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• How to shutdown VMware Fusion virtual machine on host shutdown

  - by Nikksno

  I have a Mac mini running Mavericks server. I installed the Atmail server + webmail vm [a linux centos distribution] in VMware Fusion Professional 6 with the VMware Tools addon. It works flawlessly. I've set it to start on boot and that works very reliably. However I've been looking for a way to also safely and gracefully shut it down whenever OS X shuts down for whatever reason. The Mac is connected to a UPS and configured to perform an automatic shutdown in case the battery starts running low so that's no additional problem. Now the first thing I did was to go into Fusion's prefs and select "Power off the vm" when closing it. However I noticed that for some arcane reason closing the vm window would actually forcibly power off the vm: so then I found this post that showed me how to change the default power options and I managed to have the vm cleanly shutdown when closing its window or quitting Fusion altogether. At this point I was hoping to have solved the problem but as it turns out upon invoking system shutdown OS X doesn't wait for the vm to shutdown and terminates Fusion before it has a chance to do so. At this point I started looking for a way to automate the process of shutting down the guest os via some advanced setting but had no luck in doing so. That's when I found a command to shut the vm down: vmrun and it worked. The only thing left was to find out a way to execute this script on os x shutdown and giving it a little time to power off completely. However this turned out to be a nightmare: I spent hours looking through several ways to do this with Startup Items, rc.shutdown, cron, launchd, etc... but none of them worked the way I had configured them. I have to say that I found very limited information on using launchd for a shutdown script execution and I know it's the latest thing in the OS X world so I'm hoping someone out there among you will be able to help me out with this. I still think this is an extremely basic feature to ask for and I was really surprised to find this little documentation on so many different aspects of this problem. Is Fusion too basic of an application for this? I really hope someone can help. Thank you very much in advance.

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• getfacl command and Linux file permissions - getting 403 error when accessing Wordpress

  - by tommytwoeyes

  I'm configuring Wordpress for a friend, and I just screwed up the Wordpress directory permissions (I suspect) using setfacl. Webfaction doesn't allow sudo or allow me to change the directory group ownership using chown. Now it appears that something I did is causing the entire application to give me 403 errors when I try to access it. The current directory listing looks like this (I set the whole thing to 777 temporarily to try to recover access to it): drwxrwsr-x+ 6 myusername myusername 4096 Mar 2 07:07 ./ drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Feb 25 19:48 ../ -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 286 Mar 2 06:33 gzip.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 4831 Mar 4 20:02 .htaccess -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 397 Feb 25 19:49 index.php -rw-rw-r--+ 1 myusername myusername 15606 Feb 25 19:49 license.txt -rw-rw-r--+ 1 myusername myusername 9200 Feb 25 19:49 readme.html drwxrwsr-x+ 6 myusername myusername 4096 Feb 25 19:49 .svn/ -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 4337 Feb 25 19:49 wp-activate.php drwxr-xr-x+ 10 myusername myusername 4096 Mar 4 20:03 wp-admin/ -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 40283 Feb 25 19:49 wp-app.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 226 Feb 25 19:49 wp-atom.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 274 Feb 25 19:49 wp-blog-header.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 3931 Feb 25 19:49 wp-comments-post.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 244 Feb 25 19:49 wp-commentsrss2.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 3485 Feb 25 20:15 wp-config.php drwxr-xr-x+ 6 myusername myusername 4096 Feb 26 08:52 wp-content/ -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 1255 Feb 25 19:49 wp-cron.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 246 Feb 25 19:49 wp-feed.php drwxrwxr-x+ 9 myusername myusername 4096 Feb 25 19:49 wp-includes/ -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 1997 Feb 25 19:49 wp-links-opml.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 2453 Feb 25 19:49 wp-load.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 27787 Feb 25 19:49 wp-login.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 7774 Feb 25 19:49 wp-mail.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 494 Feb 25 19:49 wp-pass.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 224 Feb 25 19:49 wp-rdf.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 334 Feb 25 19:49 wp-register.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 226 Feb 25 19:49 wp-rss2.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 224 Feb 25 19:49 wp-rss.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 9655 Feb 25 19:49 wp-settings.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 18644 Feb 25 19:49 wp-signup.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 3702 Feb 25 19:49 wp-trackback.php -rwxrwxr-x+ 1 myusername myusername 3210 Feb 25 19:49 xmlrpc.php The getfacl output looks like this: # file: . # owner: myusername # group: myusername user::rwx group::r-x group:apache:rw- mask::rwx other::r-x I simply wanted to change the ownership to myusername:apache and the file permissions to 755. I have no idea how to fix the permissions now. Any help would be really appreciated! Thanks, Tom

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• Server load spikes several times a day, load average for the past month is 5 times the load average all year

  - by AMF

  My Munin notifications set up for our (Debian) LAMP cluster have been notifying me continuously that our load on our production machine has been at dangerous levels. While the average load all year typically runs between 2 and 8, the load in the past month and only the past month -- has been skyrocketing to 10, 18, and occasionally even 50-60. The spikes last only 5-10 minutes at a time and occur about every 2-3 hours. The spikes do not effect performance only because I have a script that sends traffic off our server to a mirror CDN when the load goes above 10. I've looked for cron jobs that correlate with this timeframe but there is nothing I can see that would cause this. Site traffic is also normal (we receive about 200K visits per day). I'm also trying to think of anything I've changed around the time this problem began, and I really cannot think of anything. This is probably not much to go on. Maybe there is a clue in the top print-out (below) that I'm not seeing. How do I proceed to find the cause? -- Typical top when the load is NOT spiking: top - 11:13:09 up 472 days, 25 min, 1 user, load average: 6.08, 4.29, 3.80 Tasks: 105 total, 1 running, 104 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 41.2%us, 5.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 49.5%id, 2.7%wa, 0.1%hi, 0.7%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3369592k total, 2166980k used, 1202612k free, 559504k buffers Swap: 2650684k total, 1892k used, 2648792k free, 1129116k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 32046 apache 15 0 36300 12m 9828 S 20 0.4 0:01.97 apache2 32679 apache 15 0 36568 13m 10m S 19 0.4 0:01.69 apache2 31441 apache 15 0 36616 13m 10m S 19 0.4 0:04.13 apache2 31477 apache 15 0 36596 13m 9.8m S 15 0.4 0:01.99 apache2 31993 apache 15 0 36876 16m 12m S 12 0.5 0:02.01 apache2 31782 apache 15 0 36836 14m 10m S 8 0.4 0:02.17 apache2 32198 apache 15 0 36536 13m 10m S 7 0.4 0:01.59 apache2 880 apache 15 0 36508 9708 6236 S 7 0.3 0:00.42 apache2 31945 apache 17 0 36876 16m 13m S 5 0.5 0:03.17 apache2 32197 apache 16 0 36636 10m 7504 S 5 0.3 0:02.70 apache2 32326 apache 15 0 37024 11m 7632 S 5 0.3 0:02.15 apache2 32565 apache 15 0 37280 13m 9.8m S 5 0.4 0:03.75 apache2 32676 apache 15 0 36896 16m 12m S 4 0.5 0:00.95 apache2 32678 apache 15 0 36536 12m 9692 S 4 0.4 0:02.27 apache2 974 apache 16 0 37064 9888 6016 D 4 0.3 0:00.13 apache2 32150 apache 16 0 36832 13m 10m S 3 0.4 0:01.74 apache2 31780 apache 16 0 36848 11m 7660 S 3 0.3 0:02.87 apache2

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• Detecting upload success/failure in a scripted command-line SFTP session?

  - by Will Martin

  I am writing a BASH shell script to upload all the files in a directory to a remote server and then delete them. It'll run every few hours via a CRON job. My complete script is below. The basic problem is that the part that's supposed to figure out whether the file uploaded successfully or not doesn't work. The SFTP command's exit status is always "0" regardless of whether the upload actually succeeded or not. How can I figure out whether a file uploaded correctly or not so that I can know whether to delete it or let it be? #!/bin/bash # First, save the folder path containing the files. FILES=/home/bob/theses/* # Initialize a blank variable to hold messages. MESSAGES="" ERRORS="" # These are for notifications of file totals. COUNT=0 ERRORCOUNT=0 # Loop through the files. for f in $FILES do # Get the base filename BASE=`basename $f` # Build the SFTP command. Note space in folder name. CMD='cd "Destination Folder"\n' CMD="${CMD}put ${f}\nquit\n" # Execute it. echo -e $CMD | sftp -oIdentityFile /home/bob/.ssh/id_rsa [email protected] # On success, make a note, then delete the local copy of the file. if [ $? == "0" ]; then MESSAGES="${MESSAGES}\tNew file: ${BASE}\n" (( COUNT=$COUNT+1 )) # Next line commented out for ease of testing #rm $f fi # On failure, add an error message. if [ $? != "0" ]; then ERRORS="${ERRORS}\tFailed to upload file ${BASE}\n" (( ERRORCOUNT=$ERRORCOUNT+1 )) fi done SUBJECT="New Theses" BODY="There were ${COUNT} files and ${ERRORCOUNT} errors in the latest batch.\n\n" if [ "$MESSAGES" != "" ]; then BODY="${BODY}New files:\n\n${MESSAGES}\n\n" fi if [ "$ERRORS" != "" ]; then BODY="${BODY}Problem files:\n\n${ERRORS}" fi # Send a notification. echo -e $BODY | mail -s $SUBJECT [email protected] Due to some operational considerations that make my head hurt, I cannot use SCP. The remote server is using WinSSHD on windows, and does not have EXEC privileges, so any SCP commands fail with the message "Exec request failed on channel 0". The uploading therefore has to be done via the interactive SFTP command.

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• How can I centralise MySQL data between 3 or more geographically separate servers?

  - by Andy Castles

  To explain the background to the question: We have a home-grown PHP application (for running online language-learning courses) running on a Linux server and using MySQL on localhost for saving user data (e.g. results of tests taken, marks of submitted work, time spent on different pages in the courses, etc). As we have students from different geographic locations we currently have 3 virtual servers hosted close to those locations (Spain, UK and Hong Kong) and users are added to the server closest to them (they access via different URLs, e.g. europe.domain.com, uk.domain.com and asia.domain.com). This works but is an administrative nightmare as we have to remember which server a particular user is on, and users can only connect to one server. We would like to somehow centralise the information so that all users are visible on any of the servers and users could connect to any of the 3 servers. The question is, what method should we use to implement this. It must be an issue that that lots of people have encountered but I haven't found anything conclusive after a fair bit of Googling around. The closest I have seen to solutions are: something like master-master replication, but I have read so many posts suggesting that this is not a good idea as things like auto_increment fields can break. circular replication, this sounded perfect but to quote from O'Reilly's High Performance MySQL, "In general, rings are brittle and best avoided" We're not against rewriting code in the application to make it work with whatever solution is required but I am not sure if replication is the correct thing to use. Thanks, Andy P.S. I should add that we experimented with writes to a central database and then using reads from a local database but the response time between the different servers for writing was pretty bad and it's also important that written data is available immediately for reading so if replication is too slow this could cause out-of-date data to be returned. Edit: I have been thinking about writing my own rudimentary replication script which would involve something like having each user given a server ID to say which is his "home server", e.g. users in asia would be marked as having the Hong Kong server as their own server. Then the replication scripts (which would be a PHP script set to run as a cron job reasonably frequently, e.g. every 15 minutes or so) would run independently on each of the servers in the system. They would go through the database and distribute any information about users with the "home server" set to the server that the script is running on to all of the other databases in the system. They would also need to suck new information which has been added to any of the other databases on the system where the "home server" flag is the server where the script is running. I would need to work out the details and build in the logic to deal with conflicts but I think it would be possible, however I wanted to make sure that there is not a correct solution for this already out there as it seems like it must be a problem that many people have already come across.

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• Hang while starting several daemons [solved]

  - by Adrian Lang

  I’m running a Debian Squeeze AMD64 server. Target runlevel after boot is runlevel 2, which includes rsyslogd, cron, sshd and some other stuff, but not dovecot, postfix, apache2, etc. The system fails to reach runlevel 2 with several symptoms: The system hangs at trying to start rsyslogd Booting into runlevel 1 works, then login from the console works Starting rsyslogd from runlevel 1 via /etc/init.d/rsyslog hangs Starting runlevel 2 with rsyslogd disabled works But then, logging in via console fails: I get the motd, and then nothing Starting sshd from runlevel 1 succeeds But then, I cannot login via ssh. Sometimes password ssh login gives me the motd and then nothing, sometimes not even this. Trying to offer a public key seems to annoy the sshd enough to not talk to me any further. When rebooting from runlevel 1, the server hangs at trying to stop apache2 (which is not running, so this really should be trivial). Trying to stop apache2 when logged in in runleve 1 does hang as well. And that’s just the stuff which fails all the time. RAM has been tested, dmesg shows no problems. I have no clue. Update: (shortened) output from rsyslogd -c4 -d called in runlevel 1 rsyslogd 4.6.4 startup, compatibility mode 4, module path '' caller requested object 'net', not found (iRet -3003) Requested to load module 'lmnet' loading module '/user/lib/rsyslog/lmnet.so' module of type 2 being loaded conf.c requested ref for 'lmnet', refcount 1 rsylog runtime initialized, version 4.6.4, current users 1 syslogd.c requested ref for 'lmnet', refcount now 2 I can kill rsyslogd with Strg+C, then. /var/log shows none of the configured log files, though. Update2: Thanks to @DerfK I still have no clue, but at least I narrowed down the problem. I’m now testing with /etc/init.d/apache2 stop (without an apache2 running, of course) which hangs as well and looks like an even more obvious failure. After some testing I found out that a file with one single line: /usr/sbin/apache2ctl configtest /dev/null 2&1 hangs, while the same line executed in an interactive shell works. I was not able to further reduce this line while, i. e. every single part, the stream redirections and the commando itself is necessary to reproduce the hang. @DerfK also pointed me to strace which gave a shallow hint about what kind of hang we have here: wait4(-1for the init scripts futex(0xsomepointer, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 2, NULL for rsyslogd / apache2 binaries called by the init scripts The system was installed as a Debian Lenny by my hoster in autumn 2011, I upgraded it to Squeeze immediately and kept it up to date with Squeeze, which then used to be testing. There were no big changes, though. I guess I never tried to reboot the system before. Update3: I found the problem. My /etc/nsswitch.conf specified ldap as hosts lookup backup, which is not available at that time of the boot. Relying on dns solely fixes my boot problems.

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• When running a shell script, how can you protect it from overwriting or truncating files?

  - by Joseph Garvin

  If while an application is running one of the shared libraries it uses is written to or truncated, then the application will crash. Moving the file or removing it wholesale with 'rm' will not cause a crash, because the OS (Solaris in this case but I assume this is true on Linux and other *nix as well) is smart enough to not delete the inode associated with the file while any process has it open. I have a shell script that performs installation of shared libraries. Sometimes, it may be used to reinstall versions of shared libraries that were already installed, without an uninstall first. Because applications may be using the already installed shared libraries, it's important the the script is smart enough to rm the files or move them out of the way (e.g. to a 'deleted' folder that cron could empty at a time when we know no applications will be running) before installing the new ones so that they're not overwritten or truncated. Unfortunately, recently an application crashed just after an install. Coincidence? It's difficult to tell. The real solution here is to switch over to a more robust installation method than an old gigantic shell script, but it'd be nice to have some extra protection until the switch is made. Is there any way to wrap a shell script to protect it from overwriting or truncating files (and ideally failing loudly), but still allowing them to be moved or rm'd? Standard UNIX file permissions won't do the trick because you can't distinguish moving/removing from overwriting/truncating. Aliases could work but I'm not sure what entirety of commands need to be aliased. I imagine something like truss/strace except before each action it checks against a filter whether to actually do it. I don't need a perfect solution that would work even against an intentionally malicious script. Ideas I have so far: Alias cp to GNU cp (not the default since I'm on Solaris) and use the --remove-destination option. Alias install to GNU install and use the --backup option. It might be smart enough to move the existing file to the backup file name rather than making a copy, thus preserving the inode. "set noclobber" in ~/.bashrc so that I/O redirection won't overwrite files

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• Hang while starting several daemons

  - by Adrian Lang

  I’m running a Debian Squeeze AMD64 server. Target runlevel after boot is runlevel 2, which includes rsyslogd, cron, sshd and some other stuff, but not dovecot, postfix, apache2, etc. The system fails to reach runlevel 2 with several symptoms: The system hangs at trying to start rsyslogd Booting into runlevel 1 works, then login from the console works Starting rsyslogd from runlevel 1 via /etc/init.d/rsyslog hangs Starting runlevel 2 with rsyslogd disabled works But then, logging in via console fails: I get the motd, and then nothing Starting sshd from runlevel 1 succeeds But then, I cannot login via ssh. Sometimes password ssh login gives me the motd and then nothing, sometimes not even this. Trying to offer a public key seems to annoy the sshd enough to not talk to me any further. When rebooting from runlevel 1, the server hangs at trying to stop apache2 (which is not running, so this really should be trivial). Trying to stop apache2 when logged in in runleve 1 does hang as well. And that’s just the stuff which fails all the time. RAM has been tested, dmesg shows no problems. I have no clue. Update: (shortened) output from rsyslogd -c4 -d called in runlevel 1 rsyslogd 4.6.4 startup, compatibility mode 4, module path '' caller requested object 'net', not found (iRet -3003) Requested to load module 'lmnet' loading module '/user/lib/rsyslog/lmnet.so' module of type 2 being loaded conf.c requested ref for 'lmnet', refcount 1 rsylog runtime initialized, version 4.6.4, current users 1 syslogd.c requested ref for 'lmnet', refcount now 2 I can kill rsyslogd with Strg+C, then. /var/log shows none of the configured log files, though. Update2: Thanks to @DerfK I still have no clue, but at least I narrowed down the problem. I’m now testing with /etc/init.d/apache2 stop (without an apache2 running, of course) which hangs as well and looks like an even more obvious failure. After some testing I found out that a file with one single line: /usr/sbin/apache2ctl configtest /dev/null 2&1 hangs, while the same line executed in an interactive shell works. I was not able to further reduce this line while, i. e. every single part, the stream redirections and the commando itself is necessary to reproduce the hang. @DerfK also pointed me to strace which gave a shallow hint about what kind of hang we have here: wait4(-1for the init scripts futex(0xsomepointer, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 2, NULL for rsyslogd / apache2 binaries called by the init scripts The system was installed as a Debian Lenny by my hoster in autumn 2011, I upgraded it to Squeeze immediately and kept it up to date with Squeeze, which then used to be testing. There were no big changes, though. I guess I never tried to reboot the system before.

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• Need advice on which PCI SATA Controller Card to Purchase

  - by Matt1776

  I have a major issue with the build of a machine I am trying to get up and running. My goal is to create a file server that will service the needs of my software development, personal media storage and streaming/media server needs, as well as provide a strong platform for backing up all this data in a routine, cron-job oriented German efficiency sort of way. The issue is a simple one - all my drives are SATA drives and my motherboard controller only contains 4 ports. Solving the issue has proven to be an unmitigated nightmare. I would like advice on the purchase of the following: 4 Port internal SATA / 2 Port external eSATA PCI SATA Controller Card that has the following features and/or advantages: It must function. If I plug it in and attach drives, I expect my system to still make it to the Operating System login screen. It must function on CentOS, and I mean it must function WELL and with MINIMAL hassle. If hassle is unavoidable, there shall be CLEAR CUT and EASY TO FOLLOW instructions on how to install drivers and other supporting software. I do not need nor want fakeRAID - I will be setting up any RAID configurations from within the operating system. Now, if I am able to find such a mythical device, I would be eternally grateful to whomever would be able to point me in the right direction, a direction which I assume will be paved with yellow bricks. I am prepared to pay a considerable sum of money (as SATA controller cards go) and so paying anywhere between 60 to 120 dollars will not be an issue whatsoever. Does such a magical device exist? The following link shows an "example" of the type of thing I am looking for, however, I have no way of verifying that once I plug this baby in that my system will still continue to function once I've attached the drives, or that once I've made it to the OS, I will be able to install whatever drivers or software programs I need to make it work with relative ease. It doesn't have to be dog-shit simple, but it cannot involve kernels or brain surgery. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00552PLN4/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_1?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B003GSGMPU&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1HJG60XTZFJ48Z173HKY So does anyone have a suggestion regarding the subject I am asking about? PCI SATA Controller Cards? It would help if you've had experience with the component before - that is after all why I am asking here - for those who have had experience that I do not have. Bear in mind that this is for a home setup and that I do not have a company credit card. I have a budget with a 'relative' upper limit of about $150.00.

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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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• PHP hits 100% CPU and eats RAM at the same time Monday to Friday

  - by Daniel Samuels

  We run a learning platform for primary schools here in the UK and it's all been running extremely well. However at around 4PM Monday to Friday we see the same issue arise -- 1-2 PHP threads will spike to 100% CPU and gradually start eating up RAM until the server(s) fall over. 98%+ of our requests are HTTPS, these come into our Layer 7 load balancer which then decrypts the SSL data, adds the X-HTTP-Forwarded-For header and forwards the data onto an application server (we have 2 of those at the moment) on port 80. Our application servers have Varnish on port 80 which takes in the request from the load balancer and passes the request through to Nginx on port 81. Nginx then works out which 'vhost' it needs to use and passes any PHP processing through to PHP-CGI which is listening on a socket (managed through spawn-fcgi). There's an instance of Memcached running too, MySQL runs on a separate server / slave setup. Throughout the day the load will typically go no higher than 0.8 on either of the application servers, however at around 4PM our problem arises. I've managed to run strace on a few of the actual threads when they cause the problem and I always see the same thing: stat("/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644,st_size=3661, ...}) = 0 stat("/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644,st_size=3661, ...}) = 0 This is repeated infinitely and never stops until you SEGKILL the process or oomkiller kills it. There are no cron jobs scheduled to run at that time and I don't have any way of seeing exactly what Nginx request is associated with the PHP process which is running. We are running PHP 5.3.14 which we upgraded to from 5.3.8 last week to rule out the older version being the problem. This issue has been going on a few months now and we have no idea what is causing it. We deploy our software very frequently, so it's difficult to track down a specific release which may have started the problem - especially as we do not know the date of the first occurrence of this issue. Varnish is version 3.0.1, Nginx is 1.0.6 (which I understand is about a year old now), our servers are running CentOS release 5.7 (Final) they have Intel i3 540s at 3.07Ghz and 8GB of RAM. There's a discussion on the Debian mailing list about something very similar, you can find that here. Has anyone seen anything like this in the past, does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Are there a way of linking an Nginx request directly to a PHP thread? Is there a better way of seeing what the PHP process is doing? (I've seen GDB mentioned, though I'll have to recompile PHP) Thanks!

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• Switch flooding when bonding interfaces in Linux

  - by John Philips

  +--------+ | Host A | +----+---+ | eth0 (AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA) | | +----+-----+ | Switch 1 | (layer2/3) +----+-----+ | +----+-----+ | Switch 2 | +----+-----+ | +----------+----------+ +-------------------------+ Switch 3 +-------------------------+ | +----+-----------+----+ | | | | | | | | | | eth0 (B0:B0:B0:B0:B0:B0) | | eth4 (B4:B4:B4:B4:B4:B4) | | +----+-----------+----+ | | | Host B | | | +----+-----------+----+ | | eth1 (B1:B1:B1:B1:B1:B1) | | eth5 (B5:B5:B5:B5:B5:B5) | | | | | | | | | +------------------------------+ +------------------------------+ Topology overview Host A has a single NIC. Host B has four NICs which are bonded using the balance-alb mode. Both hosts run RHEL 6.0, and both are on the same IPv4 subnet. Traffic analysis Host A is sending data to Host B using some SQL database application. Traffic from Host A to Host B: The source int/MAC is eth0/AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA, the destination int/MAC is eth5/B5:B5:B5:B5:B5:B5. Traffic from Host B to Host A: The source int/MAC is eth0/B0:B0:B0:B0:B0:B0, the destination int/MAC is eth0/AA:AA:AA:AA:AA:AA. Once the TCP connection has been established, Host B sends no further frames out eth5. The MAC address of eth5 expires from the bridge tables of both Switch 1 & Switch 2. Switch 1 continues to receive frames from Host A which are destined for B5:B5:B5:B5:B5:B5. Because Switch 1 and Switch 2 no longer have bridge table entries for B5:B5:B5:B5:B5:B5, they flood the frames out all ports on the same VLAN (except for the one it came in on, of course). Reproduce If you ping Host B from a workstation which is connected to either Switch 1 or 2, B5:B5:B5:B5:B5:B5 re-enters the bridge tables and the flooding stops. After five minutes (the default bridge table timeout), flooding resumes. Question It is clear that on Host B, frames arrive on eth5 and exit out eth0. This seems ok as that's what the Linux bonding algorithm is designed to do - balance incoming and outgoing traffic. But since the switch stops receiving frames with the source MAC of eth5, it gets timed out of the bridge table, resulting in flooding. Is this normal? Why aren't any more frames originating from eth5? Is it because there is simply no other traffic going on (the only connection is a single large data transfer from Host A)? I've researched this for a long time and haven't found an answer. Documentation states that no switch changes are necessary when using mode 6 of the Linux interface bonding (balance-alb). Is this behavior occurring because Host B doesn't send any further packets out of eth5, whereas in normal circumstances it's expected that it would? One solution is to setup a cron job which pings Host B to keep the bridge table entries from timing out, but that seems like a dirty hack.

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• How to allow unprivileged apache/PHP to do a root task (CentOS)

  - by Chris

  I am setting up a sort of personal dropbox for our customers on a CentOS 6.3 machine. The server will be accessible thru SFTP and a proprietary http service base on PHP. This machine will be in our DMZ so it has to be secure. Because of this I have apache running as an unprivileged user, hardened the security on apache, the OS, PHP, applied a lot of filtering in iptables and applied some restrictive TCP Wrappers. Now you might have suspected this one was coming, SELinux is also set to enforcing. I'm setting up PAM to use MySQL so my users in the web application can login. These users will all be in a group that can use SSH only for SFTP and users will be chrooted to their own 'home' folder. To allow this SELinux wants the folders to have the user_home_t tag. Also the parent directory needs to be writable by root only. If these restrictions are not met SELinux will kill the SSH pipe immediately. The files that need to be accessible thru both http and SFTP so I have made a SELinux module to allow Apache to search/attr/read/write etc. to directories with the user_home_dir_t tag. As sftp users are stored in MySQL I want to setup their home dirs upon user creation. This is a problem since Apache has no write access to the /home dir, it's only writable by root since it's required to keep SELinux and OpenSSH happy. Basically I need to let Apache do only a few tasks as root and only within /home. So I need to somehow elevate the privileges temporarily or let root do these tasks for apache instead. What I need to have apache do with root privileges is the following. mkdir /home/userdir/ mkdir /home/userdir/userdir chmod -R 0755 /home/userdir umask 011 /home/userdir/userdir chcon -R -t user_home_t /home/userdir chown -R user:sftp_admin /home/userdir/userdir chmod 2770 /home/userdir/userdir This would create a home for the user, now I have an idea that might work, cron. That would mean the server needs to check for users that have no home every minute, then when creating users the interface would freeze for an average of 30 seconds before the account creation can be confirmed which I do not prefer. Does anybody know if something can be done with sudoers? Or any other idea's are welcome... Thanks for your time!

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Install Quartz.Net as a windows service and Test installation

  - by Tarun Arora

  In this blog post I’ll be covering, 01: Where to download Quartz.net from 02: How to install Quartz.net as a Windows service 03: Test the Quartz.net Installation If you are new to Quartz.net I would recommend reading the blog post on a brief introduction to Quartz.net. 01 – Where to download Quartz.net? http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartznet/files/quartznet/       Currently version  Quartz.Net 2.0.1 is the recommended download version. 02 – How to install Quartz.net as a Windows service         Go to the download location and unzip the Quartz.net package Navigate to the folder Quartz.Net \ Server \ bin – This is where you will find different .net version installers of the quartz.net packages. For example in the screen shot above, you can see the Quartz.net .net 3.5 and .net 4 packages. Open up the Quartz.net .net 4.0 folder, this folder contains the files you need to install Quartz.net as a windows service Copy the contents of the folder Downloads\Quartz.NET-2.0.1\server\bin\4.0 to the folder %program files%\Quartz.net   5. Open up a new CMD as an administrator and run the below command to install Quartz.net as a windows service /> Quartz.Server.exe install 6. How do I know that Quartz.Net service has installed as a Windows service? Go to run prompt and type ‘services.msc’ you should now see all the windows services installed on your machine. Navigate down to look for Quartz.Net. The service installs itself as an automatic startup Type and log on as ‘Local System’. You can easily change this to your prefer account that you would like to run the service as. If you wanted to name the Quartz service something else then that’s also possible… Can I change the default display name of the quartz.net windows service? Yes, you can! Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Quartz.Net\ and open up the config file ‘quartz.config’ - You can change the instance name - You can change the default thread count of 10 - The port that the service listens to (by default this is port 555) A blog post on more configuration details can be found here. 03 – Test Quartz.Net windows service installation So, I have installed Quartz.Net as a windows service, how do I test whether my installation has been successful. Open up cmd as an administrator and run the below command, C:\Program Files (x86)\Quartz.Net> Quartz.Server.exe –i Since by default the Quartz.net windows service writes INFO level diagnostics (this can be changed from Quartz.Server.exe.config) you should see the service information show up on the console. For instance in the example above I can see that the service is running in a NON CLUSTERED mode, its currently not started and is currently in standby mode with 0 number of jobs executed so far… This was second in the series of posts on enterprise scheduling using Quartz.net, in the next post I’ll be covering how to run your first scheduled task using Quartz.net windows service. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

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• SQL SERVER – SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File in SQL Server 2008

  - by pinaldave

  Note: Please read the complete post before taking any actions. This blog post would discuss SHRINKFILE and TRUNCATE Log File. The script mentioned in the email received from reader contains the following questionable code: “Hi Pinal, If you could remember, I and my manager met you at TechEd in Bangalore. We just upgraded to SQL Server 2008. One of our jobs failed as it was using the following code. The error was: Msg 155, Level 15, State 1, Line 1 ‘TRUNCATE_ONLY’ is not a recognized BACKUP option. The code was: DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDBLog, 1) BACKUP LOG TestDB WITH TRUNCATE_ONLY DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDBLog, 1) GO I have modified that code to subsequent code and it works fine. But, are there other suggestions you have at the moment? USE [master] GO ALTER DATABASE [TestDb] SET RECOVERY SIMPLE WITH NO_WAIT DBCC SHRINKFILE(TestDbLog, 1) ALTER DATABASE [TestDb] SET RECOVERY FULL WITH NO_WAIT GO Configuration of our server and system is as follows: [Removed not relevant data]“ An email like this that suddenly pops out in early morning is alarming email. Because I am a dead, busy mind, so I had only one min to reply. I wrote down quickly the following note. (As I said, it was a single-minute email so it is not completely accurate). Here is that quick email shared with all of you. “Hi Mr. DBA [removed the name] Thanks for your email. I suggest you stop this practice. There are many issues included here, but I would list two major issues: 1) From the setting database to simple recovery, shrinking the file and once again setting in full recovery, you are in fact losing your valuable log data and will be not able to restore point in time. Not only that, you will also not able to use subsequent log files. 2) Shrinking file or database adds fragmentation. There are a lot of things you can do. First, start taking proper log backup using following command instead of truncating them and losing them frequently. BACKUP LOG [TestDb] TO  DISK = N'C:\Backup\TestDb.bak' GO Remove the code of SHRINKING the file. If you are taking proper log backups, your log file usually (again usually, special cases are excluded) do not grow very big. There are so many things to add here, but you can call me on my [phone number]. Before you call me, I suggest for accuracy you read Paul Randel‘s two posts here and here and Brent Ozar‘s Post here. Kind Regards, Pinal Dave” I guess this post is very much clear to you. Please leave your comments here. As mentioned, this is a very huge subject; I have just touched a tip of the ice-berg and have tried to point to authentic knowledge. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Backup and Restore, SQL Data Storage, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – SQL Server Technology Evangelists and Evangelism

  - by pinaldave

  This is the exact conversation that I had with three people during the recent SQL Server Public Training. Person 1: “Are you an SQL Server Evangelist?” Pinal : “No, but Vinod Kumar is.” Person 1: “Who are you?” Person 2: “He is Pinal, haha!” Person 1: “I know that, but don’t you evangelize SQL Server Technology?” Pinal : “Hmm… I do that…” Person 1: “In that case, why don’t you call yourself an Evangelist?” Pinal : “…! …” Person 2: “Good Question! Who are you Pinal?” Pinal : “I think you are asking my title, is that correct?” Person 1: “Maybe.” Pinal : “I am a Mentor, and I work for Solid Quality Mentors.” Person 2: “I have seen you listing yourself as the Founder of SQLAuthority.com… so…” Pinal : “Yeah that’s true.” Person 3: “Let me summarize what these people are asking. What they are asking is that you can have multiple titles, so is being an evangelist one of your titles or not?” Pinal : “Well, I am an SQL Server MVP and lots of people say that we are also evangelists of technology. In fact,  we are all evangelists of technology, aren’t we?” Person 1: “So let me come back to my original topic: If you are an SQL Server Evangelist, then what is this evangelism?” Person 2: “And who is Vinod Kumar – I have heard about him a lot.” Pinal : “Oh okay. Now I got it. Let me explain …” The answer was quite long but since this conversation, I have been thinking about the words “evangelist” and “evangelism.” I think being an evangelist is one of the most respected jobs in the world and to do this job one must bear lots of responsibilities. There were two questions asked to me, so let me answer both one by one. Who is Vinod Kumar? Vinod Kumar is a Technology Evangelist for Microsoft and one of the most respected persons in the SQL Server Community in India. Let me copy-paste my note from the previous TechEd India 2010 article. “I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller so there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod was the best speaker in the event. He did not have a single time that disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL.” Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar What is Technology Evangelism? Here I am listing three posts written by Vinod Kumar, wherein he talks about Technology Evangelism and Technology Evangelist in an in-depth manner. They are highly-regarded articles in the Community. Evangelism beyond boundaries with an Evangelists !!! Technology Evangelism Demystified New face of Online Technology Evangelism I strongly recommend reading them all. These are wonderful blog posts. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – Reducing CXPACKET Wait Stats for High Transactional Database

  - by pinaldave

  While engaging in a performance tuning consultation for a client, a situation occurred where they were facing a lot of CXPACKET Waits Stats. The client asked me if I could help them reduce this huge number of wait stats. I usually receive this kind of request from other client as well, but the important thing to understand is whether this question has any merits or benefits, or not. Before we continue the resolution, let us understand what CXPACKET Wait Stats are. The official definition suggests that CXPACKET Wait Stats occurs when trying to synchronize the query processor exchange iterator. You may consider lowering the degree of parallelism if a conflict concerning this wait type develops into a problem. (from BOL) In simpler words, when a parallel operation is created for SQL Query, there are multiple threads for a single query. Each query deals with a different set of the data (or rows). Due to some reasons, one or more of the threads lag behind, creating the CXPACKET Wait Stat. Threads which came first have to wait for the slower thread to finish. The Wait by a specific completed thread is called CXPACKET Wait Stat. Note that CXPACKET Wait is done by completed thread and not the one which are unfinished. “Note that not all the CXPACKET wait types are bad. You might experience a case when it totally makes sense. There might also be cases when this is also unavoidable. If you remove this particular wait type for any query, then that query may run slower because the parallel operations are disabled for the query.” Now let us see what the best practices to reduce the CXPACKET Wait Stats are. The suggestions, with which you will find that if you search online through the browser, would play a major role as and might be asked about their jobs In addition, might tell you that you should set ‘maximum degree of parallelism’ to 1. I do agree with these suggestions, too; however, I think this is not the final resolutions. As soon as you set your entire query to run on single CPU, you will get a very bad performance from the queries which are actually performing okay when using parallelism. The best suggestion to this is that you set ‘the maximum degree of parallelism’ to a lower number or 1 (be very careful with this – it can create more problems) but tune the queries which can be benefited from multiple CPU’s. You can use query hint OPTION (MAXDOP 0) to run the server to use parallelism. Here is the two-quick script which helps to resolve these issues: Change MAXDOP at Server Level EXEC sys.sp_configure N'max degree of parallelism', N'1' GO RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE GO Run Query with all the CPU (using parallelism) USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail ORDER BY ProductID OPTION (MAXDOP 0) GO Below is the blog post which will help you to find all the parallel query in your server. SQL SERVER – Find Queries using Parallelism from Cached Plan Please note running Queries in single CPU may worsen your performance and it is not recommended at all. Infect this can be very bad advise. I strongly suggest that you identify the queries which are offending and tune them instead of following any other suggestions. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• BizTalk 2009 - BizTalk Benchmark Wizard: Installation

  - by StuartBrierley

  As previously detailed, I have completed a single server installation of BizTalk Server 2009 standard on my development laptop; a MacBook Pro Core2Duo running at 2.16Ghz with 2Gb of RAM.  Following this I also posted on my use of the BizTalk Server Best Practices Anaylser and how to configure the BizTalk SQL Server Jobs.  All of which means that I should have some confidence that I have a decent working BizTalk Server 2009 environment, Next I thought that it would be a good idea to try and get some idea of how this setup performs by carrying out some baseline tests that can then be replicated on the test and live servers. The aim of this would be to allow confident predictions to be made of how any solutions developed on a single "server" installation may be expected to perform when deployed to these multi-server BizTalk Server 2009 standard installations. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard would seem to be the perfect tool for the job. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard is a ultility that can be used to gain some validation of a BizTalk installation, giving a level of guidance on whether it is performing as might be expected. This utility should be used after BizTalk Server has been installed and before any solutions are deployed to the environment.  This will ensure that you are getting consistent and clean results from the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard applies load to the BizTalk Server environment under a choice of specific scenarios. During these scenarios performance counter information is collected and assessed against statistics that are appropriate to the BizTalk Server environment: "The executed scenarios may or may not be relative to any realistic scenario, and is only intended for testing. The BizTalk Benchmark Wizard has been developed in relation to the BizTalk Server 2009 Scale Out Testing Study. More information about the study can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee377068(BTS.10).aspx" After downloading and installing the wizard you will need set up the Hosts, Instances and Adapter handlers.  This is done by running a script file using the “cscript” detailed below.  To do this you will need to open a command prompt window and navigate to the script folder; assuming the default installation location this would be C:\Program Files\Blogical\BizTalk Benchmark Wizard\Artefacts\BizTalk. In this folder you should find an InstallHosts.vbs file which can be executed using the following parameters: NTGroupName - The name of the Windows NT group. UserName – The name of the user account running the service instances. Password – The password of the user account running the service instances. Receive Host – The name of the server where you want to run the receive host instance.  Send Host - The name of the server where you want to run the sen host instance. Processing Host - The name of the server where you want to run the process host instance. By default the script is set up for 64 bit hosts, so if you are running in 32 bit environment make sure that you change the following line in the script before continuing: from:   objHS.IsHost32BitOnly = False to:    objHS.IsHost32BitOnly = True If you have a single box installation, your script command might look like this: cscript InstallHosts.vbs "BizTalk Application Users" “\MyUser” “MyPassword” “BtsServer1” “BtsServer1” “BtsServer1” If you have a multi server installation, your script command might look like this: cscript InstallHosts.vbs "MyDomain\BizTalk Application Users" “MyDomain\MyUser” “MyPassword” “BtsServer1” “BtsServer2” “BtsServer2” Running this script will create: Three hosts (BBW_RxHost, BBW_TxHost and BBW_PxHost) Three host instances One send and one receive adapter handler for the WCF NetTcp adapter. You will then need to import the BizTalk MSI via the BizTalk Administration Console.  Open the BizTalk Administration Console, point to the “Applications” node and import the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard.msi found in the same folder as the script above. This will create a “BizTalk Benchmark Wizard” application along with all ports and orchestrations needed. To finish the installation you will need to run the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard.msi on all BizTalk servers to add the assemblies to the Global Assembly Cache (GAC). Next I will look at running the BizTalk Benchmark Wizard.

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• How to Create Views for All Tables with Oracle SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Got this question over the weekend via a friend and Oracle ACE Director, so I thought I would share the answer here. If you want to quickly generate DDL to create VIEWs for all the tables in your system, the easiest way to do that with SQL Developer is to create a data model. Wait, why would I want to do this? StackOverflow has a few things to say on this subject… So, start with importing a data dictionary. Step One: Open of Create a Model In SQL Developer, go to View – Data Modeler – Browser. Then in the browser panel, expand your design and create a new Relational Model. Step Two: Import your Data Dictionary This is a fancy way of saying, ‘suck objects out of the database into my model’ This will open a wizard to connect, select your schema(s), objects, etc. Once they’re in your model, you’re ready to cook with gas I’m using HR (Human Resources) for this example. You should end up with something that looks like this. Our favorite HR model Now we’re ready to generate the views! Step Three: Auto-generate the Views Go to Tools – Data Modeler – Table to View Wizard. I don’t want all my tables included, and I want to change the naming standard Decide if you want to change the default generated view names By default the views will be created as ‘V_TABLE_NAME.’ If you don’t like the ‘V_’ you can enter your own. You also can reference the object and model name with variables as shown in the screenshot above. I’m going to go with something a little more personal. The views are the little green boxes in the diagram Can’t find your views? They should be grouped together in your diagram. Don’t forget to use the Navigator to easily find and navigate to those model diagram objects! Step Four: Generate the DDL Ok, let’s use the Generate DDL button on the toolbar. Un-check everything but your views If you used a prefix, take advantage of that to create a filter. You might have existing views in your model that you don’t want to include, right? Once you click ‘OK’ the DDL will be generated. -- Generated by Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 4.0.0.825 -- at: 2013-11-04 10:26:39 EST -- site: Oracle Database 11g -- type: Oracle Database 11g CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW HR.TJS_BLOG_COUNTRIES ( COUNTRY_ID , COUNTRY_NAME , REGION_ID ) AS SELECT COUNTRY_ID , COUNTRY_NAME , REGION_ID FROM HR.COUNTRIES ; CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW HR.TJS_BLOG_EMPLOYEES ( EMPLOYEE_ID , FIRST_NAME , LAST_NAME , EMAIL , PHONE_NUMBER , HIRE_DATE , JOB_ID , SALARY , COMMISSION_PCT , MANAGER_ID , DEPARTMENT_ID ) AS SELECT EMPLOYEE_ID , FIRST_NAME , LAST_NAME , EMAIL , PHONE_NUMBER , HIRE_DATE , JOB_ID , SALARY , COMMISSION_PCT , MANAGER_ID , DEPARTMENT_ID FROM HR.EMPLOYEES ; CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW HR.TJS_BLOG_JOBS ( JOB_ID , JOB_TITLE , MIN_SALARY , MAX_SALARY ) AS SELECT JOB_ID , JOB_TITLE , MIN_SALARY , MAX_SALARY FROM HR.JOBS ; CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW HR.TJS_BLOG_JOB_HISTORY ( EMPLOYEE_ID , START_DATE , END_DATE , JOB_ID , DEPARTMENT_ID ) AS SELECT EMPLOYEE_ID , START_DATE , END_DATE , JOB_ID , DEPARTMENT_ID FROM HR.JOB_HISTORY ; CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW HR.TJS_BLOG_LOCATIONS ( LOCATION_ID , STREET_ADDRESS , POSTAL_CODE , CITY , STATE_PROVINCE , COUNTRY_ID ) AS SELECT LOCATION_ID , STREET_ADDRESS , POSTAL_CODE , CITY , STATE_PROVINCE , COUNTRY_ID FROM HR.LOCATIONS ; CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW HR.TJS_BLOG_REGIONS ( REGION_ID , REGION_NAME ) AS SELECT REGION_ID , REGION_NAME FROM HR.REGIONS ; -- Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Summary Report: -- -- CREATE TABLE 0 -- CREATE INDEX 0 -- ALTER TABLE 0 -- CREATE VIEW 6 -- CREATE PACKAGE 0 -- CREATE PACKAGE BODY 0 -- CREATE PROCEDURE 0 -- CREATE FUNCTION 0 -- CREATE TRIGGER 0 -- ALTER TRIGGER 0 -- CREATE COLLECTION TYPE 0 -- CREATE STRUCTURED TYPE 0 -- CREATE STRUCTURED TYPE BODY 0 -- CREATE CLUSTER 0 -- CREATE CONTEXT 0 -- CREATE DATABASE 0 -- CREATE DIMENSION 0 -- CREATE DIRECTORY 0 -- CREATE DISK GROUP 0 -- CREATE ROLE 0 -- CREATE ROLLBACK SEGMENT 0 -- CREATE SEQUENCE 0 -- CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW 0 -- CREATE SYNONYM 0 -- CREATE TABLESPACE 0 -- CREATE USER 0 -- -- DROP TABLESPACE 0 -- DROP DATABASE 0 -- -- REDACTION POLICY 0 -- -- ERRORS 0 -- WARNINGS 0 You can then choose to save this to a file or not. This has a few steps, but as the number of tables in your system increases, so does the amount of time this feature can save you!

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• 11 Types of Developers

  - by Lee Brandt

  Jack Dawson Jack Dawson is the homeless drifter in Titanic. At one point in the movie he says, “I figure life’s a gift, and I don’t intend on wasting it.” He is happy to wander wherever life takes him. He works himself from place to place, making just enough money to make it to his next adventure. The “Jack Dawson” developer clings on to any new technology as the ‘next big thing’, and will find ways to shoe-horn it in to places where it is not a fit. He is very appealing to the other developers because they want to try the newest techniques and tools too, He will only stay until the new technology either bores him or becomes problematic. Jack will also be hard to find once the technology has been implemented, because he will be on to the next shiny thing. However, having a Jack Dawson on your team can be beneficial. Jack can be a great ally when attempting to convince a stodgy, corporate entity to upgrade. Jack usually has an encyclopedic recall of all the new features of the technology upgrade and is more than happy to interject them in any conversation. Tom Smykowski Tom is the neurotic employee in Office Space, and is deathly afraid of being fired. He will do only what is necessary to keep the status quo. He believes as long as nothing changes, his job is safe. He will scoff at anything new and be the naysayer during any change initiative. Tom can be useful in off-setting Jack Dawson. Jack will constantly be pushing for change and Tom will constantly be fighting it. When you see that Jack is getting kind of bored with a new technology and Tom has finally stopped wetting himself at the mere mention of it, then it is probably the sweet spot of beginning to implement that new technology (providing it is the right tool for the job). Ray Consella Ray is the guy who built the Field of Dreams. He took a risk. Sometimes he screwed it up, but he knew he didn’t want to end up regretting not attempting it. He constantly doubted himself, but he knew he had to keep going. Granted, he was doing what the voices in his head were telling him to do, but my point is he was driven to do something that most people considered crazy. Even when his friends, his wife and even he told himself he was crazy, somewhere inside himself, he knew it was the right thing to do. These are the innovators. These are the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of the world. The take risks, they fail, they learn and the get better. Obviously, this kind of person thrives in start-ups and smaller companies, but that is due to their natural aversion to bureaucracy. They want to see their ideas put into motion quickly, and withdrawn quickly if it doesn’t work. Short feedback cycles are essential to Ray. He wants to know if his idea is working or not. He wants to modify or reverse his idea if it is not working or makes things worse. These are the agilistas. May I always be one.

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• POP Forums v9 Beta 1 for ASP.NET MVC 3 posted to CodePlex!

  - by Jeff

  As promised, I posted a beta build of my forum app for ASP.NET MVC 3. Get the new goodies here: http://popforums.codeplex.com/releases/view/58228 This is the first beta for the ASP.NET MVC 3 version of POP Forums. It is nearly feature complete, and ready for testing and feedback. For previous release notes, look here, here and here.Check out the live preview: http://preview.popforums.com/ForumsSetup instructions are on the home page of this project. The new hotness in the beta, or what has been done since the last preview: All views converted to use Razor E-mail subscription/notification of new posts New post indicators/mark read buttons Permalinks to posts Jump to newest post (from new post indicators) Recent topics Favorite topics Moderator functions for topics (pin/close/delete, plus move and rename) Search, ported from v8. Not a ton of optimization here, or new unit testing, but the old version worked pretty well User posts (topics the user posted in) Forgot password Vanity items (signatures and avatars) Hide vanity items per user preference Some minor data caching where appropriate A little bit of UI refinement Lots-o-bug fixes Lots-o-unit tests What's next? The plan between now and the next beta is as follows: Continue working through features/tasks, and fix bugs as they're reported Integrate the forum into a real, production site Refine the UI Refactor as much as possible... the code organization is not entirely logical in some places After the second beta, a release candidate will follow, with a real "final" release after that. Subsequent releases should come relatively frequently and without a lot of risk. The trick in building this thing has been that it mostly tossed the previous WebForms version, which was all full of crusties. The time table for this is a little harder to pin down, as day jobs and families will have their effect. Other notes Refactoring will be a priority. As the features of MVC have evolved, so have my desires to use it in a fashion that makes things clear and easy to follow. I don't even know if anyone will ever start mucking around in the code, but on the off chance they do, I'd like what they find to not suck. Other nice-to-haves are builds to target Windows Azure and SQL CE. A nice setup UI would be super too. I think the ASP.NET MVC world has gone long enough without a decent forum.The biggest challenge that I've found is making the forum something that can be dropped in any app. While it does rope its views into an area, areas are mostly just routing details. I haven't thought of a clever way yet to limit dependency injection, for example, to just the forum bits. I mean, everyone should be using Ninject, but how realistic is that? ;)How much time and effort should you spend on POP Forums in its current state? Change is inevitable, but at this point I'm reasonably committed to not changing the database schema. I really think it will stay as-is. All bets are off for the various interfaces throughout the app, but the data should generally resist change. It's not even that different from v8, which was one of the original goals because I didn't want to rewrite SQL or introduce a new ORM or whatever. My point is that if you wanted to build a site around this today, even though it's not entirely functional, I think it's low risk in terms of data loss. I can't vouch for whether or not you know what you're doing.I've been having some chats with people lately about quoting posts, and honestly there has to be something better and straight forward. That continues to be a holy grail of mine, and some day, I hope to find it.Enjoy... it's starting to feel more real every day!

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• Making a Job Change That's Easy Why Not Try a Career Change

  - by david.talamelli

  A few nights ago I received a comment on one of our blog posts that reminded me of a statistic that I heard a while back. The statistic reflected the change in our views towards work and showed how while people in past generations would stay in one role for their working career - now with so much choice people not only change jobs often but also change careers 4-5 times in their working life. To differentiate between a job change and a career change: when I say job change this could be an IT Sales person moving from one IT Sales role to another IT Sales role. A Career change for example would be that same IT Sales person moving from IT Sales to something outside the scope of their industry - maybe to something like an Engineer or Scuba Dive Instructor. The reason for Career changes can be as varied as the people who make them. Someone's motivation could be to pursue a passion or maybe there is a change in their personal circumstances forcing the change or it could be any other number of reasons. I think it takes courage to make a Career change - it can be easy to stay in your comfort zone and do what you know, but to really push yourself sometimes you need to try something new, it is a matter of making that career transition as smooth as possible for yourself. The comment that was posted is here below (thanks Dean for the kind words they are appreciated). Hi David, I just wanted to let you know that I work for a company called Milestone Search in Melbourne, Victoria Australia. (www.mstone.com.au) We subscribe to your feed on a daily basis and find your blogs both interesting and insightful. Not to mention extremely entertaining. I wonder if you have missed out on getting in journalism as this seems to be something you'd be great at ?: ) Anyways back to my point about changing careers. This could be anything from going from I.T. to Journalism, Engineering to Teaching or any combination of career you can think of. I don't think there ever has been a time where we have had so many opportunities to do so many different things in our working life. While this idea sounds great in theory, putting it into practice would be much harder to do I think. First, in an increasingly competitive job market, employers tend to look for specialists in their field. You may want to make a change but your options may be limited by the number of employers willing to take a chance on someone new to an industry that will likely require a significant investment in time to get brought up to speed. Also, using myself as an example if I was given the opportunity to move into Journalism/Communication/Marketing career from my career as an IT Recruiter - realistically I would have to take a significant pay cut to make this change as my current salary reflects the expertise I have in my current career. I would not immediately be up to speed moving into a new career and would not be able to justify a similar salary. Yes there are transferable skills in any career change, but even though you may have transferable skills you must realise that you will also have a large amount of learning to do which would take time. These are two initial hurdles that I immediately think of, there may be more but nothing is insurmountable. If you work out what you want to do with your working career whatever that may be, you then need to just need to work out the steps to get to your end goal. This is where utilising the power of your networks and using Social Media can come in handy. If you are interested in working somewhere why not proactively take the opportunity to research the industry or company - find out who it is you need to speak to and get in touch with them. We spend so much time working, we should enjoy the work we do and not be afraid to try new things. Waiting for your dream job to fall into your lap or be handed to you on a silver platter is not likely going to happen, so if there is something you do want to do, work out a plan to make it happen and chase after it. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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• So No TECH job so far.

  - by Ratman21

  O I found some temp work for the US Census and I have managed to keep the house (so far) but, it looks like I/we are going to have to do a short sale and the temp job will be ending soon.   On top of that it looks like the unemployment fund for me is drying up. I will have about one month left after the Census job is done. I am now down to Appling for work at the KFC.   This is type a work I started with, before I was a tech geek and really I didn’t think I would be doing this kind of work in my later years but, I have a wife and kid. So I got to suck it up and do it.   Oh and here is my new resume…go ahead I know you want to tare it up. I really don’t care any more.   Scott L. Newman 45219 Dutton Way, Callahan, FL32011 H: (904)879-4880 C: (352)356-0945 E: [email protected] Web:  http://beingscottnewman.webs.com/                                                       ______                                                                                 OBJECTIVE To obtain a Network or Technical support position     KEYWORD SUMMARY CompTIA A+, Network+, and Security+ Certified., Network Operation, Technical Support, Client/Vendor Relations, Networking/Administration, Cisco Routers/Switches, Helpdesk, Microsoft Office Suite, Website Design/Dev./Management, Frame Relay, ISDN, Windows NT/98/XP, Visio, Inventory Management, CICS, Programming, COBOL IV, Assembler, RPG   QUALIFICATIONS SUMMARY Twenty years’ experience in computer operations, technical support, and technical writing. Also have two and half years’ experience in internet / intranet operations.   PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE October 2009 – Present*   Volunteer Web site and PC technician – Part time       True Faith Christian Fellowship Church – Callahan, FL, Project: Create and maintain web site for Church to give it a worldwide exposure Aug 2008 – September 2009:* Volunteer Church sound and video technician – Part time      Thomas Creek Baptist Church – Callahan, FL   *Note Jobs were for the learning and/or keeping updated on skills, while looking for a tech job and training for new skills.   February 2005 to October 2008: Client Server Dev/Analyst I, Fidelity National Information Services, Jacksonville, FL (FNIS acquired Certegy in 2005 and out of 20 personal, was one of three kept on.) August 2003 to February 2005: Senior NetOps Operator, Certegy, St.Pete, Fl. (August 2003, Certegy terminated contract with EDS and out of 40 personal, was one of six kept on.) Projects: Creation and update of listing and placement for all raised floor equipment at St.Pete site. Listing was made up of, floor plan of the raised floor and equipment racks diagrams showing the placement of all devices using Visio. This was cross-referenced with an inventory excel document showing what dept was responsible for each device. Sole creator of Network operation and Server Operation procedures guide (NetOps Guide).  Expertise: Resolving circuit and/or router issues or assist circuit carrier in resolving issue from the company Network Operation Center (NOC). As well as resolving application problems or assist application support in resolution of it.     July 1999 to August 2003: Senior NetOps Operator,EDS (Certegy Account), St.Pete, FL Same expertise and on going projects as listed above for FNIS/Certegy. (Equifax outsourced the NetOps dept. to EDS in 1999)         January 1991 to July 1999: NetOps/Tandem Operator, Equifax, St.Pete & Tampa, FL Same as all of the above for FNIS/Certegy/EDS except for circuit and router issues   EDUCATION ? New Horizons Computer Learning Center, Jacksonville, Florida - CompTIA A+, Security+, and     Network+ Certified.                        Currently working on CCNA Certification 07/30/10 ? Mott Community College, Flint, Michigan – Associates Degree - Data Processing and General Education ? Currently studying Japanese

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• SQL SERVER – Free Print Book on SQL Server Joes 2 Pros Kit

  - by pinaldave

  Rick Morelan and I were discussing earlier this month that what we can give back to the community. We believe our books are very much successful and very well received by the community. The five books are a journey from novice to expert. The books have changed many lives and helped many get jobs as well pass the SQL Certifications. Rick is from Seattle, USA and I am from Bangalore, India. There are 12 hours difference between us. We try to do weekly meeting to catch up on various personal and SQL related topics. Here is one of our recent conversations. Rick and Pinal Pinal: Good Morning Rick! Rick: Good Morning…err… Good Evening to you – Pinal! Pinal: Hey Rick, did you read the recent email which I sent you – one of our reader is thanking us for writing Joes 2 Pros series. He wants to dedicate his success to us. Can you believe it? Rick: Yeah, he is very kind but did you tell him that it is all because of his hard work on learning subject and we have very little contribution in his success. Pinal: Absolutely, I told him the same – I said we just wrote the book but it is he who learned from it and proved himself in his job. It is all him! We were just igniters. Rick: Good response. Pinal: Hey Rick! Are we doing enough for the community? What can we do more? Rick: Hmmm… Let us do something more. Pinal: Remember once we discussed the idea of if anyone who buys our Joes 2 Pros Combo Kit in the next 2 weeks – we will send them SQL Wait Stats for free. What do you say? Rick: I agree! Great Idea! Let us do it. Free Giveaway Well Rick and I liked the idea of doing more. We have decided to give away free SQL Server Wait Stats books to everybody who will purchase Joes 2 Pros Combo Kit between today (Oct 15, 2012) and Oct 26, 2012. This is not a contest or a lucky winner opportunity. Everybody who participates will qualify for it. Combo Availability USA – Amazon India - Flipkart | Indiaplaza Note1: USA kit contains FREE 5 DVDs. India Kit does not contain 5 DVDs due to legal issues. Note2: Indian Kit is priced at special Indian Economic Price. Qualify for Free Giveaway You must have purchased our Joes 2 Pros Combo Kit of 5 books between Oct 15, 2012 and Oct 26, 2012. Purchase before Oct 15, 2012 and after Oct 26, 2012 will not qualify for this giveaway. Send your original receipt (email, order details) to following addresses: “[email protected];[email protected]” with the subject line “Joes 2 Pros Kit Promotion Free Offer”. Do not change the subject line or your email may be missed.  Clearly mention your shipping address with phone number and pin/zip code. Send your receipt before Oct 30, 2012. We will not entertain any conversation after Oct 30, 2012 cut off date. The Free books will be sent to USA and India address only. Availability USA - Amazon | India - Flipkart | Indiaplaza Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Book Review, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology

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