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• (Python) Extracting Text from Source Code?

  - by zhuyxn

  Currently have a large webpage whose source code is ~200,000 lines of almost all (if not all) HTML. More specifically, it is a webpage whose content is a few thousand blocks of paragraphs separated by line breaks (though a line break does not specifically mean there is a separation in content) My main objective is to extract text from the source code as if I were copying/pasting the webpage into a text editor. There is another parsing function I would like to use, which originally took in copied/pasted text rather than the source code. To do this, I'm currently using urllib2, and calling .get_text() in Beautiful Soup. The problem is, Beautiful Soup is leaving tremendous amounts of white space in my code, and it is difficult to pass the result into the second "text" parser. I have done quite a bit of research on parsing HTMLs, but I'm frankly not sure how to solve this problem easily. Furthermore, I'm a bit confused on how to use imports like lxml to extract text as if I were to simply copy and paste?

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• wrap all lines that are longer than line length

  - by user1919840

  I am writing a program that limits each line to a certain length. this is what i got so far, i am almost done but i still need to cut each line, but i cant figure it out. def main(): filename = input("Please enter the name of the file to be used: ") openFile = open(filename, 'r+') file = openFile.read() lLength = int(input("enter a number between 10 & 20: ")) while (lLength < 10) or (lLength > 20) : print("Invalid input, please try again...") lLength = int(input("enter a number between 10 & 20: ")) wr = textwrap.TextWrapper() wraped = wr.wrap(file) print("Here is your output formated to a max of", lLength, "characters per line: ") wr.width = lLength wr.expand_tabs = True for lines in wraped: print(lines) an example of what the output SHOULD be is this. If the file specified contains this text: hgytuinghdt #here the length is 11 ughtnjuiknshfyth #here the length is 16 nmjhkaiolgytuhngjuin #here the length is 20 and the lLength is specified to 15 then this should print out: hgytuinghdt ughtnjuiknshfyt h nmjhkaiolgytuhng juin Thanks.

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• mySQL .NET API - Delete all data from table

  - by keynesiancross

  Hi all, I'm trying to figure out if there is an easy way to delete all the data in a table using the mySQL .NET API. The only slightly more tricky part to this is that in the C# code, the business logic can be run in both cases where there is, or isn't, data in teh table. So in some regards I almost need an If statement... Currently I am using the following code, but it doesn't seem to ever delete data... string deleteSQL = "DELETE FROM `data`.`currentData`"; MySqlCommand cmd2 = new MySqlCommand(deleteSQL, conn); Any thoughts would be much appreciated! Cheers

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• How to design a database where the main entity table has 25+ columns but a single entity's columns g

  - by thenextwebguy

  The entities to be stored have 25+ properties (table columns). The entities are pretty diverse, meaning that, most of the columns are empty. On average, I'd say, less than 20% (<5) properties have a value in any particular item. So, I have a lot of redundant empty columns for most of the table rows. Almost all of the columns are decimal numbers. Given this scenario, would you suggest serializing the columns instead, or perhaps, create another table named "Property", which would contain all the possible properties and then creating yet another table "EntityProperty" which would map an property to an entity using foreign keys? Or would you leave it as it is?

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• Floating toolbar on bottom, centered, 80% of current screen width

  - by Tom

  I'm trying to implement a Facebook like toolbar on the bottom of the screen for a website I'm currently working on. Currently, I have it 100% of the width of the screen but I'd like to have it look almost exactly like Facebook's toolbar, centered, bottom justified on top, around 80% of the current screen's width. Here is the current CSS for the toolbar I have that is 100% of the screen's width. Thanks in advance. CSS: <style type="text/css"> #toolbar { background:url('/_assets/img/toolbar.gif') repeat-x; height:25px; position:fixed; bottom:0px; width:100%; left:0px; border-left:1px solid #000000; border-right:1px solid #000000; z-index:100; font-size:0.8em; } </style>

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• aspx page with gridview runs very fast in IE but 20% of the speed on Firefox

  - by frank2009

  Hi there I have a simple aspx page with some search options which queries an SQLEXpress database, and it is displayed in a gridview. For some reason, it runs lightning fast in IE but very slow in Firefox. It has very little code, a gridview a couple of images and a couple of textboxes and a search button. It was done with Expression Web so no additional code added. In production (not local) the speed is very noticiable when doing a search... IE displays the results almost instantly...Firefox might take 3-5 seconds. And everything else runs super fast as well in IE (update, delete etc). Is there a reason for this ? Thanks

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• Query total page count via SNMP HP Laserjet

  - by Tim

  I was asked to get hold of the total pages counts for the 100+ printers we have at work. All of them are HP Laser or Business Jets of some description and the vast majority are connected via some form of HP JetDirect network card/switch. After many hours of typing in IP addresses and copying and pasting the relevant figure in to Excel I have now been asked to do this on a weekly basis. This led me to think there must be an easier way, as an IT professional I can surely work out some time saving method to solve this issue. Suffice it to say I do not feel very professional now after a day or so of trying to make SNMP work for me! From what I understand the first thing is to enable SNMP on the printer. Done. Next I would need something to query the SNMP bit. I decided to go open source and free and someone here recommended net-snmp as a decent tool (I would like to have just added the printers as nodes in SolarWinds but we are somewhat tight on licences apparently). Next I need the name of the MIB. For this I believe the HP-LASERJET-COMMON-MIB has the correct information in it. Downloaded this and added to net-snmp. Now I need the OID which I believe after much scouring is printed-media-simplex-count (we have no duplex printers, that we are interested in at least). Running the following command yields the following demoralising output: snmpget -v 2c -c public 10.168.5.1 HP-LASERJET-COMMON-MIB:.1.3.6.1.2.1.1.16.1.1.1 (the OID was derived from running: snmptranslate -IR -On printed-media-simplex-count Unlinked OID in HP-LASERJET-COMMON-MIB: hp ::= { enterprises 11 } Undefined identifier: enterprises near line 3 of C:/usr/share/snmp/mibs/HP-LASER JET-COMMON-MIB..txt .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.16.1.1.1 ) Unlinked OID in HP-LASERJET-COMMON-MIB: hp ::= { enterprises 11 } Undefined identifier: enterprises near line 3 of C:/usr/share/snmp/mibs/HP-LASER JET-COMMON-MIB..txt HP-LASERJET-COMMON-MIB:.1.3.6.1.2.1.1.16.1.1.1: Am I barking up the wrong tree completely with this? My aim was to script it all to output to a file for all the IP addresses of the printers and then plonk that in Excel for my lords and masters to digest at their leisure. I have a feeling I am using either the wrong MIB or the wrong OID from said MIB (or both). Does anyone have any pointers on this for me? Or should I give up and go back to navigationg each printers web page individually (hoping not).

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• CentOS 5.5 : Postfix, Dovecot & MySQL

  - by GruffTech

  I'm hoping someone has seen this issue before because I'm at quite a loss. We're building a new outbound smtp server for our clients that features anti-spam scanning and virus scanning for outbound emails, something we had not previously done. So with CentOS 5.5 x64, Installed and patched completely. Postfix & Dovecot both installed via base repo. [grufftech@outgoing postfix]# rpm -qa | grep postfix postfix-2.3.3-2.1.el5_2 [grufftech@outgoing postfix]# rpm -qa | grep dovecot dovecot-1.0.7-7.el5 [grufftech@outgoing ~]# dovecot --build-options Build options: ioloop=poll notify=inotify ipv6 openssl SQL drivers: mysql postgresql Passdb: checkpassword ldap pam passwd passwd-file shadow sql Userdb: checkpassword ldap passwd prefetch passwd-file sql static /etc/dovecot.conf auth default { mechanisms = plain login digest-md5 cram-md5 passdb sql { args = /etc/dovecot-mysql.conf } userdb sql { args = /etc/dovecot-mysql.conf } userdb prefetch { } user = nobody socket listen { master { path = /var/run/dovecot/auth-master mode = 0660 user = postfix group = postfix } client { path = /var/spool/postfix/private/auth mode = 0660 user = postfix group = postfix } } } All the server is doing is auth for postfix, so no reason to have imap / pop / dict. /etc/dovecot-mysql.conf driver = mysql connect = host=10.0.32.159 dbname=mail user=****** password=******** default_pass_scheme = plain user_query = select 1 password_query = select password from users where username = '%n' and domain = '%d' So drop in my configuration, (which is working on another server identical to this one.) [grufftech@outgoing ~]# /etc/init.d/dovecot start Starting Dovecot Imap: [ OK ] Sweet. Booted up nicely, thats good.... (incoming problem in 3....2....1....) May 21 08:09:01 outgoing dovecot: Dovecot v1.0.7 starting up May 21 08:09:02 outgoing dovecot: auth-worker(default): mysql: Connect failed to 10.0.32.159 (mail): Can't connect to MySQL server on '10.0.32.159' (13) - waiting for 1 seconds before retry well what the crap. went and checked permissions on my MySQL database, and its fine. [grufftech@outgoing ~]# mysql vpopmail -h 10.0.32.159 -u ****** -p Enter password: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 127828558 Server version: 4.1.22 Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer. mysql>\q So! My server can talk to my database server. but dovecot, for whatever reason, isn't able to. I've fiddled with it for the last six hours, grabbed slightly-older copies of the RPM (ones that matched our production server exactly) to test those, copied configs, searched google, searched server fault, chatted in IRC, banged my head against the table, I've done it all. Surely I'm doing something wrong or forgetting something, can anyone tell me what the elephant in the room is? This stuff is supposed to work.

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• AIX: iscsi volumes disappear after reboot

  - by Dan

  We have an IBM P505 AIX box, with two internal disks and a defined iSCSI volume. The iSCSI volume is defined in it's own volume group, and is connected to an IBM iSCSI DS3300 disk array via the secondary onboard ethernet port (ie, we're not using a dedicated HBA, we're using the second onboard ethernet port for iSCSI exclusively.) When we reboot the AIX box, the iSCSI volume doesn't get mounted (which is fine; I've figured out that it fails to mount because AIX tries mounting it's volumes before starting the networking stack.) The problem is, after the server has booted it fails to redetect the iSCSI target as a physical disk. This means the volume group (iscsivg) can't go online. if I run cfgmgr -v to redetect the iscsi volume it successfully detects the iscsi target volume and creates a physical volume reference, but allocates it a different volume ID to what was defined before. eg - rootvg contains hdisk 0 and 1 iscsivg was originally defined with hdisk2 as the physical iSCSI volume. after reboot and running cfgmgr -v, AIX detects physical volumes hdisk0, hdisk11 and hdisk3. As there's no hdisk2, I can't varyon the iscsivg volume group. I can't seem any existing hdisk2 definition in the ODM. I can't easily add or change the definition of the physcial disk in the iscsivg volume group as it won't "varyon". Exporting the volume group deletes it completely, recreating the volume group by "importing" it from the reallocated disk makes it available again, but surely there's a better way? Can I force a specific hdisk drive designation for an iscsi target? How do you bring online iSCSI volumes after a reboot? I assume this "just works" with a dedicated HBA instead of a generic ethernet adapter? By the way, the iSCSI volume works fine once it's mounted; we only have problems getting it working - and only with AIX. The iSCSI array works fine with our Linux and Windows servers; ie the volumes get detected and remounted after boot time without any problems, using generic ethernet adapters. Here's some of the config from the AIX box: defined disks / devices: # lsdev hdisk0 Available 06-08-01-5,0 16 Bit LVD SCSI Disk Drive hdisk1 Available 06-08-01-8,0 16 Bit LVD SCSI Disk Drive hdisk3 Available Other iSCSI Disk Drive iscsi0 Available iSCSI Protocol Device scsi0 Available 06-08-00 PCI-X Dual Channel Ultra320 SCSI Adapter bus scsi1 Available 06-08-01 PCI-X Dual Channel Ultra320 SCSI Adapter bus ses0 Available 06-08-01-15,0 SCSI Enclosure Services Device sisscsia0 Available 06-08 PCI-X Dual Channel Ultra320 SCSI Adapter iscsi target definition in /etc/iscsi/targets: # IBM DS3300 disk array # port 1 on second controller 10.10.xx.xxx 3260 iqn.1992-01.com.lsi:1535.600a0b80005b0a7fxxxxxxxxxxxx physical volumes (after reimporting the volume group) # lspv hdisk0 0003b08a0d4936b6 rootvg active hdisk1 0003b08aaa5cb366 rootvg active hdisk3 0003b08a032d04bb iscsivg active

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• Supervisor sentry-web exit status 1

  - by rockingskier

  I'm having problems getting Sentry (https://www.getsentry.com - not enough rep for a link) running as a service using supervisor. I can run Sentry in the command line and view it correctly in the browser but when it comes to supervisor I am completely in the dark. I shall try and give all the details I can Initial user warning By no means a server admin, just playing/learning in VirtualBox. Literally only just discovered supervisor from reading the Sentry documentation so I may well be making some obvious mistakes here. The setup: Ubuntu server 11.10 (fresh install, VirtualBox) virtualenv with Sentry and its dependencies. supervisor Instructions followed Supervisor with vanilla ini file Sentry/supervisor instructions My supervisor ini (Sentry section) [program:sentry-web] directory=/root/.virtualenvs/sentry/ command= start http /root/.virtualenvs/sentry/bin/sentry autostart=true autorestart=true redirect_stderr=true OK so here we go: When I run supervisord -n I get the following messages rather than a nice web interface to play with. 2012-04-12 23:48:09,024 CRIT Supervisor running as root (no user in config file) 2012-04-12 23:48:09,097 INFO RPC interface 'supervisor' initialized 2012-04-12 23:48:09,099 CRIT Server 'unix_http_server' running without any HTTP authentication checking 2012-04-12 23:48:09,100 INFO supervisord started with pid 17813 2012-04-12 23:48:10,126 INFO spawned: 'sentry-web' with pid 17816 2012-04-12 23:48:10,169 INFO exited: sentry-web (exit status 1; not expected) 2012-04-12 23:48:11,199 INFO spawned: 'sentry-web' with pid 17817 2012-04-12 23:48:11,238 INFO exited: sentry-web (exit status 1; not expected) 2012-04-12 23:48:13,269 INFO spawned: 'sentry-web' with pid 17818 2012-04-12 23:48:13,309 INFO exited: sentry-web (exit status 1; not expected) 2012-04-12 23:48:16,343 INFO spawned: 'sentry-web' with pid 17819 2012-04-12 23:48:16,389 INFO exited: sentry-web (exit status 1; not expected) 2012-04-12 23:48:17,394 INFO gave up: sentry-web entered FATAL state, too many start retries too quickly CRIT Supervisor running as root (no user in config file) suggests a big problem, probably shouldn't be running this as root? CRIT Server 'unix_http_server' running without any HTTP authentication checking Surely authentication is optional? INFO exited: sentry-web (exit status 1; not expected) *sad face* here. Google hasn't been much help yet. Anyway, that is it as far as I know. If anyone can help me that would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

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• backup and restoration of a freeipa infrastructure

  - by Sirex

  I'm finding the documentation on ipa server backup and restoration sadly lacking, and being so centrally critical it's not something i'm really happy about shooting in the dark with - could some kind soul more knowledable in the matter please attempt to provide an idiot-proof guide to backing up and restoring of IPA server(s) ? Particularly the main server (the cert signing one). ...We're looking towards rolling out ipa in a two server setup (1 master, 1 replica). I'm using dns srv records to handle failover, hence a loss of the replica isn't a big deal as i could make a new one and force a resync to happen - it's losing the master that bothered me. The thing that i'm really struggling with is locating a step-by-step procedure for backing up and restoring the master server. I'm aware that whole-VM snapshot is the recommended way of doing IPA server backup, but that isn't an option at this time for us. I'm also aware that freeipa 3.2.0 includes some sort of backup command build in, but that isn't in the ipa version of centos, and i don't expect it will be for some time yet. I've been trying many different methods, but none of them seem to restore cleanly, amongst others, i've tried; a command similar to db2ldif.pl -D "cn=directory manager" -w - -n userroot -a /root/userroot.ldif the script from here to produce three ldif files -- one for the domain ({domain}-userroot), and two for the ipa server (ipa-ipaca and ipa-userroot): Most of the restores i've tried have been similar to the form of: ldif2db.pl -D "cn=directory manager" -w - -n userroot -i userroot.ldif which seems to work and reports no errors, but totally borks the ipa install on the machine and i can no longer login with either the admin password on the backed up server, or the one i set it to on installation before attempting the ldif2db command (i'm installing ipa-server and running ipa-server-install, then attempting the restore). I'm not overly bothered about losing the CA, having to rejoin the domain, losing replication etc etc (although it'd be awesome if that could be avoided) but in the instance of the main server dropping i'd really like to avoid having to re-enter all the user/group information. I guess in the instance of losing the main server i could promote the other one and replicate in the other direction, but i've not tried that, either. Has anyone done that ? tl;dr: Can someone provide an idiots guide to backing up and restoring an IPA server (preferably on CentOS 6) in a clear enough way that'd make me feel confident it'll actually work when the dreaded time comes ? Crayons are optional, but appreciated ;-) I can't be the only person struggling with this, seeing how widely used IPA is, surely ?

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• Distinction between an extranet and a DMZ

  - by Markus Yrjölä

  I've been reading about intranets, extranets, DMZs and VPNs now, and I'd need some clarifications related to extranets and DMZs. I understand that they are different types of concepts - extranet allows limited access to some intranet resources, while DMZ is a subnet that sits between the internet and intranet and hosts the external-faced services. However, I'd like to know what is their distinction in practice in a usual setup? The Wikipedia article on extranets says that extranets are similar to DMZs because they are used for the same purpose (providing access to some services/resources without exposing the whole intranet). The article also states that an extranet is a part of a VPN, and this TechNet article also states that extranet access is often implemented similarly to remote intranet access, e.g. with a VPN. The TechNet article also says that commonly the extranet is hosted inside the DMZ. This Pearson article says "Although [the DMZ] is technically located within the intranet, [it] can serve as the extranet as well". This is slightly confusing. Consider this scenario: A company has a B2C website hosted in the DMZ. The website can be accessed from anywhere, but requires user authentication. The underlying web app has its database inside the intranet and also interacts with some web services that are hosted inside the intranet (i.e. it accesses intranet resources). The way I see it, the website does effectively offer a restricted access to the intranet. But can it be considered an extranet? If we take the Wikipedia definition of an extranet literally - "An extranet is a computer network that allows controlled access from outside of an organization's intranet" - I think it can. Let's say that the above can't be considered an extranet. What if we change the scenario slightly, and say it's a B2B website, where the access is e.g. limited to connections coming from a specific business partner (by using site-to-site VPN, for example). In this case it surely is an extranet, right? If this is the case, then the difference between extranet services and any other services hosted in the DMZ is simply access restrictions?

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• Persuading openldap to work with SSL on Ubuntu with cn=config

  - by Roger

  I simply cannot get this (TLS connection to openldap) to work and would appreciate some assistance. I have a working openldap server on ubuntu 10.04 LTS, it is configured to use cn=config and most of the info I can find for TLS seems to use the older slapd.conf file :-( I've been largely following the instructions here https://help.ubuntu.com/10.04/serverguide/C/openldap-server.html plus stuff I've read here and elsewhere - which of course could be part of the problem as I don't totally understand all of this yet! I have created an ssl.ldif file as follows; dn:cn=config add: olcTLSCipherSuite olcTLSCipherSuite: TLSV1+RSA:!NULL add: olcTLSCRLCheck olcTLSCRLCheck: none add: olcTLSVerifyClient olcTLSVerifyClient: never add: olcTLSCACertificateFile olcTLSCACertificateFile: /etc/ssl/certs/ldap_cacert.pem add: olcTLSCertificateFile olcTLSCertificateFile: /etc/ssl/certs/my.domain.com_slapd_cert.pem add: olcTLSCertificateKeyFile olcTLSCertificateKeyFile: /etc/ssl/private/my.domain.com_slapd_key.pem and I import it using the following command line ldapmodify -x -D cn=admin,dc=mydomain,dc=com -W -f ssl.ldif I have edited /etc/default/slapd so that it has the following services line; SLAPD_SERVICES="ldap:/// ldapi:/// ldaps:///" And everytime I'm making a change, I'm restarting slapd with /etc/init.d/slapd restart The following command line to test out the non TLS connection works fine; ldapsearch -d 9 -D cn=admin,dc=mydomain,dc=com -w mypassword \ -b dc=mydomain,dc=com -H "ldap://mydomain.com" "cn=roger*" But when I switch to ldaps using this command line; ldapsearch -d 9 -D cn=admin,dc=mydomain,dc=com -w mypassword \ -b dc=mydomain,dc=com -H "ldaps://mydomain.com" "cn=roger*" This is what I get; ldap_url_parse_ext(ldaps://mydomain.com) ldap_create ldap_url_parse_ext(ldaps://mydomain.com:636/??base) ldap_sasl_bind ldap_send_initial_request ldap_new_connection 1 1 0 ldap_int_open_connection ldap_connect_to_host: TCP mydomain.com:636 ldap_new_socket: 3 ldap_prepare_socket: 3 ldap_connect_to_host: Trying 127.0.0.1:636 ldap_pvt_connect: fd: 3 tm: -1 async: 0 TLS: can't connect: A TLS packet with unexpected length was received.. ldap_err2string ldap_sasl_bind(SIMPLE): Can't contact LDAP server (-1) Now if I check netstat -al I can see; tcp 0 0 *:www *:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *:ssh *:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *:https *:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *:ldaps *:* LISTEN tcp 0 0 *:ldap *:* LISTEN I'm not sure if this is significant as well ... I suspect it is; openssl s_client -connect mydomain.com:636 -showcerts CONNECTED(00000003) 916:error:140790E5:SSL routines:SSL23_WRITE:ssl handshake failure:s23_lib.c:188: I think I've made all my certificates etc OK and here are the results of some checks; If I do this; certtool -e --infile /etc/ssl/certs/ldap_cacert.pem I get Chain verification output: Verified. certtool -e --infile /etc/ssl/certs/mydomain.com_slapd_cert.pem Gives "certtool: the last certificate is not self signed" but it otherwise seems OK? Where have I gone wrong? Surely getting openldap to run securely on ubuntu should be easy and not require a degree in rocket science! Any ideas?

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• Ubuntu Newbie Needs Assistance!!

  - by Steve Greene

  New Ubuntu User Needs Help!- version 9.10 does not communicate with laptop Hello folks, Several days ago, I installed Ubuntu 9.10 onto my Acer Aspire 3100 laptop, running it alongside Widows Vista as a dual-bootable system. Creation of the Ubuntu boot CD went fine, and the installation onto my hard drive was flawless. Ubuntu opens and behaves as I would expect, except for one little problem. For reasons unknown to me, Ubuntu is not communicating with my laptop's networking hardware, and I have no internet connectivity, even when sitting directly under the wireless router at the local library (literally), which puts out a wickedly-fast signal that my Windows Vista OS auto-detects and immediately connects to. Up in the right side of the Ubuntu desktop, I click on the network icon and it does not show a wireless connection at all, even though I am only a few feet from the router. At home, where I use a dialup modem, I also see no means of getting online. My modem is an HDAUDIO Soft Data Fax Modem with Smart CP,manufactured by CXT (Conexant Systems Inc., file version 4.0.13.0, and the driver version is 7.58.0.0). I desparately wish to convert to Ubuntu. I used Mac for ten years, and then Windows for ten years. Now, after 20 years, I want to live out my days as an open-source Ubuntu fanatic. I am ready to give the old status quo the boot! I am an advanced computer user, but I am not a programmer. I seek a solution that is user-friendly for normal people, something equivalent to a driver that I can easily install or activate that will allow Ubuntu to see my hardware and get me connected. Can anyone help me over this hopefully-little glitch so that I can move on in total Ubuntu bliss? My processor is a Mobile AMD Sempron Processor 3500+ at 1.80 GHz, 1.50 GB RAM, and a 32-bit Operating System. I am running Windows Vista Home Basic, Service Pack 2. My current email is [email protected] if you have a workable solution that does not require programmer status to implement. Surely this must be a simple fix that I simply am overlooking, but being the new guy on the block, I have yet to be enlightened. Thanks for your help in coming up to speed!! Steve Wanna' be Ubuntu Fanatic "If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space."

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• Puppet - Possible to use software design patterns in modules?

  - by Mike Purcell

  As I work with puppet, I find myself wanting to automate more complex setups, for example vhosts for X number of websites. As my puppet manifests get more complex I find it difficult to apply the DRY (don't repeat yourself) principle. Below is a simplified snippet of what I am after, but doesn't work because puppet throws various errors depending up whether I use classes or defines. I'd like to get some feed back from some seasoned puppetmasters on how they might approach this solution. # site.pp import 'nodes' # nodes.pp node nodes_dev { $service_env = 'dev' } node nodes_prod { $service_env = 'prod' } import 'nodes/dev' import 'nodes/prod' # nodes/dev.pp node 'service1.ownij.lan' inherits nodes_dev { httpd::vhost::package::site { 'foo': } httpd::vhost::package::site { 'bar': } } # modules/vhost/package.pp class httpd::vhost::package { class manage($port) { # More complex stuff goes here like ensuring that conf paths and uris exist # As well as log files, which is I why I want to do the work once and use many notify { $service_env: } notify { $port: } } define site { case $name { 'foo': { class 'httpd::vhost::package::manage': port => 20000 } } 'bar': { class 'httpd::vhost::package::manage': port => 20001 } } } } } That code snippet gives me a Duplicate declaration: Class[Httpd::Vhost::Package::Manage] error, and if I switch the manage class to a define, and attempt to access a global or pass in a variable common to both foo and bar, I get a Duplicate declaration: Notify[dev] error. Any suggestions how I can implement the DRY principle and still get puppet to work? -- UPDATE -- I'm still having a problem trying to ensure that some of my vhosts, which may share a parent directory, are setup correctly. Something like this: node 'service1.ownij.lan' inherits nodes_dev { httpd::vhost::package::site { 'foo_sitea': } httpd::vhost::package::site { 'foo_siteb': } httpd::vhost::package::site { 'bar': } } What I need to happen is that sitea and siteb have the same parent "foo" folder. The problem I am having is when I call a define to ensure the "foo" folder exists. Below is the site define as I have it, hopefully it will make sense what I am trying to accomplish. class httpd::vhost::package { File { owner => root, group => root, mode => 0660 } define site() { $app_parts = split($name, '[_]') $app_primary = $app_parts[0] if ($app_parts[1] == '') { $tpl_path_partial_app = "${app_primary}" $app_sub = '' } else { $tpl_path_partial_app = "${app_primary}/${app_parts[1]}" $app_sub = $app_parts[1] } include httpd::vhost::log::base httpd::vhost::log::app { $name: app_primary => $app_primary, app_sub => $app_sub } } } class httpd::vhost::log { class base { $paths = [ '/tmp', '/tmp/var', '/tmp/var/log', '/tmp/var/log/httpd', "/tmp/var/log/httpd/${service_env}" ] file { $paths: ensure => directory } } define app($app_primary, $app_sub) { $paths = [ "/tmp/var/log/httpd/${service_env}/${app_primary}", "/tmp/var/log/httpd/${service_env}/${app_primary}/${app_sub}" ] file { $paths: ensure => directory } } } The include httpd::vhost::log::base works fine, because it is "included", which means it is only implemented once, even though site is called multiple times. The error I am getting is: Duplicate declaration: File[/tmp/var/log/httpd/dev/foo]. I looked into using exec, but not sure this is the correct route, surely others have had to deal with this before and any insight is appreciated as I have been grappling with this for a few weeks. Thanks.

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• Fibre channel long distance woes

  - by Marki

  I need a fresh pair of eyes. We're using a 15km fibre optic line across which fibrechannel and 10GbE is multiplexed (passive optical CWDM). For FC we have long distance lasers suitable up to 40km (Skylane SFCxx0404F0D). The multiplexer is limited by the SFPs which can do max. 4Gb fibrechannel. The FC switch is a Brocade 5000 series. The respective wavelengths are 1550,1570,1590 and 1610nm for FC and 1530nm for 10GbE. The problem is the 4GbFC fabrics are almost never clean. Sometimes they are for a while even with a lot of traffic on them. Then they may suddenly start producing errors (RX CRC, RX encoding, RX disparity, ...) even with only marginal traffic on them. I am attaching some error and traffic graphs. Errors are currently in the order of 50-100 errors per 5 minutes when with 1Gb/s traffic. Optics Here is the power output of one port summarized (collected using sfpshow on different switches) SITE-A units=uW (microwatt) SITE-B ********************************************** FAB1 SW1 TX 1234.3 RX 49.1 SW3 1550nm (ko) RX 95.2 TX 1175.6 FAB2 SW2 TX 1422.0 RX 104.6 SW4 1610nm (ok) RX 54.3 TX 1468.4 What I find curious at this point is the asymmetry in the power levels. While SW2 transmits with 1422uW which SW4 receives with 104uW, SW2 only receives the SW4 signal with similar original power only with 54uW. Vice versa for SW1-3. Anyway the SFPs have RX sensitivity down to -18dBm (ca. 20uW) so in any case it should be fine... But nothing is. Some SFPs have been diagnosed as malfunctioning by the manufacturer (the 1550nm ones shown above with "ko"). The 1610nm ones apparently are ok, they have been tested using a traffic generator. The leased line has also been tested more than once. All is within tolerances. I'm awaiting the replacements but for some reason I don't believe it will make things better as the apparently good ones don't produce ZERO errors either. Earlier there was active equipment involved (some kind of 4GFC retimer) before putting the signal on the line. No idea why. That equipment was eliminated because of the problems so we now only have: the long distance laser in the switch, (new) 10m LC-SC monomode cable to the mux (for each fabric), the leased line, the same thing but reversed on the other side of the link. FC switches Here is a port config from the Brocade portcfgshow (it's like that on both sides, obviously) Area Number: 0 Speed Level: 4G Fill Word(On Active) 0(Idle-Idle) Fill Word(Current) 0(Idle-Idle) AL_PA Offset 13: OFF Trunk Port ON Long Distance LS VC Link Init OFF Desired Distance 32 Km Reserved Buffers 70 Locked L_Port OFF Locked G_Port OFF Disabled E_Port OFF Locked E_Port OFF ISL R_RDY Mode OFF RSCN Suppressed OFF Persistent Disable OFF LOS TOV enable OFF NPIV capability ON QOS E_Port OFF Port Auto Disable: OFF Rate Limit OFF EX Port OFF Mirror Port OFF Credit Recovery ON F_Port Buffers OFF Fault Delay: 0(R_A_TOV) NPIV PP Limit: 126 CSCTL mode: OFF Forcing the links to 2GbFC produces no errors, but we bought 4GbFC and we want 4GbFC. I don't know where to look anymore. Any ideas what to try next or how to proceed? If we can't make 4GbFC work reliably I wonder what the people working with 8 or 16 do... I don't assume that "a few errors here and there" are acceptable. Oh and BTW we are in contact with everyone of the manufacturers (FC switch, MUX, SFPs, ...) Except for the SFPs to be changed (some have been changed before) nobody has a clue. Brocade SAN Health says the fabric is ok. MUX, well, it's passive, it's only a prism, nature at it's best. Any shots in the dark? APPENDIX: Answers to your questions @Chopper3: This is the second generation of Brocades exhibiting the problem. Before we had 5000s, now we have 5100s. In the beginning when we still had the active MUX we rented a longdistance laser once to put it into the switch directly in order to make tests for a day, during that day of course it was clean. But as I said, sometimes it's clean just like that. And sometimes it's not. Alternative switches would mean to rebuild the entire SAN with those only to test. Alternative SFPs, well they're hard to come by just like that. @longneck: The line is rented. It's a dark fibre (9um monomode) so there's noone else on it. Sure there are splices. I can't go and look but I have to trust they have been done correctly. As I said the line has been checked and rechecked (using an optical time-domain reflectometer). Obviously you don't have all this equipment yourself because it's way too expensive. @mdpc: What would be the "wrong" type of cable according to you? Up to the switch everything is monomode, yes. The connectors are the correct ones too. Yeah I know there are the green ones where the fibre is cut off at a certain angle etc. But we have the correct ones for all that I know. Progress Report #1 We have had two fabrics (=2x2 switches) with Brocade 5100s with FabricOS 6.4.1 and two fabrics (another 2x4 switches) on FabricOS 7.0.2. On the longdistance ISLs (one in each fabric) it turned out that with FOS 6.4.1 setting it to long distance issues warnings about the VC Init setting and consequently the fill word. But those are only warnings. FOS 7.0.2 requires you to do modifications to VCI and the fillword for long distance links. Setting FOS 6.4.1 to the LS (long-distance static distance) setting with wrong VCI and fillword setting made the whole fabric inoperational (stuck in an SCN loop, use fabriclog -s to see, you don't see it anywhere else, no port error counters or anything increasing). Currently I'm giving the one fabric with the IMHO more correct settings a beating and it seems to do fine, whereas the other one without much traffic still has errors here and there. In short: We have eliminated the active part of the MUX (the FC retimer). We are putting the long distance SFPs into the end equipment themselves. Just to be sure we bought new monomode cables to connect the end equipment to the remaining passive part of the MUX. We are now trying out several long distance configs. It's almost black magic. Everything that happens is mostly empirical, noone seems to have a clue what are the exact reasons to do something. ("We have tried this, and it didn't work, then we tried that and it worked, so we stuck with that." But noone really seems to know why.) I'll keep you updated. Progress Report #2 We got the new lasers for one of the fabrics on warranty. It's ultra clean even on 4GbFC. They're transmitting with roughly 2mW (3dBm) whereas the others are only at 1.5mW (1.5dBm) although that should really be enough. The other fabric (where the lasers are apparently ok) still produces one or two CRCs infrequently. Using sfpshow the SFP producing the actual RX errors shows Status/Ctrl: 0x82 Alarm flags[0,1] = 0x5, 0x40 Warn Flags[0,1] = 0x5, 0x40 Now I'll have to find out what that means. Not sure if it was there before. Well I'll first clear my head with a week of vacation. 8-)

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• Cisco ASA SSL VPN options?

  - by JonH

  Disclaimer: I am not a network admin so I may be wrong here but I thought asking here would help. I'm a developer mainly on the .net framework as well as helping get a mobile intranet app working. Because this app is only allowed to be used on our network I can easily run this app on our wireless network connection within our building. All is fine and dandy but we'd also like to be able to run this mobile app at say a customer plant using VPN software. I thought surely this could be easy as we exclusively use Samsung s4 phones so I thought I'd download Cisco's Samsung any connect software to allow us to VPN...its right on the play store. Sure enough it doesn't work. I mention it to our network admin who says not possible since we have old technology that doesn't support SSL. He mentions we'd have to upgrade all of our hardware, the firewall, etc. to get this to work. We really need VPN on our phones not only for this app but other internal apps, etc. He did mention the following: We can’t upgrade the software on our ASA, because we don’t have enough memory for the new version.  (the asa is very old).  We can’t add more memory, so we would have to get a new firewall, which I have been told I cannot do. In addition he also mentioned: The Samsung AnyConnect client uses SSL to connect.  With the current (old) version of software that our firewall is running, the SSL connections are unreliable.  We need different hardware in order to upgrade our firewall, which we are unable to attain at this time.  This is the same reason that Windows 8 clients are not able to connect. I am curious hence me asking. vpns seem to be fairly simple to setup. What other options do I have aside from making this a public site or web service that consumes this data over the internet as this is a complete no no. What can we do to make this work without that much effort or cost.

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• Is there a Distributed SAN/Storage System out there?

  - by Joel Coel

  Like many other places, we ask our users not to save files to their local machines. Instead, we encourage that they be put on a file server so that others (with appropriate permissions) can use them and that the files are backed up properly. The result of this is that most users have large hard drives that are sitting mainly empty. It's 2010 now. Surely there is a system out there that lets you turn that empty space into a virtual SAN or document library? What I envision is a client program that is pushed out to users' PCs that coordinates with a central server. The server looks to users just like a normal file server, but instead of keeping entire file contents it merely keeps a record of where those files can be found among various user PCs. It then coordinates with the right clients to serve up file requests. The client software would be able to respond to such requests directly, as well as be smart enough to cache recent files locally. For redundancy the server could make sure files are copied to multiple PCs, perhaps allowing you to define groups in different locations so that an instance of the entire repository lives in each group to protect against a disaster in one building taking down everything else. Obviously you wouldn't point your database server here, but for simpler things I see several advantages: Files can often be transferred from a nearer machine. Disk space grows automatically as your company does. Should ultimately be cheaper, as you don't need to keep a separate set of disks I can see a few downsides as well: Occasional degradation of user pc performance, if the machine has to serve or accept a large file transfer during a busy period. Writes have to be propogated around the network several times (though I suspect this isn't really much of a problem, as reading happens in most places more than writing) Still need a way to send a complete copy of the data offsite occasionally, and this would make it very hard to do differentials Think of this like a cloud storage system that lives entirely within your corporate LAN and makes use of your existing user equipment. Our old main file server is due for retirement in about 2 years, and I'm looking into replacing it with a small SAN. I'm thinking something like this would be a better fit. As a school, we have a couple computer labs I can leave running that would be perfect for adding a little extra redundancy to the system. Unfortunately, the closest thing I can find is Dienst, and it's just a paper that dates back to 1994. Am I just using the wrong buzzwords in my searches, or does this really not exist? If not, is there a big downside that I'm missing?

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• Why is Windows 7 not following all routes?

  - by GigabyteProductions

  My computer is connected to my secondary router that's running the 192.168.42.0/24 network and my computer also has a route that directs anything on that network to the router, but for anything on that network other than the router itself, it get's the ICMP response of Reply from 192.168.42.194: Destination host unreachable. (with 192.168.42.194 being my computer). Every other network works, like all of the internet, or addresses on my primary router like 192.168.1.*, just not on the 192.168.42.0/24 network... route print returns: IPv4 Route Table =========================================================================== Active Routes: Network Destination Netmask Gateway Interface Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.42.1 192.168.42.194 276 127.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.0.0.1 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 127.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 192.168.42.0 255.255.255.0 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 192.168.42.194 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 192.168.42.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 224.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 127.0.0.1 306 255.255.255.255 255.255.255.255 On-link 192.168.42.194 276 =========================================================================== Persistent Routes: Network Address Netmask Gateway Address Metric 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 192.168.42.1 Default =========================================================================== The only time anything is supposed to send an ICMP Host Unreachable response is when there's no route to it, right? So, why is my own computer sending that to ping or tracert when I have the route of 192.168.42.0 with the mask of 255.255.255.0? An IP address of 192.168.42.2 surely fits into that route. If I explicitly add a route for the IP address i am trying to access, it works, like: route add 192.168.42.2 mask 255.255.255.255 192.168.42.1 (the 192.168.42.1 right after mask is gateway, or the device to send the packet to so it can route it further), but why wont it work for the implicit route that's automatically on the table? I disabled my firewall, too (I use Comodo if anyone thinks this still serves as a problem). I'v even tried explicitly adding the gateway of 192.168.42.1 to the 192.168.42.0/24 route instead of it routing through 0.0.0.0's gateway, which is what On-link does. but that didn't work either, so it's not a gateway specification problem. If the host was really unreachable, it would be the router's IP address (192.168.42.1) sending that to me... This network is all of my creation, so there's no problem such as an administrator locking me out, because i am the administrator.

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• ASP.NET MVC 2 Released

  - by ScottGu

  I’m happy to announce that the final release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is now available for VS 2008/Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.NET 3.5.  You can download and install it from the following locations: Download ASP.NET MVC 2 using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer Download ASP.NET MVC 2 from the Download Center The final release of VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 will have ASP.NET MVC 2 built-in – so you won’t need an additional install in order to use ASP.NET MVC 2 with them.  ASP.NET MVC 2 We shipped ASP.NET MVC 1 a little less than a year ago.  Since then, almost 1 million developers have downloaded and used the final release, and its popularity has steadily grown month over month. ASP.NET MVC 2 is the next significant update of ASP.NET MVC. It is a compatible update to ASP.NET MVC 1 – so all the knowledge, skills, code, and extensions you already have with ASP.NET MVC continue to work and apply going forward. Like the first release, we are also shipping the source code for ASP.NET MVC 2 under an OSI-compliant open-source license. ASP.NET MVC 2 can be installed side-by-side with ASP.NET MVC 1 (meaning you can have some apps built with V1 and others built with V2 on the same machine).  We have instructions on how to update your existing ASP.NET MVC 1 apps to use ASP.NET MVC 2 using VS 2008 here.  Note that VS 2010 has an automated upgrade wizard that can automatically migrate your existing ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 for you. ASP.NET MVC 2 Features ASP.NET MVC 2 adds a bunch of new capabilities and features.  I’ve started a blog series about some of the new features, and will be covering them in more depth in the weeks ahead.  Some of the new features and capabilities include: New Strongly Typed HTML Helpers Enhanced Model Validation support across both server and client Auto-Scaffold UI Helpers with Template Customization Support for splitting up large applications into “Areas” Asynchronous Controllers support that enables long running tasks in parallel Support for rendering sub-sections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction Lots of new helper functions, utilities, and API enhancements Improved Visual Studio tooling support You can learn more about these features in the “What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 2” document on the www.asp.net/mvc web-site.  We are going to be posting a lot of new tutorials and videos shortly on www.asp.net/mvc that cover all the features in ASP.NET MVC 2 release.  We will also post an updated end-to-end tutorial built entirely with ASP.NET MVC 2 (much like the NerdDinner tutorial that I wrote that covers ASP.NET MVC 1).  Summary The ASP.NET MVC team delivered regular V2 preview releases over the last year to get feedback on the feature set.  I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who tried out the previews and sent us suggestions/feedback/bug reports.  We hope you like the final release! Scott

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• Dec 5th Links: ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, jQuery, Silverlight, Visual Studio

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series for another on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET ASP.NET Code Samples Collection: J.D. Meier has a great post that provides a detailed round-up of ASP.NET code samples and tutorials from a wide variety of sources.  Lots of useful pointers. Slash your ASP.NET compile/load time without any hard work: Nice article that details a bunch of optimizations you can make to speed up ASP.NET project load and compile times. You might also want to read my previous blog post on this topic here. 10 Essential Tools for Building ASP.NET Websites: Great article by Stephen Walther on 10 great (and free) tools that enable you to more easily build great ASP.NET Websites.  Highly recommended reading. Optimize Images using the ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework: A nice article by 4GuysFromRolla that discusses how to use the open-source ASP.NET Sprite and Image Optimization Framework (one of the tools recommended by Stephen in the previous article).  You can use this to significantly improve the load-time of your pages on the client. Formatting Dates, Times and Numbers in ASP.NET: Scott Mitchell has a great article that discusses formatting dates, times and numbers in ASP.NET.  A very useful link to bookmark.  Also check out James Michael’s DateTime is Packed with Goodies blog post for other DateTime tips. Examining ASP.NET’s Membership, Roles and Profile APIs (Part 18): Everything you could possibly want to known about ASP.NET’s built-in Membership, Roles and Profile APIs must surely be in this tutorial series. Part 18 covers how to store additional user info with Membership. ASP.NET with jQuery An Introduction to jQuery Templates: Stephen Walther has written an outstanding introduction and tutorial on the new jQuery Template plugin that the ASP.NET team has contributed to the jQuery project. Composition with jQuery Templates and jQuery Templates, Composite Rendering, and Remote Loading: Dave Ward has written two nice posts that talk about composition scenarios with jQuery Templates and some cool scenarios you can enable with them. Using jQuery and ASP.NET to Build a News Ticker: Scott Mitchell has a nice tutorial that demonstrates how to build a dynamically updated “news ticker” style UI with ASP.NET and jQuery. Checking All Checkboxes in a GridView using jQuery: Scott Mitchell has a nice post that covers how to use jQuery to enable a checkbox within a GridView’s header to automatically check/uncheck all checkboxes contained within rows of it. Using jQuery to POST Form Data to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service: Rick Strahl has a nice post that discusses how to capture form variables and post them to an ASP.NET AJAX Web Service (.asmx). ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC Diagnostics Using NuGet: Phil Haack has a nice post that demonstrates how to easily install a diagnostics page (using NuGet) that can help identify and diagnose common configuration issues within your apps. ASP.NET MVC 3 JsonValueProviderFactory: James Hughes has a nice post that discusses how to take advantage of the new JsonValueProviderFactory support built into ASP.NET MVC 3.  This makes it easy to post JSON payloads to MVC action methods. Practical jQuery Mobile with ASP.NET MVC: James Hughes has another nice post that discusses how to use the new jQuery Mobile library with ASP.NET MVC to build great mobile web applications. Credit Card Validator for ASP.NET MVC 3: Benjii Me has a nice post that demonstrates how to build a [CreditCard] validator attribute that can be used to easily validate credit card numbers are in the correct format with ASP.NET MVC. Silverlight Silverlight FireStarter Keynote and Sessions: A great blog post from John Papa that contains pointers and descriptions of all the great Silverlight content we published last week at the Silverlight FireStarter.  You can watch all of the talks online.  More details on my keynote and Silverlight 5 announcements can be found here. 31 Days of Windows Phone 7: 31 great tutorials on how to build Windows Phone 7 applications (using Silverlight).  Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit Update: David Anson has a nice post that discusses some of the additional controls provided with the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit. Visual Studio JavaScript Editor Extensions: A nice (and free) Visual Studio plugin built by the web tools team that significantly improves the JavaScript intellisense support within Visual Studio. HTML5 Intellisense for Visual Studio: Gil has a blog post that discusses a new extension my team has posted to the Visual Studio Extension Gallery that adds HTML5 schema support to Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Team Build + Web Deployment + Web Deploy + VS 2010 = Goodness: Visual blogs about how to enable a continuous deployment system with VS 2010, TFS 2010 and the Microsoft Web Deploy framework.  Visual Studio 2010 Emacs Emulation Extension and VIM Emulation Extension: Check out these two extensions if you are fond of Emacs and VIM key bindings and want to enable them within Visual Studio 2010. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Ask How-To Geek: Dropbox in the Start Menu, Understanding Symlinks, and Ripping TV Series DVDs

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  This week we take a look at how to incorporate Dropbox into your Windows Start Menu, understanding and using symbolic links, and how to rip your TV series DVDs right to unique and high-quality episode files. Once a week we dip into our reader mailbag and help readers solve their problems, sharing the useful solutions with you in the process. Read on to see our fixes for this week’s reader dilemmas. Add Drobox to Your Start Menu Dear How-To Geek, I use Dropbox all the time and would like to add it right onto my start menu along side the other major shortcuts like Documents, Pictures, etc. It seems like adding Dropbox into the menu should be part of the Dropbox installation package! Sincerely, Dropboxing in Des Moines Dear Dropboxing, We agree, it would be a nice installation option. As it stands you’re going to have to do a little simple hacking to get Dropbox nestled neatly into your start menu. The hack isn’t super elegant but when you’re done you’ll have the link you want and it’ll look like it was there all along. Check out this step-by-step guide here in order to take an existing Library shortcut and rework it to be a Dropbox link. Understanding and Using Symbolic Links Dear How-To Geek, I was talking to a coworker the other day about an issue I’d been having with a media center application I’m running. He suggested using symbolic links to better organize my media and make it easier for the application to access my collection. I had no idea what he was talking about and never got a chance to bug him about it later. Can you clear up this whole symbolic links business for me? I’ve been using computers for years and I’ve never even heard of it! Sincerely, Symbolic Who? Dear Symbolic, Symbolic links aren’t commonly used by many Windows users which is why you likely haven’t run into the concept. Symbolic links are essentially supercharged shortcuts—the newly introduced Windows library system is really just a type of symbolic link system. You can use symbolic links to do all sorts of neat stuff like link folders to your Dropbox folder, organize media, and more. The concept of symbolic links is pretty simple but the execution can be really tricky. We’d suggest reading over our guide to creating symbolic links in Windows 7, Windows XP, and Ubunutu to get a clearer idea what you’re getting into. Rip Your TV DVDs into Handy Episode Files Dear How-To Geek, My wife got me an iPod for Christmas and I still haven’t got around to filling it up. I have tons of entire TV show seasons on DVD and would like to get them on the iPod but I have absolutely no idea where to start. How do I get the shows off the discs? I thought it would be as easy to import the TV shows into iTunes as it is to import tracks off a CD but I was totally wrong. I tried downloading some applications to rip them but those didn’t work at all. Very frustrating! Surely there is an easy and/or automated way to do this, right? Sincerely, Free My DVDs Dear DVDs, Oh man is this a frustration we can relate to. It’s inordinately difficult to get movies and TV shows off physical media and into digital (and portable media player-friendly) formats. There are a multitude of ways to rip DVDs and quite a few applications out there (some good, some mediocre, and some outright malware). We’d recommend a two-part punch to solve your ripping woes. You’ll need a copy of DVDFab to strip away the protections on the discs and rip the disc and Handbrake to load the disc image and convert the files. It’s not quite as smooth as the CD-to-iTunes workflow but it’s still pretty easy. Check out all the steps and settings you’ll want to toggle here. Have a question you want to put before the How-To Geek staff? Shoot us an email at [email protected] and then keep an eye out for a solution in the Ask How-To Geek column. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC Internet Explorer 9 RC Now Available: Here’s the Most Interesting New Stuff Here’s a Super Simple Trick to Defeating Fake Anti-Virus Malware How to Change the Default Application for Android Tasks Stop Believing TV’s Lies: The Real Truth About "Enhancing" Images The How-To Geek Valentine’s Day Gift Guide Inspire Geek Love with These Hilarious Geek Valentines Google’s New Personal Blocklist Extension Kills Search Engine Spam KeyCounter Tracks Your Keystrokes and Mouse Clicks Add Custom LED Ambient Lighting to Your PC or Media Center The Trackor Monitors Amazon Prices; Integrates with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari Four Awesome TRON Legacy Themes for Chrome and Iron Anger is Illogical – Old School Style Instructional Video [Star Trek Mashup]

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• SQLAuthority News – Author Visit Review – TechMela Nepal – March 29-30, 2010

  - by pinaldave

  I was very fortunate to attend TechMela at Kathmandu, Nepal on 29th and 30th of March 2010. I would like to thank Allen Bailochan Tuladhar from Microsoft MDP Nepal for inviting me. Allen is a person with seemingly infinite energy and unlimited passion for Microsoft Technology. If you get an opportunity to spend just one hour with him, you will surely be more enthusiastic with regards to Microsoft Technology. And, I was lucky enough that I was able to spend about a total of 9 days with him in Kathmandu, working along with him in the Tech Community. TechMela Nepal Pinal at TechMela, Nepal TechMela is considered as one of the biggest events in Nepal, having been organized by Microsoft MDP Nepal. This event was attended by around 500 students and hundreds of Tech professionals. The event was handled very professionally and at very large scale. Every minor detail was properly planned and obviously thought out well. There were around 50+ volunteers from MS MDP who were monitoring this event systematically to make sure the event would run as smooth as planned. Attendees in Geek T-Shirts During this event, I was delighted to meet David Lim of Microsoft Singapore. He is very passionate in working for Microsoft Technology, as well as building deep relations with the Community. I was fortunate to spend my entire afternoon with him during the sight-seeing trip. We discussed various MS technologies and their community’s adoption as well as the way how each of us can be a part of the community activity. He also delivered excellent keynotes at the event. I must say that this is one of the most enjoyable keynotes I have ever attended. It was interesting and interactive, and I must say that I had the 70s feelings with all the fonts and graphics. I still remember him saying, “Yeah, I was a student and I know you.” Allen Tuladhar, David Lim, Pinal Dave and Guests After the keynote, everybody cheered when Allen came on stage to talk about the event and to introduce the agenda for the next two days. I must say that Allen is one of the most well-known people in Nepal. I was impressed with his popularity, and to prove this, when he got on the stage he had to wait for a long full minute before he was able to greet “Welcome” while the attendees were clapping and cheering. Technology Panelist at Techmela Kathmandu, Nepal This event was blessed with the top-of-the-top officials of various IT industries, Nepal ministries and the US Embassy. All the prominent personalities were present for panel discussion on the stage. The talk was done on various subjects. Also, the energy level which was set by Allen really echoed in the audience as they asked certain questions on different global as well local IT-related questions. The panel discussion really was discussion instead of usual monologue of one person. Pinal Dave presenting at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal This was a two-day event and my session was on either of the day. I had a great participation from the audience on both days. The place where the event was organized had a capacity of around 500+ audience. Both of my sessions were heavily attended and volunteers did a fabulous job helping the attendees find empty seats or arrange some additional seats. I was overwhelmed with the interaction I have received in the large hall. Attendees were not so shy to express their thoughts, so both the sessions were followed up by top notch one-on-one conversations for a couple of hours. Pinal Dave presenting at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal Pinal Dave presenting at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal There are many questions that I have received during the event, and many of them can be interesting for all of us here so I will write detailed blog posts on these subjects. I also tried to participate in the gaming activities held at the event, but I felt I was kind of lost even if I was only playing for the very first minutes. This made me realize that I am really getting old for video games. Allen presenting at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal Allen’s session on Digital Photography was very impressive as he demonstrated so many features of the Windows Live Product that at one point I felt he is MVP for Windows Live. In fact, he demonstrated how all the Microsoft products work together to give users an excellent desktop experience; no wonder he is an MVP for Windows Desktop Experience. Pinal Dave presending at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal Any event has two common dilemmas – food and logistics. However, this event had excellent food and state-of-the-art organization. I was very glad that this two-day event turned out to be one of the most successful events in Nepal. I also noticed that almost all attendees rate their experience as beyond expectation and truly exceptional. Pinal Dave and Allen Bailochan Tuladhar If you ever get invited by Allen in any of his event, I strongly suggest that you drop all your plans and scheduled stuff, and accept his invitation. For sure, the event will be a very memorable one and would be your once-in-a-lifetime experience. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• SQLAuthority News – Author Visit Review – TechMela Nepal – March 29-30, 2010

  - by pinaldave

  I was very fortunate to attend TechMela at Kathmandu, Nepal on 29th and 30th of March 2010. I would like to thank Allen Bailochan Tuladhar from Microsoft MDP Nepal for inviting me. Allen is a person with seemingly infinite energy and unlimited passion for Microsoft Technology. If you get an opportunity to spend just one hour with him, you will surely be more enthusiastic with regards to Microsoft Technology. And, I was lucky enough that I was able to spend about a total of 9 days with him in Kathmandu, working along with him in the Tech Community. TechMela Nepal Pinal at TechMela, Nepal TechMela is considered as one of the biggest events in Nepal, having been organized by Microsoft MDP Nepal. This event was attended by around 500 students and hundreds of Tech professionals. The event was handled very professionally and at very large scale. Every minor detail was properly planned and obviously thought out well. There were around 50+ volunteers from MS MDP who were monitoring this event systematically to make sure the event would run as smooth as planned. Attendees in Geek T-Shirts During this event, I was delighted to meet David Lim of Microsoft Singapore. He is very passionate in working for Microsoft Technology, as well as building deep relations with the Community. I was fortunate to spend my entire afternoon with him during the sight-seeing trip. We discussed various MS technologies and their community’s adoption as well as the way how each of us can be a part of the community activity. He also delivered excellent keynotes at the event. I must say that this is one of the most enjoyable keynotes I have ever attended. It was interesting and interactive, and I must say that I had the 70s feelings with all the fonts and graphics. I still remember him saying, “Yeah, I was a student and I know you.” Allen Tuladhar, David Lim, Pinal Dave and Guests After the keynote, everybody cheered when Allen came on stage to talk about the event and to introduce the agenda for the next two days. I must say that Allen is one of the most well-known people in Nepal. I was impressed with his popularity, and to prove this, when he got on the stage he had to wait for a long full minute before he was able to greet “Welcome” while the attendees were clapping and cheering. Technology Panelist at Techmela Kathmandu, Nepal This event was blessed with the top-of-the-top officials of various IT industries, Nepal ministries and the US Embassy. All the prominent personalities were present for panel discussion on the stage. The talk was done on various subjects. Also, the energy level which was set by Allen really echoed in the audience as they asked certain questions on different global as well local IT-related questions. The panel discussion really was discussion instead of usual monologue of one person. Pinal Dave presending at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal This was a two-day event and my session was on either of the day. I had a great participation from the audience on both days. The place where the event was organized had a capacity of around 500+ audience. Both of my sessions were heavily attended and volunteers did a fabulous job helping the attendees find empty seats or arrange some additional seats. I was overwhelmed with the interaction I have received in the large hall. Attendees were not so shy to express their thoughts, so both the sessions were followed up by top notch one-on-one conversations for a couple of hours. Pinal Dave presending at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal Pinal Dave presending at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal Pinal Dave presending at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal There are many questions that I have received during the event, and many of them can be interesting for all of us here so I will write detailed blog posts on these subjects. I also tried to participate in the gaming activities held at the event, but I felt I was kind of lost even if I was only playing for the very first minutes. This made me realize that I am really getting old for video games. Allen presending at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal Allen’s session on Digital Photography was very impressive as he demonstrated so many features of the Windows Live Product that at one point I felt he is MVP for Windows Live. In fact, he demonstrated how all the Microsoft products work together to give users an excellent desktop experience; no wonder he is an MVP for Windows Desktop Experience. Pinal Dave presending at TechMela Kathmandu, Nepal Any event has two common dilemmas – food and logistics. However, this event had excellent food and state-of-the-art organization. I was very glad that this two-day event turned out to be one of the most successful events in Nepal. I also noticed that almost all attendees rate their experience as beyond expectation and truly exceptional. Pinal Dave and Allen Bailochan Tuladhar If you ever get invited by Allen in any of his event, I strongly suggest that you drop all your plans and scheduled stuff, and accept his invitation. For sure, the event will be a very memorable one and would be your once-in-a-lifetime experience. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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• The best, in the West

  - by Fatherjack

  As many of you know, I run the SQL South West user group and we are currently in full flow preparing to stage the UK’s second SQL Saturday. The SQL Saturday spotlight is going to fall on Exeter in March 2013. We have full-day session on Friday 8th with some truly amazing speakers giving their insights and experience into some vital areas of working with SQL Server: Dave Ballantyne and Dave Morrison – TSQL and internals Christian Bolton and Gavin Payne – Mission critical data platforms on Windows Server 2012 Denny Cherry – SQL Server Security André Kamman – Powershell 3.0 for SQL Server Administrators and Developers Mladen Prajdic – From SQL Traces to Extended Events – The next big switch. A number of people have claimed that the choice is too good and they’d have trouble selecting just one session to attend. I can see how this is a problem but hope that they make their minds up quickly. The venue is a bespoke conference suite in the centre of Exeter but has limited capacity so we are working on a first-come first-served basis. All the session details and booking and travel information can be found on our user group website. The Saturday will be a day of free, 50 minute sessions on all aspects SQL Server from almost 30 different speakers. If you would like to submit a session then get a move on as submissions close on 8th January 2013 (That’s less than a month away). We are really interested in getting new speakers started so we have a lightning talk session where you can come along and give a small talk (anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes long) about anything connected with SQL Server as a way to introduce you to what it’s like to be a speaker at an event. Details on registering to attend and to submit a session (Lightning talks need to be submitted too please) can be found on our SQL Saturday pages. This is going to be the biggest and best bespoke SQL Server conference to ever take place this far South West in the UK and we aim to give everyone who comes to either day a real experience of the South West so we have a few surprises for you on the day.

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