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• 12.04 making BCM4313 card work with aircrack-ng?

  - by Charles Forest

  I'm a real Linux Noob, just started using it (this month) and until now i had no issues. now i'm trying to set-up aircrack-ng on my laptop, but it seems like it's using the worst card possible (or almost) there is a TON of tutorial on this card (seems to be hell to set-up) i have tryed some, but i ended up uninstalling my drivers, messing with my desktops, and ended by having no more "X" to close my windows (i have no clue how i ended there) i just re-installed my linux (took me 2 hours to setup everything again), but now i'm a bit "Scared" to try tutorials randomly again. Right now it says the driver is wl, wich is not the one i want (AFAIK it's not supported) i'm not sure what kind of informations are needed, but here's what i think could be usefull. lspci -knn 00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller [8086:0104] (rev 09) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel 00:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port [8086:0101] (rev 09) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0116] (rev 09) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: i915 Kernel modules: i915 00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 [8086:1c3a] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: mei Kernel modules: mei 00:1a.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 [8086:1c2d] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd 00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:1c20] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel 00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 [8086:1c10] (rev b4) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 [8086:1c16] (rev b4) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1c.4 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 [8086:1c18] (rev b4) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 [8086:1c26] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd 00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation HM65 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller [8086:1c49] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel modules: iTCO_wdt 00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller [8086:1c03] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: ahci 00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller [8086:1c22] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel modules: i2c-i801 01:00.0 3D controller [0302]: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 540M] [10de:0df4] (rev a1) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: nouveau Kernel modules: nouveau, nvidiafb WIRELESS CARD 02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4727] (rev 01) Subsystem: Wistron NeWeb Corp. Device [185f:051a] Kernel driver in use: wl Kernel modules: wl, bcma, brcmsmac REST... 03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 06) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: r8169 Kernel modules: r8169 04:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller [1033:0194] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd Also, if i'm "screwed" with my hardware, just tell me.

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• Need help with chronic slow wifi connections

  - by mgeorge

  I have had chronic slow wifi connections on several networks for a while now, I think since my update to 12.04 when it came out. I have tried many of the tips and tricks already available out there in the forums with no luck (wicd, etc..). I want to see if any of you experts out there might be able to help me, and thanks in advance!! I use ubuntu 12.04 on a lenovo ideapad y650, and most networks I connect to lose the connection frequently or do not give appropriate bandwidth when I am connected. Here are some results of the usual go-to system checks: cat /etc/lsb-release; uname -a: DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=12.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=precise DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS" Linux mgeorge-lenovo 3.2.0-48-generic-pae #74-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jun 6 20:05:01 UTC 2013 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 net: 04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN [Shiloh] Network Connection [8086:4237] Subsystem: Intel Corporation WiFi Link 5100 AGN [8086:1211] Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi -- 08:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5784M Gigabit Ethernet PCIe [14e4:1698] (rev 10) Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:3878] Kernel driver in use: tg3 lsusb: Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 090c:7371 Silicon Motion, Inc. - Taiwan (formerly Feiya Technology Corp.) iwconfig: lo no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11abgn ESSID:"Dyno" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: CC:5D:4E:46:0A:93 Bit Rate=150 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=70/70 Signal level=-40 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:948 Invalid misc:728 Missed beacon:0 eth0 no wireless extensions. rfkill list all: 0: ideapad_wlan: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no 1: ideapad_bluetooth: Bluetooth Soft blocked: yes Hard blocked: no 2: phy0: Wireless LAN Soft blocked: no Hard blocked: no lsmod: Module Size Used by uvcvideo 67203 0 videodev 86588 1 uvcvideo nouveau 712674 3 ttm 65344 1 nouveau drm_kms_helper 45466 1 nouveau drm 197641 5 nouveau,ttm,drm_kms_helper i2c_algo_bit 13199 1 nouveau mxm_wmi 12893 1 nouveau wmi 18744 1 mxm_wmi joydev 17393 0 arc4 12473 2 snd_hda_codec_realtek 174313 1 snd_hda_codec_hdmi 31775 1 snd_hda_intel 32719 3 snd_hda_codec 109562 3 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel snd_hwdep 13276 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 80916 3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_seq_midi 13132 0 snd_rawmidi 25424 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq_midi_event 14475 1 snd_seq_midi psmouse 86520 0 snd_seq 51592 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event serio_raw 13027 0 snd_timer 28931 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14172 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq iwlwifi 366509 0 mac80211 436493 1 iwlwifi snd 62218 16 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,sn d_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device ideapad_laptop 17890 0 sparse_keymap 13658 1 ideapad_laptop cfg80211 178877 2 iwlwifi,mac80211 ir_lirc_codec 12739 0 lirc_dev 18700 1 ir_lirc_codec soundcore 14635 1 snd snd_page_alloc 14108 2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm ir_mce_kbd_decoder 12681 0 ir_sony_decoder 12462 0 ir_jvc_decoder 12459 0 ir_rc6_decoder 12459 0 ir_rc5_decoder 12459 0 rc_rc6_mce 12454 0 ir_nec_decoder 12459 0 video 19115 1 nouveau ene_ir 18019 0 rc_core 21263 10 ir_lirc_codec,ir_mce_kbd_decoder,ir_sony_decoder,ir_jvc_decoder,ir_rc6_decoder,ir_rc5_decoder,rc_rc6_mce,ir_nec_decoder,ene_ir bnep 17830 2 rfcomm 38139 0 parport_pc 32114 0 bluetooth 158479 10 bnep,rfcomm ppdev 12849 0 binfmt_misc 17292 1 mac_hid 13077 0 lp 17455 0 parport 40930 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp tg3 141414 0 nm-tool: NetworkManager Tool State: connected (global) - Device: eth0 ----------------------------------------------------------------- Type: Wired Driver: tg3 State: unavailable Default: no HW Address: 00:23:5A:CC:85:BD Capabilities: Carrier Detect: yes Wired Properties Carrier: off - Device: wlan0 [Dyno] -------------------------------------------------------- Type: 802.11 WiFi Driver: iwlwifi State: connected Default: yes HW Address: 00:22:FA:D0:94:CA Capabilities: Speed: 150 Mb/s Wireless Properties WEP Encryption: yes WPA Encryption: yes WPA2 Encryption: yes Wireless Access Points (* = current AP) *Dyno: Infra, CC:5D:4E:46:0A:93, Freq 2412 MHz, Rate 54 Mb/s, Strength 81 WPA2 IPv4 Settings: Address: 10.0.0.43 Prefix: 24 (255.255.255.0) Gateway: 10.0.0.1 DNS: 10.0.0.1

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• eSTEP Newsletter November 2012

  - by mseika

  Dear Partners,We would like to inform you that the November '12 issue of our Newsletter is now available.The issue contains information to the following topics: News from CorpOracle Celebrates 25 Years of SPARC Innovation; IDC White Papers Finds Growing Customer Comfort with Oracle Solaris Operating System; Oracle Buys Instantis; Pillar Axiom OpenWorld Highlights; Announcement Oracle Solaris 11.1 Availability (data sheet, new features, FAQ's, corporate pages, internal blog, download links, Oracle shop); Announcing StorageTek VSM 6; Announcement Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 Availability (new features, FAQ's, cluster corp page, download site, shop for media); Announcement: Oracle Database Appliance 2.4 patch update becomes available Technical SectionOracle White papers on SPARC SuperCluster; Understanding Parallel Execution; With LTFS, Tape is Gaining Storage Ground with additional link to How to Create Oracle Solaris 11 Zones with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center; Provisioning Capabilities of Oracle Enterprise Ops Center Manager 12c; Maximizing your SPARC T4 Oracle Solaris Application Performance with the following articles: SPARC T4 Servers Set World Record on Siebel CRM 8.1.1.4 Benchmark, SPARC T4-Based Highly Scalable Solutions Posts New World Record on SPECjEnterprise2010 Benchmark, SPARC T4 Server Delivers Outstanding Performance on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g; Oracle SUN ZFS Storage Appliance Reference Architecture for VMware vSphere4; Why 4K? - George Wilson's ZFS Day Talk; Pillar Axiom 600 with connected subjects: Oracle Introduces Pillar Axiom Release 5 Storage System Software, Driving down the high cost of Storage, This Provisioning with Pilar Axiom 600, Pillar Axiom 600- System overview and architecture; Migrate to Oracle;s SPARC Systems; Top 5 Reasons to Migrate to Oracle's SPARC Systems Learning & EventsRecently delivered Techcasts: Learning Paths; Oracle Database 11g: Database Administration (New) - Learning Path; Webcast: Drill Down on Disaster Recovery; What are Oracle Users Doing to Improve Availability and Disaster Recovery; SAP NetWeaver and Oracle Exadata Database Machine ReferencesARTstor Selects Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage 7420 Appliances To Support Rapidly Growing Digital Image Library, Scottish Widows Cuts Sales Administration 20%, Reduces Time to Prepare Reports by 75%, and Achieves Return on Investment in First Year, Oracle's CRM Cloud Service Powers Innovation: Applications on Demand; Technology on Demand, How toHow to Migrate Your Data to Oracle Solaris 11 Using Shadow Migration; Using svcbundle to Create SMF Manifests and Profiles in Oracle Solaris 11; How to prepare a Sun ZFS Storage Appliance to Serve as a Storage Devise with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c; Command Summary: Basic Operations with the Image Packaging System In Oracle Solaris 11; How to Update to Oracle Solaris 11.1 Using the Image Packaging System, How to Migrate Oracle Database from Oracle Solaris 8 to Oracle Solaris 11; Setting Up, Configuring, and Using an Oracle WebLogic Server Cluster; Ease the Chaos with Automated Patching: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c; Book excerpt: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud HandbookYou find the Newsletter on our portal under eSTEP News ---> Latest Newsletter. You will need to provide your email address and the pin below to get access. Link to the portal is shown below.URL: http://launch.oracle.com/PIN: eSTEP_2011Previous published Newsletters can be found under the Archived Newsletters section and more useful information under the Events, Download and Links tab. Feel free to explore and any feedback is appreciated to help us improve the service and information we deliver.Thanks and best regards,Partner HW Enablement EMEA

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• Microsoft 2003 DNS sometimes cant query for some A pointers when their TTL expires

  - by Bq

  Warning Long question :) We have a win 2003 server with a DNS server, every now and then it cant provide us with some A pointers for a specific domain. I have a small script running which asks for SOA,NS and A records for the domain in question and sometimes when the TTL expires the DNS fails to get the A records again, a Clear Cache fixes the problem.. Have a look Here it worked when the TTL expired Thu Apr 29 15:24:20 METDST 2010 dig basefarm.net soa basefarm.net. 64908 IN SOA ns01.osl.basefarm.net. hostmaster.basefarm.net. 2010042613 86400 3600 2419200 600 ns01.osl.basefarm.net. 299 IN A 81.93.160.4 dig basefarm.net ns basefarm.net. 64908 IN NS ns01.sth.basefarm.net. basefarm.net. 64908 IN NS ns01.osl.basefarm.net. ns01.sth.basefarm.net. 299 IN A 80.76.149.76 ns01.osl.basefarm.net. 299 IN A 81.93.160.4 dig ns01.sth.basefarm.net a ns01.sth.basefarm.net. 299 IN A 80.76.149.76 The TTL expired for ns01.sth.basefarm.net and ns01.osl.basefarm.net but the DNS managed to get the new values (TTL 3600) Thu Apr 29 15:29:20 METDST 2010 dig basefarm.net soa basefarm.net. 64608 IN SOA ns01.osl.basefarm.net. hostmaster.basefarm.net. 2010042613 86400 3600 2419200 600 ns01.osl.basefarm.net. 3600 IN A 81.93.160.4 dig basefarm.net ns basefarm.net. 64608 IN NS ns01.sth.basefarm.net. basefarm.net. 64608 IN NS ns01.osl.basefarm.net. ns01.sth.basefarm.net. 3600 IN A 80.76.149.76 ns01.osl.basefarm.net. 3600 IN A 81.93.160.4 dig ns01.sth.basefarm.net a ns01.sth.basefarm.net. 3600 IN A 80.76.149.76 But then another time it fails, and we need to clear the dns cache for it to start working again... Thu Apr 29 17:24:23 METDST 2010 dig basefarm.net soa basefarm.net. 57705 IN SOA ns01.osl.basefarm.net. hostmaster.basefarm.net. 2010042613 86400 3600 2419200 600 ns01.osl.basefarm.net. 299 IN A 81.93.160.4 dig basefarm.net ns basefarm.net. 57705 IN NS ns01.sth.basefarm.net. basefarm.net. 57705 IN NS ns01.osl.basefarm.net. ns01.sth.basefarm.net. 299 IN A 80.76.149.76 ns01.osl.basefarm.net. 299 IN A 81.93.160.4 dig ns01.sth.basefarm.net a ns01.sth.basefarm.net. 299 IN A 80.76.149.76 The TTL expires but the DNS cant get the ip addresses for ns01.sth.basefarm.net and ns01.osl.basefarm.net Thu Apr 29 17:29:23 METDST 2010 dig basefarm.net soa basefarm.net. 57405 IN SOA ns01.osl.basefarm.net. hostmaster.basefarm.net. 2010042613 86400 3600 2419200 600 ns01.osl.basefarm.net. 3600 IN A 81.93.160.4 dig basefarm.net ns basefarm.net. 57405 IN NS ns01.sth.basefarm.net. basefarm.net. 57405 IN NS ns01.osl.basefarm.net. dig ns01.sth.basefarm.net a Lookup failed I'm really lost on this one and have tried asking Google but to no avail..

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• How to use Bonjour?

  - by Roman

  First, what exactly Bonjour does (pleas read my guesses written bellow)? Here I found out that Bonjour enables automatic discovery of computers, devices, and services on IP networks. But I thought that it not only "discovers devices on IP network" it also creates an IP network by assigning IP addresses to devices where Bonjour is running. Am I right? And I still miss the essence. Does it work in the following way? First I connect devices (for example laptops) physically so that they potentially can communicate with each other. Then, let say, on some laptops I have Bonjour running and then, as a consequence, these laptops assign IP addresses to them self in automatic way. So, laptops (where Bonjour is running) build an IP network. Does it work in this way? Or may be a computer running Bonjour is not considered as a service and it does not broadcast itself just because Bonjour is running on this computer. I mean that the applications running on the computers need to use Bonjour to broadcast themself. So, it is applications that broadcast themself (not computers) and it is not done automatically (application needs to broadcast themself explicitly). Is it right? How exactly my application can broadcast itself? Can I use command line to register an service (so that all applications using Bonjour knows that a new service appeared)? Further, I would like to have an application which use the IP network created by Bonjour. For that my application needs to know which devices/services are present in the network. In more details, my application needs to have a list of services. Each service in the list should have a name, the IP address where it is running and the port which is used by the application. Can Bonjour provide this information in some way? If it is the case, how exactly it works. How my program can get this information from Bonjour? Can my program read some file created by Bonjour and containing the above mentioned information? Can I use some commands in command line to retrieve this information? I have a special interest in accessing the information about services from files, environment variables or commands in command line. These options seems to me to be the simplest! Since in these case I do not need to use any additional libraries to communicate with Bonjour from a particular programming language. P.S. Pleas ask questions if something is not clear in my question. I will try to formulate my question in a more clear way. P.P.S. I use Windows 7. ADDED: I plan to write my applications in PHP. Every computer should run a Apache web server. And I want to use Bonjour to help computer discover each other (computers are working in a local network).

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• Bypass BIOS password set by faulty Toshiba firmware on Satellite A55 laptop?

  - by Brian

  How can the CMOS be cleared on the Toshiba Satellite A55-S1065? I have this 7 year old laptop that has been crippled by a glitch in its BIOS: 'A "Password =" prompt may be displayed when the computer is turned on, even though no power-on password has been set. If this happens, there is no password that will satisfy the password request. The computer will be unusable until this problem is resolved. [..] The occurrence of this problem on any particular computer is unpredictable -- it may never happen, but it could happen any time that the computer is turned on. [..] Toshiba will cover the cost of this repair under warranty until Dec 31, 2010.' -Toshiba As they stated, this machine is "unusable." The escape key does not bypass the prompt (nor does any other key), thus no operating system can be booted and no firmware updates can be installed. After doing some research, I found solutions that have been suggested for various Toshiba Satellite models afflicted by this glitch: "Make arrangements with a Toshiba Authorized Service Provider to have this problem resolved." -Toshiba (same link). Even prior to the expiration of Toshiba's support ("repair under warranty until Dec 31, 2010"), there have been reports that this solution is prohibitively expensive, labor charges accruing even when the laptop is still under warranty, and other reports that are generally discouraging: "They were unable to fix it and the guy who worked on it said he couldn’t find the jumpers on the motherboard to clear the BIOS. I paid $39 for my troubles and still have the password problem." - Steve. Since the costs of the repairs can now exceed the value of the hardware, it would seem this is a DIY solution, or a non-solution (i.e. the hardware is trash). Build a Toshiba parallel loopback by stripping and soldering the wires on a DB25 plug to connect connect these pins: 1-5-10, 2-11, 3-17, 4-12, 6-16, 7-13, 8-14, 9-15, 18-25. -CGSecurity. According to a list of supported models on pwcrack, this will likely not work for my Satellite A55-1065 (as well as many other models of similar age). -pwcrack Disconnect the laptop battery for an extended period of time. Doesn't work, laptop sat in a closet for several years without the battery connected and I forgot about the whole thing for awhile. The poor thing. Clear CMOS by setting the proper jumper setting or by removing the CMOS (RTC) battery, or by short circuiting a (hidden?) jumper that looks like a pair of solder marks -various sources for various Satellite models: Satellite A105: "you will see C88 clearly labeled right next the jack that the wireless card plugs into. There are two little solder squares (approx 1/16") at this location" -kerneltrap Satellite 1800: "Underneath the RAM there is black sticker, peel off the black sticker and you will reveal two little solder marks which are actually 'jumpers'. Very carefully hold a flat-head screwdriver touching both points and power on the unit briefly, effectively 'shorting' this circuit." -shadowfax2020 Satellite L300: "Short the B500 solder pads on the system board." -Lester Escobar Satellite A215: "Short the B500 solder pads on the system board." -fixya Clearing the CMOS could resolve the issue, but I cannot locate a jumper or a battery on this board. Nothing that looks remotely like a battery can be removed (everything is soldered). I have looked closely at the area around the memory and do not see any obvious solder pads that could be a secret jumper. Here are pictures (click for full resolution) : Where is the jumper (or solder pads) to short circuit and wipe the CMOS on this board? Possibly related questions: Remove Toshiba laptop BIOS password? Password Problem Toshiba Satellite..

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• PPPTP VPN from Ubuntu cannot connect

  - by Andrea Polci

  I'm trying to configure under Linux (Kubuntu 9.10) a VPN I already use from Windows. I installed the network-manager-pptp package and added the vpn under Network Manager. These are the parameter under "advanced" button: Authentication Methods: PAP, CHAP, MSCHAP, SMCHAP2, EAP (I tried also with MSCHAP and MSCHAP2 only) Use MPPE Encryption: yes Crypto: Any Use stateful encryption: no Compression: Allow BSD compression: yes Allow Deflate compression: yes Allow TCP header compression: yes Send PPP echo packets: no When I try to connnect it doesn't work and this is what I get in the system log: 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> Starting VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp'... 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp' started (org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp), PID 4931 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp' just appeared, activating connections 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] Plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.5//nm-pptp-pppd-plugin.so loaded. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin state changed: 3 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN connection 'MYVPN' (Connect) reply received. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices added (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0) 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager SCPlugin-Ifupdown: device added (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0): no ifupdown configuration found. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] Using interface ppp0 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/2 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4934] nm-pptp-service-4931 log[main:pptp.c:314]: The synchronous pptp option is NOT activated 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 7 'Outgoing-Call-Request' 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:858]: Received Outgoing Call Reply. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:897]: Outgoing call established (call ID 1, peer's call ID 14800). 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] CHAP authentication succeeded 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] CHAP authentication succeeded 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] LCP terminated by peer 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:929]: Call disconnect notification received (call id 14800) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:788]: Received Stop Control Connection Request. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 4 'Stop-Control-Connection-Reply' 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[callmgr_main:pptp_callmgr.c:258]: Closing connection (shutdown) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 12 'Call-Clear-Request' 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[callmgr_main:pptp_callmgr.c:258]: Closing connection (shutdown) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 12 'Call-Clear-Request' 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[call_callback:pptp_callmgr.c:79]: Closing connection (call state) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] Modem hangup 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] Connection terminated. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin failed: 1 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices removed (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] Exit. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin failed: 1 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin state changed: 6 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin state change reason: 0 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <WARN> connection_state_changed(): Could not process the request because no VPN connection was active. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> Policy set 'Auto eth0' (eth0) as default for routing and DNS. 2010-04-08 13:54:01 pcelena NetworkManager <debug> [1270727641.001390] ensure_killed(): waiting for vpn service pid 4931 to exit 2010-04-08 13:54:01 pcelena NetworkManager <debug> [1270727641.001479] ensure_killed(): vpn service pid 4931 cleaned up Does anyone has suggestion on what can be the problem and how to make it work?

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• Secure method of changing a user's password via Python script/non-interactively

  - by Matthew Rankin

  I've created a Python script using Fabric to configure a freshly built Slicehost Ubuntu slice. In case you're not familiar with Fabric, it uses Paramiko, a Python SSH2 client, to provide remote access "for application deployment or systems administration tasks." One of the first things I have the Fabric script do is to create a new admin user and set their password. Unlike Pexpect, Fabric cannot handle interactive commands on the remote system, so I need to set the user's password non-interactively. At present, I'm using the chpasswd command to change the password. This transmits the password as clear text over SSH to the remote system. Questions Is my current method of setting the password a security concern? Currently, the drawback I see is that Fabric shows the password as clear text on my local system as follows: [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] run: echo "johnsmith:supersecretpassw0rd" | chpasswd. Since I only run the Fabric script from my laptop, I don't think this is a security issue, but I'm interested in others' input. Is there a better method for setting the user's password non-interactively? Another option, would be to use Pexpect from within the Fabric script to set the password. Current Code # Fabric imports and host configuration excluded for brevity root_password = getpass.getpass("Root's password given by SliceManager: ") admin_username = prompt("Enter a username for the admin user to create: ") admin_password = getpass.getpass("Enter a password for the admin user: ") env.user = 'root' env.password = root_password # Create the admin group and add it to the sudoers file admin_group = 'admin' run('addgroup {group}'.format(group=admin_group)) run('echo "%{group} ALL=(ALL) ALL" >> /etc/sudoers'.format( group=admin_group) ) # Create the new admin user (default group=username); add to admin group run('adduser {username} --disabled-password --gecos ""'.format( username=admin_username) ) run('adduser {username} {group}'.format( username=admin_username, group=admin_group) ) # Set the password for the new admin user run('echo "{username}:{password}" | chpasswd'.format( username=admin_username, password=admin_password) ) Local System Terminal I/O $ fab config_rebuilt_slice Root's password given by SliceManager: Enter a username for the admin user to create: johnsmith Enter a password for the admin user: [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] run: addgroup admin [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Adding group `admin' (GID 1000) ... [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Done. [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] run: echo "%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL" >> /etc/sudoers [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] run: adduser johnsmith --disabled-password --gecos "" [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Adding user `johnsmith' ... [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Adding new group `johnsmith' (1001) ... [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Adding new user `johnsmith' (1000) with group `johnsmith' ... [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Creating home directory `/home/johnsmith' ... [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Copying files from `/etc/skel' ... [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] run: adduser johnsmith admin [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Adding user `johnsmith' to group `admin' ... [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Adding user johnsmith to group admin [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: Done. [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] run: echo "johnsmith:supersecretpassw0rd" | chpasswd [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] run: passwd --lock root [xxx.xx.xx.xxx] out: passwd: password expiry information changed. Done. Disconnecting from [email protected]... done.

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• PPTP VPN from Ubuntu cannot connect

  - by Andrea Polci

  I'm trying to configure under Linux (Kubuntu 9.10) a VPN I already use from Windows. I installed the network-manager-pptp package and added the VPN under Network Manager. These are the parameters under "advanced" button: Authentication Methods: PAP, CHAP, MSCHAP, MSCHAP2, EAP (I also tried "MSCHAP, MSCHAP2") Use MPPE Encryption: yes Crypto: Any Use stateful encryption: no Allow BSD compression: yes Allow Deflate compression: yes Allow TCP header compression: yes Send PPP echo packets: no When I try to connnect it doesn't work and this is what I get in the system log: 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> Starting VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp'... 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp' started (org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp), PID 4931 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp' just appeared, activating connections 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] Plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.5//nm-pptp-pppd-plugin.so loaded. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin state changed: 3 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN connection 'MYVPN' (Connect) reply received. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices added (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0) 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager SCPlugin-Ifupdown: device added (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0): no ifupdown configuration found. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] Using interface ppp0 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/2 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4934] nm-pptp-service-4931 log[main:pptp.c:314]: The synchronous pptp option is NOT activated 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 7 'Outgoing-Call-Request' 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:858]: Received Outgoing Call Reply. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:897]: Outgoing call established (call ID 1, peer's call ID 14800). 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] CHAP authentication succeeded 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] CHAP authentication succeeded 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] LCP terminated by peer 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:929]: Call disconnect notification received (call id 14800) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:788]: Received Stop Control Connection Request. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 4 'Stop-Control-Connection-Reply' 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[callmgr_main:pptp_callmgr.c:258]: Closing connection (shutdown) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 12 'Call-Clear-Request' 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[callmgr_main:pptp_callmgr.c:258]: Closing connection (shutdown) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 12 'Call-Clear-Request' 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[call_callback:pptp_callmgr.c:79]: Closing connection (call state) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] Modem hangup 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] Connection terminated. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin failed: 1 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices removed (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] Exit. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin failed: 1 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin state changed: 6 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin state change reason: 0 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <WARN> connection_state_changed(): Could not process the request because no VPN connection was active. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> Policy set 'Auto eth0' (eth0) as default for routing and DNS. 2010-04-08 13:54:01 pcelena NetworkManager <debug> [1270727641.001390] ensure_killed(): waiting for vpn service pid 4931 to exit 2010-04-08 13:54:01 pcelena NetworkManager <debug> [1270727641.001479] ensure_killed(): vpn service pid 4931 cleaned up The error that sticks out here is "pppd[4932] LCP terminated by peer". Does anyone has suggestion on what can be the problem and how to make it work?

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• moving raid 10 to another identical server both on Smart Array 6i controllers

  - by SalimQrdl

  I have dead HP DL 380G4 with RAID 1+0 with 1 logical volume from 4x72GB drives on built-in Smart Array 6i 128Mb BBWC. It was shut down properly. It seems it was usual death for Proliant with ILO led 2,3,8 lighting. I want to move array to another identical server with same raid firmware level. What is the best strategy?: I have RAID 1+0 on bay 0 bay 1 bay 2 bay 3 As I understand bay0+bay1 are in RAID 1 , bay2+bay3 are in RAID 1, and both RAID 1 pairs are in RAID 0. So should I : Clear RAID config on new server, insert bay 0, bay 2 and power-on or Create RAID 1+0 with 1 logical volume from clear HDDs , and then poweroff ,remove HDDs and insert 2 HDDs(bay 0, bay 2) from old RAID 1+0. then power-on. (each hdd has its raid position info stored but may be could work on same config) According to documentation for Smart Array 6i it could be possible to migrate. however one requirement point is unclear for me Before you move drives, the following conditions must be met: • The array is in its original configuration. " What is orginal and non-original config for RAID 1+0? Another point "If you want to move an array to another controller, you must also consider the following additional limitations: • All drives in the array must be moved at the same time." I want to move one hdd from each RAID 1 pair. to have mirrors untouched just in case. Do they mean to move all 4 simultaniously? Smart Array 6i User Guide: Moving Drives and Arrays You can move drives to other ID positionson the same array controller. You can also move a complete arrayfrom one controller to another, even if the controllers are on different servers. Before you move drives, the following conditions must be met: • If moving thedrives to a different server, the new server must have enough empty bays to accommodate all the drives simultaneously. • The move will not result in more than 14 physical drives per controller channel. • No controller will be configured with more than 32 logical volumes. • The array has no failed or missing drives. • The array is in its original configuration. • The controller is not reading from or writing to any of the spare drives in the array. • The controller is not running capacity expansion, capacity extension, or RAID or stripe size migration. • The controller is using the latestfirmware version (recommended). If you want to move an array to another controller, you must also consider the following additional limitations: • All drives in the array must be moved at the same time. • In most cases, a moved array (and the logical drives that it contains) can still undergo arraycapacity expansion, logical drive capacity extension, or migration of RAID level orstripe size. When all the conditions have been met: Back up all data before removing any drives or changing configuration. This step is requiredif you are moving data-containing drives from a controller that does not have a battery-backed cache. Power down the system. If you are moving an array from a controller that contains a RAID ADG logical volume to a controller that does not support RAID ADG: Move the drives. Power up the system. If a 1724 POST message is displayed, drive positions were changed successfully and the configuration was updated. If a 1785 (NotConfigured)POST message is displayed: a. Power down the system immediately to prevent data loss. b. Return the drives to their original locations. c. Restore the data from backup, if necessary. Check the new drive configuration byrunning ORCA or ACU ("Configuring an Array" on page 9).

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• How to automate org-refile for multiple todo

  - by lawlist

  I'm looking to automate org-refile so that it will find all of the matches and re-file them to a specific location (but not archive). I found a fully automated method of archiving multiple todo, and I am hopeful to find or create (with some help) something similar to this awesome function (but for a different heading / location other than archiving): https://github.com/tonyday567/jwiegley-dot-emacs/blob/master/dot-org.el (defun org-archive-done-tasks () (interactive) (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (while (re-search-forward "\* \\(None\\|Someday\\) " nil t) (if (save-restriction (save-excursion (org-narrow-to-subtree) (search-forward ":LOGBOOK:" nil t))) (forward-line) (org-archive-subtree) (goto-char (line-beginning-position)))))) I also found this (written by aculich), which is a step in the right direction, but still requires repeating the function manually: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7509463/how-to-move-a-subtree-to-another-subtree-in-org-mode-emacs ;; I also wanted a way for org-refile to refile easily to a subtree, so I wrote some code and generalized it so that it will set an arbitrary immediate target anywhere (not just in the same file). ;; Basic usage is to move somewhere in Tree B and type C-c C-x C-m to mark the target for refiling, then move to the entry in Tree A that you want to refile and type C-c C-w which will immediately refile into the target location you set in Tree B without prompting you, unless you called org-refile-immediate-target with a prefix arg C-u C-c C-x C-m. ;; Note that if you press C-c C-w in rapid succession to refile multiple entries it will preserve the order of your entries even if org-reverse-note-order is set to t, but you can turn it off to respect the setting of org-reverse-note-order with a double prefix arg C-u C-u C-c C-x C-m. (defvar org-refile-immediate nil "Refile immediately using `org-refile-immediate-target' instead of prompting.") (make-local-variable 'org-refile-immediate) (defvar org-refile-immediate-preserve-order t "If last command was also `org-refile' then preserve ordering.") (make-local-variable 'org-refile-immediate-preserve-order) (defvar org-refile-immediate-target nil) "Value uses the same format as an item in `org-refile-targets'." (make-local-variable 'org-refile-immediate-target) (defadvice org-refile (around org-immediate activate) (if (not org-refile-immediate) ad-do-it ;; if last command was `org-refile' then preserve ordering (let ((org-reverse-note-order (if (and org-refile-immediate-preserve-order (eq last-command 'org-refile)) nil org-reverse-note-order))) (ad-set-arg 2 (assoc org-refile-immediate-target (org-refile-get-targets))) (prog1 ad-do-it (setq this-command 'org-refile))))) (defadvice org-refile-cache-clear (after org-refile-history-clear activate) (setq org-refile-targets (default-value 'org-refile-targets)) (setq org-refile-immediate nil) (setq org-refile-immediate-target nil) (setq org-refile-history nil)) ;;;###autoload (defun org-refile-immediate-target (&optional arg) "Set current entry as `org-refile' target. Non-nil turns off `org-refile-immediate', otherwise `org-refile' will immediately refile without prompting for target using most recent entry in `org-refile-targets' that matches `org-refile-immediate-target' as the default." (interactive "P") (if (equal arg '(16)) (progn (setq org-refile-immediate-preserve-order (not org-refile-immediate-preserve-order)) (message "Order preserving is turned: %s" (if org-refile-immediate-preserve-order "on" "off"))) (setq org-refile-immediate (unless arg t)) (make-local-variable 'org-refile-targets) (let* ((components (org-heading-components)) (level (first components)) (heading (nth 4 components)) (string (substring-no-properties heading))) (add-to-list 'org-refile-targets (append (list (buffer-file-name)) (cons :regexp (format "^%s %s$" (make-string level ?*) string)))) (setq org-refile-immediate-target heading)))) (define-key org-mode-map "\C-c\C-x\C-m" 'org-refile-immediate-target) It sure would be helpful if aculich, or some other maven, could please create a variable similar to (setq org-archive-location "~/0.todo.org::* Archived Tasks") so users can specify the file and heading, which is already a part of the org-archive-subtree functionality. I'm doing a search and mark because I don't have the wherewithal to create something like org-archive-location for this setup. EDIT: One step closer -- almost home free . . . (defun lawlist-auto-refile () (interactive) (beginning-of-buffer) (re-search-forward "\* UNDATED") (org-refile-immediate-target) ;; cursor must be on a heading to work. (save-excursion (re-search-backward "\* UNDATED") ;; must be written in such a way so that sub-entries of * UNDATED are not searched; or else infinity loop. (while (re-search-backward "\* \\(None\\|Someday\\) " nil t) (org-refile) ) ) )

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• Wordpress Permissions OS X & MAMP

  - by Matt2020

  I have installed several local versions of Wordpress for development purposes. After the install I can create posts, pages and edit admin options. However as soon as try to upload images which would be saved in wp_content/uploads I get an error: Upload Error: Unable to create directory ...../blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/05. Is its parent directory writable by the server? Looks like MAMP server runs as user _www The blog directory is owned by User1 and the group User1 _www is not in the User1 group, should it be? I do not want to chmod 777 or 765 on the directories just to get it going. Googled up a couple of references: http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions in "Permission Scheme for WordPress" All files should be owned by your user (ftp) account on your web server, and should be writable by that account. On shared hosts, files should never be owned by the webserver process itself (sometimes this is www, or apache, or nobody user). Any file that needs write access from WordPress should be owned or group-owned by the user account used by the WordPress (which may be different than the server account). For example, you may have a user account that lets you FTP files back and forth to your server, but your server itself may run using a separate user, in a separate usergroup, such as dhapache or nobody. If WordPress is running as the FTP account, that account needs to have write access, i.e., be the owner of the files, or belong to a group that has write access. In the latter case, that would mean permissions are set more permissively than default (for example, 775 rather than 755 for folders, and 664 instead of 644). User and group are User1 (which is admin). Running "ps aux | grep httpd" is running as _www So I think this means Wordpress is running as user _www. So the advice seems contradictory: "files should never be owned by the webserver process" i.e. _www but then later it says "Any file that needs write access from WordPress should be owned or group-owned by the user account used by the WordPress" So isn't this _www again? Another search found this url http://dancingengineer.com/computing/2009/07/how-to-install-wordpress-on-mac-os-x-leopard States Which says: My preferred way to do this is to change the group of the wordpress directory and its contents to _www and give write permissions to the group. Keep the owner as your "username". $ cd /Users/"username"/Sites $ sudo chown -R username:_www wordpress_directory $ sudo chmod -R g+w wordpress_directory However, when I tried this, it did not work for automatic upgrades to newer versions of WordPress although it worked for automatically updating the .htaccess file for pretty permalinks. It is not entirely clear to me what should be done. This last suggestion seems to be saying change the group from User1 to _www and give the group write access, but Wordpress upgrades won't work. Is this the right solution? I would have thought there would be a clear way to set this up on OS X 10.6? Be great if there was a plugin that could run a script for each of the main OS's that Wordpress runs on.

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• Configuring nginx server to handle requests from multiple domains

  - by KillABug

  Use Case:- I am working on a web application which allows to create HTML templates and publish them on amazon S3.Now to publish the websites I use nginx as a proxy server. What the proxy server does is,when a user enters the website URL,I want to identify how to check if the request comes from my application i.e app.mysite.com(This won't change) and route it to apache for regular access,if its coming from some other domain like a regular URL www.mysite.com(This needs to be handled dynamically.Can be random) it goes to the S3 bucket that hosts the template. My current configuration is: user nginx; worker_processes 1; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] "$request" ' '$status $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log main; charset utf-8; keepalive_timeout 65; server_tokens off; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay off; Default Server Block to catch undefined host names server { listen 80; server_name app.mysite.com; access_log off; error_log off; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_connect_timeout 90; proxy_send_timeout 90; proxy_read_timeout 90; client_max_body_size 10m; client_body_buffer_size 128k; proxy_buffer_size 4k; proxy_buffers 4 32k; proxy_busy_buffers_size 64k; } } } Load all the sites include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; Updates as I was not clear enough :- My question is how can I handle both the domains in the config file.My nginx is a proxy server on port 80 on an EC2 instance.This also hosts my application that runs on apache on a differnet port.So any request coming for my application will come from a domain app.mysite.com and I also want to proxy the hosted templates on S3 which are inside a bucket say sites.mysite.com/coolsite.com/index.html.So if someone hits coolsite.com I want to proxy it to the folder sites.mysite.com/coolsite.com/index.html and not to app.syartee.com.Hope I am clear The other server block: # Server for S3 server { # Listen on port 80 for all IPs associated with your machine listen 80; # Catch all other server names server_name _; //I want it to handle other domains then app.mysite.com # This code gets the host without www. in front and places it inside # the $host_without_www variable # If someone requests www.coolsite.com, then $host_without_www will have the value coolsite.com set $host_without_www $host; if ($host ~* www\.(.*)) { set $host_without_www $1; } location / { # This code rewrites the original request, and adds the host without www in front # E.g. if someone requests # /directory/file.ext?param=value # from the coolsite.com site the request is rewritten to # /coolsite.com/directory/file.ext?param=value set $foo 'http://sites.mysite.com'; # echo "$foo"; rewrite ^(.*)$ $foo/$host_without_www$1 break; # The rewritten request is passed to S3 proxy_pass http://sites.mysite.com; include /etc/nginx/proxy_params; } } Also I understand I will have to make the DNS changes in the cname of the domain.I guess I will have to add app.mysite.com under the CNAME of the template domain name?Please correct if wrong. Thank you for your time

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• GZip/Deflate Compression in ASP.NET MVC

  - by Rick Strahl

  A long while back I wrote about GZip compression in ASP.NET. In that article I describe two generic helper methods that I've used in all sorts of ASP.NET application from WebForms apps to HttpModules and HttpHandlers that require gzip or deflate compression. The same static methods also work in ASP.NET MVC. Here are the two routines:/// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } The first method checks whether the client sending the request includes the accept-encoding for either gzip or deflate, and if if it does it returns true. The second function uses IsGzipSupported() to decide whether it should encode content and uses an Response Filter to do its job. Basically response filters look at the Response output stream as it's written and convert the data flowing through it. Filters are a bit tricky to work with but the two .NET filter streams for GZip and Deflate Compression make this a snap to implement. In my old code and even now in MVC I can always do:public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { WebUtils.GZipEncodePage(); …} to encode my content. And that works just fine. The proper way: Create an ActionFilterAttribute However in MVC this sort of thing is typically better handled by an ActionFilter which can be applied with an attribute. So to be all prim and proper I created an CompressContentAttribute ActionFilter that incorporates those two helper methods and which looks like this:/// <summary> /// Attribute that can be added to controller methods to force content /// to be GZip encoded if the client supports it /// </summary> public class CompressContentAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute { /// <summary> /// Override to compress the content that is generated by /// an action method. /// </summary> /// <param name="filterContext"></param> public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { GZipEncodePage(); } /// <summary> /// Determines if GZip is supported /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static bool IsGZipSupported() { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(AcceptEncoding) && (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip") || AcceptEncoding.Contains("deflate"))) return true; return false; } /// <summary> /// Sets up the current page or handler to use GZip through a Response.Filter /// IMPORTANT: /// You have to call this method before any output is generated! /// </summary> public static void GZipEncodePage() { HttpResponse Response = HttpContext.Current.Response; if (IsGZipSupported()) { string AcceptEncoding = HttpContext.Current.Request.Headers["Accept-Encoding"]; if (AcceptEncoding.Contains("gzip")) { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.GZipStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "gzip"); } else { Response.Filter = new System.IO.Compression.DeflateStream(Response.Filter, System.IO.Compression.CompressionMode.Compress); Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Encoding"); Response.AppendHeader("Content-Encoding", "deflate"); } } // Allow proxy servers to cache encoded and unencoded versions separately Response.AppendHeader("Vary", "Content-Encoding"); } } It's basically the same code wrapped into an ActionFilter attribute, which intercepts requests MVC requests to Controller methods and lets you hook up logic before and after the methods have executed. Here I want to override OnActionExecuting() which fires before the Controller action is fired. With the CompressContentAttribute created, it can now be applied to either the controller as a whole:[CompressContent] public class ClassifiedsController : ClassifiedsBaseController { … } or to one of the Action methods:[CompressContent] public ActionResult List(string keyword=null, int category=0) { … } The former applies compression to every action method, while the latter is selective and only applies it to the individual action method. Is the attribute better than the static utility function? Not really, but it is the standard MVC way to hook up 'filter' content and that's where others are likely to expect to set options like this. In fact,  you have a bit more control with the utility function because you can conditionally apply it in code, but this is actually much less likely in MVC applications than old WebForms apps since controller methods tend to be more focused. Compression Caveats Http compression is very cool and pretty easy to implement in ASP.NET but you have to be careful with it - especially if your content might get transformed or redirected inside of ASP.NET. A good example, is if an error occurs and a compression filter is applied. ASP.NET errors don't clear the filter, but clear the Response headers which results in some nasty garbage because the compressed content now no longer matches the headers. Another issue is Caching, which has to account for all possible ways of compression and non-compression that the content is served. Basically compressed content and caching don't mix well. I wrote about several of these issues in an old blog post and I recommend you take a quick peek before diving into making every bit of output Gzip encoded. None of these are show stoppers, but you have to be aware of the issues. Related Posts GZip Compression with ASP.NET Content ASP.NET GZip Encoding Caveats© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in ASP.NET  MVC   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 6, Declarative Data Parallelism

  - by Reed

  When working with a problem that can be decomposed by data, we have a collection, and some operation being performed upon the collection.  I’ve demonstrated how this can be parallelized using the Task Parallel Library and imperative programming using imperative data parallelism via the Parallel class.  While this provides a huge step forward in terms of power and capabilities, in many cases, special care must still be given for relative common scenarios. C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9.0 introduced a new, declarative programming model to .NET via the LINQ Project.  When working with collections, we can now write software that describes what we want to occur without having to explicitly state how the program should accomplish the task.  By taking advantage of LINQ, many operations become much shorter, more elegant, and easier to understand and maintain.  Version 4.0 of the .NET framework extends this concept into the parallel computation space by introducing Parallel LINQ. Before we delve into PLINQ, let’s begin with a short discussion of LINQ.  LINQ, the extensions to the .NET Framework which implement language integrated query, set, and transform operations, is implemented in many flavors.  For our purposes, we are interested in LINQ to Objects.  When dealing with parallelizing a routine, we typically are dealing with in-memory data storage.  More data-access oriented LINQ variants, such as LINQ to SQL and LINQ to Entities in the Entity Framework fall outside of our concern, since the parallelism there is the concern of the data base engine processing the query itself. LINQ (LINQ to Objects in particular) works by implementing a series of extension methods, most of which work on IEnumerable<T>.  The language enhancements use these extension methods to create a very concise, readable alternative to using traditional foreach statement.  For example, let’s revisit our minimum aggregation routine we wrote in Part 4: double min = double.MaxValue; foreach(var item in collection) { double value = item.PerformComputation(); min = System.Math.Min(min, value); } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Here, we’re doing a very simple computation, but writing this in an imperative style.  This can be loosely translated to English as: Create a very large number, and save it in min Loop through each item in the collection. For every item: Perform some computation, and save the result If the computation is less than min, set min to the computation Although this is fairly easy to follow, it’s quite a few lines of code, and it requires us to read through the code, step by step, line by line, in order to understand the intention of the developer. We can rework this same statement, using LINQ: double min = collection.Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); Here, we’re after the same information.  However, this is written using a declarative programming style.  When we see this code, we’d naturally translate this to English as: Save the Min value of collection, determined via calling item.PerformComputation() That’s it – instead of multiple logical steps, we have one single, declarative request.  This makes the developer’s intentions very clear, and very easy to follow.  The system is free to implement this using whatever method required. Parallel LINQ (PLINQ) extends LINQ to Objects to support parallel operations.  This is a perfect fit in many cases when you have a problem that can be decomposed by data.  To show this, let’s again refer to our minimum aggregation routine from Part 4, but this time, let’s review our final, parallelized version: // Safe, and fast! double min = double.MaxValue; // Make a "lock" object object syncObject = new object(); Parallel.ForEach( collection, // First, we provide a local state initialization delegate. () => double.MaxValue, // Next, we supply the body, which takes the original item, loop state, // and local state, and returns a new local state (item, loopState, localState) => { double value = item.PerformComputation(); return System.Math.Min(localState, value); }, // Finally, we provide an Action<TLocal>, to "merge" results together localState => { // This requires locking, but it's only once per used thread lock(syncObj) min = System.Math.Min(min, localState); } ); Here, we’re doing the same computation as above, but fully parallelized.  Describing this in English becomes quite a feat: Create a very large number, and save it in min Create a temporary object we can use for locking Call Parallel.ForEach, specifying three delegates For the first delegate: Initialize a local variable to hold the local state to a very large number For the second delegate: For each item in the collection, perform some computation, save the result If the result is less than our local state, save the result in local state For the final delegate: Take a lock on our temporary object to protect our min variable Save the min of our min and local state variables Although this solves our problem, and does it in a very efficient way, we’ve created a set of code that is quite a bit more difficult to understand and maintain. PLINQ provides us with a very nice alternative.  In order to use PLINQ, we need to learn one new extension method that works on IEnumerable<T> – ParallelEnumerable.AsParallel(). That’s all we need to learn in order to use PLINQ: one single method.  We can write our minimum aggregation in PLINQ very simply: double min = collection.AsParallel().Min(item => item.PerformComputation()); By simply adding “.AsParallel()” to our LINQ to Objects query, we converted this to using PLINQ and running this computation in parallel!  This can be loosely translated into English easily, as well: Process the collection in parallel Get the Minimum value, determined by calling PerformComputation on each item Here, our intention is very clear and easy to understand.  We just want to perform the same operation we did in serial, but run it “as parallel”.  PLINQ completely extends LINQ to Objects: the entire functionality of LINQ to Objects is available.  By simply adding a call to AsParallel(), we can specify that a collection should be processed in parallel.  This is simple, safe, and incredibly useful.

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• Change or Reset Windows Password from a Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  If you can’t log in even after trying your twelve passwords, or you’ve inherited a computer complete with password-protected profiles, worry not – you don’t have to do a fresh install of Windows. We’ll show you how to change or reset your Windows password from a Ubuntu Live CD. This method works for all of the NT-based version of Windows – anything from Windows 2000 and later, basically. And yes, that includes Windows 7. You’ll need a Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD, or a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 Flash Drive. If you don’t have one, or have forgotten how to boot from the flash drive, check out our article on creating a bootable Ubuntu 9.10 flash drive. The program that lets us manipulate Windows passwords is called chntpw. The steps to install it are different in 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Ubuntu. Installation: 32-bit Open up Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System at the top of the screen, expanding the Administration section, and clicking on Synaptic Package Manager. chntpw is found in the universe repository. Repositories are a way for Ubuntu to group software together so that users are able to choose if they want to use only completely open source software maintained by Ubuntu developers, or branch out and use software with different licenses and maintainers. To enable software from the universe repository, click on Settings > Repositories in the Synaptic window. Add a checkmark beside the box labeled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)” and then click close. When you change the repositories you are selecting software from, you have to reload the list of available software. In the main Synaptic window, click on the Reload button. The software lists will be downloaded. Once downloaded, Synaptic must rebuild its search index. The label over the text field by the Search button will read “Rebuilding search index.” When it reads “Quick search,” type chntpw in the text field. The package will show up in the list. Click on the checkbox near the chntpw name. Click on Mark for Installation. chntpw won’t actually be installed until you apply the changes you’ve made, so click on the Apply button in the Synaptic window now. You will be prompted to accept the changes. Click Apply. The changes should be applied quickly. When they’re done, click Close. chntpw is now installed! You can close Synaptic Package Manager. Skip to the section titled Using chntpw to reset your password. Installation: 64-bit The version of chntpw available in Ubuntu’s universe repository will not work properly on a 64-bit machine. Fortunately, a patched version exists in Debian’s Unstable branch, so let’s download it from there and install it manually. Open Firefox. Whether it’s your preferred browser or not, it’s very readily accessible in the Ubuntu Live CD environment, so it will be the easiest to use. There’s a shortcut to Firefox in the top panel. Navigate to http://packages.debian.org/sid/amd64/chntpw/download and download the latest version of chntpw for 64-bit machines. Note: In most cases it would be best to add the Debian Unstable branch to a package manager, but since the Live CD environment will revert to its original state once you reboot, it’ll be faster to just download the .deb file. Save the .deb file to the default location. You can close Firefox if desired. Open a terminal window by clicking on Applications at the top-left of the screen, expanding the Accessories folder, and clicking on Terminal. In the terminal window, enter the following text, hitting enter after each line: cd Downloadssudo dpkg –i chntpw* chntpw will now be installed. Using chntpw to reset your password Before running chntpw, you will have to mount the hard drive that contains your Windows installation. In most cases, Ubuntu 9.10 makes this simple. Click on Places at the top-left of the screen. If your Windows drive is easily identifiable – usually by its size – then left click on it. If it is not obvious, then click on Computer and check out each hard drive until you find the correct one. The correct hard drive will have the WINDOWS folder in it. When you find it, make a note of the drive’s label that appears in the menu bar of the file browser. If you don’t already have one open, start a terminal window by going to Applications > Accessories > Terminal. In the terminal window, enter the commands cd /medials pressing enter after each line. You should see one or more strings of text appear; one of those strings should correspond with the string that appeared in the title bar of the file browser earlier. Change to that directory by entering the command cd <hard drive label> Since the hard drive label will be very annoying to type in, you can use a shortcut by typing in the first few letters or numbers of the drive label (capitalization matters) and pressing the Tab key. It will automatically complete the rest of the string (if those first few letters or numbers are unique). We want to switch to a certain Windows directory. Enter the command: cd WINDOWS/system32/config/ Again, you can use tab-completion to speed up entering this command. To change or reset the administrator password, enter: sudo chntpw SAM SAM is the file that contains your Windows registry. You will see some text appear, including a list of all of the users on your system. At the bottom of the terminal window, you should see a prompt that begins with “User Edit Menu:” and offers four choices. We recommend that you clear the password to blank (you can always set a new password in Windows once you log in). To do this, enter “1” and then “y” to confirm. If you would like to change the password instead, enter “2”, then your desired password, and finally “y” to confirm. If you would like to reset or change the password of a user other than the administrator, enter: sudo chntpw –u <username> SAM From here, you can follow the same steps as before: enter “1” to reset the password to blank, or “2” to change it to a value you provide. And that’s it! Conclusion chntpw is a very useful utility provided for free by the open source community. It may make you think twice about how secure the Windows login system is, but knowing how to use chntpw can save your tail if your memory fails you two or eight times! 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• Multi-tenant ASP.NET MVC - Views

  - by zowens

  Part I – Introduction Part II – Foundation Part III – Controllers   So far we have covered the basic premise of tenants and how they will be delegated. Now comes a big issue with multi-tenancy, the views. In some applications, you will not have to override views for each tenant. However, one of my requirements is to add extra views (and controller actions) along with overriding views from the core structure. This presents a bit of a problem in locating views for each tenant request. I have chosen quite an opinionated approach at the present but will coming back to the “views” issue in a later post. What’s the deal? The path I’ve chosen is to use precompiled Spark views. I really love Spark View Engine and was planning on using it in my project anyways. However, I ran across a really neat aspect of the source when I was having a look under the hood. There’s an easy way to hook in embedded views from your project. There are solutions that provide this, but they implement a special Virtual Path Provider. While I think this is a great solution, I would rather just have Spark take care of the view resolution. The magic actually happens during the compilation of the views into a bin-deployable DLL. After the views are compiled, the are simply pulled out of the views DLL. Each tenant has its own views DLL that just has “.Views” appended after the assembly name as a convention. The list of reasons for this approach are quite long. The primary motivation is performance. I’ve had quite a few performance issues in the past and I would like to increase my application’s performance in any way that I can. My customized build of Spark removes insignificant whitespace from the HTML output so I can some some bandwidth and load time without having to deal with whitespace removal at runtime.   How to setup Tenants for the Host In the source, I’ve provided a single tenant as a sample (Sample1). This will serve as a template for subsequent tenants in your application. The first step is to add a “PostBuildStep” installer into the project. I’ve defined one in the source that will eventually change as we focus more on the construction of dependency containers. The next step is to tell the project to run the installer and copy the DLL output to a folder in the host that will pick up as a tenant. Here’s the code that will achieve it (this belongs in Post-build event command line field in the Build Events tab of settings) %systemroot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\installutil "$(TargetPath)" copy /Y "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName)*.dll" "$(SolutionDir)Web\Tenants\" copy /Y "$(TargetDir)$(TargetName)*.pdb" "$(SolutionDir)Web\Tenants\" The DLLs with a name starting with the target assembly name will be copied to the “Tenants” folder in the web project. This means something like MultiTenancy.Tenants.Sample1.dll and MultiTenancy.Tenants.Sample1.Views.dll will both be copied along with the debug symbols. This is probably the simplest way to go about this, but it is a tad inflexible. For example, what if you have dependencies? The preferred method would probably be to use IL Merge to merge your dependencies with your target DLL. This would have to be added in the build events. Another way to achieve that would be to simply bypass Visual Studio events and use MSBuild.   I also got a question about how I was setting up the controller factory. Here’s the basics on how I’m setting up tenants inside the host (Global.asax) protected void Application_Start() { RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); // create a container just to pull in tenants var topContainer = new Container(); topContainer.Configure(config => { config.Scan(scanner => { scanner.AssembliesFromPath(Path.Combine(Server.MapPath("~/"), "Tenants")); scanner.AddAllTypesOf<IApplicationTenant>(); }); }); // create selectors var tenantSelector = new DefaultTenantSelector(topContainer.GetAllInstances<IApplicationTenant>()); var containerSelector = new TenantContainerResolver(tenantSelector); // clear view engines, we don't want anything other than spark ViewEngines.Engines.Clear(); // set view engine ViewEngines.Engines.Add(new TenantViewEngine(tenantSelector)); // set controller factory ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new ContainerControllerFactory(containerSelector)); } The code to setup the tenants isn’t actually that hard. I’m utilizing assembly scanners in StructureMap as a simple way to pull in DLLs that are not in the AppDomain. Remember that there is a dependency on the host in the tenants and a tenant cannot simply be referenced by a host because of circular dependencies.   Tenant View Engine TenantViewEngine is a simple delegator to the tenant’s specified view engine. You might have noticed that a tenant has to define a view engine. public interface IApplicationTenant { .... IViewEngine ViewEngine { get; } } The trick comes in specifying the view engine on the tenant side. Here’s some of the code that will pull views from the DLL. protected virtual IViewEngine DetermineViewEngine() { var factory = new SparkViewFactory(); var file = GetType().Assembly.CodeBase.Without("file:///").Replace(".dll", ".Views.dll").Replace('/', '\\'); var assembly = Assembly.LoadFile(file); factory.Engine.LoadBatchCompilation(assembly); return factory; } This code resides in an abstract Tenant where the fields are setup in the constructor. This method (inside the abstract class) will load the Views assembly and load the compilation into Spark’s “Descriptors” that will be used to determine views. There is some trickery on determining the file location… but it works just fine.   Up Next There’s just a few big things left such as StructureMap configuring controllers with a convention instead of specifying types directly with container construction and content resolution. I will also try to find a way to use the Web Forms View Engine in a multi-tenant way we achieved with the Spark View Engine without using a virtual path provider. I will probably not use the Web Forms View Engine personally, but I’m sure some people would prefer using WebForms because of the maturity of the engine. As always, I love to take questions by email or on twitter. Suggestions are always welcome as well! (Oh, and here’s another link to the source code).

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• I Hereby Resolve… (T-SQL Tuesday #14)

  - by smisner

  It’s time for another T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by Jen McCown (blog|twitter), on the topic of resolutions. Specifically, “what techie resolutions have you been pondering, and why?” I like that word – pondering – because I ponder a lot. And while there are many things that I do already because of my job, there are many more things that I ponder about doing…if only I had the time. Then I ponder about making time, but then it’s back to work! In 2010, I was moderately more successful in making time for things that I ponder about than I had been in years past, and I hope to continue that trend in 2011. If Jen hadn’t settled on this topic, I could keep my ponderings to myself and no one would ever know the outcome, but she’s egged me on (and everyone else that chooses to participate)! So here goes… For me, having resolve to do something means that I wouldn’t be doing that something as part of my ordinary routine. It takes extra effort to make time for it. It’s not something that I do once and check off a list, but something that I need to commit to over a period of time. So with that in mind, I hereby resolve… To Learn Something New… One of the things I love about my job is that I get to do a lot of things outside of my ordinary routine. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of opportunity! So what more could I possibly add to that list of things to do? Well, the more I learn, the more I realize I have so much more to learn. It would be much easier to remain in ignorant bliss, but I was born to learn. Constantly. (And apparently to teach, too– my father will tell you that as a small child, I had the neighborhood kids gathered together to play school – in the summer. I’m sure they loved that – but they did it!) These are some of things that I want to dedicate some time to learning this year: Spatial data. I have a good understanding of how maps in Reporting Services works, and I can cobble together a simple T-SQL spatial query, but I know I’m only scratching the surface here. Rob Farley (blog|twitter) posted interesting examples of combining maps and PivotViewer, and I think there’s so many more creative possibilities. I’ve always felt that pictures (including charts and maps) really help people get their minds wrapped around data better, and because a lot of data has a geographic aspect to it, I believe developing some expertise here will be beneficial to my work. PivotViewer. Not only is PivotViewer combined with maps a useful way to visualize data, but it’s an interesting way to work with data. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this interactive demonstration using Netflx OData feed. According to Rob Farley, learning how to work with PivotViewer isn’t trivial. Just the type of challenge I like! Security. You’ve heard of the accidental DBA? Well, I am the accidental security person – is there a word for that role? My eyes used to glaze over when having to study about security, or  when reading anything about it. Then I had a problem long ago that no one could figure out – not even the vendor’s tech support – until I rolled up my sleeves and painstakingly worked through the myriad of potential problems to resolve a very thorny security issue. I learned a lot in the process, and have been able to share what I’ve learned with a lot of people. But I’m not convinced their eyes weren’t glazing over, too. I don’t take it personally – it’s just a very dry topic! So in addition to deepening my understanding about security, I want to find a way to make the subject as it relates to SQL Server and business intelligence more accessible and less boring. Well, there’s actually a lot more that I could put on this list, and a lot more things I have plans to do this coming year, but I run the risk of overcommitting myself. And then I wouldn’t have time… To Have Fun! My name is Stacia and I’m a workaholic. When I love what I do, it’s difficult to separate out the work time from the fun time. But there are some things that I’ve been meaning to do that aren’t related to business intelligence for which I really need to develop some resolve. And they are techie resolutions, too, in a roundabout sort of way! Photography. When my husband and I went on an extended camping trip in 2009 to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, I had a nice little digital camera that took decent pictures. But then I saw the gorgeous cameras that other tourists were toting around and decided I needed one too. So I bought a Nikon D90 and have started to learn to use it, but I’m definitely still in the beginning stages. I traveled so much in 2010 and worked on two book projects that I didn’t have a lot of free time to devote to it. I was very inspired by Kimberly Tripp’s (blog|twitter) and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) photo-adventure in Alaska, though, and plan to spend some dedicated time with my camera this year. (And hopefully before I move to Alaska – nothing set in stone yet, but we hope to move to a remote location – with Internet access – later this year!) Astronomy. I have this cool telescope, but it suffers the same fate as my camera. I have been gone too much and busy with other things that I haven’t had time to work with it. I’ll figure out how it works, and then so much time passes by that I forget how to use it. I have this crazy idea that I can actually put the camera and the telescope together for astrophotography, but I think I need to start simple by learning how to use each component individually. As long as I’m living in Las Vegas, I know I’ll have clear skies for nighttime viewing, but when we move to Alaska, we’ll be living in a rain forest. I have no idea what my opportunities will be like there – except I know that when the sky is clear, it will be far more amazing than anything I can see in Vegas – even out in the desert - because I’ll be so far away from city light pollution. I’ve been contemplating putting together a blog on these topics as I learn. As many of my fellow bloggers in the SQL Server community know, sometimes the best way to learn something is to sit down and write about it. I’m just stumped by coming up with a clever name for the new blog, which I was thinking about inaugurating with my move to Alaska. Except that I don’t know when that will be exactly, so we’ll just have to wait and see which comes first!

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• Transparency and AlphaBlending

  - by TechTwaddle

  In this post we'll look at the AlphaBlend() api and how it can be used for semi-transparent blitting. AlphaBlend() takes a source device context and a destination device context (DC) and combines the bits in such a way that it gives a transparent effect. Follow the links for the msdn documentation. So lets take a image like, and AlphaBlend() it on our window. The code to do so is below, (under the WM_PAINT message of WndProc) HBITMAP hBitmap=NULL, hBitmapOld=NULL; HDC hMemDC=NULL; BLENDFUNCTION bf; hdc = BeginPaint(hWnd, &ps); hMemDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc); hBitmap = LoadBitmap(g_hInst, MAKEINTRESOURCE(IDB_BITMAP1)); hBitmapOld = SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap); bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER; bf.BlendFlags = 0; bf.SourceConstantAlpha = 80; //transparency value between 0-255 bf.AlphaFormat = 0;    AlphaBlend(hdc, 0, 25, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, bf); SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmapOld); DeleteDC(hMemDC); DeleteObject(hBitmap); EndPaint(hWnd, &ps);   The code above creates a memory DC (hMemDC) using CreateCompatibleDC(), loads a bitmap onto the memory DC and AlphaBlends it on the device DC (hdc), with a transparency value of 80. The result is: Pretty simple till now. Now lets try to do something a little more exciting. Lets get two images involved, each overlapping the other, giving a better demonstration of transparency. I am also going to add a few buttons so that the user can increase or decrease the transparency by clicking on the buttons. Since this is the first time I played around with GDI apis, I ran into something that everybody runs into sometime or the other, flickering. When clicking the buttons the images would flicker a lot, I figured out why and used something called double buffering to avoid flickering. We will look at both my first implementation and the second implementation just to give the concept a little more depth and perspective. A few pre-conditions before I dive into the code: - hBitmap and hBitmap2 are handles to the two images obtained using LoadBitmap(), these variables are global and are initialized under WM_CREATE - The two buttons in the application are labeled Opaque++ (make more opaque, less transparent) and Opaque-- (make less opaque, more transparent) - DrawPics(HWND hWnd, int step=0); is the function called to draw the images on the screen. This is called from under WM_PAINT and also when the buttons are clicked. When Opaque++ is clicked the 'step' value passed to DrawPics() is +20 and when Opaque-- is clicked the 'step' value is -20. The default value of 'step' is 0 Now lets take a look at my first implementation: //this funciton causes flicker, cos it draws directly to screen several times void DrawPics(HWND hWnd, int step) {     HDC hdc=NULL, hMemDC=NULL;     BLENDFUNCTION bf;     static UINT32 transparency = 100;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 0 and user clicks Opaque--     if (transparency == 0 && step < 0)         return;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 240 (opaque) and user clicks Opaque++     if (transparency == 240 && step > 0)         return;         hdc = GetDC(hWnd);     if (!hdc)         return;     //create a memory DC     hMemDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc);     if (!hMemDC)     {         ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc);         return;     }     //while increasing transparency, clear the contents of screen     if (step < 0)     {         RECT rect = {0, 0, 240, 200};         FillRect(hdc, &rect, (HBRUSH)GetStockObject(WHITE_BRUSH));     }     SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap2);     BitBlt(hdc, 0, 25, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);         SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap);     transparency += step;     if (transparency >= 240)         transparency = 240;     if (transparency <= 0)         transparency = 0;     bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER;     bf.BlendFlags = 0;     bf.SourceConstantAlpha = transparency;     bf.AlphaFormat = 0;            AlphaBlend(hdc, 0, 75, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, bf);     DeleteDC(hMemDC);     ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc); }   In the code above, we first get the window DC using GetDC() and create a memory DC using CreateCompatibleDC(). Then we select hBitmap2 onto the memory DC and Blt it on the window DC (hdc). Next, we select the other image, hBitmap, onto memory DC and AlphaBlend() it over window DC. As I told you before, this implementation causes flickering because it draws directly on the screen (hdc) several times. The video below shows what happens when the buttons were clicked rapidly: Well, the video recording tool I use captures only 15 frames per second and so the flickering is not visible in the video. So you're gonna have to trust me on this, it flickers (; To solve this problem we make sure that the drawing to the screen happens only once and to do that we create an additional memory DC, hTempDC. We perform all our drawing on this memory DC and finally when it is ready we Blt hTempDC on hdc, and the images are displayed in one go. Here is the code for our new DrawPics() function: //no flicker void DrawPics(HWND hWnd, int step) {     HDC hdc=NULL, hMemDC=NULL, hTempDC=NULL;     BLENDFUNCTION bf;     HBITMAP hBitmapTemp=NULL, hBitmapOld=NULL;     static UINT32 transparency = 100;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 0 and user clicks Opaque--     if (transparency == 0 && step < 0)         return;     //no point in drawing when transparency is 240 (opaque) and user clicks Opaque++     if (transparency == 240 && step > 0)         return;         hdc = GetDC(hWnd);     if (!hdc)         return;     hMemDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc);     hTempDC = CreateCompatibleDC(hdc);     hBitmapTemp = CreateCompatibleBitmap(hdc, 240, 150);     hBitmapOld = (HBITMAP)SelectObject(hTempDC, hBitmapTemp);     if (!hMemDC)     {         ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc);         return;     }     //while increasing transparency, clear the contents     if (step < 0)     {         RECT rect = {0, 0, 240, 150};         FillRect(hTempDC, &rect, (HBRUSH)GetStockObject(WHITE_BRUSH));     }     SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap2);     //Blt hBitmap2 directly to hTempDC     BitBlt(hTempDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);         SelectObject(hMemDC, hBitmap);     transparency += step;     if (transparency >= 240)         transparency = 240;     if (transparency <= 0)         transparency = 0;     bf.BlendOp = AC_SRC_OVER;     bf.BlendFlags = 0;     bf.SourceConstantAlpha = transparency;     bf.AlphaFormat = 0;            AlphaBlend(hTempDC, 0, 50, 240, 100, hMemDC, 0, 0, 240, 100, bf);     //now hTempDC is ready, blt it directly on hdc     BitBlt(hdc, 0, 25, 240, 150, hTempDC, 0, 0, SRCCOPY);     SelectObject(hTempDC, hBitmapOld);     DeleteObject(hBitmapTemp);     DeleteDC(hMemDC);     DeleteDC(hTempDC);     ReleaseDC(hWnd, hdc); }   This function is very similar to the first version, except for the use of hTempDC. Another point to note is the use of CreateCompatibleBitmap(). When a memory device context is created using CreateCompatibleDC(), the context is exactly one monochrome pixel high and one monochrome pixel wide. So in order for us to draw anything onto hTempDC, we first have to set a bitmap on it. We use CreateCompatibleBitmap() to create a bitmap of required dimension (240x150 above), and then select this bitmap onto hTempDC. Think of it as utilizing an extra canvas, drawing everything on the canvas and finally transferring the contents to the display in one scoop. And with this version the flickering is gone, video follows:   If you want the entire solutions source code then leave a message, I will share the code over SkyDrive.

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• How can a code editor effectively hint at code nesting level - without using indentation?

  - by pgfearo

  I've written an XML text editor that provides 2 view options for the same XML text, one indented (virtually), the other left-justified. The motivation for the left-justified view is to help users 'see' the whitespace characters they're using for indentation of plain-text or XPath code without interference from indentation that is an automated side-effect of the XML context. I want to provide visual clues (in the non-editable part of the editor) for the left-justified mode that will help the user, but without getting too elaborate. I tried just using connecting lines, but that seemed too busy. The best I've come up with so far is shown in a mocked up screenshot of the editor below, but I'm seeking better/simpler alternatives (that don't require too much code). [Edit] Taking the heatmap idea (from: @jimp) I get this and 3 alternatives - labelled a, b and c: The following section describes the accepted answer as a proposal, bringing together ideas from a number of other answers and comments. As this question is now community wiki, please feel free to update this. NestView The name for this idea which provides a visual method to improve the readability of nested code without using indentation. Contour Lines The name for the differently shaded lines within the NestView The image above shows the NestView used to help visualise an XML snippet. Though XML is used for this illustration, any other code syntax that uses nesting could have been used for this illustration. An Overview: The contour lines are shaded (as in a heatmap) to convey nesting level The contour lines are angled to show when a nesting level is being either opened or closed. A contour line links the start of a nesting level to the corresponding end. The combined width of contour lines give a visual impression of nesting level, in addition to the heatmap. The width of the NestView may be manually resizable, but should not change as the code changes. Contour lines can either be compressed or truncated to keep acheive this. Blank lines are sometimes used code to break up text into more digestable chunks. Such lines could trigger special behaviour in the NestView. For example the heatmap could be reset or a background color contour line used, or both. One or more contour lines associated with the currently selected code can be highlighted. The contour line associated with the selected code level would be emphasized the most, but other contour lines could also 'light up' in addition to help highlight the containing nested group Different behaviors (such as code folding or code selection) can be associated with clicking/double-clicking on a Contour Line. Different parts of a contour line (leading, middle or trailing edge) may have different dynamic behaviors associated. Tooltips can be shown on a mouse hover event over a contour line The NestView is updated continously as the code is edited. Where nesting is not well-balanced assumptions can be made where the nesting level should end, but the associated temporary contour lines must be highlighted in some way as a warning. Drag and drop behaviors of Contour Lines can be supported. Behaviour may vary according to the part of the contour line being dragged. Features commonly found in the left margin such as line numbering and colour highlighting for errors and change state could overlay the NestView. Additional Functionality The proposal addresses a range of additional issues - many are outside the scope of the original question, but a useful side-effect. Visually linking the start and end of a nested region The contour lines connect the start and end of each nested level Highlighting the context of the currently selected line As code is selected, the associated nest-level in the NestView can be highlighted Differentiating between code regions at the same nesting level In the case of XML different hues could be used for different namespaces. Programming languages (such as c#) support named regions that could be used in a similar way. Dividing areas within a nesting area into different visual blocks Extra lines are often inserted into code to aid readability. Such empty lines could be used to reset the saturation level of the NestView's contour lines. Multi-Column Code View Code without indentation makes the use of a multi-column view more effective because word-wrap or horizontal scrolling is less likely to be required. In this view, once code has reach the bottom of one column, it flows into the next one: Usage beyond merely providing a visual aid As proposed in the overview, the NestView could provide a range of editing and selection features which would be broadly in line with what is expected from a TreeView control. The key difference is that a typical TreeView node has 2 parts: an expander and the node icon. A NestView contour line can have as many as 3 parts: an opener (sloping), a connector (vertical) and a close (sloping). On Indentation The NestView presented alongside non-indented code complements, but is unlikely to replace, the conventional indented code view. It's likely that any solutions adopting a NestView, will provide a method to switch seamlessly between indented and non-indented code views without affecting any of the code text itself - including whitespace characters. One technique for the indented view would be 'Virtual Formatting' - where a dynamic left-margin is used in lieu of tab or space characters. The same nesting-level data used to dynamically render the NestView could also used for the more conventional-looking indented view. Printing Indentation will be important for the readability of printed code. Here, the absence of tab/space characters and a dynamic left-margin means that the text can wrap at the right-margin and still maintain the integrity of the indented view. Line numbers can be used as visual markers that indicate where code is word-wrapped and also the exact position of indentation: Screen Real-Estate: Flat Vs Indented Addressing the question of whether the NestView uses up valuable screen real-estate: Contour lines work well with a width the same as the code editor's character width. A NestView width of 12 character widths can therefore accommodate 12 levels of nesting before contour lines are truncated/compressed. If an indented view uses 3 character-widths for each nesting level then space is saved until nesting reaches 4 levels of nesting, after this nesting level the flat view has a space-saving advantage that increases with each nesting level. Note: A minimum indentation of 4 character widths is often recommended for code, however XML often manages with less. Also, Virtual Formatting permits less indentation to be used because there's no risk of alignment issues A comparison of the 2 views is shown below: Based on the above, its probably fair to conclude that view style choice will be based on factors other than screen real-estate. The one exception is where screen space is at a premium, for example on a Netbook/Tablet or when multiple code windows are open. In these cases, the resizable NestView would seem to be a clear winner. Use Cases Examples of real-world examples where NestView may be a useful option: Where screen real-estate is at a premium a. On devices such as tablets, notepads and smartphones b. When showing code on websites c. When multiple code windows need to be visible on the desktop simultaneously Where consistent whitespace indentation of text within code is a priority For reviewing deeply nested code. For example where sub-languages (e.g. Linq in C# or XPath in XSLT) might cause high levels of nesting. Accessibility Resizing and color options must be provided to aid those with visual impairments, and also to suit environmental conditions and personal preferences: Compatability of edited code with other systems A solution incorporating a NestView option should ideally be capable of stripping leading tab and space characters (identified as only having a formatting role) from imported code. Then, once stripped, the code could be rendered neatly in both the left-justified and indented views without change. For many users relying on systems such as merging and diff tools that are not whitespace-aware this will be a major concern (if not a complete show-stopper). Other Works: Visualisation of Overlapping Markup Published research by Wendell Piez, dated from 2004, addresses the issue of the visualisation of overlapping markup, specifically LMNL. This includes SVG graphics with significant similarities to the NestView proposal, as such, they are acknowledged here. The visual differences are clear in the images (below), the key functional distinction is that NestView is intended only for well-nested XML or code, whereas Wendell Piez's graphics are designed to represent overlapped nesting. The graphics above were reproduced - with kind permission - from http://www.piez.org Sources: Towards Hermenutic Markup Half-steps toward LMNL

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• API Message Localization

  - by Jesse Taber

  In my post, “Keep Localizable Strings Close To Your Users” I talked about the internationalization and localization difficulties that can arise when you sprinkle static localizable strings throughout the different logical layers of an application. The main point of that post is that you should have your localizable strings reside as close to the user-facing modules of your application as possible. For example, if you’re developing an ASP .NET web forms application all of the localizable strings should be kept in .resx files that are associated with the .aspx views of the application. In this post I want to talk about how this same concept can be applied when designing and developing APIs. An API Facilitates Machine-to-Machine Interaction You can typically think about a web, desktop, or mobile application as a collection “views” or “screens” through which users interact with the underlying logic and data. The application can be designed based on the assumption that there will be a human being on the other end of the screen working the controls. You are designing a machine-to-person interaction and the application should be built in a way that facilitates the user’s clear understanding of what is going on. Dates should be be formatted in a way that the user will be familiar with, messages should be presented in the user’s preferred language, etc. When building an API, however, there are no screens and you can’t make assumptions about who or what is on the other end of each call. An API is, by definition, a machine-to-machine interaction. A machine-to-machine interaction should be built in a way that facilitates a clear and unambiguous understanding of what is going on. Dates and numbers should be formatted in predictable and standard ways (e.g. ISO 8601 dates) and messages should be presented in machine-parseable formats. For example, consider an API for a time tracking system that exposes a resource for creating a new time entry. The JSON for creating a new time entry for a user might look like: 1: { 2: "userId": 4532, 3: "startDateUtc": "2012-10-22T14:01:54.98432Z", 4: "endDateUtc": "2012-10-22T11:34:45.29321Z" 5: }   Note how the parameters for start and end date are both expressed as ISO 8601 compliant dates in UTC. Using a date format like this in our API leaves little room for ambiguity. It’s also important to note that using ISO 8601 dates is a much, much saner thing than the \/Date(<milliseconds since epoch>)\/ nonsense that is sometimes used in JSON serialization. Probably the most important thing to note about the JSON snippet above is the fact that the end date comes before the start date! The API should recognize that and disallow the time entry from being created, returning an error to the caller. You might inclined to send a response that looks something like this: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"message" : "The end date must come after the start date"}] 3: }   While this may seem like an appropriate thing to do there are a few problems with this approach: What if there is a user somewhere on the other end of the API call that doesn’t speak English?  What if the message provided here won’t fit properly within the UI of the application that made the API call? What if the verbiage of the message isn’t consistent with the rest of the application that made the API call? What if there is no user directly on the other end of the API call (e.g. this is a batch job uploading time entries once per night unattended)? The API knows nothing about the context from which the call was made. There are steps you could take to given the API some context (e.g.allow the caller to send along a language code indicating the language that the end user speaks), but that will only get you so far. As the designer of the API you could make some assumptions about how the API will be called, but if we start making assumptions we could very easily make the wrong assumptions. In this situation it’s best to make no assumptions and simply design the API in such a way that the caller has the responsibility to convey error messages in a manner that is appropriate for the context in which the error was raised. You would work around some of these problems by allowing callers to add metadata to each request describing the context from which the call is being made (e.g. accepting a ‘locale’ parameter denoting the desired language), but that will add needless clutter and complexity. It’s better to keep the API simple and push those context-specific concerns down to the caller whenever possible. For our very simple time entry example, this can be done by simply changing our error message response to look like this: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"code": 100}] 3: }   By changing our error error from exposing a string to a numeric code that is easily parseable by another application, we’ve placed all of the responsibility for conveying the actual meaning of the error message on the caller. It’s best to have the caller be responsible for conveying this meaning because the caller understands the context much better than the API does. Now the caller can see error code 100, know that it means that the end date submitted falls before the start date and take appropriate action. Now all of the problems listed out above are non-issues because the caller can simply translate the error code of ‘100’ into the proper action and message for the current context. The numeric code representation of the error is a much better way to facilitate the machine-to-machine interaction that the API is meant to facilitate. An API Does Have Human Users While APIs should be built for machine-to-machine interaction, people still need to wire these interactions together. As a programmer building a client application that will consume the time entry API I would find it frustrating to have to go dig through the API documentation every time I encounter a new error code (assuming the documentation exists and is accurate). The numeric error code approach hurts the discoverability of the API and makes it painful to integrate with. We can help ease this pain by merging our two approaches: 1: { 2: "errors": [ {"code": 100, "message" : "The end date must come after the start date"}] 3: }   Now we have an easily parseable numeric error code for the machine-to-machine interaction that the API is meant to facilitate and a human-readable message for programmers working with the API. The human-readable message here is not intended to be viewed by end-users of the API and as such is not really a “localizable string” in my opinion. We could opt to expose a locale parameter for all API methods and store translations for all error messages, but that’s a lot of extra effort and overhead that doesn’t add a lot real value to the API. I might be a bit of an “ugly American”, but I think it’s probably fine to have the API return English messages when the target for those messages is a programmer. When resources are limited (which they always are), I’d argue that you’re better off hard-coding these messages in English and putting more effort into building more useful features, improving security, tweaking performance, etc.

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• Master Data Management and Cloud Computing

  - by david.butler(at)oracle.com

  Cloud Computing is all the rage these days. There are many reasons why this is so. But like its predecessor, Service Oriented Architecture, it can fall on hard times if the underlying data is left unmanaged. Master Data Management is the perfect Cloud companion. It can materially increase the chances for successful Cloud initiatives. In this blog, I'll review the nature of the Cloud and show how MDM fits in.   Here's the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cloud definition: •          Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.   Cloud architectures have three main layers: applications or Software as a Service (SaaS), Platforms as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS generally refers to applications that are delivered to end-users over the Internet. Oracle CRM On Demand is an example of a SaaS application. Today there are hundreds of SaaS providers covering a wide variety of applications including Salesforce.com, Workday, and Netsuite. Oracle MDM applications are located in this layer of Oracle's On Demand enterprise Cloud platform. We call it Master Data as a Service (MDaaS). PaaS generally refers to an application deployment platform delivered as a service. They are often built on a grid computing architecture and include database and middleware. Oracle Fusion Middleware is in this category and includes the SOA and Data Integration products used to connect SaaS applications including MDM. Finally, IaaS generally refers to computing hardware (servers, storage and network) delivered as a service.  This typically includes the associated software as well: operating systems, virtualization, clustering, etc.    Cloud Computing benefits are compelling for a large number of organizations. These include significant cost savings, increased flexibility, and fast deployments. Cost advantages include paying for just what you use. This is especially critical for organizations with variable or seasonal usage. Companies don't have to invest to support peak computing periods. Costs are also more predictable and controllable. Increased agility includes access to the latest technology and experts without making significant up front investments.   While Cloud Computing is certainly very alluring with a clear value proposition, it is not without its challenges. An IDC survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues identified a number of issues:   Security - 74% identified security as an issue involving data privacy and resource access control. Integration - 61% found that it is hard to integrate Cloud Apps with in-house applications. Operational Costs - 50% are worried that On Demand will actually cost more given the impact of poor data quality on the rest of the enterprise. Compliance - 49% felt that compliance with required regulatory, legal and general industry requirements (such as PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley) would be a major issue. When control is lost, the ability of a provider to directly manage how and where data is deployed, used and destroyed is negatively impacted.  There are others, but I singled out these four top issues because Master Data Management, properly incorporated into a Cloud Computing infrastructure, can significantly ameliorate all of these problems. Cloud Computing can literally rain raw data across the enterprise.   According to fellow blogger, Mike Ferguson, "the fracturing of data caused by the adoption of cloud computing raises the importance of MDM in keeping disparate data synchronized."   David Linthicum, CTO Blue Mountain Labs blogs that "the lack of MDM will become more of an issue as cloud computing rises. We're moving from complex federated on-premise systems, to complex federated on-premise and cloud-delivered systems."    Left unmanaged, non-standard, inconsistent, ungoverned data with questionable quality can pollute analytical systems, increase operational costs, and reduce the ROI in Cloud and On-Premise applications. As cloud computing becomes more relevant, and more data, applications, services, and processes are moved out to cloud computing platforms, the need for MDM becomes ever more important. Oracle's MDM suite is designed to deal with all four of the above Cloud issues listed in the IDC survey.   Security - MDM manages all master data attribute privacy and resource access control issues. Integration - MDM pre-integrates Cloud Apps with each other and with On Premise applications at the data level. Operational Costs - MDM significantly reduces operational costs by increasing data quality, thereby improving enterprise business processes efficiency. Compliance - MDM, with its built in Data Governance capabilities, insures that the data is governed according to organizational standards. This facilitates rapid and accurate reporting for compliance purposes. Oracle MDM creates governed high quality master data. A unified cleansed and standardized data view is produced. The Oracle Customer Hub creates a single view of the customer. The Oracle Product Hub creates high quality product data designed to support all go-to-market processes. Oracle Supplier Hub dramatically reduces the chances of 'supplier exceptions'. Oracle Site Hub masters locations. And Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management masters financial reference data and manages enterprise hierarchies across operational areas from ERP to EPM and CRM to SCM. Oracle Fusion Middleware connects Cloud and On Premise applications to MDM Hubs and brings high quality master data to your enterprise business processes.   An independent analyst once said "Poor data quality is like dirt on the windshield. You may be able to drive for a long time with slowly degrading vision, but at some point, you either have to stop and clear the windshield or risk everything."  Cloud Computing has the potential to significantly degrade data quality across the enterprise over time. Deploying a Master Data Management solution prior to or in conjunction with a move to the Cloud can insure that the data flowing into the enterprise from the Cloud is clean and governed. This will in turn insure that expected returns on the investment in Cloud Computing will be realized.       Oracle MDM has proven its metal in this area and has the customers to back that up. In fact, I will be hosting a webcast on Tuesday, April 10th at 10 am PT with one of our top Cloud customers, the Church Pension Group. They have moved all mainline applications to a hosted model and use Oracle MDM to insure the master data is managed and cleansed before it is propagated to other cloud and internal systems. I invite you join Martin Hossfeld, VP, IT Operations, and Danette Patterson, Enterprise Data Manager as they review business drivers for MDM and hosted applications, how they did it, the benefits achieved, and lessons learned. You can register for this free webcast here.  Hope to see you there.

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• European Interoperability Framework - a new beginning?

  - by trond-arne.undheim

  The most controversial document in the history of the European Commission's IT policy is out. EIF is here, wrapped in the Communication "Towards interoperability for European public services", and including the new feature European Interoperability Strategy (EIS), arguably a higher strategic take on the same topic. Leaving EIS aside for a moment, the EIF controversy has been around IPR, defining open standards and about the proper terminology around standardization deliverables. Today, as the document finally emerges, what is the verdict? First of all, to be fair to those among you who do not spend your lives in the intricate labyrinths of Commission IT policy documents on interoperability, let's define what we are talking about. According to the Communication: "An interoperability framework is an agreed approach to interoperability for organisations that want to collaborate to provide joint delivery of public services. Within its scope of applicability, it specifies common elements such as vocabulary, concepts, principles, policies, guidelines, recommendations, standards, specifications and practices." The Good - EIF reconfirms that "The Digital Agenda can only take off if interoperability based on standards and open platforms is ensured" and also confirms that "The positive effect of open specifications is also demonstrated by the Internet ecosystem." - EIF takes a productive and pragmatic stance on openness: "In the context of the EIF, openness is the willingness of persons, organisations or other members of a community of interest to share knowledge and stimulate debate within that community, the ultimate goal being to advance knowledge and the use of this knowledge to solve problems" (p.11). "If the openness principle is applied in full: - All stakeholders have the same possibility of contributing to the development of the specification and public review is part of the decision-making process; - The specification is available for everybody to study; - Intellectual property rights related to the specification are licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software" (p. 26). - EIF is a formal Commission document. The former EIF 1.0 was a semi-formal deliverable from the PEGSCO, a working group of Member State representatives. - EIF tackles interoperability head-on and takes a clear stance: "Recommendation 22. When establishing European public services, public administrations should prefer open specifications, taking due account of the coverage of functional needs, maturity and market support." - The Commission will continue to support the National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO), reconfirming the importance of coordinating such approaches across borders. - The Commission will align its internal interoperability strategy with the EIS through the eCommission initiative. - One cannot stress the importance of using open standards enough, whether in the context of open source or non-open source software. The EIF seems to have picked up on this fact: What does the EIF says about the relation between open specifications and open source software? The EIF introduces, as one of the characteristics of an open specification, the requirement that IPRs related to the specification have to be licensed on FRAND terms or on a royalty-free basis in a way that allows implementation in both proprietary and open source software. In this way, companies working under various business models can compete on an equal footing when providing solutions to public administrations while administrations that implement the standard in their own software (software that they own) can share such software with others under an open source licence if they so decide. - EIF is now among the center pieces of the Digital Agenda (even though this demands extensive inter-agency coordination in the Commission): "The EIS and the EIF will be maintained under the ISA Programme and kept in line with the results of other relevant Digital Agenda actions on interoperability and standards such as the ones on the reform of rules on implementation of ICT standards in Europe to allow use of certain ICT fora and consortia standards, on issuing guidelines on essential intellectual property rights and licensing conditions in standard-setting, including for ex-ante disclosure, and on providing guidance on the link between ICT standardisation and public procurement to help public authorities to use standards to promote efficiency and reduce lock-in.(Communication, p.7)" All in all, quite a few good things have happened to the document in the two years it has been on the shelf or was being re-written, depending on your perspective, in any case, awaiting the storms to calm. The Bad - While a certain pragmatism is required, and governments cannot migrate to full openness overnight, EIF gives a bit too much room for governments not to apply the openness principle in full. Plenty of reasons are given, which should maybe have been put as challenges to be overcome: "However, public administrations may decide to use less open specifications, if open specifications do not exist or do not meet functional interoperability needs. In all cases, specifications should be mature and sufficiently supported by the market, except if used in the context of creating innovative solutions". - EIF does not use the internationally established terminology: open standards. Rather, the EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification". How do "formalised specifications" relate to "standards"? According to the FAQ provided: The word "standard" has a specific meaning in Europe as defined by Directive 98/34/EC. Only technical specifications approved by a recognised standardisation body can be called a standard. Many ICT systems rely on the use of specifications developed by other organisations such as a forum or consortium. The EIF introduces the notion of "formalised specification", which is either a standard pursuant to Directive 98/34/EC or a specification established by ICT fora and consortia. The term "open specification" used in the EIF, on the one hand, avoids terminological confusion with the Directive and, on the other, states the main features that comply with the basic principle of openness laid down in the EIF for European Public Services. Well, this may be somewhat true, but in reality, Europe is 30 year behind in terminology. Unless the European Standardization Reform gets completed in the next few months, most Member States will likely conclude that they will go on referencing and using standards beyond those created by the three European endorsed monopolists of standardization, CEN, CENELEC and ETSI. Who can afford to begin following the strict Brussels rules for what they can call open standards when, in reality, standards stemming from global standardization organizations, so-called fora/consortia, dominate in the IT industry. What exactly is EIF saying? Does it encourage Member States to go on using non-ESO standards as long as they call it something else? I guess I am all for it, although it is a bit cumbersome, no? Why was there so much interest around the EIF? The FAQ attempts to explain: Some Member States have begun to adopt policies to achieve interoperability for their public services. These actions have had a significant impact on the ecosystem built around the provision of such services, e.g. providers of ICT goods and services, standardisation bodies, industry fora and consortia, etc... The Commission identified a clear need for action at European level to ensure that actions by individual Member States would not create new electronic barriers that would hinder the development of interoperable European public services. As a result, all stakeholders involved in the delivery of electronic public services in Europe have expressed their opinions on how to increase interoperability for public services provided by the different public administrations in Europe. Well, it does not take two years to read 50 consultation documents, and the EU Standardization Reform is not yet completed, so, more pragmatically, you finally had to release the document. Ok, let's leave some of that aside because the document is out and some people are happy (and others definitely not). The Verdict Considering the controversy, the delays, the lobbying, and the interests at stake both in the EU, in Member States and among vendors large and small, this document is pretty impressive. As with a good wine that has not yet come to full maturity, let's say that it seems to be coming in in the 85-88/100 range, but only a more fine-grained analysis, enjoyment in good company, and ultimately, implementation, will tell. The European Commission has today adopted a significant interoperability initiative to encourage public administrations across the EU to maximise the social and economic potential of information and communication technologies. Today, we should rally around this achievement. Tomorrow, let's sit down and figure out what it means for the future.

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• techniques for an AI for a highly cramped turn-based tactics game

  - by Adam M.

  I'm trying to write an AI for a tactics game in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics or Vandal Hearts. I can't change the game rules in any way, only upgrade the AI. I have experience programming AI for classic board games (basically minimax and its variants), but I think the branching factor is too great for the approach to be reasonable here. I'll describe the game and some current AI flaws that I'd like to fix. I'd like to hear ideas for applicable techniques. I'm a decent enough programmer, so I only need the ideas, not an implementation (though that's always appreciated). I'd rather not expend effort chasing (too many) dead ends, so although speculation and brainstorming are good and probably helpful, I'd prefer to hear from somebody with actual experience solving this kind of problem. For those who know it, the game is the land battle mini-game in Sid Meier's Pirates! (2004) and you can skim/skip the next two paragraphs. For those who don't, here's briefly how it works. The battle is turn-based and takes place on a 16x16 grid. There are three terrain types: clear (no hindrance), forest (hinders movement, ranged attacks, and sight), and rock (impassible, but does not hinder attacks or sight). The map is randomly generated with roughly equal amounts of each type of terrain. Because there are many rock and forest tiles, movement is typically very cramped. This is tactically important. The terrain is not flat; higher terrain gives minor bonuses. The terrain is known to both sides. The player is always the attacker and the AI is always the defender, so it's perfectly valid for the AI to set up a defensive position and just wait. The player wins by killing all defenders or by getting a unit to the city gates (a tile on the other side of the map). There are very few units on each side, usually 4-8. Because of this, it's crucial not to take damage without gaining some advantage from it. Units can take multiple actions per turn. All units on one side move before any units on the other side. Order of execution is important, and interleaving of actions between units is often useful. Units have melee and ranged attacks. Melee attacks vary widely in strength; ranged attacks have the same strength but vary in range. The main challenges I face are these: Lots of useful move combinations start with a "useless" move that gains no immediate advantage, or even loses advantage, in order to set up a powerful flank attack in the future. And, since the player units are stronger and have longer range, the AI pretty much always has to take some losses before they can start to gain kills. The AI must be able to look ahead to distinguish between sacrificial actions that provide a future benefit and those that don't. Because the terrain is so cramped, most of the tactics come down to achieving good positioning with multiple units that work together to defend an area. For instance, two defenders can often dominate a narrow pass by positioning themselves so an enemy unit attempting to pass must expose itself to a flank attack. But one defender in the same pass would be useless, and three units can defend a slightly larger pass. Etc. The AI should be able to figure out where the player must go to reach the city gates and how to best position its few units to cover the approaches, shifting, splitting, or combining them appropriately as the player moves. Because flank attacks are extremely deadly (and engineering flank attacks is key to the player strategy), the AI should be competent at moving its units so that they cover each other's flanks unless the sacrifice of a unit would give a substantial benefit. They should also be able to force flank attacks on players, for instance by threatening a unit from two different directions such that responding to one threat exposes the flank to the other. The AI should attack if possible, but sometimes there are no good ways to approach the player's position. In that case, the AI should be able to recognize this and set up a defensive position of its own. But the AI shouldn't be vulnerable to a trivial exploit where the player repeatedly opens and closes a hole in his defense and shoots at the AI as it approaches and retreats. That is, the AI should ideally be able to recognize that the player is capable of establishing a solid defense of an area, even if the defense is not currently in place. (I suppose if a good unit allocation algorithm existed, as needed for the second bullet point, the AI could run it on the player units to see where they could defend.) Because it's important to choose a good order of action and interleave actions between units, it's not as simple as just finding the best move for each unit in turn. All of these can be accomplished with a minimax search in theory, but the search space is too large, so specialized techniques are needed. I thought about techniques such as influence mapping, but I don't see how to use the technique to great effect. I thought about assigning goals to the units. This can help them work together in some limited way, and the problem of "how do I accomplish this goal?" is easier to solve than "how do I win this battle?", but assigning good goals is a hard problem in itself, because it requires knowing whether the goal is achievable and whether it's a good use of resources. So, does anyone have specific ideas for techniques that can help cleverize this AI? Update: I found a related question on Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133273/ai-for-a-final-fantasy-tactics-like-game The selected answer gives a decent approach to choosing between alternative actions, but it doesn't seem to have much ability to look into the future and discern beneficial sacrifices from wasteful ones. It also focuses on a single unit at a time and it's not clear how it could be extended to support cooperation between units in defending or attacking.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #052

  - by Pinal Dave

  Let us continue with the final episode of the Memory Lane Series. Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Set Server Level FILLFACTOR Using T-SQL Script Specifies a percentage that indicates how full the Database Engine should make the leaf level of each index page during index creation or alteration. fillfactor must be an integer value from 1 to 100. The default is 0. Limitation of Online Index Rebuld Operation Online operation means when online operations are happening in the database are in normal operational condition, the processes which are participating in online operations does not require exclusive access to the database. Get Permissions of My Username / Userlogin on Server / Database A few days ago, I was invited to one of the largest database company. I was asked to review database schema and propose changes to it. There was special username or user logic was created for me, so I can review their database. I was very much interested to know what kind of permissions I was assigned per server level and database level. I did not feel like asking Sr. DBA the question about permissions. Simple Example of WHILE Loop With CONTINUE and BREAK Keywords This question is one of those questions which is very simple and most of the users get it correct, however few users find it confusing for the first time. I have tried to explain the usage of simple WHILE loop in the first example. BREAK keyword will exit the stop the while loop and control is moved to the next statement after the while loop. CONTINUE keyword skips all the statement after its execution and control is sent to the first statement of while loop. Forced Parameterization and Simple Parameterization – T-SQL and SSMS When the PARAMETERIZATION option is set to FORCED, any literal value that appears in a SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE statement is converted to a parameter during query compilation. When the PARAMETERIZATION database option is SET to SIMPLE, the SQL Server query optimizer may choose to parameterize the queries. 2008 Transaction and Local Variables – Swap Variables – Update All At Once Concept Summary : Transaction have no effect over memory variables. When UPDATE statement is applied over any table (physical or memory) all the updates are applied at one time together when the statement is committed. First of all I suggest that you read the article listed above about the effect of transaction on local variant. As seen there local variables are independent of any transaction effect. Simulate INNER JOIN using LEFT JOIN statement – Performance Analysis Just a day ago, while I was working with JOINs I find one interesting observation, which has prompted me to create following example. Before we continue further let me make very clear that INNER JOIN should be used where it cannot be used and simulating INNER JOIN using any other JOINs will degrade the performance. If there are scopes to convert any OUTER JOIN to INNER JOIN it should be done with priority. 2009 Introduction to Business Intelligence – Important Terms & Definitions Business intelligence (BI) is a broad category of application programs and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data from various data sources, thus providing enterprise users with reliable and timely information and analysis for improved decision making. Difference Between Candidate Keys and Primary Key Candidate Key – A Candidate Key can be any column or a combination of columns that can qualify as unique key in database. There can be multiple Candidate Keys in one table. Each Candidate Key can qualify as Primary Key. Primary Key – A Primary Key is a column or a combination of columns that uniquely identify a record. Only one Candidate Key can be Primary Key. 2010 Taking Multiple Backup of Database in Single Command – Mirrored Database Backup I recently had a very interesting experience. In one of my recent consultancy works, I was told by our client that they are going to take the backup of the database and will also a copy of it at the same time. I expressed that it was surely possible if they were going to use a mirror command. In addition, they told me that whenever they take two copies of the database, the size of the database, is always reduced. Now this was something not clear to me, I said it was not possible and so I asked them to show me the script. Corrupted Backup File and Unsuccessful Restore The CTO, who was also present at the location, got very upset with this situation. He then asked when the last successful restore test was done. As expected, the answer was NEVER.There were no successful restore tests done before. During that time, I was present and I could clearly see the stress, confusion, carelessness and anger around me. I did not appreciate the feeling and I was pretty sure that no one in there wanted the atmosphere like me. 2011 TRACEWRITE – Wait Type – Wait Related to Buffer and Resolution SQL Trace is a SQL Server database engine technology which monitors specific events generated when various actions occur in the database engine. When any event is fired it goes through various stages as well various routes. One of the routes is Trace I/O Provider, which sends data to its final destination either as a file or rowset. DATEDIFF – Accuracy of Various Dateparts If you want to have accuracy in seconds, you need to use a different approach. In the first example, the accurate method is to find the number of seconds first and then divide it by 60 to convert it in minutes. Dedicated Access Control for SQL Server Express Edition http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k00z82u4OI Book Signing at SQLPASS 2012 Who I Am And How I Got Here – True Story as Blog Post If there was a shortcut to success – I want to know. I learnt SQL Server hard way and I am still learning. There are so many things, I have to learn. There is not enough time to learn everything which we want to learn. I am constantly working on it every day. I welcome you to join my journey as well. Please join me in my journey to learn SQL Server – more the merrier. Vacation, Travel and Study – A New Concept Even those who have advanced degrees and went to college for years, or even decades, find studying hard.  There is a difference between studying for a career and studying for a certification.  At least to get a degree there is a variety of subjects, with labs, exams, and practice problems to make things more interesting. Order By Numeric Values Formatted as String We have a table which has a column containing alphanumeric data. The data always has first as an integer and later part as a string. The business need is to order the data based on the first part of the alphanumeric data which is an integer. Now the problem is that no matter how we use ORDER BY the result is not produced as expected. Let us understand this with an example. Resolving SQL Server Connection Errors – SQL in Sixty Seconds #030 – Video One of the most famous errors related to SQL Server is about connecting to SQL Server itself. Here is how it goes, most of the time developers have worked with SQL Server and knows pretty much every error which they face during development language. However, hardly they install fresh SQL Server. As the installation of the SQL Server is a rare occasion unless you are a DBA who is responsible for such an instance – the error faced during installations are pretty rare as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k00z82u4OI Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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