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  • Corsair SSD appears completely blank and does not retain written data

    - by ebanders
    I have a 180GB Corsair SSD (model# CSSD-F180GB2-BRKT) as the primary drive in a Windows laptop. Recently the machine became unbootable after installing Windows updates. Windows installed updates before the machine shut down and the next time the machine boot up it complained about not being able to find a bootable device. After finding fixmbr unsuccessful at making the machine unbootable, I investigated a little within knoppix. Fdisk revealed an empty partition table. A scan by Testdisk came up empty. And finally 'head -c 1024 | hd' reveals all zeros. Creating a primary partition spanning the whole disk completes successfully, but after a reboot the disk appears empty again. dmesg reveals no read or write errors. smartctl indicates that the drive is healthy- although the SMART attribute values do not appear to be read properly. "Data Page | WARNING: PREVIOUS ATTRIBUTE HAS TWO" and "Threshold Page | INCONSISTENT IDENTITIES IN THE DATA" messages appear within the table of values. I don't have much experience with SSDs. Is this drive dead or something? Can anyone recommend any diagnostic tools that may be suited for diagnosing SSDs?

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  • IPTABLES syntax help to forward Remote Desktop requests to a VM [CentOS host]

    - by NVRAM
    I've a VM running MSWindows XP hosted on my CentOS 5.4 machine. I can rdesktop into it from the hosting machine and work just fine using the private ddress (192.168.122.65), but I now need to allow Remote Desktop access from other computers (not just the machine hosting the VM). [Edit] I only need to allow access for a day or so, so don't want to add a NIC (for XP activation reasons). Could someone help me with the iptables syntax? The VM is on a private/virtual network: 192.168.122.65 and my CentOS machine is on a physical network, at 10.1.3.38 (and 192.168.122.1 as the GW for the virtual net). I found this question, but none of the answers seemed to work and I'm a bit timid at blindly trying variations. My FORWARD rules are as listed. Thanks in advance. # iptables -L FORWARD Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT all -- anywhere 192.168.122.0/24 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED ACCEPT all -- 192.168.122.0/24 anywhere ACCEPT all -- anywhere anywhere REJECT all -- anywhere anywhere reject-with icmp-port-unreachable REJECT all -- anywhere anywhere reject-with icmp-port-unreachable RH-Firewall-1-INPUT all -- anywhere anywhere [Edit] If I do play "blindly" is there a simple way to reset the settings on CentOS (a la service network restart)?

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  • Can only ssh when not using wifi

    - by AChrapko
    So I have 3 machines, a windows 7 desktop that is always wired to my router, osX laptop, and raspberry pi running debian linux. My router is a Linksys e1000 wireless N. My goal is to be able to ssh the raspi from any machine, while it is connected via wifi. My problem is that when trying to ssh from either the win7 or osX to the Pi it either times out, or gives an error: "ssh: connect to host 192.168.1.### port 22: No route to host" The only times that I have managed to connect to the pi from any machine were when it connected to the router via an Ethernet cable. Currently with win7 desktop wired, macbook wireless, and pi wireless tests give the following: win7 ping macbook: Destination host unreachable. macbook ping win7: Request timeout. win7 ping pi: Destination host unreachable. macbook ping pi: Request timeout. blah blah blah Plugging the macbook into the router with an Ethernet cable all communication between win7 and macbook works. Pings, ssh, ftp, smb ect... No changes to the pi, still no connections possible to or from any of the other 2 machines. Note All machines, are able to connect to the internet and ssh to the same machine on a completely different network, wired or over wifi. Plugging the Pi in with Ethernet (and macbook still wired) I can ssh to the pi from both win7 and macbook. I can ssh from the pi to macbook. All machines still able to connect the the off network machine. Also another little side note- I was playing warcraft 3 with my roommates the other day, and the only time they were able to see my LAN game was when they were plugged into the router with an Ethernet cable. Once or twice one of the laptops was able to connect over wifi, but not without another computer connecting first via Ethernet. So basically does anyone have any info as to why my router seems to completely ignore local wireless traffic?

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  • How to keep multiple servers in sync file wise?

    - by GForceSys
    I'm currently managing a cluster of PHP-FPM servers, all of which tend to get out of sync with each other. The application that I'm using on top of the app servers (Magento) allows for admins to modify various files on the system, but now that the site is in a clustered set up modifying a file only modifies it on a single instance (on one of the app servers) of the various machines in the cluster. Is there an open-source application for Linux that may allow me to keep all of these servers in sync? I have no problem with creating a small VM instance that can listen for changes from machines to sync. In theory, the perfect application would have small clients that run on each machine to be synced, which would talk to the master server which would then decide how/what to sync from each machine. I have already examined the possibilities of running a centralized file server, but unfortunately my app servers are spread out between EC2 and physical machines, which makes this unfeasible. As there are multiple app servers (some of which are dynamically created depending on the load of the site), simply setting up a rsync cron job is not efficient as the cron job would have to be modified on each machine to send files to every other machine in the cluster, and that would just be a whole bunch of unnecessary data transfers/ssh connections.

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  • Install KVM based Windows 2008 remotely over SSH on a headless, no graphics Ubuntu 10.04 server?

    - by taazaa
    Hi, I have a Dell server at a remote data center with Ubuntu 10.04 as the host. It is a minimal install with the necessary virtulization packages. There is no X and the machine is headless. I have the win2008 DVD in the machine and want to remotely install it. I tried: virt-install --connect qemu:///system -n vmwin2k8 -r 1024 --disk path=server2k8.qcow2,size=50 --cdrom /dev/sr0 --vnc --noautoconsole --os-type windows --os-variant win2k8 The qcow2 image get created However I don't understand how to connect to see the install via VNC. This is my first time doing it so it may be trivial or may not be possible. Remotely I have a Win 7 machine with Putty and RealVNC viewer. Where is the graphic output of VNC going? Do I have to have VNC server running on the host or some other machine and then connect to it from my VNC client? Please let me know or point me to the right direction. I have been searching the web for several days to figure out how this is suppose to work. Thanks!

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  • Connect from Mac OS X to Windows 7 Desktop

    - by jrn
    I am trying to connect from my MacBook to my Windows 7 machine within my own network - if it will work from outside my network that's a plus but no need to have. My Windows 7 machine is freshly installed with Windows 7 Home Premium. It runs the built-in firewall with no settings changed so far as well as Microsoft Security Essentials. So far I tried CoRD and Microsofts Remote Desktop Connections to connect from my Mac to my Windows machine without any success. I did try and disabled the firewall on my Windows machine but could not connect either. The reason I did this was to check wether there is a Windows firewall setting preventing me from connecting. On top of that I manually started the Remote Desktop Services and Remote Desktop Configuration within services.msc. Is there anything else I have to enable for a remote desktop connection? Could there be any router setting I have to tweak? Since I do not want to connect from outside my own network I thought I don't have to do any port forwarding. The error messages I retrieve are all connection timeouts. I can however ping the hostname and/or IP address. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot, jrn

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  • What is wrong with my home network? (Routing and connection issues)

    - by David
    I have a corporate laptop that was provided to me by a client and I'm having some rather odd difficulties with it when I put the laptop on my home network. When I first brought the machine home it behaved like any other laptop. Once it was connected to the network it was assigned an IP address and I could remote into it just fine using the machine name. Lately though, whenever I put this laptop on my network I am not able to ping or RDP into the machine as the host name doesn't properly resolve. Additionally I'm able to see the device and it's assigned IP address clearly in my router firmware. This gets even more strange as now when I try to ping it's IP address listed in my router, I see that it's actually trying to ping my own machine (screenshot of this very odd event below). This has actually driven me crazy to the point that I have actually replaced my router (it was behaving oddly in other ways), and I'm continuing to have these problems. The above ping capture is from the new router. As far as network goes I am now currently using an NetGear R7000 Nighthawk and I haven't customized any of the networking settings in the router just yet (installed yesterday). I would appreciate any advice possible and would be happy to provide further diagnostic information. Networking isn't my strong suit, so I'm not even sure where to begin unraveling this thing.

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  • Windows 8 doesn't start up after installation

    - by Raj BD
    I have a DELL INSPIRON n5110 machine running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. It has 6GB of RAM and 500 GB hard disk capable to run any Windows and Linux system. And I recently attempted to install Windows 8 in the machine. Installation goes fine and smooth until the final stage when windows is done installing and GETS DEVICES READY. When GETTNG DEVICES READY reaches about 60%, the screen goes blank with the machine running. After a while it reboots. And after the new Windows Logo with dotted circles are done showing up, the screen goes blank again (when we'd expect login screen to show up). There is not even a cursor. I can see the HARD DISK ACTIVITY LED blinking but nothing shows up in the screen. I've tried CLEAN INSTALL several times. The DVD is fine, it installed and worked well in my friends' laptop PCs. I tried installing both PRO version and ENTERPRISE version and both 32-bit and 64-bit. But the problem was same everytime. Finally, I had to reinstall Windows 7 which installed and ran without any problem. The problem, we can guess, is GRAPHICS perhaps. I have Intel SandyBridge Graphics Mobile Chipset (Intel HD Graphics 3000). But if Windows 7 and Linux distrubutions like Mint and BackTrack can run on the machine, why on earth, would Windows 8 not run?

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  • What is New in ASP.NET 4.0 Code Access Security

    - by Xiaohong
    ASP.NET Code Access Security (CAS) is a feature that helps protect server applications on hosting multiple Web sites, ASP.NET lets you assign a configurable trust level that corresponds to a predefined set of permissions. ASP.NET has predefined ASP.NET Trust Levels and Policy Files that you can assign to applications, you also can assign custom trust level and policy files. Most web hosting companies run ASP.NET applications in Medium Trust to prevent that one website affect or harm another site etc. As .NET Framework's Code Access Security model has evolved, ASP.NET 4.0 Code Access Security also has introduced several changes and improvements. The main change in ASP.NET 4.0 CAS In ASP.NET v4.0 partial trust applications, application domain can have a default partial trust permission set as opposed to being full-trust, the permission set name is defined in the <trust /> new attribute permissionSetName that is used to initialize the application domain . By default, the PermissionSetName attribute value is "ASP.Net" which is the name of the permission set you can find in all predefined partial trust configuration files. <trust level="Something" permissionSetName="ASP.Net" /> This is ASP.NET 4.0 new CAS model. For compatibility ASP.NET 4.0 also support legacy CAS model where application domain still has full trust permission set. You can specify new legacyCasModel attribute on the <trust /> element to indicate whether the legacy CAS model is enabled. By default legacyCasModel is false which means that new 4.0 CAS model is the default. <trust level="Something" legacyCasModel="true|false" /> In .Net FX 4.0 Config directory, there are two set of predefined partial trust config files for each new CAS model and legacy CAS model, trust config files with name legacy.XYZ.config are for legacy CAS model: New CAS model: Legacy CAS model: web_hightrust.config legacy.web_hightrust.config web_mediumtrust.config legacy.web_mediumtrust.config web_lowtrust.config legacy.web_lowtrust.config web_minimaltrust.config legacy.web_minimaltrust.config   The figure below shows in ASP.NET 4.0 new CAS model what permission set to grant to code for partial trust application using predefined partial trust levels and policy files:    There also some benefits that comes with the new CAS model: You can lock down a machine by making all managed code no-execute by default (e.g. setting the MyComputer zone to have no managed execution code permissions), it should still be possible to configure ASP.NET web applications to run as either full-trust or partial trust. UNC share doesn’t require full trust with CASPOL at machine-level CAS policy. Side effect that comes with the new CAS model: processRequestInApplicationTrust attribute is deprecated  in new CAS model since application domain always has partial trust permission set in new CAS model.   In ASP.NET 4.0 legacy CAS model or ASP.NET 2.0 CAS model, even though you assign partial trust level to a application but the application domain still has full trust permission set. The figure below shows in ASP.NET 4.0 legacy CAS model (or ASP.NET 2.0 CAS model) what permission set to grant to code for partial trust application using predefined partial trust levels and policy files:     What $AppDirUrl$, $CodeGen$, $Gac$ represents: $AppDirUrl$ The application's virtual root directory. This allows permissions to be applied to code that is located in the application's bin directory. For example, if a virtual directory is mapped to C:\YourWebApp, then $AppDirUrl$ would equate to C:\YourWebApp. $CodeGen$ The directory that contains dynamically generated assemblies (for example, the result of .aspx page compiles). This can be configured on a per application basis and defaults to %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\{version}\Temporary ASP.NET Files. $CodeGen$ allows permissions to be applied to dynamically generated assemblies. $Gac$ Any assembly that is installed in the computer's global assembly cache (GAC). This allows permissions to be granted to strong named assemblies loaded from the GAC by the Web application.   The new customization of CAS Policy in ASP.NET 4.0 new CAS model 1. Define which named permission set in partial trust configuration files By default the permission set that will be assigned at application domain initialization time is the named "ASP.Net" permission set found in all predefined partial trust configuration files. However ASP.NET 4.0 allows you set PermissionSetName attribute to define which named permission set in a partial trust configuration file should be the one used to initialize an application domain. Example: add "ASP.Net_2" named permission set in partial trust configuration file: <PermissionSet class="NamedPermissionSet" version="1" Name="ASP.Net_2"> <IPermission class="FileIOPermission" version="1" Read="$AppDir$" PathDiscovery="$AppDir$" /> <IPermission class="ReflectionPermission" version="1" Flags ="RestrictedMemberAccess" /> <IPermission class="SecurityPermission " version="1" Flags ="Execution, ControlThread, ControlPrincipal, RemotingConfiguration" /></PermissionSet> Then you can use "ASP.Net_2" named permission set for the application domain permission set: <trust level="Something" legacyCasModel="false" permissionSetName="ASP.Net_2" /> 2. Define a custom set of Full Trust Assemblies for an application By using the new fullTrustAssemblies element to configure a set of Full Trust Assemblies for an application, you can modify set of partial trust assemblies to full trust at the machine, site or application level. The configuration definition is shown below: <fullTrustAssemblies> <add assemblyName="MyAssembly" version="1.1.2.3" publicKey="hex_char_representation_of_key_blob" /></fullTrustAssemblies> 3. Define <CodeGroup /> policy in partial trust configuration files ASP.NET 4.0 new CAS model will retain the ability for developers to optionally define <CodeGroup />with membership conditions and assigned permission sets. The specific restriction in ASP.NET 4.0 new CAS model though will be that the results of evaluating custom policies can only result in one of two outcomes: either an assembly is granted full trust, or an assembly is granted the partial trust permission set currently associated with the running application domain. It will not be possible to use custom policies to create additional custom partial trust permission sets. When parsing the partial trust configuration file: Any assemblies that match to code groups associated with "PermissionSet='FullTrust'" will run at full trust. Any assemblies that match to code groups associated with "PermissionSet='Nothing'" will result in a PolicyError being thrown from the CLR. This is acceptable since it provides administrators with a way to do a blanket-deny of managed code followed by selectively defining policy in a <CodeGroup /> that re-adds assemblies that would be allowed to run. Any assemblies that match to code groups associated with other permissions sets will be interpreted to mean the assembly should run at the permission set of the appdomain. This means that even though syntactically a developer could define additional "flavors" of partial trust in an ASP.NET partial trust configuration file, those "flavors" will always be ignored. Example: defines full trust in <CodeGroup /> for my strong named assemblies in partial trust config files: <CodeGroup class="FirstMatchCodeGroup" version="1" PermissionSetName="Nothing"> <IMembershipCondition    class="AllMembershipCondition"    version="1" /> <CodeGroup    class="UnionCodeGroup"    version="1"    PermissionSetName="FullTrust"    Name="My_Strong_Name"    Description="This code group grants code signed full trust. "> <IMembershipCondition      class="StrongNameMembershipCondition" version="1"       PublicKeyBlob="hex_char_representation_of_key_blob" /> </CodeGroup> <CodeGroup   class="UnionCodeGroup" version="1" PermissionSetName="ASP.Net">   <IMembershipCondition class="UrlMembershipCondition" version="1" Url="$AppDirUrl$/*" /> </CodeGroup> <CodeGroup class="UnionCodeGroup" version="1" PermissionSetName="ASP.Net">   <IMembershipCondition class="UrlMembershipCondition" version="1" Url="$CodeGen$/*"   /> </CodeGroup></CodeGroup>   4. Customize CAS policy at runtime in ASP.NET 4.0 new CAS model ASP.NET 4.0 new CAS model allows to customize CAS policy at runtime by using custom HostSecurityPolicyResolver that overrides the ASP.NET code access security policy. Example: use custom host security policy resolver to resolve partial trust web application bin folder MyTrustedAssembly.dll to full trust at runtime: You can create a custom host security policy resolver and compile it to assembly MyCustomResolver.dll with strong name enabled and deploy in GAC: public class MyCustomResolver : HostSecurityPolicyResolver{ public override HostSecurityPolicyResults ResolvePolicy(Evidence evidence) { IEnumerator hostEvidence = evidence.GetHostEnumerator(); while (hostEvidence.MoveNext()) { object hostEvidenceObject = hostEvidence.Current; if (hostEvidenceObject is System.Security.Policy.Url) { string assemblyName = hostEvidenceObject.ToString(); if (assemblyName.Contains(“MyTrustedAssembly.dll”) return HostSecurityPolicyResult.FullTrust; } } //default fall-through return HostSecurityPolicyResult.DefaultPolicy; }} Because ASP.NET accesses the custom HostSecurityPolicyResolver during application domain initialization, and a custom policy resolver requires full trust, you also can add a custom policy resolver in <fullTrustAssemblies /> , or deploy in the GAC. You also need configure a custom HostSecurityPolicyResolver instance by adding the HostSecurityPolicyResolverType attribute in the <trust /> element: <trust level="Something" legacyCasModel="false" hostSecurityPolicyResolverType="MyCustomResolver, MyCustomResolver" permissionSetName="ASP.Net" />   Note: If an assembly policy define in <CodeGroup/> and also in hostSecurityPolicyResolverType, hostSecurityPolicyResolverType will win. If an assembly added in <fullTrustAssemblies/> then the assembly has full trust no matter what policy in <CodeGroup/> or in hostSecurityPolicyResolverType.   Other changes in ASP.NET 4.0 CAS Use the new transparency model introduced in .Net Framework 4.0 Change in dynamically compiled code generated assemblies by ASP.NET: In new CAS model they will be marked as security transparent level2 to use Framework 4.0 security transparent rule that means partial trust code is treated as completely Transparent and it is more strict enforcement. In legacy CAS model they will be marked as security transparent level1 to use Framework 2.0 security transparent rule for compatibility. Most of ASP.NET products runtime assemblies are also changed to be marked as security transparent level2 to switch to SecurityTransparent code by default unless SecurityCritical or SecuritySafeCritical attribute specified. You also can look at Security Changes in the .NET Framework 4 for more information about these security attributes. Support conditional APTCA If an assembly is marked with the Conditional APTCA attribute to allow partially trusted callers, and if you want to make the assembly both visible and accessible to partial-trust code in your web application, you must add a reference to the assembly in the partialTrustVisibleAssemblies section: <partialTrustVisibleAssemblies> <add assemblyName="MyAssembly" publicKey="hex_char_representation_of_key_blob" />/partialTrustVisibleAssemblies>   Most of ASP.NET products runtime assemblies are also changed to be marked as conditional APTCA to prevent use of ASP.NET APIs in partial trust environments such as Winforms or WPF UI controls hosted in Internet Explorer.   Differences between ASP.NET new CAS model and legacy CAS model: Here list some differences between ASP.NET new CAS model and legacy CAS model ASP.NET 4.0 legacy CAS model  : Asp.net partial trust appdomains have full trust permission Multiple different permission sets in a single appdomain are allowed in ASP.NET partial trust configuration files Code groups Machine CAS policy is honored processRequestInApplicationTrust attribute is still honored    New configuration setting for legacy model: <trust level="Something" legacyCASModel="true" ></trust><partialTrustVisibleAssemblies> <add assemblyName="MyAssembly" publicKey="hex_char_representation_of_key_blob" /></partialTrustVisibleAssemblies>   ASP.NET 4.0 new CAS model: ASP.NET will now run in homogeneous application domains. Only full trust or the app-domain's partial trust grant set, are allowable permission sets. It is no longer possible to define arbitrary permission sets that get assigned to different assemblies. If an application currently depends on fine-tuning the partial trust permission set using the ASP.NET partial trust configuration file, this will no longer be possible. processRequestInApplicationTrust attribute is deprecated Dynamically compiled assemblies output by ASP.NET build providers will be updated to explicitly mark assemblies as transparent. ASP.NET partial trust grant sets will be independent from any enterprise, machine, or user CAS policy levels. A simplified model for locking down web servers that only allows trusted managed web applications to run. Machine policy used to always grant full-trust to managed code (based on membership conditions) can instead be configured using the new ASP.NET 4.0 full-trust assembly configuration section. The full-trust assembly configuration section requires explicitly listing each assembly as opposed to using membership conditions. Alternatively, the membership condition(s) used in machine policy can instead be re-defined in a <CodeGroup /> within ASP.NET's partial trust configuration file to grant full-trust.   New configuration setting for new model: <trust level="Something" legacyCASModel="false" permissionSetName="ASP.Net" hostSecurityPolicyResolverType=".NET type string" ></trust><fullTrustAssemblies> <add assemblyName=”MyAssembly” version=”1.0.0.0” publicKey="hex_char_representation_of_key_blob" /></fullTrustAssemblies><partialTrustVisibleAssemblies> <add assemblyName="MyAssembly" publicKey="hex_char_representation_of_key_blob" /></partialTrustVisibleAssemblies>     Hope this post is helpful to better understand the ASP.Net 4.0 CAS. Xiaohong Tang ASP.NET QA Team

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  • Complete Guide to Networking Windows 7 with XP and Vista

    - by Mysticgeek
    Since there are three versions of Windows out in the field these days, chances are you need to share data between them. Today we show how to get each version to be share files and printers with one another. In a perfect world, getting your computers with different Microsoft operating systems to network would be as easy as clicking a button. With the Windows 7 Homegroup feature, it’s almost that easy. However, getting all three of them to communicate with each other can be a bit of a challenge. Today we’ve put together a guide that will help you share files and printers in whatever scenario of the three versions you might encounter on your home network. Sharing Between Windows 7 and XP The most common scenario you’re probably going to run into is sharing between Windows 7 and XP.  Essentially you’ll want to make sure both machines are part of the same workgroup, set up the correct sharing settings, and making sure network discovery is enabled on Windows 7. The biggest problem you may run into is finding the correct printer drivers for both versions of Windows. Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 & XP  Map a Network Drive Another method of sharing data between XP and Windows 7 is mapping a network drive. If you don’t need to share a printer and only want to share a drive, then you can just map an XP drive to Windows 7. Although it might sound complicated, the process is not bad. The trickiest part is making sure you add the appropriate local user. This will allow you to share the contents of an XP drive to your Windows 7 computer. Map a Network Drive from XP to Windows 7 Sharing between Vista and Windows 7 Another scenario you might run into is having to share files and printers between a Vista and Windows 7 machine. The process is a bit easier than sharing between XP and Windows 7, but takes a bit of work. The Homegroup feature isn’t compatible with Vista, so we need to go through a few different steps. Depending on what your printer is, sharing it should be easier as Vista and Windows 7 do a much better job of automatically locating the drivers. How to Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and Vista Sharing between Vista and XP When Windows Vista came out, hardware requirements were intensive, drivers weren’t ready, and sharing between them was complicated due to the new Vista structure. The sharing process is pretty straight-forward if you’re not using password protection…as you just need to drop what you want to share into the Vista Public folder. On the other hand, sharing with password protection becomes a bit more difficult. Basically you need to add a user and set up sharing on the XP machine. But once again, we have a complete tutorial for that situation. Share Files and Folders Between Vista and XP Machines Sharing Between Windows 7 with Homegroup If you have one or more Windows 7 machine, sharing files and devices becomes extremely easy with the Homegroup feature. It’s as simple as creating a Homegroup on on machine then joining the other to it. It allows you to stream media, control what data is shared, and can also be password protected. If you don’t want to make your Windows 7 machines part of the same Homegroup, you can still share files through the Public Folder, and setup a printer to be shared as well.   Use the Homegroup Feature in Windows 7 to Share Printers and Files Create a Homegroup & Join a New Computer To It Change which Files are Shared in a Homegroup Windows Home Server If you want an ultimate setup that creates a centralized location to share files between all systems on your home network, regardless of the operating system, then set up a Windows Home Server. It allows you to centralize your important documents and digital media files on one box and provides easy access to data and the ability to stream media to other machines on your network. Not only that, but it provides easy backup of all your machines to the server, in case disaster strikes. How to Install and Setup Windows Home Server How to Manage Shared Folders on Windows Home Server Conclusion The biggest annoyance is dealing with printers that have a different set of drivers for each OS. There is no real easy way to solve this problem. Our best advice is to try to connect it to one machine, and if the drivers won’t work, hook it up to the other computer and see if that works. Each printer manufacturer is different, and Windows doesn’t always automatically install the correct drivers for the device. We hope this guide helps you share your data between whichever Microsoft OS scenario you might run into! Here are some other articles that will help you accomplish your home networking needs: Share a Printer on a Home Network from Vista or XP to Windows 7 How to Share a Folder the XP Way in Windows Vista Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Delete Wrong AutoComplete Entries in Windows Vista MailSvchost Viewer Shows Exactly What Each svchost.exe Instance is DoingFixing "BOOTMGR is missing" Error While Trying to Boot Windows VistaShow Hidden Files and Folders in Windows 7 or VistaAdd Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program Guide 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 Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go NachoFoto Searches Images in Real-time Office 2010 Product Guides Google Maps Place marks – Pizza, Guns or Strip Clubs Monitor Applications With Kiwi

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  • Share a Printer on Your Network from Vista or XP to Windows 7

    - by Mysticgeek
    The other day we looked at sharing a printer between Windows 7 machines, but you may only have one Windows 7 machine and the printer is connected to a Vista or XP computer. Today we show you how to share a printer from either Vista or XP to Windows 7. We previously showed you how to share files and printers between Windows 7 and XP. But what if you have a printer connected to an XP or Vista machine in another room, and you want to print to it from Windows 7? This guide will walk you through the process. Note: In these examples we’re using 32-bit versions of Windows 7, Vista, and XP on a basic home network. We are using an HP PSC 1500 printer, but keep in mind every printer is different so finding and installing the correct drivers will vary. Share a Printer from Vista To share the printer on a Vista machine click on Start and enter printers into the search box and hit Enter. Right-click on the printer you want to share and select Sharing from the context menu. Now in Printer Properties, select the Sharing tab, mark the box next to Share this printer, and give the printer a name. Make sure the name is something simple with no spaces then click Ok. Share a Printer from XP To share a printer from XP click on Start then select Printers and Faxes. In the Printers and Faxes window right-click on the printer to share and select Sharing. In the Printer Properties window select the Sharing tab and the radio button next to Share this printer and give it a short name with no spaces then click Ok. Add Printer to Windows 7 Now that we have the printer on Vista or XP set up to be shared, it’s time to add it to Windows 7. Open the Start Menu and click on Devices and Printers. In Devices and Printers click on Add a printer. Next click on Add a network, wireless or Bluetooth printer. Windows 7 will search for the printer on your network and once its been found click Next. The printer has been successfully added…click Next. Now you can set it as the default printer and send a test page to verify everything works. If everything is successful, close out of the add printer screens and you should be good to go.   Alternate Method If the method above doesn’t work, you’ll can try the following for either XP or Vista. In our example, when trying to add the printer connected to our XP machine, it wasn’t recognized automatically. If you’re search pulls up nothing then click on The printer that I want isn’t listed. In the Add Printer window under Find a printer by name or TCP/IP address click the radio button next to Select a shared printer by name. You can either type in the path to the printer or click on Browse to find it. In this instance we decided to browse to it and notice we have 5 computers found on the network. We want to be able to print to the XPMCE computer so we double-click on that. Type in the username and password for that computer… Now we see the printer and can select it. The path to the printer is put into the Select a shared printer by name field. Wait while Windows connects to the printer and installs it… It’s successfully added…click Next. Now you can set it as the default printer or not and print a test page to make sure everything works successfully. Now when we go back to Devices and Printers under Printers and Faxes, we see the HP printer on XPMCE. Conclusion Sharing a printer from one machine to another can sometimes be tricky, but the method we used here in our setup worked well. Since the printer we used is fairly new, there wasn’t a problem with locating any drivers for it. Windows 7 includes a lot of device drivers already so you may be surprised on what it’s able to install. Your results may vary depending on your type of printer, Windows version, and network setup. This should get you started configuring the machines on your network—hopefully with good results.  If you you have two Windows 7 computers, then sharing a printer or files is easy through the Homegroup feature. You can also share a printer between Windows 7 machines on the same network but not Homegroup. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Share a Printer Between Windows 7 Machines Not in the Same HomegroupShare Files and Printers between Windows 7 and XPHow To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and VistaEnable Mapping to \HostnameC$ Share on Windows 7 or VistaUse the Homegroup Feature in Windows 7 to Share Printers and Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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  • Share a Printer on Your Network from Vista or XP to Windows 7

    - by Mysticgeek
    The other day we looked at sharing a printer between Windows 7 machines, but you may only have one Windows 7 machine and the printer is connected to a Vista or XP computer. Today we show you how to share a printer from either Vista or XP to Windows 7. We previously showed you how to share files and printers between Windows 7 and XP. But what if you have a printer connected to an XP or Vista machine in another room, and you want to print to it from Windows 7? This guide will walk you through the process. Note: In these examples we’re using 32-bit versions of Windows 7, Vista, and XP on a basic home network. We are using an HP PSC 1500 printer, but keep in mind every printer is different so finding and installing the correct drivers will vary. Share a Printer from Vista To share the printer on a Vista machine click on Start and enter printers into the search box and hit Enter. Right-click on the printer you want to share and select Sharing from the context menu. Now in Printer Properties, select the Sharing tab, mark the box next to Share this printer, and give the printer a name. Make sure the name is something simple with no spaces then click Ok. Share a Printer from XP To share a printer from XP click on Start then select Printers and Faxes. In the Printers and Faxes window right-click on the printer to share and select Sharing. In the Printer Properties window select the Sharing tab and the radio button next to Share this printer and give it a short name with no spaces then click Ok. Add Printer to Windows 7 Now that we have the printer on Vista or XP set up to be shared, it’s time to add it to Windows 7. Open the Start Menu and click on Devices and Printers. In Devices and Printers click on Add a printer. Next click on Add a network, wireless or Bluetooth printer. Windows 7 will search for the printer on your network and once its been found click Next. The printer has been successfully added…click Next. Now you can set it as the default printer and send a test page to verify everything works. If everything is successful, close out of the add printer screens and you should be good to go.   Alternate Method If the method above doesn’t work, you’ll can try the following for either XP or Vista. In our example, when trying to add the printer connected to our XP machine, it wasn’t recognized automatically. If you’re search pulls up nothing then click on The printer that I want isn’t listed. In the Add Printer window under Find a printer by name or TCP/IP address click the radio button next to Select a shared printer by name. You can either type in the path to the printer or click on Browse to find it. In this instance we decided to browse to it and notice we have 5 computers found on the network. We want to be able to print to the XPMCE computer so we double-click on that. Type in the username and password for that computer… Now we see the printer and can select it. The path to the printer is put into the Select a shared printer by name field. Wait while Windows connects to the printer and installs it… It’s successfully added…click Next. Now you can set it as the default printer or not and print a test page to make sure everything works successfully. Now when we go back to Devices and Printers under Printers and Faxes, we see the HP printer on XPMCE. Conclusion Sharing a printer from one machine to another can sometimes be tricky, but the method we used here in our setup worked well. Since the printer we used is fairly new, there wasn’t a problem with locating any drivers for it. Windows 7 includes a lot of device drivers already so you may be surprised on what it’s able to install. Your results may vary depending on your type of printer, Windows version, and network setup. This should get you started configuring the machines on your network—hopefully with good results.  If you you have two Windows 7 computers, then sharing a printer or files is easy through the Homegroup feature. You can also share a printer between Windows 7 machines on the same network but not Homegroup. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Share a Printer Between Windows 7 Machines Not in the Same HomegroupShare Files and Printers between Windows 7 and XPHow To Share Files and Printers Between Windows 7 and VistaEnable Mapping to \HostnameC$ Share on Windows 7 or VistaUse the Homegroup Feature in Windows 7 to Share Printers and Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

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  • Announcing the release of the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 for .NET

    - by ScottGu
    Today we released the v2.1 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET.  This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK and it includes some great new features and enhancements. These new capabilities include: Visual Studio 2013 Preview Support: The Windows Azure SDK now supports using the new VS 2013 Preview Visual Studio 2013 VM Image: Windows Azure now has a built-in VM image that you can use to host and develop with VS 2013 in the cloud Visual Studio Server Explorer Enhancements: Redesigned with improved filtering and auto-loading of subscription resources Virtual Machines: Start and Stop VM’s w/suspend billing directly from within Visual Studio Cloud Services: New Emulator Express option with reduced footprint and Run as Normal User support Service Bus: New high availability options, Notification Hub support, Improved VS tooling PowerShell Automation: Lots of new PowerShell commands for automating Web Sites, Cloud Services, VMs and more All of these SDK enhancements are now available to start using immediately and you can download the SDK from the Windows Azure .NET Developer Center.  Visual Studio’s Team Foundation Service (http://tfs.visualstudio.com/) has also been updated to support today’s SDK 2.1 release, and the SDK 2.1 features can now be used with it (including with automated builds + tests). Below are more details on the new features and capabilities released today: Visual Studio 2013 Preview Support Today’s Window Azure SDK 2.1 release adds support for the recent Visual Studio 2013 Preview. The 2.1 SDK also works with Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012, and works side by side with the previous Windows Azure SDK 1.8 and 2.0 releases. To install the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 on your local computer, choose the “install the sdk” link from the Windows Azure .NET Developer Center. Then, chose which version of Visual Studio you want to use it with.  Clicking the third link will install the SDK with the latest VS 2013 Preview: If you don’t already have the Visual Studio 2013 Preview installed on your machine, this will also install Visual Studio Express 2013 Preview for Web. Visual Studio 2013 VM Image Hosted in the Cloud One of the requests we’ve heard from several customers has been to have the ability to host Visual Studio within the cloud (avoiding the need to install anything locally on your computer). With today’s SDK update we’ve added a new VM image to the Windows Azure VM Gallery that has Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview, SharePoint 2013, SQL Server 2012 Express and the Windows Azure 2.1 SDK already installed on it.  This provides a really easy way to create a development environment in the cloud with the latest tools. With the recent shutdown and suspend billing feature we shipped on Windows Azure last month, you can spin up the image only when you want to do active development, and then shut down the virtual machine and not have to worry about usage charges while the virtual machine is not in use. You can create your own VS image in the cloud by using the New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery menu within the Windows Azure Management Portal, and then by selecting the “Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview” template: Visual Studio Server Explorer: Improved Filtering/Management of Subscription Resources With the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release you’ll notice significant improvements in the Visual Studio Server Explorer. The explorer has been redesigned so that all Windows Azure services are now contained under a single Windows Azure node.  From the top level node you can now manage your Windows Azure credentials, import a subscription file or filter Server Explorer to only show services from particular subscriptions or regions. Note: The Web Sites and Mobile Services nodes will appear outside the Windows Azure Node until the final release of VS 2013. If you have installed the ASP.NET and Web Tools Preview Refresh, though, the Web Sites node will appear inside the Windows Azure node even with the VS 2013 Preview. Once your subscription information is added, Windows Azure services from all your subscriptions are automatically enumerated in the Server Explorer. You no longer need to manually add services to Server Explorer individually. This provides a convenient way of viewing all of your cloud services, storage accounts, service bus namespaces, virtual machines, and web sites from one location: Subscription and Region Filtering Support Using the Windows Azure node in Server Explorer, you can also now filter your Windows Azure services in the Server Explorer by the subscription or region they are in.  If you have multiple subscriptions but need to focus your attention to just a few subscription for some period of time, this a handy way to hide the services from other subscriptions view until they become relevant. You can do the same sort of filtering by region. To enable this, just select “Filter Services” from the context menu on the Windows Azure node: Then choose the subscriptions and/or regions you want to filter by. In the below example, I’ve decided to show services from my pay-as-you-go subscription within the East US region: Visual Studio will then automatically filter the items that show up in the Server Explorer appropriately: With storage accounts and service bus namespaces, you sometimes need to work with services outside your subscription. To accommodate that scenario, those services allow you to attach an external account (from the context menu). You’ll notice that external accounts have a slightly different icon in server explorer to indicate they are from outside your subscription. Other Improvements We’ve also improved the Server Explorer by adding additional properties and actions to the service exposed. You now have access to most of the properties on a cloud service, deployment slot, role or role instance as well as the properties on storage accounts, virtual machines and web sites. Just select the object of interest in Server Explorer and view the properties in the property pane. We also now have full support for creating/deleting/update storage tables, blobs and queues from directly within Server Explorer.  Simply right-click on the appropriate storage account node and you can create them directly within Visual Studio: Virtual Machines: Start/Stop within Visual Studio Virtual Machines now have context menu actions that allow you start, shutdown, restart and delete a Virtual Machine directly within the Visual Studio Server Explorer. The shutdown action enables you to shut down the virtual machine and suspend billing when the VM is not is use, and easily restart it when you need it: This is especially useful in Dev/Test scenarios where you can start a VM – such as a SQL Server – during your development session and then shut it down / suspend billing when you are not developing (and no longer be billed for it). You can also now directly remote desktop into VMs using the “Connect using Remote Desktop” context menu command in VS Server Explorer.  Cloud Services: Emulator Express with Run as Normal User Support You can now launch Visual Studio and run your cloud services locally as a Normal User (without having to elevate to an administrator account) using a new Emulator Express option included as a preview feature with this SDK release.  Emulator Express is a version of the Windows Azure Compute Emulator that runs a restricted mode – one instance per role – and it doesn’t require administrative permissions and uses 40% less resources than the full Windows Azure Emulator. Emulator Express supports both web and worker roles. To run your application locally using the Emulator Express option, simply change the following settings in the Windows Azure project. On the shortcut menu for the Windows Azure project, choose Properties, and then choose the Web tab. Check the setting for IIS (Internet Information Services). Make sure that the option is set to IIS Express, not the full version of IIS. Emulator Express is not compatible with full IIS. On the Web tab, choose the option for Emulator Express. Service Bus: Notification Hubs With the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release we are adding support for Windows Azure Notification Hubs as part of our official Windows Azure SDK, inside of Microsoft.ServiceBus.dll (previously the Notification Hub functionality was in a preview assembly). You are now able to create, update and delete Notification Hubs programmatically, manage your device registrations, and send push notifications to all your mobile clients across all platforms (Windows Store, Windows Phone 8, iOS, and Android). Learn more about Notification Hubs on MSDN here, or watch the Notification Hubs //BUILD/ presentation here. Service Bus: Paired Namespaces One of the new features included with today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release is support for Service Bus “Paired Namespaces”.  Paired Namespaces enable you to better handle situations where a Service Bus service namespace becomes unavailable (for example: due to connectivity issues or an outage) and you are unable to send or receive messages to the namespace hosting the queue, topic, or subscription. Previously,to handle this scenario you had to manually setup separate namespaces that can act as a backup, then implement manual failover and retry logic which was sometimes tricky to get right. Service Bus now supports Paired Namespaces, which enables you to connect two namespaces together. When you activate the secondary namespace, messages are stored in the secondary queue for delivery to the primary queue at a later time. If the primary container (namespace) becomes unavailable for some reason, automatic failover enables the messages in the secondary queue. For detailed information about paired namespaces and high availability, see the new topic Asynchronous Messaging Patterns and High Availability. Service Bus: Tooling Improvements In this release, the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio contain several enhancements and changes to the management of Service Bus messaging entities using Visual Studio’s Server Explorer. The most noticeable change is that the Service Bus node is now integrated into the Windows Azure node, and supports integrated subscription management. Additionally, there has been a change to the code generated by the Windows Azure Worker Role with Service Bus Queue project template. This code now uses an event-driven “message pump” programming model using the QueueClient.OnMessage method. PowerShell: Tons of New Automation Commands Since my last blog post on the previous Windows Azure SDK 2.0 release, we’ve updated Windows Azure PowerShell (which is a separate download) five times. You can find the full change log here. We’ve added new cmdlets in the following areas: China instance and Windows Azure Pack support Environment Configuration VMs Cloud Services Web Sites Storage SQL Azure Service Bus China Instance and Windows Azure Pack We now support the following cmdlets for the China instance and Windows Azure Pack, respectively: China Instance: Web Sites, Service Bus, Storage, Cloud Service, VMs, Network Windows Azure Pack: Web Sites, Service Bus We will have full cmdlet support for these two Windows Azure environments in PowerShell in the near future. Virtual Machines: Stop/Start Virtual Machines Similar to the Start/Stop VM capability in VS Server Explorer, you can now stop your VM and suspend billing: If you want to keep the original behavior of keeping your stopped VM provisioned, you can pass in the -StayProvisioned switch parameter. Virtual Machines: VM endpoint ACLs We’ve added and updated a bunch of cmdlets for you to configure fine-grained network ACL on your VM endpoints. You can use the following cmdlets to create ACL config and apply them to a VM endpoint: New-AzureAclConfig Get-AzureAclConfig Set-AzureAclConfig Remove-AzureAclConfig Add-AzureEndpoint -ACL Set-AzureEndpoint –ACL The following example shows how to add an ACL rule to an existing endpoint of a VM. Other improvements for Virtual Machine management includes Added -NoWinRMEndpoint parameter to New-AzureQuickVM and Add-AzureProvisioningConfig to disable Windows Remote Management Added -DirectServerReturn parameter to Add-AzureEndpoint and Set-AzureEndpoint to enable/disable direct server return Added Set-AzureLoadBalancedEndpoint cmdlet to modify load balanced endpoints Cloud Services: Remote Desktop and Diagnostics Remote Desktop and Diagnostics are popular debugging options for Cloud Services. We’ve introduced cmdlets to help you configure these two Cloud Service extensions from Windows Azure PowerShell. Windows Azure Cloud Services Remote Desktop extension: New-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtensionConfig Get-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Set-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Remove-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Windows Azure Cloud Services Diagnostics extension New-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtensionConfig Get-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension Set-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension Remove-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension The following example shows how to enable Remote Desktop for a Cloud Service. Web Sites: Diagnostics With our last SDK update, we introduced the Get-AzureWebsiteLog –Tail cmdlet to get the log streaming of your Web Sites. Recently, we’ve also added cmdlets to configure Web Site application diagnostics: Enable-AzureWebsiteApplicationDiagnostic Disable-AzureWebsiteApplicationDiagnostic The following 2 examples show how to enable application diagnostics to the file system and a Windows Azure Storage Table: SQL Database Previously, you had to know the SQL Database server admin username and password if you want to manage the database in that SQL Database server. Recently, we’ve made the experience much easier by not requiring the admin credential if the database server is in your subscription. So you can simply specify the -ServerName parameter to tell Windows Azure PowerShell which server you want to use for the following cmdlets. Get-AzureSqlDatabase New-AzureSqlDatabase Remove-AzureSqlDatabase Set-AzureSqlDatabase We’ve also added a -AllowAllAzureServices parameter to New-AzureSqlDatabaseServerFirewallRule so that you can easily add a firewall rule to whitelist all Windows Azure IP addresses. Besides the above experience improvements, we’ve also added cmdlets get the database server quota and set the database service objective. Check out the following cmdlets for details. Get-AzureSqlDatabaseServerQuota Get-AzureSqlDatabaseServiceObjective Set-AzureSqlDatabase –ServiceObjective Storage and Service Bus Other new cmdlets include Storage: CRUD cmdlets for Azure Tables and Queues Service Bus: Cmdlets for managing authorization rules on your Service Bus Namespace, Queue, Topic, Relay and NotificationHub Summary Today’s release includes a bunch of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  All the above features/enhancements are shipped and available to use immediately as part of the 2.1 release of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Protecting offline IRM rights and the error "Unable to Connect to Offline database"

    - by Simon Thorpe
    One of the most common problems I get asked about Oracle IRM is in relation to the error message "Unable to Connect to Offline database". This error message is a result of how Oracle IRM is protecting the cached rights on the local machine and if that cache has become invalid in anyway, this error is thrown. Offline rights and security First we need to understand how Oracle IRM handles offline use. The way it is implemented is one of the main reasons why Oracle IRM is the leading document security solution and demonstrates our methodology to ensure that solutions address both security and usability and puts the balance of these two in your control. Each classification has a set of predefined roles that the manager of the classification can assign to users. Each role has an offline period which determines the amount of time a user can access content without having to communicate with the IRM server. By default for the context model, which is the classification system that ships out of the box with Oracle IRM, the offline period for each role is 3 days. This is easily changed however and can be as low as under an hour to as long as years. It is also possible to switch off the ability to access content offline which can be useful when content is very sensitive and requires a tight leash. So when a user is online, transparently in the background, the Oracle IRM Desktop communicates with the server and updates the users rights and offline periods. This transparent synchronization period is determined by the server and communicated to all IRM Desktops and allows for users rights to be kept up to date without their intervention. This allows us to support some very important scenarios which are key to a successful IRM solution. A user doesn't have to make any decision when going offline, they simply unplug their laptop and they already have their offline periods synchronized to the maximum values. Any solution that requires a user to make a decision at the point of going offline isn't going to work because people forget to do this and will therefore be unable to legitimately access their content offline. If your rights change to REMOVE your access to content, this also happens in the background. This is very useful when someone has an offline duration of a week and they happen to make a connection to the internet 3 days into that offline period, the Oracle IRM Desktop detects this online state and automatically updates all rights for the user. This means the business risk is reduced when setting long offline periods, because of the daily transparent sync, you can reflect changes as soon as the user is online. Of course, if they choose not to come online at all during that week offline period, you cannot effect change, but you take that risk in giving the 7 day offline period in the first place. If you are added to a NEW classification during the day, this will automatically be synchronized without the user even having to open a piece of content secured against that classification. This is very important, consider the scenario where a senior executive downloads all their email but doesn't open any of it. Disconnects the laptop and then gets on a plane. During the flight they attempt to open a document attached to a downloaded email which has been secured against an IRM classification the user was not even aware they had access to. Because their new role in this classification was automatically synchronized their experience is a good one and the document opens. More information on how the Oracle IRM classification model works can be found in this article by Martin Abrahams. So what about problems accessing the offline rights database? So onto the core issue... when these rights are cached to your machine they are stored in an encrypted database. The encryption of this offline database is keyed to the instance of the installation of the IRM Desktop and the Windows user account. Why? Well what you do not want to happen is for someone to get their rights for content and then copy these files across hundreds of other machines, therefore getting access to sensitive content across many environments. The IRM server has a setting which controls how many times you can cache these rights on unique machines. This is because people typically access IRM content on more than one computer. Their work desktop, a laptop and often a home computer. So Oracle IRM allows for the usability of caching rights on more than one computer whilst retaining strong security over this cache. So what happens if these files are corrupted in someway? That's when you will see the error, Unable to Connect to Offline database. The most common instance of seeing this is when you are using virtual machines and copy them from one computer to the next. The virtual machine software, VMWare Workstation for example, makes changes to the unique information of that virtual machine and as such invalidates the offline database. How do you solve the problem? Resolution is however simple. You just delete all of the offline database files on the machine and they will be recreated with working encryption when the Oracle IRM Desktop next starts. However this does mean that the IRM server will think you have your rights cached to more than one computer and you will need to rerequest your rights, even though you are only going to be accessing them on one. Because it still thinks the old cache is valid. So be aware, it is good practice to increase the server limit from the default of 1 to say 3 or 4. This is done using the Enterprise Manager instance of IRM. So to delete these offline files I have a simple .bat file you can use; Download DeleteOfflineDBs.bat Note that this uses pskillto stop the irmBackground.exe from running. This is part of the IRM Desktop and holds open a lock to the offline database. Either kill this from task manager or use pskillas part of the script.

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  • Building InstallShield based Installers using Team Build 2010

    - by jehan
    Last few weeks, I have been working on Application Packaging stuff using all the widely used tools like InstallShield, WISE, WiX and Visual Studio Installer. So, I thought it would be good to post about how to Build the Installers developed using these tools with Team Build 2010. This post will focus on how to build the InstallShield generated packages using Team Build 2010. For the release of VS2010, Microsoft has partnered with Flexera who are the makers of InstallShield to create InstallShield Limited Edition, especially for the customers of Visual Studio. First Microsoft planned to release WiX (Windows Installer Xml) with VS2010, but later Microsoft dropped  WiX from VS2010 due to reasons which are best known to them and partnered with InstallShield for Limited Edition. It disappointed lot of people because InstallShield Limited Edition provides only few features of InstallShield and it may not feasable to build complex installer packages using this and it also requires License, where as WiX is an open source with no license costs and it has proved efficient in building most complex packages. Only the last three features are available in InstallShield Limited Edition from the total features offered by InstallShield as shown in below list.                                                                                            Feature Limited Edition for Visual Studio 2010 Standalone Build System Maintain a clean build machine by using only the part of InstallShield that compiles the installations. InstallShield Best Practices Validation Suite Avoid common installation issues. Try and Die Functionality RCreate a fully functional trial version of your product. InstallShield Repackager Create Windows Installer setups from any legacy installation. Multilingual Support Present installation text in up to 35 languages. Microsoft App-V™ Support Deploy your applications as App-V virtual packages that run without conflict. Industry-Standard InstallScript Achieve maximum flexibility in your installations. Dialog Editor Modify the layout of existing end-user dialogs, create new custom dialogs, and more. Patch Creation Build updates and patches for your products. Setup Prerequisite Editor Easily control prerequisite restart behavior and source locations. String Editor View Control the localizable text strings displayed at run time with this spreadsheet-like table. Text File Changes View Configure search-and-replace actions for content in text files to be modified at run time. Virtual Machine Detection Block your installations from running on virtual machines. Unicode Support Improve multi-language installation development. Support for 64-Bit COM Extraction Extract COM data from a 64-bit COM server. Windows Installer Installation Chaining Add MSI packages to your main installation and chain them together. XML Support Save time by quickly testing XML configuration changes to installation projects. Billboard Support for Custom Branding Display Adobe Flash billboards and other graphic files during the install process. SaaS Support (IIS 7 and SSL Technologies) Easily deploy Windows-based Web applications. Project Assistant Jumpstart a project by using a simplified set of views. Support for Digital Signatures Save time by digitally signing all your files at build time. Easily Run Custom Actions Schedule a custom action to run at precisely the right moment in your installation. Installation Prerequisites Check for and install prerequisites before your installation is executed. To create a InstallShield project in Visual Studio and Build it using Team Build 2010, first you have to add the InstallShield Project template  to your Solution file. If you want to use InstallShield Limited edition you can add it from FileàNewà project àother Project Types àSetup and Deploymentà InstallShield LE and if you are using other versions of InstallShield, then you have to add it from  from FileàNewà project àInstallShield Projects. Here, I’m using  InstallShield 2011 Premier edition as I already have it Installed. I have created a simple package for TailSpin Application which has a Feature called Web, few components and a IIS Web Site for  TailSpin application.   Before started working on this, I thought I may need to build the package by calling invoke process activity in build process template or have to create a new custom activity. But, it got build without any changes to build process template. But, it was failing with below error message. C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\InstallShield\2011\InstallShield.targets (68): The "InstallShield.Tasks.InstallShield" task could not be loaded from the assembly C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\InstallShield\2010Limited\InstallShield.Tasks.dll. Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Program Files(x86)\MSBuild\InstallShield\2011\InstallShield.Tasks.dll' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format. Confirm that the <UsingTask> declaration is correct, that the assembly and all its dependencies are available, and that the task contains a public class that implements Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITask. This error is due to 64-bit build machine which I’m using. This issue will be replicable if you are queuing a build on a 64-bit build machine. To avoid this you have to ensure that you configured the build definition for your InstallShield project to load the InstallShield.Tasks.dll file (which is a 32-bit file); otherwise, you will encounter this build error informing you that the InstallShield.Tasks.dll file could not be loaded. To select the 32-bit version of MSBuild, click the Process tab of your build definition in Team Explorer. Then, under the Advanced node, find the MSBuild Platform setting, and select x86. Note that if you are using a 32-bit build machine, you can select either Auto or x86 for the MSBuild Platform setting.  Once I did above changes, the build got successful.

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  • HTML5 and CSS3 Editing in Windows Live Writer

    - by Rick Strahl
    Windows Live Writer is a wonderful tool for editing blog posts and getting them posted to your blog. What makes it nice is that it has a small set of useful features, plus a simple plug-in model that has spawned many useful add-ins. Small tool with a reasonably decent plug-in model to extend equals a great solution to a simple problem. If you're running Windows, have a blog and aren’t using Live Writer you’re probably doing it wrong…One of Live Writer’s nice features is that it can download your blog’s CSS for preview and edit displays. It lets you edit your content inside of the context of that CSS using the WYSIWYG editor, so your content actually looks very close to what you’ll see on your blog while you’re editing your post. Unfortunately Live Writer renders the HTML content in the Web Browser Control’s  default IE 7 rendering mode. Yeah you read that right: IE 7 is the default for the Web Browser control and most applications that use it, are stuck in this modus unless the application explicitly overrides this default. The Web Browser control does not use the version of Internet Explorer installed on the system (IE 10 on my Win8 machine) but uses IE 7 mode for ‘compatibility’ for old applications.If you are importing your blog’s CSS that may suck if you’re using rich HTML 5 and CSS 3 formatting. Hack the Registry to get Live Writer to render using IE 9 or 10In order to get Live Writer (or any other application that uses the Web Browser Control for that matter) to render you can apply a registry hack that overrides the Web Browser Control engine usage for a specific application. I wrote about this in detail in a previous blog post a couple of years back.Here’s how you can set up Windows Live Writer to render your CSS 3 by making a change in your registry:The above is for setup on a 64 bit machine, where I configure Live Writer which is a 32 bit application for using IE 10 rendering. The keys set are as follows:32bit Configuration on 64 bit machine:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATIONKey: WindowsLiveWriter.exeValue: 9000 or 10000  (IE 9 or 10 respectively) (DWORD value)On a 32 bit only machine: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BROWSER_EMULATIONKey: WindowsLiveWriter.exeValue: 9000 or 10000  (IE 9 or 10 respectively) (DWORD value)Use decimal values of 9000, 10000 or 11000 to specify specific versions of Internet Explorer. This is a minor tweak, but it’s nice to actually see my blog posts now with the proper CSS formatting intact. Notice the rounded borders and shadow on the code blocks as well as the overflow-x and scrollbars that show up. In this particular case I can see what the code blocks actually look like in a specific resolution – much better than in the old plain view which just chopped things off at the end of the window frame. There are a few other elements that now show properly in the editor as well including block quotes and note boxes that I occasionally use. It’s minor stuff, but it makes the editing experience better yet and closer to the final things so there are less republish operations than I previously had. Sweet!Note that this approach of putting an IE version override into the registry works with most applications that use the Web Browser control. If you are using the Web Browser control in your own applications, it’s a good idea to switch the browser to a more recent version so you can take advantage of HTML 5 and CSS 3 in your browser displayed content by automatically setting this flag in the registry or as part of the application’s startup routine if not dedicated setup tool is used. At the very least you might set it to 9000 (IE 9) which supports most of the basic CSS3 features and is a decent baseline that works for most Windows 7 and 8 machines. If running pre-IE9, the browser will fall back to IE7 rendering and look bad but at least more recent browsers will see an improved experience.I’m surprised that there aren’t more vendors and third party apps using this feature. You can see in my first screen shot that there are only very few entries in the registry key group on my machine – any other apps use the Web Browser control are using IE7. Go figure. Certainly Windows Live Writer should be writing this key into the registry automatically as part of installation to support this functionality out of the box, but alas since it does not, this registry hack lets you get your way anyway…Resources.reg Files to register Live Write Browser Emulation (set for IE9)Specifying Internet Explorer Version for ApplicationsSnagIt LiveWriter Plug-inDownload Windows Live WriterDownload Windows Live Writer with Chocolatey© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Live Writer  Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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  • Why lock-free data structures just aren't lock-free enough

    - by Alex.Davies
    Today's post will explore why the current ways to communicate between threads don't scale, and show you a possible way to build scalable parallel programming on top of shared memory. The problem with shared memory Soon, we will have dozens, hundreds and then millions of cores in our computers. It's inevitable, because individual cores just can't get much faster. At some point, that's going to mean that we have to rethink our architecture entirely, as millions of cores can't all access a shared memory space efficiently. But millions of cores are still a long way off, and in the meantime we'll see machines with dozens of cores, struggling with shared memory. Alex's tip: The best way for an application to make use of that increasing parallel power is to use a concurrency model like actors, that deals with synchronisation issues for you. Then, the maintainer of the actors framework can find the most efficient way to coordinate access to shared memory to allow your actors to pass messages to each other efficiently. At the moment, NAct uses the .NET thread pool and a few locks to marshal messages. It works well on dual and quad core machines, but it won't scale to more cores. Every time we use a lock, our core performs an atomic memory operation (eg. CAS) on a cell of memory representing the lock, so it's sure that no other core can possibly have that lock. This is very fast when the lock isn't contended, but we need to notify all the other cores, in case they held the cell of memory in a cache. As the number of cores increases, the total cost of a lock increases linearly. A lot of work has been done on "lock-free" data structures, which avoid locks by using atomic memory operations directly. These give fairly dramatic performance improvements, particularly on systems with a few (2 to 4) cores. The .NET 4 concurrent collections in System.Collections.Concurrent are mostly lock-free. However, lock-free data structures still don't scale indefinitely, because any use of an atomic memory operation still involves every core in the system. A sync-free data structure Some concurrent data structures are possible to write in a completely synchronization-free way, without using any atomic memory operations. One useful example is a single producer, single consumer (SPSC) queue. It's easy to write a sync-free fixed size SPSC queue using a circular buffer*. Slightly trickier is a queue that grows as needed. You can use a linked list to represent the queue, but if you leave the nodes to be garbage collected once you're done with them, the GC will need to involve all the cores in collecting the finished nodes. Instead, I've implemented a proof of concept inspired by this intel article which reuses the nodes by putting them in a second queue to send back to the producer. * In all these cases, you need to use memory barriers correctly, but these are local to a core, so don't have the same scalability problems as atomic memory operations. Performance tests I tried benchmarking my SPSC queue against the .NET ConcurrentQueue, and against a standard Queue protected by locks. In some ways, this isn't a fair comparison, because both of these support multiple producers and multiple consumers, but I'll come to that later. I started on my dual-core laptop, running a simple test that had one thread producing 64 bit integers, and another consuming them, to measure the pure overhead of the queue. So, nothing very interesting here. Both concurrent collections perform better than the lock-based one as expected, but there's not a lot to choose between the ConcurrentQueue and my SPSC queue. I was a little disappointed, but then, the .NET Framework team spent a lot longer optimising it than I did. So I dug out a more powerful machine that Red Gate's DBA tools team had been using for testing. It is a 6 core Intel i7 machine with hyperthreading, adding up to 12 logical cores. Now the results get more interesting. As I increased the number of producer-consumer pairs to 6 (to saturate all 12 logical cores), the locking approach was slow, and got even slower, as you'd expect. What I didn't expect to be so clear was the drop-off in performance of the lock-free ConcurrentQueue. I could see the machine only using about 20% of available CPU cycles when it should have been saturated. My interpretation is that as all the cores used atomic memory operations to safely access the queue, they ended up spending most of the time notifying each other about cache lines that need invalidating. The sync-free approach scaled perfectly, despite still working via shared memory, which after all, should still be a bottleneck. I can't quite believe that the results are so clear, so if you can think of any other effects that might cause them, please comment! Obviously, this benchmark isn't realistic because we're only measuring the overhead of the queue. Any real workload, even on a machine with 12 cores, would dwarf the overhead, and there'd be no point worrying about this effect. But would that be true on a machine with 100 cores? Still to be solved. The trouble is, you can't build many concurrent algorithms using only an SPSC queue to communicate. In particular, I can't see a way to build something as general purpose as actors on top of just SPSC queues. Fundamentally, an actor needs to be able to receive messages from multiple other actors, which seems to need an MPSC queue. I've been thinking about ways to build a sync-free MPSC queue out of multiple SPSC queues and some kind of sign-up mechanism. Hopefully I'll have something to tell you about soon, but leave a comment if you have any ideas.

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  • OS Analytics with Oracle Enterprise Manager (by Eran Steiner)

    - by Zeynep Koch
    Oracle 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. The recording of our call to discuss this blog is available here: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/ldr.php?AT=pb&SP=MC&rID=71517797&rKey=4ec9d4a3508564b3Download the presentation here See also: Blog about Alert Monitoring and Problem Notification Blog about Using Operational Profiles to Install Packages and other content 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 Drill down into a process details 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. 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. 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 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

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  • GlassFish Clustering with DCOM on Windows

    - by ByronNevins
    DCOM - Distributed COM, a Microsoft protocol for communicating with Windows machines. Why use DCOM? In GlassFish 3.1 SSH is used as the standard way to run commands on remote nodes for clustering.  It is very difficult for users to get SSH configured properly on Windows.  SSH does not come with Windows so we have to depend on third party tools.  And then the user is forced to install and configure these tools -- which can be tricky. DCOM is available on all supported platforms.  It is built-in to Windows. The idea is to use DCOM to communicate with remote Windows nodes.  This has the huge advantage that the user has to do minimal, if any, configuration on the Windows nodes. Implementation HighlightsTwo open Source Libraries have been added to GlassFish: Jcifs – a SAMBA implementation in Java J-interop – A Java implementation for making DCOM calls to remote Windows computers.   Note that any supported platform can use DCOM to work with Windows nodes -- not just Windows.E.g. you can have a Linux DAS work with Windows remote instances.All existing SSH commands now have a corresponding DCOM command – except for setup-ssh which isn’t needed for DCOM.  validate-dcom is an all new command. New DCOM Commands create-node-dcom delete-node-dcom install-node-dcom list-nodes-dcom ping-node-dcom uninstall-node-dcom update-node-dcom validate-dcom setup-local-dcom (This is only available via Update Center for GlassFish 3.1.2) These commands are in-place in the trunk (4.0).  And in the branch (3.1.2) Windows Configuration Challenges There are an infinite number of possible configurations of Windows if you look at it as a combination of main release, service-pack, special drivers, software, configuration etc.  Later versions of Windows err on the side of tightening security be default.  This means that the Windows host may need to have configuration changes made.These configuration changes mostly need to be made by the user.  setup-local-dcom will assist you in making required changes to the Windows Registry.  See the reference blogs for details. The validate-dcom Command validate-dcom is a crucial command.  It should be run before any other commands.  If it does not run successfully then there is no point in running other commands.The validate-dcom command must be used from a DAS machine to test a different Windows machine.  If  validate-dcom runs successfully you can be confident that all the DCOM commands will work.  Conversely, the opposite is also true:  If validate-dcom fails, then no DCOM commands will work. What validate-dcom does Verify that the remote host is not the local machine. Resolves the remote host name Checks that the remote DCOM port is being listened on (135, 139) Checks that the remote host’s File Sharing is enabled (port 445) It copies a file (a script) to the remote host to verify that SAMBA is working and authorization is correct It runs a script that it copied on-the-fly to the remote host. Tips and Tricks The bread and butter commands that use DCOM are existing commands like create-instance, start-instance etc.   All of the commands that have dcom in their name are for dealing with the actual nodes. The way the software works is to call asadmin.bat on the remote machine and run a command.  This means that you can track these commands easily on the remote machine with the usual tools.  E.g. using AS_LOGFILE, looking at log files, etc.  It’s easy to attach a debugger to the remote asadmin process, “just in time”, if necessary. How to debug the remote commands:Edit the asadmin.bat file that is in the glassfish/bin folder.  Use glassfish/lib/nadmin.bat in GlassFish 4.0+Add these options to the java call:-Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=1234  Now if you run, say start-instance on DAS, you can attach your debugger, at your leisure, to the remote machines port 1234.  It will be running start-local-instance and patiently waiting for you to attach.

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  • Using Deployment Manager

    - by Jess Nickson
    One of the teams at Red Gate has been working very hard on a new product: Deployment Manager. Deployment Manager is a free tool that lets you deploy updates to .NET apps, services and databases through a central dashboard. Deployment Manager has been out for a while, but I must admit that even though I work in the same building, until now I hadn’t even looked at it. My job at Red Gate is to develop and maintain some of our community sites, which involves carrying out regular deployments. One of the projects I have to deploy on a fairly regular basis requires me to send my changes to our build server, TeamCity. The output is a Zip file of the build. I then have to go and find this file, copy it across to the staging machine, extract it, and copy some of the sub-folders to other places. In order to keep track of what builds are running, I need to rename the folders accordingly. However, even after all that, I still need to go and update the site and its applications in IIS to point at these new builds. Oh, and then, I have to repeat the process when I deploy on production. Did I mention the multiple configuration files that then need updating as well? Manually? The whole process can take well over half an hour. I’m ready to try out a new process. Deployment Manager is designed to massively simplify the deployment processes from what could be lots of manual copying of files, managing of configuration files, and database upgrades down to a few clicks. It’s a big promise, but I decided to try out this new tool on one of the smaller ASP.NET sites at Red Gate, Format SQL (the result of a Red Gate Down Tools week). I wanted to add some new functionality, but given it was a new site with no set way of doing things, I was reluctant to have to manually copy files around servers. I decided to use this opportunity as a chance to set the site up on Deployment Manager and check out its functionality. What follows is a guide on how to get set up with Deployment Manager, a brief overview of its features, and what I thought of the experience. To follow along with the instructions that follow, you’ll first need to download Deployment Manager from Red Gate. It has a free ‘Starter Edition’ which allows you to create up to 5 projects and agents (machines you deploy to), so it’s really easy to get up and running with a fully-featured version. The Initial Set Up After installing the product and setting it up using the administration tool it provides, I launched Deployment Manager by going to the URL and port I had set it to run on. This loads up the main dashboard. The dashboard does a good job of guiding me through the process of getting started, beginning with a prompt to create some environments. 1. Setting up Environments The dashboard informed me that I needed to add new ‘Environments’, which are essentially ways of grouping the machines you want to deploy to. The environments that get added will show up on the main dashboard. I set up two such environments for this project: ‘staging’ and ‘live’.   2. Add Target Machines Once I had created the environments, I was ready to add ‘target machine’s to them, which are the actual machines that the deployment will occur on.   To enable me to deploy to a new machine, I needed to download and install an Agent on it. The ‘Add target machine’ form on the ‘Environments’ page helpfully provides a link for downloading an Agent.   Once the agent has been installed, it is just a case of copying the server key to the agent, and the agent key to the server, to link them up.   3. Run Health Check If, after adding your new target machine, the ‘Status’ flags an error, it is possible that the Agent and Server keys have not been entered correctly on both Deployment Manager and the Agent service.     You can ‘Check Health’, which will give you more information on any issues. It is probably worth running this regardless of what status the ‘Environments’ dashboard is claiming, just to be on the safe side.     4. Add Projects Going back to the main Dashboard tab at this point, I found that it was telling me that I needed to set up a new project.   I clicked the ‘project’ link to get started, gave my new project a name and clicked ‘Create’. I was then redirected to the ‘Steps’ page for the project under the Projects tab.   5. Package Steps The ‘Steps’ page was fairly empty when it first loaded.   Adding a ‘step’ allowed me to specify what packages I wanted to grab for the deployment. This part requires a NuGet package feed to be set up, which is where Deployment Manager will look for the packages. At Red Gate, we already have one set up, so I just needed to tell Deployment Manager about it. Don’t worry; there is a nice guide included on how to go about doing all of this on the ‘Package Feeds’ page in ‘Settings’, if you need any help with setting these bits up.    At Red Gate we use a build server, TeamCity, which is capable of publishing built projects to the NuGet feed we use. This makes the workflow for Format SQL relatively simple: when I commit a change to the project, the build server is configured to grab those changes, build the project, and spit out a new NuGet package to the Red Gate NuGet package feed. My ‘package step’, therefore, is set up to look for this package on our feed. The final part of package step was simply specifying which machines from what environments I wanted to be able to deploy the project to.     Format SQL Now the main Dashboard showed my new project and environment in a rather empty looking grid. Clicking on my project presented me with a nice little message telling me that I am now ready to create my first release!   Create a release Next I clicked on the ‘Create release’ button in the Projects tab. If your feeds and package step(s) were set up correctly, then Deployment Manager will automatically grab the latest version of the NuGet package that you want to deploy. As you can see here, it was able to pick up the latest build for Format SQL and all I needed to do was enter a version number and description of the release.   As you can see underneath ‘Version number’, it keeps track of what version the previous release was given. Clicking ‘Create’ created the release and redirected me to a summary of it where I could check the details before deploying.   I clicked ‘Deploy this release’ and chose the environment I wanted to deploy to and…that’s it. Deployment Manager went off and deployed it for me.   Once I clicked ‘Deploy release’, Deployment Manager started to automatically update and provide continuing feedback about the process. If any errors do arise, then I can expand the results to see where it went wrong. That’s it, I’m done! Keep in mind, if you hit errors with the deployment itself then it is possible to view the log output to try and determine where these occurred. You can keep expanding the logs to narrow down the problem. The screenshot below is not from my Format SQL deployment, but I thought I’d post one to demonstrate the logging output available. Features One of the best bits of Deployment Manager for me is the ability to very, very easily deploy the same release to multiple machines. Deploying this same release to production was just a case of selecting the deployment and choosing the ‘live’ environment as the place to deploy to. Following on from this is the fact that, as Deployment Manager keeps track of all of your releases, it is extremely easy to roll back to a previous release if anything goes pear-shaped! You can view all your previous releases and select one to re-deploy. I needed this feature more than once when differences in my production and staging machines lead to some odd behavior.     Another option is to use the TeamCity integration available. This enables you to set Deployment Manager up so that it will automatically create releases and deploy these to an environment directly from TeamCity, meaning that you can always see the latest version up and running without having to do anything. Machine Specific Deployments ‘What about custom configuration files?’ I hear you shout. Certainly, it was one of my concerns. Our setup on the staging machine is not in line with that on production. What this means is that, should we deploy the same configuration to both, one of them is going to break. Thankfully, it turns out that Deployment Manager can deal with this. Given I had environments ‘staging’ and ‘live’, and that staging used the project’s web.config file, while production (‘live’) required the config file to undergo some transformations, I simply added a web.live.config file in the project, so that it would be included as part of the NuGet package. In this file, I wrote the XML document transformations I needed and Deployment Manager took care of the rest. Another option is to set up ‘variables’ for your project, which allow you to specify key-value pairs for your configuration file, and which environment to apply them to. You’ll find Variables as a full left-hand submenu within the ‘Projects’ tab. These features will definitely be of interest if you have a large number of environments! There are still many other features that I didn’t get a chance to play around with like running PowerShell scripts for more personalised deployments. Maybe next time! Also, let’s not forget that my use case in this article is a very simple one – deploying a single package. I don’t believe that all projects will be equally as simple, but I already appreciate how much easier Deployment Manager could make my life. I look forward to the possibility of moving our other sites over to Deployment Manager in the near future.   Conclusion In this article I have described the steps involved in setting up and configuring an instance of Deployment Manager, creating a new automated deployment process, and using this to actually carry out a deployment. I’ve tried to mention some of the features I found particularly useful, such as error logging, easy release management allowing you to deploy the same release multiple times, and configuration file transformations. If I had to point out one issue, then it would be that the releases are immutable, which from a development point of view makes sense. However, this causes confusion where I have to create a new release to deploy to a newly set up environment – I cannot simply deploy an old release onto a new environment, the whole release needs to be recreated. I really liked how easy it was to get going with the product. Setting up Format SQL and making a first deployment took very little time. Especially when you compare it to how long it takes me to manually deploy the other site, as I described earlier. I liked how it let me know what I needed to do next, with little messages flagging up that I needed to ‘create environments’ or ‘add some deployment steps’ before I could continue. I found the dashboard incredibly convenient. As the number of projects and environments increase, it might become awkward to try and search them and find out what state they are in. Instead, the dashboard handily keeps track of the latest deployments of each project and lets you know what version is running on each of the environments, and when that deployment occurred. Finally, do you remember my complaint about having to rename folders so that I could keep track of what build they came from? This is yet another thing that Deployment Manager takes care of for you. Each release is put into its own directory, which takes the name of whatever version number that release has, though these can be customised if necessary. If you’d like to take a look at Deployment Manager for yourself, then you can download it here.

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  • Top 50 ASP.Net Interview Questions & Answers

    - by Samir R. Bhogayta
    1. What is ASP.Net? It is a framework developed by Microsoft on which we can develop new generation web sites using web forms(aspx), MVC, HTML, Javascript, CSS etc. Its successor of Microsoft Active Server Pages(ASP). Currently there is ASP.NET 4.0, which is used to develop web sites. There are various page extensions provided by Microsoft that are being used for web site development. Eg: aspx, asmx, ascx, ashx, cs, vb, html, xml etc. 2. What’s the use of Response.Output.Write()? We can write formatted output  using Response.Output.Write(). 3. In which event of page cycle is the ViewState available?   After the Init() and before the Page_Load(). 4. What is the difference between Server.Transfer and Response.Redirect?   In Server.Transfer page processing transfers from one page to the other page without making a round-trip back to the client’s browser.  This provides a faster response with a little less overhead on the server.  The clients url history list or current url Server does not update in case of Server.Transfer. Response.Redirect is used to redirect the user’s browser to another page or site.  It performs trip back to the client where the client’s browser is redirected to the new page.  The user’s browser history list is updated to reflect the new address. 5. From which base class all Web Forms are inherited? Page class.  6. What are the different validators in ASP.NET? Required field Validator Range  Validator Compare Validator Custom Validator Regular expression Validator Summary Validator 7. Which validator control you use if you need to make sure the values in two different controls matched? Compare Validator control. 8. What is ViewState? ViewState is used to retain the state of server-side objects between page post backs. 9. Where the viewstate is stored after the page postback? ViewState is stored in a hidden field on the page at client side.  ViewState is transported to the client and back to the server, and is not stored on the server or any other external source. 10. How long the items in ViewState exists? They exist for the life of the current page. 11. What are the different Session state management options available in ASP.NET? In-Process Out-of-Process. In-Process stores the session in memory on the web server. Out-of-Process Session state management stores data in an external server.  The external server may be either a SQL Server or a State Server.  All objects stored in session are required to be serializable for Out-of-Process state management. 12. How you can add an event handler?  Using the Attributes property of server side control. e.g. [csharp] btnSubmit.Attributes.Add(“onMouseOver”,”JavascriptCode();”) [/csharp] 13. What is caching? Caching is a technique used to increase performance by keeping frequently accessed data or files in memory. The request for a cached file/data will be accessed from cache instead of actual location of that file. 14. What are the different types of caching? ASP.NET has 3 kinds of caching : Output Caching, Fragment Caching, Data Caching. 15. Which type if caching will be used if we want to cache the portion of a page instead of whole page? Fragment Caching: It caches the portion of the page generated by the request. For that, we can create user controls with the below code: [xml] <%@ OutputCache Duration=”120? VaryByParam=”CategoryID;SelectedID”%> [/xml] 16. List the events in page life cycle.   1) Page_PreInit 2) Page_Init 3) Page_InitComplete 4) Page_PreLoad 5) Page_Load 6) Page_LoadComplete 7) Page_PreRender 8)Render 17. Can we have a web application running without web.Config file?   Yes 18. Is it possible to create web application with both webforms and mvc? Yes. We have to include below mvc assembly references in the web forms application to create hybrid application. [csharp] System.Web.Mvc System.Web.Razor System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations [/csharp] 19. Can we add code files of different languages in App_Code folder?   No. The code files must be in same language to be kept in App_code folder. 20. What is Protected Configuration? It is a feature used to secure connection string information. 21. Write code to send e-mail from an ASP.NET application? [csharp] MailMessage mailMess = new MailMessage (); mailMess.From = “[email protected]”; mailMess.To = “[email protected]”; mailMess.Subject = “Test email”; mailMess.Body = “Hi This is a test mail.”; SmtpMail.SmtpServer = “localhost”; SmtpMail.Send (mailMess); [/csharp] MailMessage and SmtpMail are classes defined System.Web.Mail namespace.  22. How can we prevent browser from caching an ASPX page?   We can SetNoStore on HttpCachePolicy object exposed by the Response object’s Cache property: [csharp] Response.Cache.SetNoStore (); Response.Write (DateTime.Now.ToLongTimeString ()); [/csharp] 23. What is the good practice to implement validations in aspx page? Client-side validation is the best way to validate data of a web page. It reduces the network traffic and saves server resources. 24. What are the event handlers that we can have in Global.asax file? Application Events: Application_Start , Application_End, Application_AcquireRequestState, Application_AuthenticateRequest, Application_AuthorizeRequest, Application_BeginRequest, Application_Disposed,  Application_EndRequest, Application_Error, Application_PostRequestHandlerExecute, Application_PreRequestHandlerExecute, Application_PreSendRequestContent, Application_PreSendRequestHeaders, Application_ReleaseRequestState, Application_ResolveRequestCache, Application_UpdateRequestCache Session Events: Session_Start,Session_End 25. Which protocol is used to call a Web service? HTTP Protocol 26. Can we have multiple web config files for an asp.net application? Yes. 27. What is the difference between web config and machine config? Web config file is specific to a web application where as machine config is specific to a machine or server. There can be multiple web config files into an application where as we can have only one machine config file on a server. 28.  Explain role based security ?   Role Based Security used to implement security based on roles assigned to user groups in the organization. Then we can allow or deny users based on their role in the organization. Windows defines several built-in groups, including Administrators, Users, and Guests. [xml] <AUTHORIZATION>< authorization > < allow roles=”Domain_Name\Administrators” / >   < !– Allow Administrators in domain. — > < deny users=”*”  / >                            < !– Deny anyone else. — > < /authorization > [/xml] 29. What is Cross Page Posting? When we click submit button on a web page, the page post the data to the same page. The technique in which we post the data to different pages is called Cross Page posting. This can be achieved by setting POSTBACKURL property of  the button that causes the postback. Findcontrol method of PreviousPage can be used to get the posted values on the page to which the page has been posted. 30. How can we apply Themes to an asp.net application? We can specify the theme in web.config file. Below is the code example to apply theme: [xml] <configuration> <system.web> <pages theme=”Windows7? /> </system.web> </configuration> [/xml] 31: What is RedirectPermanent in ASP.Net?   RedirectPermanent Performs a permanent redirection from the requested URL to the specified URL. Once the redirection is done, it also returns 301 Moved Permanently responses. 32: What is MVC? MVC is a framework used to create web applications. The web application base builds on  Model-View-Controller pattern which separates the application logic from UI, and the input and events from the user will be controlled by the Controller. 33. Explain the working of passport authentication. First of all it checks passport authentication cookie. If the cookie is not available then the application redirects the user to Passport Sign on page. Passport service authenticates the user details on sign on page and if valid then stores the authenticated cookie on client machine and then redirect the user to requested page 34. What are the advantages of Passport authentication? All the websites can be accessed using single login credentials. So no need to remember login credentials for each web site. Users can maintain his/ her information in a single location. 35. What are the asp.net Security Controls? <asp:Login>: Provides a standard login capability that allows the users to enter their credentials <asp:LoginName>: Allows you to display the name of the logged-in user <asp:LoginStatus>: Displays whether the user is authenticated or not <asp:LoginView>: Provides various login views depending on the selected template <asp:PasswordRecovery>:  email the users their lost password 36: How do you register JavaScript for webcontrols ? We can register javascript for controls using <CONTROL -name>Attribtues.Add(scriptname,scripttext) method. 37. In which event are the controls fully loaded? Page load event. 38: what is boxing and unboxing? Boxing is assigning a value type to reference type variable. Unboxing is reverse of boxing ie. Assigning reference type variable to value type variable. 39. Differentiate strong typing and weak typing In strong typing, the data types of variable are checked at compile time. On the other hand, in case of weak typing the variable data types are checked at runtime. In case of strong typing, there is no chance of compilation error. Scripts use weak typing and hence issues arises at runtime. 40. How we can force all the validation controls to run? The Page.Validate() method is used to force all the validation controls to run and to perform validation. 41. List all templates of the Repeater control. ItemTemplate AlternatingltemTemplate SeparatorTemplate HeaderTemplate FooterTemplate 42. List the major built-in objects in ASP.NET?  Application Request Response Server Session Context Trace 43. What is the appSettings Section in the web.config file? The appSettings block in web config file sets the user-defined values for the whole application. For example, in the following code snippet, the specified ConnectionString section is used throughout the project for database connection: [csharp] <em><configuration> <appSettings> <add key=”ConnectionString” value=”server=local; pwd=password; database=default” /> </appSettings></em> [/csharp] 44.      Which data type does the RangeValidator control support? The data types supported by the RangeValidator control are Integer, Double, String, Currency, and Date. 45. What is the difference between an HtmlInputCheckBox control and anHtmlInputRadioButton control? In HtmlInputCheckBoxcontrol, multiple item selection is possible whereas in HtmlInputRadioButton controls, we can select only single item from the group of items. 46. Which namespaces are necessary to create a localized application? System.Globalization System.Resources 47. What are the different types of cookies in ASP.NET? Session Cookie – Resides on the client machine for a single session until the user does not log out. Persistent Cookie – Resides on a user’s machine for a period specified for its expiry, such as 10 days, one month, and never. 48. What is the file extension of web service? Web services have file extension .asmx.. 49. What are the components of ADO.NET? The components of ADO.Net are Dataset, Data Reader, Data Adaptor, Command, connection. 50. What is the difference between ExecuteScalar and ExecuteNonQuery? ExecuteScalar returns output value where as ExecuteNonQuery does not return any value but the number of rows affected by the query. ExecuteScalar used for fetching a single value and ExecuteNonQuery used to execute Insert and Update statements.

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  • What's My Problem? What's Your Problem?

    - by Jacek Ziabicki
    Software installers are not made for building demo environments. I can say this much after 12 years (on and off) of supporting my fellow sales consultants with environments for software demonstrations. When we release software, we include installation programs and procedures that are designed for use by our clients – to build a production environment and a limited number of testing, training and development environments. Different Objectives Your priorities when building an environment for client use vs. building a demo environment are very different. In a production environment, security, stability, and performance concerns are paramount. These environments are built on a specific server and rarely, if ever, moved to a different server or different network address. There is typically just one application running on a particular server (physical or virtual). Once built, the environment will be used for months or years at a time. Because of security considerations, the installation program wants to make these environments very specific to the organization using the software and the use case, encoding a fully qualified name of the server, or even the IP address on the network, in the configuration. So you either go through the installation procedure for each environment, or learn how to clone and reconfigure the software as a separate instance to build all your non-production environments. This may not matter much if the installation is as simple as clicking on the Setup program. But for enterprise applications, you have a number of configuration settings that you need to get just right – so whether you are installing from scratch or reconfiguring an existing installation, this requires both time and expertise in the particular piece of software. If you need a setup of several applications that are integrated to talk to one another, it is a whole new level of complexity. Now you need the expertise in all of the applications involved (plus the supporting technology products), and in addition to making each application work, you also have to configure the integration endpoints. Each application needs the URLs and credentials to call the integration layer, and the integration must be able to call each application. Then you have to make sure that each app has the right data so a business process initiated in one application can continue in the next. And, you will need to check that each application has the correct version and patch level for the integration to work. When building demo environments, your #1 concern is agility. If you can get away with a small number of long-running environments, you are lucky. More likely, you may get a request for a dedicated environment for a demonstration that is two weeks away: how quickly can you make this available so we still have the time to build the client-specific data? We are running a hands-on workshop next month, and we’ll need 15 instances of application X environment so each student can have a separate server for the exercises. We cannot connect to our data center from the client site, the client’s security policy won’t allow our VPN to go through – so we need a portable environment that we can bring with us. Our consultants need to be able to work at the hotel, airport, and the airplane, so we really want an environment that can run on a laptop. The client will need two playpen environments running in the cloud, accessible from their network, for a series of workshops that start two weeks from now. We have seen all of these scenarios and more. Here you would be much better served by a generic installation that would be easy to clone. Welcome to the Wonder Machine The reason I started this blog is to share a particular design of a demo environment, a special way to install software, that can address the above requirements, even for integrated setups. This design was created by a team at Oracle Utilities Global Business Unit, and we are using this setup for most of our demo environments. In a bout of modesty we called it the Wonder Machine. Over the next few posts – think of it as a novel in parts – I will tell you about the big idea, how it was implemented and what you can do with it. After we have laid down the groundwork, I would like to share some tips and tricks for users of our Wonder Machine implementation, as well as things I am learning about building portable, cloneable environments. The Wonder Machine is by no means a closed specification, it is under active development! I am hoping this blog will be of interest to two groups of readers – the users of the Wonder Machine we have built at Oracle Utilities, who want to get the most out of their demo environments and be able to reconfigure it to their needs – and to people who need to build environments for demonstration, testing, training, development and would like to make them cloneable and portable to maximize the reuse of their effort. Surely we are not the only ones facing this problem? If you can think of a better way to solve it, or if you can help us improve on our concept, I will appreciate your comments!

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  • Trouble with Samba Domain

    - by Arkevius
    I'm having a bit of trouble setting up this Samba domain correctly. I'm getting an Access Denied error when trying to add a Windows XP machine to the domain. I'll go through my scenario in detail, but for those of you wanting a TLDR summary it'll be at the bottom of this post. I have HP Proliant server with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed. For this particular environment, I need this server to act as a PDC, file server, and print server. I began by updating and upgrading the packages (of course). Then went to install samba, gnome-desktop, wine, and cpanm. Samba was, of course, for the PDC and file/print services. The GUI was needed because a certain software has to be installed on there that needs a GUI. Wine was needed because the software is Windows-native. And cpanm was for a perl script I have running. For Samba, I went into the smb.conf file and enabled domain logons, changed the workgroup/domain name, the logon script for a per-group basis (netlogon/%g), enabled the netlogon and profiles share, and setup a couple of custom shares for the file service. The printer was added later, and seems to be working just fine. I then restarted the services, and used the net groupmap command to ensure my unix groups were mapped correctly to the Windows groups. After this, I went to a Windows box, and was able to successfully join the domain without a problem. After some fidgeting with the software to get it running on the win boxes from the server (it's a records management system program, which stores it's database files on the server), I went to add another computer to the domain. But now it's saying Access Denied. Before when I had this trouble it was because I forgot to add the group "machines" so Samba could create machine accounts. Thinking this was the case, I manually created the machine account to test this theory. However, it would still give me an Access Denied error. That must mean it has something to do with permissions now, correct? I've been fighting with this server for the past two weeks. If it's not one thing that;s wrong, then it's something else completely different. This would be the third time I've actually reinstalled everything to start over. I'll post snippets of my system settings below. If anything else is needed, just say the word and I'll gather up the info. The unix group 'domadmin' is the Domain Admins group. Samba Administrator account administrator:x:1000:1000:Administrator,,,:/home/administrator:/bin/bash Adminstrator's groups administrator adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare domadmin crimestar Samba's Configuration FIle (a snippet anyways) [global] workgroup = CITYPD server string = BPDServer dns proxy = no log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m max log size = 1000 syslog = 0 panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d security = user encrypt passwords = true passdb backend = tdbsam obey pam restrictions = yes unix password sync = yes passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u passwd chat = *Enter\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* . pam password change = yes map to guest = bad user domain logons = yes logon path = \\%L\srv\samba\profiles\%U logon script = logon.bat add machine script = /usr/sbin/useradd -g machines -c "%u machine account" -d /var/lib/samba -s /bin/false %u domain master = yes usershare allow guests = yes [netlogon] comment = Network Logon Service path = /srv/samba/netlogon/%g guest ok = yes read only = yes browseable = no [profiles] comment = All Printers browseable = no path = /var/spool/samba printable = yes guest ok = no read only = yes create mask = 0700 [print$] comment = Printer Drivers path = /var/lib/samba/printers browseable = yes read only = yes guest ok = no write list = root, @lpadmin [crimestar] comment = "Crimestar DB" path = /srv/crimestar/db valid users = @domadmin, @crimestar admin users = administrator writeable = yes guest ok = no browseable = no create mask = 0666 directory mask = 0777 [crimestarfiles] path = /home/administrator/.wine/drive_c/crimestar admin users = administrator browseable = yes ls -la on /srv/samba/profiles drwxrwxrwx 2 root machines 4096 Nov 21 15:27 . drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:28 .. ls -la on /srv/samba/netlogon drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:30 . drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:28 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:30 crimestar drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 21 18:13 domadmin drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:30 guests drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:29 users GrouMap list Domain Users (S-1-5-21-2978508755-2341913247-928297747-513) -> users Domain Admins (S-1-5-21-2978508755-2341913247-928297747-512) -> domadmin Domain Guests (S-1-5-21-2978508755-2341913247-928297747-514) -> nogroup TLDR I'm getting an Access Denied error message while trying to join a windows box to a samba domain, even after I successfully joined another computer without a problem. System settings / files are quoted above. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

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

    - by Sandrine Riley
    v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} It is time to get started with Oracle Data Integrator 12c! We would like to highlight for you a great place to begin your journey with ODI.  Here you will find the Getting Started section for ODI, which provides a few options. v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Step 1 – Start by downloading the Getting Started (PDF). The document provides general background information and detailed examples to help you learn how to use Oracle Data Integrator. This document guides you through a first project with Oracle Data Integrator 12c, and the instructions in this document are required for using the Getting Started Demonstration Environment. If you would like to run the Getting Started Demonstration Environment on your system go to Step 2 A. If you would like to run the Getting Started Demonstration Environment installed and pre-configured in a Virtual Image, go to Step 2 B. Step 2 - A-   A -  If you would like to run the Getting Started Demo Environment on your system, you will want to then download the Demo Environment for Getting Started (ZIP) archive containing ODI metadata, configuration scripts and sample data. B-   B -  Alternatively, a pre-configured virtual machine is available with the Getting Started installation and configuration. The Virtual Machine platform uses Oracle Virtual Box technology, and use of this configuration would necessitate the download/installation of Virtual Box and the Getting Started virtual machine. If you prefer this route and would rather run the Getting Started Demonstration Environment installed and preconfigured in a Virtual Machine, please download the ODI 12c Getting Started Virtual Machine. Step 3 – In continuation with the Getting Started Demonstration Environment and the Getting Started Guide, you will now be able to run through a first project with Oracle Data Integrator. Now that you have successfully done the exercises above, you may want to play on your own, and develop with Oracle Data Integrator on your environment...  here you can download a full version of Oracle Data Integrator 12c.  Enjoy, and happy developing! Learn more about Oracle Data Integrator; including FAQ, the Oracle by Example Series, Sample Code, and White Papers. Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

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  • Implementing a Custom Coherence PartitionAssignmentStrategy

    - by jpurdy
    A recent A-Team engagement required the development of a custom PartitionAssignmentStrategy (PAS). By way of background, a PAS is an implementation of a Java interface that controls how a Coherence partitioned cache service assigns partitions (primary and backup copies) across the available set of storage-enabled members. While seemingly straightforward, this is actually a very difficult problem to solve. Traditionally, Coherence used a distributed algorithm spread across the cache servers (and as of Coherence 3.7, this is still the default implementation). With the introduction of the PAS interface, the model of operation was changed so that the logic would run solely in the cache service senior member. Obviously, this makes the development of a custom PAS vastly less complex, and in practice does not introduce a significant single point of failure/bottleneck. Note that Coherence ships with a default PAS implementation but it is not used by default. Further, custom PAS implementations are uncommon (this engagement was the first custom implementation that we know of). The particular implementation mentioned above also faced challenges related to managing multiple backup copies but that won't be discussed here. There were a few challenges that arose during design and implementation: Naive algorithms had an unreasonable upper bound of computational cost. There was significant complexity associated with configurations where the member count varied significantly between physical machines. Most of the complexity of a PAS is related to rebalancing, not initial assignment (which is usually fairly simple). A custom PAS may need to solve several problems simultaneously, such as: Ensuring that each member has a similar number of primary and backup partitions (e.g. each member has the same number of primary and backup partitions) Ensuring that each member carries similar responsibility (e.g. the most heavily loaded member has no more than one partition more than the least loaded). Ensuring that each partition is on the same member as a corresponding local resource (e.g. for applications that use partitioning across message queues, to ensure that each partition is collocated with its corresponding message queue). Ensuring that a given member holds no more than a given number of partitions (e.g. no member has more than 10 partitions) Ensuring that backups are placed far enough away from the primaries (e.g. on a different physical machine or a different blade enclosure) Achieving the above goals while ensuring that partition movement is minimized. These objectives can be even more complicated when the topology of the cluster is irregular. For example, if multiple cluster members may exist on each physical machine, then clearly the possibility exists that at certain points (e.g. following a member failure), the number of members on each machine may vary, in certain cases significantly so. Consider the case where there are three physical machines, with 3, 3 and 9 members each (respectively). This introduces complexity since the backups for the 9 members on the the largest machine must be spread across the other 6 members (to ensure placement on different physical machines), preventing an even distribution. For any given problem like this, there are usually reasonable compromises available, but the key point is that objectives may conflict under extreme (but not at all unlikely) circumstances. The most obvious general purpose partition assignment algorithm (possibly the only general purpose one) is to define a scoring function for a given mapping of partitions to members, and then apply that function to each possible permutation, selecting the most optimal permutation. This would result in N! (factorial) evaluations of the scoring function. This is clearly impractical for all but the smallest values of N (e.g. a partition count in the single digits). It's difficult to prove that more efficient general purpose algorithms don't exist, but the key take away from this is that algorithms will tend to either have exorbitant worst case performance or may fail to find optimal solutions (or both) -- it is very important to be able to show that worst case performance is acceptable. This quickly leads to the conclusion that the problem must be further constrained, perhaps by limiting functionality or by using domain-specific optimizations. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to design these more focused algorithms. In the specific case mentioned, we constrained the solution space to very small clusters (in terms of machine count) with small partition counts and supported exactly two backup copies, and accepted the fact that partition movement could potentially be significant (preferring to solve that issue through brute force). We then used the out-of-the-box PAS implementation as a fallback, delegating to it for configurations that were not supported by our algorithm. Our experience was that the PAS interface is quite usable, but there are intrinsic challenges to designing PAS implementations that should be very carefully evaluated before committing to that approach.

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