Search Results

Search found 3905 results on 157 pages for 'ed zero'.

Page 136/157 | < Previous Page | 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 | Next Page >

Tools to Help Post Content On Your WordPress Blog

- by Matthew Guay

Now that you’ve got a nice blog, you want to do more with it and start posting content. Here we look at some tools that will allow you to post directly to your WordPress blog. Writing a new blog post is easy with WordPress as we saw in our previous post about Starting your own WordPress blog. The web editor gives you a lot of features and even lets you edit your post’s source code if you enjoy hacking HTML. There are other tools that will allow you to post content, here we look at how you can post with dedicated apps, browser plugins, and even by email. Windows Live Writer Windows Live Writer (part of the Windows Live Essentials Suite) is a great app for posting content to your blog. This free program for Microsoft lets you post content to a variety of blogging services, including Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, and of course WordPress. You can write blog posts directly from its Word-like editor, complete with pictures and advanced formatting. Even if you’re offline, you can still write posts and save them for when you’re online again. For more information about installing Live writer, check out our article on how to Install Windows Live Essentials In Windows 7. Once Live Writer is installed, open it to add your blog. If you already had Live Writer installed and configured for a blog, you can add your new blog, too. Just click your blog’s name in the top right corner, and select “Add blog account”. Select “Other blog service” to add your WordPress blog to Writer, and click Next. Enter your blog’s web address, and your username and password. Check Remember my password so you don’t have to enter it every time you write something. Writer will analyze your blog and setup your account. During the setup process it may ask to post a temporary post. This will let you preview blog posts using your blog’s real theme, which is helpful, so click Yes. Finally, add your Blog’s name, and click Finish. You can now use the rich editor to write and add content to a new blog post. Select the Preview tab to see how your post will look on your blog… Or, if you’re a HTML geek, select the Source tab to edit the code of your blog post. From the bottom of the window, you can choose categories, insert tags, and even schedule the post to publish on a different day. Live Writer is fully integrated with WordPress; you’re not missing anything by using the desktop editor. If you want to edit a post you’ve already published, click the Open button and select the post. You can chose and edit any post, including ones you published via the web interface or other editors. Add Multimedia Content to your Posts with Live Writer Back in the Edit tab, you can add pictures, videos and more from the sidebar. Select what you want to insert. Pictures If you insert a picture, you can add many nice borders and designs to it. Or, you can even add artistic effects from the Effects tab in the sidebar. Photo Gallery If you want to post several pictures, say some of your vacation shots, then inserting a picture gallery may be the best option. Select Insert Photo Gallery in the sidebar, and then choose the pictures you want in the gallery. Once the gallery is inserted, you can choose from several styles to showcase your pictures. When you post the blog, you will be asked to sign in with your Windows Live ID as the gallery pictures will be stored in the free Skydrive storage service. Your blog readers can see the preview of your pictures directly on your blog, and then can view each individual picture, download them, or see a slideshow online via the link. Video If you want to add a video to your blog post, select Video from the sidebar as above. You can select a video that’s already online, or you can choose a new video from file and upload it via YouTube directly from Windows Live Writer. Note that you will have to sign in with your YouTube account to upload videos to YouTube, so if you’re not logged in you’ll be prompted to do so when you click Insert. Geek Tip: If you ever want to copy your Live Writer settings to another computer, check out our article on how to Backup Your Windows Live Writer Settings. Microsoft Office Word Word 2007 and 2010 also let you post content directly to your blog. This is especially nice if you’ve already typed up a document and think it would be good on your Blog as well. Check out our in-depth tutorial on posting blog posts via Word 2007 using Word 2007 as a blogging tool. This works in Word 2010 too, except the Office Orb has been replaced by the new Backstage view. So, in Word 2010, to start a new blog post, click File \ New then select Blog post. Proceed as you would in Word 2007 to add your blog settings and post the content you want. Or, if you’ve already written a document and want to post it, select File \ Share (or Save and Send in the final version of Word 2010), and then click Publish as Blog Post. If you haven’t setup your blog account yet, set it up as shown in the Word 2007 article. Post Via Email Most of us use email daily, and already have our favorite email app or service. Whether on your desktop or mobile phone, it’s easy to create rich emails and add content. WordPress lets you generate a unique email address that you can use to easily post content and email to your blog. Just compose your email with the subject as the title of your post, and send it to this unique address. Your new post will be up in minutes. To active this feature, click the My Account button in the top menu bar in your WordPress.com account, and select My Blogs. Click the Enable button under Post by Email beside your blog’s name. Now you’ll have a private email you can use to post to your blog. Anything you send to this email will be posted as a new post. If you think your email may be compromised, click Regenerate to get a new publishing email address. Any email program or webapp now is a blog post editor. Feel free to use rich formatting or insert pictures; it all comes through great. This is also a great way to post to your blog from your mobile device. Whether you’re using webmail or a dedicated email client on your phone, you can now blog from anywhere. Mobile Applications WordPress also offer dedicated applications for blogging directly from your mobile device. You can write new posts, edit existing ones, and manage comments all from your Smartphone. Currently they offer apps for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry. Check them out at the link below. Conclusion Whether you want to write from your browser or email a post to your blog, WordPress is flexible enough to work right along with your preferences. However you post, you can be sure that it will look professional and be easily accessible with your WordPress blog. Download Windows Live Writer Download WordPress apps for your mobile device Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Set a Future Date for a Post in WordPressAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogFuture Date a Post in Windows Live WriterHow To Start Your Own Professional Blog with WordPressUsing Word 2007 as a Blogging Tool 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 Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

Read the article
Turn A Flash Drive Into a Portable Web Server

- by Matthew Guay

Portable applications are very useful for getting work done on the go, but how about portable servers? Here’s how you can turn your flash drive into a portable web server. Getting Started To put a full web server on our flash drive, we’re going to use XAMPP Lite. This lightweight, preconfigured server includes recent versions of Apache, MySQL, and PHP so you can run most websites and webapps directly from it. You could use the full XAMPP, which includes more features such as a FileZilla FTP server and OpenSSL, but for most purposes, the light version is plenty for a portable server. Download the latest version of XAMPP Lite (link below). In this tutorial, we used the self-extracting EXE version; you could choose the ZIP file and extract the files yourself, but we found it easier to use the executable. Run the installer, and click Browse choose where to install your server. Select your flash drive, or a folder in it, and click Ok. Make sure your flash drive has at least 250MB of available storage space. XAMPP will create an xampplite folder and store all the files in it during the installation. Click Install, and all of the files will be extracted to your flash drive. This may take a few moments depending on your flash drive’s speed. When the extraction process is finished, a Command Prompt window will open to finish the installation. The first prompt will ask if you want to add shortcuts to the start menu and desktop; enter “n” since we don’t want to create start menu links to our portable server. Now enter “y” to configure XAMPP’s directories automatically. Finally, enter “y” to make XAMPP fully portable. It will set up the servers to run without specific drive letters so your server will run from any computer. XAMPP will finalize your changes; press Enter when everything is completed. Setup will automatically launch the command line version of XAMPP. On first run, confirm that your time zone is correct. And that’s it! You can now run XAMPP’s control panel by entering 1, or you can exit and run XAMPP from any other computer with your flash drive. To complete your portable webserver kit, you may want to install Portable Firefox or Iron Browser on your flash drive so you always have your favorite browser ready to use. Running your portable server Using your portable server is very simple. Open the xampplite folder on your flash drive and launch xampp-control.exe. Click Start beside Apache and MySql to get your webserver running. Please note: Do not check the Svc box, as this will run the server as a Windows service. To keep XAMPP portable, you do not want it running as a service! Windows Firewall may prompt you that it blocked the server; click Allow access to let your server run. Once they’re running, you can click Admin to open the default XAMPP admin page running from your local webserver. Or, you can view it by browsing to http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1/ in your browser. If everything is working correctly, you should see this page in your browser. Choose your default language… And then you’ll see the default XAMPP admin page. Click the Status link on the left sidebar to make sure everything is running correctly. If you click the Admin button for MySql in the XAMPP Control Panel, it will open phpMyAdmin in your default browser. Alternately, you can open the MySql admin page by entering http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ or http://127.0.0.1/phpmyadmin/ in your favorite browser. Now you can add your own webpages to your webserver. Save all of your web files in the \xampplight\htdocs\ folder on your flash drive. Install WordPress in your portable server Since XAMPP Lite includes MySql and PHP, you can even run webapps such as WordPress, the popular CMS and blogging platform. Download WordPress (link below), and extract the files to the \xampplite\htdocs folder on your flash drive. Now all of the WordPress files are stored in \xampplite\htdocs\wordpress on your flash drive. We still need to setup WordPress on our portable server. Open your MySql admin page http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ to create a new database for WordPress. Enter a name for your database in the “Create new database” box, and click Create. Click the Privileges tab on the top, and the select “Add a new User”. Enter a username and password for the database, and then click the Go button on the bottom of the page. Using WordPress Now, in your browser, enter http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php. Click Create a Configuration File to continue. Make sure you have your Database name, username, and password we created previously, and click “Let’s Go!” Enter your WordPress database name, username, and password, leave the other two entries as default, and click Submit. You should now have the database all ready to go. Click “Run the install” to finish installing WordPress. Enter a title, username, and password for your test blog, as well as your email address, and then click “Install WordPress”. You now have a portable install of WordPress. Click “Log In” to access your WordPress admin page. Enter your username and password, and click Log In. Here you can add pages, posts, themes, extensions, and anything else just like you would on a normal WordPress site. This is a great way to experiment with WordPress without messing up your real website. You can view your portable WordPress site by entering http://localhost/wordpress/ in your address bar. Closing your server When you’re done running your test server, click the Stop button on each of the services and then click the Exit button in the XAMPP control panel. If you press the exit button on the top of the window, it will just minimize the control panel to the tray. Alternately, you can shutdown your server by running xampp_stop.exe from your xampplite folder. Conclusion XAMPP Lite gives you a great way to run a full webserver directly from your flash drive. Now, anywhere you go, you can test and tweak your webpages and webapps from any Windows computer. Links Download XAMPP Lite Download WordPress Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips BitLocker To Go Encrypts Portable Flash Drives in Windows 7How To Use BitLocker on Drives without TPMSpeed up Your Windows Vista Computer with ReadyBoostView and Manage Flash Cookies the Easy WayInstall and Run Applications from Your iPod, Flash Drive or Mp3 Player 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 OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error

Read the article
Ops Center Solaris 11 IPS Repository Management: Using ISO Images

- by S Stelting

Please join us for a live WebEx presentation of this topic on Tuesday, November 20th at 9am MDT. Details for the call are provided below: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/j.php?ED=209834017&UID=1512096072&PW=NYTVlZTYxMzdm&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D Meeting password: oracle123 Call-in toll-free number: 1-866-682-4770 International numbers: http://www.intercall.com/oracle/access_numbers.htm Conference Code: 762 9343 # Security Code: 7777 # With Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c, you can provision, patch, monitor and manage Oracle Solaris 11 instances. To do this, Ops Center creates and maintains a Solaris 11 Image Packaging System (IPS) repository on the Enterprise Controller. During the Enterprise Controller configuration, you can load repository content directly from Oracle's Support Web site and subsequently synchronize the repository as new content becomes available. Of course, you can also use Solaris 11 ISO images to create and update your Ops Center repository. There are a few excellent reasons for doing this: You're running Ops Center in disconnected mode, and don't have Internet access on your Enterprise Controller You'd rather avoid the bandwidth associated with live synchronization of a Solaris 11 package repository This demo will show you how to use Solaris 11 ISO images to set up and update your Ops Center repository. Prerequisites This tip assumes that you've already installed the Enterprise Controller on a Solaris 11 OS instance and that you're ready for post-install configuration. In addition, there are specific Ops Center and OS version requirements depending on which version of Solaris 11 you plan to install.You can get full details about the requirements in the Release Notes for Ops Center 12c update 2. Additional information is available in the Ops Center update 2 Readme document. Part 1: Using a Solaris 11 ISO Image to Create an Ops Center Repository Step 1 – Download the Solaris 11 Repository Image The Oracle Web site provides a number of download links for official Solaris 11 images. Among those links is a two-part downloadable repository image, which provides repository content for Solaris 11 SPARC and X86 architectures. In this case, I used the Solaris 11 11/11 image. First, navigate to the Oracle Web site and accept the OTN License agreement: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html Next, download both parts of the Solaris 11 repository image. I recommend using the Solaris 11 11/11 image, and have provided the URLs here: http://download.oracle.com/otn/solaris/11/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-ahttp://download.oracle.com/otn/solaris/11/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-b Finally, use the cat command to generate an ISO image you can use to create your repository: # cat sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-a sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-b > sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso The process is very similar if you plan to set up a Solaris 11.1 release in Ops Center. In that case, navigate to the Solaris 11 download page, accept the license agreement and download both parts of the Solaris 11.1 repository image. Use the cat command to create a single ISO image for Solaris 11.1 Step 2 – Mount the Solaris 11 ISO Image in your Local Filesystem Once you have created the Solaris 11 ISO file, use the mount command to attach it to your local filesystem. After the image has been mounted, you can browse the repository from the ./repo subdirectory, and use the pkgrepo command to verify that Solaris 11 recognizes the content: Step 3 – Use the Image to Create your Ops Center Repository When you have confirmed the repository is available, you can use the image to create the Enterprise Controller repository. The operation will be slightly different depending on whether you configure Ops Center for Connected or Disconnected Mode operation.For connected mode operation, specify the mounted ./repo directory in step 4.1 of the configuration wizard, replacing the default Web-based URL. Since you're synchronizing from an OS repository image, you don't need to specify a key or certificate for the operation. For disconnected mode configuration, specify the Solaris 11 directory along with the path to the disconnected mode bundle downloaded by running the Ops Center harvester script: Ops Center will run a job to import package content from the mounted ISO image. A synchronization job can take several hours to run – in my case, the job ran for 3 hours, 22 minutes on a SunFire X4200 M2 server. During the job, Ops Center performs three important tasks: Synchronizes all content from the image and refreshes the repository Updates the IPS publisher information Creates OS Provisioning profiles and policies based on the content When the job is complete, you can unmount the ISO image from your Enterprise Controller. At that time, you can view the repository contents in your Ops Center Solaris 11 library. For the Solaris 11 11/11 release, you should see 8,668 packages and patches in the contents. You should also see default deployment plans for Solaris 11 provisioning. As part of the repository import, Ops Center generates plans and profiles for desktop, small and large servers for the SPARC and X86 architecture. Part 2: Using a Solaris 11 SRU to update an Ops Center Repository It's possible to use the same approach to upgrade your Ops Center repository to a Solaris 11 Support Repository Update, or SRU. Each SRU provides packages and updates to Solaris 11 - for example, SRU 8.5 provided the packaged for Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2 SRUs are available for download as ISO images from My Oracle Support, under document ID 1372094.1. The document provides download links for all SRUs which have been released by Oracle for Solaris 11. SRUs are cumulative, so later versions include the packages from earlier SRUs. After downloading an ISO image for an SRU, you can mount it to your local filesystem using a mount command similar to the one shown for Solaris 11 11/11. When the ISO image is mounted to the file system, you can perform the Add Content action from the Solaris 11 Library to synchronize packages and patches from the mounted image. I used the same mount point, so the repository URL was file://mnt/repo once again: After the synchronization of an SRU is complete, you can verify its content in the Solaris 11 library using the search function. The version pattern is 0.175.0.#, where the # is the same value as the SRU. In this example, I upgraded to SRU 1. The update job ran in just under 8 minutes, and a quick search shows that 22 software components were added to the repository: It's also possible to search for "Support Repository Update" to confirm the SRU was successfully added to the repository. Details on any of the update content are available by clicking the "View Details" button under the Packages/Patches entry.

Read the article
CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 04, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, April 04, 2010New ProjectsAcervo 2 - Gerenciador de coleções: Acervo 2 is a web application developed in ASP.NET 3.5 with Entity Framework, Coolite UI web controls and MySQL database that helps to catalog and ...AssemblyInfo Editor: AssemblyInfo Editor is a small Visual Studio 2010 extension I developed for my personal use mainly for automatically incrementing AssemblyVersion a...CommLine: It's a Command Line Interpreter. At the moment, it's a beta version, so I wait for developers that wanna help meFlowgraph Viewer: The flowgraph viewer enables users to view, build and share flowgraphs for the Crysis-franchise. It's built on Silverlight4, using MEF and Mvvmlight.Hash Calculator: WPF Windows 7 program to compute SHA1 & MD5 hash functions.MediaRSS library for .NET: This is a small set of libraries that allow you to create, read, and write MediaRSS files. By leveraging the syndication model object in .NET this...MEF Visualizer Tool: Helps to see what is going on inside the CompositionContainerone framework for developing asp.net project more elegent、flexible、and testable: if you are familiar with jsf、cdi、scoped javabean and work under asp.net, you may want to support aop and max flexibility and testability , all of ...Picasa Manager: A Silverlight Out Of Browser Application that Helps you manage your PicasaWeb albums in the easyest way possible.SharePhone: Windows Phone 7 library for connecting to SharePoint 2007/2010. Lets you work with SPWeb, SPList, reading/writing strong typed list items, user ...Silverlight Resource Extension: Silverlight Resource Extension. Extension silverlight project for use ResX resources and localize satellite dll.Silverlight Streamgraph: Streamgraph component for SilverlightTFTP Server: Managed TFTP server implementation, written in C#. Supports: - IPv4 and IPv6 - correct retry behavior. - TFTP options: block size, transfer size, a...Virtual UserGroup Video Helpers: This is a project that holds all the tools used by the C4MVC Virtual Usergroup. Tools written in C# and Powershell to automate, Live Meeting, Expr...xBlog: xBlog is a project to build a simple and extensible Blog Engine based on xml and linqXmlCodeEditor: XmlCodeEditor is a Silverlight 4 control based on RichTextControl that creates coloring and intellisense similar to the one in Visual Studio for ed...Zinc Launcher: Zinc Launcher is a simple Windows Media Center plugin that launches Zinc and attempts to manage the windows as seamlessly as possible. In addition ...New ReleasesAcervo 2 - Gerenciador de coleções: Acervo 2 - v1.0: Arquivos para implantação do sistema Acervo2 Aplicação web Web service Smart ClientAssemblyInfo Editor: Beta 1: Initial release of Assembly Info Editor. At this point, it is feature-complete and is relatively stable. There are undoubtedly some bugs to work o...Box2D.XNA: Box2D.XNA r70 Source Code and Solution: This version is synced to changeset 44697. This represents our official port of the C Box2D up to r70 on the Google Code project. With this versi...Boxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher Release 1.0.1.2: Will now stop Media Center playback before launching BoxeeBoxee Launcher: Boxee Launcher Release 1.0.1.3: Added a background window that attempts to display over the desktop and taskbar, and below Boxee and Media Center so that the desktop and taskbar a...CommLine: Beta Version 0.1: First Beta Of the AppCommLine: Source v0.1 Beta: Source Code C of 0.1 beta versionEncrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.6.2: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes (1.6.2), with general changes and improved randomness for the key generator. It has an installer that...Hash Calculator: HashCalculator: HashCalculator 1.0Hash Calculator: HashCalculator Source code: HashCalculator 1.0Hulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher 1.0.1.3: Added a background window that attempts to display over the desktop and taskbar, and below Hulu and Media Center so that the desktop and taskbar ar...Hulu Launcher: Hulu Launcher Release 1.0.1.2: Hulu Launcher will now stop playback in Media Center before launching Hulu Desktop.Innovative Games: 4.3 - Sprite Effects: Source code download for chapter 4.3 - "Sprite Effects"MediaRSS library for .NET: 0.1: Alpha release. Majority of MediaRSS spec is supported. A small set of unit test / sample code are included. A lightly tested CustomFormatter object...MEF Visualizer Tool: MEF Visualizer Tool 0.1: Help to see what going on in side CompositionContainer Container = new CompositionContainer( new AggregateCatalog( ...Ncqrs Framework - A CQRS framework for .NET: Ncqrs with sample application: This is the first release of the Ncqrs Framework. It contains the Ncqrs source code and a runnable sample application. All the code in this release...Rubik Cube's 3D Silverlight 3.0 Animated Solution: Rubik Cube 3D with Animated Solution: This project is a realization of Silverlight 3.0 Rubik Cube 3D with Animated Solution. The Solution is available for 3x3x3 cube, other features are...Scrabler: scrabler release 0.6.2.5: fixed a bug that werent executed some scriptsSharePhone: SharePhone: Initial release with basic functionality: Open SharePoint webs and subwebs Retrieve lists on SPWeb objects Read metadata/properties on lists ...SharePhone: SharePhone v.1.0.1: Fixed a bug that prevented saving list items to SharePointSharePoint Labs: SPLab4001A-FRA-Level100: SPLab4001A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you the first best practice you should apply when writing code with the SharePoint API. Lab ...Silverlight Resource Extension: ResourceExtension (alpha): Alpha version is not stable. Only for review.Silverlight Streamgraph: Port from processing.org: A port from the processing.org streamgraph. Code-heavy with very little XAML involved at this point.Theocratic Ministry School System: TMSS - Ver 1.1.1: What’s New! Added Menu Options 2010 Schedule Access 2007 Runtime There are still many uncompleted items so this is still a conceptual release....Theocratic Ministry School System: TMSS - Ver 1.1.2: Fixed the Schedule Import. Need needs to be tested. Click import button and make sure you can get the 2010 Schedule from the internet.thinktecture Starter STS (Community Edition): StarterSTS v1.0 RTW: Version 1.0 RTWTribe.Cache: Tribe.Cache Alpha - 0.2.0.0: Tribe.Cache Alpha - 0.2.0.0 - Now has sliding and absolute expiration on cache entries. Functional Alpha Release - But do not use in productionTwitterVB - A .NET Twitter Library: TwitterVB-2.3.1: This is mostly a minor release that adds br.st URL shortening to the menu (API key from http://br.st required)Virtu: Virtu 0.8.1: Source Requirements.NET Framework 3.5 with Service Pack 1 Visual Studio 2008 with Service Pack 1, or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition with Service Pa...Visual Studio DSite: Advanced C++ Calculator: An advanced visual c 2008 calculator that can do all your basic operations, plus some advanced mathematical functions. Source Code Only.xnaWebcam: xnaWebcam 0.3: xnaWebcam 0.3 Version 0.3: -ResolutionSet: 400x300 (Default), 800x600, 1024x720 -Settings Window got Icon -Settings Window Changes -DevConsole.cs ...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsGraffiti CMSnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.RawrFacebook Developer ToolkitjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesLINQ to TwitterBlogEngine.NETN2 CMSBase Class LibrariesFarseer Physics Engine

Read the article
Cloud Based Load Testing Using TF Service & VS 2013

- by Tarun Arora [Microsoft MVP]

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/TarunArora/archive/2013/06/30/cloud-based-load-testing-using-tf-service-amp-vs-2013.aspx One of the new features announced as part of the Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate Preview is ‘Cloud Based Load Testing’. In this blog post I’ll walk you through, What is Cloud Based Load Testing? How have I been using this feature? – Success story! Where can you find more resources on this feature? What is Cloud Based Load Testing? It goes without saying that performance testing your application not only gives you the confidence that the application will work under heavy levels of stress but also gives you the ability to test how scalable the architecture of your application is. It is important to know how much is too much for your application! Working with various clients in the industry I have realized that the biggest barriers in Load Testing & Performance Testing adoption are, High infrastructure and administration cost that comes with this phase of testing Time taken to procure & set up the test infrastructure Finding use for this infrastructure investment after completion of testing Is cloud the answer? 100% Visual Studio Compatible Scalable and Realistic Start testing in < 2 minutes Intuitive Pay only for what you need Use existing on premise tests on cloud There are a lot of vendors out there offering Cloud Based Load Testing, to name a few, Load Storm Soasta Blaze Meter Blitz And others… The question you may want to ask is, why should you go with Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test offering. If you are a Microsoft shop or already have investments in Microsoft technologies, you’ll see great benefit in the natural integration this offers with existing Microsoft products such as Visual Studio and Windows Azure. For example, your existing Web tests authored in Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Studio 2012 will run on the cloud without requiring any modifications what so ever. Microsoft’s cloud test rig also supports API based testing, for example, if you are building a WPF application which consumes WCF services, you can write unit tests to invoke the WCF service, these tests can be run on the cloud test rig and loaded with ‘N’ concurrent users for performance testing. If you have your assets already hosted in the Azure and possibly in the same data centre as the Cloud test rig, your Azure app will not incur a usage cost because of the generated traffic since the traffic is coming from the same data centre. The licensing or pricing information on Microsoft’s cloud based Load test service is yet to be announced, but I would expect this to be priced attractively to match the market competition. The only additional configuration required for running load tests on Microsoft Cloud based Load Tests service is to select the Test run location as Run tests using Visual Studio Team Foundation Service, How have I been using Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test Service? I have been part of the Microsoft Cloud Based Load Test Service advisory council for the last 7 months. This gave the opportunity to see the product shape up from concept to working solution. I was also the first person outside of Microsoft to try this offering out. This gave me the opportunity to test real world application at various clients using the Microsoft Load Test Service and provide real world feedback to the Microsoft product team. One of the most recent systems I tested using the Load Test Service has been an insurance quote generation engine. This insurance quote generation engine is, hosted in Windows Azure expected to get quote requests from across the globe expected to handle 5 Million quote requests in a day (not clear how this load will be distributed across the day) There was no way, I could simulate such kind of load from on premise without standing up additional hardware. But Microsoft’s Cloud based Load Test service allowed me to test my key performance testing scenarios, i.e. Simulate expected Load, Endurance Testing, Threshold Testing and Testing for Latency. Simulating expected load: approach to devising a load pattern My approach to devising a load test pattern has been to run the test scenario with 1 user to figure out the response time. Then work out how many users are required to reach the target load. So, for example, to invoke 1 quote from the quote engine software takes 0.5 seconds. Now if you do the math, 1 quote request by 1 user = 0.5 seconds quotes generated by 1 user in 24 hour = 1 * (((2 * 60) * 60) * 24) = 172,800 quotes generated by 30 users in 24 hours = 172,800 * 30 = 5,184,000 This was a very simple example, if your application requires more concurrent users to test scenario’s such as caching, etc then you can devise your own load pattern, some examples of load test patterns can be found here. Endurance Testing To test for endurance, I loaded the quote generation engine with an expected fixed user load and ran the test for very long duration such as over 48 hours and observed the affect of the long running test on the Azure infrastructure. Currently Microsoft Load Test service does not support metrics from the machine under test. I used Azure diagnostics to begin with, but later started using Cerebrata Azure Diagnostics Manager to capture the metrics of the machine under test. Threshold Testing To figure out how much user load the application could cope with before falling on its belly, I opted to step load the quote generation engine by incrementing user load with different variations of incremental user load per minute till the application crashed out and forced an IIS reset. Testing for Latency Currently the Microsoft Load Test service does not support generating geographically distributed load, I however, deployed the insurance quote generation engine in different Azure data centres and ran the same set of performance tests to measure for latency. Because I could compare load test results from different runs by exporting the results to excel (this feature is provided out of the box right from Visual Studio 2010) I could see the different in response times. More resources on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test Service A few important links to get you started, Download Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview Getting started guide for load testing using Team Foundation Service Troubleshooting guide for FAQs and known issues Team Foundation Service forum for questions and support Detailed demo and presentation (link to Tech-Ed session recording) Detailed demo and presentation (link to Build session recording) There a few limits on the usage of Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service that you can read about here. If you have any feedback on Microsoft Cloud based Load Test service, feel free to share it with the product team via the Visual Studio User Voice forum. I hope you found this useful. Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Stay tuned!

Read the article
Customize the Five Windows Folder Templates

- by Mark Virtue

Are you’re particular about the way Windows Explorer presents each folder’s contents? Here we show you how to take advantage of Explorer’s built-in templates, which cuts down the time it takes to do customizations. Note: The techniques in this article apply to Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. When opening a folder for the first time in Windows Explorer, we are presented with a standard default view of the files and folders in that folder. It may be that the items are presented are perfectly fine, but on the other hand, we may want to customize the view. The aspects of it that we can customize are the following: The display type (list view, details, tiles, thumbnails, etc) Which columns are displayed, and in which order The widths of the visible columns The order in which the files and folders are sorted Any file groupings Thankfully, Windows offers us a shortcut. A particular folder’s settings can be used as a “template” for other, similar folders. In fact, we can store up to five separate sets of folder presentation configurations. Once we save the settings for a particular template, that template can then be applied to other folders. Customize Your First Folder We’ll start by setting up the first of our templates – the default one. Once we create this template and apply it, the vast majority of the folders in our file system will change to match it, so it’s important that we set it up very carefully. The first step in creating and applying the template is to customize one folder with the settings that all the rest will have. Choose a folder that is typical of the folders that you wish to have this default template. Select it in Windows Explorer. To ensure that it is a suitable candidate, right-click the folder name and select Properties, then go to the Customize tab. Ensure that this folder is marked as General Items. If it is not, either choose a different folder or select General Items from the list. Click OK. Now we’re ready to customize our first folder. Changing the way one single folder is presented is straightforward. We start with the folder’s display type. Click the Change your view button in the top-right corner of every Explorer window. Each time you click the button, the folder’s view cycles to the next view type. Alternatively you can click the little down-arrow next to the button to see all the display types at once, and select the one you want. Click the view you want, or drag the slider next to the one you want. If you have chosen Details, then the next thing you may wish to change is which columns are displayed, and the order of these. To choose which columns are displayed, simply right-click on any column heading. A list of the columns currently being display appears. Simply uncheck a column if you don’t want it displayed, and check the columns that you want displayed. If you want some information displayed about your files that is not listed here, then click the More… button for a full list of file attributes. There’s a lot of them! To change the order of the columns that are currently being displayed, simply click on a column heading and drag it to where you think it should be. To change the width of a column, click the line that represents the right-hand edge of the column and drag it left or right. To sort by a column, click once on that column. To reverse the sort-order, click that same column again. To change the groupings of the files in the folder, right-click in a blank area of the folder, select Group by, and select the appropriate column. Apply This Default Template to All Similar Folders Once you have the folder exactly the way you want it, we now use this folder as our default template for most of the folders in our file system. To do this, ensure that you are still in the folder you just customized, and then, from the Organize menu in Explorer, click on Folder and search options. Then select the View tab and click the Apply to Folders button. After you’ve clicked OK, visit some of the other folders in your file system. You should see that most have taken on these new settings. What we’ve just done, in effect, is we have customized the General Items template. This is one of five templates that Windows Explorer uses to display folder contents. The five templates are called (in Windows 7): General Items Documents Pictures Music Videos When a folder is opened, Windows Explorer examines the contents to see if it can automatically determine which folder template to use to display the folder contents. If it is not obvious that the folder contents falls into any of the last four templates, then Windows Explorer chooses the General Items template. That’s why most of the folders in your file system are shown using the General Items template. Changing the Other Four Templates If you want to adjust the other four templates, the process is very similar to what we’ve just done. If you wanted to change the “Music” template, for example, the steps would be as follows: Select a folder that contains music items Apply the existing Music template to the folder (even if it doesn’t look like you want it to) Customize the folder to your personal preferences Apply the new template to all “Music” folders A fifth step would be: When you open a folder that contains music items but is not automatically displayed using the Music template, you manually select the Music template for that folder. First, select a folder that contains music items. It will probably be displayed using the existing Music template: Next, ensure that it is using the Music template. If it’s not, then manually select the Music template. Next, customize the folder to suit your personal preferences (here we’ve added a couple of columns, and sorted by Artist). Now we can set this view to be our Music template. Choose Organize, then the View tab, and click the Apply to Folders button. Note: The only folders that will inherit these settings are the ones that are currently (or will soon be) using the Music template. Now, if you have any folder that contains music items, and you want it to inherit all of these settings, then right-click the folder name, choose Properties, and select that this folder should use the Music template. You can also cehck the box entitled Also apply this template to all subfolders if you want to save yourself even more time with all the sub-folders. Conclusion It’s neat to be able to set up templates for your folder views like this. It’s a shame that Microsoft didn’t take the concept just a little further and allow you to create as many templates as you want. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fix For When Windows Explorer in Vista Stops Showing File NamesCustomize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuFix for New Contact Group Button Not Displaying in VistaWhy Did Windows Vista’s Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?Make Your Last Minute Holiday Cards with Microsoft Word 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 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

Read the article
SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Architecting Data Warehouse – Niraj Bhatt

- by pinaldave

Niraj Bhatt works as an Enterprise Architect for a Fortune 500 company and has an innate passion for building / studying software systems. He is a top rated speaker at various technical forums including Tech·Ed, MCT Summit, Developer Summit, and Virtual Tech Days, among others. Having run a successful startup for four years Niraj enjoys working on – IT innovations that can impact an enterprise bottom line, streamlining IT budgets through IT consolidation, architecture and integration of systems, performance tuning, and review of enterprise applications. He has received Microsoft MVP award for ASP.NET, Connected Systems and most recently on Windows Azure. When he is away from his laptop, you will find him taking deep dives in automobiles, pottery, rafting, photography, cooking and financial statements though not necessarily in that order. He is also a manager/speaker at BDOTNET, Asia’s largest .NET user group. Here is the guest post by Niraj Bhatt. As data in your applications grows it’s the database that usually becomes a bottleneck. It’s hard to scale a relational DB and the preferred approach for large scale applications is to create separate databases for writes and reads. These databases are referred as transactional database and reporting database. Though there are tools / techniques which can allow you to create snapshot of your transactional database for reporting purpose, sometimes they don’t quite fit the reporting requirements of an enterprise. These requirements typically are data analytics, effective schema (for an Information worker to self-service herself), historical data, better performance (flat data, no joins) etc. This is where a need for data warehouse or an OLAP system arises. A Key point to remember is a data warehouse is mostly a relational database. It’s built on top of same concepts like Tables, Rows, Columns, Primary keys, Foreign Keys, etc. Before we talk about how data warehouses are typically structured let’s understand key components that can create a data flow between OLTP systems and OLAP systems. There are 3 major areas to it: a) OLTP system should be capable of tracking its changes as all these changes should go back to data warehouse for historical recording. For e.g. if an OLTP transaction moves a customer from silver to gold category, OLTP system needs to ensure that this change is tracked and send to data warehouse for reporting purpose. A report in context could be how many customers divided by geographies moved from sliver to gold category. In data warehouse terminology this process is called Change Data Capture. There are quite a few systems that leverage database triggers to move these changes to corresponding tracking tables. There are also out of box features provided by some databases e.g. SQL Server 2008 offers Change Data Capture and Change Tracking for addressing such requirements. b) After we make the OLTP system capable of tracking its changes we need to provision a batch process that can run periodically and takes these changes from OLTP system and dump them into data warehouse. There are many tools out there that can help you fill this gap – SQL Server Integration Services happens to be one of them. c) So we have an OLTP system that knows how to track its changes, we have jobs that run periodically to move these changes to warehouse. The question though remains is how warehouse will record these changes? This structural change in data warehouse arena is often covered under something called Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD). While we will talk about dimensions in a while, SCD can be applied to pure relational tables too. SCD enables a database structure to capture historical data. This would create multiple records for a given entity in relational database and data warehouses prefer having their own primary key, often known as surrogate key. As I mentioned a data warehouse is just a relational database but industry often attributes a specific schema style to data warehouses. These styles are Star Schema or Snowflake Schema. The motivation behind these styles is to create a flat database structure (as opposed to normalized one), which is easy to understand / use, easy to query and easy to slice / dice. Star schema is a database structure made up of dimensions and facts. Facts are generally the numbers (sales, quantity, etc.) that you want to slice and dice. Fact tables have these numbers and have references (foreign keys) to set of tables that provide context around those facts. E.g. if you have recorded 10,000 USD as sales that number would go in a sales fact table and could have foreign keys attached to it that refers to the sales agent responsible for sale and to time table which contains the dates between which that sale was made. These agent and time tables are called dimensions which provide context to the numbers stored in fact tables. This schema structure of fact being at center surrounded by dimensions is called Star schema. A similar structure with difference of dimension tables being normalized is called a Snowflake schema. This relational structure of facts and dimensions serves as an input for another analysis structure called Cube. Though physically Cube is a special structure supported by commercial databases like SQL Server Analysis Services, logically it’s a multidimensional structure where dimensions define the sides of cube and facts define the content. Facts are often called as Measures inside a cube. Dimensions often tend to form a hierarchy. E.g. Product may be broken into categories and categories in turn to individual items. Category and Items are often referred as Levels and their constituents as Members with their overall structure called as Hierarchy. Measures are rolled up as per dimensional hierarchy. These rolled up measures are called Aggregates. Now this may seem like an overwhelming vocabulary to deal with but don’t worry it will sink in as you start working with Cubes and others. Let’s see few other terms that we would run into while talking about data warehouses. ODS or an Operational Data Store is a frequently misused term. There would be few users in your organization that want to report on most current data and can’t afford to miss a single transaction for their report. Then there is another set of users that typically don’t care how current the data is. Mostly senior level executives who are interesting in trending, mining, forecasting, strategizing, etc. don’t care for that one specific transaction. This is where an ODS can come in handy. ODS can use the same star schema and the OLAP cubes we saw earlier. The only difference is that the data inside an ODS would be short lived, i.e. for few months and ODS would sync with OLTP system every few minutes. Data warehouse can periodically sync with ODS either daily or weekly depending on business drivers. Data marts are another frequently talked about topic in data warehousing. They are subject-specific data warehouse. Data warehouses that try to span over an enterprise are normally too big to scope, build, manage, track, etc. Hence they are often scaled down to something called Data mart that supports a specific segment of business like sales, marketing, or support. Data marts too, are often designed using star schema model discussed earlier. Industry is divided when it comes to use of data marts. Some experts prefer having data marts along with a central data warehouse. Data warehouse here acts as information staging and distribution hub with spokes being data marts connected via data feeds serving summarized data. Others eliminate the need for a centralized data warehouse citing that most users want to report on detailed data. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

Read the article
User Guide to Dropbox Shared Folders

- by Matthew Guay

Dropbox is an incredibly useful tool for keeping all your files synced between your computers and the cloud. Here we’re going to look at how you can keep all of your team on the same page with Dropbox shared folders. Creating a Shared Folder Setting up a shared folder in Dropbox is easy. Add the files you want to share to a folder in Dropbox on your computer, then right-click in the folder, select Dropbox, and then choose Share This Folder. Alternately, log into your Dropbox account online, click the drop-down menu beside the folder you want to share, and click Share this folder. Now, enter the email addresses of the people you want to share the folder with, and optionally enter a message explaining why you’re sharing the folder. The people you invite will receive an email inviting them to view and join the shared folder. If they haven’t signed up for Dropbox, they can directly signup; otherwise, they can simply log into their Dropbox account and start adding or editing files. Shared folders have a slightly different icon in your Dropbox. Notice the shared folder on the left has an icon with 2 people, while the folder on the right that is not shared, shows previews of its contents. See Your Shared Folder’s History Whenever your collaborators with your shared folders add or change files, you will see a tooltip notification telling you what changed. You can also view the changes online. Log into your Dropbox account in your browser and select the Events tab. This shows all changes to your Dropbox, but you can view only the changes in your shared folder by selecting its name on the left sidebar. Now you can see all recent changes to your folder, and can also see who added or removed each file. On the bottom of the page, you can even add a comment that all the collaborators will see. If someone deleted a file you still need, you can restore it by clicking its link in this online history. Or, you can view any deleted files by right-clicking in your Dropbox folder in Explorer. Select Dropbox, and then click Show Deleted Files. Get Notified When a Change is Made You’re not always in front of your computer; you’ve got a life beyond your projects, after all (at least hopefully). If you really want to stay connected to what’s happening with your project, though, you can easily do that no matter where you are. Your shared Dropbox folder’s history page offers an RSS feed of all changes to the folder. Click the Subscribe to this feed hyperlink. Now, in the popup that opens, click “Copy to clipboard” so you can use this RSS feed. You can subscribe to RSS feeds through many web browsers, email clients, dedicated feed readers, and more. In Firefox, Internet Explorer 7/8, or Opera, you can paste the feed address into your address bar and subscribe to the feed directly in your browser. However, subscribing to the feed in a desktop application won’t help you much when you’re away from your computer. One great option is to subscribe in the popular Google Reader. Then you can check your feed from any browser, on any computer or mobile device. To add your Dropbox feed to Google Reader, log into Google Reader (link below), click Add a subscription on the top left, paste your RSS feed from Dropbox, and click Add. Now you can see any changes to files or folders in Google Reader. You can even add your feed to your iGoogle homepage. Click the Add it Now button on the right in the front page of Google Reader to add your feeds to iGoogle. Now you can see updates on your files from your homepage. If you’re using a different computer, just login to your Google account to see what’s happening. You can also access your Google Reader feeds from many programs and apps for most major Smartphones including iPhone, Windows Phone, and Blackberry. Receive a Tweet or Text When Changes are Made If you’re a hyper-connected individual, chances are you send and receive tweets on the go. If so, this might be the best way for you to get notified when changes are made to your Dropbox shared folder. To do this, first create a new Twitter account to publish your changes through. If you don’t want the whole world to see your updates, click Settings and set your new Twitter account to Private. Once the new account is created, follow it with your normal Twitter account so you’ll see updates. Now, let’s publish our Dropbox RSS feed to Twitter. Create an account with Twitterfeed (link below). Once your account is setup, add your feed to it. Name your feed, and enter your Feed address from Dropbox. Click Advanced Settings to make your feed work just like you want. In Advanced Settings, change the frequency to “Every 30 mins” to make sure you’re updated on changes as quick as possible. You can also change other settings if you like. Click “Continue to Step 2”, and then click Twitter under the available services to add your account. Make sure your signed into your new Twitter account, and then click Authenticate Twitter. Allow the application. Now, finally, click Create Service. Whenever a change is made, you will receive a tweet via your new Twitter account. And since you can receive tweets via text message or many mobile applications, you’ll never be very far away from your Dropbox changes! Conclusion Dropbox shared folders are a great way to keep your whole team working together on the same files in a project. And with these handy tricks, you can keep up with your shared files wherever you are! There are a lot of cool things you can do with Dropbox make sure to check out our posts on adding Dropbox to the Windows 7 Start menu, Accessing Dropbox files from Chrome, and Syncing your Pidgin Profile Across Multiple PCs. Links Signup or access your Dropbox account Google Reader Tweet your feed with Twitterfeed Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How to Add and Manage Shared Folders on Windows Home ServerManage User Accounts in Windows Home ServerAdd "My Dropbox" to Your Windows 7 Start MenuComplete Guide to Networking Windows 7 with XP and VistaMoving Your Personal Data Folders in Windows Vista the Easy Way 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 Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott FoxClocks adds World Times in your Statusbar (Firefox) Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7

Read the article
OS Analytics - Deep Dive Into Your OS

- by Eran_Steiner

Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides a feature called "OS Analytics". This feature allows you to get a better understanding of how the Operating System is being utilized. You can research the historical usage as well as real time data. This post will show how you can benefit from OS Analytics and how it works behind the scenes. We will have a call to discuss this blog - please join us!Date: Thursday, November 1, 2012Time: 11:00 am, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)1. Go to https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/j.php?ED=209833067&UID=1512092402&PW=NY2JhMmFjMmFh&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D2. If requested, enter your name and email address.3. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: oracle1234. Click "Join". To join the teleconference:Call-in toll-free number: 1-866-682-4770 (US/Canada) Other countries: https://oracle.intercallonline.com/portlets/scheduling/viewNumbers/viewNumber.do?ownerNumber=5931260&audioType=RP&viewGa=true&ga=ONConference Code: 7629343#Security code: 7777# Here is quick summary of what you can do with OS Analytics in Ops Center: View historical charts and real time value of CPU, memory, network and disk utilization Find the top CPU and Memory processes in real time or at a certain historical day Determine proper monitoring thresholds based on historical data View Solaris services status details Drill down into a process details View the busiest zones if applicable Where to start To start with OS Analytics, choose the OS asset in the tree and click the Analytics tab. You can see the CPU utilization, Memory utilization and Network utilization, along with the current real time top 5 processes in each category (click the image to see a larger version): In the above screen, you can click each of the top 5 processes to see a more detailed view of that process. Here is an example of one of the processes: One of the cool things is that you can see the process tree for this process along with some port binding and open file descriptors. On Solaris machines with zones, you get an extra level of tabs, allowing you to get more information on the different zones: This is a good way to see the busiest zones. For example, one zone may not take a lot of CPU but it can consume a lot of memory, or perhaps network bandwidth. To see the detailed Analytics for each of the zones, simply click each of the zones in the tree and go to its Analytics tab. Next, click the "Processes" tab to see real time information of all the processes on the machine: An interesting column is the "Target" column. If you configured Ops Center to work with Enterprise Manager Cloud Control, then the two products will talk to each other and Ops Center will display the correlated target from Cloud Control in this table. If you are only using Ops Center - this column will remain empty. Next, if you view a Solaris machine, you will have a "Services" tab: By default, all services will be displayed, but you can choose to display only certain states, for example, those in maintenance or the degraded ones. You can highlight a service and choose to view the details, where you can see the Dependencies, Dependents and also the location of the service log file (not shown in the picture as you need to scroll down to see the log file). The "Threshold" tab is particularly helpful - you can view historical trends of different monitored values and based on the graph - determine what the monitoring values should be: You can ask Ops Center to suggest monitoring levels based on the historical values or you can set your own. The different colors in the graph represent the current set levels: Red for critical, Yellow for warning and Blue for Information, allowing you to quickly see how they're positioned against real data. It's important to note that when looking at longer periods, Ops Center smooths out the data and uses averages. So when looking at values such as CPU Usage, try shorter time frames which are more detailed, such as one hour or one day. Applying new monitoring values When first applying new values to monitored attributes - a popup will come up asking if it's OK to get you out of the current Monitoring Policy. This is OK if you want to either have custom monitoring for a specific machine, or if you want to use this current machine as a "Gold image" and extract a Monitoring Policy from it. You can later apply the new Monitoring Policy to other machines and also set it as a default Monitoring Profile. Once you're done with applying the different monitoring values, you can review and change them in the "Monitoring" tab. You can also click the "Extract a Monitoring Policy" in the actions pane on the right to save all the new values to a new Monitoring Policy, which can then be found under "Plan Management" -> "Monitoring Policies". Visiting the past Under the "History" tab you can "go back in time". This is very helpful when you know that a machine was busy a few hours ago (perhaps in the middle of the night?), but you were not around to take a look at it in real time. Here's a view into yesterday's data on one of the machines: You can see an interesting CPU spike happening at around 3:30 am along with some memory use. In the bottom table you can see the top 5 CPU and Memory consumers at the requested time. Very quickly you can see that this spike is related to the Solaris 11 IPS repository synchronization process using the "pkgrecv" command. The "time machine" doesn't stop here - you can also view historical data to determine which of the zones was the busiest at a given time: Under the hood The data collected is stored on each of the agents under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/historical/ An "os.zip" file exists for the main OS. Inside you will find many small text files, named after the Epoch time stamp in which they were taken If you have any zones, there will be a file called "guests.zip" containing the same small files for all the zones, as well as a folder with the name of the zone along with "os.zip" in it If this is the Enterprise Controller or the Proxy Controller, you will have folders called "proxy" and "sat" in which you will find the "os.zip" for that controller The actual script collecting the data can be viewed for debugging purposes as well: On Linux, the location is: /opt/sun/xvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect On Solaris, the location is /opt/SUNWxvmoc/private/os_analytics/collect If you would like to redirect all the standard error into a file for debugging, touch the following file and the output will go into it: # touch /tmp/.collect.stderr The temporary data is collected under /var/opt/sun/xvm/analytics/.collectdb until it is zipped. If you would like to review the properties for the Analytics, you can view those per each agent in /opt/sun/n1gc/lib/XVM.properties. Find the section "Analytics configurable properties for OS and VSC" to view the Analytics specific values. I hope you find this helpful! Please post questions in the comments below. Eran Steiner

Read the article
Thoughts on Build 2013

- by D'Arcy Lussier

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2013/06/30/153294.aspxAnd so another Build conference has come to an end. Below are my thoughts/perspectives on various aspects of the event. I’ll do a separate blog post on my thoughts of the Build message for developers. The Good Moscone center was a great venue for Build! Easy to get around, easy to get to, and well maintained, it was a very comfortable conference venue. Yeah, the free swag was nice. Build has built up an expectation that attendees will always get something; it’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft maintains this expectation over the next few Build events. I still maintain that free swag should never be the main reason one attends an event, and for me this was definitely just an added bonus. I’m planning on trying to use the Surface as a dedicated 2nd device at work for meetings, I’ll share my experiences over the next few months. The hackathon event was a great idea, although personally I couldn’t justify spending the money on a conference registration just to spend the entire conference coding. Still, the apps that were created were really great and there was a lot of passion and excitement around the hackathon. I wonder if they couldn’t have had the hackathon on the Monday/Tuesday for those that wanted to participate so they didn’t miss any of the actual conference over Wed/Thurs. San Francisco was a great city to host Build. Getting from hotels to the conference center was very easy (well especially for me, I was only 3 blocks away) and the city itself felt very safe. However, if I never have to fly into SFO again I’ll be alright with that! Delays going into and out of SFO and both apparently were due to the airport itself. The Bad Build is one of those oddities on the conference landscape where people will pay to commit to attending an event without knowing anything about the sessions. We got our list of conference sessions when we registered on Tuesday, not before. And even then, we only got titles and not descriptions (those were eventually made available via the conference’s mobile application). I get it…they’re going to make announcements and they don’t want to give anything away through the session titles. But honestly, there wasn’t anything in the session titles that I would have considered a surprise. Breakfasts were brutal. High-carb pastries, donuts, and muffins with fruit and hard boiled eggs does not a conference breakfast make. I can’t believe that the difference between a continental breakfast per person and a hot breakfast buffet would have been a huge impact to a conference fee that was already around $2000. The vendor area was anemic. I don’t know why Microsoft forces the vendors into cookie-cutter booth areas (this year they were all made of plywood material). WPC, TechEd – booth areas there allow the vendors to be creative with their displays. Not so much for Build. Really odd was the lack of Microsoft’s own representation around Bing. In the day 1 keynote Microsoft made a big deal about Bing as an API. Yet there was nobody in the vendor area set up to provide more information or have discussions with about the Bing API. The Ugly Our name badges were NFC enabled. The purpose of this, beyond the vendors being able to scan your info, wasn’t really made clear. An attendee I talked to showed how you could get a reader app on your phone so you can scan other members cards and collect their contact info – which is a kewl idea; business cards are so 1990’s. But I was *shocked* at the amount of information that was on our name badges! Here’s what’s displayed on our name badge: - Name - Company - Twitter Handle I’m ok with that. But here’s what actually gets read: - Name - Company - Address Used for Registration - Phone Number Used for Registration So sharing that info with another attendee, they get way more of my info than just how to find me on Twitter! Microsoft, you need to fix this for the future. If vendors want to collect information on attendees, they should be able to collect an ID from the badge, then get a report with corresponding records afterwards. My personal information should not be so readily available, and without my knowledge! Final Verdict Maybe its my older age, maybe its where I’m at in life with family, maybe its where I’m at in my career, but when I consider whether a conference experience was valuable I get to the core reason I attend: opportunities to learn, opportunities to network, opportunities to engage with Microsoft. Opportunities to Learn: Sessions I attended were generally OK, with some really stand out ones on Day 2. I would love to see Microsoft adopt the Dojo format for a portion of their sessions. Hands On Labs are dull, lecture style sessions are great for information sharing. But a guided hands-on coding session (Read: Dojo) provides the best of both worlds. Being that all content is publically available online to everyone (Build attendee or not), the value of attending the conference sessions is decreased. The value though is in the discussions that take part in person afterwards, which leads to… Opportunities to Network: I enjoyed getting together with old friends and connecting with Twitter friends in person for the first time. I also had an opportunity to meet total strangers. So from a networking perspective, Build was fantastic! I still think it would have been great to have an area for ad-hoc discussions – where speakers could announce they’d be available for more questions after their sessions, or attendees who wanted to discuss more in depth on a topic with other attendees could arrange space. Some people have no problems being outgoing and making these things happen, but others are not and a structured model is more attractive. Opportunities to Engage with Microsoft: Hit and miss on this one. Outside of the vendor area, unless you cornered or reached out to a speaker, there wasn’t any defined way to connect with blue badges. And as I mentioned above, Microsoft didn’t have full representation in the vendor area (no Bing). All in all, Build was a fun party where I was informed about some new stuff and got some free swag. Was it worth the time away from home and the hit to my PD budget? I’d say Somewhat. Build is a great informational conference, but I wouldn’t call it a learning conference. Considering that TechEd seems to be moving to more of an IT Pro focus, independent developer conferences seem to be the best value for those looking to learn and not just be informed. With the rapid development cycle Microsoft is embracing, we’re already seeing Build happening twice within a 12 month period. If that continues, the value of attending Build in person starts to diminish – especially with so much content available online. If Microsoft wants Build to be a must-attend event in the future, they need to start incorporating aspects of Tech Ed, past PDCs, and other conferences so those that want to leave with more than free swag have something to attract them.

Read the article
Why can I not get a WDS-originated PXE boot to progress past the first file download?

- by Jeff Shattock

I'm trying to work out an automated Windows install process, and thought I'd give WDS a look. After some promising initial progress, I seem to have hit a wall. I imported the boot and install WIMs, and created the capture WIM successfully. However, whenever I try to PXE boot the reference machine against the WDS server, it kinda craps out. It finds the server and downloads WDSNBP.COM successfully, and then gives the message "TFTP download failed." According to WireShark, the only communication between the WDS box and the client box is the successful TFTP request and download of boot\x86\WDSNBP.COM. No further requests are sent. The WDS log on the server shows the same thing, one successful download and no more activity. I've tried every combination of the following, with exactly zero change in behaviour: Win Server 2008R2 vs 2012 vs 2012R2 WDS virtualized on KVM, ESXi, VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation Client virtualized on KVM, ESXi, VirtualBox, VMWare Workstation Every network adaptor type offered by the virtualization platforms. "Actual" network vs isolated, virtual network. MS DHCP server vs Linux isc-dhcp-server Joined to a domain vs Stand-alone I tried changing the boot filename in DHCP to pxeboot.com instead, and it has no problem downloading that file instead, but it then crabs about Boot\BCD being corrupted. Also, with 2012, it doesnt appear that WDSNBP.com does the architecture detection, or at least does'nt report that it did. 2008 reports that it found x64, and then errors. I find myself out of things to check, and I dont see anything immediately wrong. Where do I go from here? WDS server is at 192.168.1.50, DHCP/DNS at 192.168.1.7. Console of the client computer after the boot: MAC: 52:54:00:28:94:0E UUID: blah blah Searching for server (DHCP)..... Me: 192.168.1.155, DHCP: 192.168.1.7, Gateway 192.168.1.1 Loading 192.168.1.50:boot\x86\wdsnbp.com ...(PXE).................done Downloaded WDSNCP... TFPT download failed Interesting parts of /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf on the Linux DHCP server: allow booting; allow bootp; option option-60 code 60 = string; option option-66 code 66 = string; option option-67 code 67 = string; subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { range 192.168.1.110 192.168.1.253; next-server 192.168.1.50; option tftp-server-name "192.168.1.50"; option option-60 "PXEClient"; filename "boot\\x86\\wdsnbp.com"; option bootfile-name "boot\\x86\\wdsnbp.com"; }

Read the article
Bad motherboard / controller / HDs?

- by quidpro

On a leased server, I am running into some timing issues with an application that requires precise timing. Server is a Dual Xeon E5410 running on a Supermicro X7DVL-3 motherboard under CentOs 5.5 x64. The application I am running is timer sensitive and keeps sensing drift whether under load or at idle, but especially under load. I did some investigating with atop and dd and found some mind-blowing numbers. Mind you, I am no Linux guru but something sure seems out of whack. I ran: dd bs=4096 if=/dev/zero of=/bigtestfile to generate disk activity. Regardless whether I wrote it to sda or sdb my DSK value in atop would go over 100%, at one time peaking at 1700%. Again it does not matter if I am writing to sda or sdb. DSK | sdb | busy 675% | read 0 | write 110 | avio 78 ms | Here are the smartctl outputs: # smartctl -A /dev/sda smartctl version 5.38 [x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 165 165 021 Pre-fail Always - 2750 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 040 Old_age Always - 21 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000a 200 200 051 Old_age Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 065 065 000 Old_age Always - 25831 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 253 051 Old_age Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0012 100 253 051 Old_age Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 21 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 116 093 000 Old_age Always - 27 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0012 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x000a 200 253 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 051 Old_age Offline - 0 # smartctl -A /dev/sdb smartctl version 5.38 [x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 180 180 021 Pre-fail Always - 3958 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 22 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 068 068 000 Old_age Always - 24087 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 253 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 253 051 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 21 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 122 096 000 Old_age Always - 25 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0009 200 200 051 Pre-fail Offline - 0 Any idea what's wrong here? Bad motherboard? It would seem rare that both drives are going bad (smartctl says they PASS_, so it leaves the mobo as the culprit in my eyes.

Read the article
repeated failing passwords in linux security log (/var/log/secure)

- by wallyk

Recently, I opened up the SSH port through my firewalls (and redirecting to my server) so I could check on the (http) server while on the road. The first week or two there was nothing different. But now, three or four weeks later, I see lots of this: Mar 20 08:38:28 localhost sshd[21895]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.queued.net user=root Mar 20 08:38:31 localhost sshd[21895]: Failed password for root from 207.210.101.209 port 2854 ssh2 Mar 20 15:38:31 localhost sshd[21896]: Received disconnect from 207.210.101.209: 11: Bye Bye Mar 20 08:38:32 localhost unix_chkpwd[21900]: password check failed for user (root) Mar 20 08:38:32 localhost sshd[21898]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.queued.net user=root Mar 20 08:38:34 localhost sshd[21898]: Failed password for root from 207.210.101.209 port 3729 ssh2 Mar 20 15:38:35 localhost sshd[21899]: Received disconnect from 207.210.101.209: 11: Bye Bye Mar 20 08:38:36 localhost unix_chkpwd[21903]: password check failed for user (root) Mar 20 08:38:36 localhost sshd[21901]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.queued.net user=root Mar 20 08:38:38 localhost sshd[21901]: Failed password for root from 207.210.101.209 port 4313 ssh2 Mar 20 15:38:38 localhost sshd[21902]: Received disconnect from 207.210.101.209: 11: Bye Bye Mar 20 08:38:40 localhost unix_chkpwd[21906]: password check failed for user (root) Mar 20 08:38:40 localhost sshd[21904]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.queued.net user=root Mar 20 08:38:42 localhost sshd[21904]: Failed password for root from 207.210.101.209 port 4869 ssh2 Mar 20 15:38:43 localhost sshd[21905]: Received disconnect from 207.210.101.209: 11: Bye Bye Mar 20 08:38:44 localhost unix_chkpwd[21909]: password check failed for user (root) Mar 20 08:38:44 localhost sshd[21907]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=mail.queued.net user=root Mar 20 08:38:46 localhost sshd[21907]: Failed password for root from 207.210.101.209 port 2512 ssh2 Mar 20 15:38:47 localhost sshd[21908]: Received disconnect from 207.210.101.209: 11: Bye Bye Mar 20 15:38:57 localhost sshd[21912]: Connection closed by 207.210.101.209 There are about 1100 lines of these for March 20th, zero for the 19th, and 800 or so for the 18th—all related to the same IP. What does it mean? What should I do? Why isn't it chronological?

Read the article
IRP_MJ_WRITE latency up to 15 seconds

- by racitup

We have written an application that performs small (22kB) writes to multiple files at once (one thread performing asynchronous queued writes to multiple locations on behalf of other threads) on the same local volume (RAID1). 99.9% of the writes are low-latency but occasionally (maybe every minute or two) we get one or two huge latency writes (I have seen 10 seconds and above) without any real explanation. Platform: Win2003 Server with NTFS. Monitoring: Sysinternals Process Monitor (see link below) and our own application logging. We have tried multiple things to try and solve this that have been gleaned from a few websites, e.g.: Making the first part of file names unique to aid 8.3 name generation Writing files to multiple directories Changing Intel Disk Write Caching Windows File/Printer Sharing Minimize memory used Balance Maximize data throughput for file sharing Maximize data throughput for network applications System-Advanced-Performance-Advanced NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate - use fsutil behavior set disablelastaccess 1 disable 8.3 name generation - use "fsutil behavior set disable8dot3 1" + restart Enable a large size file system cache Disable paging of the kernel code IO Page Lock Limit Turn Off (or On) the Indexing Service But nothing seems to make much difference. There's a whole host of things we haven't tried yet but we wondered if anyone had come across the same problem, a reason and a solution (programmatic or not)? We can reproduce the problem using IOMeter and a simple setup: Start IOMeter and remove all but the first worker thread in 'Topology' using the disconnect button. Select the Worker thread and put a cross in the box next to the disk you want to use in the Disk Targets tab and put '2000000' in Maximum Disk Size (NOTE: must have at least 1GB free space; sector size is 512 bytes) Next create a new access specification and add it to the worker thread: Transfer Request Size = 22kB 100% Sequential Percent of Access Spec = 100% Percent Read/Write = 100% Write Change Results Display Update Frequency to 5 seconds, Test Setup Run Time to 20 seconds and both 'Number of Workers to Spawn Automatically' settings to zero. Select the Worker Thread in the Topology panel and hit the Duplicate Worker button 59 times to create 60 threads with identical settings. Hit the 'Go' button (green flag) and monitor the Results tab. The 'Maximum I/O Response Time (ms)' always hits at least 3500 on our machine. Our machine isn't exactly slow (Xeon 8 core rack server with 4GB and onboard RAID). I'd be interested to see what other people get. We have a feeling it might be something to do with the NTFS filesystem (ours is currently 75% full of fragmented files) and we are going to try a few things around this principle. But it is also related to disk performance since we don't see it on a RAMDisk and it's not as severe on a RAID10 array. Any help is much appreciated. Richard Right-click and select 'Open Link in New Tab': ProcMon Result

Read the article
What is a good layout for a somewhat advanced home network and storage solution?

- by Shaun

My home network/storage needs are changing and I am searching for some opinions and starting points on what a good network/storage layout would be that can serve my needs for a few years into the future. I think I have a decent starting point for equipment, but I am also willing to invest fairly heavily in a solution that can last me for a while. I am a bit of a tech nerd and I have a moderate tolerance for setup of the solution. I would prefer if maintenance of the system is somewhat low once it is setup, but I am willing to accept some tradeoffs. Existing equipment: Router - Netgear WNDR3700 (gigabit) Router - DLink Gamerlounge DGL-4300 (gigabit) Switch - 16 port Trendnet green switch (gigabit) Switch - 5 port Trendnet green (gigabit) Computer - i7-950 office computer (gigabit ethernet) Computer - Q6600 quad core media center, hooked up to TV, records shows (gigabit ethernet) Computer - Acer 1810T ultraportable laptop (gigabit and N ethernet) NAS - Intel SS4200-E (gigabit) External hard drive - 2TB WD Green drive (esata) All kinds of miscellaneous network connected TV, Bluray, Verizon network extender, HDhomerun TV tuners, etc. Requirements: -Robust backup solution for a growing collection of huge family picture files and personal files, around 1.5TB. (Including offsite backup) -Central location for all user's files, while also keeping them secure from each other. -Storage for terabytes of movie backups and recorded TV, and access to them from all computers (maybe around 4TB eventually) -Possibility to host files to friends and family easily Nice to have: -Backup of terabytes of movie backups Intriguing possibilities: -Capability to have users' Windows desktops and files look the same from all network computers I am not sure if the new Windows Home Server 2011 would fit into this well, if I need a domain server, how best to organize my backups, or how to most effectively use RAID. Currently I am simply backing up all computers to a RAID 1 on the NAS box, which I was thinking could prevent a situation where I reach for a backup and find that the disk is corrupt. One possibility that I am thinking about now is simply using my media center PC with a huge RAID of hard drives on which all files are stored. Pseudo-backup of all files would be present because of the RAID, but important files would also be backed up off site via carrying hard drives to work. But what if corruption seeps into the files and the corrupted data is then backed up? Does RAID protect against this? I really want to take next to zero risks with the irreplaceable files. I can handle some degree of risk with the movies and other files. I'm looking for critiques on this idea as well as other possibilities. To summarize, my goal is high functionality, media capable, and robust backup of irreplaceable files.

Read the article
Help with Windows 7 BSOD with windbg minidump !analyze -v results

- by Kurt Harless

Hi gang, Windows 7 X64 Ultimate is BSODing occasionally. I suspect an overheating issue or something related to the use of my GTX-295 card that runs very hot. Here is an !analyze -v listing of the most recent minidump. Any and all help greatly appreciated. Kurt Microsoft (R) Windows Debugger Version 6.12.0002.633 AMD64 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Loading Dump File [C:\Windows\Minidump\122810-31387-01.dmp] Mini Kernel Dump File: Only registers and stack trace are available Symbol search path is: SRV*c:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols Executable search path is: Windows 7 Kernel Version 7600 MP (8 procs) Free x64 Product: WinNt, suite: TerminalServer SingleUserTS Built by: 7600.16617.amd64fre.win7_gdr.100618-1621 Machine Name: Kernel base = 0xfffff800`03065000 PsLoadedModuleList = 0xfffff800`032a2e50 Debug session time: Tue Dec 28 11:04:03.597 2010 (UTC - 7:00) System Uptime: 2 days 2:28:40.407 Loading Kernel Symbols ............................................................... ................................................................ .............................................. Loading User Symbols Loading unloaded module list ................ ******************************************************************************* * * * Bugcheck Analysis * * * ******************************************************************************* Use !analyze -v to get detailed debugging information. BugCheck 3B, {c0000005, fffff800033b8873, fffff8800e322dc0, 0} Probably caused by : ntkrnlmp.exe ( nt!RtlCompareUnicodeStrings+c3 ) Followup: MachineOwner --------- 1: kd> !analyze -v ******************************************************************************* * * * Bugcheck Analysis * * * ******************************************************************************* SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION (3b) An exception happened while executing a system service routine. Arguments: Arg1: 00000000c0000005, Exception code that caused the bugcheck Arg2: fffff800033b8873, Address of the instruction which caused the bugcheck Arg3: fffff8800e322dc0, Address of the context record for the exception that caused the bugcheck Arg4: 0000000000000000, zero. Debugging Details: ------------------ EXCEPTION_CODE: (NTSTATUS) 0xc0000005 - The instruction at 0x%08lx referenced memory at 0x%08lx. The memory could not be %s. FAULTING_IP: nt!RtlCompareUnicodeStrings+c3 fffff800`033b8873 488b7c2418 mov rdi,qword ptr [rsp+18h] CONTEXT: fffff8800e322dc0 -- (.cxr 0xfffff8800e322dc0) rax=0000000000000041 rbx=fffff8a015a3c1c0 rcx=0000000000000024 rdx=0000000000000003 rsi=fffff8800e3238b0 rdi=0000000000000009 rip=fffff800033b8873 rsp=fffff8800e323798 rbp=000000000000000d r8=fffff8a018cb374c r9=000000200a98fdc4 r10=fffff8800e323988 r11=fffff8800e32398e r12=fffff8a018127c18 r13=fffff8800126e550 r14=0000000000000001 r15=fffffa800abe1570 iopl=0 nv up ei pl nz ac po nc cs=0010 ss=0018 ds=002b es=002b fs=0053 gs=002b efl=00010216 nt!RtlCompareUnicodeStrings+0xc3: fffff800`033b8873 488b7c2418 mov rdi,qword ptr [rsp+18h] ss:0018:fffff880`0e3237b0=???????????????? Resetting default scope CUSTOMER_CRASH_COUNT: 1 DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: VISTA_DRIVER_FAULT BUGCHECK_STR: 0x3B PROCESS_NAME: ccSvcHst.exe CURRENT_IRQL: 0 LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from 0000000000000000 to fffff800033b8873 STACK_TEXT: fffff880`0e323798 00000000`00000000 : 00000000`00000000 00000000`00000000 00000000`00000000 00000000`00000000 : nt!RtlCompareUnicodeStrings+0xc3 FOLLOWUP_IP: nt!RtlCompareUnicodeStrings+c3 fffff800`033b8873 488b7c2418 mov rdi,qword ptr [rsp+18h] SYMBOL_STACK_INDEX: 0 SYMBOL_NAME: nt!RtlCompareUnicodeStrings+c3 FOLLOWUP_NAME: MachineOwner MODULE_NAME: nt IMAGE_NAME: ntkrnlmp.exe DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 4c1c44a9 STACK_COMMAND: .cxr 0xfffff8800e322dc0 ; kb FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: X64_0x3B_nt!RtlCompareUnicodeStrings+c3 BUCKET_ID: X64_0x3B_nt!RtlCompareUnicodeStrings+c3 Followup: MachineOwner ---------

Read the article
Forward all traffic through an ssh tunnel

- by Eamorr

I hope someone can follow this and I'll explain as best I can. I'm trying to forward all traffic from port 6999 on x.x.x.224, through an ssh tunnel, and onto port 7000 on x.x.x.218. Here is some ASCII art: |browser|-----|Squid on x.x.x.224|------|ssh tunnel|------<satellite link>-----|Squid on x.x.x.218|-----|www| 3128 6999 7000 80 When I remove the ssh tunnel, everything works fine. The idea is to turn off encryption on the ssh tunnel (to save bandwidth) and turn on maximum compression (to save more bandwidth). This is because it's a satellite link. Here's the ssh tunnel I've been using: ssh -C -f -C -o CompressionLevel=9 -o Cipher=none [email protected] -L 7000:172.16.1.224:6999 -N The trouble is, I don't know how to get data from Squid on x.x.x.224 into the ssh tunnel? Am I going about this the wrong way? Should I create an ssh tunnel on x.x.x.218? I use iptables to stop squid on x.x.x.224 from reading port 80, but to feed from port 6999 instead (i.e. via the ssh tunnel). Do I need another iptables rule? Any comments greatly appreciated. Many thanks in advance, Regarding Eduardo Ivanec's question, here is a netstat -i any port 7000 -nn dump from x.x.x.218: 14:42:15.386462 IP 172.16.1.224.40006 > 172.16.1.218.7000: Flags [S], seq 2804513708, win 14600, options [mss 1460,sackOK,TS val 86702647 ecr 0,nop,wscale 4], length 0 14:42:15.386690 IP 172.16.1.218.7000 > 172.16.1.224.40006: Flags [R.], seq 0, ack 2804513709, win 0, length 0 Update 2: When I run the second command, I get the following error in my browser: ERROR The requested URL could not be retrieved The following error was encountered while trying to retrieve the URL: http://109.123.109.205/index.php Zero Sized Reply Squid did not receive any data for this request. Your cache administrator is webmaster. Generated Fri, 01 Jul 2011 16:06:06 GMT by remote-site (squid/2.7.STABLE9) remote-site is 172.16.1.224 When I do a tcpdump -i any port 7000 -nn I get the following: root@remote-site:~# tcpdump -i any port 7000 -nn tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode listening on any, link-type LINUX_SLL (Linux cooked), capture size 65535 bytes channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused channel 2: open failed: connect failed: Connection refused

Read the article
shell script to start multiple Java programs from a directory at boot

- by zcourts

I'm not sure if this is the best approach to this, It's my first time doing all of this (including writing shell scripts). OS: Centos My problem: I want to start multiple shell scripts at boot. One of the shell scripts is to start my own services and 3 others are for third party services. The shell script to start my own services will be looking for jar files. I currently have two services (will change), written in Java. All services are named under convention prefix-service-servicename What I've done: I created the following directory structure /home/username/scripts init.sh boot/ boot/startthirdprtyservice1.sh boot/startthirdprtyservice2.sh boot/startthirdprtyservice3.sh boot/startmyservices.sh /home/username/services prefix-lib-libraryname.jar prefix-lib-libraryname.jar prefix-service-servicename.jar prefix-service-servicename.jar prefix-service-servicename.jar In init.sh I have the following: #!/bin/sh #This scripts run all executable scripts in the boot directory at boot #done by adding this script to the file /etc/rc.d/rc.local #nohup #run-parts /home/username/scripts/boot/* #for each file in the boot dir... # ignore the HUP (hangup) signal for s in ./boot/*;do if [ -x $s ]; then echo "Starting $s" nohup $s & fi done echo "Done starting bootup scripts " echo "\n" In the script boot/startmyservices.sh I have #!/bin/sh fnmatch () { case "$2" in $1) return 0 ;; esac ; return 1 ; } ##sub strin to match for SUBSTRING="prefix-service" for s in /home/username/services/*;do if [ -x $s ]; then #match service in the filename , i.e. only services are started if fnmatch "$SUBSTRING" "$s" ; then echo "Starting $s " nohup $s & fi fi done echo "Done starting Services" echo "\n" Finally: Usually you can stick a program in /etc/rc.d/rc.local for it to be run at boot but I don't think this works in this case, or rather I don't know what to put in there I've just learnt how to do this by reading up a bit so I'm not sure its particularly the best thing to do so any advice is appreciated. When I run init.sh nohup.out contains Starting the thirdparty daemon... thirdparty started... .... but nothing from myservices.sh and my Java services aren't running I'm not sure where to start debugging or what could be going wrong. Edit Found some issues and got it to work, used -x instead of -n to check if the string is none zero, needed the sub string check to also be if [[ $s = $SUBSTRING ]] ; then and this last one was just stupid, missing java -jar in front of $s Still unsure of how to get init.sh to run at boot though

Read the article
RHEL5: Can't create sparse file bigger than 256GB in tmpfs

- by John Kugelman

/var/log/lastlog gets written to when you log in. The size of this file is based off of the largest UID in the system. The larger the maximum UID, the larger this file is. Thankfully it's a sparse file so the size on disk is much smaller than the size ls reports (ls -s reports the size on disk). On our system we're authenticating against an Active Directory server, and the UIDs users are assigned end up being really, really large. Like, say, UID 900,000,000 for the first AD user, 900,000,001 for the second, etc. That's strange but should be okay. It results in /var/log/lastlog being huuuuuge, though--once an AD user logs in lastlog shows up as 280GB. Its real size is still small, thankfully. This works fine when /var/log/lastlog is stored on the hard drive on an ext3 filesystem. It breaks, however, if lastlog is stored in a tmpfs filesystem. Then it appears that the max file size for any file on the tmpfs is 256GB, so the sessreg program errors out trying to write to lastlog. Where is this 256GB limit coming from, and how can I increase it? As a simple test for creating large sparse files I've been doing: dd if=/dev/zero of=sparse-file bs=1 count=1 seek=300GB I've tried Googling for "tmpfs max file size", "256GB filesystem limit", "linux max file size", things like that. I haven't been able to find much. The only mention of 256GB I can find is that ext3 filesystems with 2KB blocks are limited to 256GB files. But our hard drives are formatted with 4K blocks so that doesn't seem to be it--not to mention this is happening in a tmpfs mounted ON TOP of the hard drive so the ext3 partition shouldn't be a factor. This is all happening on a 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 system. Interestingly, on my personal development machine, which is a 32-bit Fedora Core 6 box, I can create 300GB+ files in tmpfs filesystems no problem. On the RHEL5.4 systems it is no go.

Read the article
Does a router have a receiving range?

- by Aadit M Shah

So my dad bought a TP-Link router (Model No. TL-WA7510N) which apparently has a transmitting range of 1km; and he believes that it also has a receiving range of 1km. So he's arguing with me that the router (which is a trans-receiver) can communicate with any device in the range of 1km whether or not that device has a transmitting range of 1km. To put it graphically: +----+ 1km +----+ | |------------------------------------------------->| | | TR | | TR | | | <----| | +----+ 100m+----+ So here's the problem: The two devices are 1km apart. The first device has a transmitting range of 1km. The second device only has a transmitting range of 100m. According to my dad the two devices can talk to each other. He says that the first device has a transmitting and a receiving range of 1km which means that it can both send data to devices 1km away and receive data from devices 1km away. To me this makes no sense. If the second device can only send data to devices 100m away then how can the first device catch the transmission? He further argues that for bidirectional communication both the sender and the reciver should have overlapping areas of transmission: According to him if two devices have an overlapping area of transmission then they can communicate. Here neither device has enough transmission power to reach the other. However they have enough receiving power to capture the transmission. Obviously this makes absolutely no sense to me. How can a device sense a transmission which hasn't even reached it yet and go out, capture it and bring it back it. To me a trans-receiver only has a transmission power. It has zero receiving power. Hence for two devices to be able to communicate bidirectionally, the diagram should look like: Hence, from my point of view, both the devices should have a transmission range far enough to reach the other for bidirectional communication to be possible; but no matter how much I try to explain to my dad he adamantly disagrees. So, to put an end to this debate once and for all, who is correct? Is there even such a thing as a receiving range? Can a device fetch a transmission that would otherwise never reach it? I would like a canonical answer on this.

Read the article
RAID 50 24Port Fast Writes Slow Reads - Ubuntu

- by James

What is going on here?! I am baffled. serveradmin@FILESERVER:/Volumes/MercuryInternal/test$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/MercuryInternal/test/test.fs bs=4096k count=10000 10000+0 records in 10000+0 records out 41943040000 bytes (42 GB) copied, 57.0948 s, 735 MB/s serveradmin@FILESERVER:/Volumes/MercuryInternal/test$ sudo dd if=/Volumes/MercuryInternal/test/test.fs of=/dev/null bs=4096k count=10000 10000+0 records in 10000+0 records out 41943040000 bytes (42 GB) copied, 116.189 s, 361 MB/s OF NOTE: My RAID50 is 3 sets of 8 disks. - This might not be the best config for SPEED. OS: Ubuntu 12.04.1 x64 Hardware Raid: RocketRaid 2782 - 24 Port Controller HardDriveType: Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB Drivers: v1.1 Open Source Linux Drivers. So 24 x 1TB drives, partitioned using parted. Filesystem is ext4. I/O scheduler WAS noop but have changed it to deadline with no seemingly performance benefit/cost. serveradmin@FILESERVER:/Volumes/MercuryInternal/test$ sudo gdisk -l /dev/sdb GPT fdisk (gdisk) version 0.8.1 Partition table scan: MBR: protective BSD: not present APM: not present GPT: present Found valid GPT with protective MBR; using GPT. Disk /dev/sdb: 41020686336 sectors, 19.1 TiB Logical sector size: 512 bytes Disk identifier (GUID): 95045EC6-6EAF-4072-9969-AC46A32E38C8 Partition table holds up to 128 entries First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 41020686302 Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries Total free space is 5062589 sectors (2.4 GiB) Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name 1 2048 41015625727 19.1 TiB 0700 primary To me this should be working fine. I can't think of anything that would be causing this other then fundamental driver errors? I can't seem to get much/if any higher then the 361MB a second, is this hitting the "SATA2" link speed, which it shouldn't given it is a PCIe2.0 card. Or maybe some cacheing quirk - I do have Write Back enabled. Does anyone have any suggestions? Tests for me to perform? Or if you require more information, I am happy to provide it! This is a video fileserver for editing machines, so we have a preference for FAST reads over writes. I was just expected more from RAID 50 and 24 drives together... EDIT: (hdparm results) serveradmin@FILESERVER:/Volumes/MercuryInternal$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 17458 MB in 2.00 seconds = 8735.50 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 884 MB in 3.00 seconds = 294.32 MB/sec EDIT2: (config details) Also, I am using a RAID block size of 256K. I was told a larger block size is better for larger (in my case large video) files. EDIT3: (Bonnie++ Results. Would love some guidance with this!)

Read the article
Some apps very slow to load on Windows 7, copy & paste very slow.

- by Mike

Hello, I searched here and couldn't find a similar issue to mine but apologies if I missed it. I've searched the web and no one else seems to be having the same issue either. I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit on a pretty high spec. machine (well, apart from the graphics): Asus M4A79T Deluxe AMD Phenom II 965 black edition (quad core, 3.4GHz) 8GB Crucial Ballistix DDR 1333MHz RAM 80GB Intex X25 SSD for OS 500GB mechanical drive for data. ATi Radeon HD 4600 series PCI-e Be Quiet! 850W PSU I think those are all the relevant stats, if you need anything else let me know. I've updated chipset, graphics and various other drivers all to no avail, the problem remains. I have also unplugged and replugged every connection internally and cleaned the RAM edge connectors. The problems: Video LAN (VLC) and CDBurnerXP both take ages to load, I'm talking 30 seconds and 1 minute respectively which is really not right. Copy and paste from Open Office spread sheet into Fire Fox, for example, is really, really slow, I'll have pressed control V 5 or 6 times before it actually happens, if I copy and then wait 5 to 10 seconds or so it'll paste first time so it's definitely some sort of time lag. Command and Conquer - Generals: Zero Hour. When playing it'll run perfectly for about 10 or 20 seconds then it'll just pause for 3 or 4 then run for another 10 or 20 seconds and pause again and so on. I had the Task Manager open on my 2nd monitor whilst playing once and I noticed it was using about 25% of the CPU, pretty stable but when the pause came another task didn't shoot up to 100% like others on the web have been reporting (similar but not the same as my issue, often svchost.exe for them) but dropped to 2 or 3% usage then back up to 25% when it started playing properly again. Very odd! But it gets even odder... I had a BSOD and reboot last week, when it rebooted the problem had completely gone, I could play C&C to my heart's content and both the other apps loaded instantly, copy and paste worked instantly too. I did an AVG update earlier this week which required a reboot, rebooted and the problem's back. I don't think it's AVG related though, I think it was just coincidence that's the app that required a reboot. I think any reboot would have brought the issue back. A number of reboots later and it hasn't gone away again. If any one could make any suggestions as to the likely cause and solution to these issues I'd be most grateful, it's driving me nuts! Thanks, Mike....

Read the article
How can I repair my USB drive?

- by yurko

USB drive is in read only state and I can't repair it. First of all I tried erase it using dd: root@yurko-laptop:/home/yurko-laptop# ls -l /dev/disk/by-id | grep usb lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 ??? 18 23:45 usb-Generic_Flash_Disk_C173828A-0:0 -> ../../sdb lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 ??? 18 23:45 usb-Generic_Flash_Disk_C173828A-0:0-part1 -> ../../sdb1 root@yurko-laptop:/home/yurko-laptop# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb dd: ?????? ? «/dev/sdb»: ?? ?????????? ????????? ????? 8257537+0 ??????? ??????? 8257536+0 ??????? ???????? ??????????? 4227858432 ????? (4,2 GB), 942,633 c, 4,5 MB/c After that I wanted to create new filesystem using fdisk: root@yurko-laptop:/home/yurko-laptop# fdisk /dev/sdb You will not be able to write the partition table. WARNING: DOS-compatible mode is deprecated. It's strongly recommended to switch off the mode (command 'c') and change display units to sectors (command 'u'). Command (m for help): p Disk /dev/sdb: 4227 MB, 4227858432 bytes 4 heads, 63 sectors/track, 32768 cylinders Units = cylinders of 252 * 512 = 129024 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 18 32768 4126596 b W95 FAT32 Command (m for help): fdisk showed that the partition still exists and I can't write the partition table. I tried to delete the existing partition: Command (m for help): d Selected partition 1 Command (m for help): w Unable to write /dev/sdb root@yurko-laptop:/home/yurko-laptop# Why am I not be able to write the partition table? Does it mean that some hardware failure occurred? And is it possible to repair the current USB drive? I've tried to use hdparm and it showed that the readonly flag is on: root@yurko-laptop:/home/yurko-laptop# hdparm /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: f0 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 26 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 multcount = 0 (off) readonly = 1 (on) readahead = 256 (on) geometry = 1016/131/62, sectors = 8257536, start = 0

Read the article
LDAP installed, running, but can't connect remotely [Ubuntu 10.10]

- by Casey Jordan

Hi all, I installed LDAP on my ubuntu 10.10 system, using the tutorial found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/10.10/serverguide/C/openldap-server.html Everything seems to be working well, when logged into the server via ssh I can run commands like: > ldapsearch -xLLL -b "dc=easydita,dc=com" uid=john sn givenName cn dn: uid=john,ou=people,dc=easydita,dc=com sn: Doe givenName: John cn: John Doe So I think that's a good sign that things are working well. However I have had zero luck connecting to the server remotely via GUI tools or command line. I have tied JXplorer, and LDAP administration tool. Running commands like this: > ldapsearch -xLLL -W -H ldap://ice.rit.edu -d1 "dc=easydita,dc=com" ldap_url_parse_ext(ldap://ice.rit.edu) ldap_create ldap_url_parse_ext(ldap://ice.rit.edu:389/??base) Enter LDAP Password: ldap_sasl_bind ldap_send_initial_request ldap_new_connection 1 1 0 ldap_int_open_connection ldap_connect_to_host: TCP ice.rit.edu:389 ldap_new_socket: 3 ldap_prepare_socket: 3 ldap_connect_to_host: Trying 127.0.0.1:389 ldap_pvt_connect: fd: 3 tm: -1 async: 0 ldap_open_defconn: successful ldap_send_server_request ber_scanf fmt ({it) ber: ber_scanf fmt ({i) ber: ber_flush2: 34 bytes to sd 3 ldap_result ld 0xb8940170 msgid 1 wait4msg ld 0xb8940170 msgid 1 (infinite timeout) wait4msg continue ld 0xb8940170 msgid 1 all 1 ** ld 0xb8940170 Connections: * host: ice.rit.edu port: 389 (default) refcnt: 2 status: Connected last used: Thu Mar 17 19:42:29 2011 ** ld 0xb8940170 Outstanding Requests: * msgid 1, origid 1, status InProgress outstanding referrals 0, parent count 0 ld 0xb8940170 request count 1 (abandoned 0) ** ld 0xb8940170 Response Queue: Empty ld 0xb8940170 response count 0 ldap_chkResponseList ld 0xb8940170 msgid 1 all 1 ldap_chkResponseList returns ld 0xb8940170 NULL ldap_int_select read1msg: ld 0xb8940170 msgid 1 all 1 ber_get_next ber_get_next: tag 0x30 len 16 contents: read1msg: ld 0xb8940170 msgid 1 message type bind ber_scanf fmt ({eAA) ber: read1msg: ld 0xb8940170 0 new referrals read1msg: mark request completed, ld 0xb8940170 msgid 1 request done: ld 0xb8940170 msgid 1 res_errno: 49, res_error: <>, res_matched: <> ldap_free_request (origid 1, msgid 1) ldap_parse_result ber_scanf fmt ({iAA) ber: ber_scanf fmt (}) ber: ldap_msgfree ldap_err2string ldap_bind: Invalid credentials (49) I am pretty sure that I set up the admin password correctly, but the tutorial was not very specific about that. (Also could not find instructions on how to reset admin password.) Additional info: I was told that this file might hold important information so I will post it: /etc/ldap/slapd.d/cn=config/olcDatabase={0}config.ldif dn: olcDatabase={0}config objectClass: olcDatabaseConfig olcDatabase: {0}config olcAccess: {0}to * by dn.exact=cn=localroot,cn=config manage by * break olcRootDN: cn=admin,cn=config structuralObjectClass: olcDatabaseConfig entryUUID: eca09490-e524-102f-87c5-17d7a82e8985 creatorsName: cn=config createTimestamp: 20110317205733Z entryCSN: 20110317205733.193089Z#000000#000#000000 modifiersName: cn=config modifyTimestamp: 20110317205733Z Given that it seems I have this almost set up correctly is there any steps I can take to correct this? Thanks, Casey

Read the article
Areca 1280ml RAID6 volume set failed

- by Richard

Today we hit some kind of worst case scenario and are open to any kind of good ideas. Here is our problem: We are using several dedicated storage servers to host our virtual machines. Before I continue, here are the specs: Dedicated Server Machine Areca 1280ml RAID controller, Firmware 1.49 12x Samsung 1TB HDDs We configured one RAID6-set with 10 discs that contains one logical volume. We have two hot spares in the system. Today one HDD failed. This happens from time to time, so we replaced it. Upon rebuilding a second disc failed. Normally this is no fun. We stopped heavy IO-operations to ensure a stable RAID rebuild. Sadly the hot-spare disc failed while rebuilding and the whole thing stopped. Now we have the following situation: The controller says that the raid set is rebuilding The controller says that the volume failed It is a RAID 6 system and two discs failed, so the data has to be intact, but we cannot bring the volume online again to access the data. While searching we found the following leads. I don't know whether they are good or bad: Mirroring all the discs to a second set of drives. So we would have the possibility to try different things without loosing more than we already have. Trying to rebuild the array in R-Studio. But we have no real experience with the software. Pulling all drives, rebooting the system, changing into the areca controller bios, reinserting the HDDs one-by-one. Some people are saying that the brought the system online by this. Some are saying that the effect is zero. Some say, that they blew the whole thing. Using undocumented areca commands like "rescue" or "LeVel2ReScUe". Contacting a computer forensics service. But whoa... primary estimates by phone exceeded 20.000€. That's why we would kindly ask for help. Maybe we are missing the obvious? And yes of course, we have backups. But some systems lost one week of data, thats why we'd like to get the system up and running again. Any help, suggestions and questions are more than welcome.

Read the article

Search Results

Search found 3905 results on 157 pages for 'ed zero'.

Page 136/157 | < Previous Page | 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 | Next Page >

- by Matthew Guay

- by Matthew Guay

- by S Stelting

- by Tarun Arora [Microsoft MVP]

- by Mark Virtue

- by pinaldave

- by Matthew Guay

- by Eran_Steiner

- by D'Arcy Lussier

- by Jeff Shattock

- by quidpro

- by wallyk

- by racitup

- by Shaun

- by Kurt Harless

- by Eamorr

- by zcourts

- by John Kugelman

- by Aadit M Shah

- by James

- by Mike

- by yurko

- by Casey Jordan

- by Richard

< Previous Page | 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 | Next Page >