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  • Initial Cisco ASA 5510 Config

    - by Brendan ODonnell
    Fair warning, I'm a but of a noob so please bear with me. I'm trying to set up a new ASA 5510. I have a pretty simple set up with one /24 on the inside NATed to a DHCP address on the outside. Everything on the inside works and I can ping the outside interface from external devices. No matter what I do I can't get anything internal to route across the border to the outside and back. To try and eliminate ACL issues as a possibility I added permit any any rules to the incoming access lists on the inside and outside interfaces. I'd appreciate any help I can get. Here's the sh run. : Saved : ASA Version 8.4(3) ! hostname gateway domain-name xxx.local enable password xxx encrypted passwd xxx encrypted names ! interface Ethernet0/0 nameif outside security-level 0 ip address dhcp setroute ! interface Ethernet0/1 nameif inside security-level 100 ip address 10.x.x.x 255.255.255.0 ! interface Ethernet0/2 shutdown no nameif no security-level no ip address ! interface Ethernet0/3 shutdown no nameif no security-level no ip address ! interface Management0/0 nameif management security-level 100 ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 management-only ! ftp mode passive dns domain-lookup inside dns server-group DefaultDNS name-server 10.x.x.x domain-name xxx.local same-security-traffic permit inter-interface same-security-traffic permit intra-interface object network inside-network subnet 10.x.x.x 255.255.255.0 object-group protocol TCPUDP protocol-object udp protocol-object tcp access-list outside_access_in extended permit ip any any access-list inside_access_in extended permit ip any any pager lines 24 logging enable logging buffered informational logging asdm informational mtu management 1500 mtu inside 1500 mtu outside 1500 no failover icmp unreachable rate-limit 1 burst-size 1 icmp permit any inside icmp permit any outside no asdm history enable arp timeout 14400 ! object network inside-network nat (any,outside) dynamic interface access-group inside_access_in in interface inside access-group outside_access_in in interface outside timeout xlate 3:00:00 timeout pat-xlate 0:00:30 timeout conn 1:00:00 half-closed 0:10:00 udp 0:02:00 icmp 0:00:02 timeout sunrpc 0:10:00 h323 0:05:00 h225 1:00:00 mgcp 0:05:00 mgcp-pat 0:05:00 timeout sip 0:30:00 sip_media 0:02:00 sip-invite 0:03:00 sip-disconnect 0:02:00 timeout sip-provisional-media 0:02:00 uauth 0:05:00 absolute timeout tcp-proxy-reassembly 0:01:00 timeout floating-conn 0:00:00 dynamic-access-policy-record DfltAccessPolicy user-identity default-domain LOCAL aaa authentication ssh console LOCAL aaa authentication http console LOCAL http server enable http 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 management http 10.x.x.x 255.255.255.0 inside http authentication-certificate management http authentication-certificate inside no snmp-server location no snmp-server contact snmp-server enable traps snmp authentication linkup linkdown coldstart warmstart telnet timeout 5 ssh 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 management ssh 10.x.x.x 255.255.255.0 inside ssh timeout 5 ssh version 2 console timeout 0 dhcp-client client-id interface outside dhcpd address 192.168.1.2-192.168.1.254 management dhcpd enable management ! threat-detection basic-threat threat-detection statistics access-list no threat-detection statistics tcp-intercept webvpn username xxx password xxx encrypted ! class-map inspection_default match default-inspection-traffic ! ! policy-map type inspect dns preset_dns_map parameters message-length maximum client auto message-length maximum 512 policy-map global_policy class inspection_default inspect dns preset_dns_map inspect ftp inspect h323 h225 inspect h323 ras inspect rsh inspect rtsp inspect esmtp inspect sqlnet inspect skinny inspect sunrpc inspect xdmcp inspect sip inspect netbios inspect tftp inspect ip-options inspect icmp ! service-policy global_policy global prompt hostname context no call-home reporting anonymous Cryptochecksum:fe19874e18fe7107948eb0ada6240bc2 : end no asdm history enable

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  • Google Apps e-mail being rejected from some domains

    - by Paul J. Lucas
    I'm migrating e-mail for my domains to Google Apps' e-mail. Most everything seems to work except e-mail sent to any user at (at least) sonic.net is rejected with a message of the form (where any-address has been substituted for my friend's address): From: Mail Delivery Subsystem <[email protected]> Date: March 11, 2010 10:04:48 AM PST To: [email protected] Subject: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: by 10.229.194.26 with SMTP id dw26cs8717qcb; Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:04:48 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.223.68.143 with SMTP id v15mr3841599fai.62.1268330688325; Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:04:48 -0800 (PST) Received: by 10.223.68.143 with SMTP id v15mr5119424fai.62; Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:04:48 -0800 (PST) Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-Path: <> X-Failed-Recipients: [email protected] Message-Id: <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently: [email protected] Technical details of permanent failure: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 5.1.1 <[email protected]>... No such user here (state 13). And here are the headers from the message it bounces back: Received: by 10.101.90.7 with SMTP id s7mr2515885anl.176.1267979929490; Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:38:49 -0800 (PST) Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from [10.0.1.203] (adsl-76-201-171-194.dsl.pltn13.sbcglobal.net [76.201.171.194]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id 4sm1046550yxd.70.2010.03.07.08.38.48 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5); Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:38:49 -0800 (PST) From: "Paul J. Lucas" <[email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: Some fascinating subject Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 08:38:46 -0800 References: <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Message-Id: <[email protected]> Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v1077) X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.1077) However, I am able to send mail to a user at sonic.net using my old e-mail account. Also, my company uses Google Apps for e-mail and I can send e-mail to a user at sonic.net from my company. The differences between my personal e-mail and my company's are: My company's domain has no SPF record whereas mine does. My company's domain has an A record whereas mine does not. My SPF record initially was as prescribed by Google here. However, this guy claims Google is wrong and gives a fix. I've tried it both ways with no difference. My SPF record is currently: v=spf1 mx include:aspmx.googlemail.com include:_spf.google.com ~all As for the lack of an A record, you wouldn't think that a mail host would care about that so long as mx records are defined. However, the funny thing is that if you look at the error message, why does Google state that the recipient's domain stated that there is "No such user here" for my address? That makes no sense. Of course there is no user having my address at sonic.net. Also, I assume that I just discovered that I can't send mail to users at sonic.net by accident and that there are probably other domains I can't send e-mail to. So... anybody have any idea what's going on? And how I can get mail to users at sonic.net?

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  • Varnish POST problem "9 FetchError c backend write error: 11" for application/x-www-form-urlencoded content

    - by ompap
    Cutting a longish story short, we have managed to get a more precise error out of Varnishlog. Varnishlog tells us that we are sending a 31 TxRequest - POST 31 TxHeader - Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded but we are getting 9 FetchError c backend write error: 11 31 BackendClose - [backend name] 9 VCL_call c error 9 VCL_return c deliver 9 Length c 488 9 VCL_call c deliver 9 VCL_return c deliver 9 TxProtocol c HTTP/1.1 9 TxStatus c 503 We still do not know what this is exactly, but apparently Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded is not getting through as it should. Help still needed, please! Original message below. The title was "Varnish not letting Joomla users to log in - 503 guru meditation error", but I changed it to get more attention to the problem and not to the symptoms. Hello, We have a production site for a local newspaper which is currently behind an Apache reverse proxy, basicly the site on one server and the other being reserved as a reverse proxy only (well, there is more but that has no relevance here). Apache as a reverse proxy works, but could be faster. We want to change the reverse proxy to use Varnish instead of Apache on an Ubuntu 10.4 Server. The Varnish is version 2.10 installed directly from Ubuntu repos. Ubuntu 10.4 uses PHP 5.3.2. For anonymous surfers the site works wonderfully with Varnish. So far we can get very good speed out of Varnish, we just have a few problems with logging in or out. The big one is, that the users cannot log in: they get a Varnish 503 error page every time. The logs do not reveal the cause. It feels as if the request would never leave Varnish. So we are merely guessing - not a strong starting point. We have gone through what has been suggested on various plces on the web. We have increased the timeouts to backend xxx { .host = "xxx.xx"; .port = "http"; .connect_timeout = 60s; .first_byte_timeout = 60s; .between_bytes_timeout = 60s; } but we seem to get the 503 guru error page much faster than that, as in approx. 5 seconds. We have increased the Varnish headers size to 128 in daemon. In vcl_recv we have if (req.http.Authenticate || req.http.Authorization) { return(pass); } and in vcl_fetch ## auhtentication handling if (req.http.Authenticate || req.http.Authorization) { return(pass); } We do not strip cookies. We have tried to make sure that error pages are not cached. As said above, we cannot see anything in the backend Apache logs, apparently it never gets asked for Joomla user authentication. Varnish does not seem to get much mentioning with connection to Joomla. (We cannot dump Joomla, that selection has been done and we just have to live with what we have been given) Has anyone a working Varnish - Joomla combination? Thanks for reading. Please help. We need some hints - desperately. Any suggestions? ompap

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  • My Thoughts On the Xbox 180

    - by Chris Gardner
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/freestylecoding/archive/2013/06/21/my-thoughts-on-the-xbox-180.aspx Everyone seems to be putting their 0.00237 cents into the wishing well over Microsoft's recent decision to reverse the DRM policy on the Xbox One. However, there have been a few issues that nobody has touched. As such, I have decided to dig 0.00237 cents out of my pocket. First, let me be clear about this point. I do not support the decision to reverse the DRM policy on the Xbox One. I wanted that point to be expressed first and unambiguously. I will say it again. I do not support the decision to reverse the DRM policy on the Xbox One. Now that I have that out of the way, let me go into my rationale. This decision removes most of the cool features that enticed me to pre-order the console. No, I didn't cancel my pre-order. There is still five months before the release of the console, and there is still a plethora of information that we, as consumers, do not have. With that, it should be noted that much of the talk in this post is speculation and rhetoric. I do not have any insider information that you do not possess. The persistent connection would have allowed the console to do many of the functions for which we have been begging. That demo where someone was playing Ryse, seamlessly accepted a multiplayer challenge in Killer Instinct, played the match (and a rematch,) and then jumped back into Ryse. That's gone, if you bought the game on disc. The new, DRM free system will require the disc in the system to play a game. That bullet point where one Xbox Live account could have up to 10 slave accounts so families could play together, no matter where they were located. That's gone as well. The promise of huge, expansive, dynamically changing worlds that was brought to us with the power of cloud computing. Well, "the people" didn't want there to be a forced, persistent connection. As such, developers can't rely on a connection and, as such, that feature is gone. This is akin to the removal of the hard drive on the Xbox 360. The list continues, but the enthusiast press has enumerated the list far better than I wish. All of this is because the Xbox team saw the HUGE success of Steam and decided to borrow a few ideas. Yes, Steam. The service that everyone hated for the first six months (for the same reasons the Xbox One is getting flack.) There was an initial growing pain. However, it is now lauded as the way games distribution should be handled. Unless you are Microsoft. I do find it curious that many of the features were originally announced for the PS4 during its unveiling. However, much of that was left strangely absent for Sony's E3 press conference. Instead, we received a single, static slide that basically said the exact opposite of Microsoft's plans. It is not farfetched to believe that slide came into existence during the approximately seven hours between the two media briefings. The thing that majorly annoys me over this whole kerfuffle is that the single thing that caused the call to arms is, really, not an issue. Microsoft never said they were going to block used sales. They said it was up to the publisher to make that decision. This would have allowed publishers to reclaim some of the costs of development in subsequent sales of the product. If you sell your game to GameStop for 7 USD, GameStop is going to sell it for 55 USD. That is 48 USD pure profit for them. Some publishers asked GameStop for a small cut. Was this a huge, money grubbing scheme? Well, yes, but the idea was that they have to handle server infrastructure for dormant accounts, etc. Of course, GameStop flatly refused, and the Online Pass was born. Fortunately, this trend didn’t last, and most publishers have stopped the practice. The ability to sell "licenses" has already begun to be challenged. Are you living in the EU? If so, companies must allow you to sell digital property. With this precedent in place, it's only a matter of time before other areas follow suit. If GameStop were smart, they should have immediately contacted every publisher out there to get the rights to become a clearing house for these licenses. Then, they keep their business model and could reduce their brick and mortar footprint. The digital landscape is changing. We need to not block this process. As Seth MacFarlane best said "Some issues are so important that you should drag people kicking and screaming." I believe this was said on an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher about the issue of Gay Marriages. Much like the original source, this is an issue that we need to drag people to the correct, progressive position. Microsoft, as a company, actually has the resources to weather the transition period. They have a great pool of first and second party developers that can leverage this new framework to prove the validity. Over time, the third party developers will get excited to use these tools. As an old C++ guy, I resisted C# for years. Now, I think it's one of the best languages I've ever used. I have a server room and a Co-Lo full of servers, so I originally didn't see the value in Azure. Now, I wish I could move every one of my projects into the cloud. I still LOVE getting physical packaging, which my music and games collection will proudly attest. However, I have started to see the value in pure digital, and have found ways to integrate this into the ways I consume those products. I can, honestly, understand how some parts of the population would be very apprehensive about this new landscape. There were valid arguments about people with no internet access. There are ways to combat these problems. These methods do not require us to throw the baby out with the bathwater. However, the number of people in the computer industry that I have seen cry foul is truly appalling. We are the forward looking people that help show how technology can improve people's lives. If we can't see the value of the brief pain involved with an exciting new ecosystem, than who will?

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  • Have I pushed the limits of my current VPS or is there room for optimization?

    - by JRameau
    I am currently on a mediatemple DV server (basic) 512mb dedicated ram, this is a CentOS based VPS with Plesk and Virtuozzo. My experience with it from day 1 has been bad and I only could sooth my server issues with several caching "Band-aids," but my sites are not as small as they were a year ago either so the issues have worsen. I have 3 Drupal installs running on separate (plesk) domains, 1 of those drupal installs is a multisite, that consists of 5-6 sites 2 of those sites are bringing in actual traffic. Those caching "Band-aids" I mentioned are APC, which seemed to help alot initially, and Drupal's Boost, which is considered a poorman's Varnish, it makes all my pages static for anonymous users. Last 30day combined estimate on Google Ananlytics: 90k visitors 260k pageviews. Issue: alot of downtime, I am continually checking if my sites are up, and lately I have been finding it down more than 3 times daily. Restarting Apache will bring it back up, for some time. I have google search every error message and looked up ways to optimize my DV server, and I am beyond stump what is my next move. Is this server bad, have I hit a impossibly low restriction such as the 12mb kernel memory barrier (kmemsize), is it on my end, do I need to optimize some more? *I have provided as much information as I can below, any help or suggestions given will be appreciated Common Error messages I see in the log: [error] (12)Cannot allocate memory: fork: Unable to fork new process [error] make_obcallback: could not import mod_python.apache.\n Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/mod_python/apache.py", line 21, in ? import traceback File "/usr/lib/python2.4/traceback.py", line 3, in ? import linecache ImportError: No module named linecache [error] python_handler: no interpreter callback found. [warn-phpd] mmap cache can't open /var/www/vhosts/***/httpdocs/*** - Too many open files in system (pid ***) [alert] Child 8125 returned a Fatal error... Apache is exiting! [emerg] (43)Identifier removed: couldn't grab the accept mutex [emerg] (22)Invalid argument: couldn't release the accept mutex cat /proc/user_beancounters: Version: 2.5 uid resource held maxheld barrier limit failcnt 41548: kmemsize 4582652 5306699 12288832 13517715 21105036 lockedpages 0 0 600 600 0 privvmpages 38151 42676 229036 249036 0 shmpages 16274 16274 17237 17237 2 dummy 0 0 0 0 0 numproc 43 46 300 300 0 physpages 27260 29528 0 2147483647 0 vmguarpages 0 0 131072 2147483647 0 oomguarpages 27270 29538 131072 2147483647 0 numtcpsock 21 29 300 300 0 numflock 8 8 480 528 0 numpty 1 1 30 30 0 numsiginfo 0 1 1024 1024 0 tcpsndbuf 648440 675272 2867477 4096277 1711499 tcprcvbuf 301620 359716 2867477 4096277 0 othersockbuf 4472 4472 1433738 2662538 0 dgramrcvbuf 0 0 1433738 1433738 0 numothersock 12 12 300 300 0 dcachesize 0 0 2684271 2764800 0 numfile 3447 3496 6300 6300 3872 dummy 0 0 0 0 0 dummy 0 0 0 0 0 dummy 0 0 0 0 0 numiptent 14 14 200 200 0 TOP: (In January the load avg was really high 3-10, I was able to bring it down where it is currently is by giving APC more memory play around with) top - 16:46:07 up 2:13, 1 user, load average: 0.34, 0.20, 0.20 Tasks: 40 total, 2 running, 37 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie Cpu(s): 0.3% us, 0.1% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.7% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 916144k total, 156668k used, 759476k free, 0k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 0k cached MySQLTuner: (after optimizing every table and repairing any table with overage I got the fragmented count down to 86) [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 285M (Tables: 1105) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 86 [--] Up for: 2h 44m 38s (409K q [41.421 qps], 6K conn, TX: 1B, RX: 174M) [--] Reads / Writes: 79% / 21% [--] Total buffers: 58.0M global + 2.7M per thread (100 max threads) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 675307 [!!] Temporary tables created on disk: 35% (7K on disk / 20K total)

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  • Blank black screen with cursor after login -- RHEL5

    - by Sean O.
    I have a RHEL 5 machine here which is a Dell Precision T3500. I'm an Ubuntu guy, but I'm having a heck of a time with this machine. After processing its first security update, we cannot log in via the gdm greeter. A new kernel was installed; then I installed the nVidia drivers for our Quadro NVS 295. I know the X configuration is valid because the gdm greeter does display; however, upon login all we can get is a blank, black screen with a cursor. I thought perhaps our python installation was corrupted but a reinstall via yum has not helped. I have searched & googled extensively for a potential fix for this and can find nothing. Below are outputs from uname, a tail of an error in /var/log/messages, and the Xorg.conf. Can anyone suggest a course of action? [sean@cheetah ~]$ uname -a Linux cheetah.*.* 2.6.18-308.8.1.el5 #1 SMP Fri May 4 16:43:02 EDT 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux [sean@cheetah ~]$ sudo tail /var/log/messages Jun 5 15:03:04 cheetah gconfd (sean-4592): Resolved address "xml:readonly:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.defaults" to a read-only configuration source at position 2 Jun 5 15:03:05 cheetah hcid[3855]: Default passkey agent (:1.8, /org/bluez/applet) registered Jun 5 15:03:05 cheetah pcscd: winscard.c:304:SCardConnect() Reader E-Gate 0 0 Not Found Jun 5 15:03:05 cheetah last message repeated 2 times Jun 5 15:03:06 cheetah gconfd (sean-4592): Resolved address "xml:readwrite:/home/sean/.gconf" to a writable configuration source at position 0 Jun 5 15:03:06 cheetah setroubleshoot: [program.ERROR] exception ImportError: /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_assertion_message_expr Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/sealert", line 952, in ? from setroubleshoot.gui_utils import * File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/setroubleshoot/gui_utils.py", line 26, in ? import gtk File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py", line 48, in ? from gtk import _gtk ImportError: /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_assertion_message_expr Jun 5 15:03:07 cheetah setroubleshoot: [program.ERROR] exception ImportError: /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_assertion_message_expr Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/bin/sealert", line 952, in ? from setroubleshoot.gui_utils import * File "/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/setroubleshoot/gui_utils.py", line 26, in ? import gtk File "/usr/lib64/python2.4/site-packages/gtk-2.0/gtk/__init__.py", line 48, in ? from gtk import _gtk ImportError: /usr/lib/libatk-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol: g_assertion_message_expr Jun 5 15:03:08 cheetah pcscd: winscard.c:304:SCardConnect() Reader E-Gate 0 0 Not Found Jun 5 15:07:01 cheetah ntpd[4114]: synchronized to 64.16.211.38, stratum 3 Jun 5 15:07:01 cheetah ntpd[4114]: kernel time sync enabled 0001 [sean@cheetah ~]$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf # nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig # nvidia-xconfig: version 295.53 ([email protected]) Sat May 12 00:34:20 PDT 2012 # Xorg configuration created by system-config-display Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "single head configuration" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer" InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard" EndSection Section "InputDevice" # generated from default Identifier "Mouse0" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no" Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" EndSection Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Keyboard0" Driver "kbd" Option "XkbModel" "pc105" Option "XkbLayout" "us" EndSection Section "Monitor" ### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC: ### Comment all HorizSync and VertSync values to use DDC: Identifier "Monitor0" ModelName "LCD Panel 1600x1200" HorizSync 31.5 - 74.7 VertRefresh 56.0 - 65.0 Option "dpms" EndSection Section "Device" Identifier "Videocard0" Driver "nvidia" EndSection Section "Screen" Identifier "Screen0" Device "Videocard0" Monitor "Monitor0" DefaultDepth 24 SubSection "Display" Viewport 0 0 Depth 24 EndSubSection EndSection

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  • Troubleshooting inconsistent ODBC connectivity

    - by Chris
    I'm attempting to integrate UPS WorldShip with a SQL Server 2008 R2 database but the connection is very inconsistent. UPS claims this is a DSN/Windows problem and I have not been able to convince them otherwise. The integration is quite simple: my shipping guy clicks a button which opens a form where he enters an order #. After pressing enter the shipping information will be pulled from the database for that order #. The problem is that WorldShip often times thinks the DSN does not exist. However, I am able to open WorldShip's customization tool and browse all the tables and fields in the database my DSN is connected to which means at the very least my DSN does, in fact, exist. The reason this has been so difficult to troubleshoot is because there is no consistency to the problem and I'm not able to reliably repeat any behavior. That is to say that rebooting the PC doesn't cause the connection to break and opening the integration tool and viewing the tables and fields doesn't cause the integration button to work. Is there some way for me to monitor this connection from the SQL server or get any clues as to why it fails? As requested by TallTed here is a sample of the trace file I created. After a mere 5 hours the trace file was over 130MB so there's no way I could provide it in its entirety. WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLSetStmtAttrW with return code -1 (SQL_ERROR) SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1227 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1227] SQLINTEGER -5 DIAG [IM006] [Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Driver's SQLSetConnectAttr failed (0) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLAllocHandle SQLSMALLINT 3 <SQL_HANDLE_STMT> SQLHANDLE 0x0C662FC0 SQLHANDLE * 0x03EBCE38 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLAllocHandle with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) SQLSMALLINT 3 <SQL_HANDLE_STMT> SQLHANDLE 0x0C662FC0 SQLHANDLE * 0x03EBCE38 ( 0x0C6632A0) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLSetStmtAttrW SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 0 <SQL_ATTR_QUERY_TIMEOUT> SQLPOINTER 30 SQLINTEGER -5 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLSetStmtAttrW with return code -1 (SQL_ERROR) SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 0 <SQL_ATTR_QUERY_TIMEOUT> SQLPOINTER 30 SQLINTEGER -5 DIAG [HYC00] [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver]Optional feature not implemented (106) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLGetDiagFieldW SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLGetDiagFieldW with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 (10) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLGetInfoW HDBC 0x0C662FC0 UWORD 77 <SQL_DRIVER_ODBC_VER> PTR 0x03EBCEDC SWORD 100 SWORD * 0x0028E290 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLGetInfoW with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) HDBC 0x0C662FC0 UWORD 77 <SQL_DRIVER_ODBC_VER> PTR 0x03EBCEDC [ 10] "03.51" SWORD 100 SWORD * 0x0028E290 (10) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLSetStmtAttrW SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1228 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1228] SQLINTEGER -5 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLSetStmtAttrW with return code -1 (SQL_ERROR) SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1228 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1228] SQLINTEGER -5 DIAG [HY092] [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver]Invalid attribute/option identifier (86) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLGetDiagFieldW SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLGetDiagFieldW with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 (10) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLSetStmtAttrW SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1227 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1227] SQLINTEGER -5 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLSetStmtAttrW with return code -1 (SQL_ERROR) SQLHSTMT 0x0C6632A0 SQLINTEGER 1227 <unknown> SQLPOINTER [Unknown attribute 1227] SQLINTEGER -5 DIAG [HY092] [Microsoft][ODBC Microsoft Access Driver]Invalid attribute/option identifier (86) WorldShipTD d94-690 ENTER SQLGetDiagFieldW SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 WorldShipTD d94-690 EXIT SQLGetDiagFieldW with return code 0 (SQL_SUCCESS) SQLSMALLINT 3 SQLHANDLE 0x0C6632A0 SQLSMALLINT 1 SQLSMALLINT 4 SQLPOINTER 0x00520708 SQLSMALLINT 12 SQLSMALLINT * 0x0028E2A8 (10)

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  • T-SQL Tuesday #31 - Logging Tricks with CONTEXT_INFO

    - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)
    This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Aaron Nelson [b | t], fellow Atlantan (the city in Georgia, not the famous sunken city, or the resort in the Bahamas) and covers the topic of logging (the recording of information, not the harvesting of trees) and maintains the fine T-SQL Tuesday tradition begun by Adam Machanic [b | t] (the SQL Server guru, not the guy who fixes cars, check the spelling again, there will be a quiz later). This is a trick I learned from Fernando Guerrero [b | t] waaaaaay back during the PASS Summit 2004 in sunny, hurricane-infested Orlando, during his session on Secret SQL Server (not sure if that's the correct title, and I haven't used parentheses in this paragraph yet).  CONTEXT_INFO is a neat little feature that's existed since SQL Server 2000 and perhaps even earlier.  It lets you assign data to the current session/connection, and maintains that data until you disconnect or change it.  In addition to the CONTEXT_INFO() function, you can also query the context_info column in sys.dm_exec_sessions, or even sysprocesses if you're still running SQL Server 2000, if you need to see it for another session. While you're limited to 128 bytes, one big advantage that CONTEXT_INFO has is that it's independent of any transactions.  If you've ever logged to a table in a transaction and then lost messages when it rolled back, you can understand how aggravating it can be.  CONTEXT_INFO also survives across multiple SQL batches (GO separators) in the same connection, so for those of you who were going to suggest "just log to a table variable, they don't get rolled back":  HA-HA, I GOT YOU!  Since GO starts a new batch all variable declarations are lost. Here's a simple example I recently used at work.  I had to test database mirroring configurations for disaster recovery scenarios and measure the network throughput.  I also needed to log how long it took for the script to run and include the mirror settings for the database in question.  I decided to use AdventureWorks as my database model, and Adam Machanic's Big Adventure script to provide a fairly large workload that's repeatable and easily scalable.  My test would consist of several copies of AdventureWorks running the Big Adventure script while I mirrored the databases (or not). Since Adam's script contains several batches, I decided CONTEXT_INFO would have to be used.  As it turns out, I only needed to grab the start time at the beginning, I could get the rest of the data at the end of the process.   The code is pretty small: declare @time binary(128)=cast(getdate() as binary(8)) set context_info @time   ... rest of Big Adventure code ...   go use master; insert mirror_test(server,role,partner,db,state,safety,start,duration) select @@servername, mirroring_role_desc, mirroring_partner_instance, db_name(database_id), mirroring_state_desc, mirroring_safety_level_desc, cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime), datediff(s,cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime),getdate()) from sys.database_mirroring where db_name(database_id) like 'Adv%';   I declared @time as a binary(128) since CONTEXT_INFO is defined that way.  I couldn't convert GETDATE() to binary(128) as it would pad the first 120 bytes as 0x00.  To keep the CAST functions simple and avoid using SUBSTRING, I decided to CAST GETDATE() as binary(8) and let SQL Server do the implicit conversion.  It's not the safest way perhaps, but it works on my machine. :) As I mentioned earlier, you can query system views for sessions and get their CONTEXT_INFO.  With a little boilerplate code this can be used to monitor long-running procedures, in case you need to kill a process, or are just curious  how long certain parts take.  In this example, I added code to Adam's Big Adventure script to set CONTEXT_INFO messages at strategic places I want to monitor.  (His code is in UPPERCASE as it was in the original, mine is all lowercase): declare @msg binary(128) set @msg=cast('Altering bigProduct.ProductID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ALTER COLUMN ProductID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg1 binary(128) set @msg1=cast('Adding pk_bigProduct Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg1 go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigProduct PRIMARY KEY (ProductID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg2 binary(128) set @msg2=cast('Altering bigTransactionHistory.TransactionID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg2 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ALTER COLUMN TransactionID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg3 binary(128) set @msg3=cast('Adding pk_bigTransactionHistory Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg3 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigTransactionHistory PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED(TransactionID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg4 binary(128) set @msg4=cast('Creating IX_ProductId_TransactionDate Index' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg4 go CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ProductId_TransactionDate ON bigTransactionHistory(ProductId,TransactionDate) INCLUDE(Quantity,ActualCost) GO set context_info 0x0   This doesn't include the entire script, only those portions that altered a table or created an index.  One annoyance is that SET CONTEXT_INFO requires a literal or variable, you can't use an expression.  And since GO starts a new batch I need to declare a variable in each one.  And of course I have to use CAST because it won't implicitly convert varchar to binary.  And even though context_info is a nullable column, you can't SET CONTEXT_INFO NULL, so I have to use SET CONTEXT_INFO 0x0 to clear the message after the statement completes.  And if you're thinking of turning this into a UDF, you can't, although a stored procedure would work. So what does all this aggravation get you?  As the code runs, if I want to see which stage the session is at, I can run the following (assuming SPID 51 is the one I want): select CAST(context_info as varchar(128)) from sys.dm_exec_sessions where session_id=51   Since SQL Server 2005 introduced the new system and dynamic management views (DMVs) there's not as much need for tagging a session with these kinds of messages.  You can get the session start time and currently executing statement from them, and neatly presented if you use Adam's sp_whoisactive utility (and you absolutely should be using it).  Of course you can always use xp_cmdshell, a CLR function, or some other tricks to log information outside of a SQL transaction.  All the same, I've used this trick to monitor long-running reports at a previous job, and I still think CONTEXT_INFO is a great feature, especially if you're still using SQL Server 2000 or want to supplement your instrumentation.  If you'd like an exercise, consider adding the system time to the messages in the last example, and an automated job to query and parse it from the system tables.  That would let you track how long each statement ran without having to run Profiler. #TSQL2sDay

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  • Ubuntu 10.04: OpenVZ Kernel and pure-ftpd issues on HOST (no guest setup yet)

    - by Seidr
    After compiling and installing the OpenVZ flavour of kernel under Ubuntu 10.04, I am unable to browse to certain directories when connecting to the pure-ftpd server. The clients are dropping into PASSIVE mode, which is fine. This behaviour was happening before the change of kernel, however now when I browse to certain directories the connection just gets dropped. This only happens with a few directories under one login (web in specific), where as with another login it happens as soon as I connect. I've got the nf_conntrack_ftp kernel module installed (required to keep track of passive FTP connections as I understand, and an alias of the ip_conntrack_ftp module), however this has provided no alleviation of my problem. This module was actually required upon initial setup of my OS to get passive FTP working correctly, however when I compiled the OpenVZ kernel a lot of these modules were missing (iptables, conntrack etc). I recompiled the kernel with the missing modules, but to no effect. I've turned verbosity for the pure-ftpd server up, and still no clues have been spotted in either syslog or the transfer log. Neither did an strace provide any clues (that I could discern anyway) - although one strange thing is both in the output to the client and in the strace I notice that it does infact probe the directory and return the number of matches - it just fails after that. One more thing to mention is that if I FTP using the same credentials locally, everything works fine. This suggests that it is in fact an issue with either the conntrack_ftp module not functioning as expected, or a deeper networking issue. The Kernel was compiled and installed following the instructions at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OpenVZ - bar the changes to the Kernel configuration (such as add iptables as a module). Below is an example of the log sent to the data (under FileZilla). Status: Resolving address of xxxx.co.uk Status: Connecting to 78.46.xxx.xxx:21... Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message... Response: 220---------- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [privsep] [TLS] ---------- Response: 220-You are user number 4 of 10 allowed. Response: 220-Local time is now 08:52. Server port: 21. Response: 220-This is a private system - No anonymous login Response: 220-IPv6 connections are also welcome on this server. Response: 220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity. Command: USER xxx Response: 331 User xxx OK. Password required Command: PASS ******** Response: 230-User xxx has group access to: client1 sshusers Response: 230 OK. Current restricted directory is / Command: OPTS UTF8 ON Response: 200 OK, UTF-8 enabled Status: Connected Status: Retrieving directory listing... Command: PWD Response: 257 "/" is your current location Status: Directory listing successful Status: Retrieving directory listing... Command: CWD /web Response: 250 OK. Current directory is /web Command: TYPE I Response: 200 TYPE is now 8-bit binary Command: PORT 10,0,2,30,14,143 Response: 500 I won't open a connection to 10.0.2.30 (only to 188.220.xxx.xxx) Command: PASV Response: 227 Entering Passive Mode (78,46,79,147,234,110) Command: MLSD Response: 150 Accepted data connection Response: 226-ASCII Response: 226-Options: -a -l Response: 226 57 matches total Error: Could not read from transfer socket: ECONNRESET - Connection reset by peer Error: Failed to retrieve directory listing Any suggestions please? I'm willing to try anything!

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  • Beginner’s Guide to Flock, the Social Media Browser

    - by Asian Angel
    Are you wanting a browser that can work as a social hub from the first moment that you start it up? If you love the idea of a browser that is ready to go out of the box then join us as we look at Flock. During the Install Process When you are installing Flock there are two install windows that you should watch for. The first one lets you choose between the “Express Setup & Custom Setup”. We recommend the “Custom Setup”. Once you have selected the “Custom Setup” you can choose which of the following options will enabled. Notice the “anonymous usage statistics” option at the bottom…you can choose to leave this enabled or disable it based on your comfort level. The First Look When you start Flock up for the first time it will open with three tabs. All three are of interest…especially if this is your first time using Flock. With the first tab you can jump right into “logging in/activating” favorite social services within Flock. This page is set to display each time that you open Flock unless you deselect the option in the lower left corner. The second tab provides a very nice overview of Flock and its’ built-in social management power. The third and final page can be considered a “Personal Page”. You can make some changes to the content displayed for quick and easy access and/or monitoring “Twitter Search, Favorite Feeds, Favorite Media, Friend Activity, & Favorite Sites”. Use the “Widget Menu” in the upper left corner to select the “Personal Page Components” that you would like to use. In the upper right corner there is a built-in “Search Bar” and buttons for “Posting to Your Blog & Uploading Media”. To help personalize the “My World Page” just a bit more you can even change the text to your name or whatever best suits your needs. The Flock Toolbar The “Flock Toolbar” is full of social account management goodness. In order from left to right the buttons are: My World (Homepage), Open People Sidebar, Open Media Bar, Open Feeds Sidebar, Webmail, Open Favorites Sidebar, Open Accounts and Services Sidebar, Open Web Clipboard Sidebar, Open Blog Editor, & Open Photo Uploader. The buttons will be “highlighted” with a blue background to help indicate which area you are in. The first area will display a listing of people that you are watching/following at the services shown here. Clicking on the “Media Bar Button” will display the following “Media Slider Bar” above your “Tab Bar”. Notice that there is a built-in “Search Bar” on the right side. Any photos, etc. clicked on will be opened in the currently focused tab below the “Media Bar”. Here is a listing of the “Media Streams” available for viewing. By default Flock will come with a small selection of pre-subscribed RSS Feeds. You can easily unsubscribe, rearrange, add custom folders, or non-categorized feeds as desired. RSS Feeds subscribed to here can be viewed combined together as a single feed (clickable links) in the “My World Page”. or can be viewed individually in a new tab. Very nice! Next on the “Flock Toolbar is the “Webmail Button”. You can set up access to your favorite “Yahoo!, Gmail, & AOL Mail” accounts from here. The “Favorites Sidebar” combines your “Browser History & Bookmarks” into one convenient location. The “Accounts and Services Sidebar” gives you quick and easy access to get logged into your favorite social accounts. Clicking on any of the links will open that particular service’s login page in a new tab. Want to store items such as photos, links, and text to add into a blog post or tweet later on? Just drag and drop them into the “Web Clipboard Sidebar” for later access. Clicking on the “Blog Editor Button” will open up a separate blogging window to compose your posts in. If you have not logged into or set up an account yet in Flock you will see the following message window. The “Blogging Window”…nice, simple, and straightforward. If you are not already logged into your photo account(s) then you will see the following message window when you click on the “Photo Uploader Button”. Clicking “OK” will open the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” with compatible photo services highlighted in a light yellow color. Log in to your favorite service to start uploading all those great images. After Setting Up Here is what our browser looked like after setting up some of our favorite services. The Twitter feed is certainly looking nice and easy to read through… Some tweaking in the “RSS Feeds Sidebar” makes for a perfect reading experience. Keeping up with our e-mail is certainly easy to do too. A look back at the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” shows that all of our accounts are actively logged in (green dot on the right side). Going back to our “My World Page” you can see how nice everything looks for monitoring our “Friend Activity & Favorite Feeds”. Moving on to regular browsing everything is looking very good… Flock is a perfect choice for anyone wanting a browser and social hub all built into a single app. Conclusion Anyone who loves keeping up with their favorite social services while browsing will find using Flock to be a wonderful experience. You literally get the best of both worlds with this browser. Links Download Flock The Official Flock Extensions Homepage The Official Flock Toolbar Homepage Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow to use an ISO image on Ubuntu LinuxAdvertise on How-To GeekFixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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  • Microsoft Business Intelligence Seminar 2011

    - by DavidWimbush
    I was lucky enough to attend the maiden presentation of this at Microsoft Reading yesterday. It was pretty gripping stuff not only because of what was said but also because of what could only be hinted at. Here's what I took away from the day. (Disclaimer: I'm not a BI guru, just a reasonably experienced BI developer, so I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted a few things. Particularly when so much of the talk was about the vision and subtle hints of what is coming. Please comment if you think I've got anything wrong. I'm also not going to even try to cover Master Data Services as I struggled to imagine how you would actually use it.) I was a bit worried when I learned that the whole day was going to be presented by one guy but Rafal Lukawiecki is a very engaging speaker. He's going to be presenting this about 20 times around the world over the coming months. If you get a chance to hear him speak, I say go for it. No doubt some of the hints will become clearer as Denali gets closer to RTM. Firstly, things are definitely happening in the SQL Server Reporting and BI world. Traditionally IT would build a data warehouse, then cubes on top of that, and then publish them in a structured and controlled way. But, just as with many IT projects in general, by the time it's finished the business has moved on and the system no longer meets their requirements. This not sustainable and something more agile is needed but there has to be some control. Apparently we're going to be hearing the catchphrase 'Balancing agility with control' a lot. More users want more access to more data. Can they define what they want? Of course not, but they'll recognise it when they see it. It's estimated that only 28% of potential BI users have meaningful access to the data they need, so there is a real pent-up demand. The answer looks like: give them some self-service tools so they can experiment and see what works, and then IT can help to support the results. It's estimated that 32% of Excel users are comfortable with its analysis tools such as pivot tables. It's the power user's preferred tool. Why fight it? That's why PowerPivot is an Excel add-in and that's why they released a Data Mining add-in for it as well. It does appear that the strategy is going to be to use Reporting Services (in SharePoint mode), PowerPivot, and possibly something new (smiles and hints but no details) to create reports and explore data. Everything will be published and managed in SharePoint which gives users the ability to mash-up, share and socialise what they've found out. SharePoint also gives IT tools to understand what people are looking at and where to concentrate effort. If PowerPivot report X becomes widely used, it's time to check that it shows what they think it does and perhaps get it a bit more under central control. There was more SharePoint detail that went slightly over my head regarding where Excel Services and Excel Web Application fit in, the differences between them, and the suggestion that it is likely they will one day become one (but not in the immediate future). That basic pattern is set to be expanded upon by further exploiting Vertipaq (the columnar indexing engine that enables PowerPivot to store and process a lot of data fast and in a small memory footprint) to provide scalability 'from the desktop to the data centre', and some yet to be detailed advances in 'frictionless deployment' (part of which is about making the difference between local and the cloud pretty much irrelevant). Excel looks like becoming Microsoft's primary BI client. It already has: the ability to consume cubes strong visualisation tools slicers (which are part of Excel not PowerPivot) a data mining add-in PowerPivot A major hurdle for self-service BI is presenting the data in a consumable format. You can't just give users PowerPivot and a server with a copy of the OLTP database(s). Building cubes is labour intensive and doesn't always give the user what they need. This is where the BI Semantic Model (BISM) comes in. I gather it's a layer of metadata you define that can combine multiple data sources (and types of data source) into a clear 'interface' that users can work with. It comes with a new query language called DAX. SSAS cubes are unlikely to go away overnight because, with their pre-calculated results, they are still the most efficient way to work with really big data sets. A few other random titbits that came up: Reporting Services is going to get some good new stuff in Denali. Keep an eye on www.projectbotticelli.com for the slides. You can also view last year's seminar sessions which covered a lot of the same ground as far as the overall strategy is concerned. They plan to add more material as Denali's features are publicly exposed. Check out the PASS keynote address for a showing of Yahoo's SQL BI servers. Apparently they wheeled the rack out on stage still plugged in and running! Check out the Excel 2010 Data Mining Add-Ins. 32 bit only at present but 64 bit is on the way. There are lots of data sets, many of them free, at the Windows Azure Marketplace Data Market (where you can also get ESRI shape files). If you haven't already seen it, have a look at the Silverlight Pivot Viewer (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/29/silverlight-pivotviewer-now-available.aspx). The Bing Maps Data Connector is worth a look if you're into spatial stuff (http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/07/13/data-connector-sql-server-2008-spatial-amp-bing-maps.aspx).  

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  • T-SQL Tuesday #31 - Logging Tricks with CONTEXT_INFO

    - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)
    This month's T-SQL Tuesday is being hosted by Aaron Nelson [b | t], fellow Atlantan (the city in Georgia, not the famous sunken city, or the resort in the Bahamas) and covers the topic of logging (the recording of information, not the harvesting of trees) and maintains the fine T-SQL Tuesday tradition begun by Adam Machanic [b | t] (the SQL Server guru, not the guy who fixes cars, check the spelling again, there will be a quiz later). This is a trick I learned from Fernando Guerrero [b | t] waaaaaay back during the PASS Summit 2004 in sunny, hurricane-infested Orlando, during his session on Secret SQL Server (not sure if that's the correct title, and I haven't used parentheses in this paragraph yet).  CONTEXT_INFO is a neat little feature that's existed since SQL Server 2000 and perhaps even earlier.  It lets you assign data to the current session/connection, and maintains that data until you disconnect or change it.  In addition to the CONTEXT_INFO() function, you can also query the context_info column in sys.dm_exec_sessions, or even sysprocesses if you're still running SQL Server 2000, if you need to see it for another session. While you're limited to 128 bytes, one big advantage that CONTEXT_INFO has is that it's independent of any transactions.  If you've ever logged to a table in a transaction and then lost messages when it rolled back, you can understand how aggravating it can be.  CONTEXT_INFO also survives across multiple SQL batches (GO separators) in the same connection, so for those of you who were going to suggest "just log to a table variable, they don't get rolled back":  HA-HA, I GOT YOU!  Since GO starts a new batch all variable declarations are lost. Here's a simple example I recently used at work.  I had to test database mirroring configurations for disaster recovery scenarios and measure the network throughput.  I also needed to log how long it took for the script to run and include the mirror settings for the database in question.  I decided to use AdventureWorks as my database model, and Adam Machanic's Big Adventure script to provide a fairly large workload that's repeatable and easily scalable.  My test would consist of several copies of AdventureWorks running the Big Adventure script while I mirrored the databases (or not). Since Adam's script contains several batches, I decided CONTEXT_INFO would have to be used.  As it turns out, I only needed to grab the start time at the beginning, I could get the rest of the data at the end of the process.   The code is pretty small: declare @time binary(128)=cast(getdate() as binary(8)) set context_info @time   ... rest of Big Adventure code ...   go use master; insert mirror_test(server,role,partner,db,state,safety,start,duration) select @@servername, mirroring_role_desc, mirroring_partner_instance, db_name(database_id), mirroring_state_desc, mirroring_safety_level_desc, cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime), datediff(s,cast(cast(context_info() as binary(8)) as datetime),getdate()) from sys.database_mirroring where db_name(database_id) like 'Adv%';   I declared @time as a binary(128) since CONTEXT_INFO is defined that way.  I couldn't convert GETDATE() to binary(128) as it would pad the first 120 bytes as 0x00.  To keep the CAST functions simple and avoid using SUBSTRING, I decided to CAST GETDATE() as binary(8) and let SQL Server do the implicit conversion.  It's not the safest way perhaps, but it works on my machine. :) As I mentioned earlier, you can query system views for sessions and get their CONTEXT_INFO.  With a little boilerplate code this can be used to monitor long-running procedures, in case you need to kill a process, or are just curious  how long certain parts take.  In this example, I added code to Adam's Big Adventure script to set CONTEXT_INFO messages at strategic places I want to monitor.  (His code is in UPPERCASE as it was in the original, mine is all lowercase): declare @msg binary(128) set @msg=cast('Altering bigProduct.ProductID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ALTER COLUMN ProductID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg1 binary(128) set @msg1=cast('Adding pk_bigProduct Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg1 go ALTER TABLE bigProduct ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigProduct PRIMARY KEY (ProductID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg2 binary(128) set @msg2=cast('Altering bigTransactionHistory.TransactionID' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg2 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ALTER COLUMN TransactionID INT NOT NULL GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg3 binary(128) set @msg3=cast('Adding pk_bigTransactionHistory Constraint' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg3 go ALTER TABLE bigTransactionHistory ADD CONSTRAINT pk_bigTransactionHistory PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED(TransactionID) GO set context_info 0x0 go declare @msg4 binary(128) set @msg4=cast('Creating IX_ProductId_TransactionDate Index' as binary(128)) set context_info @msg4 go CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX IX_ProductId_TransactionDate ON bigTransactionHistory(ProductId,TransactionDate) INCLUDE(Quantity,ActualCost) GO set context_info 0x0   This doesn't include the entire script, only those portions that altered a table or created an index.  One annoyance is that SET CONTEXT_INFO requires a literal or variable, you can't use an expression.  And since GO starts a new batch I need to declare a variable in each one.  And of course I have to use CAST because it won't implicitly convert varchar to binary.  And even though context_info is a nullable column, you can't SET CONTEXT_INFO NULL, so I have to use SET CONTEXT_INFO 0x0 to clear the message after the statement completes.  And if you're thinking of turning this into a UDF, you can't, although a stored procedure would work. So what does all this aggravation get you?  As the code runs, if I want to see which stage the session is at, I can run the following (assuming SPID 51 is the one I want): select CAST(context_info as varchar(128)) from sys.dm_exec_sessions where session_id=51   Since SQL Server 2005 introduced the new system and dynamic management views (DMVs) there's not as much need for tagging a session with these kinds of messages.  You can get the session start time and currently executing statement from them, and neatly presented if you use Adam's sp_whoisactive utility (and you absolutely should be using it).  Of course you can always use xp_cmdshell, a CLR function, or some other tricks to log information outside of a SQL transaction.  All the same, I've used this trick to monitor long-running reports at a previous job, and I still think CONTEXT_INFO is a great feature, especially if you're still using SQL Server 2000 or want to supplement your instrumentation.  If you'd like an exercise, consider adding the system time to the messages in the last example, and an automated job to query and parse it from the system tables.  That would let you track how long each statement ran without having to run Profiler. #TSQL2sDay

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  • Single-Signon options for Exchange 2010

    - by freiheit
    We're working on a project to migrate employee email from Unix/open-source (courier IMAP, exim, squirrelmail, etc) to Exchange 2010, and trying to figure out options for single-signon for Outlook Web Access. So far all the options I've found are very ugly and "unsupportable", and may simply not work with Forefront. We already have JA-SIG CAS for token-based single-signon and Shibboleth for SAML. Users are directed to a simple in-house portal (a Perl CGI, really) that they use to sign in to most stuff. We have an HA OpenLDAP cluster that's already synchronized against another AD domain and will be synchronized with the AD domain Exchange will be using. CAS authenticates against LDAP. The portal authenticates against CAS. Shibboleth authenticates with CAS but pulls additional data from LDAP. We're moving in the direction of having web services authenticate against CAS or Shibboleth. (Students are already on SAML/Shibboleth authenticated Google Apps for Education) With Squirrelmail we have a horrible hack linked to from that portal page that authenticates against CAS, gets your original plaintext password (yes, I know, evil), and gives you an HTTP form pre-filled with all the necessary squirrelmail login details with javaScript onLoad stuff to immediately submit the form. Trying to find out exactly what is possible with Exchange/OWA seems to be difficult. "CAS" is both the acronym for our single-signon server and an Exchange component. From what I've been able to tell there's an addon for Exchange that does SAML, but only for federating things like free/busy calendar info, not authenticating users. Plus it costs additional money so there's no way to experiment with it to see if it can be coaxed into doing what we want. Our plans for the Exchange cluster involve Forefront Threat Management Gateway (the new ISA) in the DMZ front-ending the CAS servers. So, the real question: Has anybody managed to make Exchange authenticate with CAS (token-based single-signon) or SAML, or with something I can reasonably likely make authenticate with one of those (such as anything that will accept apache's authentication)? With Forefront? Failing that, anybody have some tips on convincing OWA Forms Based Authentication (FBA) into letting us somehow "pre-login" the user? (log in as them and pass back cookies to the user, or giving the user a pre-filled form that autosubmits like we do with squirrelmail). This is the least-favorite option for a number of reasons, but it would (just barely) satisfy our requirements. From what I hear from the guy implementing Forefront, we may have to set OWA to basic authentication and do forms in Forefront for authentication, so it's possible this isn't even possible. I did find CasOwa, but it only mentions Exchange 2007, looks kinda scary, and as near as I can tell is mostly the same OWA FBA hack I was considering slightly more integrated with the CAS server. It also didn't look like many people had had much success with it. And it may not work with Forefront. There's also "CASifying Outlook Web Access 2", but that one scares me, too, and involves setting up a complex proxy config, which seems more likely to break. And, again, doesn't look like it would work with Forefront. Am I missing something with Exchange SAML (OWA Federated whatchamacallit) where it is possible to configure to do user authentication and not just free/busy access authorization?

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, July 02, 2013Popular ReleasesMastersign.Expressions: Mastersign.Expressions v0.4.2: added support for if(<cond>, <true-part>, <false-part>) fixed multithreading issue with rand() improved demo applicationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module: NB_Store v2.3.6 Rel0: v2.3.6 Is now DNN6 and DNN7 compatible Important : During update this install with overwrite the menu.xml setting, if you have changed this then make a backup before you upgrade and reapply your changes after the upgrade. Please view the following documentation if you are installing and configuring this module for the first time System Requirements Skill requirements Downloads and documents Step by step guide to a working store Please ask all questions in the Discussions tab. Document.Editor: 2013.26: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.26: New Insert Chart Improved User Interface Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsWsus Package Publisher: Release V1.2.1307.01: Fix an issue in the UI, approvals are not shown correctly in the 'Report' tabDirectX Tool Kit: July 2013: July 1, 2013 VS 2013 Preview projects added and updates for DirectXMath 3.05 vectorcall Added use of sRGB WIC metadata for JPEG, PNG, and TIFF SaveToWIC functions updated with new optional setCustomProps parameter and error check with optional targetFormatCore Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: new_root.zip: Verison 1.0JSON Toolkit: JSON Toolkit 4.1.736: Improved strinfigy performance New serializing feature New anonymous type support in constructorsDotNetNuke® IFrame: IFrame 04.05.00: New DNN6/7 Manifest file and Azure Compatibility.VidCoder: 1.5.2 Beta: Fixed crash on presets with an invalid bitrate.Gardens Point LEX: Gardens Point LEX version 1.2.1: The main distribution is a zip file. This contains the binary executable, documentation, source code and the examples. ChangesVersion 1.2.1 has new facilities for defining and manipulating character classes. These changes make the construction of large Unicode character classes more convenient. The runtime code for performing automaton backup has been re-implemented, and is now faster for scanners that need backup. Source CodeThe distribution contains a complete VS2010 project for the appli...ZXMAK2: Version 2.7.5.7: - fix TZX emulation (Bruce Lee, Zynaps) - fix ATM 16 colors for border - add memory module PROFI 512K; add PROFI V03 rom image; fix PROFI 3.XX configTwitter image Downloader: Twitter Image Downloader 2 with Installer: Application file with Install shield and Dot Net 4.0 redistributableUltimate Music Tagger: Ultimate Music Tagger 1.0.0.0: First release of Ultimate Music TaggerBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.2: 2013.06.28 Ver5.9.2 (1) ??????????(????SMTP?????)?????????? (2) HTTPS???????????Outlook 2013 Add-In: Configuration Form: This new version includes the following changes: - Refactored code a bit. - Removing configuration from main form to gain more space to display items. - Moved configuration to separate form. You can click the little "gear" icon to access the configuration form (still very simple). - Added option to show past day appointments from the selected day (previous in time, that is). - Added some tooltips. You will have to uninstall the previous version (add/remove programs) if you had installed it ...Terminals: Version 3.0 - Release: Changes since version 2.0:Choose 100% portable or installed version Removed connection warning when running RDP 8 (Windows 8) client Fixed Active directory search Extended Active directory search by LDAP filters Fixed single instance mode when running on Windows Terminal server Merged usage of Tags and Groups Added columns sorting option in tables No UAC prompts on Windows 7 Completely new file persistence data layer New MS SQL persistence layer (Store data in SQL database)...NuGet: NuGet 2.6: Released June 26, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.6Python Tools for Visual Studio: 2.0 Beta: We’re pleased to announce the release of Python Tools for Visual Studio 2.0 Beta. Python Tools for Visual Studio (PTVS) is an open-source plug-in for Visual Studio which supports programming with the Python language. PTVS supports a broad range of features including CPython/IronPython, Edit/Intellisense/Debug/Profile, Cloud, HPC, IPython, and cross platform debugging support. For a quick overview of the general IDE experience, please watch this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuewiStN...Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows 8 and WP8 (v1.3 beta): Preview: New MPEG DASH adaptive streaming plugin for Windows Azure Media Services Preview: New Ultraviolet CFF plugin. Preview: New WP7 version with WP8 compatibility. (source code only) Source code is now available via CodePlex Git Misc bug fixes and improvements: WP8 only: Added optional fullscreen and mute buttons to default xaml JS only: protecting currentTime from returning infinity. Some videos would cause currentTime to be infinity which could cause errors in plugins expectin...AssaultCube Reloaded: 2.5.8: SERVER OWNERS: note that the default maprot has changed once again. Linux has Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit precompiled binaries and Ubuntu 10.10 64-bit precompiled binaries, but you can compile your own as it also contains the source. If you are using Mac or other operating systems, please wait while we continue to try to package for those OSes. Or better yet, try to compile it. If it fails, download a virtual machine. The server pack is ready for both Windows and Linux, but you might need to compi...New ProjectsALM Rangers DevOps Tooling and Guidance: Practical tooling and guidance that will enable teams to realize a faster deployment based on continuous feedback.Core Server 2012 Powershell Script Hyper-v Manager: Free core Server 2012 powershell scripts and batch files that replace the non-existent hyper-v manager, vmconnect and mstsc.Enhanced Deployment Service (EDS): EDS is a web service based utility designed to extend the deployment capabilities of administrators with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit.ExtendedDialogBox: Libreria DialogBoxJazdy: This project is here only because we wanted to take advantage of a public git server.Mon Examen: This web interface is meant to make examinationsneet: summaryOrchard Multi-Choice Voting: A multiple choice voting Orchard module.Particle Swarm Optimization Solving Quadratic Assignment Problem: This project is submitted for the solving of QAP using PSO algorithms with addition of some modification Porjects: 23123123PPL Power Pack: PPL Power PackProperty Builder: Visual Studio tool for speeding up process of coding class properties getters and setters.RedRuler for Redline: I tried some on-screen rulers, none of them help me measure the UI element quickly based on the Redline. So I decided to created this handy RedRuler tool. Royale Living: Mahindra Royale Community PortalSearch and booking Hotel or Tours: Ð? án nghiên c?u c?a sinh viên tdt theo mô hình mvc 4SystemBuilder.Show: This tool is a helper after you create your project in visual studio to create the respective objects and interface. TalentDesk: new ptojectTcmplex: The Training Center teaches many different kind of course such as English, French, Computer hardware and computer softwareTFS Reporting Guide: Provides guidance and samples to enable TFS users to generate reports based on WIT data.Umbraco AdaptiveImages: Adaptive Images Package for UmbracoVirtualNet - A ILcode interpreter/emulator written in C++/Assembly: VirtualNet is a interpreter/emulator for running .net code in native without having to install the .Net FrameWorkVisual Blocks: Visual Blocks ????IDE ????? ??????? ????? ????/?? Visual Studio and Cloud Based Mobile Device Testing: Practical guidance enabling field to remove blockers to adoption and to use and extend the Perfecto Mobile Cloud Device testing within the context of VS.Windows 8 Time Picker for Windows Phone: A Windows Phone implementation of the Time Picker control found in the Windows 8.1 Alarms app.???? - SmallBasic?: ?????????

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  • Issues with Verizon's "Network Extender" device talking on my home network.

    - by Logan
    I recently switched my phone service to Verizon from ATT, and I get somewhat spotty service in my house. I called them and they sent me a "network extender" device for free. Its a femtocell that connects to my home network. The directions that come with it are very dumbed down, basically just say to connect it to your router and put it near a window (so it can get a GPS signal, it has to make sure its within the correct area before operating). The problem I'm having is the network light on it stays red. The troubleshooting information that came with it tells me this means there is a bad network connection. Its connected through an ASUS router running DD-WRT. No other devices on my network have a problem with it, including a Western Digital WDLIVE device, mine and my wife's cell phones (via wifi), a Wii, and an Xbox. If I connect the device directly to my cable modem, the light goes blue (which means good) and it starts working. So this tells me that its definately a configuration issue with my router. Verizon basically washed their hands of me when I connected it to my cable modem, and told me that its a router issue and to try a different router. Because normal people just have extra routers laying around their houses... When I connect it to the router, I can watch the DHCP Clients list on the status page, and the MAC of the network extender quickly fills up the clients list, grabbing every available DHCP address. Its like it grabs an address, can't connect to the internet, releases it, grabs another, then another, then another. So in the DHCP server settings I assigned a static IP to its MAC. This made it quit doing what it was doing before, but its still not working. I found the ports I needed to open on verizon's website, and opened them in the port forwarding config on my router. This still didn't help. So, I tried setting the network extender device's IP as the DMZ IP on the router. This still did no good. I called Verizon back and got the tech to write up a report which he passed on to a "senior network tech" who I got a call back from a few hours ago. This guy told me that while an ASUS router isn't listed as a supported device, he's not really sure why its not working. He suggested restoring the firmware to stock ASUS firmware and trying again. I have a very hard time believing its DD-WRT doing this, since every other device is working just fine with it. But its also not the Network Extender, since it works just fine when connected directly to the modem. At this point I'm out of ideas, and the next step is to restore the stock firmware on my router, and then going to walmart and getting a linksys WRT-54G to try. Is there anything else I could try before going that drastic? Cliffs- -Network extender won't work behind router, works when connected directly to cable modem. -Extender goes nuts when allowed to pick its own DHCP address, I had to assign it a static IP. -Won't work when correct ports are forwarded to it -Won't work with a DMZ address.

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  • Source-control 'wet-work'?

    - by Phil Factor
    When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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  • Agile Like Jazz

    - by Jeff Certain
    (I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so now, thinking that it needed to be tightened up a bit to make it less rambling. Since that’s clearly not going to happen, reader beware!) I had the privilege of spending around 90 minutes last night sitting and listening to Sonny Rollins play a concert at the Disney Center in LA. If you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is, I don’t know how to explain the experience; if you know who he is, I don’t need to. Suffice it to say that he has been recording professionally for over 50 years, and helped create an entire genre of music. A true master by any definition. One of the most intriguing aspects of a concert like this, however, is watching the master step aside and let the rest of the musicians play. Not just play their parts, but really play… letting them take over the spotlight, to strut their stuff, to soak up enthusiastic applause from the crowd. Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that Sonny Rollins has been doing this for more than a half-century. Maybe it has something to do with a kind of patience you learn when you’re on the far side of 80 – and the man can still blow a mean sax for 90 minutes without stopping! Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was out there for the love of the music and the love of the show, not because he had anything to prove to anyone and, I like to think, not for the money. Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that, when you’re at that level of mastery, the other musicians are going to be good. Really good. Whatever the reasons, there was a incredible freedom on that stage – the ability to improvise, for each musician to showcase their own specialization and skills, and them come back to the common theme, back to being on the same page, as it were. All this took place in the same venue that is home to the L.A. Phil. Somehow, I can’t ever see the same kind of free-wheeling improvisation happening in that context. And, since I’m a geek, I started thinking about agility. Rollins has put together a quintet that reflects his own particular style and past. No upright bass or piano for Rollins – drums, bongos, electric guitar and bass guitar along with his sax. It’s not about the mix of instruments. Other trios, quartets, and sextets use different mixes of instruments. New Orleans jazz tends towards trombones instead of sax; some prefer cornet or trumpet. But no matter what the choice of instruments, size matters. Team sizes are something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We’re on a quest to rethink how our teams are organized. They just feel too big, too unwieldy. In fact, they really don’t feel like teams at all. Most of the time, they feel more like collections or people who happen to report to the same manager. I attribute this to a couple factors. One is over-specialization; we have a tendency to have people work in silos. Although the teams are product-focused, within them our developers are both generalists and specialists. On the one hand, we expect them to be able to build an entire vertical slice of the application; on the other hand, each developer tends to be responsible for the vertical slice. As a result, developers often work on their own piece of the puzzle, in isolation. This sort of feels like working on a jigsaw in a group – each person taking a set of colors and piecing them together to reveal a portion of the overall picture. But what inevitably happens when you go to meld all those pieces together? Inevitably, you have some sections that are too big to move easily. These sections end up falling apart under their own weight as you try to move them. Not only that, but there are other challenges – figuring out where that section fits, and how to tie it into the rest of the puzzle. Often, this is when you find a few pieces need to be added – these pieces are “glue,” if you will. The other issue that arises is due to the overhead of maintaining communications in a team. My mother, who worked in IT for around 30 years, once told me that 20% per team member is a good rule of thumb for maintaining communication. While this is a rule of thumb, it seems to imply that any team over about 6 people is going to become less agile simple because of the communications burden. Teams of ten or twelve seem like they fall into the philharmonic organizational model. Complicated pieces of music requiring dozens of players to all be on the same page requires a much different model than the jazz quintet. There’s much less room for improvisation, originality or freedom. (There are probably orchestral musicians who will take exception to this characterization; I’m calling it like I see it from the cheap seats.) And, there’s one guy up front who is running the show, whose job is to keep all of those dozens of players on the same page, to facilitate communications. Somehow, the orchestral model doesn’t feel much like a self-organizing team, either. The first violin may be the best violinist in the orchestra, but they don’t get to perform free-wheeling solos. I’ve never heard of an orchestra getting together for a jam session. But I have heard of teams that organize their work based on the developers available, rather than organizing the developers based on the work required. I have heard of teams where desired functionality is deferred – or worse yet, schedules are missed – because one critical person doesn’t have any bandwidth available. I’ve heard of teams where people simply don’t have the big picture, because there is too much communication overhead for everyone to be aware of everything that is happening on a project. I once heard Paul Rayner say something to the effect of “you have a process that is perfectly designed to give you exactly the results you have.” Given a choice, I want a process that’s much more like jazz than orchestral music. I want a process that doesn’t burden me with lots of forms and checkboxes and stuff. Give me the simplest, most lightweight process that will work – and a smaller team of the best developers I can find. This seems like the kind of process that will get the kind of result I want to be part of.

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  • The Faces in the Crowdsourcing

    - by Applications User Experience
    By Jeff Sauro, Principal Usability Engineer, Oracle Imagine having access to a global workforce of hundreds of thousands of people who can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately. Distributing simple tasks not easily done by computers to the masses is called "crowdsourcing" and until recently was an interesting concept, but due to practical constraints wasn't used often. Enter Amazon.com. For five years, Amazon has hosted a service called Mechanical Turk, which provides an easy interface to the crowds. The service has almost half a million registered, global users performing a quarter of a million human intelligence tasks (HITs). HITs are submitted by individuals and companies in the U.S. and pay from $.01 for simple tasks (such as determining if a picture is offensive) to several dollars (for tasks like transcribing audio). What do we know about the people who toil away in this digital crowd? Can we rely on the work done in this anonymous marketplace? A rendering of the actual Mechanical Turk (from Wikipedia) Knowing who is behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is fitting, considering the history of the actual Mechanical Turk. In the late 1800's, a mechanical chess-playing machine awed crowds as it beat master chess players in what was thought to be a mechanical miracle. It turned out that the creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, had a small person (also a chess master) hiding inside the machine operating the arms to provide the illusion of automation. The field of human computer interaction (HCI) is quite familiar with gathering user input and incorporating it into all stages of the design process. It makes sense then that Mechanical Turk was a popular discussion topic at the recent Computer Human Interaction usability conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery in Atlanta. It is already being used as a source for input on Web sites (for example, Feedbackarmy.com) and behavioral research studies. Two papers shed some light on the faces in this crowd. One paper tells us about the shifting demographics from mostly stay-at-home moms to young men in India. The second paper discusses the reliability and quality of work from the workers. Just who exactly would spend time doing tasks for pennies? In "Who are the crowdworkers?" University of California researchers Ross, Silberman, Zaldivar and Tomlinson conducted a survey of Mechanical Turk worker demographics and compared it to a similar survey done two years before. The initial survey reported workers consisting largely of young, well-educated women living in the U.S. with annual household incomes above $40,000. The more recent survey reveals a shift in demographics largely driven by an influx of workers from India. Indian workers went from 5% to over 30% of the crowd, and this block is largely male (two-thirds) with a higher average education than U.S. workers, and 64% report an annual income of less than $10,000 (keeping in mind $1 has a lot more purchasing power in India). This shifting demographic certainly has implications as language and culture can play critical roles in the outcome of HITs. Of course, the demographic data came from paying Turkers $.10 to fill out a survey, so there is some question about both a self-selection bias (characteristics which cause Turks to take this survey may be unrepresentative of the larger population), not to mention whether we can really trust the data we get from the crowd. Crowds can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately for usability testing. (Photo attributed to victoriapeckham Flikr While having immediate access to a global workforce is nice, one major problem with Mechanical Turk is the incentive structure. Individuals and companies that deploy HITs want quality responses for a low price. Workers, on the other hand, want to complete the task and get paid as quickly as possible, so that they can get on to the next task. Since many HITs on Mechanical Turk are surveys, how valid and reliable are these results? How do we know whether workers are just rushing through the multiple-choice responses haphazardly answering? In "Are your participants gaming the system?" researchers at Carnegie Mellon (Downs, Holbrook, Sheng and Cranor) set up an experiment to find out what percentage of their workers were just in it for the money. The authors set up a 30-minute HIT (one of the more lengthy ones for Mechanical Turk) and offered a very high $4 to those who qualified and $.20 to those who did not. As part of the HIT, workers were asked to read an email and respond to two questions that determined whether workers were likely rushing through the HIT and not answering conscientiously. One question was simple and took little effort, while the second question required a bit more work to find the answer. Workers were led to believe other factors than these two questions were the qualifying aspect of the HIT. Of the 2000 participants, roughly 1200 (or 61%) answered both questions correctly. Eighty-eight percent answered the easy question correctly, and 64% answered the difficult question correctly. In other words, about 12% of the crowd were gaming the system, not paying enough attention to the question or making careless errors. Up to about 40% won't put in more than a modest effort to get paid for a HIT. Young men and those that considered themselves in the financial industry tended to be the most likely to try to game the system. There wasn't a breakdown by country, but given the demographic information from the first article, we could infer that many of these young men come from India, which makes language and other cultural differences a factor. These articles raise questions about the role of crowdsourcing as a means for getting quick user input at low cost. While compensating users for their time is nothing new, the incentive structure and anonymity of Mechanical Turk raises some interesting questions. How complex of a task can we ask of the crowd, and how much should these workers be paid? Can we rely on the information we get from these professional users, and if so, how can we best incorporate it into designing more usable products? Traditional usability testing will still play a central role in enterprise software. Crowdsourcing doesn't replace testing; instead, it makes certain parts of gathering user feedback easier. One can turn to the crowd for simple tasks that don't require specialized skills and get a lot of data fast. As more studies are conducted on Mechanical Turk, I suspect we will see crowdsourcing playing an increasing role in human computer interaction and enterprise computing. References: Downs, J. S., Holbrook, M. B., Sheng, S., and Cranor, L. F. 2010. Are your participants gaming the system?: screening mechanical turk workers. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2399-2402. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753688 Ross, J., Irani, L., Silberman, M. S., Zaldivar, A., and Tomlinson, B. 2010. Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2863-2872. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753873

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  • Source-control 'wet-work'?

    - by Phil Factor
    When a design or creative work is flawed beyond remedy, it is often best to destroy it and start again. The other day, I lost the code to a long and intricate SQL batch I was working on. I’d thought it was impossible, but it happened. With all the technology around that is designed to prevent this occurring, this sort of accident has become a rare event.  If it weren’t for a deranged laptop, and my distraction, the code wouldn’t have been lost this time.  As always, I sighed, had a soothing cup of tea, and typed it all in again.  The new code I hastily tapped in  was much better: I’d held in my head the essence of how the code should work rather than the details: I now knew for certain  the start point, the end, and how it should be achieved. Instantly the detritus of half-baked thoughts fell away and I was able to write logical code that performed better.  Because I could work so quickly, I was able to hold the details of all the columns and variables in my head, and the dynamics of the flow of data. It was, in fact, easier and quicker to start from scratch rather than tidy up and refactor the existing code with its inevitable fumbling and half-baked ideas. What a shame that technology is now so good that developers rarely experience the cleansing shock of losing one’s code and having to rewrite it from scratch.  If you’ve never accidentally lost  your code, then it is worth doing it deliberately once for the experience. Creative people have, until Technology mistakenly prevented it, torn up their drafts or sketches, threw them in the bin, and started again from scratch.  Leonardo’s obsessive reworking of the Mona Lisa was renowned because it was so unusual:  Most artists have been utterly ruthless in destroying work that didn’t quite make it. Authors are particularly keen on writing afresh, and the results are generally positive. Lawrence of Arabia actually lost the entire 250,000 word manuscript of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ by accidentally leaving it on a train at Reading station, before rewriting a much better version.  Now, any writer or artist is seduced by technology into altering or refining their work rather than casting it dramatically in the bin or setting a light to it on a bonfire, and rewriting it from the blank page.  It is easy to pick away at a flawed work, but the real creative process is far more brutal. Once, many years ago whilst running a software house that supplied commercial software to local businesses, I’d been supervising an accounting system for a farming cooperative. No packaged system met their needs, and it was all hand-cut code.  For us, it represented a breakthrough as it was for a government organisation, and success would guarantee more contracts. As you’ve probably guessed, the code got mangled in a disk crash just a week before the deadline for delivery, and the many backups all proved to be entirely corrupted by a faulty tape drive.  There were some fragments left on individual machines, but they were all of different versions.  The developers were in despair.  Strangely, I managed to re-write the bulk of a three-month project in a manic and caffeine-soaked weekend.  Sure, that elegant universally-applicable input-form routine was‘nt quite so elegant, but it didn’t really need to be as we knew what forms it needed to support.  Yes, the code lacked architectural elegance and reusability. By dawn on Monday, the application passed its integration tests. The developers rose to the occasion after I’d collapsed, and tidied up what I’d done, though they were reproachful that some of the style and elegance had gone out of the application. By the delivery date, we were able to install it. It was a smaller, faster application than the beta they’d seen and the user-interface had a new, rather Spartan, appearance that we swore was done to conform to the latest in user-interface guidelines. (we switched to Helvetica font to look more ‘Bauhaus’ ). The client was so delighted that he forgave the new bugs that had crept in. I still have the disk that crashed, up in the attic. In IT, we have had mixed experiences from complete re-writes. Lotus 123 never really recovered from a complete rewrite from assembler into C, Borland made the mistake with Arago and Quattro Pro  and Netscape’s complete rewrite of their Navigator 4 browser was a white-knuckle ride. In all cases, the decision to rewrite was a result of extreme circumstances where no other course of action seemed possible.   The rewrite didn’t come out of the blue. I prefer to remember the rewrite of Minix by young Linus Torvalds, or the rewrite of Bitkeeper by a slightly older Linus.  The rewrite of CP/M didn’t do too badly either, did it? Come to think of it, the guy who decided to rewrite the windowing system of the Xerox Star never regretted the decision. I’ll agree that one should often resist calls for a rewrite. One of the worst habits of the more inexperienced programmer is to denigrate whatever code he or she inherits, and then call loudly for a complete rewrite. They are buoyed up by the mistaken belief that they can do better. This, however, is a different psychological phenomenon, more related to the idea of some motorcyclists that they are operating on infinite lives, or the occasional squaddies that if they charge the machine-guns determinedly enough all will be well. Grim experience brings out the humility in any experienced programmer.  I’m referring to quite different circumstances here. Where a team knows the requirements perfectly, are of one mind on methodology and coding standards, and they already have a solution, then what is wrong with considering  a complete rewrite? Rewrites are so painful in the early stages, until that point where one realises the payoff, that even I quail at the thought. One needs a natural disaster to push one over the edge. The trouble is that source-control systems, and disaster recovery systems, are just too good nowadays.   If I were to lose this draft of this very blog post, I know I’d rewrite it much better. However, if you read this, you’ll know I didn’t have the nerve to delete it and start again.  There was a time that one prayed that unreliable hardware would deliver you from an unmaintainable mess of a codebase, but now technology has made us almost entirely immune to such a merciful act of God. An old friend of mine with long experience in the software industry has long had the idea of the ‘source-control wet-work’,  where one hires a malicious hacker in some wild eastern country to hack into one’s own  source control system to destroy all trace of the source to an application. Alas, backup systems are just too good to make this any more than a pipedream. Somehow, it would be difficult to promote the idea. As an alternative, could one construct a source control system that, on doing all the code-quality metrics, would systematically destroy all trace of source code that failed the quality test? Alas, I can’t see many managers buying into the idea. In reading the full story of the near-loss of Toy Story 2, it set me thinking. It turned out that the lucky restoration of the code wasn’t the happy ending one first imagined it to be, because they eventually came to the conclusion that the plot was fundamentally flawed and it all had to be rewritten anyway.  Was this an early  case of the ‘source-control wet-job’?’ It is very hard nowadays to do a rapid U-turn in a development project because we are far too prone to cling to our existing source-code.

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  • Cannot log into Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g: ORA-28001

    - by Álvaro G. Vicario
    I can no longer log into Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g. I get this error message: ORA-28001: the password has expired (DBD ERROR: OCISessionBegin) I could log into the server using SQL*Plus. I warned me that the password was going to expire in 7 days (which is not the same as being already expired). Following advice from several documents, I ran these commands from SQL*Plus: ALTER USER sys IDENTIFIED BY new_password; ALTER USER system IDENTIFIED BY new_password; SQL*Plus no longer warns about passwords, but I still cannot use the Enterprise Manager. Then I followed this to remove password expiration: ALTER PROFILE default LIMIT password_life_time UNLIMITED And I've also restarted the Oracle services. In case it was using cached credentials, I've tried to connect from several browsers in several computers. No way: I still get ORA-28001 in Enterprise Manager. What am I missing? Update: Some more info SQL> select username,ACCOUNT_STATUS,EXPIRY_DATE from dba_users; USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_D ------------------------------ -------------------------------- -------- MGMT_VIEW OPEN SYS OPEN SYSTEM OPEN [...] DBSNMP EXPIRED 24/05/10 SYSMAN EXPIRED 24/05/10 OUTLN EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 FLOWS_FILES EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_D ------------------------------ -------------------------------- -------- MDSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 ORDSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 EXFSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 WMSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 WKSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 WK_TEST EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 CTXSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 ANONYMOUS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 XDB EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 WKPROXY EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 ORDPLUGINS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_D ------------------------------ -------------------------------- -------- FLOWS_030000 EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 OWBSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SI_INFORMTN_SCHEMA EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 OLAPSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SCOTT EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 ORACLE_OCM EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 TSMSYS EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 XS$NULL EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 BI EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 PM EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 MDDATA EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 USERNAME ACCOUNT_STATUS EXPIRY_D ------------------------------ -------------------------------- -------- IX EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SH EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 DIP EXPIRED & LOCKED OE EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 APEX_PUBLIC_USER EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 HR EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SPATIAL_CSW_ADMIN_USR EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09 SPATIAL_WFS_ADMIN_USR EXPIRED & LOCKED 16/11/09

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  • Conducting Effective Web Meetings

    - by BuckWoody
    There are several forms of corporate communication. From immediate, rich communications like phones and IM messaging to historical transactions like e-mail, there are a lot of ways to get information to one or more people. From time to time, it's even useful to have a meeting. (This is where a witty picture of a guy sleeping in a meeting goes. I won't bother actually putting one here; you're already envisioning it in your mind) Most meetings are pointless, and a complete waste of time. This is the fault, completely and solely, of the organizer. It's because he or she hasn't thought things through enough to think about alternate forms of information passing. Here's the criteria for a good meeting - whether in-person or over the web: 100% of the content of a meeting should require the participation of 100% of the attendees for 100% of the time It doesn't get any simpler than that. If it doesn't meet that criteria, then don't invite that person to that meeting. If you're just conveying information and no one has the need for immediate interaction with that information (like telling you something that modifies the message), then send an e-mail. If you're a manager, and you need to get status from lots of people, pick up the phone.If you need a quick answer, use IM. I once had a high-level manager that called frequent meetings. His real need was status updates on various processes, so 50 of us would sit in a room while he asked each one of us questions. He believed this larger meeting helped us "cross pollinate ideas". In fact, it was a complete waste of time for most everyone, except in the one or two moments that they interacted with him. So I wrote some code for a Palm Pilot (which was a kind of SmartPhone but with no phone and no real graphics, but this was in the days when we had just discovered fire and the wheel, although the order of those things is still in debate) that took an average of the salaries of the people in the room (I guessed at it) and ran a timer which multiplied the number of people against the salaries. I left that running in plain sight for him, and when he asked about it, I explained how much the meetings were really costing the company. We had far fewer meetings after. Meetings are now web-enabled. I believe that's largely a good thing, since it saves on travel time and allows more people to participate, but I think the rule above still holds. And in fact, there are some other rules that you should follow to have a great meeting - and fewer of them. Be Clear About the Goal This is important in any meeting, but all of us have probably gotten an invite with a web link and an ambiguous title. Then you get to the meeting, and it's a 500-level deep-dive on something everyone expects you to know. This is unfair to the "expert" and to the participants. I always tell people that invite me to a meeting that I will be as detailed as I can - but the more detail they can tell me about the questions, the more detailed I can be in my responses. Granted, there are times when you don't know what you don't know, but the more you can say about the topic the better. There's another point here - and it's that you should have a clearly defined "win" for the meeting. When the meeting is over, and everyone goes back to work, what were you expecting them to do with the information? Have that clearly defined in your head, and in the meeting invite. Understand the Technology There are several web-meeting clients out there. I use them all, since I meet with clients all over the world. They all work differently - so I take a few moments and read up on the different clients and find out how I can use the tools properly. I do this with the technology I use for everything else, and it's important to understand it if the meeting is to be a success. If you're running the meeting, know the tools. I don't care if you like the tools or not, learn them anyway. Don't waste everyone else's time just because you're too bitter/snarky/lazy to spend a few minutes reading. Check your phone or mic. Check your video size. Install (and learn to use)  ZoomIT (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx). Format your slides or screen or output correctly. Learn to use the voting features of the meeting software, and especially it's whiteboard features. Figure out how multiple monitors work. Try a quick meeting with someone to test all this. Do this *before* you invite lots of other people to your meeting.   Use a WebCam I'm not a pretty man. I have a face fit for radio. But after attending a meeting with clients where one Microsoft person used a webcam and another did not, I'm convinced that people pay more attention when a face is involved. There are tons of studies around this, or you can take my word for it, but toss a shirt on over those pajamas and turn the webcam on. Set Up Early Whether you're attending or leading the meeting, don't wait to sign on to the meeting at the time when it starts. I can almost plan that a 10:00 meeting will actually start at 10:10 because the participants/leader is just now installing the web client for the meeting at 10:00. Sign on early, go on mute, and then wait for everyone to arrive. Mute When Not Talking No one wants to hear your screaming offspring / yappy dog / other cubicle conversations / car wind noise (are you driving in a desert storm or something?) while the person leading the meeting is trying to talk. I use the Lync software from Microsoft for my meetings, and I mute everyone by default, and then tell them to un-mute to talk to the group. Share Collateral If you have a PowerPoint deck, mail it out in case you have a tech failure. If you have a document, share it as an attachment to the meeting. Don't make people ask you for the information - that's why you're there to begin with. Even better, send it out early. "But", you say, "then no one will come to the meeting if they have the deck first!" Uhm, then don't have a meeting. Send out the deck and a quick e-mail and let everyone get on with their productive day. Set Actions At the Meeting A meeting should have some sort of outcome (see point one). That means there are actions to take, a follow up, or some deliverable. Otherwise, it's an e-mail. At the meeting, decide who will do what, when things are needed, and so on. And avoid, if at all possible, setting up another meeting, unless absolutely necessary. So there you have it. Whether it's on-premises or on the web, meetings are a necessary evil, and should be treated that way. Like politicians, you should have as few of them as are necessary to keep the roads paved and public libraries open.

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  • How I Work: Staying Productive Whilst Traveling

    - by BuckWoody
    I travel a lot. Not like some folks that are gone every week, mind you, although in the last month I’ve been to: Cambridge, UK; Anchorage, AK; San Jose, CA; Copenhagen, DK, Boston, MA; and I’m currently en-route to Anaheim, CA.  While this many places in a month is a bit unusual for me, I would say I travel frequently. I’ve travelled most of my 28+ years in IT, and at one time was a consultant traveling weekly.   With that much time away from my primary work location, I have to find ways to stay productive. Some might say “just rest – take a nap!” – but I’m not able to do that. For one thing, I’m a very light sleeper and I’ve never slept on a plane - even a 30+ hour trip to New Zealand in Business Class - so that just isn’t option. I also am not always in the plane, of course. There’s the hotel, the taxi/bus/train, the airport and then all that over again when I arrive. Since my regular jobs have many demands, I have to get work done.   Note: No, I’m not always focused on work. I need downtime just like everyone else. Sometimes I just think, watch a movie or listen to tunes – and I give myself permission to do that anytime – sometimes the whole trip. I have too fewheartbeats left in life to only focus on work – it’s just not that important, and neither am I. Some of these tasks are letters to friends and family, or other personal things. What I’m talking about here is a plan, not some task list I have to follow. When I get to the location I’m traveling to, I always build in as much time as I can to ensure I enjoy those sights and the people I’m with. I would find traveling to be a waste if not for that.   The Unrealistic Expectation As I would evaluate the trip I was taking – say a 6-8 hour flight – I would expect to get 10-12 hours of work done. After all, there’s the time at the airport, the taxi and so on, and then of course the time in the air with all of the room, power, internet and everything else I needed to get my work done. I would pile up tasks at home, pack my bags, and head happily to the magical land of the TSA.   Right. On return from the trip, I had accomplished little, had more e-mails and other work that had piled up, and I was tired, hungry, and unorganized. This had to change. So, I decided to do three things: Segment my work Set realistic expectations Plan accordingly  Segmenting By Available Resources The first task was to decide what kind of work I could do in each location – if any. I found that I was dependent on a few things to get work done, such as power, the Internet, and a place to sit down. Before I fly, I take some time at home to get all of the work I’d like to accomplish while away segmented into these areas, and print that out on paper, which goes in my suit-coat pocket along with a mechanical pencil. I print my tickets, and I’m all set for the adventure ahead. Then I simply do each kind of work whenever I’m in that situation. No power There are certain times when I don’t have power available. But not only that, I might not even be able to use most of my electronics. So I now schedule as many phone calls as I can for the taxi/bus/train ride and the airports as I can. I have a paper notebook (Moleskine, of course) and a pencil and I print out any notes or numbers I need prior to the trip. Once I’m airborne or at the airport, I work on my laptop. I check and respond to e-mails, create slides, write code, do architecture, whatever I can.  If I can’t use any electronics, or once the power runs out, I schedule time for reading. I can read at the airport or anywhere, actually, even in-flight or any other transport. I “read with a pencil”, meaning I take a lot of notes, which I liketo put in OneNote, but since in most cases I don’t have power, I use the Moleskine to do that. Speaking of which, sometimes as I’m thinking I come up with new topics, ideas, blog posts, or things to teach in my classes. Once again I take out the notebook and write it down. All of these notes get a check-mark when I get back to the office and transfer the writing to OneNote. I’ve tried those “smart pens” and so on to automate this, but it just never works out. Pencil and paper are just fine. As I mentioned, sometime I just need to think. I’ll do nothing, and let my mind wander, thinking of nothing in particular, or some math problem or science question I’m interested in. My only issue with this is that I communicate tothink, and I don’t want to drive people crazy by being that guy that won’t shut up, so I think in a different way. Power, but no Internet or Phone If I have power but no Internet or phone, I focus on the laptop and the tablet as before, and I also recharge my other gadgets. Power, Internet, Phone and a Place to Work At first I thought that when I arrived at the hotel or event I could get the same amount of work done that I do at the office. Not so. There’s simply too many distractions, things you need, or other issues that allow this. Of course, Ican work on any device, read, think, write or whatever, but I am simply not as productive as I am in my home office. So I plan for about 25-50% as much work getting done in this environment as I think I could really do. I’ve done some measurements, and this holds out to be true almost every time. The key is that I re-set my expectations (and my co-worker’s expectations as well) that this is the case. I use the Out-Of-Office notices to let people know that I’m just not going to be 100% at this time – it’s hard for everyone, but it’s more honest and realistic, and I’d rather they know that – and that I realize that – than to let them think I’m totally available. Because I’m not – I’m traveling. I don’t tend to put too much detail, because after all I don’t necessarily want to let people know when I’m not home :) but I do think it’s important to let people that depend on my know that I’ll get back with them later. I hope this helps you think through your own methodology of staying productive when you travel. Or perhaps you just go offline, and don’t worry about any of this – good for you! That’s completely valid as well.   (Oh, and yes, I wrote this at 35K feet, on Alaska Airlines on a trip. :)  Practice what you preach, Buck.)

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  • How to get ISA 2006 Web Proxy to work with the Single Network Adapter template

    - by tronda
    I need to test an issue with running our application behind a proxy server with different type of configurations, so I installed ISA 2006 Enterprise on a desktop computer. Since this computer only has a single network card and I want to start out easy, I chose the "Single Network Adapter" template. We have a internal NAT'ed network which is in the 10 range. I have defined the internal network on the ISA server to be 10.XXX.YY.1 - 10.XXX.YY.255 I also have the Default rule which denies all traffic, but I've added the following Rule: Policy - Protocols - From - To Accept HTTP Internal External HTTPS Local Host Internal HTTS Server Localhost Then I configured Internet Explorer on a virutal machine running XP within virtualbox with Brigded network (gets same network address range as regular computers on our network) similar to this Instead of the server name I used the IP address. When I try to access a web page, this doesn't go through and I get the following log messages on the proxy server: Original Client IP Client Agent Authenticated Client Service Referring Server Destination Host Name Transport HTTP Method MIME Type Object Source Source Proxy Destination Proxy Bidirectional Client Host Name Filter Information Network Interface Raw IP Header Raw Payload GMT Log Time Source Port Processing Time Bytes Sent Bytes Received Cache Information Error Information Authentication Server Log Time Client IP Destination IP Destination Port Protocol Action Rule Result Code HTTP Status Code Client Username Source Network Destination Network URL Server Name Log Record Type 10.XXX.YY.174 - TCP - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:24 1080 0 0 0 0x0 0x0 - 24.08.2010 06:25:24 10.XXX.YY.174 10.XXX.YY.175 80 HTTP Initiated Connection MyHTTPAccess 0x0 ERROR_SUCCESS Internal Local Host - PROXYTEST Firewall 10.XXX.YY.175 - TCP - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:24 2275 0 0 0 0x0 0x0 - 24.08.2010 06:25:24 10.XXX.YY.175 10.XXX.YY.175 80 HTTP Initiated Connection 0x0 ERROR_SUCCESS Local Host Local Host - PROXYTEST Firewall 10.XXX.YY.175 - TCP - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:25 2275 0 0 0 0x0 0x0 - 24.08.2010 06:25:25 10.XXX.YY.175 10.XXX.YY.175 80 HTTP Closed Connection 0x80074e20 FWX_E_GRACEFUL_SHUTDOWN Local Host Local Host - PROXYTEST Firewall 10.XXX.YY.175 - TCP - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:25 2276 0 0 0 0x0 0x0 - 24.08.2010 06:25:25 10.XXX.YY.175 10.XXX.YY.175 80 HTTP Initiated Connection 0x0 ERROR_SUCCESS Local Host Local Host - PROXYTEST Firewall 10.XXX.YY.175 - TCP - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:26 2276 0 0 0 0x0 0x0 - 24.08.2010 06:25:26 10.XXX.YY.175 10.XXX.YY.175 80 HTTP Closed Connection 0x80074e20 FWX_E_GRACEFUL_SHUTDOWN Local Host Local Host - PROXYTEST Firewall 10.XXX.YY.175 - TCP - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:26 2277 0 0 0 0x0 0x0 - 24.08.2010 06:25:26 10.XXX.YY.175 10.XXX.YY.175 80 HTTP Initiated Connection 0x0 ERROR_SUCCESS Local Host Local Host - PROXYTEST Firewall 10.XXX.YY.159 - UDP - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:26 68 0 0 0 0x0 0x0 - 24.08.2010 06:25:26 10.XXX.YY.159 255.255.255.255 67 DHCP (request) Denied Connection [Enterprise] Default rule 0xc004000d FWX_E_POLICY_RULES_DENIED Internal Local Host - PROXYTEST Firewall 10.XXX.YY.166 - UDP - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:26 68 0 0 0 0x0 0x0 - 24.08.2010 06:25:26 10.XXX.YY.166 255.255.255.255 67 DHCP (request) Denied Connection [Enterprise] Default rule 0xc004000d FWX_E_POLICY_RULES_DENIED Internal Local Host - PROXYTEST Firewall 0.0.0.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729) Yes Proxy 10.XXX.YY.175 TCP GET Internet - - - Req ID: 096c76ae; Compression: client=No, server=No, compress rate=0% decompress rate=0% - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:27 0 2945 2581 446 0x0 0x40 24.08.2010 06:25:27 10.XXX.YY.174 10.XXX.YY.175 80 http Failed Connection Attempt MyHTTPAccess 10061 anonymous Internal Local Host http://www.vg.no/ PROXYTEST Web Proxy Filter 10.XXX.YY.175 - TCP - - - 24.08.2010 13:25:27 2277 0 0 0 0x0 0x0 - 24.08.2010 06:25:27 10.XXX.YY.175 10.XXX.YY.175 80 HTTP Closed Connection 0x80074e20 FWX_E_GRACEFUL_SHUTDOWN Local Host Local Host - PROXYTEST Firewall

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  • All my sites are 403 but the server is running. Errors on startup

    - by Craig
    We gave access to a contractor to install a firewall and somehow while he was doing it he fracked something up. Everything went off-line about 24 hours ago and we are effectively out of business until I solve this and the person who messed up the thing is not returning calls. I found a few errors. First, I'm not a server guy - I can look at log files and normally everything runs fine. All 'services' are running according to 1and1 server monitoring and mail is being delivered just fine. The whole thing was off-line until I (probably stupidly) updated the kernel from 6.2 to 6.3 this morning and I got everything back except the http access. All the domains (~200 of them) are returning a 403 error and nothing is recorded in the access log. On every restart I see this error in the messages log file: init: Failed to spawn ttyS0 main process: unable to execute: No such file or directory and a little later these: kernel: WARNING: at kernel/sched.c:5914 thread_return+0x232/0x79d() (Not tainted) kernel: Hardware name: X9SCL/X9SCM kernel: Modules linked in: xt_iprange iptable_filter ip_tables ip6t_REJECT nf_conntrack_ipv6 nf_defrag_ipv6 xt_state nf_conntrack ip6table_filter ip6_tables ipv6 ext4 jbd2 serio_raw i2c_i801 i2c_core sg iTCO_wdt iTCO_vendor_support e1000e ext3 jbd mbcache raid1 sd_mod crc_t10dif ahci dm_mirror dm_region_hash dm_log dm_mod [last unloaded: scsi_wait_scan] kernel: Pid: 367, comm: md3_raid1 Not tainted 2.6.32-220.2.1.el6.x86_64 #1 kernel: Call Trace: kernel: [<ffffffff81069997>] ? warn_slowpath_common+0x87/0xc0 kernel: [<ffffffff810699ea>] ? warn_slowpath_null+0x1a/0x20 kernel: [<ffffffff814eccc5>] ? thread_return+0x232/0x79d kernel: [<ffffffff8126a4d9>] ? cpumask_next_and+0x29/0x50 kernel: [<ffffffff813e9c05>] ? md_super_wait+0x55/0x90 kernel: [<ffffffff81090a10>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x40 kernel: [<ffffffff813ebf46>] ? md_update_sb+0x206/0x3f0 kernel: [<ffffffff813ee922>] ? md_check_recovery+0x3f2/0x6d0 kernel: [<ffffffffa005b129>] ? raid1d+0x49/0x1050 [raid1] kernel: [<ffffffff814ed985>] ? schedule_timeout+0x215/0x2e0 kernel: [<ffffffff814ef447>] ? _spin_unlock_irqrestore+0x17/0x20 kernel: [<ffffffff813eb336>] ? md_thread+0x116/0x150 kernel: [<ffffffff81090a10>] ? autoremove_wake_function+0x0/0x40 kernel: [<ffffffff813eb220>] ? md_thread+0x0/0x150 kernel: [<ffffffff810906a6>] ? kthread+0x96/0xa0 kernel: [<ffffffff8100c14a>] ? child_rip+0xa/0x20 kernel: [<ffffffff81090610>] ? kthread+0x0/0xa0 kernel: [<ffffffff8100c140>] ? child_rip+0x0/0x20 And something is wrong with the Named/BIND resulting in the same error for all domains: zone DOMAINEXAMPLE.com/IN: loading from master file DOMAINEXAMPLE.com failed: file not found zone DOMAINEXAMPLE.com/IN: not loaded due to errors. _default/DOMAINEXAMPLE.com/IN: file not found I'm pretty sure this is not enough information to solve the problem, but I'm willing to engage someone who can work this out for me. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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  • Blogging locally and globally–my experience

    - by DigiMortal
    In Baltic MVP Summit 2011 there was discussion about having two blogs - one for local and another for global audience – and how to publish once written information in these blogs. There are many ways how to optimize your blogging activities if you have more than one audience and here you can find my experiences, best practices and advices about this topic. My two blogs I have to working blogs: this one here technology and programming blog for local market My local blog is almost five years old and it makes it one of the oldest company blogs in Estonia. It is still active and I write there as much as I have time for it. This blog here is active since September 2007, so it is about 3.5 years old right now. Both of these blogs are  my major hits in my MVP carrier and they have very good web statistics too. My local blog My local blog is about programming, web and technology. It has way wider target audience then this blog here has. By example, in my local blog I blog also about local events, cool new concept phones, different webs providing some interesting services etc. But local guys can find there also my postings about how to solve one or another programming problem and postings about Microsoft technologies I am playing with. This far my local blog has a lot of readers for such a small country that Estonia is. This blog has made me a lot of cool contacts and I have had there a lot of interesting discussions about different technical topics. Why I started this blog? Living in small country is different than living in big country. In small country you have less people and therefore smaller audience so you have to target more than one technical topic to find enough readers. In a same time you are still interested in your main topics and you want to reach to more people who are sharing same interests with you. Practically one day y will grow out from local market and you go global. This is how this blog was born. Was it worth to create, promote and mess with it? Every second I have put on my time to this blog has been worth of it. Thanks to this blog I have found new good friends and without them I think it is more boring to work on different problems and solutions. Defining target audiences One thing you should always do when having more than one blog is defining target audiences. If you are just technomaniac interested in sharing your stuff and make some new friends and have something to write to your MVP nomination form then you don’t have to go through complex targeting process. You can do it simple way and same effectively. Here is how I defined target audiences to my blogs: local blog – reader of my local blog is IT professional, software developer, technology innovator or just some guy who is interested in technology,   this blog – reader of this blog is experienced professional software developer who works on Microsoft technologies or software developer who is open minded and open to new technologies and interesting solutions to development problems. You can see how local blog – due to small market with less people – has wider definition for audience while this blog is heavily targeted to Microsoft technologies and specially to software development. On practical side these decisions are also made well I think because it is very hard to build up popular common IT blog. On global level it is better to target some specific niche and find readers who are professionals on your favorite topics. Thanks to this blog I have found new friends who are professional developers and I am very happy about all the discussions I have had with them. Publishing content to different blogs My local blog and this blog have some overlapping topics like .NET, databases and SEO. Due to this overlapping there is question: when I write posting to my local blog then should I have to publish same thing in my global blog? And if I write something to my global blog then should I publish same thing also in my local blog? Well, it really depends on the definition of your target audiences. If they match then of course it is good idea to translate you post and publish it also to another blog. But if you have different audiences then you may need to modify your posting before publishing it. The questions you have to answer are: is target audience interested in this topic? is target audience expecting more specific and deeper handling of this topic or are they expecting more general handling of topic? is the problem you are discussing actual for target audience or not? You have to answer these questions and after that make your decision. If you need to modify your original posting then take some time and do it. Provide quality to all your readers because they will respect you if you respect them. Cross-posting and referencing It is tempting to save time that preparing some blog post takes and if you have are done with posting in one blog it may seem like good idea to make short posting to another blog and add reference to first one where topic is discussed longer. Well, don’t do it – all your readers expect good quality content from you and jumping from one blog post to another is disturbing for them. Of course, there is problem with differences between target audiences. You may have wider target audience and some people may be interested in more specific handling of topic. In this case feel free to refer your blog you are writing in english. This is not working very well in opposite direction because almost all my global blog readers understand english but not estonian. By example, estonian language is complex one and online translating tools make very poor translations from estonian language. This is why I don’t even plan to publish postings here that refer to my local blog for more information. I am keeping these two blogs as two different worlds and if there is posting that fits well to both blogs I will write my posting to one blog and then answer previous three questions before posting same thing to another blog. Conclusion Growing out of your local market is not anything mysterious if you are living in small country. As it is harder to find people there who are interested in same topics with you then sooner or later you will start finding these new contacts from global audience. Global audience is bigger and to be visible there you must provide high quality content to your audience. It is something you will learn over time and you will learn every day something new when you are posting to your global blog. You may ask: if global blog is much more complex thing to do then is it worth to do at all? My answer is: yes, do it for sure. It is not easy thing to do when you start but if you work on your global blog and improve it over time you will get over all obstacles pretty soon. Just don’t forget one thing – content is king and your readers expect high quality from you.

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