high voltage - Page 146

Best file manager for developers

- by RSabet

Developers have high demands, so I think many of us are unsatisfied with the average file manager shipped with the operating system. What is your file manager of choice, and why?

What does it mean to flush a socket?

I don't really know much about sockets except how to read and write to them as if they were files. I know a little about using socket selectors. I don't get why you have to flush a socket, what's actually happening there? The bits just hang out somewhere in memory until they get pushed off? I read some things online about sockets, but it's all very abstract and high level. What's actually happening here?

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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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Oracle performance problem

- by jreid42

We are using an Oracle 11G machine that is very powerful; has redundant storage etc. It's a beast from what I have been told. We just got this DB for a tool that when I first came on as a coop had like 20 people using, now its upwards of 150 people. I am the only one working on it :( We currently have a system in place that distributes PERL scripts across our entire data center essentially giving us a sort of "grid" computing power. The Perl scripts run a sort of simulation and report back the results to the database. They do selects / inserts. The load is not very high for each script but it could be happening across 20-50 systems at the same time. We then have multiple data centers and users all hitting the same database with this same approach. Our main problem with this is that our database is getting overloaded with connections and having to drop some. We sometimes have upwards of 500 connections. These are old perl scripts and they do not handle this well. Essentially they fail and the results are lost. I would rather avoid having to rewrite a lot of these as they are poorly written, and are a headache to even look at. The database itself is not overloaded, just the connection overhead is too high. We open a connection, make a quick query and then drop the connection. Very short connections but many of them. The database team has basically said we need to lower the number of connections or they are going to ignore us. Because this is distributed across our farm we cant implement persistent connections. I do this with our webserver; but its on a fixed system. The other ones are perl scripts that get opened and closed by the distribution tool and thus arent always running. What would be my best approach to resolving this issue? The scripts themselves can wait for a connection to be open. They do not need to act immediately. Some sort of queing system? I've been suggested to set up a few instances of a tool called "SQL Relay". Maybe one in each data center. How reliable is this tool? How good is this approach? Would it work for what we need? We could have one for each data center and relay requests through it to our main database, keeping a pipeline of open persistent connections? Does this make sense? Is there any other suggestions you can make? Any ideas? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Sadly I am just a coop student working for a very big company and somehow all of this has landed all on my shoulders (there is literally nobody to ask for help; its a hardware company, everybody is hardware engineers, and the database team is useless and in India) and I am quite lost as what the best approach would be? I am extremely overworked and this problem is interfering with on going progress and basically needs to be resolved as quickly as possible; preferably without rewriting the whole system, purchasing hardware (not gonna happen), or shooting myself in the foot. HELP LOL!

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Why do GPUs overheat?

- by JAD

About a year ago, I added a 9800GT (1 GB version) and a Corsair CX500 PSU to an HP M8000N computer. A few weeks ago, the HDD overheated and I decided to transfer the GPU & PSU to a new build, which consists of: i3 @ 3.3Ghz Gigabyte H61 Micro ATX Mobo 4GB RAM 500GB WD HDD DVD RW Drive Cooler Master Elite 430 Tower Once I had Win7 up and running, I installed all the essential drivers that came with the Gigabyte Mobo CD. However, whenever I tried installing the Graphics Media Accelerator driver, the computer would crash and enter an endless boot sequence on the next startup. I skipped installing this driver and installed the CD driver for the 9800GT, which by now is a year old. Everything was working fine, WEI rated my GPU at 6.6 graphics & aero performance. However, after updating my Nvidia drivers to the latest, the WEI dropped my rating to 3.3 for Aero, and 4.7 for graphics performance. Just to make sure that everything was ok, I ran Bad Company 2 on medium settings. The first few minutes ran just fine at a smooth framerate, so I dismissed this as Windows being Windows. About 6 hours later, I ran BC2 again. This time I averaged anywhere from 2-5 FPS. I checked the GPU temperature through GPU-Z, and it came back as 120C. The problem with this, is that the computer was on for six hours up to that point. Wouldn't the card have experienced a reactor core meltdown a lot sooner than that? Granted, the computer was "sleeping" some of the time, but still... The next day I took out a temperature gun and ran some tests. I would point the laser at a very specific area on the reverse side of the card (not the fan or "front"), and compare the temp reading with GPU-Z. After leaving the system on idle on idle for a few minutes, I ran BC2 twice. Here are the results: GPU-Z Reading / Temp Gun Reading / Time Null / 22.3°C / Comp is Off 53°C / 33.5°C / 1:49 78°C / 46°C / 1:53 - (First BC2 run; good framerate) 102°C / 64.6°C / 2:01 - (System is again on idle) 113°C / 64.8°C / 2:10 119°C / 71.8°C / 2:17 - (Second BC2 run; poor framerate) I should also mention that I also took a temp recording of another part of the GPU from 2:01-2:17. The temp in this area jumped from 75°C to 82.9°C in that time frame. This pretty much confirms that GPU-Z is reporting the temperature accurately, and the card is overheating. But I'd like to know why; the cars is doing nothing and still the temperature climbs at a steady rate. I thoroughly cleaned the GPU and PSU when I salvaged them from the old HP M8000N computer with a can of compressed air, dust cant be the issue. Similarly, the rest of the computer is brand new. I installed various Nvidia drivers, but no luck. It seems strange to me that a year-old card is suddenly failing on me; aren't they supposed to last at least two years? Could this be a driver issue? Is the motherboard faulty? Could the PSU be overfeeding the card on voltage? Neither case seems likely, as the CPU, RAM and otherwise the rest of the comp has worked flawlessly and has stayed well within respectable temp ranges (the i3 lingers around 50C, the HDD stays at 30C, so does the PSU). How can I pinpoint the issue?

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xrandr shows two displays (LVDS1), but how can I use VGA1 only?

- by Tom Fishman

We're running Ubuntu 11 on this hardware: Foxconn R20-D2 Intel Atom D510 Intel NM10 Intel GMA 3150 Barebone There is no integrated display (it is a barebone box). I connected an external VGA to it. However xrandr shows two displays: Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 4096 x 4096 LVDS1 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm 1024x768 60.0*+ 800x600 60.3 56.2 640x480 59.9 VGA1 connected 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 519mm x 324mm 1920x1200 60.0 + 1600x1200 60.0 1680x1050 60.0 1280x1024 76.0 75.0 72.0 60.0 1440x900 75.0 59.9 1152x864 75.0 1024x768 75.1 70.1 60.0* 832x624 74.6 800x600 72.2 75.0 60.3 640x480 72.8 75.0 66.7 60.0 720x400 70.1 But I don't have two displays. How can I get rid of LVDS1 and use only VGA1? The direct result is that I'm seeing a 1024x768 resolution on my VGA display, because the OS is using "mirror" mode which uses the lower resolution of the two. Turning off the mirror is not a solution. I want to fix it. Related logs: ... [ 20.019] (II) intel(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section "Default Screen Section" for depth/fbbpp 24/32 [ 20.019] (==) intel(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32 [ 20.019] (==) intel(0): RGB weight 888 [ 20.019] (==) intel(0): Default visual is TrueColor [ 20.019] (II) intel(0): Integrated Graphics Chipset: Intel(R) Pineview G [ 20.019] (--) intel(0): Chipset: "Pineview G" [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Relaxed fencing enabled [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Wait on SwapBuffers? enabled [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Triple buffering? enabled [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Framebuffer tiled [ 20.019] (**) intel(0): Pixmaps tiled [ 20.020] (**) intel(0): 3D buffers tiled [ 20.020] (**) intel(0): SwapBuffers wait enabled [ 20.020] (==) intel(0): video overlay key set to 0x101fe [ 20.020] (II) intel(0): Output LVDS1 has no monitor section [ 20.020] (II) intel(0): found backlight control interface /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight [ 20.080] (II) intel(0): Output VGA1 has no monitor section [ 20.080] (II) intel(0): EDID for output LVDS1 [ 20.081] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "320x240" (doublescan mode not supported) [ 20.081] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "400x300" (doublescan mode not supported) [ 20.081] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "400x300" (doublescan mode not supported) [ 20.081] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "512x384" (doublescan mode not supported) ... [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Not using default mode "960x600" (doublescan mode not supported) [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Printing probed modes for output LVDS1 [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Modeline "1024x768"x60.0 65.00 1024 1048 1184 1344 768 771 777 806 -hsync -vsync (48.4 kHz) [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Modeline "800x600"x60.3 40.00 800 840 968 1056 600 601 605 628 +hsync +vsync (37.9 kHz) [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Modeline "800x600"x56.2 36.00 800 824 896 1024 600 601 603 625 +hsync +vsync (35.2 kHz) [ 20.082] (II) intel(0): Modeline "640x480"x59.9 25.18 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz) [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): EDID for output VGA1 [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): Manufacturer: BNQ Model: 771b Serial#: 6595 [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): Year: 2008 Week: 16 [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): EDID Version: 1.3 [ 20.149] (II) intel(0): Analog Display Input, Input Voltage Level: 0.700/0.700 V ... [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Modeline "640x480"x60.0 25.20 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 -hsync -vsync (31.5 kHz) [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Modeline "720x400"x70.1 28.32 720 738 846 900 400 412 414 449 -hsync +vsync (31.5 kHz) [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Output LVDS1 connected [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Output VGA1 connected [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Using exact sizes for initial modes [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Output LVDS1 using initial mode 1024x768 [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Output VGA1 using initial mode 1024x768 [ 20.152] (II) intel(0): Using default gamma of (1.0, 1.0, 1.0) unless otherwise stated. ...

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Chrome does not re-draw properly on Windows 8

- by Akshat Mittal

There are a lot of problems with Chrome (24.0.1312.14 beta || But all this happened before update also) on Windows 8. Problems and explanations are listed below: Google Chrome re-draw time: When I switch tabs, the window retains the content of the previous tab and displays that even if I move my mouse, if only refreshes (re-draws) when there is a change on the webpage (like on hover) or I do a select all (or scroll). One thing to note is that the hover and select happens on the real page and not the retained image-like thing of the older webpage. Chrome is slow and laggy: Websites such as Facebook and Twitter (and more) have gone extremely laggy on Chrome (Win 8). When I was using Windows 7, I never experienced a lag or something. Also when using HTML-5 Websites, the transition (the -webkit-transition in CSS) goes extremely slow at times. Plugins Crash: Plugins like Flash Player, Shockwave Player, and more that are in-built into Chrome Crashes a lot, even when doing simple tasks like playing YouTube Videos, displaying ads or something. Chrome Crashes: Chrome has crashed over 100 times in the past month. Google Chrome just crashes randomly or I don't know the reason. Random Page crashes: Chrome results chrome://crash/(Copy-Paste this in address bar) on random pages even when the page is just loaded, I understand that this can happen on heavy HTML5 or JS websites but what about HTML only websites? Computer Freeze: Chrome sometimes, randomly, freezes my computer. Freeze in the sense, none of the other apps are also working. It's like the whole system freezes, I can not even switch to other apps. I am sure that this is because of Chrome since this happens only when Chrome is active. Most of the things above happens on Super User also, Super User never had any problem when using Chrome on Windows 7. UPDATE 1: @magicandre1981 Commented for trying to disable Hardware Acceleration. I tried it, it somewhat solved the problem but din't fix it. I am still experiencing all the above issues but less frequently (maybe because Chrome Restarted Completely) UPDATE 2: @avirk asked me to try a Stable Version of Chrome and Firefox, I din't experience any lag in Firefox, a little (negligible) lag in Chrome 22 (Maybe because its a new copy of Chrome, I haven't used it much). UPDATE 3: @NothingsImpossible said that He is also experiencing the same problem on Windows Server 2008! This seams to be a major issue now. He also said that GPU load is also high at the same time! Even I saw the same thing. UPDATE 4: Recently, Chrome updated to v24 Stable (I am using stable from a long time now). I was experiencing this problem a lot less in Chrome 23, but this is back in Chrome 24. Seams like Chrome 24 is the most affected from this bug, as this same problem was high in Chrome 24 beta also. UPDATE 5: Chrome was updated to v25 Stable. This problem is 99% Gone, it is still there in 1% of the cases. One such example is when I leave chrome inactive for a while with a few tabs open, the tabs go black and no activity can get them back to active state. If I open a new tab, the new tab is OK but the others are still black, I need to close all those tabs. UPDATE 6: Chrome updated to v27 Stable channel, this problem is nearly gone. This does happen occasionally, but not as frequent as in earlier versions of Chrome. UPDATE 7: I am on Chrome v35.0.1916.114 Stable, Windows 8.1 Pro Update 1. Some of the other problems appears to be back. Chrome is slow and laggy again. Re-draw time is getting worse. Is anybody else experiencing such issues? Does anybody have a solution to any of these?

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Is it possible to repair a Cisco 3500 XL (3548) switch with POST Error messages?

- by Alex

I've got an old Cisco 3500 XL, and it seems to have hardware issues. I've loaded the latest IOS and cleared all config. Does anyone have any experience fixing the switch core? I'm a reasonably competent SMD solderer, can I replace/reflow some chips? I've checked the power supply voltages and it's all within tolerance, and no visible signs of any component damage. Some chips are hot to the touch. I understand that these were EOL as of 2007, but should have a lifetime warranty for the electronics. I don't have a Cisco support contract, so I can't file a ticket. What should I do? Console output: switch: dir flash: Directory of flash:/ 2 -rwx 1811584 <date> c3500xl-c3h2s-mz.120-5.WC17.bin 1799680 bytes available (1812992 bytes used) switch: boot Loading "flash:c3500xl-c3h2s-mz.120-5.WC17.bin"...################################################################################################################################################################################### File "flash:c3500xl-c3h2s-mz.120-5.WC17.bin" uncompressed and installed, entry point: 0x3000 executing... Restricted Rights Legend Use, duplication, or disclosure by the Government is subject to restrictions as set forth in subparagraph (c) of the Commercial Computer Software - Restricted Rights clause at FAR sec. 52.227-19 and subparagraph (c) (1) (ii) of the Rights in Technical Data and Computer Software clause at DFARS sec. 252.227-7013. cisco Systems, Inc. 170 West Tasman Drive San Jose, California 95134-1706 Cisco Internetwork Operating System Software IOS (tm) C3500XL Software (C3500XL-C3H2S-M), Version 12.0(5)WC17, RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc1) Copyright (c) 1986-2007 by cisco Systems, Inc. Compiled Tue 13-Feb-07 15:04 by antonino Image text-base: 0x00003000, data-base: 0x00352924 Initializing C3500XL flash... flashfs[1]: 1 files, 1 directories flashfs[1]: 0 orphaned files, 0 orphaned directories flashfs[1]: Total bytes: 3612672 flashfs[1]: Bytes used: 1812992 flashfs[1]: Bytes available: 1799680 flashfs[1]: flashfs fsck took 3 seconds. flashfs[1]: Initialization complete. ...done Initializing C3500XL flash. C3500XL POST: System Board Test: Passed C3500XL POST: Daughter Card Test: Passed C3500XL POST: CPU Buffer Test: Passed C3500XL POST: CPU Notify RAM Test: Passed C3500XL POST: CPU Interface Test: Passed C3500XL POST: Testing Switch Core: Passed Error with Switch Core BIST test Phase 0. Returns: Test Complete Low : 0x0FFFFFFF, Test Complete High : 0xFFFFFFFE Test Phase Low : 0x00000040, Test Phase High : 0x00000000 Test Phase Third : 0x00000000, Test Complete Third : 0x000001F8 C3500XL POST FAILURE: Testing Switch Core: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Testing Buffer Table: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Data Buffer Test: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Configuring Switch Parameters: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Switch Core BIST failed. C3500XL POST FAILURE: Cannot test Modules due to failure of Switch Core POST Del Mar Failure (0th Del Mar): req system failed to init C3500XL POST FAILURE: C3500XL POST FAILURE: ATM: required system failed to init C3500XL POST: Ethernet Controller Test: Passed C3500XL POST FAILURE: MII Test: Failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: Error waiting for Ethernet Controller and SW_PARAMS C3500XL POST FAILURE: Initialization/POST failed C3500XL POST FAILURE: AT: Failing because system POST failed Exception (8192)! Debug Exception (Could be NULL pointer dereference) CPU Register Context: Vector = 0x00002000 PC = 0x000F36F4 MSR = 0x00029200 CR = 0x22000024 LR = 0x000F6964 CTR = 0x001DE46C XER = 0x00000000 R0 = 0x00000000 R1 = 0x004E2580 R2 = 0x00000000 R3 = 0x00000000 R4 = 0x00000001 R5 = 0x00000000 R6 = 0x004E2718 R7 = 0x004E2718 R8 = 0x00000008 R9 = 0x00000000 R10 = 0x0000FFFF R11 = 0x00480000 R12 = 0x42000024 R13 = 0x00000000 R14 = 0x00000000 R15 = 0x00000000 R16 = 0x00000000 R17 = 0x00000000 R18 = 0x00000000 R19 = 0x00000000 R20 = 0x00000000 R21 = 0x00000000 R22 = 0x00000000 R23 = 0x00000000 R24 = 0x00000000 R25 = 0x00000020 R26 = 0x004E2718 R27 = 0x004E2718 R28 = 0x00000020 R29 = 0x00002513 R30 = 0x00000001 R31 = 0x00000000 Stack trace: PC = 0x000F36F4, SP = 0x004E2580 Frame 00: SP = 0x004E25A0 PC = 0x40000016 Frame 01: SP = 0x004E2618 PC = 0x000F6964 Frame 02: SP = 0x004E26A8 PC = 0x000F76DC Frame 03: SP = 0x004E26C8 PC = 0x000E8114 Frame 04: SP = 0x004E26F0 PC = 0x001F5BF8 Frame 05: SP = 0x004E2710 PC = 0x001F5CF4 Frame 06: SP = 0x004E2748 PC = 0x0023F4DC Frame 07: SP = 0x004E2750 PC = 0x0023E650 Frame 08: SP = 0x004E27C8 PC = 0x0023E89C Frame 09: SP = 0x004E27E0 PC = 0x0028AF34 Frame 10: SP = 0x004E27E8 PC = 0x001E38F8 Frame 11: SP = 0x004E2808 PC = 0x001E39A8 Frame 12: SP = 0x004E2820 PC = 0x0014E220 Frame 13: SP = 0x004E28C8 PC = 0x0014E39C Frame 14: SP = 0x00000000 PC = 0x001EB510

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How to understand the memory usage and load average in linux server

- by Tim

Hi, I am using a linux server which has 128GB of memory and 24 cores. I use top to see how much it is used. Its output is pasted at the end of the post. Here are two questions: (1) I see that each of the running processes occupies a very small percentage of memory (%MEM no more than 0.2%, and most just 0.0%), but how the total memory is almost used as in the fourth line of output ("Mem: 130766620k total, 130161072k used, 605548k free, 919300k buffers")? The sum of used percentage of memory over all processes seems unlikely to achieve almost 100%, doesn't it? (2) how to understand the load average on the first line ("load average: 14.04, 14.02, 14.00")? Thanks and regards! Edit: Thanks! I also really like to hear some rough numbers based on used percentage of memory to determine if a server is heavily loaded, since I once became the one who cramed the server without understanding the current load. Is swap regarded as almost the same as memory? For example, when memory and swap are almost of same size, if the memory is almost running out but the swap is still largely free, may I just view it as if the used percentage of memory + swap is still not high and run other new processes? How would you consider together CPU or memory (or memory + swap) usage? Do you become worried if either of them reaches too high or both? Output of top: $ top top - 12:45:33 up 19 days, 23:11, 18 users, load average: 14.04, 14.02, 14.00 Tasks: 484 total, 12 running, 472 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 36.7%us, 19.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 43.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 130766620k total, 130161072k used, 605548k free, 919300k buffers Swap: 63111312k total, 500556k used, 62610756k free, 124437752k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 6529 sanchez 18 -2 1075m 219m 13m S 100 0.2 13760:23 MATLAB 13210 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1216 R 100 0.0 3:56.75 absurdity 13888 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1204 R 100 0.0 2:04.89 absurdity 14542 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1196 R 100 0.0 1:08.34 absurdity 14544 timothy 18 -2 2888 2076 400 R 100 0.0 1:06.14 gatherData 6183 sanchez 18 -2 1133m 195m 13m S 100 0.2 13676:04 MATLAB 6795 sanchez 18 -2 1079m 210m 13m S 100 0.2 13734:26 MATLAB 10178 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1204 R 100 0.0 11:33.93 absurdity 12438 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1216 R 100 0.0 5:38.17 absurdity 13661 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1216 R 100 0.0 2:44.13 absurdity 14098 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1204 R 100 0.0 1:58.31 absurdity 14335 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1196 R 100 0.0 1:08.93 absurdity 14765 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1196 R 99 0.0 0:32.57 absurdity 13445 timothy 18 -2 48336 37m 1216 R 99 0.0 3:01.37 absurdity 28990 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 2 0.0 65:50.21 pdflush 12141 tim 18 -2 19380 1660 1024 R 1 0.0 0:04.04 top 1240 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 16:07.11 kjournald 9019 root 20 0 296m 4460 2616 S 0 0.0 82:19.51 kdm_greet 1 root 20 0 4028 728 592 S 0 0.0 0:03.11 init 2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd 3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:01.01 migration/0 4 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:08.13 ksoftirqd/0 5 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0 6 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 17:27.31 migration/1 7 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:01.21 ksoftirqd/1 8 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/1 9 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 10:02.56 migration/2 10 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.34 ksoftirqd/2 11 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/2 12 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 4:29.53 migration/3 13 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.34 ksoftirqd/3

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Severe mysqldump performance degradation using Centos Linux, 8GB PAE and MySQL 5.0.77

- by Duncan Harris

We use MySQL 5.0.77 on CentOS 5.5 on VMWare: Linux dev.ic.soschildrensvillages.org.uk 2.6.18-194.11.4.el5PAE #1 SMP Tue Sep 21 05:48:23 EDT 2010 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux We have recently upgraded from 4GB RAM to 8GB. When we did this the time of our mysqldump overnight backup jumped from under 10 minutes to over 2 hours. It also caused unresponsiveness on our plone based web site due to database load. The dump is using the optimized mysqldump format and is spooled directly through a socket to another server. Any ideas on what we could do to fix gratefully appreciated. Would a MySQL upgrade help? Anything we can do to MySQL config? Anything we can do to Linux config? Or do we have to add another server or go to 64-bit? We ran a previous (non-virtual) server on 6GB PAE and didn't notice a similar issue. This was on same MySQL version, but Centos 4.4. Server config file: [mysqld] port=3307 socket=/tmp/mysql_live.sock wait_timeout=31536000 interactive_timeout=31536000 datadir=/var/mysql/live/data user=mysql max_connections = 200 max_allowed_packet = 64M table_cache = 2048 binlog_cache_size = 128K max_heap_table_size = 32M sort_buffer_size = 2M join_buffer_size = 2M lower_case_table_names = 1 innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend innodb_buffer_pool_size=1G innodb_log_file_size=300M innodb_log_buffer_size=8M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 innodb_file_per_table [mysqldump] # Do not buffer the whole result set in memory before writing it to # file. Required for dumping very large tables quick max_allowed_packet = 64M [mysqld_safe] # Increase the amount of open files allowed per process. Warning: Make # sure you have set the global system limit high enough! The high value # is required for a large number of opened tables open-files-limit = 8192 Server variables: mysql> show variables; +---------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Variable_name | Value | +---------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+ | auto_increment_increment | 1 | | auto_increment_offset | 1 | | automatic_sp_privileges | ON | | back_log | 50 | | basedir | /usr/local/mysql-5.0.77-linux-i686-glibc23/ | | binlog_cache_size | 131072 | | bulk_insert_buffer_size | 8388608 | | character_set_client | latin1 | | character_set_connection | latin1 | | character_set_database | latin1 | | character_set_filesystem | binary | | character_set_results | latin1 | | character_set_server | latin1 | | character_set_system | utf8 | | character_sets_dir | /usr/local/mysql-5.0.77-linux-i686-glibc23/share/mysql/charsets/ | | collation_connection | latin1_swedish_ci | | collation_database | latin1_swedish_ci | | collation_server | latin1_swedish_ci | | completion_type | 0 | | concurrent_insert | 1 | | connect_timeout | 10 | | datadir | /var/mysql/live/data/ | | date_format | %Y-%m-%d | | datetime_format | %Y-%m-%d %H:%i:%s | | default_week_format | 0 | | delay_key_write | ON | | delayed_insert_limit | 100 | | delayed_insert_timeout | 300 | | delayed_queue_size | 1000 | | div_precision_increment | 4 | | keep_files_on_create | OFF | | engine_condition_pushdown | OFF | | expire_logs_days | 0 | | flush | OFF | | flush_time | 0 | | ft_boolean_syntax | + -><()~*:""&| | | ft_max_word_len | 84 | | ft_min_word_len | 4 | | ft_query_expansion_limit | 20 | | ft_stopword_file | (built-in) | | group_concat_max_len | 1024 | | have_archive | YES | | have_bdb | NO | | have_blackhole_engine | YES | | have_compress | YES | | have_crypt | YES | | have_csv | YES | | have_dynamic_loading | YES | | have_example_engine | NO | | have_federated_engine | YES | | have_geometry | YES | | have_innodb | YES | | have_isam | NO | | have_merge_engine | YES | | have_ndbcluster | DISABLED | | have_openssl | DISABLED | | have_ssl | DISABLED | | have_query_cache | YES | | have_raid | NO | | have_rtree_keys | YES | | have_symlink | YES | | hostname | app.ic.soschildrensvillages.org.uk | | init_connect | | | init_file | | | init_slave | | | innodb_additional_mem_pool_size | 1048576 | | innodb_autoextend_increment | 8 | | innodb_buffer_pool_awe_mem_mb | 0 | | innodb_buffer_pool_size | 1073741824 | | innodb_checksums | ON | | innodb_commit_concurrency | 0 | | innodb_concurrency_tickets | 500 | | innodb_data_file_path | ibdata1:10M:autoextend | | innodb_data_home_dir | | | innodb_adaptive_hash_index | ON | | innodb_doublewrite | ON | | innodb_fast_shutdown | 1 | | innodb_file_io_threads | 4 | | innodb_file_per_table | ON | | innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit | 1 | | innodb_flush_method | | | innodb_force_recovery | 0 | | innodb_lock_wait_timeout | 50 | | innodb_locks_unsafe_for_binlog | OFF | | innodb_log_arch_dir | | | innodb_log_archive | OFF | | innodb_log_buffer_size | 8388608 | | innodb_log_file_size | 314572800 | | innodb_log_files_in_group | 2 | | innodb_log_group_home_dir | ./ | | innodb_max_dirty_pages_pct | 90 | | innodb_max_purge_lag | 0 | | innodb_mirrored_log_groups | 1 | | innodb_open_files | 300 | | innodb_rollback_on_timeout | OFF | | innodb_support_xa | ON | | innodb_sync_spin_loops | 20 | | innodb_table_locks | ON | | innodb_thread_concurrency | 8 | | innodb_thread_sleep_delay | 10000 | | interactive_timeout | 31536000 | | join_buffer_size | 2097152 | | key_buffer_size | 8384512 | | key_cache_age_threshold | 300 | | key_cache_block_size | 1024 | | key_cache_division_limit | 100 | | language | /usr/local/mysql-5.0.77-linux-i686-glibc23/share/mysql/english/ | | large_files_support | ON | | large_page_size | 0 | | large_pages | OFF | | lc_time_names | en_US | | license | GPL | | local_infile | ON | | locked_in_memory | OFF | | log | OFF | | log_bin | OFF | | log_bin_trust_function_creators | OFF | | log_error | | | log_queries_not_using_indexes | OFF | | log_slave_updates | OFF | | log_slow_queries | OFF | | log_warnings | 1 | | long_query_time | 10 | | low_priority_updates | OFF | | lower_case_file_system | OFF | | lower_case_table_names | 1 | | max_allowed_packet | 67108864 | | max_binlog_cache_size | 4294963200 | | max_binlog_size | 1073741824 | | max_connect_errors | 10 | | max_connections | 200 | | max_delayed_threads | 20 | | max_error_count | 64 | | max_heap_table_size | 33554432 | | max_insert_delayed_threads | 20 | | max_join_size | 18446744073709551615 | | max_length_for_sort_data | 1024 | | max_prepared_stmt_count | 16382 | | max_relay_log_size | 0 | | max_seeks_for_key | 4294967295 | | max_sort_length | 1024 | | max_sp_recursion_depth | 0 | | max_tmp_tables | 32 | | max_user_connections | 0 | | max_write_lock_count | 4294967295 | | multi_range_count | 256 | | myisam_data_pointer_size | 6 | | myisam_max_sort_file_size | 2146435072 | | myisam_recover_options | OFF | | myisam_repair_threads | 1 | | myisam_sort_buffer_size | 8388608 | | myisam_stats_method | nulls_unequal | | ndb_autoincrement_prefetch_sz | 1 | | ndb_force_send | ON | | ndb_use_exact_count | ON | | ndb_use_transactions | ON | | ndb_cache_check_time | 0 | | ndb_connectstring | | | net_buffer_length | 16384 | | net_read_timeout | 30 | | net_retry_count | 10 | | net_write_timeout | 60 | | new | OFF | | old_passwords | OFF | | open_files_limit | 8192 | | optimizer_prune_level | 1 | | optimizer_search_depth | 62 | | pid_file | /var/mysql/live/mysqld.pid | | plugin_dir | | | port | 3307 | | preload_buffer_size | 32768 | | profiling | OFF | | profiling_history_size | 15 | | protocol_version | 10 | | query_alloc_block_size | 8192 | | query_cache_limit | 1048576 | | query_cache_min_res_unit | 4096 | | query_cache_size | 0 | | query_cache_type | ON | | query_cache_wlock_invalidate | OFF | | query_prealloc_size | 8192 | | range_alloc_block_size | 4096 | | read_buffer_size | 131072 | | read_only | OFF | | read_rnd_buffer_size | 262144 | | relay_log | | | relay_log_index | | | relay_log_info_file | relay-log.info | | relay_log_purge | ON | | relay_log_space_limit | 0 | | rpl_recovery_rank | 0 | | secure_auth | OFF | | secure_file_priv | | | server_id | 0 | | skip_external_locking | ON | | skip_networking | OFF | | skip_show_database | OFF | | slave_compressed_protocol | OFF | | slave_load_tmpdir | /tmp/ | | slave_net_timeout | 3600 | | slave_skip_errors | OFF | | slave_transaction_retries | 10 | | slow_launch_time | 2 | | socket | /tmp/mysql_live.sock | | sort_buffer_size | 2097152 | | sql_big_selects | ON | | sql_mode | | | sql_notes | ON | | sql_warnings | OFF | | ssl_ca | | | ssl_capath | | | ssl_cert | | | ssl_cipher | | | ssl_key | | | storage_engine | MyISAM | | sync_binlog | 0 | | sync_frm | ON | | system_time_zone | GMT | | table_cache | 2048 | | table_lock_wait_timeout | 50 | | table_type | MyISAM | | thread_cache_size | 0 | | thread_stack | 196608 | | time_format | %H:%i:%s | | time_zone | SYSTEM | | timed_mutexes | OFF | | tmp_table_size | 33554432 | | tmpdir | /tmp/ | | transaction_alloc_block_size | 8192 | | transaction_prealloc_size | 4096 | | tx_isolation | REPEATABLE-READ | | updatable_views_with_limit | YES | | version | 5.0.77 | | version_comment | MySQL Community Server (GPL) | | version_compile_machine | i686 | | version_compile_os | pc-linux-gnu | | wait_timeout | 31536000 | +---------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------------------+ 237 rows in set (0.00 sec)

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NGINX - CORS error affecting only Firefox

- by wiherek

this is an issue with Nginx that affects only firefox. I have this config: http://pastebin.com/q6Yeqxv9 upstream connect { server 127.0.0.1:8080; } server { server_name admin.example.com www.admin.example.com; listen 80; return 301 https://admin.example.com$request_uri; } server { listen 80; server_name ankieta.example.com www.ankieta.example.com; add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin $http_origin; add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS, PUT, PATCH, DELETE'; add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true'; add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'Access-Control-Request-Method,Access-Control-Request-Headers,Cache,Pragma,Authorization,Accept,Accept-Encoding,Accept-Language,Host,Referer,Content-Length,Origin,DNT,X-Mx-ReqToken,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type'; return 301 https://ankieta.example.com$request_uri; } server { server_name admin.example.com; listen 443 ssl; ssl_certificate /srv/ssl/14182263.pem; ssl_certificate_key /srv/ssl/admin_i_ankieta.example.com.key; ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; ssl_ciphers ALL:!aNULL:!ADH:!eNULL:!LOW:!EXP:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM; location / { proxy_pass http://connect; } } server { server_name ankieta.example.com; listen 443 ssl; ssl_certificate /srv/ssl/14182263.pem; ssl_certificate_key /srv/ssl/admin_i_ankieta.example.com.key; ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1; ssl_ciphers ALL:!aNULL:!ADH:!eNULL:!LOW:!EXP:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM; root /srv/limesurvey; index index.php; add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' $http_origin; add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Methods' 'GET, POST, OPTIONS, PUT, PATCH, DELETE'; add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Credentials' 'true'; add_header 'Access-Control-Allow-Headers' 'Access-Control-Request-Method,Access-Control-Request-Headers,Cache,Pragma,Authorization,Accept,Accept-Encoding,Accept-Language,Host,Referer,Content-Length,Origin,DNT,X-Mx-ReqToken,Keep-Alive,User-Agent,X-Requested-With,If-Modified-Since,Cache-Control,Content-Type'; client_max_body_size 4M; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args; } location ~ /*.php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(/.+)$; #NOTE: You should have "cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;" in php.ini include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /srv/limesurvey$fastcgi_script_name; # fastcgi_param HTTPS $https; fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; } location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ { expires max; log_not_found off; } } this is basically an AngularJS app and a PHP app (LimeSurvey), served under two different domains by the same webserver (Nginx). AngularJS is in fact served by ConnectJS, which is proxied to by Nginx (ConnectJS listens only on localhost). In Firefox console I get this: Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://ankieta.example.com/admin/remotecontrol. This can be fixed by moving the resource to the same domain or enabling CORS. which of course is annoying. Other browsers work fine (Chrome, IE). Any suggestions on this?

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Wi-Fi Stick with ZD1211 chip refuses to work on Ubuntu >8.10. No clue.

- by Benjamin Maus

I have a machine running Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic *x86_64*). Everything is running smooth so far, except for the Wi-Fi USB Stick. The same device worked perfectly in 8.10. The wireless device is a GW-US54GXS using the Zydas Zd1211 chipset. Dmesg output after plugging in: [ 196.303436] phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel' [ 196.304209] zd1211rw 2-1:1.0: phy0 [ 196.304227] usbcore: registered new interface driver zd1211rw [ 196.334137] usb 2-1: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_ub [ 196.357463] usb 2-1: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_uphr [ 196.402643] zd1211rw 2-1:1.0: firmware version 4725 [ 196.442611] zd1211rw 2-1:1.0: zd1211b chip 2019:5303 v4810 high 00-90-cc AL2230_RF pa0 ---N- [ 196.463814] usb 2-1: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_ub [ 196.466823] usb 2-1: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_uphr Syslog output: Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem kernel: [ 196.303436] phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'minstrel' Nov 5 11:20:24 kierkegaard NetworkManager: <info> Found radio killswitch rfkill0 (at /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/ieee80211/phy0/rfkill0) (driver <unknown>) Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem kernel: [ 196.304209] zd1211rw 2-1:1.0: phy0 Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem kernel: [ 196.304227] usbcore: registered new interface driver zd1211rw Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/net/wmaster0, iface: wmaster0) Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: device added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/net/wmaster0, iface: wmaster0): no ifupdown configuration found. Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/net/wlan0, iface: wlan0) Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: device added (path: /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb2/2-1/2-1:1.0/net/wlan0, iface: wlan0): no ifupdown configuration found. Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: <info> (wlan0): driver supports SSID scans (scan_capa 0x01). Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: <info> (wlan0): new 802.11 WiFi device (driver: 'zd1211rw') Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: <info> (wlan0): exported as /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/2 Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: <info> (wlan0): now managed Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: <info> (wlan0): device state change: 1 -> 2 (reason 2) Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: <info> (wlan0): bringing up device. Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem kernel: [ 196.334137] usb 2-1: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_ub Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem kernel: [ 196.357463] usb 2-1: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_uphr Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem kernel: [ 196.402643] zd1211rw 2-1:1.0: firmware version 4725 Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem kernel: [ 196.442611] zd1211rw 2-1:1.0: zd1211b chip 2019:5303 v4810 high 00-90-cc AL2230_RF pa0 ---N- Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: <WARN> nm_device_hw_bring_up(): (wlan0): device not up after timeout! Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem NetworkManager: <info> (wlan0): deactivating device (reason: 2). Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem kernel: [ 196.463814] usb 2-1: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_ub Nov 5 11:20:24 somesystem kernel: [ 196.466823] usb 2-1: firmware: requesting zd1211/zd1211b_uphr Nov 5 11:20:29 somesystem wpa_supplicant[978]: Could not set interface 'wlan0' UP Nov 5 11:20:29 somesystem wpa_supplicant[978]: Failed to initialize driver interface Nov 5 11:20:29 somesystem NetworkManager: <WARN> nm_supplicant_interface_add_cb(): Unexpected supplicant error getting interface: wpa_supplicant couldn't grab this interface. Gnome tells me in the network menu that the device was "not ready". It appears in iwconfig but not in ifconfig. The same symptoms appear when I boot from the live CD. How can I solve this dilemma?

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Outlook Web Access, reverse proxy and browser

- by M'vy

Hi SF'ers! We recently moved an exchange server behind a reverse proxy due to the loss of a public IP. I've managed to configure the reverse proxy (httpd proxy_http). But there is a problem for the SSL configuration. When accessing the OWA interface with Firefox, all is ok and working. When accessing with MSIE or Chrome, they do not retrieve the good SSL Certificate. I think this is due to the multiples virtual host for httpd. Is there a workaround to make sure MSIE/Chrome request the certificate for the good domain name like FF does? Already tested with the SSL virtual host : SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" value BrowserMSIE Header unset WWW-Authenticate Header add WWW-Authenticate "Basic realm=exchange.domain.com" A: ProxyPreserveHost On also: BrowserMatch ".*MSIE.*" \ nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \ downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 Or: SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" \ nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown \ downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 And lots of ProxyPassand ProxyReversePath on /exchweb /exchange /public etc... And it still don't seem to work. Any clue? Thanks. Edit 1: Precision of versions # openssl version OpenSSL 0.9.8k-fips 25 Mar 2009 /usr/sbin/httpd -v Server version: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) Server built: Mar 17 2009 09:15:10 Browser versions : MSIE : 8.0.6001 Opera: Version 11.01 Revision 1190 Firefox: 3.6.15 Chrome: 10.0.648.151 Operating System: Windows Vista 32bits. They are all SNI compliant, I've tested them this afternoon https://sni.velox.ch/ You're right Shane Madden, I have multiple sites on the same public IP (and same port as well). The server itself is just a reverse proxy, that rewrite addresses to internal servers. The default host is a dev site, configure with the certificate that does not match the OWA (of course... would have been to easy) <VirtualHost *:443> ServerName dev2.domain.com ServerAdmin [email protected] CustomLog "| /usr/sbin/rotatelogs /var/log/httpd/access-%y%m%d.log 86400" combined ErrorLog "| /usr/sbin/rotatelogs /var/log/httpd/error-%y%m%d.log 86400" LogLevel warn RewriteEngine on SetEnvIfNoCase X-Forwarded-For .+ proxy=yes SSLEngine on SSLProtocol -all +SSLv3 +TLSv1 SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL:+SSLv3 SSLCertificateFile /etc/httpd/ssl/domain.com.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/httpd/ssl/domain.com.key RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} dev2\.domain\.com RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://dev2.domain.com/$1 [L,P] </VirtualHost> The certificate of domain is a *.domain.com The second vHost is : <VirtualHost *:443> ServerName exchange.domain2.com ServerAdmin [email protected] CustomLog "| /usr/sbin/rotatelogs /var/log/httpd/exchange/access-%y%m%d.log 86400" combined ErrorLog "| /usr/sbin/rotatelogs /var/log/httpd/exchange/error-%y%m%d.log 86400" LogLevel warn SSLEngine on SSLProxyEngine On SSLProtocol -all +SSLv3 +TLSv1 SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL:+SSLv3 SSLCertificateFile /etc/httpd/ssl/exchange.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/httpd/ssl/exchange.key RewriteEngine on SetEnvIfNoCase X-Forwarded-For .+ proxy=yes RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} exchange\.domain2\.com RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ https://exchange.domain2.com/$1 [L,P] </VirtualHost> and it's certificate is exchange.domain2.com only. I presume the SNI is somewhere not activated on my server. The versions of openssl and apache seams to be ok for the SNI support. The only thing I do not know is if httpd has been compile with the good options. (I assume it's a fedora packet).

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mySQL Optimization Suggestions

- by Brian Schroeter

I'm trying to optimize our mySQL configuration for our large Magento website. The reason I believe that mySQL needs to be configured further is because New Relic has shown that our SELECT queries are taking a long time (20,000+ ms) in some categories. I ran MySQLTuner 1.3.0 and got the following results... (Disclaimer: I restarted mySQL earlier after tweaking some settings, and so the results here may not be 100% accurate): >> MySQLTuner 1.3.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.5.37-35.0 [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: +ARCHIVE +BLACKHOLE +CSV -FEDERATED +InnoDB +MRG_MYISAM [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 7G (Tables: 332) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 213G (Tables: 8714) [--] Data in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables: 0B (Tables: 17) [--] Data in MEMORY tables: 0B (Tables: 353) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 5492 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '@host5.server1.autopartsnetwork.com' has no password set. [!!] User '@localhost' has no password set. [!!] User 'root@%' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 5h 3m 4s (5M q [317.443 qps], 42K conn, TX: 18B, RX: 2B) [--] Reads / Writes: 95% / 5% [--] Total buffers: 35.5G global + 184.5M per thread (1024 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 220.0G (174% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (6K/5M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 5% (61/1024) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 512.0M/3.1G [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (102M cached / 45K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 66.9% (3M cached / 5M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 3486361 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (0 temp sorts / 812K sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 1328 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 11% (126K on disk / 1M total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (61 created / 42K connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 19% (9K open / 49K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 2% (712/25K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (5M immediate / 5M locks) [!!] InnoDB buffer pool / data size: 32.0G/213.4G [OK] InnoDB log waits: 0 -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Read this before increasing table_cache over 64: http://bit.ly/1mi7c4C Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 512M) [see warning above] join_buffer_size (> 128.0M, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache (> 12288) innodb_buffer_pool_size (>= 213G) My my.cnf configuration is as follows... [client] port = 3306 [mysqld_safe] nice = 0 [mysqld] tmpdir = /var/lib/mysql/tmp user = mysql port = 3306 skip-external-locking character-set-server = utf8 collation-server = utf8_general_ci event_scheduler = 0 key_buffer = 512M max_allowed_packet = 64M thread_stack = 512K thread_cache_size = 512 sort_buffer_size = 24M read_buffer_size = 8M read_rnd_buffer_size = 24M join_buffer_size = 128M # for some nightly processes client sessions set the join buffer to 8 GB auto-increment-increment = 1 auto-increment-offset = 1 myisam-recover = BACKUP max_connections = 1024 # max connect errors artificially high to support behaviors of NetScaler monitors max_connect_errors = 999999 concurrent_insert = 2 connect_timeout = 5 wait_timeout = 180 net_read_timeout = 120 net_write_timeout = 120 back_log = 128 # this table_open_cache might be too low because of MySQL bugs #16244691 and #65384) table_open_cache = 12288 tmp_table_size = 512M max_heap_table_size = 512M bulk_insert_buffer_size = 512M open-files-limit = 8192 open-files = 1024 query_cache_type = 1 # large query limit supports SOAP and REST API integrations query_cache_limit = 4M # larger than 512 MB query cache size is problematic; this is typically ~60% full query_cache_size = 512M # set to true on read slaves read_only = false slow_query_log_file = /var/log/mysql/slow.log slow_query_log = 0 long_query_time = 0.2 expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 1024M binlog_cache_size = 32K sync_binlog = 0 # SSD RAID10 technically has a write capacity of 10000 IOPS innodb_io_capacity = 400 innodb_file_per_table innodb_table_locks = true innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 30 # These servers have 80 CPU threads; match 1:1 innodb_thread_concurrency = 48 innodb_commit_concurrency = 2 innodb_support_xa = true innodb_buffer_pool_size = 32G innodb_file_per_table innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_log_buffer_size = 2G skip-federated [mysqldump] quick quote-names single-transaction max_allowed_packet = 64M I have a monster of a server here to power our site because our catalog is very large (300,000 simple SKUs), and I'm just wondering if I'm missing anything that I can configure further. :-) Thanks!

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need assistance with my.cnf - 1500% CPU usage

- by Alan Long

I'm running into a few issues with our new database server. It is a HP G8 with 2 INTEL XEON E5-2650 processors and 32GB of ram. This server is dedicated as a MySQL server (5.1.69) for our intranet portal. I have been having issues with this server staying alive - I notice high CPU usage during certain times of day (8% ~ 1500%+) and see very low memory usage (7 ~ 15%) based on using the 'top' command. When the CPU usage passes 1000%, that is when the app usually dies. I'm trying to see what I'm doing wrong with the config file, hopefully one of the experts can chime in and let me know what they think. See below for my.cnf file: [mysqld] default-storage-engine=InnoDB datadir=/var/lib/mysql socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock #user=mysql large-pages # Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks symbolic-links=0 max_connections=275 tmp_table_size=1G key_buffer_size=384M key_buffer=384M thread_cache_size=1024 long_query_time=5 low_priority_updates=1 max_heap_table_size=1G myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M concurrent_insert=2 table_cache=1024 sort_buffer_size=8M read_buffer_size=5M read_rnd_buffer_size=6M join_buffer_size=16M table_definition_cache=6k open_files_limit=8k slow_query_log #skip-name-resolve # Innodb Settings innodb_buffer_pool_size=18G innodb_thread_concurrency=0 innodb_log_file_size=1G innodb_log_buffer_size=16M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2 innodb_lock_wait_timeout=50 innodb_file_per_table #innodb_buffer_pool_instances=4 #eliminating double buffering innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT flush_time=86400 innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=40M #innodb_io_capacity = 5000 #innodb_read_io_threads = 64 #innodb_write_io_threads = 64 # increase until threads_created doesnt grow anymore thread_cache=1024 query_cache_type=1 query_cache_limit=4M query_cache_size=256M # Try number of CPU's*2 for thread_concurrency thread_concurrency = 0 wait_timeout = 1800 connect_timeout = 10 interactive_timeout = 60 [mysqldump] max_allowed_packet=32M [mysqld_safe] log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid log-slow-queries=/var/log/mysql/slow-queries.log long_query_time = 1 log-queries-not-using-indexes we connect to one database with 75 tables, the largest table has 1,150,000 entries and the second largest has 128,036 entries. I have also verified that our PHP queries are optimized as best as possible. Reference - MySQLtuner: >> MySQLTuner 1.2.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.69-log [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 420M (Tables: 75) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 75 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '[email protected]' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 1h 14m 50s (8M q [1K qps], 705 conn, TX: 6B, RX: 892M) [--] Reads / Writes: 68% / 32% [--] Total buffers: 19.7G global + 35.2M per thread (275 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 29.1G (93% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (472/8M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 66% (183/275) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 384.0M/91.0K [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (173 cached / 0 reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 96.2% (7M cached / 7M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 553614 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (3 temp sorts / 1K sorts) [!!] Temporary tables created on disk: 49% (3K on disk / 7K total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 74% (183 created / 705 connections) [OK] Table cache hit rate: 97% (231 open / 238 opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 0% (17/8K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (432K immediate / 432K locks) [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 420.9M/18.0G -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Temporary table size is already large - reduce result set size Reduce your SELECT DISTINCT queries without LIMIT clauses Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 256M) [see warning above] Thanks in advanced for your help!

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What networking hardware do I need in this situation (Fairpoint [ISP] "E-DIA" connection)?

- by Tegeril

Right away you'd probably want to say, "Well just ask Fairpoint." I've done that, a number of times in as many different ways I can phrase it and just keep hitting a brick wall where they will not commit to giving any useful information and instead recommend contracting an outside firm and spending a pile of money. Anyway... I'm trying to help a family member out with an office connection that is being setup. I've managed to scrape tiny details here and there from our discussions with the ISP (Fairpoint in Maine) about what is going to be done and what is going to be needed. This is the connection that is being setup: http://www.fairpoint.com/enterprise/vantagepoint/e-dia/index.jsp Information I have been given: Via this connection I can get IPs across different C blocks if that were necessary (it is not) Fairpoint is bringing hardware with them that they claim simply does the conversion from whatever line is coming in the building to ethernet, they have referred to this as the "Fairpoint Netvanta" which I know suggests a line of products that I have looked up, but some (most? all?) of those seems to handle all the routing that I saw. Fairpoint says that I need to bring my own router to sit behind their device. They have literally declined to even suggest products that have worked for other clients in the past and fall back on "any business router works, not a home router." That alone makes my head spin. Detail and clarity hit a brick wall from there. At one moment I got them to cough up that the router I provide needs to be able to do VPN tunneling but they typically fall back to "not a home router" and I was even given "just a business router, Cisco or something, it'll be $500-$1000". Now I know that VPN tunneling routers exist well below that price point and since this connection is going to one machine, possibly two only via ethernet, my desire to purchase networking hardware that over-delivers what I need is not very high. They are literally setting all this up, have provided no configuration details for after they finish, and expect me to just plunk a $500+ router behind it and cross my fingers or contract out to a third party company. If there were other options available for the location, I would have dropped them in a second, but there aren't. The device that is connected requires a static IP and I'm honestly a bit hazy on the necessity of an additional router behind their device and generally a bit over my head. I presume that the router needs to be able to serve external static IPs to its clients, but I really don't know what is going to show up when they come to do the install. This was originally going to be run via an ADSL bridge modem with a range of static IPs (which is easy and is currently setup properly) but the location is too far from the telco to get speeds that we really want for upload and this is also a connection that needs high availability. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated (I see a number of options in the Cisco Small Business line and other competitors that aren't going to break the bank…), especially if you've worked with Fairpoint before! Thanks for reading my wall of text.

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Monitor randomly shutting down, computer accepting no input, need to restart to get working

- by Sebastian Lamerichs

First off, spec list: OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit SP1 CPU: i7-4820k @ 3.7GHz (stock) GPU: Two 3GB Radeon HD 7970s @ 1.05GHz Mobo: AsRock X79 Extreme6 HDD: 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm RAM: 16GB quad-channel Kingston 1600MHz PSU: Antec HCG 900W Monitors: Acer S220HQL 1920x1080 + ViewSonic VA2251 1920x1080. Plugged into different GPUs. My problem is that, on a daily-ish basis, my monitors will turn off and not turn back on. My computer will still be running, GPU/CPU/case fans all still going, but the monitors will not turn back on. Additionally, it seems to cease all network activity. It doesn't seem to log any errors at all. I've verified that this is not a monitor issue, as when I press the num/caps/scroll lock buttons on my keyboard, the lights don't change, so the computer is clearly not accepting input. I have noticed a few other people on the internet with this problem, and some have claimed that it was solved by disabling PCI-Express Link State Power Management, but the issue still occurs for me after this. Whilst my CPU and GPUs both run at 100% 24/7, the temperatures are certainly not at dangerous levels, with the CPU averaging 65°C and the GPUs at 70°C and 78°C average. All components are brand new. I have tried forcing MSI Afterburner to start when Windows starts and to force a constant voltage, as this fixed the issue for a few days for another user, but he reported back saying that it had stopped working properly again, so I'm not putting too much faith in this working. Many people have said to adjust display sleep mode settings, but this will clearly not work, as the keyboard lights would still work if the monitors were the issue. The closest I can get to a log file for this issue is the following Folding@Home logs: 14:45:21:WU01:FS00:0x17:Completed 1120000 out of 2000000 steps (56%) 14:46:43:WU00:FS01:0x17:Completed 480000 out of 2000000 steps (24%) 14:46:49:WU01:FS00:0x17:Completed 1140000 out of 2000000 steps (57%) 14:48:30:WU01:FS00:0x17:Completed 1160000 out of 2000000 steps (58%) 14:49:55:WU01:FS00:0x17:Completed 1180000 out of 2000000 steps (59%) As you can see, the second GPU (FS01) stops computation approximately three and a half minutes before the issue occurs (it should be completing 1% every 80-120 seconds), and the first GPU (FS00) continues for a few minutes more before the logs just end. As far as I can tell, the computer has a network failure at the time the first GPU stops working, the latest IRC message I received from this time was at 14:47:58. That being said, there could have just not been any messages between then and 14:50:00, so I'm going to be connecting a laptop to the same bouncer to double-check if it happens again. The GPUs functioned perfectly well in another computer for a significant period of time, so I'm fairly confident that they aren't the issue, which means that this is being caused by either software or the motherboard, or possibly RAM. I really hope it's software. I heard from a forum board that there was a patch from Microsoft that fixed this problem, but "I've forgot which KB it was or the google search terms I used to find the patch, LOL.", so that's not much help. Haven't seen it mentioned by anyone else on about a dozen threads about this issue either. The computer is plugged in via a surge-protected power board, and I've run several other computers and pieces of hardware through it with no issues, so that is not the cause. I have just set the hard disk to never turn off, although I don't believe that that will solve the issue. Strangely, this has only happened when I'm not at the computer (which is actually a minority of the time). Until today it had only happened when I had not been actively using the computer for 6 hours, but today it happened within 10-30 minutes of me last using the computer actively. I have enabled file logging from MSI Afterburner, so hopefully this will shed some light on the issue, but I'm not too optimistic. I've heard that it could be a motherboard problem, but I figured I should ask around before RMAing it. Any help?

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TFS 2010 Basic Concepts

- by jehan

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In TFS 2010 Installation, First you need to do the Installation and then you have to configure the Installation Feature from the available features. This is bit similar to SharePoint Installation, where you will first do the Installation and then configure the SharePoint Farms. 1) Installation Features available in TFS2010: a) Basic: It is the most compact TFS installation possible. It will install and configure Source Control, Work Item tracking and Build Services only. (SharePoint and Reporting Integration will not be possible). b) Standard Single Server: This is suitable for Single Server deployment of TFS. It will install and configure Windows SharePoint Services for you and will use the default instance of SQL Server. c) Advanced: It is suitable, if you want use Remote Servers for SQL Server Databases, SharePoint Products and Technologies and SQL Server Reporting Services. d) Application Tier Only: If you want to configure high availability for Team Foundation Server in a Load Balanced Environment (NLB) or you want to move Team Foundation Server from one server to other or you want to restore TFS. e) Upgrade: If you want to upgrade from a prior version of TFS. Note: One more important thing to know here about TFS 2010 Basic is that, it can be installed on Client Operations Systems(Windows 7 and Windows Vista SP3), Where as earlier you cannot Install previous version of TFS (2008 and 2005) on client OS. 2) Team Project Collections: Connect to TFS dialog box in TFS 2008: In TFS 2008, the TFS Server contains a set of Team Projects and each project may or may not be independent of other projects and every checkin gets a ever increasing changeset ID irrespective of the team project in which it is checked in and the same applies to work items also, who also gets unique Work Item Ids.The main problem with this approach was that there are certain things which were impossible to do; those were required as per the Application Development Process. a) If something has gone wrong in one team project and now you want to restore it back to earlier state where it was working properly then it requires you to restore the Database of Team Foundation Server from the backup you have taken as per your Maintenance plans and because of this the other team projects may lose out on the work which is not backed up. b) Your company had a merge with some other company and now you have two TFS servers. One TFS Server which you are working on and other TFS server which other company was working and now after the merge you want to integrate the team projects from two TFS servers into one, which is almost impossible to achieve in TFS 2008. Though you can create the Team Projects in one server manually (In Source Control) which you want to integrate from the other TFS Server, but will lose out on History of Change Sets and Work items and others which are very important. There were few more issues of this sort, which were difficult to resolve in TFS 2008. To resolve issues related to above kind of scenarios which were mainly related TFS Maintenance, Integration, migration and Security, Microsoft has come up with Team Project Collections concept in TFS 2010.This concept is similar to SharePoint Site Collections and if you are familiar with SharePoint Architecture, then it will help you to understand TFS 2010 Architecture easily. Connect to TFS dialog box in TFS 2010: In above dialog box as you can see there are two Team Project Collections, each team project can contain any number of team projects as you can see on right side it shows the two Team Projects in Team Project Collection (Default Collection) which I have chosen. Note: You can connect to only one Team project Collection at a time using an instance of TFS Team Explorer. How does it work? To introduce Team Project Collections, changes have been done in reorganization of TFS databases. TFS 2008 was composed of 5-7 databases partitioned by subsystem (each for Version Control, Work Item Tracking, Build, Integration, Project Management...) New TFS 2010 database architecture: TFS_Config: It’s the root database and it contains centralized TFS configuration data, including the list of all team projects exist in TFS server. TFS_Warehouse: The data warehouse contains all the reporting data of served by this server (farm). TFS_* : This contains individual team project collection data. This database contains all the operational data of team project collection regardless of subsystem.In additional to this, you will have databases for SharePoint and Report Server. 3) TFS Farms: As TFS 2010 is more flexible to configure as multiple Application tiers and multiple Database tiers, so it will be more appropriate to call as TFS Farm if you going for multi server installation of TFS. NLB support for TFS application tiers – With TFS 2010: you can configure multiple TFS application tier machines to serve the same set of Team Project Collections. The primary purpose of NLB support is to enable a cleaner and more complete high availability than in TFS 2008. Even if any application tier in the farm fails then farm will automatically continue to work with hardly any indication to end users of a problem. SQL data tiers: With 2010 you can configure many SQL Servers. Each Database can be configured to be on any SQL Server because each Team Project Collection is an independent database. This feature can also be used to load balance databases across SQL Servers.These new capabilities will significantly change the way enterprises manage their TFS installations in the future. With Team Project Collections and TFS farms, you can create a single, arbitrarily large TFS installation. You can grow it incrementally by adding ATs and SQL Servers as needed.

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Issue 15: The Benefits of Oracle Exastack

- by rituchhibber

SOLUTIONS FOCUS The Benefits of Oracle Exastack Paul ThompsonDirector, Alliances and Solutions Partner ProgramsOracle EMEA Alliances & Channels RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Ready Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Exastack Labs Video Tour SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Exastack is a revolutionary programme supporting Oracle independent software vendor partners across the entire Oracle technology stack. Oracle's core strategy is to engineer software and hardware together, and our ISV strategy is the same. At Oracle we design engineered systems that are pre-integrated to reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructures while increasing productivity and performance. Oracle innovates and optimises performance at every layer of the stack to simplify business operations, drive down costs and accelerate business innovation. Our engineered systems are optimised to achieve enterprise performance levels that are unmatched in the industry. Faster time to production is achieved by implementing pre-engineered and pre-assembled hardware and software bundles. Our strategy of delivering a single-vendor stack simplifies and reduces costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and supporting IT environments for our customers and partners. In parallel to this core engineered systems strategy, the Oracle Exastack Program enables our Oracle ISV partners to leverage a scalable, integrated infrastructure that delivers their applications tuned, tested and optimised for high-performance. Specifically, the Oracle Exastack Program helps ISVs run their solutions on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 - integrated systems products in which the software and hardware are engineered to work together. These products provide OPN members with a lower cost and high performance infrastructure for database and application workloads across on-premise and cloud based environments. Ready and Optimized Oracle Partners can now leverage our new Oracle Exastack Program to become Oracle Exastack Ready and Oracle Exastack Optimized. Partners can achieve Oracle Exastack Ready status through their support for Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Database, Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. By doing this, partners can demonstrate to their customers that their applications are available on the latest major releases of these products. The Oracle Exastack Ready programme helps customers readily differentiate Oracle partners from lesser software developers, and identify applications that support Oracle engineered systems. Achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status demonstrates that an OPN member has proven itself against goals for performance and scalability on Oracle integrated systems. This status enables end customers to readily identify Oracle partners that have tested and tuned their solutions for optimum performance on an Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, and Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4. These ISVs can display the Oracle Exadata Optimized, Oracle Exalogic Optimized or Oracle SPARC SuperCluster Optimized logos on websites and on all their collateral to show that they have tested and tuned their application for optimum performance. Deliver higher value to customers Oracle's investment in engineered systems enables ISV partners to deliver higher value to customer business processes. New innovations are enabled through extreme performance unachievable through traditional best-of-breed multi-vendor server/software approaches. Core product requirements can be launched faster, enabling ISVs to focus research and development investment on core competencies in order to bring value to market as quickly as possible. Through Exastack, partners no longer have to worry about the underlying product stack, which allows greater focus on the development of intellectual property above the stack. Partners are not burdened by platform issues and can concentrate simply on furthering their applications. The advantage to end customers is that partners can focus all efforts on business functionality, rather than bullet-proofing underlying technologies, and so will inevitably deliver application updates faster. Exastack provides ISVs with a number of flexible deployment options, such as on-premise or Cloud, while maintaining one single code base for applications regardless of customer deployment preference. Customers buying their solutions from Exastack ISVs can therefore be confident in deploying on their own networks, on private clouds or into a public cloud. The underlying platform will support all conceivable deployments, enabling a focus on the ISV's application itself that wouldn't be possible with other vendor partners. It stands to reason that Exastack accelerates time to value as well as lowering implementation costs all round. There is a big competitive advantage in partners being able to offer customers an optimised, pre-configured solution rather than an assortment of components and a suggested fit. Once a customer has decided to buy an Oracle Exastack Ready or Optimized partner solution, it will be up and running without any need for the customer to conduct testing of its own. Operational costs and complexity are also reduced, thanks to streamlined customer support through standardised configurations and pro-active monitoring. 'Engineered to Work Together' is a significant statement of Oracle strategy. It guarantees smoother deployment of a single vendor solution, clear ownership with no finger-pointing and the peace of mind of the Oracle Support Centre underpinning the entire product stack. Next steps Every OPN member with packaged applications must seriously consider taking steps to become Exastack Ready, or Exastack Optimized at the first opportunity. That first step down the track is to talk to an expert on the OPN Portal, at the Oracle Partner Business Center or to discuss the next steps with the closest Oracle account manager. Oracle Exastack lab environments and other technical enablement resources are available for OPN members wishing to further their knowledge of Oracle Exastack and qualify their applications for Oracle Exastack Optimized. New Boot Camps and Guided Learning Paths (GLPs), tailored specifically for ISVs, are available for Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Database, and Oracle WebLogic Server. More information about these GLPs and Boot Camps (including delivery dates and locations) are posted on the OPN Competency Center and corresponding OPN Knowledge Zones. Learn more about Oracle Exastack labs and ISV specific enablement resources. "Oracle Specialized partners are of course front-and-centre, with potential customers clearly directed to those partners and to Exadata Ready partners as a matter of priority." --More OpenWorld 2011 highlights for Oracle partners and customers Oracle Application Testing Suite 9.3 application testing solution for Web, SOA and Oracle Applications Oracle Application Express Release 4.1 improving the development of database-centric Web 2.0 applications and reports Oracle Unified Directory 11g helping customers manage the critical identity information that drives their business applications Oracle SOA Suite for healthcare integration Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 11g demonstrating continued commitment to the developer and open source communities Oracle Coherence 3.7.1, the latest release of the industry's leading distributed in-memory data grid Oracle Process Accelerators helping to simplify and accelerate time-to-value for customers' business process management initiatives Oracle's JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on the iPad meeting the increasingly mobile demands of today's workforces Oracle CRM On Demand Release 19 Innovation Pack introducing industry-leading hosted call centre and enterprise-marketing capabilities designed to drive further revenue and productivity while reducing costs and improving the customer experience Oracle's Primavera Portfolio Management 9 for businesses delivering on project portfolio goals with increased versatility, transparency and accuracy Oracle's PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) 9.1 On Demand Standard Edition helping customers manage their long-term investment in enterprise-wide business applications New versions of Oracle FLEXCUBE Universal Banking and Oracle FLEXCUBE Investor Servicing for Financial Institutions, as well as Oracle Financial Services Enterprise Case Management, Oracle Financial Services Pricing Management, Oracle Financial Management Analytics and Oracle Tax Analytics Oracle Utilities Network Management System 1.11 offering new modelling and analysis features to improve distribution-grid management for electric utilities Oracle Communications Network Charging and Control 4.4 helping communications service providers (CSPs) offer their customers more flexible charging options Plus many, many more technology announcements, enhancements, momentum news and community updates -- Oracle OpenWorld 2012 A date has already been set for Oracle OpenWorld 2012. Held once again in San Francisco, exhibitors, partners, customers and Oracle people will gather from 30 September until 4 November to meet, network and learn together with the rest of the global Oracle community. Register now for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and save $$$! We'll reward your early planning for Oracle OpenWorld 2012 with reduced rates. Super Saver deals are now available! -- Back to the welcome page

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Oracle Data Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study

- by charlie.berger

There is a complete and detailed Telco Churn case study "How to" Blog Series just posted by Ari Mozes, ODM Dev. Manager. In it, Ari provides detailed guidance in how to leverage various strengths of Oracle Data Mining including the ability to: mine Star Schemas and join tables and views together to obtain a complete 360 degree view of a customer combine transactional data e.g. call record detail (CDR) data, etc. define complex data transformation, model build and model deploy analytical methodologies inside the Database His blog is posted in a multi-part series. Below are some opening excerpts for the first 3 blog entries. This is an excellent resource for any novice to skilled data miner who wants to gain competitive advantage by mining their data inside the Oracle Database. Many thanks Ari! Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (1 of 3) One of the strengths of Oracle Data Mining is the ability to mine star schemas with minimal effort. Star schemas are commonly used in relational databases, and they often contain rich data with interesting patterns. While dimension tables may contain interesting demographics, fact tables will often contain user behavior, such as phone usage or purchase patterns. Both of these aspects - demographics and usage patterns - can provide insight into behavior.Churn is a critical problem in the telecommunications industry, and companies go to great lengths to reduce the churn of their customer base. One case study1 describes a telecommunications scenario involving understanding, and identification of, churn, where the underlying data is present in a star schema. That case study is a good example for demonstrating just how natural it is for Oracle Data Mining to analyze a star schema, so it will be used as the basis for this series of posts...... Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (2 of 3) This post will follow the transformation steps as described in the case study, but will use Oracle SQL as the means for preparing data. Please see the previous post for background material, including links to the case study and to scripts that can be used to replicate the stages in these posts.1) Handling missing values for call data recordsThe CDR_T table records the number of phone minutes used by a customer per month and per call type (tariff). For example, the table may contain one record corresponding to the number of peak (call type) minutes in January for a specific customer, and another record associated with international calls in March for the same customer. This table is likely to be fairly dense (most type-month combinations for a given customer will be present) due to the coarse level of aggregation, but there may be some missing values. Missing entries may occur for a number of reasons: the customer made no calls of a particular type in a particular month, the customer switched providers during the timeframe, or perhaps there is a data entry problem. In the first situation, the correct interpretation of a missing entry would be to assume that the number of minutes for the type-month combination is zero. In the other situations, it is not appropriate to assume zero, but rather derive some representative value to replace the missing entries. The referenced case study takes the latter approach. The data is segmented by customer and call type, and within a given customer-call type combination, an average number of minutes is computed and used as a replacement value.In SQL, we need to generate additional rows for the missing entries and populate those rows with appropriate values. To generate the missing rows, Oracle's partition outer join feature is a perfect fit. select cust_id, cdre.tariff, cdre.month, minsfrom cdr_t cdr partition by (cust_id) right outer join (select distinct tariff, month from cdr_t) cdre on (cdr.month = cdre.month and cdr.tariff = cdre.tariff); ....... Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (3 of 3) Now that the "difficult" work is complete - preparing the data - we can move to building a predictive model to help identify and understand churn.The case study suggests that separate models be built for different customer segments (high, medium, low, and very low value customer groups). To reduce the data to a single segment, a filter can be applied: create or replace view churn_data_high asselect * from churn_prep where value_band = 'HIGH'; It is simple to take a quick look at the predictive aspects of the data on a univariate basis. While this does not capture the more complex multi-variate effects as would occur with the full-blown data mining algorithms, it can give a quick feel as to the predictive aspects of the data as well as validate the data preparation steps. Oracle Data Mining includes a predictive analytics package which enables quick analysis. begin dbms_predictive_analytics.explain( 'churn_data_high','churn_m6','expl_churn_tab'); end; /select * from expl_churn_tab where rank <= 5 order by rank; ATTRIBUTE_NAME ATTRIBUTE_SUBNAME EXPLANATORY_VALUE RANK-------------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------LOS_BAND .069167052 1MINS_PER_TARIFF_MON PEAK-5 .034881648 2REV_PER_MON REV-5 .034527798 3DROPPED_CALLS .028110322 4MINS_PER_TARIFF_MON PEAK-4 .024698149 5From the above results, it is clear that some predictors do contain information to help identify churn (explanatory value > 0). The strongest uni-variate predictor of churn appears to be the customer's (binned) length of service. The second strongest churn indicator appears to be the number of peak minutes used in the most recent month. The subname column contains the interior piece of the DM_NESTED_NUMERICALS column described in the previous post. By using the object relational approach, many related predictors are included within a single top-level column. ..... NOTE: These are just EXCERPTS. Click here to start reading the Oracle Data Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study from the beginning.

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SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Part 3

- by SQLOS Team

In parts 1 and 2 of this series we looked at the basics of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and SQL Server memory management. In this part Serdar looks at configuration guidelines for SQL Server memory management. Part 3: Configuration Guidelines for Hyper-V Dynamic Memory and SQL Server Now that we understand SQL Server Memory Management and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory basics, let’s take a look at general configuration guidelines in order to utilize benefits of Hyper-V Dynamic Memory in your SQL Server VMs. Requirements Host Operating System Requirements Hyper-V Dynamic Memory feature is introduced with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1. Therefore in order to use Dynamic Memory for your virtual machines, you need to have Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 SP1 in your Hyper-V host. Guest Operating System Requirements In addition to this Dynamic Memory is only supported in Standard, Web, Enterprise and Datacenter editions of windows running inside VMs. Make sure that your VM is running one of these editions. For additional requirements on each operating system see “Dynamic Memory Configuration Guidelines” here. SQL Server Requirements All versions of SQL Server support Hyper-V Dynamic Memory. However, only certain editions of SQL Server are aware of dynamically changing system memory. To have a truly dynamic environment for your SQL Server VMs make sure that you are running one of the SQL Server editions listed below: · SQL Server 2005 Enterprise · SQL Server 2008 Enterprise / Datacenter Editions · SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise / Datacenter Editions Configuration guidelines for other versions of SQL Server are covered below in the FAQ section. Guidelines for configuring Dynamic Memory Parameters Here is how to configure Dynamic Memory for your SQL VMs in a nutshell: Hyper-V Dynamic Memory Parameter Recommendation Startup RAM 1 GB + SQL Min Server Memory Maximum RAM > SQL Max Server Memory Memory Buffer % 5 Memory Weight Based on performance needs Startup RAM In order to ensure that your SQL Server VMs can start correctly, ensure that Startup RAM is higher than configured SQL Min Server Memory for your VMs. Otherwise SQL Server service will need to do paging in order to start since it will not be able to see enough memory during startup. Also note that Startup Memory will always be reserved for your VMs. This will guarantee a certain level of performance for your SQL Servers, however setting this too high will limit the consolidation benefits you’ll get out of your virtualization environment. Maximum RAM This one is obvious. If you’ve configured SQL Max Server Memory for your SQL Server, make sure that Dynamic Memory Maximum RAM configuration is higher than this value. Otherwise your SQL Server will not grow to memory values higher than the value configured for Dynamic Memory. Memory Buffer % Memory buffer configuration is used to provision file cache to virtual machines in order to improve performance. Due to the fact that SQL Server is managing its own buffer pool, Memory Buffer setting should be configured to the lowest value possible, 5%. Configuring a higher memory buffer will prevent low resource notifications from Windows Memory Manager and it will prevent reclaiming memory from SQL Server VMs. Memory Weight Memory weight configuration defines the importance of memory to a VM. Configure higher values for the VMs that have higher performance requirements. VMs with higher memory weight will have more memory under high memory pressure conditions on your host. Questions and Answers Q1 – Which SQL Server memory model is best for Dynamic Memory? The best SQL Server model for Dynamic Memory is “Locked Page Memory Model”. This memory model ensures that SQL Server memory is never paged out and it’s also adaptive to dynamically changing memory in the system. This will be extremely useful when Dynamic Memory is attempting to remove memory from SQL Server VMs ensuring no SQL Server memory is paged out. You can find instructions on configuring “Locked Page Memory Model” for your SQL Servers here. Q2 – What about other SQL Server Editions, how should I configure Dynamic Memory for them? Other editions of SQL Server do not adapt to dynamically changing environments. They will determine how much memory they should allocate during startup and don’t change this value afterwards. Therefore make sure that you configure a higher startup memory for your VM because that will be all the memory that SQL Server utilize Tune Maximum Memory and Memory Buffer based on the other workloads running on the system. If there are no other workloads consider using Static Memory for these editions. Q3 – What if I have multiple SQL Server instances in a VM? Having multiple SQL Server instances in a VM is not a general recommendation for predictable performance, manageability and isolation. In order to achieve a predictable behavior make sure that you configure SQL Min Server Memory and SQL Max Server Memory for each instance in the VM. And make sure that: · Dynamic Memory Startup Memory is greater than the sum of SQL Min Server Memory values for the instances in the VM · Dynamic Memory Maximum Memory is greater than the sum of SQL Max Server Memory values for the instances in the VM Q4 – I’m using Large Page Memory Model for my SQL Server. Can I still use Dynamic Memory? The short answer is no. SQL Server does not dynamically change its memory size when configured with Large Page Memory Model. In virtualized environments Hyper-V provides large page support by default. Most of the time, Large Page Memory Model doesn’t bring any benefits to a SQL Server if it’s running in virtualized environments. Q5 – How do I monitor SQL performance when I’m trying Dynamic Memory on my VMs? Use the performance counters below to monitor memory performance for SQL Server: Process - Working Set: This counter is available in the VM via process performance counters. It represents the actual amount of physical memory being used by SQL Server process in the VM. SQL Server – Buffer Cache Hit Ratio: This counter is available in the VM via SQL Server counters. This represents the paging being done by SQL Server. A rate of 90% or higher is desirable. Conclusion These blog posts are a quick start to a story that will be developing more in the near future. We’re still continuing our testing and investigations to provide more detailed configuration guidelines with example performance numbers with a white paper in the upcoming months. Now it’s time to give SQL Server and Hyper-V Dynamic Memory a try. Use this guidelines to kick-start your environment. See what you think about it and let us know of your experiences. - Serdar Sutay Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

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Win a place at a SQL Server Masterclass with Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal

- by Testas

The top things YOU need to know about managing SQL Server - in one place, on one day - presented by two of the best SQL Server industry trainers!And you could be there courtesy of UK SQL Server User Group and SQL Server Magazine! This week the UK SQL Server User Group will provide you with details of how to win a place at this must see seminar You can also register for the seminar yourself at:www.regonline.co.uk/kimtrippsql More information about the seminar Where: Radisson Edwardian Heathrow Hotel, London When: Thursday 17th June 2010 This one-day MasterClass will focus on many of the top issues companies face when implementing and maintaining a SQL Server-based solution. In the case where a company has no dedicated DBA, IT managers sometimes struggle to keep the data tier performing well and the data available. This can be especially troublesome when the development team is unfamiliar with the affect application design choices have on database performance. The Microsoft SQL Server MasterClass 2010 is presented by Paul S. Randal and Kimberly L. Tripp, two of the most experienced and respected people in the SQL Server world. Together they have over 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server in the field, and on the SQL Server product team itself. This is a unique opportunity to hear them present at a UK event which will:· Debunk many of the ingrained misconceptions around SQL Server's behaviour · Show you disaster recovery techniques critical to preserving your company's life-blood - the data · Explain how a common application design pattern can wreak havoc in the database · Walk through the top-10 points to follow around operations and maintenance for a well-performing and available data tier! Please Note: Agenda may be subject to changeSessions AbstractsKEYNOTE: Bridging the Gap Between Development and Production Applications are commonly developed with little regard for how design choices will affect performance in production. This is often because developers don't realize the implications of their design on how SQL Server will be able to handle a high workload (e.g. blocking, fragmentation) and/or because there's no full-time trained DBA that can recognize production problems and help educate developers. The keynote sets the stage for the rest of the day. Discussing some of the issues that can arise, explaining how some can be avoided and highlighting some of the features in SQL 2008 that can help developers and DBAs make better use of SQL Server, and troubleshoot when things go wrong. SESSION ONE: SQL Server MythbustersIt's amazing how many myths and misconceptions have sprung up and persisted over the years about SQL Server - after many years helping people out on forums, newsgroups, and customer engagements, Paul and Kimberly have heard it all. Are there really non-logged operations? Can interrupting shrinks or rebuilds cause corruption? Can you override the server's MAXDOP setting? Will the server always do a table-scan to get a row count? Many myths lead to poor design choices and inappropriate maintenance practices so these are just a few of many, many myths that Paul and Kimberly will debunk in this fast-paced session on how SQL Server operates and should be managed and maintained. SESSION TWO: Database Recovery Techniques Demo-Fest Even if a company has a disaster recovery strategy in place, they need to practice to make sure that the plan will work when a disaster does strike. In this fast-paced demo session Paul and Kimberly will repeatedly do nasty things to databases and then show how they are recovered - demonstrating many techniques that can be used in production for disaster recovery. Not for the faint-hearted! SESSION THREE: GUIDs: Use, Abuse, and How To Move Forward Since the addition of the GUID (Microsoft’s implementation of the UUID), my life as a consultant and "tuner" has been busy. I’ve seen databases designed with GUID keys run fairly well with small workloads but completely fall over and fail because they just cannot scale. And, I know why GUIDs are chosen - it simplifies the handling of parent/child rows in your batches so you can reduce round-trips or avoid dealing with identity values. And, yes, sometimes it's even for distributed databases and/or security that GUIDs are chosen. I'm not entirely against ever using a GUID but overusing and abusing GUIDs just has to be stopped! Please, please, please let me give you better solutions and explanations on how to deal with your parent/child rows, round-trips and clustering keys! SESSION 4: Essential Database MaintenanceIn this session, Paul and Kimberly will run you through their top-ten database maintenance recommendations, with a lot of tips and tricks along the way. These are distilled from almost 30 years combined experience working with SQL Server customers and are geared towards making your databases more performant, more available, and more easily managed (to save you time!). Everything in this session will be practical and applicable to a wide variety of databases. Topics covered include: backups, shrinks, fragmentation, statistics, and much more! Focus will be on 2005 but we'll explain some of the key differences for 2000 and 2008 as well. Speaker Biographies Paul S.Randal Kimberley L. Tripp Paul and Kimberly are a husband-and-wife team who own and run SQLskills.com, a world-renowned SQL Server consulting and training company. They are both SQL Server MVPs and Microsoft Regional Directors, with over 30 years of combined experience on SQL Server. Paul worked on the SQL Server team for nine years in development and management roles, writing many of the DBCC commands, and ultimately with responsibility for core Storage Engine for SQL Server 2008. Paul writes extensively on his blog (SQLskills.com/blogs/Paul) and for TechNet Magazine, for which he is also a Contributing Editor. Kimberly worked on the SQL Server team in the early 1990s as a tester and writer before leaving to found SQLskills and embrace her passion for teaching and consulting. Kimberly has been a staple at worldwide conferences since she first presented at TechEd in 1996, and she blogs at SQLskills.com/blogs/Kimberly. They have written Microsoft whitepapers and books for SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008, and are regular, top-rated presenters worldwide on database maintenance, high availability, disaster recovery, performance tuning, and SQL Server internals. Together they teach the SQL MCM certification and throughout Microsoft.In their spare time, they like to find frogfish in remote corners of the world.

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Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 Event and its SNMP Interface

- by user12609115

Background The cluster event SNMP interface was first introduced in Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.2 release. The details of the SNMP interface are described in the Oracle Solaris Cluster System Administration Guide and the Cluster 3.2 SNMP blog. Prior to the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 release, when the event SNMP interface was enabled, it would take effect on WARNING or higher severity events. The events with WARNING or higher severity are usually for the status change of a cluster component from ONLINE to OFFLINE. The interface worked like an alert/alarm interface when some components in the cluster were out of service (changed to OFFLINE). The consumers of this interface could not get notification for all status changes and configuration changes in the cluster. Cluster Event and its SNMP Interface in Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 The user model of the cluster event SNMP interface is the same as what was provided in the previous releases. The cluster event SNMP interface is not enabled by default on a freshly installed cluster; you can enable it by using the cluster event SNMP administration commands on any cluster nodes. Usually, you only need to enable it on one of the cluster nodes or a subset of the cluster nodes because all cluster nodes get the same cluster events. When it is enabled, it is responsible for two basic tasks. • Logs up to 100 most recent NOTICE or higher severity events to the MIB. • Sends SNMP traps to the hosts that are configured to receive the above events. The changes in the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 release are1) Introduction of the NOTICE severity for the cluster configuration and status change events.The NOTICE severity is introduced for the cluster event in the 4.2 release. It is the severity between the INFO and WARNING severity. Now all severities for the cluster events are (from low to high) • INFO (not exposed to the SNMP interface) • NOTICE (newly introduced in the 4.2 release) • WARNING • ERROR • CRITICAL • FATAL In the 4.2 release, the cluster event system is enhanced to make sure at least one event with the NOTICE or a higher severity will be generated when there is a configuration or status change from a cluster component instance. In other words, the cluster events from a cluster with the NOTICE or higher severities will cover all status and configuration changes in the cluster (include all component instances). The cluster component instance here refers to an instance of the following cluster componentsnode, quorum, resource group, resource, network interface, device group, disk, zone cluster and geo cluster heartbeat. For example, pnode1 is an instance of the cluster node component, and oracleRG is an instance of the cluster resource group. With the introduction of the NOTICE severity event, when the cluster event SNMP interface is enabled, the consumers of the SNMP interface will get notification for all status and configuration changes in the cluster. A thrid-party system management platform with the cluster SNMP interface integration can generate alarms and clear alarms programmatically, because it can get notifications for the status change from ONLINE to OFFLINE and also from OFFLINE to ONLINE. 2) Customization for the cluster event SNMP interface • The number of events logged to the MIB is 100. When the number of events stored in the MIB reaches 100 and a new qualified event arrives, the oldest event will be removed before storing the new event to the MIB (FIFO, first in, first out). The 100 is the default and minimum value for the number of events stored in the MIB. It can be changed by setting the log_number property value using the clsnmpmib command. The maximum number that can be set for the property is 500. • The cluster event SNMP interface takes effect on the NOTICE or high severity events. The NOTICE severity is also the default and lowest event severity for the SNMP interface. The SNMP interface can be configured to take effect on other higher severity events, such as WARNING or higher severity events by setting the min_severity property to the WARNING. When the min_severity property is set to the WARNING, the cluster event SNMP interface would behave the same as the previous releases (prior to the 4.2 release). Examples, • Set the number of events stored in the MIB to 200 # clsnmpmib set -p log_number=200 event • Set the interface to take effect on WARNING or higher severity events. # clsnmpmib set -p min_severity=WARNING event Administering the Cluster Event SNMP Interface Oracle Solaris Cluster provides the following three commands to administer the SNMP interface. • clsnmpmib: administer the SNMP interface, and the MIB configuration. • clsnmphost: administer hosts for the SNMP traps • clsnmpuser: administer SNMP users (specific for SNMP v3 protocol) Only clsnmpmib is changed in the 4.2 release to support the aforementioned customization of the SNMP interface. Here are some simple examples using the commands. Examples: 1. Enable the cluster event SNMP interface on the local node # clsnmpmib enable event 2. Display the status of the cluster event SNMP interface on the local node # clsnmpmib show -v 3. Configure my_host to receive the cluster event SNMP traps. # clsnmphost add my_host Cluster Event SNMP Interface uses the common agent container SNMP adaptor, which is based on the JDMK SNMP implementation as its SNMP agent infrastructure. By default, the port number for the SNMP MIB is 11161, and the port number for the SNMP traps is 11162. The port numbers can be changed by using the cacaoadm. For example, # cacaoadm list-params Print all changeable parameters. The output includes the snmp-adaptor-port and snmp-adaptor-trap-port properties. # cacaoadm set-param snmp-adaptor-port=1161 Set the SNMP MIB port number to 1161. # cacaoadm set-param snmp-adaptor-trap-port=1162 Set the SNMP trap port number to 1162. The cluster event SNMP MIB is defined in sun-cluster-event-mib.mib, which is located in the /usr/cluster/lib/mibdirectory. Its OID is 1.3.6.1.4.1.42.2.80, that can be used to walk through the MIB data. Again, for more detail information about the cluster event SNMP interface, please see the Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.2 System Administration Guide. - Leland Chen

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Convert DVD to MP4 / H.264 with HD Decrypter and Handbrake

- by DigitalGeekery

Are you looking for a way to convert your DVD collection to high quality MP4 files? Today we are going to take a look at using DVDFab HD Decrypter along with Handbrake to convert DVDs to MP4 using the H.264 codec. Process Overview Handbrake is a great file conversion application, but it unfortunately can’t handle DVD copy protection. For that we will use DVDFab’s HD Decrypter. HD Decrypter is the always free portion of the DVDFab application. What HD Decrypter will do, is remove the copy protection from your DVD, and copy the Video-TS and Audio-TS folders to your hard drive. Once the copy protection is gone, we will use Handbrake to convert the files to MP4 format with H.264 compression. Note: You’ll get full access to all the options in DVDFab during the 30 trial period. However, the HD Decrypter is free and will continue to work. Ripping the DVD Install both Handbrake and DVDFab HD Decrypter. (Download links below) Once the applications are installed, place your DVD into your DVD drive and open DVDFab. On the welcome screen, click “Start DVDFab.” You’ll be prompted to choose your region. Click “OK.” The disc is analyzed and opened… You’ll be brought to the main interface. Make sure you have the Full Disc option selected at the left panel and “Copy DVD-Video (VIDEO_TS folder) is selected. Click “Start.” Don’t be confused by the “DVD to DVD” option pop up. We won’t actually be burning to DVD. The HD Decrypter portion of the DVDFab suite is part of the DVD to DVD option. Click “OK.” The DVD will be ripped to your hard drive. When the copy process is complete, you’ll be prompted to insert media to start the write process. We aren’t going to be burning to disc, so just click Cancel then close out of DVDFab. Converting to MP4 Now we are ready to convert Open Handbrake and click on the “Source” button at the top left. Select DVD / VIDEO_TS folder from the drop down list. Now we need to browse for the location where DVDFab HD Decrypter copied your movie. By default, that location will be the \DVDFab\Temp\FullDisc directory in your Documents folder. For example, in Windows 7, it would be: C:\Users\%username%\Documents\DVDFab\Temp\FullDisc\[Name of Your DVD] Select the folder, and click “OK.” You may be prompted to set a default path in Handbrake. This is an optional step. Click “OK.” If you’d like to set a default destination folder, Go to Tools on the top menu, select Options. On the General tab, click “Browse” to select a destination output folder. Click “Close” when Finished. Next, click the dropdown list next to “Title.” Select the title that matches the length of the movie. It’s possible you may have see more than one title with a similar length. If so, consult the DVD information, or a site like IMDB.com, to find the proper movie title length. Select your container under Output Settings. This will be your final output file extension. We will be using MP4 for this example. You also have the option of MKV. If you didn’t set up a default destination folder, you’ll need to select one by clicking the “Browse” button. You can manually customize the output file name and change the output file extension to .mp4 (Unless you prefer the iPod friendly .m4v extension). Settings There are a variety of custom settings that can be changed either through the tabs listed under Output Settings, or by selecting one of the Presets to the right. If converting exclusively for any of the devices listed in the preset list, simply click on that device and the settings will be automatically applied in the Output Settings tabs. For more Universal (non-Apple) devices or output, select the Normal profile. For the most part, the presets will suit quite nicely. However, you can further customize settings if you’d like. The Picture tab allows you to tweak the size or cropping region. You must change Anamorphic to Loose or Custom to change the size. The Video tab allows you to choose your codec. H.264 is the default. You also have the option to choose a target (output) size. The Constant Quality is recommended to be set between 59% – 63%. Anything over 70% will likely result in an output file larger than the input without any improved quality. On the Subtitles tab, you can select an available subtitle from the dropdown list and click “Add” to add it to the output file. When you’ve finished any customizations you are ready to begin the conversion process. Click “Start.” A Command window will open and you can follow the process. You’ll probably want to find something to do in the meantime as the process could take a couple of hours. When the process completes, you’re ready to watch your video. Although it’s a time consuming process that involves a couple steps, this method will give you high quality H.264 video files. If you want to rip and burn your DVD’s to ISO check out our article on how to rip and convert DVD’s to an ISO image. Links Download DVDFab HD Decrypter (Part of the DVDFab suite) Download Handbrake Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Enjoy Quick & Easy Unit Conversion with Convert for WindowsConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 FormatCalculate with Qalculate on LinuxHow To Convert Video Files to MP3 with VLCConvert a Row to a Column in Excel the Easy Way TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Use Quick Translator to Translate Text in 50 Languages (Firefox) Get Better Windows Search With UltraSearch Scan News With NY Times Article Skimmer SpeedyFox Claims to Speed up your Firefox Beware Hover Kitties Test Drive Mobile Phones Online With TryPhone

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Computer crashes on resume from standby almost every time

- by Los Frijoles

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 on a Core i5 2500K and ASRock Z68 Pro3-M motherboard (no graphics card, hd is a WD Green 1TB, and cd drive is some cheap lite-on drive). Since installing 12.04, my computer has been freezing after resume, but not every time. When I start to resume, it starts going normally with a blinking cursor on the screen and then sometimes it will continue on to the gnome 3 unlock screen. Most of the time, however, it will blink for a little bit and then the monitor will flip modes and shut off due to no signal. Pressing keys on the keyboard gets no response (num lock light doesn't respond, Ctrl-Alt-F1 fails to drop it into a terminal, Ctrl-Alt-Backspace doesn't work) and so I assume the computer is crashed. The worst part is, the logs look entirely normal. Here is my system log during one of these crashes and my subsequent hard poweroff and restart: Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-2, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-1, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[12419]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-0, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 21:54:43 kcuzner-desktop udevd[10448]: inotify_add_watch(6, /dev/dm-0, 10) failed: No such file or directory Jun 6 22:09:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[9061]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 22:17:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[22142]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jun 6 22:39:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[26909]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 22:54:21 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [57905.560822] show_signal_msg: 36 callbacks suppressed Jun 6 22:54:21 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [57905.560828] chromium-browse[9139]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f3a78efade0 sp 00007fff7e2d2c18 error 4 in chromium-browser[7f3a76604000+412b000] Jun 6 23:05:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [58586.415158] chromium-browse[21025]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f3a78efade0 sp 00007fff7e2d2c18 error 4 in chromium-browser[7f3a76604000+412b000] Jun 6 23:09:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[13542]: (root) CMD ( [ -x /usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime ] && [ -d /var/lib/php5 ] && find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -cmin +$(/usr/lib/php5/maxlifetime) ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete) Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.317590] usb 2-1.7: USB disconnect, device number 8 Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.319672] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdg] Synchronizing SCSI cache Jun 6 23:12:43 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [59006.319737] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdg] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK Jun 6 23:17:01 kcuzner-desktop CRON[26580]: (root) CMD ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.hourly) Jun 6 23:19:04 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client connected from 29925[0:0] Jun 6 23:19:04 kcuzner-desktop acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30131 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' high priority at nice level -11. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 1 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30162 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' RT at priority 5. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 2 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30163 of process 30131 (n/a) owned by '104' RT at priority 5. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 3 threads of 1 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/HFPAG Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint registered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Successfully made thread 30166 of process 30166 (n/a) owned by '104' high priority at nice level -11. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop rtkit-daemon[1835]: Supervising 4 threads of 2 processes of 1 users. Jun 6 23:19:07 kcuzner-desktop pulseaudio[30166]: [pulseaudio] pid.c: Daemon already running. Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client 2942[0:0] has disconnected Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client 29925[0:0] has disconnected Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: client connected from 1286[0:0] Jun 6 23:19:10 kcuzner-desktop acpid: 1 client rule loaded Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/HFPAG Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSource Jun 6 23:19:31 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1140]: Endpoint unregistered: sender=:1.239 path=/MediaEndpoint/A2DPSink Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="5.8.6" x-pid="1053" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] start Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: rsyslogd's groupid changed to 103 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd: rsyslogd's userid changed to 101 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop rsyslogd-2039: Could not open output pipe '/dev/xconsole' [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2039 ] Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Ericsson MBM Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Sierra Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Generic Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Huawei Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop modem-manager[1070]: <info> Loaded plugin Linktop Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1072]: Failed to init gatt_example plugin Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop bluetoothd[1072]: Listening for HCI events on hci0 Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> NetworkManager (version 0.9.4.0) is starting... Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> Read config file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> VPN: loaded org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop NetworkManager[1080]: <info> DNS: loaded plugin dnsmasq Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset Jun 6 23:28:12 kcuzner-desktop kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu Sorry it's so huge; the restart happens at 23:28:12 I believe and all I see is that chromium segfaulted a few times. I wouldn't think a segfault from an individual program on the computer would crash it, but could that be the issue?

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