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• Why bother writing an Windows 8 app?

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  So you want to know more about development for Window 8. Great! There are lots of reasons you should be excited about this. Since I don’t know why YOU are interested in this, I’ll make a list of reasons people can choose from. (as a side note: whenever I talk about Win8 development I am referring to the Metro Style / WinRt side of things. Apps for the ‘classic’ desktop side of Win8 on Intel are business as usual…) So… Why would you care about making an app for Windows 8? 1. It’s cool. Let’s not beat around the bush: if you like development for a hobby then you’ll love to work on this new platform. You can create apps in a relative short time (short time as in compared to writing a new CRM system) and that makes it great for a hobby product. 2. You’ll stand out. Hey, we all need an ego boost every now and then. We all need to feel special. So if you can manage to be one of the first to have you app in the Store then you’ll likely to be noticed. Just close your eyes for a moment and image you standing in a bar. It’s crowded, and then you casually say “Oh yeah, I just had my app certified and it’s in the Win8 store now”. People will stop talking, will offer you drinks and beautiful women / gorgeous man / furry creatures from Alpha Centauri (whatever your preferences are) will propose. Or maybe not. Anyway…. 3. Make some cash! IDC predicts there will be about 350,000,000 Windows 8 licenses sold in the next year. Think about that number. 350,000,000. And they all have access to the Store. Where you’re app will be. With one little click they can select it, download and somehow magically $1.00 or $2.00 from their bank account is transferred to yours. Now, I am not saying that all of those people will download and buy your app but what if only 1% of them did? Remember: there aren’t that many apps available yet….. 4. Learn. Creating new small apps is a great way to learn new stuff. Yes, you could read about it (on this blog for instance) but the only way to learn something is to do it. So be prepared for the future and learn something new by doing it.Write an app! Now! 5. The biggie (for me at least): it’s fun. Even if you remove the points above it’s still fun to write for these devices and this platform. Now some of you will say : “But why not write a great app for IOS or Android?” I think this is a valid question. Of course the novelty of the platform wears out and points 2 and 3 from above list will not be as relevant as it is today. But still 1 4 and 5 remain. And don’t forget: if you already work on the Microsoft platform it’s not that hard to learn this new Win8 stuff. If you have done some XAML development (be it WPF or Silverlight) you are almost there in becoming a good Win8 developer. So you’ll be more productive much sooner than when you have to learn Objective C or Java. Even if you’re a HTML / Javascript developer (I say developer here, not designer) you’ll be up to speed on Win8 development pretty soon. Yes, you, that funky Web Developer who lives and breathes HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript / Node.Js / JQuery: you too can be a Win8 developer. A first class Win8 developer! So.. Download the stuff you need from http://dev.windows.com install Windows 8 and Visual Studio 12 and by the time you’re ready I’ll be working on the next article: how to do all this? Happy coding!

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• How You Helped Shape Java EE 7...

  - by reza_rahman

  I have been working with the JCP in various roles since EJB 3/Java EE 5 (much of it on my own time), eventually culminating in my decision to accept my current role at Oracle (despite it's inevitable set of unique challenges, a role I find by and large positive and fulfilling). During these years, it has always been clear to me that pretty much everyone in the JCP genuinely cares about openness, feedback and developer participation. Perhaps the most visible sign to date of this high regard for grassroots level input is a survey on Java EE 7 gathered a few months ago. The survey was designed to get open feedback on a number of critical issues central to the Java EE 7 umbrella specification including what APIs to include in the standard. When we started the survey, I don't think anyone was certain what the level of participation from developers would really be. I also think everyone was pleasantly surprised that a large number of developers (around 1100) took the time out to vote on these very important issues that could impact their own professional life. And it wasn't just a matter of the quantity of responses. I was particularly impressed with the quality of the comments made through the survey (some of which I'll try to do justice to below). With Java EE 7 under our belt and the horizons for Java EE 8 emerging, this is a good time to thank everyone that took the survey once again for their thoughts and let you know what the impact of your voice actually was. As an aside, you may be happy to know that we are working hard behind the scenes to try to put together a similar survey to help kick off the agenda for Java EE 8 (although this is by no means certain). I'll break things down by the questions asked in the survey, the responses and the resulting change in the specification. APIs to Add to Java EE 7 Full/Web Profile The first question in the survey asked which of four new candidate APIs (WebSocket, JSON-P, JBatch and JCache) should be added to the Java EE 7 Full and Web profile respectively. Developers by and large wanted all the new APIs added to the full platform. The comments expressed particularly strong support for WebSocket and JCache. Others expressed dissatisfaction over the lack of a JSON binding (as opposed to JSON processing) API. WebSocket, JSON-P and JBatch are now part of Java EE 7. In addition, the long-awaited Java EE Concurrency Utilities API was also included in the Full Profile. Unfortunately, JCache was not finalized in time for Java EE 7 and the decision was made not to hold up the Java EE release any longer. JCache continues to move forward strongly and will very likely be included in Java EE 8 (it will be available much sooner than Java EE 8 to boot). An emergent standard for JSON-B is also a strong possibility for Java EE 8. When it came to the Web Profile, developers were supportive of adding WebSocket and JSON-P, but not JBatch and JCache. Both WebSocket and JSON-P are now part of the Web Profile, now also including the already popular JAX-RS API. Enabling CDI by Default The second question asked whether CDI should be enabled in Java EE by default. The overwhelming majority of developers supported the default enablement of CDI. In addition, developers expressed a desire for better CDI/Java EE alignment (with regards to EJB and JSF in particular). Some developers expressed legitimate concerns over the performance implications of enabling CDI globally as well as the potential conflict with other JSR 330 implementations like Spring and Guice. CDI is enabled by default in Java EE 7. Respecting the legitimate concerns, CDI 1.1 was very careful to add additional controls around component scanning. While a lot of work was done in Java EE 6 and Java EE 7 around CDI alignment, further alignment is under serious consideration for Java EE 8. Consistent Usage of @Inject The third question was around using CDI/JSR 330 @Inject consistently vs. allowing JSRs to create their own injection annotations (e.g. @BatchContext). A majority of developers wanted consistent usage of @Inject. The comments again reflected a strong desire for CDI/Java EE alignment. A lot of emphasis in Java EE 7 was put into using @Inject consistently. For example, the JBatch specification is focused on using @Inject wherever possible. JAX-RS remains an exception with it's existing custom injection annotations. However, the JAX-RS specification leads understand the importance of eventual convergence, hopefully in Java EE 8. Expanding the Use of @Stereotype The fourth question was about expanding CDI @Stereotype to cover annotations across Java EE beyond just CDI. A solid majority of developers supported the idea of making @Stereotype more universal in Java EE. The comments maintained the general theme of strong support for CDI/Java EE alignment Unfortunately, there was not enough time and resources in Java EE 7 to implement this fairly pervasive feature. However, it remains a serious consideration for Java EE 8. Expanding Interceptor Use The final set of questions was about expanding interceptors further across Java EE. Developers strongly supported the concept. Along with injection, interceptors are now supported across all Java EE 7 components including Servlets, Filters, Listeners, JAX-WS endpoints, JAX-RS resources, WebSocket endpoints and so on. I hope you are encouraged by how your input to the survey helped shape Java EE 7 and continues to shape Java EE 8. Participating in these sorts of surveys is of course just one way of contributing to Java EE. Another great way to stay involved is the Adopt-A-JSR Program. A large number of developers are already participating through their local JUGs. You could of course become a Java EE JSR expert group member or observer. You should stay tuned to The Aquarium for the progress of Java EE 8 JSRs if that's something you want to look into...

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• Time to Get Started with Oracle Data Integrator 12c!

  - by Sandrine Riley

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} It is time to get started with Oracle Data Integrator 12c! We would like to highlight for you a great place to begin your journey with ODI.  Here you will find the Getting Started section for ODI, which provides a few options. v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Step 1 – Start by downloading the Getting Started (PDF). The document provides general background information and detailed examples to help you learn how to use Oracle Data Integrator. This document guides you through a first project with Oracle Data Integrator 12c, and the instructions in this document are required for using the Getting Started Demonstration Environment. If you would like to run the Getting Started Demonstration Environment on your system go to Step 2 A. If you would like to run the Getting Started Demonstration Environment installed and pre-configured in a Virtual Image, go to Step 2 B. Step 2 - A-   A -  If you would like to run the Getting Started Demo Environment on your system, you will want to then download the Demo Environment for Getting Started (ZIP) archive containing ODI metadata, configuration scripts and sample data. B-   B -  Alternatively, a pre-configured virtual machine is available with the Getting Started installation and configuration. The Virtual Machine platform uses Oracle Virtual Box technology, and use of this configuration would necessitate the download/installation of Virtual Box and the Getting Started virtual machine. If you prefer this route and would rather run the Getting Started Demonstration Environment installed and preconfigured in a Virtual Machine, please download the ODI 12c Getting Started Virtual Machine. Step 3 – In continuation with the Getting Started Demonstration Environment and the Getting Started Guide, you will now be able to run through a first project with Oracle Data Integrator. Now that you have successfully done the exercises above, you may want to play on your own, and develop with Oracle Data Integrator on your environment...  here you can download a full version of Oracle Data Integrator 12c.  Enjoy, and happy developing! Learn more about Oracle Data Integrator; including FAQ, the Oracle by Example Series, Sample Code, and White Papers. Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; 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-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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• Some Early Considerations

  - by Chris Massey

  Following on from my previous post, I want to say "thank you" to everyone who has got in touch and got involved – you are pioneers! An update on where we are right now: paper prototypes v1 To be more specific, we’ve picked two of the ideas that seem to have more pros than cons, turned them into Balsamiq mockups, and are getting them fleshed out with realistic content. We’ll initially make these available to the aforementioned pioneers (thank you again), roll in the feedback, and then open up to get more data on what works and what doesn’t. If you’ve got any questions about this (or what we’re working on right now), feel free to ask me in the comments below. I’ve had a few people express an interest in the process we’re going through, and I’m more than happy to share details more frequently as we go along – not least because you, dear reader, will help us stay on target and create something Good. To start with, here’s a quick flashback to bring you all up to speed. A Brief Retrospective As you may already know, we’re creating a new publishing asset specifically focused on providing great content for web developers. We don’t yet know exactly what this thing will look like, or exactly how it will work, but we know we want to create something that is useful different. For my part, I’m seriously excited at the prospect of building a genuinely digital publishing system (as opposed to what most publishing is these days, which is print-style publishing which just happens to be on the web). The main challenge at this point is working out our build-measure-assess loop to speed up our experimental turn-around, and that’ll get better as we run more trials. Of course, there are a few things we’ve been pondering at this early conceptual stage: Do we publishing about heterogeneous technology stacks from day 1, or do we start with ASP.NET (which we’re familiar with) & branch out later? There are challenges with either approach. What publishing "modes" are already being well-handled? For example, the likes of Pluralsight, TekPub, and Treehouse have pretty much nailed video training (debate about price, if you like), and unless we think we can do it faster / better / cheaper (unlikely, for the record), we should leave them to it. Where should we base whatever we create? Should we create a completely new asset under a new name, graft something onto Simple-Talk (like the labs), or just build something directly into Simple-Talk? It sounds trivial, but it does have at least some impact on infrastructure and what how we manage the different types of content we (will) have. Are there any obvious problems or niches that we think could address really well, or should we just throw ideas out and see what readers respond to? What kind of users do we want to provide for? This actually deserves a little bit of unpacking… Why are you here? We currently divide readers into (broadly) the categories: Category 1: I know nothing about X, and I’d like to learn about it. Category 2: I know something about X, but I’d like to learn how to do something specific with it. Category 3: Ah man, I have a problem with X, and I need to fix it now. Now that I think about it, I might also include a 4th class of reader: Category 4: I’m looking for something interesting to engage my brain. These are clearly task-based categorizations, and depending on which task you’re performing when you arrive here, you’re going to need different types of content, or will have specific discovery needs. One of the questions that’s at the back of my mind whenever I consider a new idea is “How many of the categories will this satisfy?” As an example, typical video training is very well suited to categories 1, 2, and 4. StackOverflow is very well suited to category 3, and serves as a sign-posting system to the rest. Clearly it’s not necessary to satisfy every category need to be useful and popular, but being aware of what behavior readers might be exhibiting when they arrive will help us tune our ideas appropriately. < / Flashback > We don’t have clean answers to most of these considerations – they’re things we’re aware of, and each idea we look at is going to be best suited to a different mix of the options I’ve described. Our first experimental loop will be coming full circle in the next few days, so we should start to see how the different possibilities vary between ideas. Free to chime in with questions and suggestions about anything I’ve just brain-dumped, or at any stage as we go along. If you see anything that intrigued or enrages you, or just have an idea you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you.

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• Inside Red Gate - Be Reasonable!

  - by simonc

  As I discussed in my previous posts, divisions and project teams within Red Gate are allowed a lot of autonomy to manage themselves. It's not just the teams though, there's an awful lot of freedom given to individual employees within the company as well. Reasonableness How Red Gate treats it's employees is embodied in the phrase 'You will be reasonable with us, and we will be reasonable with you'. As an employee, you are trusted to do your job to the best of you ability. There's no one looking over your shoulder, no one clocking you in and out each day. Everyone is working at the company because they want to, and one of the core ideas of Red Gate is that the company exists to 'let people do the best work of their lives'. Everything is geared towards that. To help you do your job, office services and the IT department are there. If you need something to help you work better (a third or fourth monitor, footrests, or a new keyboard) then ask people in Information Systems (IS) or Office Services and you will be given it, no questions asked. Everyone has administrator access to their own machines, and you can install whatever you want on it. If there's a particular bit of software you need, then ask IS and they will buy it. As an example, last year I wanted to replace my main hard drive with an SSD; I had a summer job at school working in a computer repair shop, so knew what to do. I went to IS and asked for 'an SSD, a SATA cable, and a screwdriver'. And I got it there and then, even the screwdriver. Awesome. I screwed it in myself, copied all my main drive files across, and I was good to go. Of course, if you're not happy doing that yourself, then IS will sort it all out for you, no problems. If you need something that the company doesn't have (say, a book off Amazon, or you need some specifications printing off & bound), then everyone has a expense limit of £100 that you can use without any sign-off needed from your managers. If you need a company credit card for whatever reason, then you can get it. This freedom extends to working hours and holiday; you're expected to be in the office 11am-3pm each day, but outside those times you can work whenever you want. If you need a half-day holiday on a days notice, or even the same day, then you'll get it, unless there's a good reason you're needed that day. If you need to work from home for a day or so for whatever reason, then you can. If it's reasonable, then it's allowed. Trust issues? A lot of trust, and a lot of leeway, is given to all the people in Red Gate. Everyone is expected to work hard, do their jobs to the best of their ability, and there will be a minimum of bureaucratic obstacles that stop you doing your work. What happens if you abuse this trust? Well, an example is company trip expenses. You're free to expense what you like; food, drink, transport, etc, but if you expenses are not reasonable, then you will never travel with the company again. Simple as that. Everyone knows when they're abusing the system, so simply don't do it. Along with reasonableness, another phrase used is 'Don't be an a**hole'. If you act like an a**hole, and abuse any of the trust placed in you, even if you're the best tester, salesperson, dev, or manager in the company, then you won't be a part of the company any more. From what I know about other companies, employee trust is highly variable between companies, all the way up to CCTV trained on employee's monitors. As a dev, I want to produce well-written & useful code that solves people's problems. Being able to get whatever I need - install whatever tools I need, get time off when I need to, obtain reference books within a day - all let me do my job, and so let Red Gate help other people do their own jobs through the tools we produce. Plus, I don't think I would like working for a company that doesn't allow admin access to your own machine and blocks Facebook! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Deduping your redundancies

  - by nospam(at)example.com (Joerg Moellenkamp)

  Robin Harris of Storagemojo pointed to an interesting article about about deduplication and it's impact to the resiliency of your data against data corruption on ACM Queue. The problem in short: A considerable number of filesystems store important metadata at multiple locations. For example the ZFS rootblock is copied to three locations. Other filesystems have similar provisions to protect their metadata. However you can easily proof, that the rootblock pointer in the uberblock of ZFS for example is pointing to blocks with absolutely equal content in all three locatition (with zdb -uu and zdb -r). It has to be that way, because they are protected by the same checksum. A number of devices offer block level dedup, either as an option or as part of their inner workings. However when you store three identical blocks on them and the devices does block level dedup internally, the device may just deduplicated your redundant metadata to a block stored just once that is stored on the non-voilatile storage. When this block is corrupted, you have essentially three corrupted copies. Three hit with one bullet. This is indeed an interesting problem: A device doing deduplication doesn't know if a block is important or just a datablock. This is the reason why I like deduplication like it's done in ZFS. It's an integrated part and so important parts don't get deduplicated away. A disk accessed by a block level interface doesn't know anything about the importance of a block. A metadata block is nothing different to it's inner mechanism than a normal data block because there is no way to tell that this is important and that those redundancies aren't allowed to fall prey to some clever deduplication mechanism. Robin talks about this in regard of the Sandforce disk controllers who use a kind of dedup to reduce some of the nasty effects of writing data to flash, but the problem is much broader. However this is relevant whenever you are using a device with block level deduplication. It's just the point that you have to activate it for most implementation by command, whereas certain devices do this by default or by design and you don't know about it. However I'm not perfectly sure about that ? given that storage administration and server administration are often different groups with different business objectives I would ask your storage guys if they have activated dedup without telling somebody elase on their boxes in order to speak less often with the storage sales rep. The problem is even more interesting with ZFS. You may use ditto blocks to protect important data to store multiple copies of data in the pool to increase redundancy, even when your pool just consists out of one disk or just a striped set of disk. However when your device is doing dedup internally it may remove your redundancy before it hits the nonvolatile storage. You've won nothing. Just spend your disk quota on the the LUNs in the SAN and you make your disk admin happy because of the good dedup ratio However you can just fall in this specific "deduped ditto block"trap when your pool just consists out of a single device, because ZFS writes ditto blocks on different disks, when there is more than just one disk. Yet another reason why you should spend some extra-thought when putting your zpool on a single LUN, especially when the LUN is sliced and dices out of a large heap of storage devices by a storage controller. However I have one problem with the articles and their specific mention of ZFS: You can just hit by this problem when you are using the deduplicating device for the pool. However in the specifically mentioned case of SSD this isn't the usecase. Most implementations of SSD in conjunction with ZFS are hybrid storage pools and so rotating rust disk is used as pool and SSD are used as L2ARC/sZIL. And there it simply doesn't matter: When you really have to resort to the sZIL (your system went down, it doesn't matter of one block or several blocks are corrupt, you have to fail back to the last known good transaction group the device. On the other side, when a block in L2ARC is corrupt, you simply read it from the pool and in HSP implementations this is the already mentioned rust. In conjunction with ZFS this is more interesting when using a storage array, that is capable to do dedup and where you use LUNs for your pool. However as mentioned before, on those devices it's a user made decision to do so, and so it's less probable that you deduplicating your redundancies. Other filesystems lacking acapability similar to hybrid storage pools are more "haunted" by this problem of SSD using dedup-like mechanisms internally, because those filesystem really store the data on the the SSD instead of using it just as accelerating devices. However at the end Robin is correct: It's jet another point why protecting your data by creating redundancies by dispersing it several disks (by mirror or parity RAIDs) is really important. No dedup mechanism inside a device can dedup away your redundancy when you write it to a totally different and indepenent device.

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• IE9, LightSwitch Beta 2 and Zune HD: A Study in Risk Management?

  - by andrewbrust

  Photo by parl, 'Risk.’ Under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License This has been a busy week for Microsoft, and for me as well.  On Monday, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX.  That evening I flew from New York to Seattle.  On Tuesday morning, Microsoft launched Visual Studio LightSwitch, Beta 2 with a Go-Live license, in Redmond, and I had the privilege of speaking at the keynote presentation where the announcement was made.  Readers of this blog know I‘m a fan of LightSwitch, so I was happy to tell the app dev tools partners in the audience that I thought the LightSwitch extensions ecosystem represented a big opportunity – comparable to the opportunity when Visual Basic 1.0 was entering its final beta roughly 20 years ago.  On Tuesday evening, I flew back to New York (and wrote most of this post in-flight). Two busy, productive days.  But there was a caveat that impacts the accomplishments, because Monday was also the day reports surfaced from credible news agencies that Microsoft was discontinuing its dedicated Zune hardware efforts.  While the Zune brand, technology and service will continue to be a component of Windows Phone and a piece of the Xbox puzzle as well, speculation is that Microsoft will no longer be going toe-to-toe with iPod touch in the portable music player market. If we take all three of these developments together (even if one of them is based on speculation), two interesting conclusions can reasonably be drawn, one good and one less so. Microsoft is doubling down on technologies it finds strategic and de-emphasizing those that it does not.  HTML 5 and the Web are strategic, so here comes IE9, and it’s a very good browser.  Try it and see.  Silverlight is strategic too, as is SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure, so here comes Visual Studio LightSwitch Beta 2 and a license to deploy its apps to production.  Downloads of that product have exceeded Microsoft’s projections by more than 50%, and the company is even citing analyst firms’ figures covering the number of power-user developers that might use it. (I happen to think the product will be used by full-fledged developers as well, but that’s a separate discussion.) Windows Phone is strategic too…I wasn’t 100% positive of that before, but the Nokia agreement has made me confident.  Xbox as an entertainment appliance is also strategic.  Standalone music players are not strategic – and even if they were, selling them has been a losing battle for Microsoft.  So if Microsoft has consolidated the Zune content story and the ZunePass subscription into Xbox and Windows Phone, it would make sense, and would be a smart allocation of resources.  Essentially, it would be for the greater good. But it’s not all good.  In this scenario, Zune player customers would lose out.  Unless they wanted to switch to Windows Phone, and then use their phone’s battery for the portable media needs, they’re going to need a new platform.  They’re going to feel abandoned.  Even if Zune lives, there have been other such cul de sacs for customers.  Remember SPOT watches?  Live Spaces?  The original Live Mesh?  Microsoft discontinued each of these products.  The company is to be commended for cutting its losses, as admitting a loss isn’t easy.  But Redmond won’t be well-regarded by the victims of those decisions.  Instead, it gets black marks. What’s the answer?  I think it’s a bit like the 1980’s New York City “don’t block the box” gridlock rules: don’t enter an intersection unless you see a clear path through it.  If the light turns red and you’re blocking the perpendicular traffic, that’s your fault in judgment.  You get fined and get points on your license and you don’t get to shrug it off as beyond your control.  Accountability is key.  The same goes for Microsoft.  If it decides to enter a market, it should see a reasonable path through success in that market. Switching analogies, Microsoft shouldn’t make investments haphazardly, and it certainly shouldn’t ask investors to buy into a high-risk fund that is sold as safe and which offers only moderate returns.  People won’t continue to invest with a fund manager with a track record of over-zealous, imprudent, sub-prime investments.  The same is true on the product side for Microsoft, and not just with music players and geeky wrist watches.  It’s true of Web browsers, and line-of-business app dev tools, and smartphones, and cloud platforms and operating systems too.  When Microsoft is casual about its own risk, it raises risk for its customers, and weakens its reputation, market share and credibility.  That doesn’t mean all risk is bad, but it does mean no product team’s risk should be taken lightly. For mutual fund companies, it’s the CEO’s job to give his fund managers autonomy, but to make sure they’re conforming to a standard of rational risk management.  Because all those funds carry the same brand, and many of them serve the same investors. The same goes for Microsoft, its product portfolio, its executive ranks and its product managers.

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• Adventures in Windows 8: Solving activation errors

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  Note: I tagged this article with “MVVM” because I got a few support requests for MVVM Light regarding this exact issue. In fact it is a Windows 8 issue and has nothing to do with MVVM Light per se… Sometimes when you work on a Windows 8 app, you will get a very annoying issue when starting the app. In that case, the app doesn’t not even start past the Splash screen. Putting a breakpoint in App.xaml.cs doesn’t help because the app doesn’t even reach that point! So what exactly is happening? Well when a Windows 8 app starts, the system is performing a few check first. One of the checks, for instance, is to see if an app with the same package ID is already available. The package ID is a unique value set in the package manifest. In the Solution Explorer, double click on Package.appxmanifest. This opens the manifest in a special editor Click on the Packaging tab See the GUID under Package Name. This is the unique ID I am talking about. If there is a conflict (i.e. if an app is already installed with the exact same ID), Windows will warm the user that the app is already installed. However when you are in the process of developing an app, you install and uninstall the same app many many times (every time that you start in Visual Studio), and sometimes some issues arise, for instance failing to uninstall the app before starting the new instance of the same app. First step if you get such an error When the application fails to start past the splash screen, the first step is to identify what kind of error happened. In my experience the “already installed” is by far the most frequent (in fact I never had another such error), but it can be something else. An annoying thing is that the popup that shows the error is usually started below the Windows 8 app, and so you don’t even see it! This is especially true if you run this in the Simulator. In that case, do the following: Press on the Simulator’s home button, then press on the Desktop tile on the Start menu. The error popup should be shown on the desktop. If your applications runs on the Local machine, you also do the same and press the Windows button, and then from the Start menu press the Desktop tile. Deployment error in Studio Sometimes the same error causes Visual Studio to fail launching the application at all with a deployment error. This is a better case, because at least it is clear that there is an issue. In that case, write down the code that is shown in the Error window (for instance 0x80073D05 in the example below). Once you have the error code, go to the “Troubleshooting packaging, deployment, and query of Windows Store apps” page and look up the code in question. In my case, the error was “ERROR_DELETING_EXISTING_APPLICATIONDATA_STORE_FAILED”, “An error occurred while deleting the package's previously existing application data.” Solving the “ERROR_DELETING_EXISTING_APPLICATIONDATA_STORE_FAILED” issue Update: Before trying the below, you can also try the simple steps: Exit Visual Studio Go to the Start menu Locate your app’s tile. It should be visible in the Start menu directly, towards the far end on the right. Right click the tile and select Uninstall from the App Bar. Restart Visual Studio and try again. Sometimes it helps. If it doesn’t, then try the following: In order to solve the case where Windows, for any reason, fails to delete the existing application before starting the new instance, follow the steps: Open the Package.appxmanifest in Visual Studio Open the Packaging tab. Change the Package name. For tests you can just try to change the last character of the GUID, though I would recommend creating a brand new GUID. Press Start Type GUID Start the GUID Generator application Select Registry Format Press Copy. Paste the new GUID in place of the Package Name in Visual Studio Important: don’t forget to remove the curly brackets at the beginning and at the end of the newly pasted GUID. Then you just have to cross your fingers and start the application again… If it works, celebrate. if it doesn’t work… well at this point I am not sure so good luck with that ;) Happy coding, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• How do I achieve lossless JPEG joining without truncation of partial MCUs?

  - by Karan

  I am working on a project for which I need to join thousands of JPEG images losslessly (I'm not talking about the Lossless JPEG/JPEG 2000/JPEG-LS formats here). Aforementioned images have varying levels of chroma subsampling (1x1, 1x2, 2x1, 2x2), resulting in varying MCU sizes (8x8, 8x16, 16x8, 16x16 px). However, in any given set of images to be joined together, each image has identical characteristics. For now, let's assume I only have 2 images. Image #1 (I1) is 256x256px in size and #2 (I2) is 239x256px in size. 2x2 subsampling is used such that MCU size is 16x16px. I2 thus obviously has partial MCUs at the right edge, since its width is not evenly divisible by 16. (I've read that so-called 'partial' MCUs actually contain the data for a complete MCU, but the image dimensions instruct the renderer to only display the relevant pixels and ignore/hide the extra ones.) Looking around for tools that could help me accomplish this, I came across a modified version of JpegTran, that contains an experimental lossless crop 'n' drop (cut & paste) feature. All the other apps I encountered that support lossless JPEG editing seem to utilise IJG's (JpegTran) code, so this seemed to be the logical choice. Also, given the sheer number of images, I wanted something that could preferably be run from the command-line so that I could automate the process with a script. Unfortunately, while everything else worked fine, it seems JpegTran truncates the partial MCUs instead of retaining them. Thus in the example above, the final joined image contains all of I1, but only 224x256px of I2. Why 224? because 239 = 14x16+15, which means there are 14 full MCUs along the width, and 1 partial MCU (just 1px short of the complete 16px). The last 15px is what is getting blanked, leading to a 495x256px image with 15px of blank (grey) pixels at the right edge. See images below (shame that imgur re-compresses them): (left )+ (right) = As you can clearly see, the red portion (15px) of I2 has been truncated by JpegTran. If the MCUs were 8px in width, the lost portion would have been the right-most 7px of I2. Similarly, joining I3 (256x239px) *below * I1 would cause the loss of 7 or 15px, depending on the MCU height of course: (top) + (bottom) = If this is better suited to some other StackExchange (or even non-SE) site/forum where JPEG/image encoding experts hang out, do let me know. Can what I am attempting even be done, or is the so-called 'lossless' JPEG crop 'n' drop only valid for images with no partial MCUs? (Maybe that is why the feature is still in an "experimental state" more than a decade after being introduced...) Until I know for sure that it is impossible, I am not interested in suggestions for lossy joining. Avoiding any generational loss whatsoever is the sole reason why I'm breaking my head over this, else I'd have had this done and dusted ages ago. Also, I am not interested in suggestions related to switching image formats. I do not control the source of the images. If it can be done, how? Please keep in mind that any alternate apps suggested must ideally be capable of automation, given the requirements stated above. (But given how it's unlikely I'm even going to receive a useful answer given the constraints, I would be happy with any app suggestion just as long as it actually works. I can always look into an AutoIT/AHK script or something later to automate it.) I understand that an odd-sized final image might cause issues, so I am fully prepared to accept any solution, even if it results in blank (preferably black) padding pixels to the right/bottom. What I mean is, I don't care if I1 + I2 is 496x256px (1px padding) or even 512x256px (17px padding) in size, as long as the final image contains all the actual image data from both source images, and the entire process is lossless. Obviously the lesser the padding (if any), the better, but at this point any solution will do. A Windows-based solution would be perfect, but a Linux-based one would be entirely acceptable.

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• Disk operations freeze Debian

  - by Grzenio

  Hi, I have just installed Debian testing on my new desktop and I am not very happy with performance - when I perform a disk intensive operation, e.g. upgrade packages in the system, everything seems to freeze, e.g. changing tabs in Iceweasel takes 3 seconds. I run the Debian on my 3 year old Thinkpad X60 ultra-portable, and I don't have these issues. (every single parameter of the laptop is much worse than the desktop). I am using the default packaged kernel and scripts. I run hdparm -t /dev/sda1 And I got around 96GB/s, which is expected. What else can I try to make it work better? EDIT: grzes:/home/ga# hdparm -i /dev/sda /dev/sda: Model=WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1, FwRev=80.00A80, SerialNo=WD-WMAVU1362357 Config={ HardSect NotMFM HdSw>15uSec SpinMotCtl Fixed DTR>5Mbs FmtGapReq } RawCHS=16383/16/63, TrkSize=0, SectSize=0, ECCbytes=50 BuffType=unknown, BuffSize=unknown, MaxMultSect=16, MultSect=16 CurCHS=16383/16/63, CurSects=16514064, LBA=yes, LBAsects=2930277168 IORDY=on/off, tPIO={min:120,w/IORDY:120}, tDMA={min:120,rec:120} PIO modes: pio0 pio3 pio4 DMA modes: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 UDMA modes: udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 udma5 *udma6 AdvancedPM=no WriteCache=enabled Drive conforms to: Unspecified: ATA/ATAPI-1,2,3,4,5,6,7 * signifies the current active mode EDIT2: Even my wife said "on this new computer I can't do anything when I copy the photos from the camera and its much worse than on the old one". So it must be serious. EDIT3: Updated to 2.6.32, but still no improvement EDIT4: I forgot to mention that the new disk is ext4, the old was ext3. EDIT5: Still not solved. I have a P43 ASUS P5QL-E board. Lines from dmesg that seem relevant: [ 0.370850] Block layer SCSI generic (bsg) driver version 0.4 loaded (major 253) [ 0.370852] io scheduler noop registered [ 0.370853] io scheduler anticipatory registered [ 0.370854] io scheduler deadline registered [ 0.370876] io scheduler cfq registered (default) ... [ 0.908233] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: version 2.13 [ 0.908243] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: PCI INT B -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 [ 0.908246] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: MAP [ P0 P2 P1 P3 ] [ 0.908275] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.2: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.908316] scsi0 : ata_piix [ 0.908374] scsi1 : ata_piix [ 0.909180] ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xa000 ctl 0x9c00 bmdma 0x9480 irq 19 [ 0.909183] ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0x9880 ctl 0x9800 bmdma 0x9488 irq 19 [ 0.909199] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.5: PCI INT B -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19 [ 0.909202] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.5: MAP [ P0 -- P1 -- ] [ 0.909228] ata_piix 0000:00:1f.5: setting latency timer to 64 [ 0.909279] scsi2 : ata_piix [ 0.909326] scsi3 : ata_piix [ 0.910021] ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xb000 ctl 0xac00 bmdma 0xa480 irq 19 [ 0.910024] ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xa880 ctl 0xa800 bmdma 0xa488 irq 19 [ 0.915575] FDC 0 is a post-1991 82077 ... [ 1.716062] ata1.00: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300) [ 1.716074] ata1.01: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300) [ 1.724318] ata1.00: ATA-8: WDC WD15EARS-00Z5B1, 80.00A80, max UDMA/133 [ 1.724322] ata1.00: 2930277168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32) [ 1.740339] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 [ 1.740428] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA WDC WD15EARS-00Z 80.0 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 [ 1.746788] scsi 6:0:0:0: CD-ROM ASUS DRW-1608P 1.17 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5 ... [ 1.925981] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 2930277168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.50 TB/1.36 TiB) [ 1.926005] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off [ 1.926007] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 [ 1.926020] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [ 1.926092] sda:sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 40x/40x writer cd/rw xa/form2 cdda tray [ 1.931106] Uniform CD-ROM driver Revision: 3.20 [ 1.931191] sr 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi CD-ROM sr0 ... [ 1.941936] sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 < sda5 sda6 > [ 1.967691] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk [ 1.970938] sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg0 type 0 [ 1.970959] sr 6:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg1 type 5 ... [ 2.500086] EXT4-fs (sda3): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode ... [ 7.150468] EXT4-fs (sda6): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode

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• MS Securily Essentials efficiency / usage, suspicious processes

  - by biggvsdiccvs

  I recently noticed that my (originally pretty fast) Windows 7 Pro laptop started getting slow and using a lot of CPU power for no apparent reason. A full scan by Microsoft Security Essentials revealed nothing. After some investigation, I found multiple instances of a strange process called urpev.exe and a couple of similar exe files sitting in subdirectories of Users//AppData/Roaming (this particular one was in a folder called Xyceowme). Description: "Mescrosift Visaal Studie 2010". Company name: "Mesrosift Corporatien". Is it a virus or something? :) Now, all of these exe files were scheduled to be started from the Task Scheduler by tasks with names like "Security Center Update - 1291373911" and similar. My user name was listed as the author of the tasks. I disabled the tasks, restarted the computer in safe mode and moved all of the exe files to quarantine for further investigation. All of this was done last night. I just scanned the files with Security Essentials again (not updated since yesterday) in the quarantine location and this time it found PWS:Win32/Zbot.gen!plock in urpev.exe (but not in the other exe files, which are most likely viruses, too). Category: Password Stealer Description: This program is dangerous and captures user passwords. Another strange process is browser.exe (not chrome.exe) by Google Inc., described as Google Chrome. I uninstalled Chrome but it's still there. It runs out of Users\\AppData\LocalLow\UIVoice\ToolMedium\browser.exe and if I move it in safe mode, it just reappears there, and multiple instances run. Needless to say, it I kill it, it just runs again. Couldn't see anything in Task Scheduler, but found a couple of references to it in the Registry Editor: HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/LowRegistry/Audio/PolicyConfig/PropertyStore/ HKEY_USERS/S-1-5-21-1685709306-872053864-2599010960-1002/Software/Microsoft/Internet Explorer/LowRegistry/Audio/PolicyConfig/PropertyStore/ Maybe it's a legit process, but seems kind of strange. For the time being, I suspended the process and killed all of the child processes when I booted up the laptop. I used Security Essentials to scan the system periodically, but obviously it's not effective at least against one virus. I had the "real-time protection" turned off. Would it help if it were turned on and how much of a nuisance would it be? I wonder if there is a better alternative to Security Essentials. Over the years I've used multiple antivirus products at home and especially at work and was not very happy with any of them. Apparently, asking for software recommendations or comparisons is taboo here, but I will mention that I installed Malware Bytes and it was able to find an quarantine a bunch of suspicious files, and at least some of which were truly infected, but when it scans the bogus security center update executables from Mesrosift Corporatien, it finds nothing wrong. Also, any thoughts on the browser.exe mystery? Neither MS Security Essentials nor Malware Bytes found anything wrong with that file. However, after I ran a Malware Bytes scan and quarantined everything it found suspicious and rebooted the laptop, the process did not run.

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• Samba4 [homes] share

  - by SambaDrivesMeCrazy

  I am having issues with the [homes] share. OS is Ubuntu 12.04. I've installed samba 4.0.3, bind9 dlz, ntp, winbind, everything but pam modules, and did all the tests from https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_AD_DC_HOWTO. Running getent passwd and getent user work just fine. Creating a simple share works just fine too. I can manage the users, GPOs, and DNS from the windows mmc snap-ins. I can join winxp,7,8 to the domain and log on perfectly. I can change my passwords from windows, etc..etc.. I could say that everything is fine and be happy :) buuuut, no, home directories do not work. Searching in here, and on our good friend google I gathered that a simple [homes] read only = no path = /storage-server/users/ and mapping the user's home folder in dsa.msc to \\server-001\username or \\server-001\homes should get me a home share I could map for my user homedir. But the snap-in give me an error saying that it cannot create the home folder because the network name has not been found (rough translation from portuguese). also, running root@server-001:/storage-server/users# smbclient //server-001/test -Utest%'12345678' -c 'ls' Domain=[MYDOMAIN] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 4.0.3] tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME Server name is alright, if I go for a simple share on the same server it opens just fine. If I map the user homedir to this simple share it works. What I want is that I dont have to go and manually make a new folder on linux everytime I create a new user on windows. It looks like permissions but I cant find any documentation on this (yes I've tried the manpages, but its hard to tell with so many options on man smb.conf alone). My smb.conf right now looks like this (pretty simple I know) # Global parameters [global] workgroup = MYDOMAIN realm = MYDOMAIN.LAN netbios name = SERVER-001 server role = active directory domain controller server services = s3fs, rpc, nbt, wrepl, ldap, cldap, kdc, drepl, winbind, ntp_signd, kcc, dnsupdate [netlogon] path = /usr/local/samba/var/locks/sysvol/mydomain.lan/scripts read only = No [sysvol] path = /usr/local/samba/var/locks/sysvol read only = No [homes] read only = no path = /storage-server/users Folder permissions /storage-server drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Fev 15 15:17 storage-server /storage-server/users drwxrwxrwx 6 root root 4096 Fev 18 17:05 users/ Yes, I was desperate enough to set 777 on the users folder... not proud of it. Any pointers in the right direction would be very welcome. Edited to include: root@server-001:/# wbinfo --user-info=test MYDOMAIN\test:*:3000045:100:test:/home/MYDOMAIN/test:/bin/false root@server-001:/# wbinfo -n test S-1-5-21-1957592451-3401938807-633234758-1128 SID_USER (1) root@server-001:/# id test uid=3000045(MYDOMAIN\test) gid=100(users) grupos=100(users) root@server-001:/# wbinfo -U 3000045 S-1-5-21-1957592451-3401938807-633234758-1128 root@server-001:/# Edit 2: getent passwd | grep test MYDOMAIN\test:*:3000045:100:test:/home/MYDOMAIN/test:/bin/false I have no idea how to change that home folder to /storage-server/users/test so I just went and ln -s /storage-server/users /home/MYDOMAIN just in case. still, no changes, same errors. Edit 3 On log.smbd I get the following error when trying to set the test user home folder to \server-001\test [2013/02/20 14:22:08.446658, 2] ../source3/smbd/service.c:418(create_connection_session_info) user 'MYDOMAIN\Administrator' (from session setup) not permitted to access this share (test)

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• Performance Tuning a High-Load Apache Server

  - by futureal

  I am looking to understand some server performance problems I am seeing with a (for us) heavily loaded web server. The environment is as follows: Debian Lenny (all stable packages + patched to security updates) Apache 2.2.9 PHP 5.2.6 Amazon EC2 large instance The behavior we're seeing is that the web typically feels responsive, but with a slight delay to begin handling a request -- sometimes a fraction of a second, sometimes 2-3 seconds in our peak usage times. The actual load on the server is being reported as very high -- often 10.xx or 20.xx as reported by top. Further, running other things on the server during these times (even vi) is very slow, so the load is definitely up there. Oddly enough Apache remains very responsive, other than that initial delay. We have Apache configured as follows, using prefork: StartServers 5 MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 10 MaxClients 150 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 And KeepAlive as: KeepAlive On MaxKeepAliveRequests 100 KeepAliveTimeout 5 Looking at the server-status page, even at these times of heavy load we are rarely hitting the client cap, usually serving between 80-100 requests and many of those in the keepalive state. That tells me to rule out the initial request slowness as "waiting for a handler" but I may be wrong. Amazon's CloudWatch monitoring tells me that even when our OS is reporting a load of 15, our instance CPU utilization is between 75-80%. Example output from top: top - 15:47:06 up 31 days, 1:38, 8 users, load average: 11.46, 7.10, 6.56 Tasks: 221 total, 28 running, 193 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 66.9%us, 22.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 2.6%id, 3.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.7%si, 4.5%st Mem: 7871900k total, 7850624k used, 21276k free, 68728k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 3750664k cached The majority of the processes look like: 24720 www-data 15 0 202m 26m 4412 S 9 0.3 0:02.97 apache2 24530 www-data 15 0 212m 35m 4544 S 7 0.5 0:03.05 apache2 24846 www-data 15 0 209m 33m 4420 S 7 0.4 0:01.03 apache2 24083 www-data 15 0 211m 35m 4484 S 7 0.5 0:07.14 apache2 24615 www-data 15 0 212m 35m 4404 S 7 0.5 0:02.89 apache2 Example output from vmstat at the same time as the above: procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 8 0 0 215084 68908 3774864 0 0 154 228 5 7 32 12 42 9 6 21 0 198948 68936 3775740 0 0 676 2363 4022 1047 56 16 9 15 23 0 0 169460 68936 3776356 0 0 432 1372 3762 835 76 21 0 0 23 1 0 140412 68936 3776648 0 0 280 0 3157 827 70 25 0 0 20 1 0 115892 68936 3776792 0 0 188 8 2802 532 68 24 0 0 6 1 0 133368 68936 3777780 0 0 752 71 3501 878 67 29 0 1 0 1 0 146656 68944 3778064 0 0 308 2052 3312 850 38 17 19 24 2 0 0 202104 68952 3778140 0 0 28 90 2617 700 44 13 33 5 9 0 0 188960 68956 3778200 0 0 8 0 2226 475 59 17 6 2 3 0 0 166364 68956 3778252 0 0 0 21 2288 386 65 19 1 0 And finally, output from Apache's server-status: Server uptime: 31 days 2 hours 18 minutes 31 seconds Total accesses: 60102946 - Total Traffic: 974.5 GB CPU Usage: u209.62 s75.19 cu0 cs0 - .0106% CPU load 22.4 requests/sec - 380.3 kB/second - 17.0 kB/request 107 requests currently being processed, 6 idle workers C.KKKW..KWWKKWKW.KKKCKK..KKK.KKKK.KK._WK.K.K.KKKKK.K.R.KK..C.C.K K.C.K..WK_K..KKW_CK.WK..W.KKKWKCKCKW.W_KKKKK.KKWKKKW._KKK.CKK... KK_KWKKKWKCKCWKK.KKKCK.......................................... ................................................................ From my limited experience I draw the following conclusions/questions: We may be allowing far too many KeepAlive requests I do see some time spent waiting for IO in the vmstat although not consistently and not a lot (I think?) so I am not sure this is a big concern or not, I am less experienced with vmstat Also in vmstat, I see in some iterations a number of processes waiting to be served, which is what I am attributing the initial page load delay on our web server to, possibly erroneously We serve a mixture of static content (75% or higher) and script content, and the script content is often fairly processor intensive, so finding the right balance between the two is important; long term we want to move statics elsewhere to optimize both servers but our software is not ready for that today I am happy to provide additional information if anybody has any ideas, the other note is that this is a high-availability production installation so I am wary of making tweak after tweak, and is why I haven't played with things like the KeepAlive value myself yet.

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• IBM Server Config questions

  - by Joel Coel

  I have a few questions on a potential server setup. First, the situation: Last year we bought an IBM x3500 server with 2 Xeon E5410's, 9GB RAM, 6 HDDs. The original intent for this server was to replace the old exchange e-mail server. It was brought in, set up, and then shortly after we switched to gmail. Shortly after that my predecessor left for greener pastures, and finally I was hired. So this nice server is now sitting (mostly) idle. This year I have budget again for one server, and of course I want to put this other server to work. I'm thinking about the best use for the two server, and I think I finally have a plan for what I want to do with them. The idea is to use the two newer servers as a pair of VM hosts. I will set up each server with the same 8 VMs, but divide up the load so that only 4 are active per physical host. That means I've normally got 2GB RAM + 2 cores per host. I've done some load testing to pick out what servers to convert to virtual, and chose them so that each host will be capable of handling the entire set of 8 by itself in a pinch with 1 core and 1GB RAM, but would be very taxed to do so. This should take our data center from 13 total servers down to 7. The "servers" I'm replacing are mostly re-purposed desktops, so I'm more than happy to be able to do this. Now it's time to go shopping for the new server. I'd like my two hosts to match as closely as possible, and so I'm looking at IBM again. It also helps that we have some educational matching grant money from IBM that I need to use to help pay for this system (we're a small private college). So finally, (if you're not bored already), we come to my questions: Am I missing anything big or obvious in this plan? I'm a little worried about network performance since the VM hosts will only have 4 nics total where 8 used to be, but I don't think it will be a problem. Is there anything else like this I might be overlooking? Am I making it even too complicated? IBM no longer has a good analog to last year's server. If I want to match the performance (8 cores, 9GB RAM, 1333mhz front side bus, 6 spindles), I have to spend quite a bit more than we paid last year: $2K+, or nearly a 33% cost increase. This only brings a marginal increase in performance. The alternative to stay in budget is to take a hit on the fsb down to 800mhz or cut the number of cores in half, neither of which is attractive. The main cost culprit is the processor. IBM no longer offers the E5410. It's listed as a part, but not available in any of the server configs I've looked at. I'm considering getting the cheapest 800mhz fsb dual core xeon I can configure and then buying the E5410's separately. That's still an extra $350 I wasn't counting on, but that's better than $2K. I want to know what others think of this - will it work or will I end up with the wrong motherboard or some other issue? Am I missing a simple way to configure the server I really want? I don't really intend to do this, but one option to save some money back is to omit the redundant power supply. Since my redundancy plan for these system is to switch over to a completely different host, the extra power isn't fully necessary. That said, it's still very helpful to avoid even short downtimes while I switch over VMs. Has anyone done this?

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• synchronization of file locations between two machines

  - by intuited

  Although similar threads have been asked on this site and its siblings before, I've not managed to glean the answer to this persistent question. Any help is much appreciated. The situation: I've got two laptops; both contain a ton of music. Sometimes I move these music files to different locations, or change the metadata in them, or convert them to a different format. I might do any of these things on either machine. I rarely do all of them at once — ie it's unlikely that I'll convert a file's format and move it to a different location all in one go. I'd like to be able to synchronize these changes without having to sift through everything that was renamed or moved. I'm familiar with rsync but I find it inadequate, because although it can compute checksums, it doesn't have any way to store them. So if a file differs, it can't figure out which side it changed on. This also means that it can't attempt to match a missing file to a new one with the same checksum (ie a move) if the filesize and date are the same, it , so it takes an epoch to do a sync on a large repository. I would like to only check the checksum if the files even if you turn on checksumming, it still doesn't use it intelligently: ie it checksums files even if the sizes differ. IIRC. it's not able to use file metadata as a means of file comparison. this is sort of a wishlist item but it seems doable. I've also looked into rsnapshot, but its requirement to create a full backup is impractical in this situation. I don't need a backup, I just need a record of what file with each hash was where when. Unison seems like it might be able to do something vaguely along these lines, but I'm loathe to spend hours wading through its details only to discover that it's sadly lacking. Plus, it's fun asking questions on here. What I'd like is a tool that does something along these lines: keeps track of file checksums or of actual renames, possibly using inotify to greatly reduce resource consumption/latency stores a database containing this info, along with other pertinencies like the file format and metadata, the actual inode, the filename history, etc. uses this info to provide more-intelligent synchronization with a counterpart on the other side. So for example: if a file has been converted from flac to ogg, but kept the same base filename, or the same metadata, it should be able to send the new version over, and the other side should delete the original. Probably it should actually sequester it somewhere in case they or you screwed up, but that's a detail. And then when the transaction is done, the state is logged so that the next time the two interact they can work out their differences. Maybe all this metadata stuff is a fancy pipe dream. I would actually be pretty happy if there was something out there that could just use checksums in an intelligent way. This would be sort of like having the intelligence of something like git, minus the need to duplicate data in an index/backup/etc (and branching, and checkouts, and all the other great stuff that RCSs do. basically just fast forward commit pushes are all I want, with maybe the option to roll back.) So is there something out there that can do this? If not, can someone suggest a good way to start making it?

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• Performance issues when using SSD for a developer notebook (WAMP/LAMP stack)?

  - by András Szepesházi

  I'm a web application developer using my notebook as a standalone development environment (WAMP stack). I just switched from a Core2-duo Vista 32 bit notebook with 2Gb RAM and SATA HDD, to an i5-2520M Win7 64 bit with 4Gb RAM and 128 GB SDD (Corsair P3 128). My initial experience was what I expected, fast boot, quick load of all the applications (Eclipse takes now 5 seconds as opposed to 30s on my old notebook), overall great experience. Then I started to build up my development stack, both as LAMP (using VirtualBox with a debian guest) and WAMP (windows native apache + mysql + php). I wanted to compare those two. This still all worked great out, then I started to pull in my projects to these stacks. And here came the nasty surprise, one of those projects produced a lot worse response times than on my old notebook (that was true for both the VirtualBox and WAMP stack). Apache, php and mysql configurations were practically identical in all environments. I started to do a lot of benchmarking and profiling, and here is what I've found: All general benchmarks (Performance Test 7.0, HDTune Pro, wPrime2 and some more) gave a big advantage to the new notebook. Nothing surprising here. Disc specific tests showed that read/write operations peaked around 380M/160M for the SSD, and all the different sized block operations also performed very well. Started apache performance benchmarking with Apache Benchmark for a small static html file (10 concurrent threads, 500 iterations). Old notebook: min 47ms, median 111ms, max 156ms New WAMP stack: min 71ms, median 135ms, max 296ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 6ms, median 46ms, max 175ms Right here I don't get why the native WAMP stack performed so bad, but at least the LAMP environment brought the expected speed. Apache performance measurement for non-cached php content. The php runs a loop of 1000 and generates sha1(uniqid()) inisde. Again, 10 concurrent threads, 500 iterations were used for the benchmark. Old notebook: min 0ms, median 39ms, max 218ms New WAMP stack: min 20ms, median 61ms, max 186ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 124ms, median 704ms, max 2463ms What the hell? The new LAMP performed miserably, and even the new native WAMP was outperformed by the old notebook. php + mysql test. The test consists of connecting to a database and reading a single record form a table using INNER JOIN on 3 more (indexed) tables, repeated 100 times within a loop. Databases were identical. 10 concurrent threads, 100 iterations were used for the benchmark. Old notebook: min 1201ms, median 1734ms, max 3728ms New WAMP stack: min 367ms, median 675ms, max 1893ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 1410ms, median 3659ms, max 5045ms And the same test with concurrency set to 1 (instead of 10): Old notebook: min 1201ms, median 1261ms, max 1357ms New WAMP stack: min 399ms, median 483ms, max 539ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 285ms, median 348ms, max 444ms Strictly for my purposes, as I'm using a self contained development environment (= low concurrency) I could be satisfied with the second test's result. Though I have no idea why the VirtualBox environment performed so bad with higher concurrency. Finally I performed a test of including many php files. The application that I mentioned at the beginning, the one that was performing so bad, has a heavy bootstrap, loads hundreds of small library and configuration files while initializing. So this test does nothing else just includes about 100 files. Concurrency set to 1, 100 iterations: Old notebook: min 140ms, median 168ms, max 406ms New WAMP stack: min 434ms, median 488ms, max 604ms New LAMP stack (in VirtualBox): min 413ms, median 1040ms, max 1921ms Even if I consider that VirtualBox reached those files via shared folders, and that slows things down a bit, I still don't see how could the old notebook outperform so heavily both new configurations. And I think this is the real root of the slow performance, as the application uses even more includes, and the whole bootstrap will occur several times within a page request (for each ajax call, for example). To sum it up, here I am with a brand new high-performance notebook that loads the same page in 20 seconds, that my old notebook can do in 5-7 seconds. Needless to say, I'm not a very happy person right now. Why do you think I experience these poor performance values? What are my options to remedy this situation?

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• Set up lnux box for hosting a-z

  - by microchasm

  I am in the process of reinstalling the OS on a machine that will be used to host a couple of apps for our business. The apps will be local only; access from external clients will be via vpn only. The prior setup used a hosting control panel (Plesk) for most of the admin, and I was looking at using another similar piece of software for the reinstall - but I figured I should finally learn how it all works. I can do most of the things the software would do for me, but am unclear on the symbiosis of it all. This is all an attempt to further distance myself from the land of Configuration Programmer/Programmer, if at all possible. I can't find a full walkthrough anywhere for what I'm looking for, so I thought I'd put up this question, and if people can help me on the way I will edit this with the answers, and document my progress/pitfalls. Hopefully someday this will help someone down the line. The details: CentOS 5.5 x86_64 httpd: Apache/2.2.3 mysql: 5.0.77 (to be upgraded) php: 5.1 (to be upgraded) The requirements: SECURITY!! Secure file transfer Secure client access (SSL Certs and CA) Secure data storage Virtualhosts/multiple subdomains Local email would be nice, but not critical The Steps: Download latest CentOS DVD-iso (torrent worked great for me). Install CentOS: While going through the install, I checked the Server Components option thinking I was going to be using another Plesk-like admin. In hindsight, considering I've decided to try to go my own way, this probably wasn't the best idea. Basic config: Setup users, networking/ip address etc. Yum update/upgrade. Upgrade PHP: To upgrade PHP to the latest version, I had to look to another repo outside CentOS. IUS looks great and I'm happy I found it! cd /tmp #wget http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5/x86_64/epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm #rpm -Uvh epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm #wget http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5/x86_64/ius-release-1-4.ius.el5.noarch.rpm #rpm -Uvh ius-release-1-4.ius.el5.noarch.rpm yum list | grep -w \.ius\. [will list all packages available in the IUS repo] rpm -qa | grep php [will list installed packages needed to be removed. the installed packages need to be removed before you can install the IUS packages otherwise there will be conflicts] #yum shell >remove php-gd php-cli php-odbc php-mbstring php-pdo php php-xml php-common php-ldap php-mysql php-imap Setting up Remove Process >install php53 php53-mcrypt php53-mysql php53-cli php53-common php53-ldap php53-imap php53-devel >transaction solve >transaction run Leaving Shell #php -v PHP 5.3.2 (cli) (built: Apr 6 2010 18:13:45) This process removes the old version of PHP and installs the latest. To upgrade mysql: Pretty much the same process as above with PHP #/etc/init.d/mysqld stop [OK] rpm -qa | grep mysql [installed mysql packages] #yum shell >remove mysql mysql-server Setting up Remove Process >install mysql51 mysql51-server mysql51-devel >transaction solve >transaction run Leaving Shell #service mysqld start [OK] #mysql -v Server version: 5.1.42-ius Distributed by The IUS Community Project The above upgrade instructions courtesy of IUS wiki: http://wiki.iuscommunity.org/Doc/ClientUsageGuide Create a chroot jail to hold sftp user via rssh. This will force SCP/SFTP and will circumvent traditional FTP server setup. #cd /tmp #wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rssh/rssh-2.3.2-1.2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm #rpm -ivh rssh-2.3.2-1.2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm #useradd -m -d /home/dev -s /usr/bin/rssh dev #passwd dev Edit /etc/rssh.conf to grant access to SFTP to rssh users. #vi /etc/rssh.conf Uncomment line allowscp This allows me to connect to the machine via SFTP protocol in Transmit (my FTP program of choice; I'm sure it's similar with other FTP apps). Above instructions for SFTP appropriated (with appreciation!) from http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-unix-restrict-shell-access-with-rssh.html And this is where I'm at. I will keep editing this as I make progress. Any tips on how to Configure virtual interfaces/ip based virtual hosts for SSL, setting up a CA, or anything else would be appreciated.

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• "Possible SYN flooding" in log despite low number of SYN_RECV connections

  - by al4

  Recently we had an apache server which was responding very slowly due to SYN flooding. The workaround for this was to enable tcp_syncookies (net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf). I posted a question about this here if you want more background. After enabling syncookies we started seeing the following message in /var/log/messages approximately every 60 seconds: [84440.731929] possible SYN flooding on port 80. Sending cookies. Vinko Vrsalovic informed me that this means the syn backlog is getting full, so I raised tcp_max_syn_backlog to 4096. At some point I also lowered tcp_synack_retries to 3 (down from the default of 5) by issuing sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries=3. After doing this, the frequency seemed to drop, with the interval of the messages varying between roughly 60 and 180 seconds. Next I issued sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog=65536, but am still getting the message in the log. Throughout all this I've been watching the number of connections in SYN_RECV state (by running watch --interval=5 'netstat -tuna |grep "SYN_RECV"|wc -l'), and it never goes higher than about 240, much much lower than the size of the backlog. Yet I have a Red Hat server which hovers around 512 (limit on this server is the default of 1024). Are there any other tcp settings which would limit the size of the backlog or am I barking up the wrong tree? Should the number of SYN_RECV connections in netstat -tuna correlate to the size of the backlog? Update As best I can tell I'm dealing with legitimate connections here, netstat -tuna|wc -l hovers around 5000. I've been researching this today and found this post from a last.fm employee, which has been rather useful. I've also discovered that the tcp_max_syn_backlog has no effect when syncookies are enabled (as per this link) So as a next step I set the following in sysctl.conf: net.ipv4.tcp_syn_retries = 3 # default=5 net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries = 3 # default=5 net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 65536 # default=1024 net.core.wmem_max = 8388608 # default=124928 net.core.rmem_max = 8388608 # default=131071 net.core.somaxconn = 512 # default = 128 net.core.optmem_max = 81920 # default = 20480 I then setup my response time test, ran sysctl -p and disabled syncookies by sysctl -w net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies=0. After doing this the number of connections in the SYN_RECV state still remained around 220-250, but connections were starting to delay again. Once I noticed these delays I re-enabled syncookies and the delays stopped. I believe what I was seeing was still an improvement from the initial state, however some requests were still delayed which is much worse than having syncookies enabled. So it looks like I'm stuck with them enabled until we can get some more servers online to cope with the load. Even then, I'm not sure I see a valid reason to disable them again as they're only sent (apparently) when the server's buffers get full. But the syn backlog doesn't appear to be full with only ~250 connections in the SYN_RECV state! Is it possible that the SYN flooding message is a red herring and it's something other than the syn_backlog that's filling up? If anyone has any other tuning options I haven't tried yet I'd be more than happy to try them out, but I'm starting to wonder if the syn_backlog setting isn't being applied properly for some reason.

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• Hardware recommendations / parts list for a modern, quiet ZFS NAS box - 2011-Feb edition [closed]

  - by dandv

  I want to build some really reliable storage for my data, and it seems that ZFS is the only filesystem at the moment that does live checksumming. That rules out DroboPro, so I'm looking to building a quiet ZFS NAS that would start with 4 2TB or larger hard drives. I'd like this system to be very reliable and relatively future-proof for 2-3 years, so I'm willing to invest some $$$ and buy higher end components. I did see questions here and on other forums about low-cost servers, but I'm not looking for those. I'd be super happy to go for an off-the-shelf solution, but I haven't found one that's quiet. I started doing the research (summarized on my wiki), but I realized that it just gets too complicated for what I know as a software dude, and I'm entering the analysis paralysis area. At this point, I'm basically looking for a parts list for a configuration that will work (and is modern), and I know there are folks around here who are way more competent than me. I've built computers and am comfortable assembling one and messing with *nix; I can follow guides; I just want to end the decision process for the hardware and software configuration. What I've researched so far (not that these are very modern components): Case: I think I've settled on the Antec Twelve Hundred case because it cools well, is quiet, and simply has 12 bays that allow elastic mounting. The SilverStone Raven is its counter-candidate, but I find its construction quite odd. For the PSU, I'm torn between Antec CP-850 and Nexus RX-8500, but I did this research more than a year ago. The Nexus has a very uniform power profile, and I'd rather not have the Antec spin up and down based on load. On the other hand, I'm not sure how often my file server will draw more than 400W under use. For the hard drives, I've read that WD Black drives are actually WD RE3 with a software setting changed. I'd also like to buy different drive types, not just 4 WDs. Recommendations? Right now I have a 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K300. For the motherboard, CPU and RAM I have no idea, other than the RAM must be ECC. I already asked a question here about ECC RAM, but I was misguided and was looking for a motherboard that would support USB 3.0 as well. I've learned to go with eSATA, or worry about USB later. Then there's the (liquid) cooling, Wi-Fi card, and FreeBSD vs. OpenSolaris Express. Lastly, I'm wondering if I can make this PC into a media server by adding a Blu-ray drive and a good sound card. But support for Blu-Ray is spotty on Linux, and I don't know if Windows 7 on VirtualBox would get sufficient hardware access to output HDMI or SPDIFF signals. (Running OpenSolaris virtualized is not an option because of the reliability risk.) Then there are HDCP concerns. Suggestions on that would be appreciated as well, but I don't want us to get sidetracked. A specific shopping list on the core components would be great, so I can start ordering, and in the meantime educate myself with regards to the other issues. Finally, I think this could become a great FAQ for those technically inclined to build their own ZFS server, but confused by the dizzying array of options out there, and I promise to compile the results and share my experience building and benchmarking the server.

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• AWS Load balancer connection reset

  - by joshmmo

  I have an ELB set up with two instances. The issue I have with it is that when I do not add www. to it, the ELB just hangs. This is some info I get when I spider with wget: Spider mode enabled. Check if remote file exists. --2013-06-20 13:40:54-- http://learning.example.com/ Resolving learning.example.com... 54.xxx.x.x53, 50.xx.xxx.x71 Connecting to learning.example.com|54.xxx.x.x53|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... No data received. Retrying. when I add www. it works great. I have a GoDaddy SSL cert that I added to the listener section that covers 3 domains, www.learning.example.com, files.learning.example.com and learning.example.com. These are my listener settings: - HTTP 80 HTTPS 443 N/A N/A - SSL 443 SSL 443 Change canvasNew (Change) My EC2 instances are running apache2 on Ubuntu 12.04. I will be happy to post my vhosts file if needed. However, when I ran the server with the domains pointing to just one EC2 instance things worked fine. How can I fix this issue for learning.example.com? Why does www work just fine? A second question would be what is the difference between instance protocol and load balancer protocol? EDIT: Here are the dig results for learning.example.com from yesterday. I changed the DNS entry to point to one instance to make sure it was the elb. When I switch it back I will do it for www.learning.example.com ; <<>> DiG 9.9.1-P2 <<>> learning.example.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 20210 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;learning.example.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: learning.example.com. 2559 IN CNAME canvas-22222222222.us-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com. canvas-22222222222.us-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com. 60 IN A 54.xxx.x.x53 canvas-22222222222.us-west-1.elb.amazonaws.com. 60 IN A 50.xx.xxx.x71 ;; Query time: 83 msec ;; SERVER: 10.x.xx.20#53(10.x.xx.20) ;; WHEN: Thu Jun 20 13:40:47 2013 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 137 EDIT 2: Here is some more info that might be helpful. Port Configuration: 80 (HTTP) forwarding to 443 (HTTPS) Backend Authentication: Disabled Stickiness: Disabled(edit) 443 (SSL, Certificate: canvasNew) forwarding to 443 (SSL) Backend Authentication: Disabled So I switched everything to one EC2 IP address to bypass the elb to make sure things are working. It's running great. www and the non-www url work perfectly fine. Its only when I switch things to the ELB that learning.example.com hangs and www.learning.example.com works. Hopefully you can get some ideas flowing.

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• RAID controller dropping the wrong drive

  - by bramp

  I've been having an issue with 3ware 9500S-8 RAID 10, and I have contracted their tech support, but I wanted to hear the serverfault community's recommendations. Firstly, all my data is backuped and secure, so I don't mind blowing my RAID away if I have to. But let me describe the problem I've been seeing. A month ago, disk 6 dropped out of the RAID. It is mirrored with disk 7, so I wasn't that bothered. I went to the data centre and replaced it. When I got back to the office, I noticed that disk 6 will still not in the RAID, and in fact the controller was show the name of the old drive still. A week later I went back and replace the drive again, thinking I might have swapped in a bad drive. Still the same problem. I decided to reboot the machine, to see if that would "force" the controller into seeing the new drive. It did, and a rebuild started to happen (from disk 7). Eventually both drives were showing as good. A week later, the MySQL database has flagged the database is corrupt, and is unable to repair it. I don't know what has gone wrong, but I suspected this 6-7 pair. At this point I noticed that the RAID had constantly been verifying itself, over and over. Regardless of this I began to rebuild the database, which took about 19 hours. It's a big database. Near the end of the repair, the RAID controller told me it had dropped disk 7, and that some data was most likely corrupted. I contacted LSI tech support, and they very promptly started to help me. I mentioned that drive 7 had been dropped. They suspect that drive 7 was always at fault, and drive 6 had always been good. I want to know how often a RAID controller would drop the wrong drive (in this case dropping drive 6 a month ago, instead of 7). I foolishly didn't run smartctl on the drives before I started swapping them out. I just assumed the RAID controller knew what it was talking about. I think my plan of action is to replace drive 7, rebuild the array from scratch, double check smartctl on ALL the disks, and then start restoring my data again. I would appreciate anyone's input on what the correct procedure for swapping drives is, and how often failures like this happen. If anyone would like more information then I'd be happy to provide it. thanks in advance. Oh some more information. I'm running CentOS 5.3, with two RAID arrays, a simple RAID 1 for the OS, and RAID 10 for the database. Both arrays are on different controllers. The RAID 10 is made of 10 identical ST3640323AS drives, until I swapped in a SAMSUNG HD103SJ last month.

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• Where is my VMware-ws FreeNAS CIFS(ZFS) bottle-neck?

  - by maka

  Background: I'm building a quiet HTPC + NAS that is also supposed to be used for general computer usage. I'm so far generally happy with things, it was just that I was expecting a little better IO performance. I have no clue if my expectations are unreal. The NAS is there as a general purpose file storage and as a media server for XBMC and other devices. ZFS is a requirement. Question: Where is my bottle-neck, and is there anything I can do config wise, to improve my performance? I'm thinking VM-disk settings could be something but I really have no idea where to go since I'm neither experienced with FreeNAS nor VMware-WS. Tests: When I'm on the host OS and copy files (from the SSD) to the CIFS share, I get around 30 Mbytes/sec read and write. When I'm on my laptop laptop, wired to the network, I get about the same specs. The test I've done are with a 16 GB ISO, and with about 200 MB of RARs and I've tried avoiding the RAM-cache by reading different files than the ones I'm writing ( 10 GB). It feels like having less CPU cores is a lot more efficient, since the resource manager in Windows reports less CPU-usage. With 4 cores in VMware, CPU usage was 50-80%, with 1 core it was 25-60%. EDIT: HD ActiveTime was quite high on SSD so I moved the page file, disabled hibernate and enabled Win DiskCache both on SSD and RAID. This resulted in no real performance difference for one file, but if i transferred 2 files the total speed went up to 50 Mbytes/s vs ~40. The ActiveTime avg also went down a lot (to ~20%) but has now higher bursts. DiskIO is on ~ 30-35 Mbytes/s avgs, with ~100Mb bursts. Network is on 200-250Mbits/s with ~45 active TCP connections. Hardware Asus F2A85-M Pro A10-5700 16GB DDR3 1600 OCZ Vertex 2 128GB SSD 2x Generic 1tb 7200 RPM drives as RAID0 (in win7) Intel Gigabit Desktop CT Software Host OS: Win7 (SSD) VMware Worksation 9 (SSD) FreeNAS 8.3 VM (20GB VDisk on SSD) CPU: I've tried 1, 2 and 4 cores. Virtualisation engine, Preferred mode: Automatic 10,24Gb ram 50Gb SCSI VDisk on the RAID0, VDisk is formatted as ZFS and exposed through CIFS through FreeNAS. NIC Bridge, Replicate physical network state Below are two typical process print-outs while I'm transfering one file to the CIFS share. last pid: 2707; load averages: 0.60, 0.43, 0.24 up 0+00:07:05 00:34:26 32 processes: 2 running, 30 sleeping Mem: 101M Active, 53M Inact, 1620M Wired, 2188K Cache, 149M Buf, 8117M Free Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND 2640 root 1 102 0 50164K 10364K RUN 0:25 25.98% smbd 1897 root 6 44 0 168M 74808K uwait 0:02 0.00% python last pid: 2746; load averages: 0.93, 0.60, 0.33 up 0+00:08:53 00:36:14 33 processes: 2 running, 31 sleeping Mem: 101M Active, 53M Inact, 4722M Wired, 2188K Cache, 152M Buf, 5015M Free Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND 2640 root 1 76 0 50164K 10364K RUN 0:52 16.99% smbd 1897 root 6 44 0 168M 74816K uwait 0:02 0.00% python I'm sorry if my question isn't phrased right, I'm really bad at these kind of things, and it is the first time I post here at SU. I also appreciate any other suggestions to something, I could have missed.

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• Set up lnux box for hosting a-z [apache mysql php ssl]

  - by microchasm

  I am in the process of reinstalling the OS on a machine that will be used to host a couple of apps for our business. The apps will be local only; access from external clients will be via vpn only. The prior setup used a hosting control panel (Plesk) for most of the admin, and I was looking at using another similar piece of software for the reinstall - but I figured I should finally learn how it all works. I can do most of the things the software would do for me, but am unclear on the symbiosis of it all. This is all an attempt to further distance myself from the land of Configuration Programmer/Programmer, if at all possible. I can't find a full walkthrough anywhere for what I'm looking for, so I thought I'd put up this question, and if people can help me on the way I will edit this with the answers, and document my progress/pitfalls. Hopefully someday this will help someone down the line. The details: CentOS 5.5 x86_64 httpd: Apache/2.2.3 mysql: 5.0.77 (to be upgraded) php: 5.1 (to be upgraded) The requirements: SECURITY!! Secure file transfer Secure client access (SSL Certs and CA) Secure data storage Virtualhosts/multiple subdomains Local email would be nice, but not critical The Steps: Download latest CentOS DVD-iso (torrent worked great for me). Install CentOS: While going through the install, I checked the Server Components option thinking I was going to be using another Plesk-like admin. In hindsight, considering I've decided to try to go my own way, this probably wasn't the best idea. Basic config: Setup users, networking/ip address etc. Yum update/upgrade. Upgrade PHP: To upgrade PHP to the latest version, I had to look to another repo outside CentOS. IUS looks great and I'm happy I found it! cd /tmp #wget http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5/x86_64/epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm #rpm -Uvh epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm #wget http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5/x86_64/ius-release-1-4.ius.el5.noarch.rpm #rpm -Uvh ius-release-1-4.ius.el5.noarch.rpm yum list | grep -w \.ius\. [will list all packages available in the IUS repo] rpm -qa | grep php [will list installed packages needed to be removed. the installed packages need to be removed before you can install the IUS packages otherwise there will be conflicts] #yum shell >remove php-gd php-cli php-odbc php-mbstring php-pdo php php-xml php-common php-ldap php-mysql php-imap Setting up Remove Process >install php53 php53-mcrypt php53-mysql php53-cli php53-common php53-ldap php53-imap php53-devel >transaction solve >transaction run Leaving Shell #php -v PHP 5.3.2 (cli) (built: Apr 6 2010 18:13:45) This process removes the old version of PHP and installs the latest. To upgrade mysql: Pretty much the same process as above with PHP #/etc/init.d/mysqld stop [OK] rpm -qa | grep mysql [installed mysql packages] #yum shell >remove mysql mysql-server Setting up Remove Process >install mysql51 mysql51-server mysql51-devel >transaction solve >transaction run Leaving Shell #service mysqld start [OK] #mysql -v Server version: 5.1.42-ius Distributed by The IUS Community Project And this is where I'm at. I will keep editing this as I make progress. Any tips on how to Configure Virtualhosts for SSL, setting up a CA, setting up SFTP with openSSH, or anything else would be appreciated.

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• Please verify my layout: bottom button keeps coming up over keyboard

  - by steff

  Hi everyone, I have a layout which does almost what I want. There's just one bug regarding the button at the bottom. I should stay at the bottom at all times. But whenever I bring up the soft-keyboard the button will be displayed above the keyboard. This is not what I want but it should become covered by the keyboard. Moreover, I'd be happy if you could comment on how the layout's built. Thanks, steff <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <RelativeLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" android:orientation="vertical"> <LinearLayout android:id="@+id/l_layout_tags" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:orientation="horizontal"> <TextView android:text="TAGS:" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" /> <AutoCompleteTextView android:id="@+id/actv_tags" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_weight="1" android:imeOptions="actionDone" /> <ImageButton android:id="@+id/btn_add_tag" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:src="@android:drawable/ic_input_add" android:onClick="addTag"/> </LinearLayout> <ScrollView android:id="@+id/sv_scroll_contents" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_below="@id/l_layout_tags" android:scrollbarFadeDuration="2000" > <TableLayout android:id="@+id/t_layout_contents" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:stretchColumns="1" android:paddingRight="5dip"> <TableRow android:id="@+id/tr_template"> <ImageView android:id="@+id/iv_blank" android:src="@android:color/transparent" /> <EditText android:id="@+id/et_content1" android:gravity="top" android:maxWidth="200dp" android:imeOptions="actionDone" /> </TableRow> </TableLayout> </ScrollView> <LinearLayout android:id="@+id/l_layout_media_btns" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:orientation="horizontal" android:layout_centerHorizontal="true" android:layout_below="@id/sv_scroll_contents" > <ImageButton android:id="@+id/btn_camera" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:src="@android:drawable/ic_menu_camera" android:onClick="takePicture" /> <ImageButton android:id="@+id/btn_video" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:src="@android:drawable/ic_menu_camera" /> <ImageButton android:id="@+id/btn_audio" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:src="@android:drawable/ic_btn_speak_now" /> <ImageButton android:id="@+id/btn_sketch" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:src="@android:drawable/ic_menu_edit" /> </LinearLayout> <ImageButton android:id="@+id/btn_save_note" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:layout_alignParentBottom="true" android:src="@android:drawable/ic_menu_upload" /> </RelativeLayout>

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• Facebook Oauth Logout

  - by Derek Troy-West

  I have an application that integrates with Facebook using Oauth 2. I can authorize with FB and query their REST and Graph APIs perfectly well, but when I authorize an active browser session is created with FB. I can then log-out of my application just fine, but the session with FB persists, so if anyone else uses the browser they will see the previous users FB account (unless the previous user manually logs out of FB also). The steps I take to authorize are: Call [LINK: graph.facebook.com/oauth/authorize?client_id...] This step opens a Facebook login/connect window if the user's browser doesn't already have an active FB session. Once they log-in to facebook they redirect to my site with a code I can exchange for an oauth token. Call [LINK: graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token?client_id..] with the code from (1) Now I have an Oauth Token, and the user's browser is logged into my site, and into FB. I call a bunch of APIs to do stuff: i.e. [LINK: graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=..] Lets say my user wants to log out of my site. The FB terms and conditions demand that I perform Single Sign Off, so when the user logs out of my site, they also are logged out of Facebook. There are arguments that this is a bit daft, but I'm happy to comply if there is any way of actually achieving that. I have seen suggestions that: A. I use the Javascript API to logout: FB.Connect.logout(). Well I tried using that, but it didn't work, and I'm not sure exactly how it could, as I don't use the Javascript API in any way on my site. The session isn't maintained or created by the Javascript API so I'm not sure how it's supposed to expire it either. B. Use [LINK: facebook.com/logout.php]. This was suggested by an admin in the Facebook forums some time ago. The example given related to the old way of getting FB sessions (non-oauth) so I don't think I can apply it in my case. C. Use the old REST api expireSession or revokeAuthorization. I tried both of these and while they do expire the Oauth token they don't invalidate the session that the browser is currently using so it has no effect, the user is not logged out of Facebook. I'm really at a bit of a loose end, the Facebook documentation is patchy, ambiguous and pretty poor. The support on the forums is non-existant, at the moment I can't even log in to the facebook forum, and aside from that, their own FB Connect integration doesn't even work on the forum itself. Doesn't inspire much confidence. Ta for any help you can offer. Derek ps. Had to change HTTPS to LINK, not enough karma to post links which is probably fair enough.

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