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• S3 file Uploading from Mac app though PHP?

  - by Ilija Tovilo

  I have asked this question before, but it was deleted due too little information. I'll try to be more concrete this time. I have an Objective-C mac application, which should allow users to upload files to S3-storage. The s3 storage is mine, the users don't have an Amazon account. Until now, the files were uploaded directly to the amazon servers. After thinking some more about it, it wasn't really a great concept, regarding security and flexibility. I want to add a server in between. The user should authenticate with my server, the server would open a session if the authentication was successful, and the file-sharing could begin. Now my question. I want to upload the files to S3. One option would be to make a POST-request and wait until the server would receive the file. Problems here are, that there would be a delay, when the file is being uploaded from my server to the S3 servers, and it would double the uploading time. Best would be, if I could validate the request, and then redirecting it, so the client uploads it directly to the s3-storage. Not sure if this is possible somehow. Uploading directly to S3 doesn't seem to be very smart. After looking into other apps like Droplr and Dropmark, it looks like they don't do this. Btw. I did this using Little Snitch. They have their api on their own web-server, and that's it. Could someone clear things up for me? EDIT How should I transmit my files to S3? Is there a way to "forward" it, or do I have to upload it to my server and then upload it from there to S3? Like I said, other apps can do this efficiently and without the need of communicating with S3 directly.

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• How do I see if an established socket is stuck on a server that's expecting input?

  - by Parker

  I have a script that scans ports for open proxy servers. Problem is if it encounters a login program (specifically telnet) then it hangs there forever since it doesn't know what to do and eventually the server closes the connection. The simple solution would be to create a bunch of cases. If telnet, do this. If SSH, do that. If something else, blah blah blah. I'd like an umbrella solution since the script is not a high priority for me. The script, as it is now, is available at http://parkrrr.net/socks/scan.phps On a small scale (the page maybe averages 15 hits/day) it's fine but on a larger scale I'd be worried about a lot of open zombie sockets. Swapping the !$strpos doesn't work since servers can return more information than what you requested (headers, ads, etc). Only accepting a fixed number of bytes (as opposed to appending until EOF, which it does now) from the $fgets also does not seem to work. I am sure this is where it gets stuck: while (!feof($fp)) { $data.=fgets($fp,512); } But what can I do? Any other suggestions/warnings would also be welcomed.

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• Scalability 101: How can I design a scalable web application using PHP?

  - by Legend

  I am building a web-application and have a couple of quick questions. From what I learnt, one should not worry about scalability when initially building the app and should only start worrying when the traffic increases. However, this being my first web-application, I am not quite sure if I should take an approach where I design things in an ad-hoc manner and later "fix" them. I have been reading stories about how people start off with an app that gets millions of users in a week or two. Not that I will face the same situation but I can't help but wonder, how do these people do it? Currently, I bought a shared hosting account on Lunarpages and that got me started in building and testing the application. However, I am interested in learning how to build the same application in a scalable-manner using the cloud, for instance, Amazon's EC2. From my understanding, I can see a couple of components: There is a load balancer that first receives requests and then decides where to route each request This request is then handled by a server replica that then processes the request and updates (if required) the database and sends back the response to the client If a similar request comes in, then a caching mechanism like memcached kicks into picture and returns objects from the cache A blackbox that handles database replication Specifically, I am trying to do the following: Setting up a load balancer (my homework revealed that HAProxy is one such load balancer) Setting up replication so that databases can be synchronized Using memcached Configuring Apache to work with multiple web servers Partitioning application to use Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 (my application is something that will need great deal of storage) Finally, how can I avoid burning myself when using Amazon services? Because this is just a learning phase, I can probably do with 2-3 servers with a simple load balancer and replication but until I want to avoid paying loads of money accidentally. I am able to find resources on individual topics but am unable to find something that starts off from the big picture. Can someone please help me get started?

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• Processing a database queue across multiple threads - design advice

  - by rwmnau

  I have a SQL Server table full of orders that my program needs to "follow up" on (call a webservice to see if something has been done with them). My application is multi-threaded, and could have instances running on multiple servers. Currently, every so often (on a Threading timer), the process selects 100 rows, at random (ORDER BY NEWID()), from the list of "unconfirmed" orders and checks them, marking off any that come back successfully. The problem is that there's a lot of overlap between the threads, and between the different processes, and their's no guarantee that a new order will get checked any time soon. Also, some orders will never be "confirmed" and are dead, which means that they get in the way of orders that need to be confirmed, slowing the process down if I keep selecting them over and over. What I'd prefer is that all outstanding orders get checked, systematically. I can think of two easy ways do this: The application fetches one order to check at a time, passing in the last order it checked as a parameter, and SQL Server hands back the next order that's unconfirmed. More database calls, but this ensures that every order is checked in a reasonable timeframe. However, different servers may re-check the same order in succession, needlessly. The SQL Server keeps track of the last order it asked a process to check up on, maybe in a table, and gives a unique order to every request, incrementing its counter. This involves storing the last order somewhere in SQL, which I wanted to avoid, but it also ensures that threads won't needlessly check the same orders at the same time Are there any other ideas I'm missing? Does this even make sense? Let me know if I need some clarification.

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• visual analysis of web pages in ruby

  - by Clint Miller

  I'm looking to write some code that does visual analysis of web pages, preferably using Ruby. My code will need to be able to determine the top, left, width, height, background color, color, and font size for all the elements in the DOM. Of course, these values can only be calculated once all CSS is applied. So, I don't think that Nokogiri is up for the job. Ultimately, I'm trying to use this data in a VIPS-like (Vision-Based Page Segmentation) algorithm in an attempt to find the main content in downloaded news articles. I've considered using Watir to drive Chrome or Firefox and then extract the data. The problem is that browsers can't be run headless through Watir (I think). Ultimately, this code will be running on an array of Linux servers in a data center. So, the code won't have easy access to an X Server for displaying the browser. I suppose one solution is to use Watir and run a headless X Server on the Linux servers. That's a bit of a pain, but it looks like my best option right now. Does anyone have any better ideas?

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• Error monitoring/handling on webservers

  - by Industrial

  Hi everybody, We have a web server that we're about to launch a number of applications onto. They will all share database and memcached servers, but each application has it's own mySQL database and all memcached keys per application, is prefixed. Possible scenario: If a memcached server in our cluster goes boom, we want someone (operative system admin) to be automatically contacted by email/iphone push notification or in any other appropriate way. If we we're about to install 150 identical applications for our customers on our servers, and a memcached server dies - all 150 applications will individually find this out and contact our system admin, which most certainly is going to think about getting a new job where he or she isn't about to be woken up by getting 150 messages sent 4:15 in the morning. Possible solution: One idea is to set up an external server for error handling that gets a $_POST or cURL request sent, and handles storage of the error message depending on the seriousness of the actual error message. It would of course check upon receiving the error call, that if the same memcached server have already been reported as offline, there would be no need to spam the system admin with additional reminders... The questions: What's a good approach on how to handle errors? How does the big guys in the industry handle this? Thanks!

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• How to handle 30k files in a project which requires them?

  - by Jeremiah

  Visual Studio 2010 RC - Silverlight Application We have a library of images that we need to have access to. They are given to us from a vendor (through an installer) and they are not in a database, they are files in a folder (a very large monster of a folder). We do not control when the images change, so the vendor needs to be able to override them individually. We get updates frequently enough from this vendor to state that these images change "randomly" and without our (programmer) knowledge. The problem: I don't want 30K images in SVN. Heck, I don't even want to imagine them in my Solution. However, our application requires them in order to run properly. So, our build/staging servers need access to these images (we have two build servers). The Question: How would you handle it when your application will not work as specified without access to each of 30k images and you don't control when those images change? I'm do not want to have a crazy large SVN repository. Because I don't know when any of these images change, I really don't want them in my solution (definitely do not want a large solution, either). I also don't want a bunch of manual steps to do every time these images change. Our mantra, up to this point, has always been, any developer could download from SVN, compile and run our app. These images are going to kill that mantra. I'm tempted to make a WCF service that will return images if they exist and a dummy image if they don't. This way all dev boxes will return a dummy image and our build/staging/production boxes will return real images (ones that actually have the vendor's image installer installed on). This has to be a solved problem. What have other people done to handle these types of problems? I'm open to suggestions.

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• WCF hosting: Can access svc file but cannot go to wsdl link

  - by Impulse

  Hello, I have a WCF service that is hosted in IIS 7.5. I have two servers, one for test and one for production. The service works fine on test server, but on the production server I have the following error. When I access the address http//..../service.svc I can see the default page that says: You have created a service. To test this service, you will need to create a client and use it to call the service. You can do this using the svcutil.exe tool from the command line with the following syntax: svcutil.exe http://..../service.svc?wsdl This will generate a configuration file and a code file that contains the client class. Add the two files to your client application and use the generated client class to call the Service. But when I click the wsdl link, I cannot go to the wsdl page. It returns me to this default web page without any errors. I am suspecting a network/firewall authorization error but does anybody have an experience like this one? All IIS settings are the same for test and production servers. Thank you, Best Regards.

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• Sending Email to a specific address without requiring user to specify their mail server details

  - by sgmoore

  Can anyone recommend a simple and reliable method of sending email notifications and possibly log files attachments from a C# program without requiring the installer or the user to configure the program by specifying server details and email addresses etc. (Mainly because they won't know the details, but also because they could change) The program will normally be run as a service of a Windows Server, but can be run on a client. I tried connecting to our own mail server and sending a email to myself, but some ISP's are blocking Port 25 on all servers but their own, so that method isn't working reliably. Tried sending email through gmail but that was less successful as the port they used was blocked by firewalls. Ditto webservices connecting on weird ports. Trying to use the local smptservice but did not work either. It would be nice, but not essential if it was not dependant on my own Internet connection/Servers. (Don't mind them being delayed, but prefer them not to get lost). Are there any webservices on http/https that allow you to do this sort of thing? TIA

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• Time out when creating a site collection

  - by Daeko

  I am trying to create a site collection programmatically. It has worked for about 6 months, but after the servers have been updated (various patches) it doesn’t work anymore (we have 3 servers: 1 development, 1 test, 1 production). It is still working in my development environment which hasn’t been updated, but not on the two others. I don’t receive any error messages, it just hangs at the code that is supposed to add the site collection (see code below). I am using Windows Server 2003 R2 and Sharepoint 2007 (version 12.0.0.6421 ). It doesn’t give me any errors, it just hangs until Internet Explorer comes with a “request timed out” response. If I try and debug the code, the code just stops there and nothing happens. No error messages or anything. public static string CreateSPAccountSite(string siteName) { string url = ""; SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate() { SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web; using (SPSite siteCollectionOuter = new SPSite(web.Site.ID)) { SPWebApplication webApp = siteCollectionOuter.WebApplication; SPSiteCollection siteCollection = webApp.Sites; SPSite site = siteCollection.Add("sites/" + siteName, siteName, "Auto generated Site collection.", 1033, "STS#0", siteCollectionOuter.Owner.LoginName, siteCollectionOuter.Owner.Name, siteCollectionOuter.Owner.Email); //Hangs here site.PortalName = "Portal"; site.PortalUrl = mainUrl; // https://www.ourdomain.net url = site.Url; } }); return url; //Should be "https://www.outdomain.net/sites/siteName" }

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• Managing server instance identity on EC2

  - by kikibobo

  I recently brought up a cluster on EC2, and I felt like I had to invent a lot of things. I'm wondering what kinds of tools, patterns, ideas are out there for how to deal with this. Some context: I had 3 different kinds of servers, so first I created AMIs for each of them. The first AMI had zookeeper, so step one in deploying the system was to get the zookeeper server running. My script then made a note of the mapping between EC2's completely arbitrary and unpredictable hostnames, and the zookeeper server. Then as I brought up new instances of the other 2 kinds of servers, the first thing I would do is ssh to the new server, and add the zookeeper server to its /etc/hosts file. Then as the server software on each instance starts up, it can find zookeeper. Obviously this is a problem that lots of people have to solve, and it probably works a little bit differently in different clouds. Are there products that address this concept? I was pretty surprised that EC2 didn't provide some kind of way to tie your own name to its name. Thanks for any ideas.

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• Laravel4: Checking many-to-many relationship attribute even when it does not exist

  - by Simo A.

  This is my first time with Laravel and also Stackoverflow... I am developing a simple course management system. The main objects are User and Course, with a many-to-many relationship between them. The pivot table has an additional attribute, participant_role, which defines whether the user is a student or an instructor within that particular course. class Course extends Eloquent { public function users() { return $this->belongsToMany('User')->withPivot('participant_role')->withTimestamps(); } } However, there is an additional role, system admin, which can be defined on the User object. And this brings me mucho headache. In my blade view I have the following: @if ($course->pivot->participant_role == 'instructor') { // do something here... } This works fine when the user has been assigned to that particular $course and there is an entry for this user-course combination in the pivot table. However, the problem is the system administrator, who also should be able to access course details. The if-clause above gives Trying to get property of non-object error, apparently because there is no entry in the pivot table for system administrator (as the role is defined within the User object). I could probably solve the problem by using some off-the-shelf bundle for handling role-based permissions. Or I could (but don't want to) do something like this with two internal if-clauses: if (!empty($course->pivot)) { if ($course->pivot->participant_role == 'instructor') { // do something... } } Other options (suggested in partially similar entries in Stackoverflow) would include 1) reading all the pivot table entries to an array, and use in_array to check if a role exists, or even 2) SQL left join to do this on database level. However, ultimately I am looking for a compact one-line solution? Can I do anything similar to this, which unfortunately does not seem to work? if (! empty ($course->pivot->participant_role == 'instructor') ) { // do something... } The shorter the answer, the better :-). Thanks a lot!

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• Convert IIS / Tomcat Web Application to a multi-server environment.

  - by bill_the_loser

  I have an existing web application built in .Net, running on IIS that leverages a java servlet that we have running on Tomcat 5.5. We need to scale the application and I'm confused about what relates to our situation and what we need to do to get the servlet running on multiple servers. Right now I have 4 servers that can each individually process results, it almost seems like all I should have to do is add the ajp13 worker processes from three additional machines to the machine hosting the load balancer worker. But I can't imagine it should be that easy. What do I need to do to distribute the Tomcat load to the extra three machines? Thanks. Update: The current configuration is using a workers2.properties configuration file. From all of the documentation online I have not been able to determine the distinction between the workers.properties and the workers2.properties. Most of the examples that I have found are configuring the workers.properties and revolve around adding workers and registering them in the worker.list element. The workers2.properties does not appears to have a worker.list element and the syntax is different enough between the workers.properties and the workers2.properties that I'm doubtful that I can add that element. If I just add my multiple AJP workers to the workers2.properties file do I need to worry about the apparent lack of a worker.list element? [ajp13:localhost:8009] channel=channel.socket:localhost:8009 group=lb [ajp13:host2.mydomain.local:8009] channel=channel.socket:host2.mydomain.local:8009 group=lb [ajp13:host3.mydomain.local:8009] channel=channel.socket:host3.mydomain.local:8009 group=lb A couple of side notes... One I've noticed that sometime Tomcat doesn't seem to reload my changes and I don't know why. Also, I have no idea why this configuration has a workers2.properties and not a workers.properties. I've been assuming that it's based on version but I haven't seen anything to back up that assumption.

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• Question about how AppFabric's cache feature can be used.

  - by Kevin Buchan

  Question about how AppFabric's cache feature can be used. I apologize for asking a question that I should be able to answer from the documentation, but I have read and read and searched and cannot answer this question, which leads me to believe that I have a fundamentally flawed understanding of what AppFabric's caching capabilities are intended for. I work for a geographically disperse company. We have a particular application that was originally written as a client/server application. It’s so massive and business critical that we want to baby step converting it to a better architected solution. One of the ideas we had was to convert the app to read its data using WCF calls to a co-located web server that would cache communication with the database in the United States. The nature of the application is such that everyone will tend to be viewing the same 2000 records or so with only occasional updates and those updates will be made by a limited set of users. I was hoping that AppFabric’s cache mechanism would allow me to set up one global cache and when a user in Asia, for example, requested data that was not in the cache or was stale that the web server would read from the database in the USA, provide the data to the user, then update the cache which would propagate that data to the other web servers so that they would know not to go back to the database themselves. Can AppFabric work this way or should I just have the servers retrieve their own data from the database?

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• What kind of online hosting do I need for a WCF-based service?

  - by mafutrct

  First of all, I'm not sure if SO is the right place to ask. Please migrate me if needed. I would like to host a WCF-based service so it is available for everyone. While hosting it on my personal, local servers succeeded, I would prefer to move it to an external service provider for various reasons. I'll be blunt: I have no clue about hosting providers. I know there are webhosters, virtual and root servers and several other services. What I would like to know is what kind of hosting I need in my case. I understand that a root server would easily fulfill my requirements, but that is not exactly cheap. The program I'd like to run on the server requires .NET 4, preferably on a windows machine. Access to a folder in the file system is much appreciated (1 GB storage is enough by far). Communication with clients (in form of an applications written in .NET) via opening a port on the server. Traffic is low (<<1 GB/month?) There is no website. Having the provider perform updates would be nice. My understanding is that a virtual server would be a possible solution. Prices seem start at around 5€/month, which is ok for me. However, I read that for these cheap solutions RAM is severely limited (~400 MB), and I'm not confident that is enough to run windows and a .NET application.

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• C# Script to get modified date from URL directory

  - by Jynx

  Hello, I am fairly new to C# and was hoping for some assistance. I currently use Visual Studio 2008. What I am wanting to do is the following: I have a server (\backupserv) that runs a RoboCopy script nightly to backup directories from 18 other servers. These directories are then copied down to \backup in directories of their own: Example: It copies down "Dir1", "Dir2", and "Dir3" from Server1 into \backupserv\backups\Server1 into their own directories (\backupserv\backups\Server1\Dir1, \backupserv\backups\Server1\Dir2, and \backupserv\backups\Server1\Dir3). It does this for all 18 servers nightly between 12am and 6am. The RoboCopy runs via schedule task. A log file is created in \backupserv\backups\log and is named server1-dir1.log, server1-dir2.log, etc. What I am wanting to accomplish in C# is the ability to have a 'report' showing the modified date of each text log file. To do this I need to browse the \backupserv\backups\log directory, determine the modified date, and have a report displayed (prefer HTML if possible). Along with the modified date I will be showing more information, but that is later. Again, I am fairly new to C#, so, please be gentle. I was referred here by another programmer, and was told I would get some assistance. Thanks in advance. If I have missed any detail please let me know and I will do my best to answer.

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• Is there a unique computer identifier that can be used reliably even in a virtual machine?

  - by SaUce

  I'm writing a small client program to be run on a terminal server. I'm looking for a way to make sure that it will only run on this server and in case it is removed from the server it will not function. I understand that there is no perfect way of securing it to make it impossible to ran on other platforms, but I want to make it hard enough to prevent 95% of people to try anything. The other 5% who can hack it is not my concern. I was looking at different Unique Identifiers like Processor ID, Windows Product ID, Computer GUID and other UIs. Because the terminal server is a virtual machine, I cannot locate anything that is completely unique to this machine. Any ideas on what I should look into to make this 95% secure. I do not have time or the need to make it as secure as possible because it will defeat the purpose of the application itself. I do not want to user MAC address. Even though it is unique to each machine it can be easily spoofed. As far as Microsoft Product ID, because our system team clones VM servers and we use corporate volume key, I found already two servers that I have access to that have same Product ID Number. I have no Idea how many others out there that have same Product ID By 95% and 5% I just simply wanted to illustrate how far i want to go with securing this software. I do not have precise statistics on how many people can do what. I believe I might need to change my approach and instead of trying to identify the machine, I will be better off by identifying the user and create group based permission for access to this software.

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Configuring SSL

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index So far in this guide we have an IRM Server up and running, however I skipped over SSL configuration in the previous article because I wanted to focus in more detail now. You can, if you wish, not bother with setting up SSL, but considering this is a security technology it is worthwhile doing. Contents Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server There are two common scenarios in which an Oracle IRM server is configured. For a development or evaluation system, people usually communicate directly to the WebLogic Server running the IRM service. However in a production environment and for some proof of concept evaluations that require a setup reflecting a production system, the traffic to the IRM server travels via a web server proxy, commonly Apache. In this guide we are building an Oracle Enterprise Linux based IRM service and this article will go over the configuration of SSL in WebLogic and also in Apache. Like in the past articles, we are going to use two host names in the configuration below,irm.company.com will refer to the public Apache server irm.company.internal will refer to the internal WebLogic IRM server Setting up a one way, self signed SSL certificate in WebLogic First lets look at creating just a simple self signed SSL certificate to be used in WebLogic. This is a quick and easy way to get SSL working in your environment, however the downside is that no browsers are going to trust this certificate you create and you'll need to manually install the certificate onto any machine's communicating with the server. This is fine for development or when you have only a few users evaluating the system, but for any significant use it's usually better to have a fully trusted certificate in use and I explain that in the next section. But for now lets go through creating, installing and testing a self signed certificate. We use a library in Java to create the certificates, open a console and running the following commands. Note you should choose your own secure passwords whenever you see password below. [oracle@irm /] source /oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin/setWLSEnv.sh [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/ [oracle@irm /] java utils.CertGen -selfsigned -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key -keyfilepass password -cn "irm.oracle.demo" [oracle@irm /] java utils.ImportPrivateKey -keystore MyOwnIdentityStore.jks -storepass password -keypass password -alias trustself -certfile MyOwnSelfCA.cer.pem -keyfile MyOwnSelfKey.key.pem -keyfilepass password [oracle@irm /] keytool -import -trustcacerts -alias trustself -keystore TrustMyOwnSelf.jks -file MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -keyalg RSA We now have two Java Key Stores, MyOwnIdentityStore.jks and TrustMyOwnSelf.jks. These contain keys and certificates which we will use in WebLogic Server. Now we need to tell the IRM server to use these stores when setting up SSL connections for incoming requests. Make sure the Admin server is running and login into the WebLogic Console at http://irm.company.intranet:7001/console and do the following; In the menu on the left, select the + next to Environment to expose the submenu, then click on Servers. You will see two servers in the list, AdminServer(admin) and IRM_server1. If the IRM server is running, shut it down either by hitting CONTROL + C in the console window it was started from, or you can switch to the CONTROL tab, select IRM_server1 and then select the Shutdown menu and then Force Shutdown Now. In the Configuration tab select IRM_server1 and switch to the Keystores tab. By default WebLogic Server uses it's own demo identity and trust. We are now going to switch to the self signed one's we've just created. So select the Change button and switch to Custom Identity and Custom Trust and hit save. Now we have to complete the resulting fields, the setting's i've used in my evaluation server are below. IdentityCustom Identity Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/MyOwnIdentityStore.jks Custom Identity Keystore Type: JKS Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Identity Keystore Passphrase: password TrustCustom Trust Keystore: /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/TrustMyOwnSelf.jks Custom Trust Keystore Type: JKS Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Confirm Custom Trust Keystore Passphrase: password Now click on the SSL tab for the IRM_server1 and enter in the alias and passphrase, in my demo here the details are; IdentityPrivate Key Alias: trustself Private Key Passphrase: password Confirm Private Key Passphrase: password And hit save. Now lets test a connection to the IRM server over HTTPS using SSL. Go back to a console window and start the IRM server, a quick reminder on how to do this is... [oracle@irm /] cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/bin [oracle@irm /] ./startManagedWeblogic IRM_server1 Once running, open a browser and head to the SSL port of the server. By default the IRM server will be listening on the URL https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. Note in the example image on the right the port is 7002 because it's a system that has the IRM services installed on the Admin server, this isn't typical (or advisable). Your system is going to have a separate managed server which will be listening on port 16101. Once you open this address you will notice that your browser is going to complain that the server certificate is untrusted. The images on the right show how Firefox displays this error. You are going to be prompted every time you create a new SSL session with the server, both from the browser and more annoyingly from the IRM Desktop. If you plan on always using a self signed certificate, it is worth adding it to the Windows certificate store so that when you are accessing sealed content you do not keep being informed this certificate is not trusted. Follow these instructions (which are for Internet Explorer 8, they may vary for your version of IE.) Start Internet Explorer and open the URL to your IRM server over SSL, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet:16101/irm_rights. IE will complain that about the certificate, click on Continue to this website (not recommended). From the IE Tools menu select Internet Options and from the resulting dialog select Security and then click on Trusted Sites and then the Sites button. Add to the list of trusted sites a URL which mates the server you are accessing, e.g. https://irm.company.intranet/ and select OK. Now refresh the page you were accessing and next to the URL you should see a red cross and the words Certificate Error. Click on this button and select View Certificates. You will now see a dialog with the details of the self signed certificate and the Install Certificate... button should be enabled. Click on this to start the wizard. Click next and you'll be asked where you should install the certificate. Change the option to Place all certificates in the following store. Select browse and choose the Trusted Root Certification Authorities location and hit OK. You'll then be prompted to install the certificate and answer yes. You also need to import the root signed certificate into the same location, so once again select the red Certificate Error option and this time when viewing the certificate, switch to the Certification Path tab and you should see a CertGenCAB certificate. Select this and then click on View Certificate and go through the same process as above to import the certificate into the store. Finally close all instances of the IE browser and re-access the IRM server URL again, this time you should not receive any errors. Setting up an official SSL certificate in Apache 2.x At this point we now have an IRM server that you can communicate with over SSL. However this certificate isn't trusted by any browser because it's path of trust doesn't end in a recognized certificate authority (CA). Also you are communicating directly to the WebLogic Server over a non standard SSL port, 16101. In a production environment it is common to have another device handle the initial public internet traffic and then proxy this to the WebLogic server. The diagram below shows a very simplified view of this type of deployment. What i'm going to walk through next is configuring Apache to proxy traffic to a WebLogic server and also to use a real SSL certificate from an official CA. First step is to configure Apache to handle incoming requests over SSL. In this guide I am configuring the IRM service in Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 update 3 and Apache 2.2.3 which came with OpenSSL and mod_ssl components. Before I purchase an SSL certificate, I need to generate a certificate request from the server. Oracle.com uses Verisign and for my own personal needs I use cheaper certificates from GoDaddy. The following instructions are specific to Apache, but there are many references out there for other web servers. For Apache I have OpenSSL and the commands are; [oracle@irm /] cd /usr/bin [oracle@irm bin] openssl genrsa -des3 -out irm-apache-server.key 2048 Generating RSA private key, 2048 bit long modulus ............................+++ .........+++ e is 65537 (0x10001) Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: Verifying - Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: [oracle@irm bin] openssl req -new -key irm-apache-server.key -out irm-apache-server.csr Enter pass phrase for irm-apache-server.key: You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated into your certificate request. What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN. There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank For some fields there will be a default value, If you enter '.', the field will be left blank. ----- Country Name (2 letter code) [GB]:US State or Province Name (full name) [Berkshire]:CA Locality Name (eg, city) [Newbury]:San Francisco Organization Name (eg, company) [My Company Ltd]:Oracle Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Security Common Name (eg, your name or your server's hostname) []:irm.company.com Email Address []:[email protected] Please enter the following 'extra' attributes to be sent with your certificate request A challenge password []:testing An optional company name []: You must make sure to remember the pass phrase you used in the initial key generation, you will need this when later configuring Apache. In the /usr/bin directory there are now two new files. The irm-apache-server.csr contains our certificate request and is what you cut and paste, or upload, to your certificate authority when you purchase and validate your SSL certificate. In response you will typically get two files. Your server certificate and another certificate file that will likely contain a set of certificates from your CA which validate your certificate's trust. Next we need to configure Apache to use these files. Typically there is an ssl.conf file which is where all the SSL configuration is done. On my Oracle Enterprise Linux server this file is located in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ssl.conf and i've added the following lines. <VirtualHost irm.company.com> # Setup SSL for irm.company.com ServerName irm.company.com SSLEngine On SSLCertificateFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /oracle/secure/irm.company.com.key SSLCertificateChainFile /oracle/secure/gd_bundle.crt </VirtualHost> Restarting Apache (apachectl restart) and I can now attempt to connect to the Apache server in a web browser, https://irm.company.com/. If all is configured correctly I should now see an Apache test page delivered to me over HTTPS. Configuring Apache to proxy traffic to the IRM server Final piece in setting up SSL is to have Apache proxy requests for the IRM server but do so securely. So the requests to Apache will be over HTTPS using a legitimate certificate, but we can also configure Apache to proxy these requests internally across to the IRM server using SSL with the self signed certificate we generated at the start of this article. To do this proxying we use the WebLogic Web Server plugin for Apache which you can download here from Oracle. Download the zip file and extract onto the server. The file extraction reveals a set of zip files, each one specific to a supported web server. In my instance I am using Apache 2.2 32bit on an Oracle Enterprise Linux, 64 bit server. If you are not sure what version your Apache server is, run the command /usr/sbin/httpd -V and you'll see version and it its 32 or 64 bit. Mine is a 32bit server so I need to extract the file WLSPlugin1.1-Apache2.2-linux32-x86.zip. The from the resulting lib folder copy the file mod_wl.so into /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. First we want to test that the plug in will work for regular HTTP traffic. Edit the httpd.conf for Apache and add the following section at the bottom. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl.so <IfModule mod_weblogic.c>    WebLogicHost irm.company.internal    WebLogicPort 16100    WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> <Location /irm_rights>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_desktop>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_sealing>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> <Location /irm_services>    SetHandler weblogic-handler </Location> Now restart Apache again (apachectl restart) and now open a browser to http://irm.company.com/irm_rights. Apache will proxy the HTTP traffic from the port 80 of your Apache server to the IRM service listening on port 16100 of the WebLogic Managed server. Note above I have included all four of the Locations you might wish to proxy. http://irm.company.internalirm_rights is the URL to the management website, /irm_desktop is the URL used for the IRM Desktop to communicate. irm_sealing is for web services based document sealing and irm_services is for IRM server web services. The last two are typically only used when you have the IRM server integrated with another application and it is unlikely you'd be accessing these resources from the public facing Apache server. However, just in case, i've mentioned them above. Now let's enable SSL communication from Apache to WebLogic. In the ZIP file we extracted were some more modules we need to copy into the Apache folder. Looking back in the lib that we extracted, there are some more files. Copy the following into the /usr/lib/httpd/modules/ folder. libwlssl.so libnnz11.so libclntsh.so.11.1 Now the documentation states that should only need to do this, but I found that I also needed to create an environment variable called LD_LIBRARY_PATH and point this to the folder /usr/lib/httpd/modules/. If I didn't do this, starting Apache with the WebLogic module configured to SSL would throw the error. [crit] (20014)Internal error: WL SSL Init failed for server: (null) on 0 So I had to edit the file /etc/profile and add the following lines at the bottom. You may already have the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable defined, therefore simply add this path to it. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/httpd/modules/ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH Now the WebLogic plug in uses an Oracle Wallet to store the required certificates.You'll need to copy the self signed certificate from the IRM server over to the Apache server. Copy over the MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der into the same folder where you are storing your public certificates, in my example this is /oracle/secure. It's worth mentioning these files should ONLY be readable by root (the user Apache runs as). Now lets create an Oracle Wallet and import the self signed certificate from the IRM server. The file orapki was included in the bin folder of the Apache 1.1 plugin zip you extracted. orapki wallet create -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -auto_login_only orapki wallet add -wallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet -trusted_cert -cert MyOwnSelfCA.cer.der -auto_login_only Finally change the httpd.conf to reflect that we want the WebLogic Apache plug-in to use HTTPS/SSL and not just plain HTTP. <IfModule mod_weblogic.c>    WebLogicHost irm.company.internal    WebLogicPort 16101    SecureProxy ON    WLSSLWallet /oracle/secure/my-wallet    WLLogFile /tmp/wl-proxy.log </IfModule> Then restart Apache once more and you can go back to the browser to test the communication. Opening the URL https://irm.company.com/irm_rights will proxy your request to the WebLogic server at https://irm.company.internal:16101/irm_rights. At this point you have a fully functional Oracle IRM service, the next step is to create a sealed document and test the entire system.

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• Built-in GZip/Deflate Compression on IIS 7.x

  - by Rick Strahl

  IIS 7 improves internal compression functionality dramatically making it much easier than previous versions to take advantage of compression that’s built-in to the Web server. IIS 7 also supports dynamic compression which allows automatic compression of content created in your own applications (ASP.NET or otherwise!). The scheme is based on content-type sniffing and so it works with any kind of Web application framework. While static compression on IIS 7 is super easy to set up and turned on by default for most text content (text/*, which includes HTML and CSS, as well as for JavaScript, Atom, XAML, XML), setting up dynamic compression is a bit more involved, mostly because the various default compression settings are set in multiple places down the IIS –> ASP.NET hierarchy. Let’s take a look at each of the two approaches available: Static Compression Compresses static content from the hard disk. IIS can cache this content by compressing the file once and storing the compressed file on disk and serving the compressed alias whenever static content is requested and it hasn’t changed. The overhead for this is minimal and should be aggressively enabled. Dynamic Compression Works against application generated output from applications like your ASP.NET apps. Unlike static content, dynamic content must be compressed every time a page that requests it regenerates its content. As such dynamic compression has a much bigger impact than static caching. How Compression is configured Compression in IIS 7.x  is configured with two .config file elements in the <system.WebServer> space. The elements can be set anywhere in the IIS/ASP.NET configuration pipeline all the way from ApplicationHost.config down to the local web.config file. The following is from the the default setting in ApplicationHost.config (in the %windir%\System32\inetsrv\config forlder) on IIS 7.5 with a couple of small adjustments (added json output and enabled dynamic compression): <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <configuration> <system.webServer> <httpCompression directory="%SystemDrive%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files"> <scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> <dynamicTypes> <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" /> </dynamicTypes> <staticTypes> <add mimeType="text/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="message/*" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/x-javascript" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/atom+xml" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="application/xaml+xml" enabled="true" /> <add mimeType="*/*" enabled="false" /> </staticTypes> </httpCompression> <urlCompression doStaticCompression="true" doDynamicCompression="true" /> </system.webServer> </configuration> You can find documentation on the httpCompression and urlCompression keys here respectively: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms690689%28v=vs.90%29.aspx http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa347437%28v=vs.90%29.aspx The httpCompression Element – What and How to compress Basically httpCompression configures what types to compress and how to compress them. It specifies the DLL that handles gzip encoding and the types of documents that are to be compressed. Types are set up based on mime-types which looks at returned Content-Type headers in HTTP responses. For example, I added the application/json to mime type to my dynamic compression types above to allow that content to be compressed as well since I have quite a bit of AJAX content that gets sent to the client. The UrlCompression Element – Enables and Disables Compression The urlCompression element is a quick way to turn compression on and off. By default static compression is enabled server wide, and dynamic compression is disabled server wide. This might be a bit confusing because the httpCompression element also has a doDynamicCompression attribute which is set to true by default, but the urlCompression attribute by the same name actually overrides it. The urlCompression element only has three attributes: doStaticCompression, doDynamicCompression and dynamicCompressionBeforeCache. The doCompression attributes are the final determining factor whether compression is enabled, so it’s a good idea to be explcit! The default for doDynamicCompression='false”, but doStaticCompression="true"! Static Compression is enabled by Default, Dynamic Compression is not Because static compression is very efficient in IIS 7 it’s enabled by default server wide and there probably is no reason to ever change that setting. Dynamic compression however, since it’s more resource intensive, is turned off by default. If you want to enable dynamic compression there are a few quirks you have to deal with, namely that enabling it in ApplicationHost.config doesn’t work. Setting: <urlCompression doDynamicCompression="true" /> in applicationhost.config appears to have no effect and I had to move this element into my local web.config to make dynamic compression work. This is actually a smart choice because you’re not likely to want dynamic compression in every application on a server. Rather dynamic compression should be applied selectively where it makes sense. However, nowhere is it documented that the setting in applicationhost.config doesn’t work (or more likely is overridden somewhere and disabled lower in the configuration hierarchy). So: remember to set doDynamicCompression=”true” in web.config!!! How Static Compression works Static compression works against static content loaded from files on disk. Because this content is static and not bound to change frequently – such as .js, .css and static HTML content – it’s fairly easy for IIS to compress and then cache the compressed content. The way this works is that IIS compresses the files into a special folder on the server’s hard disk and then reads the content from this location if already compressed content is requested and the underlying file resource has not changed. The semantics of serving an already compressed file are very efficient – IIS still checks for file changes, but otherwise just serves the already compressed file from the compression folder. The compression folder is located at: %windir%\inetpub\temp\IIS Temporary Compressed Files\ApplicationPool\ If you look into the subfolders you’ll find compressed files: These files are pre-compressed and IIS serves them directly to the client until the underlying files are changed. As I mentioned before – static compression is on by default and there’s very little reason to turn that functionality off as it is efficient and just works out of the box. The one tweak you might want to do is to set the compression level to maximum. Since IIS only compresses content very infrequently it would make sense to apply maximum compression. You can do this with the staticCompressionLevel setting on the scheme element: <scheme name="gzip" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> Other than that the default settings are probably just fine. Dynamic Compression – not so fast! By default dynamic compression is disabled and that’s actually quite sensible – you should use dynamic compression very carefully and think about what content you want to compress. In most applications it wouldn’t make sense to compress *all* generated content as it would generate a significant amount of overhead. Scott Fortsyth has a great post that details some of the performance numbers and how much impact dynamic compression has. Depending on how busy your server is you can play around with compression and see what impact it has on your server’s performance. There are also a few settings you can tweak to minimize the overhead of dynamic compression. Specifically the httpCompression key has a couple of CPU related keys that can help minimize the impact of Dynamic Compression on a busy server: dynamicCompressionDisableCpuUsage dynamicCompressionEnableCpuUsage By default these are set to 90 and 50 which means that when the CPU hits 90% compression will be disabled until CPU utilization drops back down to 50%. Again this is actually quite sensible as it utilizes CPU power from compression when available and falling off when the threshold has been hit. It’s a good way some of that extra CPU power on your big servers to use when utilization is low. Again these settings are something you likely have to play with. I would probably set the upper limit a little lower than 90% maybe around 70% to make this a feature that kicks in only if there’s lots of power to spare. I’m not really sure how accurate these CPU readings that IIS uses are as Cpu usage on Web Servers can spike drastically even during low loads. Don’t trust settings – do some load testing or monitor your server in a live environment to see what values make sense for your environment. Finally for dynamic compression I tend to add one Mime type for JSON data, since a lot of my applications send large chunks of JSON data over the wire. You can do that with the application/json content type: <add mimeType="application/json" enabled="true" /> What about Deflate Compression? The default compression is GZip. The documentation hints that you can use a different compression scheme and mentions Deflate compression. And sure enough you can change the compression settings to: <scheme name="deflate" dll="%Windir%\system32\inetsrv\gzip.dll" staticCompressionLevel="9" /> to get deflate style compression. The deflate algorithm produces slightly more compact output so I tend to prefer it over GZip but more HTTP clients (other than browsers) support GZip than Deflate so be careful with this option if you build Web APIs. I also had some issues with the above value actually being applied right away. Changing the scheme in applicationhost.config didn’t show up on the site  right away. It required me to do a full IISReset to get that change to show up before I saw the change over to deflate compressed content. Content was slightly more compressed with deflate – not sure if it’s worth the slightly less common compression type, but the option at least is available. IIS 7 finally makes GZip Easy In summary IIS 7 makes GZip easy finally, even if the configuration settings are a bit obtuse and the documentation is seriously lacking. But once you know the basic settings I’ve described here and the fact that you can override all of this in your local web.config it’s pretty straight forward to configure GZip support and tweak it exactly to your needs. Static compression is a total no brainer as it adds very little overhead compared to direct static file serving and provides solid compression. Dynamic Compression is a little more tricky as it does add some overhead to servers, so it probably will require some tweaking to get the right balance of CPU load vs. compression ratios. Looking at large sites like Amazon, Yahoo, NewEgg etc. – they all use Related Content Code based ASP.NET GZip Caveats HttpWebRequest and GZip Responses © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in IIS7   ASP.NET  

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• From Bluehost to WP Engine, My WordPress Story

  - by thatjeffsmith

  This is probably the longest blog post I’ve written in a LONG time. And if you’re used to coming here for the Oracle stuff, this post is not about that. It’s about my blog, and the stuff under the hood that makes it run, AKA WordPress. If you want to skip to the juicy stuff, then use these shortcuts: My Site Slowed Down How I Moved to WP Engine How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me Why WP Engine? I started thatJeffSmith.com on May 28th, 2010. I had been already been blogging for several years, but a couple of really smart people I respected (Andy, Brent – thanks again!) suggested that I take ownership of my content and begin building my personal brand. I thought that was a good idea, and so I signed up for service with bluehost. Bluehost makes setting up a WordPress site very, very easy. And, they continued to be easy to work with for the past 2 years. I would even recommend them to anyone looking to host their own WordPress install/site. For $83.40, I purchased a year’s worth of service and my domain name registration – a very good value. And then last year I paid $107.40 for another year’s services. And when that year expired I paid another $190.80 for an additional two year’s service in advance. I had been up to that point, getting my money’s worth. And then, just a few weeks ago… My Site Slowed to a Crawl That spike was from an April Fool's Day Post, I think Why? Well, when I first started blogging, I had the same problem that most beginner bloggers have – not many readers. In my first year of blogging, I think the highest number of readers on a single day was about 125. I remember that day as I was very excited to break 100! Bluehost was very reliable, serving up my content with maybe a total of 3-4 outages in the past 2 years. Support was usually very prompt with answers and solutions, and I love their ‘Chat now’ technology – much nicer than message boards only or pay-to-talk phone support. In the past 6 months however, I noticed a couple of things: daily traffic was increasing – woohoo! my service was experiencing severe CPU throttling – doh! To be honest, I wasn’t aware the throttling was occuring, but I did know that the response time of my blog was starting to lag. Average load times were approaching 20-30 seconds. Not good when good sites are loading in 5 seconds or less. And just this past week, in getting ready to launch a new website for work that sucked in an RSS feed from my blog, the new page was left waiting for more than a minute. Not good! In fact my boss asked, why aren’t you blogging on Blogger? Ugh. I tried a few things to fix the problem: I paid for a premium WordPress theme – Themify’s Grido (thanks to @SQLRockstar for the heads-up) I installed a couple of WP caching plugins I read every WP optimization blog post I could get my greedy little eyes on However, at the same time I was also getting addicted to WordPress bloggers talking about all the cool things you could do with your blog. As a result I had at one point about 30 different plugins installed. WordPress runs on MySQL, and certain queries running via these plugins were starving for CPU. Plugins that would be called every page load meant that as more people clicked on my site, the more CPU I needed. I’m not stupid, so I eventually figured out that maybe less plugins was better, and was able to go down to just 20. But still, the site was running like a dog. CPU Throttling, makes MySQL wait to run a query Bluehost runs shared servers. Your site runs on the same box that several hundred (or thousand?) other services are running on. If you take more CPU than they think you should have, they will limit your service by making you stand in line for CPU, AKA ‘throttling.’ This is not bad. This business model allows them to serve many, many users for a very fair price. It works great until, well, until it doesn’t. I noticed in the last week that for every minute of service, I was being throttled between 60 and 300 seconds. If there were 5 MySQL processes running, then every single one of them were being held in check. The blog visitor notice this as their page requests would take a minute or more to be answered. Bluehost unfortunately doesn’t offer dedicated server hosting, so there was no real upgrade path for me follow and remain one of their customers. So what was I to do? Uninstall every plugin and hope the site sped up? Ask for people to take turns on my blog? I decided to spend my way out of the problem. I signed up for service with WP Engine and moved ThatJeffSmith.com The first 2 months are free, and after that it’s about $29/month to run my site on their system. My math tells me that’s a good bit more expensive than what Bluehost was charging me – to the tune of about 300% more a month. Oh, and I should just say that my blog is a personal blog even though I talk about work stuff here. I don’t get paid for blogging, I don’t sell ads, and I don’t expense the service fees – this is my personal passion. So is it worth it? In the first 4 days, it seems to be totally worth it. Load times have gone from 20-30 seconds to less than 5 seconds. A few folks have told me via Twitter that they notice faster page loads. I anticipate this will indirectly lead to more traffic as Google penalizes you in search results if your site is too slow, and of course some folks won’t even bother waiting more than 5-10 seconds. I noticed right away that writing posts, uploading pictures, and just using the WordPress dashboard in general was much more responsive. So writing is less of a chore now, which means I won’t have a good reason not to write How I Moved to WP Engine I signed up for the service and registered my domain. I then took a full export of my ‘old’ site by doing a FTP GET of all my files, then did a MySQL database backup, exported my WordPress Theme settings to a .zip file, and then finally used the WordPress ‘Export’ feature. I then used the WordPress ‘Import’ on the new site to load up my posts. Then I uploaded the theme .zip package from Themify. Then I FTP’d the ‘wp-content’ directory up to my new server using SFTP (WP Engine only supports secure FTP – good on them!) Using a temporary URL to see my new site, I was able to confirm that everything looked mostly OK – I’ll detail the challenges and issues of fixing the content next – but then it was time to ‘flip the switch.’ I updated the IP address that the DNS lookup tables use to route traffic to my new server. In a matter of minutes the DNS servers around the world were updated and it was time to see the new site! But It Was ‘Broken’ I had never moved a website before, and in my rush to update the DNS, I had changed the records without really finding out what I was supposed to do first. After re-reading the directions provided by WP Engine and following the guidance of their support engineer, I realized I had needed to set the CNAME (Alias) ‘www’ record to point to a different URL than the ‘www.thatjeffsmith.com’ entry I had set. Once corrected the site was up and running in less than a minute. Then It Was Only Mostly Broken Many of my plugins weren’t working. Apparently just ftp’ing the wp-content directory up wasn’t the proper way to re-install the plugin. I suspect file permissions or file ownership wasn’t proper. Some plug-ins were working, many had their settings wiped to the defaults, and a few just didn’t work again. I had to delete the directory of the plug-in manually via SFTP, and then use the WP Dashboard to install it from scratch. And here was my first ‘lesson’ – don’t switch the DNS records until you’ve completely tested your new site. I wasn’t able to navigate the old WP console to review my plug-in settings. Thankfully I was able to use the Wayback Machine to reverse engineer some things, and of course most plug-ins aren’t that complicated to setup to begin with. An example of one that I had to redo from scratch is the ‘Twitter @Anywhere Plus’ plugin that I use to create the form that allows folks to tweet a post they enjoyed at the end of each story. How WP Engine ‘Hooked’ Me I actually signed up with another provider first. They ranked highly in Google searches and a few Tweeps recommended them to me. But hours after signing up and I still didn’t have sever reyady, I was ready to give up on them. They offered no chat or phone support – only mail and message boards. And the message boards were rife with posts about how the service had gone downhill in the past 6 months. To their credit, they did make it easy to cancel, although I did have to do so via email as their website ‘cancel’ button was non-existent. Within minutes of activating my WP Engine account I had received my welcome message and directions on how to get started. I was able to see my staged website right away. They also did something very cool before I even got started – they looked at my existing site and told me by how much they could improve its performance. The proof is in the web pudding. I like this for a few reasons, but primarily I liked their business model. It told me they knew what they were doing, and that they were willing to put their money where their mouth was. This was further evident by their 60-day money back guarantee. And if I understand it correctly, they don’t even take your money until after that 60 day period is over. After a day, I was welcomed by the WP Engine social media team, and was given the opportunity to subscribe to their newsletter and follow their account on Twitter. I noticed their Twitter team is sure to post regular WordPress tips several times a day. It’s not just an account that’s setup for the sake of having a Twitter presence. These little things add up and give me confidence in my decision to choose them as my hosting partner. ‘Partner’ – that’s a lot nicer word than just ‘service provider,’ isn’t it? Oh, and they offered me a t-shirt. Don’t ever doubt the power of a ‘free’ t-shirt! How awesome is this e-mail, from a customer perspective? I wasn’t really expecting any of this. Exceeding expectations before I have even handed over a single dollar seems like a pretty good business plan. This is how you treat customers. Love them to death, and they reward you with loyalty. But Jeff, You Skipped a Piece Here, Why WP Engine? I found them on one of those ‘Top 10′ list posts, and pulled up their webpage. I noticed they offered a specialized service – they host WordPress installs, and that’s it. Their servers are tuned specifically for running WordPress. They had in bolded text, things like ‘INSANELY FAST. INFINITELY SCALABLE.’ and ‘LIGHTNING SPEED.’ And then they offered insurance against hackers and they took care of automatic backups and restores. The only drawbacks I have noticed so far relate to plugins I used that have been ‘blacklisted.’ In order to guarantee that ‘lightning’ speed, they have banned the use of the CPU-suckiest plugins. One of those is the ‘Related Posts’ plugin. So if you are a subscriber and are reading this in your email, you’ll notice there’s no links back to my blog to continue reading other related stories. Since that referral traffic is very small single-digit for my site, I decided that I’m OK with that. I’d rather have the warp-speed page loads. Again, I think that will lead to higher traffic down the road. In 50+ days I will need to decide if WP Engine is a permanent solution. I’ll be sure to update this post when that time comes and let y’all know how it turns out.

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• How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

  - by kanichiro.nishida

    Do you know how many reports on your BI Publisher server are accessed yesterday ? Or, how many users accessed to the reports yesterday, or what are the average number of the users accessed to the reports during the week vs. weekend or morning vs. afternoon ? With BI Publisher 11G, now you can audit your user’s reports access and understand the state of the reporting environment at your server, each user, or each report level. At the previous post I’ve talked about what the BI Publisher’s auditing functionality and how to enable it so that BI Publisher can start collecting such data. (How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?)Now, how can you visualize such auditing data to have a better understanding and gain more insights? With Fusion Middleware Audit Framework you have an option to store the auditing data into a database instead of a log file, which is the default option. Once you enable the database storage option, that means you have your auditing data (or, user report access data) in your database tables, now no brainer, you can start visualize the data, create reports, analyze, and share with BI Publisher. So, first, let’s take a look on how to enable the database storage option for the auditing data. How to Feed the Auditing Data into Database First you need to create a database schema for Fusion Middleware Audit Framework with RCU (Repository Creation Utility). If you have already installed BI Publisher 11G you should be familiar with this RCU. It creates any database schema necessary to run any Fusion Middleware products including BI stuff. And you can use the same RCU that you used for your BI or BI Publisher installation to create this Audit schema. Create Audit Schema with RCU Here are the steps: Go to $RCU_HOME/bin and execute the ‘rcu’ command Choose Create at the starting screen and click Next. Enter your database details and click Next. Choose the option to create a new prefix, for example ‘BIP’, ‘KAN’, etc. Select 'Audit Services' from the list of schemas. Click Next and accept the tablespace creation. Click Finish to start the process. After this, there should be following three Audit related schema created in your database. <prefix>_IAU (e.g. KAN_IAU) <prefix>_IAU_APPEND (e.g. KAN_IAU_APPEND) <prefix>_IAU_VIEWER (e.g. KAN_IAU_VIEWER) Setup Datasource at WebLogic After you create a database schema for your auditing data, now you need to create a JDBC connection on your WebLogic Server so the Audit Framework can access to the database schema that was created with the RCU with the previous step. Connect to the Oracle WebLogic Server administration console: http://hostname:port/console (e.g. http://report.oracle.com:7001/console) Under Services, click the Data Sources link. Click ‘Lock & Edit’ so that you can make changes Click New –> ‘Generic Datasource’ to create a new data source. Enter the following details for the new data source:  Name: Enter a name such as Audit Data Source-0.  JNDI Name: jdbc/AuditDB  Database Type: Oracle  Click Next and select ‘Oracle's Driver (Thin XA) Versions: 9.0.1 or later’ as Database Driver (if you’re using Oracle database), and click Next. The Connection Properties page appears. Enter the following information: Database Name: Enter the name of the database (SID) to which you will connect. Host Name: Enter the hostname of the database.  Port: Enter the database port.  Database User Name: This is the name of the audit schema that you created in RCU. The suffix is always IAU for the audit schema. For example, if you gave the prefix as ‘BIP’, then the schema name would be ‘KAN_IAU’.  Password: This is the password for the audit schema that you created in RCU.   Click Next. Accept the defaults, and click Test Configuration to verify the connection. Click Next Check listed servers where you want to make this JDBC connection available. Click ‘Finish’ ! After that, make sure you click ‘Activate Changes’ at the left hand side top to take the new JDBC connection in effect. Register your Audit Data Storing Database to your Domain Finally, you can register the JNDI/JDBC datasource as your Auditing data storage with Fusion Middleware Control (EM). Here are the steps: 1. Login to Fusion Middleware Control 2. Navigate to Weblogic Domain, right click on ‘bifoundation…..’, select Security, then Audit Store. 3. Click the searchlight icon next to the Datasource JNDI Name field. 4.Select the Audit JNDI/JDBC datasource you created in the previous step in the pop-up window and click OK. 5. Click Apply to continue. 6. Restart the whole WebLogic Servers in the domain. After this, now the BI Publisher should start feeding all the auditing data into the database table called ‘IAU_BASE’. Try login to BI Publisher and open a couple of reports, you should see the activity audited in the ‘IAU_BASE’ table. If not working, you might want to check the log file, which is located at $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/logs/AdminServer-diagnostic.log to see if there is any error. Once you have the data in the database table, now, it’s time to visualize with BI Publisher reports! Create a First BI Publisher Auditing Report Register Auditing Datasource as JNDI datasource First thing you need to do is to register the audit datasource (JNDI/JDBC connection) you created in the previous step as JNDI data source at BI Publisher. It is a JDBC connection registered as JNDI, that means you don’t need to create a new JDBC connection by typing the connection URL, username/password, etc. You can just register it using the JNDI name. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Login to BI Publisher as Administrator (e.g. weblogic) Go to Administration Page Click ‘JNDI Connection’ under Data Sources and Click ‘New’ Type Data Source Name and JNDI Name. The JNDI Name is the one you created in the WebLogic Console as the auditing datasource. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Click ‘Test Connection’ to make sure the datasource connection works. Provide appropriate roles so that the report developers or viewers can share this data source to view reports. Click ‘Apply’ to save. Create Data Model Select Data Model from the tool bar menu ‘New’ Set ‘Default Data Source’ to the audit JNDI data source you have created in the previous step. Select ‘SQL Query’ for your data set Use Query Builder to build a query or just type a sql query. Either way, the table you want to report against is ‘IAU_BASE’. This IAU_BASE table contains all the auditing data for other products running on the WebLogic Server such as JPS, OID, etc. So, if you care only specific to BI Publisher then you want to filter by using  ‘IAU_COMPONENTTYPE’ column which contains the product name (e.g. ’xmlpserver’ for BI Publisher). Here is my sample sql query. select     "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" as "IAU_COMPONENTTYPE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTTYPE" as "IAU_EVENTTYPE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTCATEGORY" as "IAU_EVENTCATEGORY",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TSTZORIGINATING" as "IAU_TSTZORIGINATING",    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'YYYY-MM-DD') IAU_DATE,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'DAY') as IAU_DAY,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'HH24') as IAU_HH24,    to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'WW') as IAU_WEEK_OF_YEAR,      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_INITIATOR" as "IAU_INITIATOR",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_RESOURCE" as "IAU_RESOURCE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TARGET" as "IAU_TARGET",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_MESSAGETEXT" as "IAU_MESSAGETEXT",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_FAILURECODE" as "IAU_FAILURECODE",      "IAU_BASE"."IAU_REMOTEIP" as "IAU_REMOTEIP" from    "KAN3_IAU"."IAU_BASE" "IAU_BASE" where "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" = 'xmlpserver' Once you saved a sample XML for this data model, now you can create a report with this data model. Create Report Now you can use one of the BI Publisher’s layout options to design the report layout and visualize the auditing data. I’m a big fan of Online Layout Editor, it’s just so easy and simple to create reports, and on top of that, all the reports created with Online Layout Editor has the Interactive View with automatic data linking and filtering feature without any setting or coding. If you haven’t checked the Interactive View or Online Layout Editor you might want to check these previous blog posts. (Interactive Reporting with BI Publisher 11G, Interactive Master Detail Report Just A Few Clicks Away!) But of course, you can use other layout design option such as RTF template. Here are some sample screenshots of my report design with Online Layout Editor.     Visualize and Gain More Insights about your Customers (Users) ! Now you can visualize your auditing data to have better understanding and gain more insights about your reporting environment you manage. It’s been actually helping me personally to answer the  questios like below.  How many reports are accessed or opened yesterday, today, last week ? Who is accessing which report at what time ? What are the time windows when the most of the reports access happening ? What are the most viewed reports ? Who are the active users ? What are the # of reports access or user access trend for the last month, last 6 months, last 12 months, etc ? I was talking with one of the best concierge in the world at this hotel the other day, and he was telling me that the best concierge knows about their customers inside-out therefore they can provide a very private service that is customized to each customer to meet each customer’s specific needs. Well, this is true when it comes to how to administrate and manage your reporting environment, right ? The best way to serve your customers (report users, including both viewers and developers) is to understand how they use, what they use, when they use. Auditing is not just about compliance, but it’s the way to improve the customer service. The BI Publisher 11G Auditing feature enables just that to help you understand your customers better. Happy customer service, be the best reporting concierge! p.s. please share with us on what other information would be helpful for you for the auditing! Always, any feedback is a great value and inspiration for us!  

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• R Package Installation with Oracle R Enterprise

  - by Sherry LaMonica-Oracle

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Programming languages give developers the opportunity to write reusable functions and to bundle those functions into logical deployable entities. In R, these are called packages. R has thousands of such packages provided by an almost equally large group of third-party contributors. To allow others to benefit from these packages, users can share packages on the CRAN system for use by the vast R development community worldwide. R's package system along with the CRAN framework provides a process for authoring, documenting and distributing packages to millions of users. In this post, we'll illustrate the various ways in which such R packages can be installed for use with R and together with Oracle R Enterprise. In the following, the same instructions apply when using either open source R or Oracle R Distribution. In this post, we cover the following package installation scenarios for: R command line Linux shell command line Use with Oracle R Enterprise Installation on Exadata or RAC Installing all packages in a CRAN Task View Troubleshooting common errors 1. R Package Installation BasicsR package installation basics are outlined in Chapter 6 of the R Installation and Administration Guide. There are two ways to install packages from the command line: from the R command line and from the shell command line. For this first example on Oracle Linux using Oracle R Distribution, we’ll install the arules package as root so that packages will be installed in the default R system-wide location where all users can access it, /usr/lib64/R/library.Within R, using the install.packages function always attempts to install the latest version of the requested package available on CRAN:R> install.packages("arules")If the arules package depends upon other packages that are not already installed locally, the R installer automatically downloads and installs those required packages. This is a huge benefit that frees users from the task of identifying and resolving those dependencies.You can also install R from the shell command line. This is useful for some packages when an internet connection is not available or for installing packages not uploaded to CRAN. To install packages this way, first locate the package on CRAN and then download the package source to your local machine. For example:$ wget http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/arules_1.1-2.tar.gz Then, install the package using the command R CMD INSTALL:$ R CMD INSTALL arules_1.1-2.tar.gzA major difference between installing R packages using the R package installer at the R command line and shell command line is that package dependencies must be resolved manually at the shell command line. Package dependencies are listed in the Depends section of the package’s CRAN site. If dependencies are not identified and installed prior to the package’s installation, you will see an error similar to:ERROR: dependency ‘xxx’ is not available for package ‘yyy’As a best practice and to save time, always refer to the package’s CRAN site to understand the package dependencies prior to attempting an installation. If you don’t run R as root, you won’t have permission to write packages into the default system-wide location and you will be prompted to create a personal library accessible by your userid. You can accept the personal library path chosen by R, or specify the library location by passing parameters to the install.packages function. For example, to create an R package repository in your home directory: R> install.packages("arules", lib="/home/username/Rpackages")or$ R CMD INSTALL arules_1.1-2.tar.gz --library=/home/username/RpackagesRefer to the install.packages help file in R or execute R CMD INSTALL --help at the shell command line for a full list of command line options.To set the library location and avoid having to specify this at every package install, simply create the R startup environment file .Renviron in your home area if it does not already exist, and add the following piece of code to it:R_LIBS_USER = "/home/username/Rpackages" 2. Setting the RepositoryEach time you install an R package from the R command line, you are asked which CRAN mirror, or server, R should use. To set the repository and avoid having to specify this during every package installation, create the R startup command file .Rprofile in your home directory and add the following R code to it:cat("Setting Seattle repository")r = getOption("repos") r["CRAN"] = "http://cran.fhcrc.org/"options(repos = r)rm(r) This code snippet sets the R package repository to the Seattle CRAN mirror at the start of each R session. 3. Installing R Packages for use with Oracle R EnterpriseEmbedded R execution with Oracle R Enterprise allows the use of CRAN or other third-party R packages in user-defined R functions executed on the Oracle Database server. The steps for installing and configuring packages for use with Oracle R Enterprise are the same as for open source R. The database-side R engine just needs to know where to find the R packages.The Oracle R Enterprise installation is performed by user oracle, which typically does not have write permission to the default site-wide library, /usr/lib64/R/library. On Linux and UNIX platforms, the Oracle R Enterprise Server installation provides the ORE script, which is executed from the operating system shell to install R packages and to start R. The ORE script is a wrapper for the default R script, a shell wrapper for the R executable. It can be used to start R, run batch scripts, and build or install R packages. Unlike the default R script, the ORE script installs packages to a location writable by user oracle and accessible by all ORE users - $ORACLE_HOME/R/library.To install a package on the database server so that it can be used by any R user and for use in embedded R execution, an Oracle DBA would typically download the package source from CRAN using wget. If the package depends on any packages that are not in the R distribution in use, download the sources for those packages, also.  For a single Oracle Database instance, replace the R script with ORE to install the packages in the same location as the Oracle R Enterprise packages. $ wget http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/arules_1.1-2.tar.gz$ ORE CMD INSTALL arules_1.1-2.tar.gzBehind the scenes, the ORE script performs the equivalent of setting R_LIBS_USER to the value of $ORACLE_HOME/R/library, and all R packages installed with the ORE script are installed to this location. For installing a package on multiple database servers, such as those in an Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) or a multinode Oracle Exadata Database Machine environment, use the ORE script in conjunction with the Exadata Distributed Command Line Interface (DCLI) utility.$ dcli -g nodes -l oracle ORE CMD INSTALL arules_1.1-1.tar.gz The DCLI -g flag designates a file containing a list of nodes to install on, and the -l flag specifies the user id to use when executing the commands. For more information on using DCLI with Oracle R Enterprise, see Chapter 5 in the Oracle R Enterprise Installation Guide.If you are using an Oracle R Enterprise client, install the package the same as any R package, bearing in mind that you must install the same version of the package on both the client and server machines to avoid incompatibilities. 4. CRAN Task ViewsCRAN also maintains a set of Task Views that identify packages associated with a particular task or methodology. Task Views are helpful in guiding users through the huge set of available R packages. They are actively maintained by volunteers who include detailed annotations for routines and packages. If you find one of the task views is a perfect match, you can install every package in that view using the ctv package - an R package for automating package installation. To use the ctv package to install a task view, first, install and load the ctv package.R> install.packages("ctv")R> library(ctv)Then query the names of the available task views and install the view you choose.R> available.views() R> install.views("TimeSeries") 5. Using and Managing R packages To use a package, start up R and load packages one at a time with the library command.Load the arules package in your R session. R> library(arules)Verify the version of arules installed.R> packageVersion("arules")[1] '1.1.2'Verify the version of arules installed on the database server using embedded R execution.R> ore.doEval(function() packageVersion("arules"))View the help file for the apropos function in the arules packageR> ?aproposOver time, your package repository will contain more and more packages, especially if you are using the system-wide repository where others are adding additional packages. It’s good to know the entire set of R packages accessible in your environment. To list all available packages in your local R session, use the installed.packages command:R> myLocalPackages <- row.names(installed.packages())R> myLocalPackagesTo access the list of available packages on the ORE database server from the ORE client, use the following embedded R syntax: R> myServerPackages <- ore.doEval(function() row.names(installed.packages()) R> myServerPackages 6. Troubleshooting Common ProblemsInstalling Older Versions of R packagesIf you immediately upgrade to the latest version of R, you will have no problem installing the most recent versions of R packages. However, if your version of R is older, some of the more recent package releases will not work and install.packages will generate a message such as: Warning message: In install.packages("arules") : package ‘arules’ is not availableThis is when you have to go to the Old sources link on the CRAN page for the arules package and determine which version is compatible with your version of R.Begin by determining what version of R you are using:$ R --versionOracle Distribution of R version 3.0.1 (--) -- "Good Sport" Copyright (C) The R Foundation for Statistical Computing Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)Given that R-3.0.1 was released May 16, 2013, any version of the arules package released after this date may work. Scanning the arules archive, we might try installing version 0.1.1-1, released in January of 2014:$ wget http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/arules/arules_1.1-1.tar.gz$ R CMD INSTALL arules_1.1-1.tar.gzFor use with ORE:$ ORE CMD INSTALL arules_1.1-1.tar.gzThe "package not available" error can also be thrown if the package you’re trying to install lives elsewhere, either another R package site, or it’s been removed from CRAN. A quick Google search usually leads to more information on the package’s location and status.Oracle R Enterprise is not in the R library pathOn Linux hosts, after installing the ORE server components, starting R, and attempting to load the ORE packages, you may receive the error:R> library(ORE)Error in library(ORE) : there is no package called ‘ORE’If you know the ORE packages have been installed and you receive this error, this is the result of not starting R with the ORE script. To resolve this problem, exit R and restart using the ORE script. After restarting R and ">running the command to load the ORE packages, you should not receive any errors.$ ORER> library(ORE)On Windows servers, the solution is to make the location of the ORE packages visible to R by adding them to the R library paths. To accomplish this, exit R, then add the following lines to the .Rprofile file. On Windows, the .Rprofile file is located in R\etc directory C:\Program Files\R\R-<version>\etc. Add the following lines:.libPaths("<path to $ORACLE_HOME>/R/library")The above line will tell R to include the R directory in the Oracle home as part of its search path. When you start R, the path above will be included, and future R package installations will also be saved to $ORACLE_HOME/R/library. This path should be writable by the user oracle, or the userid for the DBA tasked with installing R packages.Binary package compiled with different version of RBy default, R will install pre-compiled versions of packages if they are found. If the version of R under which the package was compiled does not match your installed version of R you will get an error message:Warning message: package ‘xxx’ was built under R version 3.0.0The solution is to download the package source and build it for your version of R.$ wget http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Archive/arules/arules_1.1-1.tar.gz$ R CMD INSTALL arules_1.1-1.tar.gzFor use with ORE:$ ORE CMD INSTALL arules_1.1-1.tar.gzUnable to execute files in /tmp directoryBy default, R uses the /tmp directory to install packages. On security conscious machines, the /tmp directory is often marked as "noexec" in the /etc/fstab file. This means that no file under /tmp can ever be executed, and users who attempt to install R package will receive an error:ERROR: 'configure' exists but is not executable -- see the 'R Installation and Administration Manual’The solution is to set the TMP and TMPDIR environment variables to a location which R will use as the compilation directory. For example:$ mkdir <some path>/tmp$ export TMPDIR= <some path>/tmp$ export TMP= <some path>/tmpThis error typically appears on Linux client machines and not database servers, as Oracle Database writes to the value of the TMP environment variable for several tasks, including holding temporary files during database installation. 7. Creating your own R packageCreating your own package and submitting to CRAN is for advanced users, but it is not difficult. The procedure to follow, along with details of R's package system, is detailed in the Writing R Extensions manual.

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• sftp Bad message - (badly formatted packet or protocol incompatibility)

  - by culter

  I have two servers connected through SFTP. When I'm trying to upload file DONATE_SPLATNOSTSFRB-1503_20120315.xls.gpg via WinSCP, it works fine, but when I change file name to DONATE_SPLATNOSTSFRB-1503_20120315.gpg it sometimes upload to server and sometimes not. When It's uploaded, I have problems to delete it. I get this error message: Bad message - (badly formatted packet or protocol incompatibility) Error code: 5 Error message from server: Bad Message Request code: 13 Others files works fine e.g.: DONATE_PREDSFRB-0212_20120315.gpg Thank you.

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• Remove expired PXE certificates from SCCM

  - by newmanth

  Our SCCM 2007 R2 environment, which runs in native mode, just had its PXE client certificates renewed. Now, the site server automatically blocks the old certificates, but it appears that there is no functionality to actually delete them. I know it doesn't really affect anything other than aesthetics, but as we've had a few renewals now, the certificate list is getting long and cluttered (and unlike my desk, I like to try to keep our servers neat and organized). Does anyone know of a way to remove the old certs?

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• Repair .NET Framework on Windows 2008 R2

  - by Niels R.

  One of our web servers has become inoperable and after some searching we think the .NET Framework might be corrupted in some way. The server runs Windows 2008 R2 and uses the 2.0 framework for the ASP.NET application that is (or better: was) running using IIS 7.5. I'm wondering how we can reinstall the .NET 2.0 Framework on Windows 2008 R2. Any ideas? Kind regards, Niels R.

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