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• ASP.NET and WIF: Showing custom profile username as User.Identity.Name

  - by DigiMortal

  I am building ASP.NET MVC application that uses external services to authenticate users. For ASP.NET users are fully authenticated when they are redirected back from external service. In system they are logically authenticated when they have created user profiles. In this posting I will show you how to force ASP.NET MVC controller actions to demand existence of custom user profiles. Using external authentication sources with AppFabric Suppose you want to be user-friendly and you don’t force users to keep in mind another username/password when they visit your site. You can accept logins from different popular sites like Windows Live, Facebook, Yahoo, Google and many more. If user has account in some of these services then he or she can use his or her account to log in to your site. If you have community site then you usually have support for user profiles too. Some of these providers give you some information about users and other don’t. So only thing in common you get from all those providers is some unique ID that identifies user in service uniquely. Image above shows you how new user joins your site. Existing users who already have profile are directed to users homepage after they are authenticated. You can read more about how to solve semi-authorized users problem from my blog posting ASP.NET MVC: Using ProfileRequiredAttribute to restrict access to pages. The other problem is related to usernames that we don’t get from all identity providers. Why is IIdentity.Name sometimes empty? The problem is described more specifically in my blog posting Identifying AppFabric Access Control Service users uniquely. Shortly the problem is that not all providers have claim called http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name. The following diagram illustrates what happens when user got token from AppFabric ACS and was redirected to your site. Now, when user was authenticated using Windows Live ID then we don’t have name claim in token and that’s why User.Identity.Name is empty. Okay, we can force nameidentifier to be used as name (we can do it in web.config file) but we have user profiles and we want username from profile to be shown when username is asked. Modifying name claim Now let’s force IClaimsIdentity to use username from our user profiles. You can read more about my profiles topic from my blog posting ASP.NET MVC: Using ProfileRequiredAttribute to restrict access to pages and you can find some useful extension methods for claims identity from my blog posting Identifying AppFabric Access Control Service users uniquely. Here is what we do to set User.Identity.Name: we will check if user has profile, if user has profile we will check if User.Identity.Name matches the name given by profile, if names does not match then probably identity provider returned some name for user, we will remove name claim and recreate it with correct username, we will add new name claim to claims collection. All this stuff happens in Application_AuthorizeRequest event of our web application. The code is here. protected void Application_AuthorizeRequest() {     if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(User.Identity.Name))     {         var identity = User.Identity;         var profile = identity.GetProfile();         if (profile != null)         {             if (profile.UserName != identity.Name)             {                 identity.RemoveName();                   var claim = new Claim("http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name", profile.UserName);                 var claimsIdentity = (IClaimsIdentity)identity;                 claimsIdentity.Claims.Add(claim);             }         }     } } RemoveName extension method is simple – it looks for name claims of IClaimsIdentity claims collection and removes them. public static void RemoveName(this IIdentity identity) {     if (identity == null)         return;       var claimsIndentity = identity as ClaimsIdentity;     if (claimsIndentity == null)         return;       for (var i = claimsIndentity.Claims.Count - 1; i >= 0; i--)     {         var claim = claimsIndentity.Claims[i];         if (claim.ClaimType == "http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/name")             claimsIndentity.Claims.RemoveAt(i);     } } And we are done. Now User.Identity.Name returns the username from user profile and you can use it to show username of current user everywhere in your site. Conclusion Mixing AppFabric Access Control Service and Windows Identity Foundation with custom authorization logic is not impossible but a little bit tricky. This posting finishes my little series about AppFabric ACS and WIF for this time and hopefully you found some useful tricks, tips, hacks and code pieces you can use in your own applications.

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• SSIS - XML Source Script

  - by simonsabin

  The XML Source in SSIS is great if you have a 1 to 1 mapping between entity and table. You can do more complex mapping but it becomes very messy and won't perform. What other options do you have? The challenge with XML processing is to not need a huge amount of memory. I remember using the early versions of Biztalk with loaded the whole document into memory to map from one document type to another. This was fine for small documents but was an absolute killer for large documents. You therefore need a streaming approach. For flexibility however you want to be able to generate your rows easily, and if you've ever used the XmlReader you will know its ugly code to write. That brings me on to LINQ. The is an implementation of LINQ over XML which is really nice. You can write nice LINQ queries instead of the XMLReader stuff. The downside is that by default LINQ to XML requires a whole XML document to work with. No streaming. Your code would look like this. We create an XDocument and then enumerate over a set of annoymous types we generate from our LINQ statement XDocument x = XDocument.Load("C:\\TEMP\\CustomerOrders-Attribute.xml");   foreach (var xdata in (from customer in x.Elements("OrderInterface").Elements("Customer")                        from order in customer.Elements("Orders").Elements("Order")                        select new { Account = customer.Attribute("AccountNumber").Value                                   , OrderDate = order.Attribute("OrderDate").Value }                        )) {     Output0Buffer.AddRow();     Output0Buffer.AccountNumber = xdata.Account;     Output0Buffer.OrderDate = Convert.ToDateTime(xdata.OrderDate); } As I said the downside to this is that you are loading the whole document into memory. I did some googling and came across some helpful videos from a nice UK DPE Mike Taulty http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/screencasts/screencast/289/LINQ-to-XML-Streaming-In-Large-Documents.aspx. Which show you how you can combine LINQ and the XmlReader to get a semi streaming approach. I took what he did and implemented it in SSIS. What I found odd was that when I ran it I got different numbers between using the streamed and non streamed versions. I found the cause was a little bug in Mikes code that causes the pointer in the XmlReader to progress past the start of the element and thus foreach (var xdata in (from customer in StreamReader("C:\\TEMP\\CustomerOrders-Attribute.xml","Customer")                                from order in customer.Elements("Orders").Elements("Order")                                select new { Account = customer.Attribute("AccountNumber").Value                                           , OrderDate = order.Attribute("OrderDate").Value }                                ))         {             Output0Buffer.AddRow();             Output0Buffer.AccountNumber = xdata.Account;             Output0Buffer.OrderDate = Convert.ToDateTime(xdata.OrderDate);         } These look very similiar and they are the key element is the method we are calling, StreamReader. This method is what gives us streaming, what it does is return a enumerable list of elements, because of the way that LINQ works this results in the data being streamed in. static IEnumerable<XElement> StreamReader(String filename, string elementName) {     using (XmlReader xr = XmlReader.Create(filename))     {         xr.MoveToContent();         while (xr.Read()) //Reads the first element         {             while (xr.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element && xr.Name == elementName)             {                 XElement node = (XElement)XElement.ReadFrom(xr);                   yield return node;             }         }         xr.Close();     } } This code is specifically designed to return a list of the elements with a specific name. The first Read reads the root element and then the inner while loop checks to see if the current element is the type we want. If not we do the xr.Read() again until we find the element type we want. We then use the neat function XElement.ReadFrom to read an element and all its sub elements into an XElement. This is what is returned and can be consumed by the LINQ statement. Essentially once one element has been read we need to check if we are still on the same element type and name (the inner loop) This was Mikes mistake, if we called .Read again we would advance the XmlReader beyond the start of the Element and so the ReadFrom method wouldn't work. So with the code above you can use what ever LINQ statement you like to flatten your XML into the rowsets you want. You could even have multiple outputs and generate your own surrogate keys.        

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• Transparency and AlphaBlending

  - by TechTwaddle

  In this post we'll look at the AlphaBlend() api and how it can be used for semi-transparent blitting. AlphaBlend() takes a source device context and a destination device context (DC) and combines the bits in such a way that it gives a transparent effect. Follow the links for the msdn documentation. So lets take a image like, and AlphaBlend() it on our window. The code to do so is below, (under the WM_PAINT message of WndProc) HBITMAP hBitmap=NULL, hBitmapOld=NULL; HDC hMemDC=NULL; BLENDFUNCTION bf; hdc = BeginPaint(hWnd, &ps); hMemDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc); hBitmap = LoadBitmap(g_hInst, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDB_BITMAP1)); hBitmapOld = SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap); bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER; bf.BlendFlags = 0; bf.SourceConstantAlpha = 80; //transparency value between 0-255 bf.AlphaFormat = 0;    AlphaBlend(hdc, 0, 25, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, bf); SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmapOld); DeleteDC(hMemDC); DeleteObject(hBitmap); EndPaint(hWnd, &ps);   The code above creates a memory DC (hMemDC) using CreateCompatibleDC(), loads a bitmap onto the memory DC and AlphaBlends it on the device DC (hdc), with a transparency value of 80. The result is: Pretty simple till now. Now lets try to do something a little more exciting. Lets get two images involved, each overlapping the other, giving a better demonstration of transparency. I am also going to add a few buttons so that the user can increase or decrease the transparency by clicking on the buttons. Since this is the first time I played around with GDI apis, I ran into something that everybody runs into sometime or the other, flickering. When clicking the buttons the images would flicker a lot, I figured out why and used something called double buffering to avoid flickering. We will look at both my first implementation and the second implementation just to give the concept a little more depth and perspective. A few pre-conditions before I dive into the code: - hBitmap and hBitmap2 are handles to the two images obtained using LoadBitmap(), these variables are global and are initialized under WM_CREATE - The two buttons in the application are labeled Opaque++ (make more opaque, less transparent) and Opaque-- (make less opaque, more transparent) - DrawPics(HWND hWnd, int step=0); is the function called to draw the images on the screen. This is called from under WM_PAINT and also when the buttons are clicked. When Opaque++ is clicked the 'step' value passed to DrawPics() is +20 and when Opaque-- is clicked the 'step' value is -20. The default value of 'step' is 0 Now lets take a look at my first implementation: //this funciton causes flicker, cos it draws directly to screen several times void DrawPics(HWND hWnd, int step) {     HDC hdc=NULL, hMemDC=NULL;     BLENDFUNCTION bf;     static UINT32 transparency = 100;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 0 and user clicks Opaque--     if (transparency == 0 && step < 0)         return;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 240 (opaque) and user clicks Opaque++     if (transparency == 240 && step > 0)         return;         hdc = GetDC(hWnd);     if (!hdc)         return;     //create a memory DC     hMemDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc);     if (!hMemDC)     {         ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc);         return;     }     //while increasing transparency, clear the contents of screen     if (step < 0)     {         RECT rect = {0, 0, 240, 200};         FillRect(hdc, &rect, (HBRUSH)GetStockObject(WHITE_BRUSH));     }     SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap2);     BitBlt(hdc, 0, 25, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);         SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap);     transparency += step;     if (transparency >= 240)         transparency = 240;     if (transparency <= 0)         transparency = 0;     bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER;     bf.BlendFlags = 0;     bf.SourceConstantAlpha = transparency;     bf.AlphaFormat = 0;            AlphaBlend(hdc, 0, 75, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, bf);     DeleteDC(hMemDC);     ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc); }   In the code above, we first get the window DC using GetDC() and create a memory DC using CreateCompatibleDC(). Then we select hBitmap2 onto the memory DC and Blt it on the window DC (hdc). Next, we select the other image, hBitmap, onto memory DC and AlphaBlend() it over window DC. As I told you before, this implementation causes flickering because it draws directly on the screen (hdc) several times. The video below shows what happens when the buttons were clicked rapidly: Well, the video recording tool I use captures only 15 frames per second and so the flickering is not visible in the video. So you're gonna have to trust me on this, it flickers (; To solve this problem we make sure that the drawing to the screen happens only once and to do that we create an additional memory DC, hTempDC. We perform all our drawing on this memory DC and finally when it is ready we Blt hTempDC on hdc, and the images are displayed in one go. Here is the code for our new DrawPics() function: //no flicker void DrawPics(HWND hWnd, int step) {     HDC hdc=NULL, hMemDC=NULL, hTempDC=NULL;     BLENDFUNCTION bf;     HBITMAP hBitmapTemp=NULL, hBitmapOld=NULL;     static UINT32 transparency = 100;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 0 and user clicks Opaque--     if (transparency == 0 && step < 0)         return;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 240 (opaque) and user clicks Opaque++     if (transparency == 240 && step > 0)         return;         hdc = GetDC(hWnd);     if (!hdc)         return;     hMemDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc);     hTempDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc);     hBitmapTemp = CreateCompatibleBitmap(hdc, 240, 150);     hBitmapOld = (HBITMAP)SelectObject(hTempDC, hBitmapTemp);     if (!hMemDC)     {         ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc);         return;     }     //while increasing transparency, clear the contents     if (step < 0)     {         RECT rect = {0, 0, 240, 150};         FillRect(hTempDC, &rect, (HBRUSH)GetStockObject(WHITE_BRUSH));     }     SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap2);     //Blt hBitmap2 directly to hTempDC     BitBlt(hTempDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);         SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap);     transparency += step;     if (transparency >= 240)         transparency = 240;     if (transparency <= 0)         transparency = 0;     bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER;     bf.BlendFlags = 0;     bf.SourceConstantAlpha = transparency;     bf.AlphaFormat = 0;            AlphaBlend(hTempDC, 0, 50, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, bf);     //now hTempDC is ready, blt it directly on hdc     BitBlt(hdc, 0, 25, 240, 150, hTempDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);     SelectObject(hTempDC, hBitmapOld);     DeleteObject(hBitmapTemp);     DeleteDC(hMemDC);     DeleteDC(hTempDC);     ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc); }   This function is very similar to the first version, except for the use of hTempDC. Another point to note is the use of CreateCompatibleBitmap(). When a memory device context is created using CreateCompatibleDC(), the context is exactly one monochrome pixel high and one monochrome pixel wide. So in order for us to draw anything onto hTempDC, we first have to set a bitmap on it. We use CreateCompatibleBitmap() to create a bitmap of required dimension (240x150 above), and then select this bitmap onto hTempDC. Think of it as utilizing an extra canvas, drawing everything on the canvas and finally transferring the contents to the display in one scoop. And with this version the flickering is gone, video follows:   If you want the entire solutions source code then leave a message, I will share the code over SkyDrive.

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• LLBLGen Pro feature highlights: grouping model elements

  - by FransBouma

  (This post is part of a series of posts about features of the LLBLGen Pro system) When working with an entity model which has more than a few entities, it's often convenient to be able to group entities together if they belong to a semantic sub-model. For example, if your entity model has several entities which are about 'security', it would be practical to group them together under the 'security' moniker. This way, you could easily find them back, yet they can be left inside the complete entity model altogether so their relationships with entities outside the group are kept. In other situations your domain consists of semi-separate entity models which all target tables/views which are located in the same database. It then might be convenient to have a single project to manage the complete target database, yet have the entity models separate of each other and have them result in separate code bases. LLBLGen Pro can do both for you. This blog post will illustrate both situations. The feature is called group usage and is controllable through the project settings. This setting is supported on all supported O/R mapper frameworks. Situation one: grouping entities in a single model. This situation is common for entity models which are dense, so many relationships exist between all sub-models: you can't split them up easily into separate models (nor do you likely want to), however it's convenient to have them grouped together into groups inside the entity model at the project level. A typical example for this is the AdventureWorks example database for SQL Server. This database, which is a single catalog, has for each sub-group a schema, however most of these schemas are tightly connected with each other: adding all schemas together will give a model with entities which indirectly are related to all other entities. LLBLGen Pro's default setting for group usage is AsVisualGroupingMechanism which is what this situation is all about: we group the elements for visual purposes, it has no real meaning for the model nor the code generated. Let's reverse engineer AdventureWorks to an entity model. By default, LLBLGen Pro uses the target schema an element is in which is being reverse engineered, as the group it will be in. This is convenient if you already have categorized tables/views in schemas, like which is the case in AdventureWorks. Of course this can be switched off, or corrected on the fly. When reverse engineering, we'll walk through a wizard which will guide us with the selection of the elements which relational model data should be retrieved, which we can later on use to reverse engineer to an entity model. The first step after specifying which database server connect to is to select these elements. below we can see the AdventureWorks catalog as well as the different schemas it contains. We'll include all of them. After the wizard completes, we have all relational model data nicely in our catalog data, with schemas. So let's reverse engineer entities from the tables in these schemas. We select in the catalog explorer the schemas 'HumanResources', 'Person', 'Production', 'Purchasing' and 'Sales', then right-click one of them and from the context menu, we select Reverse engineer Tables to Entity Definitions.... This will bring up the dialog below. We check all checkboxes in one go by checking the checkbox at the top to mark them all to be added to the project. As you can see LLBLGen Pro has already filled in the group name based on the schema name, as this is the default and we didn't change the setting. If you want, you can select multiple rows at once and set the group name to something else using the controls on the dialog. We're fine with the group names chosen so we'll simply click Add to Project. This gives the following result:   (I collapsed the other groups to keep the picture small ;)). As you can see, the entities are now grouped. Just to see how dense this model is, I've expanded the relationships of Employee: As you can see, it has relationships with entities from three other groups than HumanResources. It's not doable to cut up this project into sub-models without duplicating the Employee entity in all those groups, so this model is better suited to be used as a single model resulting in a single code base, however it benefits greatly from having its entities grouped into separate groups at the project level, to make work done on the model easier. Now let's look at another situation, namely where we work with a single database while we want to have multiple models and for each model a separate code base. Situation two: grouping entities in separate models within the same project. To get rid of the entities to see the second situation in action, simply undo the reverse engineering action in the project. We still have the AdventureWorks relational model data in the catalog. To switch LLBLGen Pro to see each group in the project as a separate project, open the Project Settings, navigate to General and set Group usage to AsSeparateProjects. In the catalog explorer, select Person and Production, right-click them and select again Reverse engineer Tables to Entities.... Again check the checkbox at the top to mark all entities to be added and click Add to Project. We get two groups, as expected, however this time the groups are seen as separate projects. This means that the validation logic inside LLBLGen Pro will see it as an error if there's e.g. a relationship or an inheritance edge linking two groups together, as that would lead to a cyclic reference in the code bases. To see this variant of the grouping feature, seeing the groups as separate projects, in action, we'll generate code from the project with the two groups we just created: select from the main menu: Project -> Generate Source-code... (or press F7 ;)). In the dialog popping up, select the target .NET framework you want to use, the template preset, fill in a destination folder and click Start Generator (normal). This will start the code generator process. As expected the code generator has simply generated two code bases, one for Person and one for Production: The group name is used inside the namespace for the different elements. This allows you to add both code bases to a single solution and use them together in a different project without problems. Below is a snippet from the code file of a generated entity class. //... using System.Xml.Serialization; using AdventureWorks.Person; using AdventureWorks.Person.HelperClasses; using AdventureWorks.Person.FactoryClasses; using AdventureWorks.Person.RelationClasses; using SD.LLBLGen.Pro.ORMSupportClasses; namespace AdventureWorks.Person.EntityClasses { //... /// <summary>Entity class which represents the entity 'Address'.<br/><br/></summary> [Serializable] public partial class AddressEntity : CommonEntityBase //... The advantage of this is that you can have two code bases and work with them separately, yet have a single target database and maintain everything in a single location. If you decide to move to a single code base, you can do so with a change of one setting. It's also useful if you want to keep the groups as separate models (and code bases) yet want to add relationships to elements from another group using a copy of the entity: you can simply reverse engineer the target table to a new entity into a different group, effectively making a copy of the entity. As there's a single target database, changes made to that database are reflected in both models which makes maintenance easier than when you'd have a separate project for each group, with its own relational model data. Conclusion LLBLGen Pro offers a flexible way to work with entities in sub-models and control how the sub-models end up in the generated code.

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• European Interoperability Framework - a new beginning?

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  The most controversial document in the history of the European Commission's IT policy is out. EIF is here, wrapped in the Communication "Towards interoperability for European public services", and including the new feature European Interoperability Strategy (EIS), arguably a higher strategic take on the same topic. Leaving EIS aside for a moment, the EIF controversy has been around IPR, defining open standards and about the proper terminology around standardization deliverables. Today, as the document finally emerges, what is the verdict? First of all, to be fair to those among you who do not spend your lives in the intricate labyrinths of Commission IT policy documents on interoperability, let's define what we are talking about. According to the Communication: "An interoperability framework is an agreed approach to interoperability for organisations that want to collaborate to provide joint delivery of public services. Within its scope of applicability, it specifies common elements such as vocabulary, concepts, principles, policies, guidelines, recommendations, standards, specifications and practices." The Good - EIF reconfirms that "The Digital Agenda can only take off if interoperability based on standards and open platforms is ensured" and also confirms that "The positive effect of open specifications is also demonstrated by the Internet ecosystem." - EIF takes a productive and pragmatic stance on openness: "In the context of the EIF, openness is the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and stimulate debate within that community, the ultimate goal being to advance knowledge and the use of this knowledge to solve problems" (p.11). "If the openness principle is applied in full: - All stakeholders have the same possibility of contributing to the development of the specification and public review is part of the decision-making process; - The specification is available for everybody to study; - Intellectual property rights related to the specification are licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software" (p. 26). - EIF is a formal Commission document. The former EIF 1.0 was a semi-formal deliverable from the PEGSCO, a working group of Member State representatives. - EIF tackles interoperability head-on and takes a clear stance: "Recommendation 22. When establishing European public services, public administrations should prefer open specifications, taking due account of the coverage of functional needs, maturity and market support." - The Commission will continue to support the National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO), reconfirming the importance of coordinating such approaches across borders. - The Commission will align its internal interoperability strategy with the EIS through the eCommission initiative. - One cannot stress the importance of using open standards enough, whether in the context of open source or non-open source software. The EIF seems to have picked up on this fact: What does the EIF says about the relation between open specifications and open source software? The EIF introduces, as one of the characteristics of an open specification, the requirement that IPRs related to the specification have to be licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software. In this way, companies working under various business models can compete on an equal footing when providing solutions to public administrations while administrations that implement the standard in their own software (software that they own) can share such software with others under an open source licence if they so decide. - EIF is now among the center pieces of the Digital Agenda (even though this demands extensive inter-agency coordination in the Commission): "The EIS and the EIF will be maintained under the ISA Programme and kept in line with the results of other relevant Digital Agenda actions on interoperability and standards such as the ones on the reform of rules on implementation of ICT standards in Europe to allow use of certain ICT fora and consortia standards, on issuing guidelines on essential intellectual property rights and licensing conditions in standard-setting, including for ex-ante disclosure, and on providing guidance on the link between ICT standardisation and public procurement to help public authorities to use standards to promote efficiency and reduce lock-in.(Communication, p.7)" All in all, quite a few good things have happened to the document in the two years it has been on the shelf or was being re-written, depending on your perspective, in any case, awaiting the storms to calm. The Bad - While a certain pragmatism is required, and governments cannot migrate to full openness overnight, EIF gives a bit too much room for governments not to apply the openness principle in full. Plenty of reasons are given, which should maybe have been put as challenges to be overcome: "However, public administrations may decide to use less open specifications, if open specifications do not exist or do not meet functional interoperability needs. In all cases, specifications should be mature and sufficiently supported by the market, except if used in the context of creating innovative solutions". - EIF does not use the internationally established terminology: open standards. Rather, the EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification". How do "formalised specifications" relate to "standards"? According to the FAQ provided: The word "standard" has a specific meaning in Europe as defined by Directive 98/34/EC. Only technical specifications approved by a recognised standardisation body can be called a standard. Many ICT systems rely on the use of specifications developed by other organisations such as a forum or consortium. The EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification", which is either a standard pursuant to Directive 98/34/EC or a specification established by ICT fora and consortia. The term "open specification" used in the EIF, on the one hand, avoids terminological confusion with the Directive and, on the other, states the main features that comply with the basic principle of openness laid down in the EIF for European Public Services. Well, this may be somewhat true, but in reality, Europe is 30 year behind in terminology. Unless the European Standardization Reform gets completed in the next few months, most Member States will likely conclude that they will go on referencing and using standards beyond those created by the three European endorsed monopolists of standardization, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. Who can afford to begin following the strict Brussels rules for what they can call open standards when, in reality, standards stemming from global standardization organizations, so-called fora/consortia, dominate in the IT industry. What exactly is EIF saying? Does it encourage Member States to go on using non-ESO standards as long as they call it something else? I guess I am all for it, although it is a bit cumbersome, no? Why was there so much interest around the EIF? The FAQ attempts to explain: Some Member States have begun to adopt policies to achieve interoperability for their public services. These actions have had a significant impact on the ecosystem built around the provision of such services, e.g. providers of ICT goods and services, standardisation bodies, industry fora and consortia, etc... The Commission identified a clear need for action at European level to ensure that actions by individual Member States would not create new electronic barriers that would hinder the development of interoperable European public services. As a result, all stakeholders involved in the delivery of electronic public services in Europe have expressed their opinions on how to increase interoperability for public services provided by the different public administrations in Europe. Well, it does not take two years to read 50 consultation documents, and the EU Standardization Reform is not yet completed, so, more pragmatically, you finally had to release the document. Ok, let's leave some of that aside because the document is out and some people are happy (and others definitely not). The Verdict Considering the controversy, the delays, the lobbying, and the interests at stake both in the EU, in Member States and among vendors large and small, this document is pretty impressive. As with a good wine that has not yet come to full maturity, let's say that it seems to be coming in in the 85-88/100 range, but only a more fine-grained analysis, enjoyment in good company, and ultimately, implementation, will tell. The European Commission has today adopted a significant interoperability initiative to encourage public administrations across the EU to maximise the social and economic potential of information and communication technologies. Today, we should rally around this achievement. Tomorrow, let's sit down and figure out what it means for the future.

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt 3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  Start with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  IStart with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• Network communications mechanisms for SQL Server

  - by Akshay Deep Lamba

  Problem I am trying to understand how SQL Server communicates on the network, because I'm having to tell my networking team what ports to open up on the firewall for an edge web server to communicate back to the SQL Server on the inside. What do I need to know? Solution In order to understand what needs to be opened where, let's first talk briefly about the two main protocols that are in common use today: TCP - Transmission Control Protocol UDP - User Datagram Protocol Both are part of the TCP/IP suite of protocols. We'll start with TCP. TCP TCP is the main protocol by which clients communicate with SQL Server. Actually, it is more correct to say that clients and SQL Server use Tabular Data Stream (TDS), but TDS actually sits on top of TCP and when we're talking about Windows and firewalls and other networking devices, that's the protocol that rules and controls are built around. So we'll just speak in terms of TCP. TCP is a connection-oriented protocol. What that means is that the two systems negotiate the connection and both agree to it. Think of it like a phone call. While one person initiates the phone call, the other person has to agree to take it and both people can end the phone call at any time. TCP is the same way. Both systems have to agree to the communications, but either side can end it at any time. In addition, there is functionality built into TCP to ensure that all communications can be disassembled and reassembled as necessary so it can pass over various network devices and be put together again properly in the right order. It also has mechanisms to handle and retransmit lost communications. Because of this functionality, TCP is the protocol used by many different network applications. The way the applications all can share is through the use of ports. When a service, like SQL Server, comes up on a system, it must listen on a port. For a default SQL Server instance, the default port is 1433. Clients connect to the port via the TCP protocol, the connection is negotiated and agreed to, and then the two sides can transfer information as needed until either side decides to end the communication. In actuality, both sides will have a port to use for the communications, but since the client's port is typically determined semi-randomly, when we're talking about firewalls and the like, typically we're interested in the port the server or service is using. UDP UDP, unlike TCP, is not connection oriented. A "client" can send a UDP communications to anyone it wants. There's nothing in place to negotiate a communications connection, there's nothing in the protocol itself to coordinate order of communications or anything like that. If that's needed, it's got to be handled by the application or by a protocol built on top of UDP being used by the application. If you think of TCP as a phone call, think of UDP as a postcard. I can put a postcard in the mail to anyone I want, and so long as it is addressed properly and has a stamp on it, the postal service will pick it up. Now, what happens it afterwards is not guaranteed. There's no mechanism for retransmission of lost communications. It's great for short communications that doesn't necessarily need an acknowledgement. Because multiple network applications could be communicating via UDP, it uses ports, just like TCP. The SQL Browser or the SQL Server Listener Service uses UDP. Network Communications - Talking to SQL Server When an instance of SQL Server is set up, what TCP port it listens on depends. A default instance will be set up to listen on port 1433. A named instance will be set to a random port chosen during installation. In addition, a named instance will be configured to allow it to change that port dynamically. What this means is that when a named instance starts up, if it finds something already using the port it normally uses, it'll pick a new port. If you have a named instance, and you have connections coming across a firewall, you're going to want to use SQL Server Configuration Manager to set a static port. This will allow the networking and security folks to configure their devices for maximum protection. While you can change the network port for a default instance of SQL Server, most people don't. Network Communications - Finding a SQL Server When just the name is specified for a client to connect to SQL Server, for instance, MySQLServer, this is an attempt to connect to the default instance. In this case the client will automatically attempt to communicate to port 1433 on MySQLServer. If you've switched the port for the default instance, you'll need to tell the client the proper port, usually by specifying the following syntax in the connection string: <server>,<port>. For instance, if you moved SQL Server to listen on 14330, you'd use MySQLServer,14330 instead of just MySQLServer. However, because a named instance sets up its port dynamically by default, the client never knows at the outset what the port is it should talk to. That's what the SQL Browser or the SQL Server Listener Service (SQL Server 2000) is for. In this case, the client sends a communication via the UDP protocol to port 1434. It asks, "Where is the named instance?" So if I was running a named instance called SQL2008R2, it would be asking the SQL Browser, "Hey, how do I talk to MySQLServer\SQL2008R2?" The SQL Browser would then send back a communications from UDP port 1434 back to the client telling the client how to talk to the named instance. Of course, you can skip all of this of you set that named instance's port statically. Then you can use the <server>,<port> mechanism to connect and the client won't try to talk to the SQL Browser service. It'll simply try to make the connection. So, for instance, is the SQL2008R2 instance was listening on port 20080, specifying MySQLServer,20080 would attempt a connection to the named instance. Network Communications - Named Pipes Named pipes is an older network library communications mechanism and it's generally not used any longer. It shouldn't be used across a firewall. However, if for some reason you need to connect to SQL Server with it, this protocol also sits on top of TCP. Named Pipes is actually used by the operating system and it has its own mechanism within the protocol to determine where to route communications. As far as network communications is concerned, it listens on TCP port 445. This is true whether we're talking about a default or named instance of SQL Server. The Summary Table To put all this together, here is what you need to know: Type of Communication Protocol Used Default Port Finding a SQL Server or SQL Server Named Instance UDP 1434 Communicating with a default instance of SQL Server TCP 1433 Communicating with a named instance of SQL Server TCP * Determined dynamically at start up Communicating with SQL Server via Named Pipes TCP 445

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• ASP.NET MVC: Using ProfileRequiredAttribute to restrict access to pages

  - by DigiMortal

  If you are using AppFabric Access Control Services to authenticate users when they log in to your community site using Live ID, Google or some other popular identity provider, you need more than AuthorizeAttribute to make sure that users can access the content that is there for authenticated users only. In this posting I will show you hot to extend the AuthorizeAttribute so users must also have user profile filled. Semi-authorized users When user is authenticated through external identity provider then not all identity providers give us user name or other information we ask users when they join with our site. What all identity providers have in common is unique ID that helps you identify the user. Example. Users authenticated through Windows Live ID by AppFabric ACS have no name specified. Google’s identity provider is able to provide you with user name and e-mail address if user agrees to publish this information to you. They both give you unique ID of user when user is successfully authenticated in their service. There is logical shift between ASP.NET and my site when considering user as authorized. For ASP.NET MVC user is authorized when user has identity. For my site user is authorized when user has profile and row in my users table. Having profile means that user has unique username in my system and he or she is always identified by this username by other users. My solution is simple: I created my own action filter attribute that makes sure if user has profile to access given method and if user has no profile then browser is redirected to join page. Illustrating the problem Usually we restrict access to page using AuthorizeAttribute. Code is something like this. [Authorize] public ActionResult Details(string id) {     var profile = _userRepository.GetUserByUserName(id);     return View(profile); } If this page is only for site users and we have user profiles then all users – the ones that have profile and all the others that are just authenticated – can access the information. It is okay because all these users have successfully logged in in some service that is supported by AppFabric ACS. In my site the users with no profile are in grey spot. They are on half way to be users because they have no username and profile on my site yet. So looking at the image above again we need something that adds profile existence condition to user-only content. [ProfileRequired] public ActionResult Details(string id) {     var profile = _userRepository.GetUserByUserName(id);     return View(profile); } Now, this attribute will solve our problem as soon as we implement it. ProfileRequiredAttribute: Profiles are required to be fully authorized Here is my implementation of ProfileRequiredAttribute. It is pretty new and right now it is more like working draft but you can already play with it. public class ProfileRequiredAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute {     private readonly string _redirectUrl;       public ProfileRequiredAttribute()     {         _redirectUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["JoinUrl"];         if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(_redirectUrl))             _redirectUrl = "~/";     }              public override void OnAuthorization(AuthorizationContext filterContext)     {         base.OnAuthorization(filterContext);           var httpContext = filterContext.HttpContext;         var identity = httpContext.User.Identity;           if (!identity.IsAuthenticated || identity.GetProfile() == null)             if(filterContext.Result == null)                 httpContext.Response.Redirect(_redirectUrl);          } } All methods with this attribute work as follows: if user is not authenticated then he or she is redirected to AppFabric ACS identity provider selection page, if user is authenticated but has no profile then user is by default redirected to main page of site but if you have application setting with name JoinUrl then user is redirected to this URL. First case is handled by AuthorizeAttribute and the second one is handled by custom logic in ProfileRequiredAttribute class. GetProfile() extension method To get user profile using less code in places where profiles are needed I wrote GetProfile() extension method for IIdentity interface. There are some more extension methods that read out user and identity provider identifier from claims and based on this information user profile is read from database. If you take this code with copy and paste I am sure it doesn’t work for you but you get the idea. public static User GetProfile(this IIdentity identity) {     if (identity == null)         return null;       var context = HttpContext.Current;     if (context.Items["UserProfile"] != null)         return context.Items["UserProfile"] as User;       var provider = identity.GetIdentityProvider();     var nameId = identity.GetNameIdentifier();       var rep = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<IUserRepository>();     var profile = rep.GetUserByProviderAndNameId(provider, nameId);       context.Items["UserProfile"] = profile;       return profile; } To avoid round trips to database I cache user profile to current request because the chance that profile gets changed meanwhile is very minimal. The other reason is maybe more tricky – profile objects are coming from Entity Framework context and context has also HTTP request as lifecycle. Conclusion This posting gave you some ideas how to finish user profiles stuff when you use AppFabric ACS as external authentication provider. Although there was little shift between us and ASP.NET MVC with interpretation of “authorized” we were easily able to solve the problem by extending AuthorizeAttribute to get all our requirements fulfilled. We also write extension method for IIdentity that returns as user profile based on username and caches the profile in HTTP request scope.

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• External File Upload Optimizations for Windows Azure

  - by rgillen

  [Cross posted from here: http://rob.gillenfamily.net/post/External-File-Upload-Optimizations-for-Windows-Azure.aspx] I’m wrapping up a bit of the work we’ve been doing on data movement optimizations for cloud computing and the latest set of data yielded some interesting points I thought I’d share. The work done here is not really rocket science but may, in some ways, be slightly counter-intuitive and therefore seemed worthy of posting. Summary: for those who don’t like to read detailed posts or don’t have time, the synopsis is that if you are uploading data to Azure, block your data (even down to 1MB) and upload in parallel. Set your block size based on your source file size, but if you must choose a fixed value, use 1MB. Following the above will result in significant performance gains… upwards of 10x-24x and a reduction in overall file transfer time of upwards of 90% (eg, uploading a 1GB file averaged 46.37 minutes prior to optimizations and averaged 1.86 minutes afterwards). Detail: For those of you who want more detail, or think that the claims at the end of the preceding paragraph are over-reaching, what follows is information and code supporting these claims. As the title would indicate, these tests were run from our research facility pointing to the Azure cloud (specifically US North Central as it is physically closest to us) and do not represent intra-cloud results… we have performed intra-cloud tests and the overall results are similar in notion but the data rates are significantly different as well as the tipping points for the various block sizes… this will be detailed separately). We started by building a very simple console application that would loop through a directory and upload each file to Azure storage. This application used the shipping storage client library from the 1.1 version of the azure tools. The only real variation from the client library is that we added code to collect and record the duration (in ms) and size (in bytes) for each file transferred. The code is available here. We then created a directory that had a collection of files for the following sizes: 2KB, 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, 512KB, 1MB, 5MB, 10MB, 25MB, 50MB, 100MB, 250MB, 500MB, 750MB, and 1GB (50 files for each size listed). These files contained randomly-generated binary data and do not benefit from compression (a separate discussion topic). Our file generation tool is available here. The baseline was established by running the application described above against the directory containing all of the data files. This application uploads the files in a random order so as to avoid transferring all of the files of a given size sequentially and thereby spreading the affects of periodic Internet delays across the collection of results.  We then ran some scripts to split the resulting data and generate some reports. The raw data collected for our non-optimized tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. For each file size, we calculated the average upload time (and standard deviation) and the average transfer rate (and standard deviation). As you likely are aware, transferring data across the Internet is susceptible to many transient delays which can cause anomalies in the resulting data. It is for this reason that we randomized the order of source file processing as well as executed the tests 50x for each file size. We expect that these steps will yield a sufficiently balanced set of results. Once the baseline was collected and analyzed, we updated the test harness application with some methods to split the source file into user-defined block sizes and then to upload those blocks in parallel (using the PutBlock() method of Azure storage). The parallelization was handled by simply relying on the Parallel Extensions to .NET to provide a Parallel.For loop (see linked source for specific implementation details in Program.cs, line 173 and following… less than 100 lines total). Once all of the blocks were uploaded, we called PutBlockList() to assemble/commit the file in Azure storage. For each block transferred, the MD5 was calculated and sent ensuring that the bits that arrived matched was was intended. The timer for the blocked/parallelized transfer method wraps the entire process (source file splitting, block transfer, MD5 validation, file committal). A diagram of the process is as follows: We then tested the affects of blocking & parallelizing the transfers by running the updated application against the same source set and did a parameter sweep on the block size including 256KB, 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, and 4MB (our assumption was that anything lower than 256KB wasn’t worth the trouble and 4MB is the maximum size of a block supported by Azure). The raw data for the parallel tests is available via the links in the Related Resources section at the bottom of this post. This data was processed and then compared against the single-threaded / non-optimized transfer numbers and the results were encouraging. The Excel version of the results is available here. Two semi-obvious points need to be made prior to reviewing the data. The first is that if the block size is larger than the source file size you will end up with a “negative optimization” due to the overhead of attempting to block and parallelize. The second is that as the files get smaller, the clock-time cost of blocking and parallelizing (overhead) is more apparent and can tend towards negative optimizations. For this reason (and is supported in the raw data provided in the linked worksheet) the charts and dialog below ignore source file sizes less than 1MB. (click chart for full size image) The chart above illustrates some interesting points about the results: When the block size is smaller than the source file, performance increases but as the block size approaches and then passes the source file size, you see decreasing benefit to the point of negative gains (see the values for the 1MB file size) For some of the moderately-sized source files, small blocks (256KB) are best As the size of the source file gets larger (see values for 50MB and up), the smallest block size is not the most efficient (presumably due, at least in part, to the increased number of blocks, increased number of individual transfer requests, and reassembly/committal costs). Once you pass the 250MB source file size, the difference in rate for 1MB to 4MB blocks is more-or-less constant The 1MB block size gives the best average improvement (~16x) but the optimal approach would be to vary the block size based on the size of the source file.    (click chart for full size image) The above is another view of the same data as the prior chart just with the axis changed (x-axis represents file size and plotted data shows improvement by block size). It again highlights the fact that the 1MB block size is probably the best overall size but highlights the benefits of some of the other block sizes at different source file sizes. This last chart shows the change in total duration of the file uploads based on different block sizes for the source file sizes. Nothing really new here other than this view of the data highlights the negative affects of poorly choosing a block size for smaller files.   Summary What we have found so far is that blocking your file uploads and uploading them in parallel results in significant performance improvements. Further, utilizing extension methods and the Task Parallel Library (.NET 4.0) make short work of altering the shipping client library to provide this functionality while minimizing the amount of change to existing applications that might be using the client library for other interactions.   Related Resources Source code for upload test application Source code for random file generator ODatas feed of raw data from non-optimized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets 2KB Uploads 32KB Uploads 64KB Uploads 128KB Uploads 256KB Uploads 512KB Uploads 1MB Uploads 5MB Uploads 10MB Uploads 25MB Uploads 50MB Uploads 100MB Uploads 250MB Uploads 500MB Uploads 750MB Uploads 1GB Uploads Raw Data OData feeds of raw data from blocked/parallelized transfer tests Experiment Metadata Experiment Datasets Raw Data 256KB Blocks 512KB Blocks 1MB Blocks 2MB Blocks 4MB Blocks Excel worksheet showing summarizations and comparisons

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• Disaster, or Migration?

  - by Rob Farley

  This post is in two parts – technical and personal. And I should point out that it’s prompted in part by this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Allen Kinsel. First, the technical: I’ve had a few conversations with people recently about migration – moving a SQL Server database from one box to another (sometimes, but not primarily, involving an upgrade). One question that tends to come up is that of downtime. Obviously there will be some period of time between the old server being available and the new one. The way that most people seem to think of migration is this: Build a new server. Stop people from using the old server. Take a backup of the old server Restore it on the new server. Reconfigure the client applications (or alternatively, configure the new server to use the same address as the old) Make the new server online. There are other things involved, such as testing, of course. But this is essentially the process that people tell me they’re planning to follow. The bit that I want to look at today (as you’ve probably guessed from my title) is the “backup and restore” section. If a SQL database is using the Simple Recovery Model, then the only restore option is the last database backup. This backup could be full or differential. The transaction log never gets backed up in the Simple Recovery Model. Instead, it truncates regularly to stay small. One that’s using the Full Recovery Model (or Bulk-Logged) won’t truncate its log – the log must be backed up regularly. This provides the benefit of having a lot more option available for restores. It’s a requirement for most systems of High Availability, because if you’re making sure that a spare box is up-and-running, ready to take over, then you have to be interested in the logs that are happening on the current box, rather than truncating them all the time. A High Availability system such as Mirroring, Replication or Log Shipping will initialise the spare machine by restoring a full database backup (and maybe a differential backup if available), and then any subsequent log backups. Once the secondary copy is close, transactions can be applied to keep the two in sync. The main aspect of any High Availability system is to have a redundant system that is ready to take over. So the similarity for migration should be obvious. If you need to move a database from one box to another, then introducing a High Availability mechanism can help. By turning on the Full Recovery Model and then taking a backup (so that the now-interesting logs have some context), logs start being kept, and are therefore available for getting the new box ready (even if it’s an upgraded version). When the migration is ready to occur, a failover can be done, letting the new server take over the responsibility of the old, just as if a disaster had happened. Except that this is a planned failover, not a disaster at all. There’s a fine line between a disaster and a migration. Failovers can be useful in patching, upgrading, maintenance, and more. Hopefully, even an unexpected disaster can be seen as just another failover, and there can be an opportunity there – perhaps to get some work done on the principal server to increase robustness. And if I’ve just set up a High Availability system for even the simplest of databases, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. :) So now the personal: It’s been an interesting time recently... June has been somewhat odd. A court case with which I was involved got resolved (through mediation). I can’t go into details, but my lawyers tell me that I’m allowed to say how I feel about it. The answer is ‘lousy’. I don’t regret pursuing it as long as I did – but in the end I had to make a decision regarding the commerciality of letting it continue, and I’m going to look forward to the days when the kind of money I spent on my lawyers is small change. Mind you, if I had a similar situation with an employer, I’d do the same again, but that doesn’t really stop me feeling frustrated about it. The following day I had to fly to country Victoria to see my grandmother, who wasn’t expected to last the weekend. She’s still around a week later as I write this, but her 92-year-old body has basically given up on her. She’s been a Christian all her life, and is looking forward to eternity. We’ll all miss her though, and it’s hard to see my family grieving. Then on Tuesday, I was driving back to the airport with my family to come home, when something really bizarre happened. We were travelling down the freeway, just pulled out to go past a truck (farm-truck sized, not a semi-trailer), when a car-sized mass of metal fell off it. It was something like an industrial air-conditioner, but from where I was sitting, it was just a mass of spinning metal, like something out of a movie (one friend described it as “holidays by Michael Bay”). Somehow, and I’m really don’t know how, the part of it nearest us bounced high enough to clear the car, and there wasn’t even a scratch. We pulled over the check, and I was just thanking God that we’d changed lanes when we had, and that we remained unharmed. I had all kinds of thoughts about what could’ve happened if we’d had something that size land on the windscreen... All this has drilled home that while I feel that I haven’t provided as well for the family as I could’ve done (like by pursuing an expensive legal case), I shouldn’t even consider that I have proper control over things. I get to live life, and make decisions based on what I feel is right at the time. But I’m not going to get everything right, and there will be things that feel like disasters, some which could’ve been in my control and some which are very much beyond my control. The case feels like something I could’ve pursued differently, a disaster that could’ve been avoided in some way. Gran dying is lousy of course. An accident on the freeway would have been awful. I need to recognise that the worst disasters are ones that I can’t affect, and that I need to look at things in context – perhaps seeing everything that happens as a migration instead. Life is never the same from one day to the next. Every event has a before and an after – sometimes it’s clearly positive, sometimes it’s not. I remember good events in my life (such as my wedding), and bad (such as the loss of my father when I was ten, or the back injury I had eight years ago). I’m not suggesting that I know how to view everything from the “God works all things for good” perspective, but I am trying to look at last week as a migration of sorts. Those things are behind me now, and the future is in God’s hands. Hopefully I’ve learned things, and will be able to live accordingly. I’ve come through this time now, and even though I’ll miss Gran, I’ll see her again one day, and the future is bright.

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• Augmenting your Social Efforts via Data as a Service (DaaS)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is the 3rd in a series of posts on the value of leveraging social data across your enterprise by Oracle VP Product Development Don Springer and Oracle Cloud Data and Insight Service Sr. Director Product Management Niraj Deo. In this post, we will discuss the approach and value of integrating additional “public” data via a cloud-based Data-as-as-Service platform (or DaaS) to augment your Socially Enabled Big Data Analytics and CX Management. Let’s assume you have a functional Social-CRM platform in place. You are now successfully and continuously listening and learning from your customers and key constituents in Social Media, you are identifying relevant posts and following up with direct engagement where warranted (both 1:1, 1:community, 1:all), and you are starting to integrate signals for communication into your appropriate Customer Experience (CX) Management systems as well as insights for analysis in your business intelligence application. What is the next step? Augmenting Social Data with other Public Data for More Advanced Analytics When we say advanced analytics, we are talking about understanding causality and correlation from a wide variety, volume and velocity of data to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to achieve and optimize business value. And in some cases, to predict future performance to make appropriate course corrections and change the outcome to your advantage while you can. The data to acquire, process and analyze this is very nuanced: It can vary across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data It can span across content, profile, and communities of profiles data It is increasingly public, curated and user generated The key is not just getting the data, but making it value-added data and using it to help discover the insights to connect to and improve your KPIs. As we spend time working with our larger customers on advanced analytics, we have seen a need arise for more business applications to have the ability to ingest and use “quality” curated, social, transactional reference data and corresponding insights. The challenge for the enterprise has been getting this data inline into an easily accessible system and providing the contextual integration of the underlying data enriched with insights to be exported into the enterprise’s business applications. The following diagram shows the requirements for this next generation data and insights service or (DaaS): Some quick points on these requirements: Public Data, which in this context is about Common Business Entities, such as - Customers, Suppliers, Partners, Competitors (all are organizations) Contacts, Consumers, Employees (all are people) Products, Brands This data can be broadly categorized incrementally as - Base Utility data (address, industry classification) Public Master Reference data (trade style, hierarchy) Social/Web data (News, Feeds, Graph) Transactional Data generated by enterprise process, workflows etc. This Data has traits of high-volume, variety, velocity etc., and the technology needed to efficiently integrate this data for your needs includes - Change management of Public Reference Data across all categories Applied Big Data to extract statics as well as real-time insights Knowledge Diagnostics and Data Mining As you consider how to deploy this solution, many of our customers will be using an online “cloud” service that provides quality data and insights uniformly to all their necessary applications. In addition, they are requesting a service that is: Agile and Easy to Use: Applications integrated with the service can obtain data on-demand, quickly and simply Cost-effective: Pre-integrated into applications so customers don’t have to Has High Data Quality: Single point access to reference data for data quality and linkages to transactional, curated and social data Supports Data Governance: Becomes more manageable and cost-effective since control of data privacy and compliance can be enforced in a centralized place Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Just as the cloud has transformed and now offers a better path for how an enterprise manages its IT from their infrastructure, platform, and software (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), the next step is data (DaaS). Over the last 3 years, we have seen the market begin to offer a cloud-based data service and gain initial traction. On one side of the DaaS continuum, we see an “appliance” type of service that provides a single, reliable source of accurate business data plus social information about accounts, leads, contacts, etc. On the other side of the continuum we see more of an online market “exchange” approach where ISVs and Data Publishers can publish and sell premium datasets within the exchange, with the exchange providing a rich set of web interfaces to improve the ease of data integration. Why the difference? It depends on the provider’s philosophy on how fast the rate of commoditization of certain data types will occur. How do you decide the best approach? Our perspective, as shown in the diagram below, is that the enterprise should develop an elastic schema to support multi-domain applicability. This allows the enterprise to take the most flexible approach to harness the speed and breadth of public data to achieve value. The key tenet of the proposed approach is that an enterprise carefully federates common utility, master reference data end points, mobility considerations and content processing, so that they are pervasively available. One way you may already be familiar with this approach is in how you do Address Verification treatments for accounts, contacts etc. If you design and revise this service in such a way that it is also easily available to social analytic needs, you could extend this to launch geo-location based social use cases (marketing, sales etc.). Our fundamental belief is that value-added data achieved through enrichment with specialized algorithms, as well as applying business “know-how” to weight-factor KPIs based on innovative combinations across an ever-increasing variety, volume and velocity of data, will be where real value is achieved. Essentially, Data-as-a-Service becomes a single entry point for the ever-increasing richness and volume of public data, with enrichment and combined capabilities to extract and integrate the right data from the right sources with the right factoring at the right time for faster decision-making and action within your core business applications. As more data becomes available (and in many cases commoditized), this value-added data processing approach will provide you with ongoing competitive advantage. Let’s look at a quick example of creating a master reference relationship that could be used as an input for a variety of your already existing business applications. In phase 1, a simple master relationship is achieved between a company (e.g. General Motors) and a variety of car brands’ social insights. The reference data allows for easy sort, export and integration into a set of CRM use cases for analytics, sales and marketing CRM. In phase 2, as you create more data relationships (e.g. competitors, contacts, other brands) to have broader and deeper references (social profiles, social meta-data) for more use cases across CRM, HCM, SRM, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the amount of master reference relationships is constrained only by your imagination and the availability of quality curated data you have to work with. DaaS is just now emerging onto the marketplace as the next step in cloud transformation. For some of you, this may be the first you have heard about it. Let us know if you have questions, or perspectives. In the meantime, we will continue to share insights as we can.Photo: Erik Araujo, stock.xchng

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• PASS Summit 2010 BI Workshop Feedbacks

  - by Davide Mauri

  As many other speakers already did, I’d like to share with the SQL Community the feedback of my PASS Summit 2010 Workshop. For those who were not there, my workshop was the “BI From A-Z” and the main objective of that workshop was to introduce people in the BI world not only from a technical point of view but insist a lot on the methodological and “engineered” approach. The will to put more engineering in the IT (and specially in the BI field) is something that has been growing stronger and stronger in me every day for of this last 5 years since is simply envy the fact that Airbus, Fincatieri, BMW (just to name a few) can create very complex machine “just” using putting people together and giving them some rules to follow (Of course this is an oversimplification but I think you get what I mean). The key point of engineering is that, after having defined the project blueprint, you have the possibility to give to a huge number of people, the rules to follow, the correct tools in order to implement the rules easily and semi-automatically and a way to measure the quality of the results. Could this be done in IT? Very big question, so my scope is now limited to BI. So that’s the main point of my workshop: and entry-level approach to BI (level was 200) in order to allow attendees to know the basics, to understand what tools they should use for which purpose and, above all, a set of rules and tools in order to make a BI solution scalable in terms of people working on it, while still maintaining a very good quality. All done not focusing only on the practice but explaining the theory behind to see how it can help *a lot* to build a correct solution despite the technology used to implement it. The idea is to reach a point where more then 70% of the work done to create a BI solution can be reused even if technologies changes. This is a very demanding challenge nowadays with the coming of Denali and its column-aligned storage and the shiny-new DAX language. As you may understand I was looking forward to get the feedback since you may have noticed that there’s a lot of “architectural” stuff in IT but really nothing on “engineering”. So how the session could be perceived by the attendees was really unknown to me. The feedback could also give a good indication if the need of more “engineering” is something I feel only by myself or if is something more broad. I’m very happy to be able to say that the overall score of 4.75 put my workshop in the TOP 20 session (on near 200 sessions)! Here’s the detailed evaluations: How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment? 4.75 Answer:    # of Responses 3    1         4    12        5    42               How would you rate the Speaker's presentation skills? 4.80 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 1         4 : 9         5 : 45               How would you rate the Speaker's knowledge of the subject? 4.95 Answer:    # of Responses 4 :  3         5 : 52               How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session? 4.75 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 2         4 : 10         5 : 43               How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session? 4.44 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 7         4 : 17        5 : 31               How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials? 4.62 Answer:    # of Responses 4 : 21        5 : 34 The comments where all very positive. Many of them asked for more time on the subject (or to shorten the very last topics). I’ll make treasure of these comments and will review the content accordingly. We’ll organize a two-day classes on this topic, where also more examples will be shown and some arguments will be explained more deeply. I’d just like to answer a comment that asks how much of what I shown is “universally applicable”. I can tell you that all of our BI project follow these rules and they’ve been applied to different markets (Insurance, Fashion, GDO) with different people and different teams and they allowed us to be “Adaptive” against the customer. The more the rules are well defined and the more there are tools that supports their implementations, the easier is to add new people to the project and to add or change solution features. Think of a car. How come that almost any mechanic can help you to fix a problem? Because they know what to expect. Because there a rules that allow them to identify the problem without having to discover each time how the car has been implemented build. And this is of course also true for car upgrades/improvements. Last but not least: thanks a lot to everyone for coming!

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• Installing gnome on Linode with Ubuntu 9.10 x64 - remote VNC/RDP

  - by Kieran Benton

  Hi, I'm a self confessed Linux newbie, having lived and worked mostly within the Windows world for most of my life. I'm making the effort to try moving my virtual host from a Windows box to a Linode instance to try and better learn Linux, and one of the uses I occasionally have with my current Windows VPS is to RDP into it and browse the internet. I'm aware that this is probably not best practice (from either performance or security), and most of the time I will be learning from the shell, but I do occasionally need to boot into a GUI. Because of this, I'd like the ability within my Ubuntu installation on Linode to start/stop Windows X and Gnome at will after SSHing in (startx? gdm?), so I've tried: apt-get install ubuntu-desktop Reboot startx But I've got an error that no amount of googling has helped me with so far, which I'm assuming is something to do with the fact the box is headless and X needs some more configuration that is beyond me at the moment: root@local:~# startx hostname: Unknown host xauth: creating new authority file /root/.Xauthority xauth: creating new authority file /root/.Xauthority xauth: (argv):1: bad display name "local.kieranbenton.com:0" in "list" command xauth: (stdin):1: bad display name "local.kieranbenton.com:0" in "add" command X.Org X Server 1.6.4 Release Date: 2009-9-27 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-23-server x86_64 Ubuntu Current Operating System: Linux local.kieranbenton.com 2.6.31.5-x86_64-linode9 #1 SMP Mon Oct 26 19:35:25 UTC 2009 x86_64 Kernel command line: root=/dev/xvda xencons=tty console=tty1 console=hvc0 nosep nodevfs ramdisk_size=32768 ro Build Date: 26 October 2009 05:19:56PM xorg-server 2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4 (buildd@) Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Wed Dec 2 15:50:23 2009 Primary device is not PCI (==) Using default built-in configuration (21 lines) (EE) open /dev/fb0: No such file or directory (EE) No devices detected. Fatal server error: no screens found Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help. Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information. ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log Can anyone give me any pointers as to how to go from here and get VNC/RDP setup? (RDP would be preferred?). Thanks.

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• Installing gnome on Linode with Ubuntu 9.10 x64 - remote VNC/RDP

  - by Kieran Benton

  Hi, I'm a self confessed Linux newbie, having lived and worked mostly within the Windows world for most of my life. I'm making the effort to try moving my virtual host from a Windows box to a Linode instance to try and better learn Linux, and one of the uses I occasionally have with my current Windows VPS is to RDP into it and browse the internet. I'm aware that this is probably not best practice (from either performance or security), and most of the time I will be learning from the shell, but I do occasionally need to boot into a GUI. Because of this, I'd like the ability within my Ubuntu installation on Linode to start/stop Windows X and Gnome at will after SSHing in (startx? gdm?), so I've tried: apt-get install ubuntu-desktop Reboot startx But I've got an error that no amount of googling has helped me with so far, which I'm assuming is something to do with the fact the box is headless and X needs some more configuration that is beyond me at the moment: root@local:~# startx hostname: Unknown host xauth: creating new authority file /root/.Xauthority xauth: creating new authority file /root/.Xauthority xauth: (argv):1: bad display name "local.kieranbenton.com:0" in "list" command xauth: (stdin):1: bad display name "local.kieranbenton.com:0" in "add" command X.Org X Server 1.6.4 Release Date: 2009-9-27 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-23-server x86_64 Ubuntu Current Operating System: Linux local.kieranbenton.com 2.6.31.5-x86_64-linode9 #1 SMP Mon Oct 26 19:35:25 UTC 2009 x86_64 Kernel command line: root=/dev/xvda xencons=tty console=tty1 console=hvc0 nosep nodevfs ramdisk_size=32768 ro Build Date: 26 October 2009 05:19:56PM xorg-server 2:1.6.4-2ubuntu4 (buildd@) Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Wed Dec 2 15:50:23 2009 Primary device is not PCI (==) Using default built-in configuration (21 lines) (EE) open /dev/fb0: No such file or directory (EE) No devices detected. Fatal server error: no screens found Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help. Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information. ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log Can anyone give me any pointers as to how to go from here and get VNC/RDP setup? (RDP would be preferred?). Thanks.

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• Modifying a HTML page to fix several "bugs" add a function to next/previous on a option dropdown

  - by Dennis Sylvian

  SOF, I've got a few problems plaguing me at the moment and am wondering if anyone could assist me with them. I'm trying to get Next Class | Previous Class to act as buttons so that when Next Class is clicked it will go to the next item in the dropdown list and for previous it would go to back one. There used to be a scroll bar that allowed me to scroll the main window left and right, it's missing because (I think it was to do with the scroll left and scroll right function) The footer at the bottom doesn't show correctly on mobile devices; for some reason it appears completely differently to as it does on a computer. The "bar" practically and the Scroll Left and Scroll buttons don't appear at all on mobile devices. The scroll left button is unable to be clicked for some reason, I'm unsure what I've done wrong. Refreshing the page resets the horizontal scroll position to far left (I'm pretty sure this relates to the scroll bar) I want to also find a way so that on mobile devices the the header will not show the placeholder image, however I can't work out what CSS media tag(s) I should be using. Latest: http://jsfiddle.net/pwv7u/ Smaller HTML <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title>DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA</title> <style type="text/css"> <!-- @import url("nstyle.css"); --> </style> <script src="jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready( function() { for (var i=0;i<($("table").children().length);i++){ if(readCookie(i)) $($($("table").children()[i]).children()[(readCookie(i))]).toggleClass('selected').siblings().removeClass('selected'); } $("tr").click(function(){ $(this).toggleClass('selected').siblings().removeClass('selected'); if(readCookie($(this).parent().index())){ if(readCookie($(this).parent().index())==$(this).index()) eraseCookie($(this).parent().index()); else{ eraseCookie($(this).parent().index()); createCookie($(this).parent().index(),$(this).index(),1); } } else createCookie($(this).parent().index(),$(this).index(),1); }); // gather CLASS info var selector = $('.class-selector').on('change', function(){ var id = this.value; if (id!==''){ scrollToAnchor(id); } }); $('a[id^="CLASS"]').each(function(){ var id = this.id, option = $('<option>',{ value: this.id, text:this.id }); selector.append(option); }); function scrollToAnchor(aid) { var aTag = $("a[id='" + aid + "']"); $('html,body').animate({ scrollTop: aTag.offset().top - 80 }, 1); } $("a.TOPJS").click(function () { scrollToAnchor('TOP'); }); $("a.KEYJS").click(function () { scrollToAnchor('KEY'); }); $("a.def").click(function () { $('#container').animate({ "scrollLeft": "-=204" }, 200); }); $("a.abc").click(function () { $("#container").animate({ "scrollLeft": "+=204" }, 200); }); function createCookie(name,value,days) { var expires; if (days) { var date = new Date(); date.setMilliseconds(0); date.setSeconds(0); date.setMinutes(0); date.setHours(0); date.setDate(date.getDate()+days); expires = "; expires="+date.toGMTString(); } else expires = ""; document.cookie = name+"="+value+expires+"; path=/"; } function readCookie(name) { var nameEQ = name + "="; var ca = document.cookie.split(';'); for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) { var c = ca[i]; while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length); if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) === 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length); } return null; } function eraseCookie(name) { createCookie(name,"",-1); } }); </script> </head> <body> <div id="header_container"> <div id="header"> <a href="http://site.x/" target="_blank"><img src="http://placehold.it/300x80"></a> <select class="class-selector"> <option value="">-select class-</option> </select> <div class="classcycler"> <a href="#TOP"><font color=#EFEFEF>Next Class</font></a> <font color=red>|</font> <a href="#TOP"><font color=#EFEFEF>Previous Class</font></a> </div> <div id="header1"> Semi-Transparent Image <a href="#TOP"><font color=#EFEFEF>Up to Top</font></a> | <a href="#KEY"><font color=#EFEFEF>Down to Key</font></a> </div> </div> </div> <a id="TOP"></a> <div id="container"> <table id="gradient-style"> <tbody> <thead> <tr> <th scope="col"><a id="CLASS1"></a>Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class<br>Test 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class Data 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1<br>Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1<br>Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1</th> <th scope="col">Class 1 Class 1</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> (data text)</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> <th scope="col">text</th> <th scope="col">text</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> </tr> </thead> <tr class="ft3"><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>class b</td><td>test4</td><td><div align="left">data</div></td><td><div align="left"> </div></td><td><div align="left"></div></td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><tr> <tr class="f3"><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>class a</td><td>test2</td><td><div align="left"> </div></td><td><div align="left"></div></td><td><div align="left"></div></td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><tr> <thead> <tr> <th scope="col"><a id="CLASS2"></a>Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class<br>Test 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class Data 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2<br>Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2<br>Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2</th> <th scope="col">Class 2 Class 2</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> data text</th> <th scope="col">title text<br> (data text)</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> <th scope="col">text</th> <th scope="col">text</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> <th scope="col">title text</th> </tr> </thead> <tr class="ft3"><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>class f</td><td>test2</td><td><div align="left">data</div></td><td><div align="left"></div></td><td><div align="left">data</div></td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><tr> <tr><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>class f</td><td>test4</td><td><div align="left">data</div></td><td><div align="left"></div></td><td><div align="left"></div></td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><tr> <tr class="f3"><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>class d</td><td>test5</td><td><div align="left">data</div></td><td><div align="left"> </div></td><td><div align="left">data</div></td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><tr> <tr><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>class f</td><td>test5</td><td><div align="left"></div></td><td><div align="left"></div></td><td><div align="left">data</div></td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><tr> <tr class="f2"><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>class a</td><td>test1</td><td><div align="left">data</div></td><td><div align="left"> </div></td><td><div align="left">data</div></td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><td>testing data</td><td>testing data</td><td>test</td><tr> </tbody> <tfoot> <tr> <th class="alt" colspan="34" scope="col"><a id="KEY"></a><img src="http://placehold.it/300x50"></th> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="34"><em><b>DATA DATA</b> - DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA </em></td> </tr> <tr> <td class="alt" colspan="34"><em><b>DAT DATA</b> - DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA DATA </em></td> </tr> </tfoot> </table> </div> <div id="footer_container"> <div id="footer"> <a href="http://site.x/" target="_blank"><img src="http://placehold.it/300x80"></a> <div class="footleft"> <a class="def" href="javascript: void(0);"><font color="#EFEFEF">Scroll Left</font></a> </div> <div id="footer1"> <font color="darkblue">Semi-Transparent Image</font> <i>Copyright &copy; 2013 <a href="http://site.x/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration: none"><font color=#ADD8E6>site</font></a>.</i> </div> <div id="footer2"> <i>All Rights Reserved.</i> </div> <div class="footright"> <a class="abc" href="javascript: void(0);"><font color="#EFEFEF">Scroll Right</font></a> </div> </div> </div> </body> </html> CSS gradient-style * { white-space: nowrap; } #header .class-selector { top: 10px; left: 20px; position: fixed; } #header .classcycler { top: 45px; left: 20px; position: fixed; font-size:20px; } body { line-height: 1.6em; background-color: #535353; overflow-x: scroll; } #gradient-style { font-family: "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida 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background: #000000 url('table-images/gradhead.png') repeat-x; border: 0px solid #666; bottom: 0; height: 95px; left: 0; position: fixed; width: 100%; } #footer { position: relative; margin: 0 auto; height: 100%; text-align: center; color: #FFF; } #footer1 { position: absolute; width: 103%; top: 50px; } #footer2 { position: absolute; width: 110%; top: 70px; } #footer .footleft { top: 45px; left: 2%; position: absolute; font-size:20px; } #footer .footright { top: 45px; right: 2%; position: absolute; font-size:20px; }

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• How can I install things in Linux with *no yum* and *no wget*?

  - by e9t

  I'm a newbie to Linux (that mainly uses Windows and Mac OS X) needing some advice. I was trying to install git on a Linux machine today, and encountered some problems: Not knowing the version of the installed OS, I've opened the /proc/version file which said: Linux version 2.6.9-42.0.2.ELsmp ([email protected]) (gcc version 3.4.6 20060404 (Red Hat 3.4.6-3)) #1 SMP Thu Aug 17 17:57:31 EDT 2006 Then, as written in the git documents (http://git-scm.com/download/linux), I assumed I could use the yum install git command for Fedora, but got the following result. [root@myserver ~]# yum install git -bash: yum: command not found So I tried installing yum using wget, but wasn't so lucky. [root@myserver ~]# wget http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/download/2.0/yum-2.0.7.tar.gz -bash: wget: command not found I googled and found this page and this page, so tried installing yum with rpm, but only got a result full of question marks. (Possibly an encoding problem, hmm...) [root@myserver ~]# rpm -Uvh http://www.eomy.net/linux/install-yum-x86_64/wget-1.10.2-0.40E.x86_64.rpm http://www.eomy.net/linux/install-yum-x86_64/wget-1.10.2-0.40E.x86_64.rpm(??)?? ?????? ?: /var/tmp/rpm-xfer.TbuAOu: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 443e1821 ???.. ########################################### [100%] wget-1.10.2-0.40E U???????g??????? wget-1.10.2-0.40E???? ??g??/usr/bin/wget ?? wget-1.10.2-0.40E U?????? ???? wget-1.10.2-0.40E???? ??g??/usr/share/man/man1/wget.1.gz ?? wget-1.10.2-0.40E U?????? ???? [root@myserver ~]# Finally, when I typed rpm --version in the terminal, I got the below results. [root@myserver ~]# rpm --version RPM ???? - 4.3.3 I would like to know what I can do or possibly try now. Is it not possible to wget or yum anything in my situation? Or is there any magical tool like homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/) that I can use? Any comments or advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!

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• How to reference a Domain Controller out of the Local Network?

  - by Adrian

  We have multiple servers scattered over different hosting providers. For learning, experimenting and, ultimately, production purposes, I set one of them as a Domain Controller. That went well, most of our services are now authenticating via AD, which helps us a lot. What I want to do now is to simplify the authentication for the multiple servers, by making each of them look at the Domain Controller. This way, our Devs can log into (Remote Desktop) the multiple servers with the same credentials from AD. I know I have to configure each server to look at the Domain Controller. But when I try to add the Domain Controller to the Computer, it cannot find it, although the Domain Controller address is a valid, reachable internet sub-domain (as in "ad.ourcompany.com"). This is the detailed error message: Note: This information is intended for a network administrator. If you are not your network's administrator, notify the administrator that you received this information, which has been recorded in the file C:\Windows\debug\dcdiag.txt. The following error occurred when DNS was queried for the service location (SRV) resource record used to locate an Active Directory Domain Controller for domain ad.ourcompany.com: The error was: "DNS name does not exist." (error code 0x0000232B RCODE_NAME_ERROR) The query was for the SRV record for _ldap._tcp.dc._msdcs.ad.ourcompany.com Common causes of this error include the following: - The DNS SRV records required to locate a AD DC for the domain are not registered in DNS. These records are registered with a DNS server automatically when a AD DC is added to a domain. They are updated by the AD DC at set intervals. This computer is configured to use DNS servers with the following IP addresses: 109.188.207.9 109.188.207.10 - One or more of the following zones do not include delegation to its child zone: ad.ourcompany.com ourcompany.com com . (the root zone) For information about correcting this problem, click Help. What am I missing? I'm an experienced Dev, but a newbie Sysdamin experimenting with new stuff. Disclaimer All IP addresses and domains/subdomains were changed to preserve security. If by any chance you still can see private information, please let me know so that I can change it.

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• VPN - force a selective range of ip to run on VPN (linux)

  - by Francesco

  Preface: I know there are similar question here and there however I'm a kind of newbie on Net stuff so I need an answer on this specific scenario, hoping that can help others too as it is a common problem Let say I cannot do anything on the local switch to change the local ip range, I don't want to use any complicate trick as use VMachine to hide the local ip range but I want to use net tools to solve the issue. Scenario my local net assign me an IP of this class 192.168.1.xxx (ex. 192.168.1.116) and my VPN (VPNC) assign me IP of same class 192.168.1.xxx (ex. 192.168.1.247) Obviously I need VPN to access local address (ex. 192.168.1.100) but when I open any address of the class 192.168.1.xx the route point to my local net and not to the VPN ones. I'm on linux and i'd like gui solution (network manager) in case it is not possible let play with route command. here what network manager offer me: Here my actual route once connected to the VPN: Here some route information (route -n) Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 ppp0 169.254.0.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 wlan0 182.71.21.106 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.255 UGH 0 0 0 wlan0 182.71.21.106 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.255 UGH 0 0 0 wlan0 192.168.1.0 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.0 U 9 0 0 wlan0 192.168.1.246 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 ppp0 Here my ifconfig : ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol inet addr:192.168.1.247 P-t-P:192.168.1.246 Mask:255.255.255.255 UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1400 Metric:1 RX packets:3415 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:2525 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:3 RX bytes:3682328 (3.6 MB) TX bytes:402315 (402.3 KB) wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 4c:eb:42:06:a3:a6 inet addr:192.168.1.116 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::4eeb:42ff:fe06:a3a6/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:72598 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:42300 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:76000532 (76.0 MB) TX bytes:13919400 (13.9 MB) The Question So basically I would like to add a rule to force this particular address (192.168.1.100) on the VPN and not on my local net

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• Unable to start auditd

  - by George Reith

  I am on CentOS 5.8 final I recently installed auditd via yum install audit however I am unable to start it. I edited the configuration file to give a verbose output of the error it is recieving in starting up and this is the output: # service auditd start Starting auditd: Config file /etc/audit/auditd.conf opened for parsing log_file_parser called with: /var/log/audit/audit.log log_format_parser called with: RAW log_group_parser called with: root priority_boost_parser called with: 4 flush_parser called with: INCREMENTAL freq_parser called with: 20 num_logs_parser called with: 4 qos_parser called with: lossy dispatch_parser called with: /sbin/audispd name_format_parser called with: NONE max_log_size_parser called with: 5 max_log_size_action_parser called with: ROTATE space_left_parser called with: 75 space_action_parser called with: SYSLOG action_mail_acct_parser called with: root admin_space_left_parser called with: 50 admin_space_left_action_parser called with: SUSPEND disk_full_action_parser called with: SUSPEND disk_error_action_parser called with: SUSPEND tcp_listen_queue_parser called with: 5 tcp_max_per_addr_parser called with: 1 tcp_client_max_idle_parser called with: 0 enable_krb5_parser called with: no GSSAPI support is not enabled, ignoring value at line 30 krb5_principal_parser called with: auditd GSSAPI support is not enabled, ignoring value at line 31 Started dispatcher: /sbin/audispd pid: 3097 type=DAEMON_START msg=audit(1339336882.187:9205): auditd start, ver=1.8 format=raw kernel=2.6.32-042stab056.8 auid=4294967295 pid=3095 res=success config_manager init complete Error setting audit daemon pid (Connection refused) type=DAEMON_ABORT msg=audit(1339336882.189:9206): auditd error halt, auid=4294967295 pid=3095 res=failed Unable to set audit pid, exiting The audit daemon is exiting. Error setting audit daemon pid (Connection refused) [FAILED] The only information I can find online is that this may be due to SELinux, however SELinux is giving me problems of it's own. No matter what I do it appears to be disabled (I want to enable it). The configuration is set to enforced and the server has been rebooted many a time however sestatus still returns SELinux status: disabled. Can anyone shine some light on this problem? EDIT: I don't know if it is related but I noticed the following message appearing in my /var/log/messages Jun 10 16:25:22 s1 iscsid: iSCSI logger with pid=2056 started! Jun 10 16:25:22 s1 iscsid: Missing or Invalid version from /sys/module/scsi_transport_iscsi/version. Make sure a up to date scsi_transport_iscsi module is loaded and a up todate version of iscsid is running. Exiting... I try to start the iSCSI daemon myself (I have not a clue what it does; I am a linux newbie) and I get the following error: Starting iSCSI daemon: FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.32-042stab056.8/modules.dep: No such file or directory FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.32-042stab056.8/modules.dep: No such file or directory FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.32-042stab056.8/modules.dep: No such file or directory FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.32-042stab056.8/modules.dep: No such file or directory FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.32-042stab056.8/modules.dep: No such file or directory [FAILED] If I go to /lib/modules/ I notice the directory exists but is completely empty.

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• Restart mysql keeping the data

  - by sitonico

  I'm quite new using mysql, so let me know if I'm missing something. I took some holidays, and when I got back to work and I tried to log in phpmyadmin I got a ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2). I never had this problem, so I was browsing to look for a solution. I tried some things, and I'm afraid I touched too much. I couldn't solve the problem, and the I realized that I had some actualizations to be done, and I thought that they may be helpful for mysql. Then I also realized that when I was doing this actualizations first day, they stopped because I had a lack of space, so I restarted then. Then,when the system was configuring mysql, it didn't advance. I waited for a long time and then I just stopped it and restarted the computer. After it, I just tried to uninstall mysql with sudo apt-get remove mysql-server-5.1, and install it again, but it didn't work. Now I have 2 questions: What do you think it is happening? Should I remove mysql completely? What should I do? I'm afraid of losing my databases, is there anyway to recover the data? Thank you very much in advance. -----------EDIT------- These are the messages: alfonso@alfonso-laptop:/$ tail -F /var/log/syslog | grep Feb 15 15:08:01 alfonso-laptop init: mysql post-start process (15192) terminated with status Feb 15 15:08:01 alfonso-laptop init: mysql main process (15263) terminated with status Feb 15 15:08:01 alfonso-laptop init: mysql main process ended, Feb 15 15:08:31 alfonso-laptop init: mysql post-start process (15264) terminated with status Feb 15 15:08:31 alfonso-laptop init: mysql main process (15358) terminated with status Feb 15 15:08:31 alfonso-laptop init: mysql main process ended, Feb 15 15:09:01 alfonso-laptop init: mysql post-start process (15359) terminated with status Feb 15 15:09:01 alfonso-laptop init: mysql main process (15447) terminated with status Feb 15 15:09:01 alfonso-laptop init: mysql main process ended, Feb 15 15:09:32 alfonso-laptop init: mysql post-start process (15448) terminated with status 1 This is the content of error.log-old 110128 13:17:20 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Normal shutdown 110128 13:17:20 [Note] Event Scheduler: Purging the queue. 0 events 110128 13:17:20 InnoDB: Starting shutdown... 110128 13:17:22 InnoDB: Shutdown completed; log sequence number 0 590872 110128 13:17:22 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: Shutdown complete 110214 2:08:18 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 110214 2:08:19 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 590872 110214 2:08:19 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events 110214 2:08:19 [Note] /usr/sbin/mysqld: ready for connections. Version: '5.1.41-3ubuntu12.8' socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' port: 3306 (Ubuntu) -- Some links of similar problems https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mysql-dfsg-5.1/+bug/573318 http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-newbie-8/lamp-install-on-lucid-mysqld-sock-missing-mysql-terminating-status%3D1-853152/ It seems it's a permissions problem... But I don't know which permissions I should change... SOLVED -- mysql error 2002 "cannot connect to socket"

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• chrooting user causes "connection closed" message when using sftp

  - by George Reith

  First off I am a linux newbie so please don't assume much knowledge. I am using CentOS 5.8 (final) and using OpenSSH version 5.8p1. I have made a user playwithbits and I am attempting to chroot them to the directory home/nginx/domains/playwithbits/public I am using the following match statement in my sshd_config file: Match group web-root-locked ChrootDirectory /home/nginx/domains/%u/public X11Forwarding no AllowTcpForwarding no ForceCommand /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server # id playwithbits returns: uid=504(playwithbits) gid=504(playwithbits) groups=504(playwithbits),507(web-root-locked) I have changed the user's home directory to: home/nginx/domains/playwithbits/public Now when I attempt to sftp in with this user I instantly get the message: connection closed Does anyone know what I am doing wrong? Edit: Following advice from @Dennis Williamson I have connected in debug mode (I think... correct me if I'm wrong). I have made a bit of progress by using chmod to set permissions recursively of all files in the directly to 700. Now I get the following messages when I attempt to log on (still connection refused): Connection from [My ip address] port 38737 debug1: Client protocol version 2.0; client software version OpenSSH_5.6 debug1: match: OpenSSH_5.6 pat OpenSSH* debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0 debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.8 debug1: permanently_set_uid: 74/74 debug1: list_hostkey_types: ssh-rsa,ssh-dss debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received debug1: kex: client->server aes128-ctr hmac-md5 none debug1: kex: server->client aes128-ctr hmac-md5 none debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REQUEST received debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_GROUP sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_INIT debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REPLY sent debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received debug1: KEX done debug1: userauth-request for user playwithbits service ssh-connection method none debug1: attempt 0 failures 0 debug1: user playwithbits matched group list web-root-locked at line 91 debug1: PAM: initializing for "playwithbits" debug1: PAM: setting PAM_RHOST to [My host info] debug1: PAM: setting PAM_TTY to "ssh" debug1: userauth-request for user playwithbits service ssh-connection method password debug1: attempt 1 failures 0 debug1: PAM: password authentication accepted for playwithbits debug1: do_pam_account: called Accepted password for playwithbits from [My ip address] port 38737 ssh2 debug1: monitor_child_preauth: playwithbits has been authenticated by privileged process debug1: SELinux support disabled debug1: PAM: establishing credentials User child is on pid 3942 debug1: PAM: establishing credentials Changed root directory to "/home/nginx/domains/playwithbits/public" debug1: permanently_set_uid: 504/504 debug1: Entering interactive session for SSH2. debug1: server_init_dispatch_20 debug1: server_input_channel_open: ctype session rchan 0 win 2097152 max 32768 debug1: input_session_request debug1: channel 0: new [server-session] debug1: session_new: session 0 debug1: session_open: channel 0 debug1: session_open: session 0: link with channel 0 debug1: server_input_channel_open: confirm session debug1: server_input_global_request: rtype [email protected] want_reply 0 debug1: server_input_channel_req: channel 0 request env reply 0 debug1: session_by_channel: session 0 channel 0 debug1: session_input_channel_req: session 0 req env debug1: server_input_channel_req: channel 0 request subsystem reply 1 debug1: session_by_channel: session 0 channel 0 debug1: session_input_channel_req: session 0 req subsystem subsystem request for sftp by user playwithbits debug1: subsystem: cannot stat /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server: Permission denied debug1: subsystem: exec() /usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server debug1: Forced command (config) '/usr/libexec/openssh/sftp-server' debug1: session_new: session 0 debug1: Received SIGCHLD. debug1: session_by_pid: pid 3943 debug1: session_exit_message: session 0 channel 0 pid 3943 debug1: session_exit_message: release channel 0 debug1: session_by_channel: session 0 channel 0 debug1: session_close_by_channel: channel 0 child 0 debug1: session_close: session 0 pid 0 debug1: channel 0: free: server-session, nchannels 1 Received disconnect from [My ip address]: 11: disconnected by user debug1: do_cleanup debug1: do_cleanup debug1: PAM: cleanup debug1: PAM: closing session debug1: PAM: deleting credentials

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• New monitor connected to HDMI adaptor doesn't show output after booting

  - by Paul

  Hello out there in the multiple monitors’ world. I am a very old newbie in your world and need help. I just purchased a new Asus VH236H monitor and hooked it up the HDMI port of an ATI Radeon HD4300 / 4500 Series display adaptor. I left the old Princeton LCD19 (TMDS) hooked up to the DVI port of the same display adaptor. Both monitors displayed the boot sequence, after I fired good old Sarastro2 (Asus P5Q Pro Turbo – Dual Core E5300 – 2.60 GHz) up. The Asus lacked one half of a second behind the Princeton until the Windows 7 Ultimate SP 1 boot up was complete. Then the Asus displayed “HDMI NO SIGNAL” and went into hibernation. The Princeton stayed lit up as before. Both monitors are displayed on the “Screen Resolution Setup Display” and I plaid around with them for a while. The only thing I accomplished was to shove the desktop icons from the Princeton to the still hibernating Asus. The “Multiple displays:” is set to “Extend these displays”, the Orientation is “Landscape” and the Resolutions are set on both to the “recommended” one. Both monitors show that they work properly in the advanced Properties display. What am I doing wrong, what am I missing? Never mind the opinions about the different resolutions of the two monitors. I always can unhook the Princeton and give it to a Goodwill Store if I do not like the setup. I just would like to make it work. Any constructive help is very much appreciated, Thank you. Thank you Anees Bakrain Only the ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 Series adapter is displayed in the Device Manager, for that reason I have to assume that the onboard display adaptor is not active. All 40 drivers of Sarastro2 are up to date and the HDMI cable can not be the problem because both monitors displayed the boot sequence up to the moment when Windows 7 was loaded completely. This was the moment, when the Asus monitor lost its signal. Both connectors, HDMI and DVI are connected and removing the DVI connector would not solve my problem of running both monitors simultaneously. However, your suggestions shifted my seventy one year old brain into the next gear. The only question remaining is; “Why the signals to the Asus monitor stop after the sequence is complete”. The ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 Series adapter seems to be capable of sending simultaneous HDMI and DVI signals, what is done during the boot sequence. Why do the signals change after the boot sequence is complete is the key question or der springende Punkt? Is this a correct assumption slhck?

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• How to start nginx via different port(other than 80)

  - by Zhao Peng

  Hi I am a newbie on nginx, I tried to set it up on my server(running Ubuntu 4), which already has apache running. So after I apt-get install it, I tried to start nginx. Then I get the message like this: Starting nginx: the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf syntax is ok configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf test is successful [emerg]: bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use) [emerg]: bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use) [emerg]: bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use) [emerg]: bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use) [emerg]: bind() to 0.0.0.0:80 failed (98: Address already in use) That makes sense as Apache is using port 80. Then I tried to modify nginx.conf, I reference some articles, so I changed it like so: server { listen 8080; location / { proxy_pass http://94.143.9.34:9500; proxy_set_header Host $host:8080; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header Via "nginx"; } After saving this and try to start nginx again, I still get the same error as previously. I cannot really find a related post about this, could any good people shred some light? Thanks in advance :) ========================================================================= I should post all the content in conf here: user www-data; worker_processes 1; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; # multi_accept on; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log; sendfile on; #tcp_nopush on; #keepalive_timeout 0; keepalive_timeout 65; tcp_nodelay on; gzip on; gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)"; include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; server { listen 81; location / { proxy_pass http://94.143.9.34:9500; proxy_set_header Host $host:81; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header Via "nginx"; } } } mail { See sample authentication script at: http://wiki.nginx.org/NginxImapAuthenticateWithApachePhpScript auth_http localhost/auth.php; pop3_capabilities "TOP" "USER"; imap_capabilities "IMAP4rev1" "UIDPLUS"; server { listen localhost:110; protocol pop3; proxy on; } server { listen localhost:143; protocol imap; proxy on; } } Basically, I changed nothing except adding the server part.

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• ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats

  - by Rick Strahl

  GZip encoding in ASP.NET is pretty easy to accomplish using the built-in GZipStream and DeflateStream classes and applying them to the Response.Filter property.  While applying GZip and Deflate behavior is pretty easy there are a few caveats that you have watch out for as I found out today for myself with an application that was throwing up some garbage data. But before looking at caveats let’s review GZip implementation for ASP.NET. ASP.NET GZip/Deflate Basics Response filters basically are applied to the Response.OutputStream and transform it as data is written to it through the ASP.NET Response object. So a Response.Write eventually gets written into the output stream which if a filter is also written through the filter stream’s interface. To perform the actual GZip (and Deflate) encoding typically used by Web pages .NET includes the GZipStream and DeflateStream stream classes which can be readily assigned to the Repsonse.OutputStream. With these two stream classes in place it’s almost trivially easy to create a couple of reusable methods that allow you to compress your HTTP output. In my standard WebUtils utility class (from the West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit) created two static utility methods – IsGZipSupported and GZipEncodePage – that check whether the client supports GZip encoding and then actually encodes the current output (note that although the method includes ‘Page’ in its name this code will work with any ASP.NET output). /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } } } As you can see the actual assignment of the Filter is as simple as: Response.Filter = new DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); which applies the filter to the OutputStream. You also need to ensure that your response reflects the new GZip or Deflate encoding and ensure that any pages that are cached in Proxy servers can differentiate between pages that were encoded with the various different encodings (or no encoding). To use this utility function now is trivially easy: In any ASP.NET code that wants to compress its Response output you simply use: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); Entry = WebLogFactory.GetEntry(); var entries = Entry.GetLastEntries(App.Configuration.ShowEntryCount, "pk,Title,SafeTitle,Body,Entered,Feedback,Location,ShowTopAd", "TEntries"); if (entries == null) throw new ApplicationException("Couldn't load WebLog Entries: " + Entry.ErrorMessage); this.repEntries.DataSource = entries; this.repEntries.DataBind(); } Here I use an ASP.NET page, but the above WebUtils.GZipEncode() method call will work in any ASP.NET application type including HTTP Handlers. The only requirement is that the filter needs to be applied before any other output is sent to the OutputStream. For example, in my CallbackHandler service implementation by default output over a certain size is GZip encoded. The output that is generated is JSON or XML and if the output is over 5k in size I apply WebUtils.GZipEncode(): if (sbOutput.Length > GZIP_ENCODE_TRESHOLD) WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); Response.ContentType = ControlResources.STR_JsonContentType; HttpContext.Current.Response.Write(sbOutput.ToString()); Ok, so you probably get the idea: Encoding GZip/Deflate content is pretty easy. Hold on there Hoss –Watch your Caching Or is it? There are a few caveats that you need to watch out for when dealing with GZip content. The fist issue is that you need to deal with the fact that some clients don’t support GZip or Deflate content. Most modern browsers support it, but if you have a programmatic Http client accessing your content GZip/Deflate support is by no means guaranteed. For example, WinInet Http clients don’t support GZip out of the box – it has to be explicitly implemented. Other low level HTTP clients on other platforms too don’t support GZip out of the box. The problem is that your application, your Web Server and Proxy Servers on the Internet might be caching your generated content. If you return content with GZip once and then again without, either caching is not applied or worse the wrong type of content is returned back to the client from a cache or proxy. The result is an unreadable response for *some clients* which is also very hard to debug and fix once in production. You already saw the issue of Proxy servers addressed in the GZipEncodePage() function: // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); This ensures that any Proxy servers also check for the Content-Encoding HTTP Header to cache their content – not just the URL. The same thing applies if you do OutputCaching in your own ASP.NET code. If you generate output for GZip on an OutputCached page the GZipped content will be cached (either by ASP.NET’s cache or in some cases by the IIS Kernel Cache). But what if the next client doesn’t support GZip? She’ll get served a cached GZip page that won’t decode and she’ll get a page full of garbage. Wholly undesirable. To fix this you need to add some custom OutputCache rules by way of the GetVaryByCustom() HttpApplication method in your global_ASAX file: public override string GetVaryByCustomString(HttpContext context, string custom) { // Override Caching for compression if (custom == "GZIP") { string acceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Response.Headers["Content-Encoding"]; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(acceptEncoding)) return ""; else if (acceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) return "GZIP"; else if (acceptEncoding.Contains("deflate")) return "DEFLATE"; return ""; } return base.GetVaryByCustomString(context, custom); } In a page that use Output caching you then specify: <%@ OutputCache Duration="180" VaryByParam="none" VaryByCustom="GZIP" %> To use that custom rule. It’s all Fun and Games until ASP.NET throws an Error Ok, so you’re up and running with GZip, you have your caching squared away and your pages that you are applying it to are jamming along. Then BOOM, something strange happens and you get a lovely garbled page that look like this: Lovely isn’t it? What’s happened here is that I have WebUtils.GZipEncode() applied to my page, but there’s an error in the page. The error falls back to the ASP.NET error handler and the error handler removes all existing output (good) and removes all the custom HTTP headers I’ve set manually (usually good, but very bad here). Since I applied the Response.Filter (via GZipEncode) the output is now GZip encoded, but ASP.NET has removed my Content-Encoding header, so the browser receives the GZip encoded content without a notification that it is encoded as GZip. The result is binary output. Here’s what Fiddler says about the raw HTTP header output when an error occurs when GZip encoding was applied: HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 22:21:08 GMT Content-Length: 2138 Connection: close ?`I?%&/m?{J?J??t??` … binary output striped here Notice: no Content-Encoding header and that’s why we’re seeing this garbage. ASP.NET has stripped the Content-Encoding header but left our filter intact. So how do we fix this? In my applications I typically have a global Application_Error handler set up and in this case I’ve been using that. One thing that you can do in the Application_Error handler is explicitly clear out the Response.Filter and set it to null at the top: protected void Application_Error(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Remove any special filtering especially GZip filtering Response.Filter = null; … } And voila I get my Yellow Screen of Death or my custom generated error output back via uncompressed content. BTW, the same is true for Page level errors handled in Page_Error or ASP.NET MVC Error handling methods in a controller. Another and possibly even better solution is to check whether a filter is attached just before the headers are sent to the client as pointed out by Adam Schroeder in the comments: protected void Application_PreSendRequestHeaders() { // ensure that if GZip/Deflate Encoding is applied that headers are set // also works when error occurs if filters are still active HttpResponse response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (response.Filter is GZipStream && response.Headers["Content-encoding"] != "gzip") response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "gzip"); else if (response.Filter is DeflateStream && response.Headers["Content-encoding"] != "deflate") response.AppendHeader("Content-encoding", "deflate"); } This uses the Application_PreSendRequestHeaders() pipeline event to check for compression encoding in a filter and adjusts the content accordingly. This is actually a better solution since this is generic – it’ll work regardless of how the content is cleaned up. For example, an error Response.Redirect() or short error display might get changed and the filter not cleared and this code actually handles that. Sweet, thanks Adam. It’s unfortunate that ASP.NET doesn’t natively clear out Response.Filters when an error occurs just as it clears the Response and Headers. I can’t see where leaving a Filter in place in an error situation would make any sense, but hey - this is what it is and it’s easy enough to fix as long as you know where to look. Riiiight! IIS and GZip I should also mention that IIS 7 includes good support for compression natively. If you can defer encoding to let IIS perform it for you rather than doing it in your code by all means you should do it! Especially any static or semi-dynamic content that can be made static should be using IIS built-in compression. Dynamic caching is also supported but is a bit more tricky to judge in terms of performance and footprint. John Forsyth has a great article on the benefits and drawbacks of IIS 7 compression which gives some detailed performance comparisons and impact reviews. I’ll post another entry next with some more info on IIS compression since information on it seems to be a bit hard to come by. Related Content Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression in IIS 7.x HttpWebRequest and GZip Responses © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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