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• Book Review (Book 11) - Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform

  - by BuckWoody

  This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for April 2012 was: Applied Architecture Patterns on the Microsoft Platform. I was traveling at the end of last month so I’m a bit late posting this review here. Why I chose this book: I actually know a few of the authors on this book, so when they told me about it I wanted to check it out. The premise of the book is exactly as it states in the title - to learn how to solve a problem using products from Microsoft. What I learned: I liked the book - a lot. They've arranged the content in a "Solution Decision Framework", that presents a few elements to help you identify a need and then propose alternate solutions to solve them, and then the rationale for the choice. But the payoff is that the authors then walk through the solution they implement and what they ran into doing it. I really liked this approach. It's not a huge book, but one I've referred to again since I've read it. It's fairly comprehensive, and includes server-oriented products, not things like Microsoft Office or other client-side tools. In fact, I would LOVE to have a work like this for Open Source and other vendors as well - would make for a great library for a Systems Architect. This one is unashamedly aimed at the Microsoft products, and even if I didn't work here, I'd be fine with that. As I said, it would be interesting to see some books on other platforms like this, but I haven't run across something that presents other systems in quite this way. And that brings up an interesting point - This book is aimed at folks who create solutions within an organization. It's not aimed at Administrators, DBA's, Developers or the like, although I think all of those audiences could benefit from reading it. The solutions are made up, and not to a huge level of depth - nor should they be. It's a great exercise in thinking these kinds of things through in a structured way. The information is a bit dated, especially for Windows and SQL Azure. While the general concepts hold, the cloud platform from Microsoft is evolving so quickly that any printed book finds it hard to keep up with the improvements. I do have one quibble with the text - the chapters are a bit uneven. This is always a danger with multiple authors, but it shows up in a couple of chapters. I winced at one of the chapters that tried to take a more conversational, humorous style. This kind of academic work doesn't lend itself to that style. I recommend you get the book - and use it. I hope they keep it updated - I'll be a frequent customer. :)  

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• Career Advice: finding challenging work in software and web development

  - by dianovich

  Having left my physics degree early, I started out in the realm of web design / front end web development and was able to get work quite quickly. I moved on to spend a chunk of my time on servers and gained experience with frameworks like Wordpress and Drupal, then the likes of Codeigniter and CakePHP and became comfortable in Debian-based and RHEL/CentOS environments. I ventured in to iOS development and published a couple of native apps to the app store too! I have started to spend a good deal of my time writing Python and have invested a little time in Django. The problem is, I still spend a fair chunk of my time doing more front end web development (writing markup and CSS for site themes, design-lead JavaScript, small applications for which application architecture and software engineering are relatively unimportant or too time consuming to invest in) in my job. What I want to do is really exercise the systematic/logical portion of my brain and tackle challenging problems on a daily basis. I want to have to care about big-oh running times, modularity in software, DRY, performance tuning and development methodologies. I want to work for a firm whose clients say: "Yes, these things are important to us and we'll pay you to get them right." But it is difficult: I have no formal training and am potentially becoming a jack of all trades. Not that being a jack of many trades is necessarily a bad thing, but the scope of work I find myself involved in is far too broad. And, there are only so many hours in a day outside of work! My question is: where do I go from here? I am starting to work on a few open source projects and have started to publish content to my blog. But this isn't likely to make it past the recruitment consultants and HR departments of many-a-firm. And I do not, for example, work in a team that practices agile methodologies, so how do I get work in such a team to gain experience? While I have been responsible for implementing version control and some solid working practices into our current environment, there is only so far I can go in this context. What would convince you that i'm worth taking a risk? What would convince you that i'll have caught up the other guys in your employ in next to no time?

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• Keybindings for individual letter keys (not modifier-combinations) on a GtkTextView widget (Gtk3 and PyGI)

  - by monotasker

  I've been able to set several keybord shortcuts for a GtkTextView and a GtkTextEntry using the new css provider system. I'm finding, though, that I only seem to be able to establish keybindings for combinations including a modifier key. The widget doesn't respond to any bindings I set up that use: the delete key the escape key individual letter or punctuation keys alone Here's the code where I set up the css provider for the keybindings: #set up style context keys = Gtk.CssProvider() keys.load_from_path(os.path.join(data_path, 'keybindings.css')) #set up style contexts and css providers widgets = {'window': self.window, 'vbox': self.vbox, 'toolbar': self.toolbar, 'search_entry': self.search_entry, 'paned': self.paned, 'notelist_treeview': self.notelist_treeview, 'notelist_window': self.notelist_window, 'notetext_window': self.notetext_window, 'editor': self.editor, 'statusbar': self.statusbar } for l, w in widgets.iteritems(): w.get_style_context().add_provider(keys, Gtk.STYLE_PROVIDER_PRIORITY_USER) Then in keybindings.css this is an example of what works: @binding-set gtk-vi-text-view { bind "<ctrl>b" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, -5, 0) }; /* 5 lines up */ bind "<ctrl>k" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, -1, 0) }; /* down */ bind "<ctrl>j" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, 1, 0) }; /* up */ } Part of what I'm trying to do is just add proper delete-key function to the text widgets (right now the delete key does nothing at all). So if I add a binding like one of these, nothing happens: bind "Delete" { "delete-selection" () }; bind "Delete" { "delete-from-cursor" (chars, 1) }; The other part of what I want to do is more elaborate. I want to set up something like Vim's command and visual modes. So at the moment I'm just playing around with (a) setting the widget to editable=false by hitting the esc key; and (b) using homerow letters to move the cursor (as a proof-of-concept exercise). So far there's no response from the escape key or from the letter keys, even though the bindings work when I apply them to modifier-key combinations. For example, I do this in the css for the text-widget: bind "j" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, 1, 0) }; /* down */ bind "k" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, -1, 0) }; /* up */ bind "l" { "move-cursor" (logical-positions, 1, 0) }; /* right */ bind "h" { "move-cursor" (logical-positions, -1, 0) }; /* left */ but none of these bindings does anything, even if other bindings in the same set are respected. What's especially odd is that the vim-like movement bindings above are respected when I attach them to a GtkTreeView widget for navigating the tree-view options: @binding-set gtk-vi-tree-view { bind "j" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, 1) }; /* selection down */ bind "k" { "move-cursor" (display-lines, -1) }; /* selection up */ } So it seems like there are limitations or overrides of some kind on keybindings for the TextView widget (and for the del key?), but I can't find documentation of anything like that. Are these just things that can't be done with the css providers? If so, what are my alternatives for non-modified keybindings? Thanks.

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• Restoring MSDB

  - by David-Betteridge

  We recently performed a disaster recovery exercise which included the restoration of the MSDB database onto our DR server.  I did a quick google to see if there were any special considerations and found the following MS article.  Considerations for Restoring the model and msdb Databases (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190749(v=sql.105).aspx).   It said both the original and replacement servers must be on the same version,  I double-checked and in my case they are both SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 (10.50.2500).. So I went ahead and stopped SQL Server agent, restored the database and restarted the agent.  Checked the jobs and they were all there, everything looked great, and was until the server was rebooted a few days later.Then the syspolicy_purge_history job started failing on the 3rd step with the error message “Unable to start execution of step 3 (reason: The PowerShell subsystem failed to load [see the SQLAGENT.OUT file for details]; The job has been suspended). The step failed.”   A bit more googling pointed me to the msdb.dbo.syssubsystems table SELECT * FROM msdb.dbo.syssubsystems WHERE start_entry_point ='PowerShellStart'   And in particular the value for the subsystem_dll. It still had the path to the SQLPOWERSHELLSS.DLL but on the old server. The DR instance has a different name to the live instance and so the paths are different.   This was quickly fixed with the following SQL Use msdb; GO sp_configure 'allow updates', 1 ; RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE ; GO UPDATE msdb.dbo.syssubsystems SET subsystem_dll='C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10_50.DR\MSSQL\binn\SQLPOWERSHELLSS.DLL' WHERE start_entry_point ='PowerShellStart'; GO sp_configure 'allow updates', 0; RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE ; GO Stopped and started SQL Server agent and now the job completes.   I then wondered if anything else might be broken, SELECT subsystem_dll FROM msdb.dbo.syssubsystems Shows a further 10 wrong paths – fortunately for parts of SQL (replication, SSIS etc) we aren’t using! Lessons Learnt 1.       DR exercises are a good thing! 2.       Keep the Live and DR environments as similar as possible.    

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• ConsumeStructuredBuffer, what am I doing wrong?

  - by John

  I'm trying to implement the 3rd exercise in chapter 12 of Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11, that is: Implement a Compute Shader to calculate the length of 64 vectors. Previous exercises ask you to do the same with typed buffers and regular structured buffers and I had no problems with them. For what I've read, [Consume|Append]StructuredBuffers are bound to the pipeline using UnorderedAccessViews (as long as they use the D3D11_BUFFER_UAV_FLAG_APPEND, and the buffers have both D3D11_BIND_SHADER_RESOURCE and D3D11_BIND_UNORDERED_ACCESS bind flags). Problem is: my AppendStructuredBuffer works, since I can append data to it and retrieve it from the application to write to a results file, but the ConsumeStructuredBuffer always returns zeroed data. Data is in the buffer, since if I change the UAV to a ShaderResourceView and to a StructuredBuffer in the HLSL side it works. I don't know what I am missing: Should I initialize the ConsumeStructuredBuffer on the GPU, or can I do it when I create the buffer (as I amb currently doing). Is it OK to bind the buffer with a UAV as described above? Do I need to bind it as a ShaderResourceView somehow? Maybe I am missing some step? This is the declaration of buffers in the Compute Shader: struct Data { float3 v; }; struct Result { float l; }; ConsumeStructuredBuffer<Data> gInput; AppendStructuredBuffer<Result> gOutput; And here the creation of the buffer and UAV for input data: D3D11_BUFFER_DESC inputDesc; inputDesc.Usage = D3D11_USAGE_DEFAULT; inputDesc.ByteWidth = sizeof(Data) * mNumElements; inputDesc.BindFlags = D3D11_BIND_SHADER_RESOURCE | D3D11_BIND_UNORDERED_ACCESS; inputDesc.CPUAccessFlags = 0; inputDesc.StructureByteStride = sizeof(Data); inputDesc.MiscFlags = D3D11_RESOURCE_MISC_BUFFER_STRUCTURED; D3D11_SUBRESOURCE_DATA vinitData; vinitData.pSysMem = &data[0]; HR(md3dDevice->CreateBuffer(&inputDesc, &vinitData, &mInputBuffer)); D3D11_UNORDERED_ACCESS_VIEW_DESC uavDesc; uavDesc.Format = DXGI_FORMAT_UNKNOWN; uavDesc.ViewDimension = D3D11_UAV_DIMENSION_BUFFER; uavDesc.Buffer.FirstElement = 0; uavDesc.Buffer.Flags = D3D11_BUFFER_UAV_FLAG_APPEND; uavDesc.Buffer.NumElements = mNumElements; md3dDevice->CreateUnorderedAccessView(mInputBuffer, &uavDesc, &mInputUAV); Initial data is an array of Data structs, which contain a XMFLOAT3 with random data. I bind the UAV to the shader using the Effects framework: ID3DX11EffectUnorderedAccessViewVariable* Input = mFX->GetVariableByName("gInput")->AsUnorderedAccessView(); Input->SetUnorderedAccessView(uav); // uav is mInputUAV Any ideas? Thank you.

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• Iterative and Incremental Principle Series 2: Finding Focus

  - by llowitz

  Welcome back to the second blog in a five part series where I recount my personal experience with applying the Iterative and Incremental principle to my daily life.  As you recall from part one of the series, a conversation with my son prompted me to think about practical applications of the Iterative and Incremental approach and I realized I had incorporated this principle in my exercise regime.    I have been a runner since college but about a year ago, I sustained an injury that prevented me from exercising.  When I was sufficiently healed, I decided to pick it up again.  Knowing it was unrealistic to pick up where I left off, I set a goal of running 3 miles or approximately for 30 minutes.    I was excited to get back into running and determined to meet my goal.  Unfortunately, after what felt like a lifetime, I looked at my watch and realized that I had 27 agonizing minutes to go!  My determination waned and my positive “I can do it” attitude was overridden by thoughts of “This is impossible”.   My initial focus and excitement was not sustained so I never met my goal.   Understanding that the 30 minute run was simply too much for me mentally, I changed my approach.   I decided to try interval training.  For each interval, I planned to walk for 3 minutes, then jog for 2 minutes, and finally sprint for 1 minute, and I planned to repeat this pattern 5 times.  I found that each interval set was challenging, yet achievable, leaving me excited and invigorated for my next interval.  I easily completed five intervals – or 30 minutes!!  My sense of accomplishment soared. What does this have to do with OUM?  Have you heard the saying -- “How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time!”?  This adage certainly applies in my example and in an OUM systems implementation.  It is easier to manage, track progress and maintain team focus for weeks at a time, rather than for months at a time.   With shorter milestones, the project team focuses on the iteration goal.  Once the iteration goal is met, a sense of accomplishment is experience and the team can be re-focused on a fresh, yet achievable new challenge.  Join me tomorrow as I expand the concept of Iterative and incremental by taking a step back to explore the recommended approach for planning your iterations.

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• Wireframing: A Day In the Life of UX Workshop at Oracle

  - by ultan o'broin

  The Oracle Applications User Experience team's Day in the Life (DITL) of User Experience (UX) event was run in Oracle's Redwood Shores HQ for Oracle Usability Advisory Board (OUAB) members. I was charged with putting together a wireframing session, together with Director of Financial Applications User Experience, Scott Robinson (@scottrobinson). Example of stunning new wireframing visuals we used on the DITL events. We put on a lively show, explaining the basics of wireframing, the concepts, what it is and isn't, considerations on wireframing tool choice, and then imparting some tips and best practices. But the real energy came when the OUAB customers and partners in the room were challenge to do some wireframing of their own. Wireframing is about bringing your business and product use cases to life in real UX visual terms, by creating a low-fidelity drawing to iterate and agree on in advance of prototyping and coding what is to be finally built and rolled out for users. All the best people wireframe. Leonardo da Vinci used "cartoons" on some great works, tracing outlines first and using red ochre or charcoal dropped through holes in the tracing parchment onto the canvas to outline the subject. (Image distributed under Wikimedia commons license) Wireframing an application's user experience design enables you to: Obtain stakeholder buy-in. Enable faster iteration of different designs. Determine the task flow navigation paths (in Oracle Fusion Applications navigation is linked with user roles). Develop a content strategy (readability, search engine optimization (SEO) of content, and so on) Lay out the pages, widgets, groups of features, and so on. Apply usability heuristics early (no replacement for usability testing, but a great way to do some heavy-lifting up front). Decide upstream which functional user experience design patterns to apply (out of the box solutions that expedite productivity). Assess which Oracle Application Development Framework (ADF) or equivalent technology components can be used (again, developer productivity is enhanced downstream). We ran a lively hands-on exercise where teams wireframed a choice of application scenarios using the time-honored tools of pen and paper. Scott worked the floor like a pro, pointing out great use of features, best practices, innovations, and making sure that the whole concept of wireframing, the gestalt, transferred. "We need more buttons!" The cry of the energized. Not quite. The winning wireframe session (online shopping scenario) from the Applications UX DITL event shown. Great fun, great energy, and great teamwork were evident in the room. Naturally, there were prizes for the best wireframe. Well, actually, prizes were handed out to the other attendees too! An exciting, slightly different aspect to delivery of this session made the wireframing event one of the highlights of the day. And definitely, something we will repeat again when we get the chance. Thanks to everyone who attended, contributed, and helped organize.

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• Indefinite loops where the first time is different

  - by George T

  This isn't a serious problem or anything someone has asked me to do, just a seemingly simple thing that I came up with as a mental exercise but has stumped me and which I feel that I should know the answer to already. There may be a duplicate but I didn't manage to find one. Suppose that someone asked you to write a piece of code that asks the user to enter a number and, every time the number they entered is not zero, says "Error" and asks again. When they enter zero it stops. In other words, the code keeps asking for a number and repeats until zero is entered. In each iteration except the first one it also prints "Error". The simplest way I can think of to do that would be something like the folloing pseudocode: int number = 0; do { if(number != 0) { print("Error"); } print("Enter number"); number = getInput(); }while(number != 0); While that does what it's supposed to, I personally don't like that there's repeating code (you test number != 0 twice) -something that should generally be avoided. One way to avoid this would be something like this: int number = 0; while(true) { print("Enter number"); number = getInput(); if(number == 0) { break; } else { print("Error"); } } But what I don't like in this one is "while(true)", another thing to avoid. The only other way I can think of includes one more thing to avoid: labels and gotos: int number = 0; goto question; error: print("Error"); question: print("Enter number"); number = getInput(); if(number != 0) { goto error; } Another solution would be to have an extra variable to test whether you should say "Error" or not but this is wasted memory. Is there a way to do this without doing something that's generally thought of as a bad practice (repeating code, a theoretically endless loop or the use of goto)? I understand that something like this would never be complex enough that the first way would be a problem (you'd generally call a function to validate input) but I'm curious to know if there's a way I haven't thought of.

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• Homepage issue on Google [closed]

  - by nico

  We have recently updated our website www.blinds4uk.co.uk with a new homepage containing additional features and more on page content but since then we have lost primary keyword positions and the home page has disappeared completely. The only time it appears is for an exact search ‘blinds4uk’. Today I took snippets of 'unique content' from the homepage and put this into the 'google search' but our homepage was nowhere to be found. When I did the same in ‘Yahoo’ the homepage came up. Are we missing something? We ranked in the top 4 for primary kw terms 'blinds uk' & 'uk blinds' but now we don’t show anywhere for these terms. Our homepage has never ranked well for the primary kw 'blinds' yet our internal pages rank very well with many pages on page 1 of google uk. We employed an SEO firm for 9 months to help us establish issues with the homepage but they never could, so we got rid. We have been trying to get to the root cause of why the homepage ranks so poorly for a number of years and only yesterday we established that we had the meta tag directly below the tag and our title & meta description were further down the page; we have today corrected. Not sure what effect this would have on the way Google reads the homepage but we are trying everything to try and get the homepage ranking fro those primary kw's. Our current developers & ex SEO guys are all part of the same company and cannot pin-point anything other than saying carryon with their SEO team because it will take time but just comes across as a milking exercise. Another thing which I have found very strange is the data from our 'traffic audience'. We are a UK based website yet our traffic stats were showing as;- UK 36.6%, Denmark 35.8% and India 27.6%. – don’t make sense to me! Is there anybody out there that could simply point us in the right direction to the problem(s), so we can fix once and for all? Could there be anything within the code that is causing the home page not to display within google for our primary kw's terms such as blinds, window blinds etc. I would appreciate any advice at all that may help us in our quest to sort this homepage issue once and for all

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• Event-Driven Debugging

  - by Brian Donahue

  Most application troubleshooting involves getting an error, analyzing the error message, and at worst, attaching a debugger to work out the real cause. What is not really covered is how to troubleshoot an applicaiton that is not errant, but is having a performance issue, and more than likely, in the middle of the night when you are snug in your bed, sawing logs. What you need is an ever-vigilant cyborg who never sleeps to sit in front of your server all night, but as SkyNet is not live yet, you can settle for the next-best thing. Windows provides performance counters and alerts that can tell you when an applicaiton reaches an unacceptable threshold of naughty behavior, but although it can tattle on your brainchild, it won't be the child psychiatrist that you need to tell you why he's pulling your server's pigtails and pulling faces at the teacher. What you need is to plug a debugger into performance monitor and have it tell you what's going on with your applicaiton at the time. For this purpose, I'd used Microsoft's MDbgEngine as the basis for an applicaiton that will dump a program's stacks, I call it Application Slicer Dicer Wonder Dumper Super Cyborg, or StackOMatic for short. StackOMatic can look at a program's behavior and tell you if the stacks are not moving, but it can also work on the command-line to dump all managed methods on the stack at will. Now that there is a command you can use to dump the stacks, all you need to do is politely tell Windows to run it when you're displeased with your creation as it's trashing the CPU of your server at 3 AM. The first step is to create a scheduled task to tell StackOMatic to dump your applicaiton. Start Task Scheduler and right-click Task Scheduler Library and then Create Task. For this exercise I'm creating a task that will dump the Red Gate SQL Monitor Base Monitor Service. In the Actions tab, I enter the path to StackOMatic and use the arguments to log the stack dump to a file: /PN:RedGate.Response.Engine.Alerting.Base.Service /OUT:c:\users\administrator\MonitorLog.txt Next, I go into Windows Server 2008's Reliability and Performance Monitor and add a new Data Collector Set. This set will produce an alert on the %Processor Time for the service. When the processor time breaches 50%, it will run the StackDumpBaseService task I created. Whenever the service misbehaves, it will append to the log file. Now when I go to work in the morning, I can see what the service was doing when it overloaded the processor and take action.

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• iptables -P FORWARD DROP makes port forwarding slow

  - by Isaac

  I have three computers, linked like this: box1 (ubuntu) box2 router & gateway (debian) box3 (opensuse) [10.0.1.1] ---- [10.0.1.18,10.0.2.18,10.0.3.18] ---- [10.0.3.15] | box4, www [10.0.2.1] Among other things I want box2 to do nat and port forwarding, so that I can do ssh -p 2223 box2 to reach box3. For this I have the following iptables script: #!/bin/bash # flush iptables -F INPUT iptables -F FORWARD iptables -F OUTPUT iptables -t nat -F PREROUTING iptables -t nat -F POSTROUTING iptables -t nat -F OUTPUT # default default_action=DROP for chain in INPUT OUTPUT;do iptables -P $chain $default_action done iptables -P FORWARD DROP # allow ssh to local computer allowed_ssh_clients="10.0.1.1 10.0.3.15" for ip in $allowed_ssh_clients;do iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 22 -d $ip -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -s $ip -j ACCEPT done # allow DNS iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -m state \ --state NEW,ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p udp --sport 53 -m state \ --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT # allow HTTP & HTTPS iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 80,443 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --sports 80,443 -j ACCEPT # # ROUTING # # allow routing echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward # nat iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE # http iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --sport 80 -j ACCEPT # ssh redirect iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -i eth1 --dport 2223 -j DNAT \ --to-destination 10.0.3.15:22 iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --sport 22 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --sport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --dport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT iptables -I FORWARD -j LOG --log-prefix "iptables denied: " While this works, it takes about 10 seconds to get a password promt from my ssh command. Afterwards, the connection is as responsive as could be. If I change the default policy for my FORWARD chain to "ACCEPT", then the password promt is there imediatly. I have tried analysing the logs, but I can not spot a difference in the logs for ACCEPT/DROP in my FORWARD chain. Also I have tried allowing all the unprivileged ports, as box1 uses thoses for doing ssh to box2. Any hints? (If the whole setup seems strange to you - the point of the exercise is to understand iptables ;))

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• Running SSL locally on a hosts redirected domain name with Ubuntu and Apache

  - by Matthew Brown

  I recently made some changes to my Ubuntu computer so that a domain name resolved to my local copy of Apache. I edited /etc/hosts and added 127.0.0.1 thisbit.example.com Then set up a VirtualHost for the responses I wishes to create. That all works fine and my testing is now shooting on ahead without harm or risk tot he production server. Now for my next trick I need to test the authentication and so need to do this with HTTPS Basically https://auth.example.com needs to work on my PC without the SSL causing an issue which I imagine would be the case as I am clearly not the true https://auth.example.com but for the basis of this exercise I need to pretend that I am. Now it might be that the Apps I'm testing don't worry about checking the certificate. (Many are in Java which I'm no expert with). What gotchas am I likely to encounter and what is the best way of not letting my own hacks spoil my testing? I'm guessing the place to start is to enable SSL with Apcahe... I've never done that before as it has never come up before.

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• Tips on setting up a virtual lab for self-learning networking topics

  - by Harry

  I'm trying to self-learn the following topics on Linux (preferably Fedora): Network programming (using sockets API), especially across proxies and firewalls Proxies (of various kinds like transparent, http, socks...), Firewalls (iptables) and 'basic' Linux security SNAT, DNAT Network admininstration power tools: nc, socat (with all its options), ssh, openssl, etc etc. Now, I know that, ideally, it would be best if I had 'enough' number of physical nodes and physical network equipment (routers, switches, etc) for this self-learning exercise. But, obviously, don't have the budget or the physical space, nor want to be wasteful -- especially, when things could perhaps be simulated/emulated in a Linux environment. I have got one personal workstation, which is a single-homed Fedora desktop with 4GB memory, 200+ GB disk, and a 4-core CPU. I may be able to get 3 to 4 additional low-end Fedora workstations. But all of these -- including mine -- will always remain strictly behind our corporate firewall :-( Now, I know I could use VirtualBox-based virtual nodes, but don't know if there are any better alternatives disk- and memory- footprint-wise. Would you be able to give me some tips or suggestions on how to get started setting up this little budget- and space-constrained 'virtual lab' of mine? For example, how would I create virtual routers? Has someone attempted this sort of thing before: namely, creating a virtual network lab behind a corporate firewall for learning/development/testing purposes? I hope my question is not vague or too open-ended. Basically, right now, I don't know how to best leverage the Linux environment and the various 'goodies' it comes with, and buying physical devices only when it is absolutely necessary.

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• Determine the time difference between two linux servers

  - by Paul

  I am troubleshooting a latency network issue on a network. It is probably a nic or cabling issue, but while I was going through the process of figuring it out, I was looking at the timings of a ping packet leaving a network card and arriving at another server. Both linux. So I have tcpdump running on both, and I issue a ping from one to the other, and back again, and looking at the timing differences might have shed light on where the latency is coming from. It is an academic exercise now, as I need to eliminate some more fundamental causes, but I was curious as to how this could be achieved. Given that ntpd is installed and running on two servers, how can I confirm the current time discrepency between the two servers, to whatever level of accuracy is possible - given that we are talking about latency on a local lan, which is ideally a millisecond or so. NTP itself is accurate to a couple of ms under good conditions, and as both servers are in the same environment, they should (presumably) achieve a similar level of accuracy, and so should have a time discrepency between them of a only few ms - but how can I check this?

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• The Server Fault Wiki of recommended practices [migrated]

  - by Avery Payne

  So I've noticed that there are several recommendations on basic practices on Server Fault, but there doesn't seem to be a cohesive view as to how those recommendations would all fit together. So I thought I would lump these together as a kind of mental exercise to see what the "ServerFault Community IT Department" would look like if it were implemented. This would give a few things: it would make a reasonable wiki (in the true wiki spirit of many contributions), it would provide several links to well-vetted practices, and it would be kind of fun to see what the amalgamation would look like. And who knows, it may even point out some interesting issues between different forms of "best practices", although I would be stunned if there was a conflict hidden in there someplace... Add your favorites from Server Fault as answers, and I'll re-edit this section with the results. Here's a few catagories to collect different ideas together. Hardware Configuration(s) Server room configuration. Server room temperature Firmware Updates and Scheduling Storage Configuration(s) Selecting a NAS box Linux: Dealing with /tmp Linux: Install apps in /var or /opt? Network Configuration(s) checking DNS health and compliance Security Practice(s) Password (General) Best Practices Password sharing methods Windows Update Updating Windows Servers that are hosts for VMs Network Service(s) User Service(s) User Naming & Deletion Upgrade Process(es) Disaster Recovery Checking Backups Documenting an outage for a post-mortem review Last Edit: 2010-02-17

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• Google Apps Sync bloated PST file to 14GB

  - by James S

  Back story: I have Outlook connected to my Google Apps email and noticed that some mail never got migrated from my original PST file. I found some VBA code online that compares mail in different PST folders, modified it to find missing and copy those to the target folder. I ran it folder by folder and moved missing mail. Before the exercise the Google Apps PST was about ~4GB and after it was ~4.7GB. Problem: I left Outlook open so Google Sync can copy it online. 24 hours later the Google Apps PST file bloated to 14GB+ and none of the mail has been synced to the cloud. I know that there should be at most ~5GB of mail. Why is the rest of the space being taken up? Funny thing is Gmail shows 3GB as being used online. What I tried: I emptied the deleted items folder and recycling bin I've run Outlook compact PST and it didn't work. I tried SCANPST.exe on the PST and it didn't work. I re-ran compact PST and it didn't work (after SCANPST found and fixed a few errors) Any ideas out there on what caused the problem and how to solve it?

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• How to discover true identity of hard disk?

  - by F21

  I have 2 fake external hard drives that claim to have a storage capacity of 2TB. I pulled the enclosure apart and the hard drives seems to be refurbished ones with their labels replaced as Barracuda LP 2000 GB labels (the serial numbers on both labels are the same). Interestingly, one of the drives have 160G written on it with pencil. However, the counterfeiters seem to have done something to the firmware, because CrystalDiskInfo reports them as 2TB ST2000DL003 drives. I then delete the 1.81 TB partition in Windows disk management and tried to create a new one and format it. Once I get to this point, the drives would make some noise that is common to dying drives. I am not interested in using these drives for production, but I am interested in finding the true identity (manufacturer/serial number/model number, etc) and restoring it to their factory defaults with the right capacity. Can this be done without any special equipment? This would be an interesting learning exercise. Some pictures of the drives in question: Here are the screens from CrystalDiskInfo: Note the serial numbers are the same (these are 2 different drives!). How is this done? Did they have to tamper with the controller board? I would assume that changing the firmware doesn't change the serial number at all.

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• Recommended open-source firmware for ASUS RT-N16

  - by MasterF

  I have recently acquired an ASUS RT-N16 router. My original plan for it was to install Tomato on it. However, after checking their website i found out that the firmware was not updated in the last 2 years. There seem to be a few updated mods but none of them really seemed mature/stable/well-documented. I would like to know what other people recommend as open-source firmware for this router. I know the answers will probably be subjective; so i will give a bit of background on my needs: for now i will only use the Wi-Fi on an Android phone the connection will not be shared with anyone (so QOS is optional) i want a stable (wired) connection on my PC (for online gaming etc.) i want the (wired) download/upload speeds to be as close as possible to those achieved by directly plugging the Ethernet cable to the PC's network card; i have a 100 Mbps connection my ISP uses PPPOE my technical level: i am a software developer and i have good knowledge of bash scripting, but no experience with networking Also, i know that i could probably just use the stock firmware (and maybe will use it for a while), but i'm interested in trying an open-source version (for more features, flexibility, as a learning exercise etc.)

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• Using udev to create a character device based on a driver being loaded

  - by SteveCB

  I'm in the process of setting up RAID monitoring for a number of Dell servers that use the PERC 6i integrated card. We're using Nagios at present and the check_megasasctl plugin seems to fit the bill. However, the plugin relies upon the existence of: /dev/megaraid_sas_ioctl_node This device node doesn't exist by default, you have to create it by hand using something like: mknod /dev/megaraid_sas_ioctl_node c 253 0 Now, to make the existence of this device node persistent across reboots, I thought I could write a udev rule, but as usual, I'm missing something. I thought I could create a file such as /etc/udev/rules.d/10-local/rules that contained: DRIVER=="megasas" NAME="megaraid_sas_ioctl_node" MODE="0600" But this doesn't work - no device node after a reboot. Dmesg output indicates the megasas driver is loaded and functional: megasas: 00.00.04.01-RH1 Thu July 10 09:41:51 PST 2008 megasas: 0x1000:0x0060:0x1028:0x1f0c: bus 1:slot 0:func 0 megasas: FW now in Ready state Further, I don't see any means to instruct udev on which type of device node to create: character or block. I suspect I'm failing to understand exactly how udev is meant to work. I realise I could just cheat and run MegaCLI in /etc/rc.local, redirecting output to /dev/null; it creates the megaraid_sas_ioctl_node device node as part of its execution. I just thought using udev rules would be a) cleaner and b) a useful learning exercise. Perhaps I should just dump the above mknod command in /etc/rc.local... So how do I get udev to create the /dev/megaraid_sas_ioctl_node device node based on the presence of the megasas driver? Cheers Steve

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• Moving a site from IIs6 to IIS7.5

  - by Sukotto

  I need to move a site off of IIS6 (Win Server 2003) and onto IIS7.5 (Win Server 2008) as soon as possible. Preferably tomorrow. The site itself is a delightful mix of classic asp (vbscript) and one-off asp.net (C#) applications (each asp.net app is in its own virtual dir and has a self-contained web.config). In case it's relevant, this is a sort of research site made up of 40 or 50 unconnected microsites. Each microsite is typically a simple form allowing a user to submit a form, which then runs a Stored Proc on a sqlserver db and displays a chart and/or table of the results. There is very little security to worry about. The database connection info is in a central file (in the case of the classic asp) or app's individual web.config (lots of duplication there) To add a little spice to the exercise... I have no idea how to admin IIS The company no longer employs the sysadmin or the guys who set this thing up. (They're not going to employ me much longer either but my sense of professional pride does not permit me to just walk away from this task). The servers are on mutually firewalled networks and I have to perform a convoluted, multi-step process to copy anything from one to the other. Would someone please point me to a crash-course tutorial for accomplishing the above? I have: a complete copy of the site's filesystem on the new box installed the 3rd party charting tool on the new system a config.xml file from the "all tasks - save configuration to a file" right click menu. There doesn't seem to be a way to import it on the new system however. The newer IIS manager has a completely different UI and I'm totally lost. Please help.

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• How do you avoid that server documentation gets out of sync with the actual setup?

  - by Frerich Raabe

  I'm a hobbyist maintaining a small FreeBSD server serving mail via IMAP - it's an exercise in server administration. The setup does have reasonably good documentation (in AsciiDoc format) which recently allowed another person to recreate the entire setup from scratch in less than 30 minutes. However, I noticed that after the initial setup, it easily happens that small changes done to the system (say: inetd gets disabbled, my IMAP server listens on an additional port for ManageSieve connections, a new router is added to the exim configuration) don't end up in the documentation immediately (if at all). My idea was to avoid this problem by (partially?) generating the documentation out of the configuration files and the comments therein - one way to implement this may be to put /etc and /usr/local/etc into some source code management system (say - git) and then run a script which regenerates the documentation on every commit. However, I'm not sure whether that would be overkill and/or too difficult to get right (after all, I don't want complete copies of the source files in my documentation but rather just the diffs). How do other people avoid that the server documentation gets outdated - is there a good way to keep them in sync automatically, or do you just have the discipline to update the documentation the same time you modify the system?

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• hi, beginner issue with socat [closed]

  - by ams

  the main question is how to begin sending request to server with some data(send request with number) and get data from server?? and second question is how can i solve this simple question (author said) ? In this part, you should write a simple Shell script which receives URL of a website by sending your student number to a server and after creating and sending HTTP request for this URL, receives the desired content. Finally the content should be saved in an HTML file. Steps 1. Connect to port 4000 of the server and send the massage which includes your student number (e.g. 89207704) to the server. Receive the URL in the form of http://www.example.com. Create the HTTP request and send it to the website's server. Receive the content of the URL from the website. Save the content in the HTML file. what i can do? how i begin? thank u all the topology that exercise is speaking about is here Topology is here Is there any easy way to do this?

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• jQuery: How to check if a value exists in an array?

  - by Jannis

  Hello, I am trying to write a simple input field validation plugin at the moment (more of a learning exercise really) and thought this would not be too hard, seeing as all I should have to do is: Get input fields Store them in array with each one's value On submit of form check if array contains any empty strings But I seem to fail at writing something that checks for an empty string (read: input with no text inside) inside my array. Here is the code I have so far: var form = $(this), // passed in form element inputs = form.find('input'), // all of this forms input fields isValid = false; // initially set the form to not be valid function validate() { var fields = inputs.serializeArray(); // make an array out of input fields // start -- this does not work for (var n in fields) { if (fields[n].value == "") { isValid = false; console.log('failed'); } else { isValid = true; console.log('passed'); }; } // end -- this does not work }; // close validate() // TRIGGERS inputs.live('keyup blur', function(event) { validate(); }); Any help with how I can check if one of the fields is blank and if so return a isValid = false would be much appreciated. I also played around with the $.inArray("", fields) but this would never return 0 or 1 even when the console.log showed that the fields had no value. Thanks for reading.

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• OO Design - polymorphism - how to design for handing streams of different file types

  - by Kache4

  I've little experience with advanced OO practices, and I want to design this properly as an exercise. I'm thinking of implementing the following, and I'm asking if I'm going about this the right way. I have a class PImage that holds the raw data and some information I need for an image file. Its header is currently something like this: #include <boost/filesytem.hpp> #include <vector> namespace fs = boost::filesystem; class PImage { public: PImage(const fs::path& path, const unsigned char* buffer, int bufferLen); const vector<char> data() const { return data_; } const char* rawData() const { return &data_[0]; } /*** other assorted accessors ***/ private: fs::path path_; int width_; int height_; int filesize_; vector<char> data_; } I want to fill the width_ and height_ by looking through the file's header. The trivial/inelegant solution would be to have a lot of messy control flow that identifies the type of image file (.gif, .jpg, .png, etc) and then parse the header accordingly. Instead of using vector<char> data_, I was thinking of having PImage use a class, RawImageStream data_ that inherits from vector<char>. Each type of file I plan to support would then inherit from RawImageStream, e.g. RawGifStream, RawPngStream. Each RawXYZStream would encapsulate the respective header-parsing functions, and PImage would only have to do something like height_ = data_.getHeight();. Am I thinking this through correctly? How would I create the proper RawImageStream subclass for data_ to be in the PImage ctor? Is this where I could use an object factory? Anything I'm forgetting?

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• shell_exec escaping quotes in php for Twitter API --> Getting CURL to work with obscure twitter api

  - by yc10

  I'm using shell_exec() to execute a Twitter API Call. shell_exec('curl -u user:password -d "id=3191321" http://api.twitter.com/1/twitterapi/twitterlist/members.xml'); That works fine when I authenticate correctly and put in a number for the id. But when I try to put in a variable ($id), it screws up. $addtolist = shell_exec('curl -u pxlist:Weekend1 -d "id='.$id.'" http://twitter.com/username/twitterlist/members.xml'); I tried flipping the quote types $addtolist = shell_exec("curl -u pxlist:Weekend1 -d 'id=$id' http://twitter.com/username/twitterlist/members.xml"); I tried using double quotes and escaping them $addtolist = shell_exec("curl -u pxlist:Weekend1 -d \"id=$id\" http://twitter.com/username/twitterlist/members.xml"); None of them worked. What am I doing wrong? EDIT: The purists say I should be using PHP's built in curl methods, not the shell_exec. That's not working either. $url = 'http://twitter.com/user/list/members.xml'; // Set up and execute the curl process $curl_handle = curl_init(); curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url"); curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2); curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1); curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "id=$id"); curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "user:pw"); $buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle); curl_close($curl_handle); It returns bool(false), and doesn't properly update the Twitter List in question (the whole point of the exercise)

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