would need to setup a second site. To do this I've created the directory structure, and I've created a /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/sugar.domain.com configuration file that has the following: * server { listen 80; server_name sugar.domain.com *.domain.com; access_log /var/www/sugar/log/access.log; error_log /var/www/sugar/log/error.log info; location / { root /var/www/sugar; index index.php; } location ~ .php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$; fastcgi_pass backend; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/sugar/$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string; fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method; fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type; fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_ignore_client_abort on; fastcgi_read_timeout 180; } ## Disable viewing .htaccess & .htpassword location ~ /\.ht { deny all; } } upstream backend { server 127.0.0.1:9000; } As far as I know, I need the *.domain.com parameter on the "server_name" flag, but something is crashing here: I get either a 403 Forbidden error, or I get PHP code (I can read the PHP file code in the browser, like normal text) that somehow is not executed. I've tried setting permissions to 755 inside the /var/www/sugar/ directory, and I've also set up the owner:group with a chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/sugar/ The thing is, I don't now if my mistake is in the nginx site configuration, in my folder permissions, or in other place :( Could it be because of the main domain (www.domain.com) is hosted on other server? Do they have to be together necessarily?

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• Recovering from backup without original install media

  - by KGendron

  A machine from my old job had a complete hard drive failure. I have backups but I'm running into severe problems restoring from them. The only install media was a secondary restore partition on the system's hard drive. I hate whoever came up with that idea more than i can possibly express with words. I spent several days trying to recover the disk - it is pretty well shot and none of my best tricks could even get it to show up in the bios/ The machine that broke is an hp with xp media center edition on it (I don't know why either). The backups were created using the default windows backup tool - I have .bfk file on an external hardrive that i am trying to restore from. I've replaced the hard drive. My home machine is running windows 7 64bit and i'm trying to use it as a platform to restore to the other disk. I downloaded the window 7 nt-restore utility, however no matter what i do it restores to my C drive rather than the specified drive. Fortunately win7 security settings prevented it from being a complete disaster - but still not a happy thing. I tried firing up the xp virtual machine. I can browse to the backups but it says they are invalid and refuse to let me view/ continue with the restore. I tried installing XP to an extra harddrive on my machine - however it bluescreens on me during the install process and I cry. I tried installing xp pro to the new drive and attempted to restore over it, it of course blackscreened on me as that was a stupid idea. I made two partitions on the new hard drive (Apparently the bios on this accursed piece of junk doesn't allow hd partitions larger than 200G anyways and thus fails 40 minutes into the install with an ever-descriptive "Disk Read Error". Guess how i spent last weekend? My last idea was to install xp pro to the second partition and then use it to restore from backup to the first. After the first restart it gives me the error "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware". My brain made one of those bad hard drive clicky noises. I've tried several boot disks but they don't seem to work. If anyone has a link to a good one it would be greatly appreciated. Anyone have any more ideas? - I really hate asking on what seems like such a simple issue but i am quite literally at my wit's end. Thanks - and sorry for the really long post.

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• Router behind Router--second router (and its clients) cannot be "seen" even after both routers are D

  - by Trioke

  Couple of terminology I guess I should get out of the way for consistency's sake throughout the post: External Router/Modem - SMC 8014WG - External IP 173.32.144.134 - Internal IP 192.168.0.1 Internal Router - LinkSys WRT120N - "External" IP of 192.168.0.175 - Internal IP 192.168.1.1 - Connected via Ethernet Cable (a really long one, from the basement to the second floor) PC - IP 192.168.200 - Connected Wirelessly via WAP2 Personal. Laptop - Used to try and diagnose the problem, a 4th machine to the setup which won't be part of the final setup once everything works. The actual problem: I've tried setting the LinkySys router as a DMZ'd client on the SMC router, and then DMZ'd the actual PC on the LinkSys. So the DMZ looks like this: On the SMZ, client with IP 192.168.0.175 is DMZ'd. On the LinkSys, client with IP 192.168.1.200 is DMZ'd. No dice. I then tried port forwarding the necessary port on the SMC to the LinkSys (lets just say, port 80). Then port forwarded Port 80 on the LinkSys to the PC. Same as the DMZ scenario above, but change DMZ with port forwarding. No dice, still :(. Now here's where I went stupid--and tell me if one should never do this--I enabled both DMZ and port forwarding at the same time. I fired up Opera--my browser of choice ;)--typed in 173.32.144.134:6333 and... ... Third time is the charm they say? Well, clearly not. Otherwise I wouldn't be here ;). To diagnose the problem, I enabled "Allow remote access to the Admin panel" on the LinkSys router, and specified port 6333 as the port to use. I port forwarded port 6333 on the SMC to 192.168.0.175, and access my external IP of 173.32.144.134:6333 in hopes of seeing the Admin panel... No dice (I think I've ran out of dice by now ;)). So to see where the problem was, I connected a laptop to the SMC via LAN cable, and typed in 192.168.0.175:6333, and viola, Admin Panel access! So the problem looks like it lies with the SMC--But that's as far as I've got, I've done the port forwarding, the DMZ'ing, and I've even disabled the built-in firewall for safe measures, but nothing worked. So, here I am. Unable to connect to the PC behind the Internal router externally, and without anything to go on other than to come here and ask for the wisdom of the the superuser folks :). If any more detail is required, just ask. (Apologies in advance, if questions should never be this long winded!)

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• C#: System.Lazy&lt;T&gt; and the Singleton Design Pattern

  - by James Michael Hare

  So we've all coded a Singleton at one time or another.  It's a really simple pattern and can be a slightly more elegant alternative to global variables.  Make no mistake, Singletons can be abused and are often over-used -- but occasionally you find a Singleton is the most elegant solution. For those of you not familiar with a Singleton, the basic Design Pattern is that a Singleton class is one where there is only ever one instance of the class created.  This means that constructors must be private to avoid users creating their own instances, and a static property (or method in languages without properties) is defined that returns a single static instance. 1: public class Singleton 2: { 3: // the single instance is defined in a static field 4: private static readonly Singleton _instance = new Singleton(); 5:  6: // constructor private so users can't instantiate on their own 7: private Singleton() 8: { 9: } 10:  11: // read-only property that returns the static field 12: public static Singleton Instance 13: { 14: get 15: { 16: return _instance; 17: } 18: } 19: } This is the most basic singleton, notice the key features: Static readonly field that contains the one and only instance. Constructor is private so it can only be called by the class itself. Static property that returns the single instance. Looks like it satisfies, right?  There's just one (potential) problem.  C# gives you no guarantee of when the static field _instance will be created.  This is because the C# standard simply states that classes (which are marked in the IL as BeforeFieldInit) can have their static fields initialized any time before the field is accessed.  This means that they may be initialized on first use, they may be initialized at some other time before, you can't be sure when. So what if you want to guarantee your instance is truly lazy.  That is, that it is only created on first call to Instance?  Well, there's a few ways to do this.  First we'll show the old ways, and then talk about how .Net 4.0's new System.Lazy<T> type can help make the lazy-Singleton cleaner. Obviously, we could take on the lazy construction ourselves, but being that our Singleton may be accessed by many different threads, we'd need to lock it down. 1: public class LazySingleton1 2: { 3: // lock for thread-safety laziness 4: private static readonly object _mutex = new object(); 5:  6: // static field to hold single instance 7: private static LazySingleton1 _instance = null; 8:  9: // property that does some locking and then creates on first call 10: public static LazySingleton1 Instance 11: { 12: get 13: { 14: if (_instance == null) 15: { 16: lock (_mutex) 17: { 18: if (_instance == null) 19: { 20: _instance = new LazySingleton1(); 21: } 22: } 23: } 24:  25: return _instance; 26: } 27: } 28:  29: private LazySingleton1() 30: { 31: } 32: } This is a standard double-check algorithm so that you don't lock if the instance has already been created.  However, because it's possible two threads can go through the first if at the same time the first time back in, you need to check again after the lock is acquired to avoid creating two instances. Pretty straightforward, but ugly as all heck.  Well, you could also take advantage of the C# standard's BeforeFieldInit and define your class with a static constructor.  It need not have a body, just the presence of the static constructor will remove the BeforeFieldInit attribute on the class and guarantee that no fields are initialized until the first static field, property, or method is called.   1: public class LazySingleton2 2: { 3: // because of the static constructor, this won't get created until first use 4: private static readonly LazySingleton2 _instance = new LazySingleton2(); 5:  6: // Returns the singleton instance using lazy-instantiation 7: public static LazySingleton2 Instance 8: { 9: get { return _instance; } 10: } 11:  12: // private to prevent direct instantiation 13: private LazySingleton2() 14: { 15: } 16:  17: // removes BeforeFieldInit on class so static fields not 18: // initialized before they are used 19: static LazySingleton2() 20: { 21: } 22: } Now, while this works perfectly, I hate it.  Why?  Because it's relying on a non-obvious trick of the IL to guarantee laziness.  Just looking at this code, you'd have no idea that it's doing what it's doing.  Worse yet, you may decide that the empty static constructor serves no purpose and delete it (which removes your lazy guarantee).  Worse-worse yet, they may alter the rules around BeforeFieldInit in the future which could change this. So, what do I propose instead?  .Net 4.0 adds the System.Lazy type which guarantees thread-safe lazy-construction.  Using System.Lazy<T>, we get: 1: public class LazySingleton3 2: { 3: // static holder for instance, need to use lambda to construct since constructor private 4: private static readonly Lazy<LazySingleton3> _instance 5: = new Lazy<LazySingleton3>(() => new LazySingleton3()); 6:  7: // private to prevent direct instantiation. 8: private LazySingleton3() 9: { 10: } 11:  12: // accessor for instance 13: public static LazySingleton3 Instance 14: { 15: get 16: { 17: return _instance.Value; 18: } 19: } 20: } Note, you need your lambda to call the private constructor as Lazy's default constructor can only call public constructors of the type passed in (which we can't have by definition of a Singleton).  But, because the lambda is defined inside our type, it has access to the private members so it's perfect. Note how the Lazy<T> makes it obvious what you're doing (lazy construction), instead of relying on an IL generation side-effect.  This way, it's more maintainable.  Lazy<T> has many other uses as well, obviously, but I really love how elegant and readable it makes the lazy Singleton.

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• Form, function and complexity in rule processing

  - by Charles Young

  Tim Bass posted on ‘Orwellian Event Processing’. I was involved in a heated exchange in the comments, and he has more recently published a post entitled ‘Disadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1)’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of our exchange, it clearly failed to generate any agreement or understanding of our different positions. I don't particularly want to promote further argument of that kind, but I do want to take the opportunity of offering a different perspective on rule-processing and an explanation of my comments. For me, the ‘red rag’ lay in Tim’s claim that “...rules alone are highly inefficient for most classes of (not simple) problems” and a later paragraph that appears to equate the simplicity of form (‘IF-THEN-ELSE’) with simplicity of function.   It is not the first time Tim has expressed these views and not the first time I have responded to his assertions.   Indeed, Tim has a long history of commenting on the subject of complex event processing (CEP) and, less often, rule processing in ‘robust’ terms, often asserting that very many other people’s opinions on this subject are mistaken.   In turn, I am of the opinion that, certainly in terms of rule processing, which is an area in which I have a specific interest and knowledge, he is often mistaken. There is no simple answer to the fundamental question ‘what is a rule?’ We use the word in a very fluid fashion in English. Likewise, the term ‘rule processing’, as used widely in IT, is equally difficult to define simplistically. The best way to envisage the term is as a ‘centre of gravity’ within a wider domain. That domain contains many other ‘centres of gravity’, including CEP, statistical analytics, neural networks, natural language processing and so much more. Whole communities tend to gravitate towards and build themselves around some of these centres. The term 'rule processing' is associated with many different technology types, various software products, different architectural patterns, the functional capability of many applications and services, etc. There is considerable variation amongst these different technologies, techniques and products. Very broadly, a common theme is their ability to manage certain types of processing and problem solving through declarative, or semi-declarative, statements of propositional logic bound to action-based consequences. It is generally important to be able to decouple these statements from other parts of an overall system or architecture so that they can be managed and deployed independently.  As a centre of gravity, ‘rule processing’ is no island. It exists in the context of a domain of discourse that is, itself, highly interconnected and continuous.   Rule processing does not, for example, exist in splendid isolation to natural language processing.   On the contrary, an on-going theme of rule processing is to find better ways to express rules in natural language and map these to executable forms.   Rule processing does not exist in splendid isolation to CEP.   On the contrary, an event processing agent can reasonably be considered as a rule engine (a theme in ‘Power of Events’ by David Luckham).   Rule processing does not live in splendid isolation to statistical approaches such as Bayesian analytics. On the contrary, rule processing and statistical analytics are highly synergistic.   Rule processing does not even live in splendid isolation to neural networks. For example, significant research has centred on finding ways to translate trained nets into explicit rule sets in order to support forms of validation and facilitate insight into the knowledge stored in those nets. What about simplicity of form?   Many rule processing technologies do indeed use a very simple form (‘If...Then’, ‘When...Do’, etc.)   However, it is a fundamental mistake to equate simplicity of form with simplicity of function.   It is absolutely mistaken to suggest that simplicity of form is a barrier to the efficient handling of complexity.   There are countless real-world examples which serve to disprove that notion.   Indeed, simplicity of form is often the key to handling complexity. Does rule processing offer a ‘one size fits all’. No, of course not.   No serious commentator suggests it does.   Does the design and management of large knowledge bases, expressed as rules, become difficult?   Yes, it can do, but that is true of any large knowledge base, regardless of the form in which knowledge is expressed.   The measure of complexity is not a function of rule set size or rule form.  It tends to be correlated more strongly with the size of the ‘problem space’ (‘search space’) which is something quite different.   Analysis of the problem space and the algorithms we use to search through that space are, of course, the very things we use to derive objective measures of the complexity of a given problem. This is basic computer science and common practice. Sailing a Dreadnaught through the sea of information technology and lobbing shells at some of the islands we encounter along the way does no one any good.   Building bridges and causeways between islands so that the inhabitants can collaborate in open discourse offers hope of real progress.

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• It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice

  - by BuckWoody

  I’ve been a little “preachy” lately, telling you that you should let people finish their sentences, and always check a problem out before you tell a user that their issue is “impossible”. Well, I’ll round that out with one more tip today. Keep in mind that all of these things are actions I’ve been guilty of, hopefully in the past. I’m kind of a “work in progress”. And yes, I know these tips are coming from someone who picks on people in presentations, but that is of course done in fun, and (hopefully) with the audience’s knowledge.   (No, this isn’t aimed at any one person or event in particular – I just see it happen a lot)   I’ve seen, unfortunately over and over, someone in authority react badly to someone who is incorrect, or at least perceived to be incorrect. This might manifest itself in a comment, post, question or whatever, but the point is that I’ve seen really intelligent people literally attack someone they view as getting something wrong. Don’t misunderstand me; if someone posts that you should always drop a production database in the middle of the day I think you should certainly speak up and mention that this might be a bad idea!  No, I’m talking about generalizations or even incorrect statements done in good faith. Let me explain with an example.   Suppose someone makes the statement: “If you don’t have enough space on your system, you can just use a DBCC command to shrink the database”. Let’s take two responses to this statement.   Response One: “That’s insane. Everyone knows that shrinking a database is a stupid idea, you’re just going to fragment your indexes all over the place.” Response Two: “That’s an interesting take – in my experience and from what I’ve read here (someurl.com) I think this might not be a universal best practice.”   Of course, both responses let the person making the statement and those reading it know that you don’t agree, and that it’s probably wrong. But the person you responded to and the general audience hearing you (or reading your response) might form two different opinions of you.   The first response says to me “this person really needs to be right, and takes arguments personally. They aren’t thinking of the other person at all, or the folks reading or hearing the exchange. They turned an incorrect technical statement into a personal attack. They haven’t left the other party any room to ‘save face’, and they have potentially turned what could be a positive learning experience for everyone into a negative. Also, they sound more than just a little arrogant.”   The second response says to me “this person has left room for everyone to save face, has presented evidence to the contrary and is thinking about moving the ball forward and getting it right rather than attacking someone for getting it wrong.” It’s the idea of questioning a statement rather than attacking a person.   Perhaps you have a different take. Maybe you think the “direct” approach is best – and maybe that’s worked for you. Something to consider is what you’ve really accomplished while using that first method. Sure, the info you provide is correct, and perhaps someone out there won’t shrink a database because of your response – but perhaps you’ve turned a lot more people off, and now they won’t listen to your other valuable information. You’ll be an expert, but another one of the nameless, arrogant jerks in technology. And I don’t think anyone likes to be thought of that way.   OK, I’ll get down off of the high-horse now. And I’ll keep the title of this entry (said to me by my grandmother when I was a little kid) in mind when I dismount. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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