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• Common Areas For Securing Web Services

  The only way to truly keep a web service secure is to host it on a web server and then turn off the server. In real life no web service is 100% secure but there are methodologies for increasing the security around web services. In order for consumers of a web service they must adhere to the service’s Service-Level Agreement (SLA).  An SLA is a digital contract between a web service and its consumer. This contract defines what methods and protocols must be used to access the web service along with the defined data formats for sending and receiving data through the service. If either part does not abide by the contract then the service will not be accessible for consumption. Common areas for securing web services: Universal Discovery Description Integration  (UDDI) Web Service Description Language  (WSDL) Application Level Network Level “UDDI is a specification for maintaining standardized directories of information about web services, recording their capabilities, location and requirements in a universally recognized format.” (UDDI, 2010) WSDL on the other hand is a standardized format for defining a web service. A WSDL describes the allowable methods for accessing the web service along with what operations it performs. Web services in the Application Level can control access to what data is available by implementing its own security through various methodologies but the most common method is to have a consumer pass in a token along with a system identifier so that they system can validate the users access to any data or actions that they may be requesting. Security restrictions can also be applied to the host web server of the service by restricting access to the site by IP address or login credentials. Furthermore, companies can also block access to a service by using firewall rules and only allowing access to specific services on certain ports coming from specific IP addresses. This last methodology may require consumers to obtain a static IP address and then register it with the web service host so that they will be provide access to the information they wish to obtain. It is important to note that these areas can be secured in any combination based on the security level tolerance dictated by the publisher of the web service. This being said, the bare minimum security implantation must be in the Application Level within the web service itself. Typically I create a security layer within a web services exposed Internet that requires a consumer identifier and a consumer token. This information is then used to authenticate the requesting consumer before the actual request is performed. Refernece:UDDI. (2010). Retrieved 11 13, 2011, from LooselyCoupled.com: http://www.looselycoupled.com/glossary/UDDIService-Level Agreement (SLA). (n.d.). Retrieved 11 13, 2011, from SearchITChannel: http://searchitchannel.techtarget.com/definition/service-level-agreement

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• What tools exist for assessing an organisation's development capability?

  - by Eric Smith

  I have a bit of a challenge at work at the moment. Presently (and in fact, for some time now), we have been experiencing the following problems with some in-house maintained applications: Defects (sometimes quite serious) being released into production; The Customer (that is, the relevant business unit) perpetually changing their minds (or appearing to do so) about what issue to work on next; A situation where everyone seems to be in a "fire-fighting" mode a lot of the time; Development staff responding to operational requests from business users; ("operational" here means something that needs to be done in order to continue with business, or perhaps just to make a business user's life a little less painful, as opposed to fixing a bug in the application, or enhancing the application); Now I'm sure this doesn't sound particularly new or surprising to most of the participants on this Q&A site and no prizes for identifying the "usual suspects" when it comes to root causes. My challenge is that I have to persuade the higher-ups to do uncomfortable things in order to address all of this. The folk I need to persuade come from a mixture of the following two cultures: Accounting; IT Infrastructure. I have therefore opted for a strategy that draws from things with-which folk from such a culture would be most comfortable (at least, in my estimation), namely: numbers and tangibles. Of course modern development practitioners know all too well that this sort of thing isn't easily solved using an analytical mindset (some would argue that that mindset is, in fact, entirely inappropriate). Never-the-less, this is the dichotomy with-which I am faced, so that's the stake that I've put in the ground. I would like to be able to do research and use the outputs to present findings in the form of metrics and measures. I am finding it quite difficult, though, to find an agreed-upon methodology and set of templates for assessing an organisations development capability--the only thing that seems applicable is the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model. The latter, however, seems dated and even then rather vague. So, the question is: Do any tools or methodologies (free or commercial) exist that would assist me in completing this assessment?

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• Good, simple reasons for having a multiple environments

  - by smp7d

  Throughout my career I had worked at companies that had a collection of different environments for different purposes. We always had more or less our desktop environment, a test environment, a QA environment, a staging environment and a production environment. This went for both servers/applications and any data sources we were using. When I started at my current company I found that 90% of the apps were either developed on a desktop environment against production data sources or developed directly on the production server depending on the platform. I wasn't phased because I was hired in part to make changes to improve the way the development team functioned, which was clear from my interview process. We slowly started to turn the philosophy and pretty soon, most of the apps could be run in either a desktop, test or production environment. Not too long after that staging came around as well. Now most of our developers see the benefit of this methodology and defend it vigilantly. However, we have a number of legacy apps that never got migrated. We also have a number of legacy programmers who think of this as a waste of time. Unfortunately, we got lip service but never full buy-in from management. We got what we thought was a commitment to invest substantially in this about a year ago, but nothing materialized despite the considerable planning that we put into it. Now we are finding that we need more and more environments. We need help from the server/network administration teams for setup and we need participation from the business stakeholders to support the release cycle. We are at a place now where a project can function what I consider "normally" only if you have the right people on the project and the time to set up the proper environments. I'd love to present a complete argument, but management really has no time and interest in hearing me out until there is a critical issue. I cant really articulate the benefits simply as it always just seemed second nature to me. I was wondering if there are any good, simple, irrefutable reasons for the separation of environments that would get managers with no development experience to get behind this idea. Are there any good resources/literature on the topic?

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• How can I solve the same problems a CB-architecture is trying to solve without using hacks? [on hold]

  - by Jefffrey

  A component based system's goal is to solve the problems that derives from inheritance: for example the fact that some parts of the code (that are called components) are reused by very different classes that, hypothetically, would lie in a very different branch of the inheritance tree. That's a very nice concept, but I've found out that CBS is often hard to accomplish without using ugly hacks. Implementations of this system are often far from clean. But I don't want to discuss this any further. My question is: how can I solve the same problems a CBS try to solve with a very clean interface? (possibly with examples, there are a lot of abstract talks about the "perfect" design already). Here's an example I was going for before realizing I was just reinventing inheritance again: class Human { public: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other human specific components }; class Zombie { Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; // other zombie specific components }; After writing that I realized I needed an interface, otherwise I would have needed N containers for N different types of objects (or to use boost::variant to gather them all together). So I've thought of polymorphism (move what systems do in a CBS design into class specific functions): class Entity { public: virtual void on_event(Event) {} // not pure virtual on purpose virtual void on_update(World) {} virtual void on_draw(Window) {} }; class Human { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; class Zombie { private: Position position; Movement movement; Sprite sprite; public: virtual void on_event(Event) { ... } virtual void on_update(World) { ... } virtual void on_draw(Window) { ... } }; Which was nice, except for the fact that now the outside world would not even be able to know where a Human is positioned (it does not have access to its position member). That would be useful to track the player position for collision detection or if on_update the Zombie would want to track down its nearest human to move towards him. So I added const Position& get_position() const; to both the Zombie and Human classes. And then I realized that both functionality were shared, so it should have gone to the common base class: Entity. Do you notice anything? Yes, with that methodology I would have a god Entity class full of common functionality (which is the thing I was trying to avoid in the first place).

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• Synchronizing ODSEE and OUD

  - by Etienne Remillon

  When it comes to synchronizing between ODSEE and OUD, what should be the best options ? Couple  options are available - Use one of OUD internal capability called Replication Gateway - Use our synchronization tool called Directory Integration Platform part of Oracle Directory Services Plus - Manuel export and import Let's check pro and cons on each method. Replication Gateway is the natural, out of the box solution to perform the task. We created this as a feature of OUD because it works at our replication protocol level. The gateway perform the required adaptation between the ODSEE's replication protocol and OUD's one. The benefits of doing this is that it provide strong consistency between the to type of directories. This fully leverage conflict management implemented in the replication protocols to ensure that changes are applied in a coherent and ordered manner. It does not require specific modification on existing ODSEE production instances such as turning on "retro changelog". Changes are propagated at near speed of replication in both directions. Replication Gateway can also synchronize information that are stored internally in the directory server such as "xxxxx" account locking managed at ODSEE server level and not via the nsyyyy attribute. OUD replication gateway does no require any specific tools or installation specific procedure. It is manged like other OUD component with monitoring and configuration via the standard console. OUD Replication Gateway does not perform adaptation between ODSEE and OUD. Using Directory Integration Protocol as external component to OUD, brings flexibility in remapping and transformations between ODSEE and OUD. There is a price to pay in using DIP to perform the synchronization task. You will have to turn on the retro change log to get access to changes on the ODSEE side (this will impact disk and CPU usage and performances which could be a serious challenge for your existing ODSEE environment (if you have not provisioned additional hardware and instances). You will not benefits of conflict resolution management and this might have to be addressed at application level, which is not always possible to implement. Using export and import seams very simple, but this methodology cannot ensure an highly available deployment with up to date entries on booth sides. This solution can be used if full HA with up-to-date data is not needed (during synchronization time). It often used  if data-cleaning need to take place to avoid polluting a new environment with old un-necessary data.

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• Default values - are they good or evil?

  - by Andrew

  The question about default values in general - default return function values, default parameter values, default logic for when something is missing, default logic for handling exceptions, default logic for handling the edge conditions etc. For a long time I considered default values to be a "pure evil" thing, something that "cloaks the catastrophe" and results in a very hard do find bugs. But recently I started to think about default values as some sort of a technical debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?). When I say a "short term" - I don't mean - "do something quickly first and do refactor it out later before it hits the production". No - I am talking about relying on a hardcoded default values in a production software. Granted - it could cause some issues, but what if it only going to cause a single trouble in a whole year. Again - I am talking about the "average" mainstream software here (not a software for a nuclear power station) - the average web site or a UI application for the accounting software, meaning that people lives are not at stake, nor millions of dollars. Again, from my experience, business users would rather live with the software which "works somehow", rather then wait for a perfect one. And the use of default values helps a lot if you develop a software in a RAD style. But again - the longest debug sessions I have spent were because of the bugs introduced by a default value which either stopped being "a default" along the way or because a small subsystem has recently been upgraded and as a result of this upgrade it does not handle the default correctly (e.g. empty list vs null, or null string vs empty string). So my question is - are the default values good or evil. And if they are a technical debt - how do measure up how much you can borrow so you can afford the repayments? Would really appreciate any input. Cheers. EDIT: If I am using the default values as a way to cut the corners during the development - and if the corners cutting results in a bugs and issues - what is the methodology to recover from these issues?

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• In an Entity-Component-System Engine, How do I deal with groups of dependent entities?

  - by John Daniels

  After going over a few game design patterns, I have settle with Entity-Component-System (ES System) for my game engine. I've reading articles (mainly T=Machine) and review some source code and I think I got enough to get started. There is just one basic idea I am struggling with. How do I deal with groups of entities that are dependent on each other? Let me use an example: Assume I am making a standard overhead shooter (think Jamestown) and I want to construct a "boss entity" with multiple distinct but connected parts. The break down might look like something like this: Ship body: Movement, Rendering Cannon: Position (locked relative to the Ship body), Tracking\Fire at hero, Taking Damage until disabled Core: Position (locked relative to the Ship body), Tracking\Fire at hero, Taking Damage until disabled, Disabling (er...destroying) all other entities in the ship group My goal would be something that would be identified (and manipulated) as a distinct game element without having to rewrite subsystem form the ground up every time I want to build a new aggregate Element. How do I implement this kind of design in ES System? Do I implement some kind of parent-child entity relationship (entities can have children)? This seems to contradict the methodology that Entities are just empty container and makes it feel more OOP. Do I implement them as separate entities, with some kind of connecting Component (BossComponent) and related system (BossSubSystem)? I can't help but think that this will be hard to implement since how components communicate seem to be a big bear trap. Do I implement them as one Entity, with a collection of components (ShipComponent, CannonComponents, CoreComponent)? This one seems to veer way of the ES System intent (components here seem too much like heavy weight entities), but I'm know to this so I figured I would put that out there. Do I implement them as something else I have mentioned? I know that this can be implemented very easily in OOP, but my choosing ES over OOP is one that I will stick with. If I need to break with pure ES theory to implement this design I will (not like I haven't had to compromise pure design before), but I would prefer to do that for performance reason rather than start with bad design. For extra credit, think of the same design but, each of the "boss entities" were actually connected to a larger "BigBoss entity" made of a main body, main core and 3 "Boss Entities". This would let me see a solution for at least 3 dimensions (grandparent-parent-child)...which should be more than enough for me. Links to articles or example code would be appreciated. Thanks for your time.

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• Gauging Maturity of your BPM Strategy - part 1 / 2

  - by Sanjeev Sharma

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} In this post I will discuss the essence of maturity assessment and the business imperative for doing the same in the context of BPM. Social psychology purports that an individual progresses from being a beginner to an expert in a given activity or task along four stages of self-awareness: Unconscious Incompetence where the individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit and may even deny the usefulness of the skill. Conscious Incompetence where the individual recognizes the deficit, as well as the value of a new skill in addressing the deficit. Conscious Competence where the individual understands or knows how to do something but demonstrating the skill requires explicit concentration. Unconscious Competence where the individual has had so much practice with a skill that it has become "second nature" and serves as a basis of developing other complementary skills. We can extend the above thinking to an organization as a whole by measuring an organization’s level of competence in a specific area or capability, as an aggregate of the competence levels of individuals it is comprised of. After all organizations too like individuals, evolve through experience, develop “memory” and capabilities that are shaped through a constant cycle of learning, un-learning and re-learning. Hence the key to organizational success lies in developing these capabilities to enable execution of its strategy in-line with the external environment i.e. demand, competition, economy etc. However developing a capability merits establishing a base line in order to Assess the magnitude of improvement from past investments Identify gaps and short-comings Prioritize future investments in the right areas A maturity assessment is essentially an organizational self-awareness check that is aimed at depicting the “as-is” snapshot of an existing capability in-order to guide future investments to develop that capability in-line with business goals. This effectively is the essence of a maturity Organizational capabilities stem through its architecture, routines, culture and intellectual resources that are implicitly and explicitly embedded in its business processes. Given that business processes underpin realization of organizational capabilities, is what has prompted business transformation and process management efforts. Thus, the BPM capability of an organization needs to be measured on an on-going basis to ensure delivery of its planned benefits. In my next post I will describe Oracle’s BPM Maturity assessment methodology.

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• Oracle OpenWorld / JavaOne Where I'll Be

  - by Shay Shmeltzer

  It's that time of the year again when San Francisco get flooded with Oracle and Java geeks for the annual OpenWorld and JavaOne conferences. Here are some of the places where you'll be able to find me: Sunday has a bunch of great ADF content in the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group track - I'm not sure if I'll make it there but I'm sure those who will will get some serious knowledge transfer. I'm starting Monday at the Keynote for Developers (10:45 in Salon 8 at the Marriott) - that's a great place for ADF developers to start the official week with an overview of what's new and upcoming in the world of development with ADF. While I'm not presenting this session - Chris Tonas who leads the development tools org will -  a demo that I built will be shown. So I'll be sitting in the audience crossing my fingers praying for the demo gods (and the wifi connection to work). My presentation part of the week starts on Monday at 12:15 at Moscone South room 306 where I'll be presenting "CON3004 - Understanding Oracle ADF and Its Role in Oracle Fusion"  . A basic introduction to ADF, it's architecture, development experience and how it integrates and works with the rest of the Fusion Middleware components.  After the session between 2-4 I'll be at the JDeveloper demo booth in Moscone South to answer any questions people might have. Then at 6:15 together with Grant we'll host BOF4492 - How to Get Started with Oracle ADF where we'll try and explain some of the learning paths and resources that are available for people who want to start learning ADF. This is a birds-of-a-feather so we'll also love to hear ideas from the audience about what paths they took and what things work or need improvment. Tuesday is relatively a quite day for me with a shift at the Oracle ADF Essentials pod at JavaOne from 1:30-3:30. There are several very good ADF architecture and best practices sessions on that day - so I'll try and hit those. Wednesday starts with another shift at the JDeveloper booth at JavaOne. Then at 4:30, instead of doing what all the ADF developers should do and heading over to the ADF meetup at the OTN Lounge, I'll be heading over to JavaOne for my CON3770 - Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF: What’s New session. It's been a couple of years since the last time JDeveloper or ADF got any airtime at JavaOne - so it will be a great opportunity to show those in the Java community with open minds our approach to Java development. Now that ADF Essentials offers a free way to develop with ADF on GlassFish, I hope we'll be getting more people from the core Java camp interested in what we have to offer. Thursday is another relaxed day for me - who knows maybe I'll even be able to catch a session or two on that day. If you want to learn more about the ADF related sessions at OOW check out our full list here.

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• Good, simple reasons for having multiple environments

  - by smp7d

  Throughout my career I had worked at companies that had a collection of different environments for different purposes. We always had more or less our desktop environment, a test environment, a QA environment, a staging environment and a production environment. This went for both servers/applications and any data sources we were using. When I started at my current company I found that 90% of the apps were either developed on a desktop environment against production data sources or developed directly on the production server depending on the platform. I wasn't fazed because I was hired in part to make changes to improve the way the development team functioned, which was clear from my interview process. We slowly started to turn the philosophy and pretty soon, most of the apps could be run in either a desktop, test or production environment. Not too long after that staging came around as well. Now most of our developers see the benefit of this methodology and defend it vigilantly. However, we have a number of legacy apps that never got migrated. We also have a number of legacy programmers who think of this as a waste of time. Unfortunately, we got lip service but never full buy-in from management. We got what we thought was a commitment to invest substantially in this about a year ago, but nothing materialized despite the considerable planning that we put into it. Now we are finding that we need more and more environments. We need help from the server/network administration teams for setup and we need participation from the business stakeholders to support the release cycle. We are at a place now where a project can function what I consider "normally" only if you have the right people on the project and the time to set up the proper environments. I'd love to present a complete argument, but management really has no time and interest in hearing me out until there is a critical issue. I can't really articulate the benefits simply as it always just seemed second nature to me. I was wondering if there are any good, simple, irrefutable reasons for the separation of environments that would get managers with no development experience to get behind this idea. Are there any good resources/literature on the topic?

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• Loose Coupling and UX Patterns for Applications Integrations

  - by ultan o'broin

  I love that software architecture phrase loose coupling. There’s even a whole book about it. And, if you’re involved in enterprise methodology you’ll know just know important loose coupling is to the smart development of applications integrations too. Whether you are integrating offerings from the Oracle partner ecosystem with Fusion apps or applications coexistence scenarios, loose coupling enables the development of scalable, reliable, flexible solutions, with no second-guessing of technology. Another great book Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions tells us about loose coupling benefits of reducing the assumptions that integration parties (components, applications, services, programs, users) make about each other when they exchange information. Eliminating assumptions applies to UI development too. The days of assuming it’s enough to hard code a UI with linking libraries called code on a desktop PC for an office worker are over. The book predates PaaS development and SaaS deployments, and was written when web services and APIs were emerging. Yet it calls out how using middleware as an assumptions-dissolving technology “glue" is central to applications integration. Realizing integration design through a set of middleware messaging patterns (messaging in the sense of asynchronously communicating data) that enable developers to meet the typical business requirements of enterprises requiring integrated functionality is very Fusion-like. User experience developers can benefit from the loose coupling approach too. User expectations and work styles change all the time, and development is now about integrating SaaS through PaaS. Cloud computing offers a virtual pivot where a single source of truth (customer or employee data, for example) can be experienced through different UIs (desktop, simplified, or mobile), each optimized for the context of the user’s world of work and task completion. Smart enterprise applications developers, partners, and customers use design patterns for user experience integration benefits too. The Oracle Applications UX design patterns (and supporting guidelines) enable loose coupling of the optimized UI requirements from code. Developers can get on with the job of creating integrations through web services, APIs and SOA without having to figure out design problems about how UIs should work. Adding the already user proven UX design patterns (and supporting guidelines to your toolkit means ADF and other developers can easily offer much more than just functionality and be super productive too. Great looking application integration touchpoints can be built with our design patterns and guidelines too for a seamless applications UX. One of Oracle’s partners, Innowave Technologies used loose coupling architecture and our UX design patterns to create an integration for a customer that was scalable, cost effective, fast to develop and kept users productive while paving a roadmap for customers to keep pace with the latest UX designs over time. Innowave CEO Basheer Khan, a Fusion User Experience Advocate explains how to do it on the Usable Apps blog.

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• Chunking large rsync transfers?

  - by Gabe Martin-Dempesy

  We use rsync to update a mirror of our primary file server to an off-site colocated backup server. One of the issues we currently have is that our file server has 1TB of mostly smaller files (in the 10-100kb range), and when we're transferring this much data, we often end up with the connection being dropped several hours into the transfer. Rsync doesn't have a resume/retry feature that simply reconnects to the server to pickup where it left off -- you need to go through the file comparison process, which ends up being very length with the amount of files we have. The solution that's recommended to get around is to split up your large rsync transfer into a series of smaller transfers. I've figured the best way to do this is by first letter of the top-level directory names, which doesn't give us a perfectly even distribution, but is good enough. I'd like to confirm if my methodology for doing this is sane, or if there's a more simple way to accomplish the goal. To do this, I iterate through A-Z, a-z, 0-9 to pick a one character $prefix. Initially I was thinking of just running rsync -av --delete --delete-excluded --exclude "*.mp3" "src/$prefix*" dest/ (--exclude "*.mp3" is just an example, as we have a more lengthy exclude list for removing things like temporary files) The problem with this is that any top-level directories in dest/ that are no longer present present on src will not get picked up by --delete. To get around this, I'm instead trying the following: rsync \ --filter 'S /$prefix*' \ --filter 'R /$prefix*' \ --filter 'H /*' \ --filter 'P /*' \ -av --delete --delete-excluded --exclude "*.mp3" src/ dest/ I'm using the show and hide over include and exclude, because otherwise the --delete-excluded will delete anything that doesn't match $prefix. Is this the most effective way of splitting the rsync into smaller chunks? Is there a more effective tool, or a flag that I've missed, that might make this more simple?

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• Troubleshooting wireless connection problem / site survey?

  - by johnnyb10

  I just started in the IT department of a small company (200 users) and it's clear that one of the main problems that is driving everyone crazy is the spotty nature of the wireless connectivity throughout the office, particularly in certain conference rooms. This is a huge problem because the connection often drops during important presentations to clients. I was hired to help ease the load on the existing IT admin, who has done a great job, but is overloaded with many other tasks to deal with. So I would like to try to help out with this wireless issue. I am looking for advice on the best way to solve this problem--a realistic troubleshooting methodology that does not require me to spend any money. So far, I've experimented with Ekahau Heat Mapper, which is free and helps create a site survey. But I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for or if there are other programs/tools/methods I should try as well. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. [Some background: The wireless setup consists of an HP ProCurve Mobility MSM (710?) controller that controls 10 access points throughout the building. There are three virtual wireless networks configured on the controller: one seems to be a default that cannot be changed, one is for internal employees and authenticates via Active Directory, and the third is a guest network for visitors. When I use HeatMapper, these show up as three different SSIDs, with different MAC addresses, all on the same channel. At first I thought maybe this would cause interference, but this seems to be the way the controller works;apparently, it automatically configures the channels to avoid interference from the other APs on the network.]

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• Troubleshoot dropped wireless connections

  - by Jack

  I was recently hired in the IT department of a small company (~180 users) and one of the issues that people have been complaining about is having their wi-fi connections drop during meetings. The company is using an HP ProCurve Wireless LAN with 10 APs and a controller unit located in the server room. I don't have any experience troubleshooting WLAN in a multi-AP environment, so I'm trying to at least gather information using free or cheap tools. I did a basic site survey using the free version of Ekahau HeatMapper and discovered the following in one of the conference rooms that has been a problem. The program picked up three access points (plus a bunch of others with much lower signals that were out of range): AP 1: SSID: "Unknown SSID" - Signal strength: -48 dBm - -40 dBm. Channel: 2 AP 2: SSID "CompanyMain" - Signal strength: -35 dBm or greater. Channel: 2. Security: WEP (This is the main SSID for the company's WLAN.) AP 3: SSID: "CompanyGuest" - Signal strength: -40 dBm - -35 dBm. Channel: 2. Security: WPA2 (This SSID is the company's "guest" WLAN, which was setup to allow Internet access, but prevent network access.) Is there anything that you see that is clearly a problem from the above? I'm assuming that the unknown SSID might be a big problem, and that it is an AP from a neighboring office that is causing interference. Does that seem likely? Also, regarding channel, should we try changing the channels of our APs to avoid interference with that unknown SSID? (Since everything seems to be on Channel 2?) Should our APs be on different channels? In other words, should the CompanyMain and CompanyGuest APs be on different channels? Finally, any recommendations for free/cheap tools to help me figure this out, and/or a good methodology to follow? Thanks in advance for any help. Jack

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• Application for time and projet management

  - by user10826

  I want to improve the way I organize my projects/tasks/schedule What I do now is: keep an excel sheet with the name of the most important tasks/projects, I look at it at the beginning of each day and decide the ones I will focus on on iCal I write down events for each day, or for a concrete time (13 to 14 hours). I set up each day the tasks I want to accomlish, and allocate them hours I use Things (culture code) to keep info about tasks and projects not very important and which are not time allocated yet (GTD name = someday) I use Mail on Mac and create folders for the mails I want to process with the name of the different projects I save the main info for each project on freemind maps My system works well at the moment but it is pretty complicated to use. I want to make it better and I am looking for something with these requirements: must be 100% offline accessable it should use as less programs/resources as possible, ideally just one program should be able to manage all my info I can use the GTD methodology mixed with priorities and I can allocate each task converted to event on my calendar I can have different daily/weekly, etc views on a calendar to see the "big picture" must run on mac os x leopard price does not matter, I will pay for this So, according to your experience, can you recommend me something like this? Thanks

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• How can I write automated tests for iptables?

  - by Phil Frost

  I am configuring a Linux router with iptables. I want to write acceptance tests for the configuration that assert things like: traffic from some guy on the internet is not forwarded, and TCP to port 80 on the webserver in the DMZ from hosts on the corporate LAN is forwarded. An ancient FAQ alludes to a iptables -C option which allows one to ask something like, "given a packet from X, to Y, on port Z, would it be accepted or dropped?" Although the FAQ suggests it works like this, for iptables (but maybe not ipchains as it uses in the examples) the -C option seems to not simulate a test packet running through all the rules, but rather checks for the existence for an exactly matching rule. This has little value as a test. I want to assert that the rules have the desired effect, not just that they exist. I've considered creating yet more test VMs and a virtual network, then probing with tools like nmap for effects. However, I'm avoiding this solution due to the complexity of creating all those additional virtual machines, which is really quite a heavy way to generate some test traffic. It would also be nice to have an automated testing methodology which can also work on a real server in production. How else might I solve this problem? Is there some mechanism I might use to generate or simulate arbitrary traffic, then know if it was (or would be) dropped or accepted by iptables?

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• Application for time and project management

  - by user10826

  I want to improve the way I organize my projects/tasks/schedule What I do now is: keep an excel sheet with the name of the most important tasks/projects, I look at it at the beginning of each day and decide the ones I will focus on on iCal I write down events for each day, or for a concrete time (13 to 14 hours). I set up each day the tasks I want to accomlish, and allocate them hours I use Things (culture code) to keep info about tasks and projects not very important and which are not time allocated yet (GTD name = someday) I use Mail on Mac and create folders for the mails I want to process with the name of the different projects I save the main info for each project on freemind maps My system works well at the moment but it is pretty complicated to use. I want to make it better and I am looking for something with these requirements: must be 100% offline accessable it should use as less programs/resources as possible, ideally just one program should be able to manage all my info I can use the GTD methodology mixed with priorities and I can allocate each task converted to event on my calendar I can have different daily/weekly, etc views on a calendar to see the "big picture" must run on mac os x leopard price does not matter, I will pay for this So, according to your experience, can you recommend me something like this? Thanks

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• How far should we take the N+N redundancy craziness ?

  - by Brann

  The industry standard when it comes from redundancy is quite high, to say the least. To illustrate my point, here is my current setup (I'm running a financial service). Each server has a RAID array in case something goes wrong on one hard drive .... and in case something goes wrong on the server, it's mirrored by another spare identical server ... and both server cannot go down at the same time, because I've got redundant power, and redundant network connectivity, etc ... and my hosting center itself has dual electricity connections to two different energy providers, and redundant network connectivity, and redundant toilets in case the two security guards (sorry, four) needs to use it at the same time ... and in case something goes wrong anyway (a nuclear nuke? can't think of anything else), I've got another identical hosting facility in another country with the exact same setup. Cost of reputational damage if down = very high Probability of a hardware failure with my setup : <<1% Probability of a hardware failure with a less paranoiac setup : <<1% ASWELL Probability of a software failure in our application code : 1% (if your software is never down because of bugs, then I suggest you doublecheck your reporting/monitoring system is not down. Even SQLServer - which is arguably developed and tested by clever people with a strong methodology - is sometimes down) In other words, I feel like I could host a cheap laptop in my mother's flat, and the human/software problems would still be my higher risk. Of course, there are other things to take into consideration such as : scalability data security the clients expectations that you meet the industry standard But still, hosting two servers in two different data centers (without extra spare servers, nor doubled network equipment apart from the one provided by my hosting facility) would provide me with the scalability and the physical security I need. I feel like we're reaching a point where redundancy is just a communcation tool. Honestly, what's the difference between a 99.999% uptime and a 99.9999% uptime when you know you'll be down 1% of the time because of software bugs ? How far do you push your redundancy crazyness ?

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• Group Policy for DNS Server Addresses

  - by John

  This question deals strictly with the methodology of using Active Directory to publish DNS settings and controlling the DNS server address order to domain attached clients. This is not asking about if this is the right function, role, or best use of group policy; but rather, how to make it work. I would like to be able to publish in group policy DNS addresses and possibly control the order in which the client consumes the addresses. I have tried following the information from this site without success. I set the following setting within group policy, but the client never shows the settings within the TCP/IP properties. Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Network/DNS Client/DNS Servers I did list them as a single space separated list. For example, the following: 192.168.0.1 192.168.10.3 192.168.34.2 192.168.2.67 192.168.56.99 192.168.99.23 This would be for Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 clients. I am not sure what I am doing wrong or how to get this to work. Am I missing a setting? Do I need to set something differently?

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• How to clone a HDD and then use the clone with VMware (so that Windows works!)?

  - by Ahmad

  I have a system on which Windows 7 is installed, and I am trying to make a clone of its HDD image, which I then want to use in my main PC with VMware, so that I can boot Windows 7 off the cloned HDD. I used Ultimate Boot CD v5.1.1 with the system whose HDD I wanted to clone, and I cloned it using EaseUs Disk Copy, which comes with Ultimate Boot CD. The source HDD was 250 GB in size which had 3 partitions, while the USB HDD I attached to the system, which was supposed to be the destination/clone HDD, was 320 GB in size. I chose to create an exact replica, and so 250 GB worth of data (partitions, etc.) was copied exactly, and the rest of the space was un-allocated. I now connected this USB HDD to my main PC, fired up VMware Workstation 8 and defined a new Virtual Machine, and chose to boot off the USB HDD. Result is that when Windows is booting (from the cloned HDD inside VMware), I get the blue screen error before I reach the login screen. How can I change my methodology so that Windows even boots from the clone? I can change any tools I use, etc.

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• Disk usage on IIS, PHP5, performance problems.

  - by Jacob84

  Hi everybody, I'm quite worried with a performance problem that I'm facing in one of our production servers. I'm working for a hosting company, so you can imagine how heterogeneous the applications runnning here are. All started with a call of a client complaining about the speed loading a Joomla. The setup is IIS6 (Windows 2003) with PHP5 and FAST CGI wich normally works pretty well. I've tested the loading time and indeed, he was right. 7 or 8 seconds to load, when usually this can be accomplished in 2. Seeing this results, I started to check first CPU and RAM. Everithing normal, 2GB of RAM free, 3%-8% of CPU activity. That's what I call a relaxed server ;). Unfortunately, digging a little deeper I've found the 'PhysicalDisk' counters quite high (above 10), specially the read queues. I've used Process Explorer to see wich of those processes has the higher deltas, but everything seemed normal. As the problem is specially related to PHP pages, I've checked specific IIS counters, as Actual connections, Number of CGI requeriments and Number of ISAPI requeriments. CGI -> 3 to 7 ISAPI -> 5 to 9 Connections-> 90 to 120 (wich appears at the top of the graph) More than a solution (I know this is hard to find), I would like to know if you have an specifical methodology to face this kind of problems. Thanks a lot, as always.

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• Printer Naming Conventions

  - by John

  I am working on building a new AD print server and have been pondering the idea of renaming the printers. Right now we have a mix of names that varies between a mashup of some that reference location, some that reference functional area, and some that are rather generic. Some examples include the following: Dell 5210 - Building Name HP 4350 - Functional Area Dell Color 3100 - Location and Building Number HP 6500 - Mailroom I was curious what other people used to name their printers with. What conventions do you use and how to design a method that will be able to be used for a while without needing to rename them all again. Also, the naming methodology needs to be understandable for regular computing users so that they can relatively easily find the printer that they need. I was looking at some ideas from here, but I was not sure how practical some of them are. Any help that you can provide is appreciated. Note: I have reviewed many of the postings on here in relation to server naming conventions and found that they were not specific enough for the use case I present above.

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• Applying Test Driven Development to a tightly coupled architecture

  - by Chris D

  Hi all, I've recently been studying TDD, attended a conference and have dabbled in few tests and already I'm 100% sold, I absolutely love it TDD. As a result I've raised this with my seniors and they are prepared to give it a chance, so they have tasked me with coming up with a way to implement TDD in the development of our enterprise product. The problem is our system has evolved since the days of VB6 to .NET and implements alot of legacy technology and some far from best practice development techniques i.e. alot of business logic in the ASP.NET code behind and client script. The largest problem however is how our classes are tightly coupled with database access; properties, methods, constructors - usually has some database access in some form or another. We use an in-house data access code generator tool that creates sqlDataAdapters that gives us all the database access we could ever want, which helps us develop extremely quickly, however, classes in our business layer are very tightly coupled to this data layer - we aren't even close to implementing some form of repository design. This and the issues above have created me all sorts of problems. I have tried to develop some unit tests for some existing classes I've already written but the tests take ALOT longer to run since db access is required, not to mention since we use the MS Enterprise Caching framework I am forced to fake a httpcontext for my tests to run successfully which isn't practical. Also, I can't see how to use TDD to drive the design of any new classes I write since they have to be soo tightly coupled to the database ... help! Because of the architecture of the system it appears I can't implement TDD without some real hack which in my eyes just defeats the aim of TDD and the huge benefits that come with. Does anyone have any suggestions how I could implement TDD with the constraints I'm bound too? or do I need to push the repository design pattern down my seniors throats and tell them we either change our architecture/development methodology or forget about TDD altogether? :) Thanks

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• Recommendations on developing a WPF application without using MVVM or similar

  - by Metro Smurf

  We were building out the next version of an in-house thick-client application using WPF/Prism (Composite Application Library). As we were nearly done with the client our team was put under new management and shortly thereafter: We were then directed to drop the Prism framework to keep things simple. This includes not using any type of Inversion of Control. We were directed to build out the WPF application without using MVVM or similar; and more along the lines of a traditional WinForm application. The idea is that if a developer sees a control in Visual Studio’s designer view, then (s)he should be able to click on the control and see exactly what it's doing without having to traverse through a view-model (or similar). We have now been tasked with building out the WPF application using one primary Window, use a Frame Control to contain the content, and use a Ribbon outside of the frame for the menu items. Reason we were provided to use Frame Control: a. We will show a view in the Frame with a Page (not a user control) and then load the page in the Frame. b. When a new view is to be shown in the Frame, the current view (Page) will be closed/disposed and the new view (Page) will take its place in the Frame. c. When a developer looks at the Page in design view, (s)he will be able to click on any control and see exactly what is being done. Given the restrictions of 1 and 2 above, we’d like to present another method of building out the application that: Can be presented as an alternative to using the “Frame Methodology” (item 3 above) but still provides the same type of functionality. Does not use MVVM (see #1 and #2 above). Provided the direction we’ve been given, any suggestions as to an alternative we can present? I’d request that the responses be kept on the professional level and thank you in advance.

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• Seperating Javascript and Html, when dynamically adding html via javascript

  - by optician

  I am currently building a very dynamic table for a list application, which will basically perform basic CRUD functions via AJAX. What I would like to do is separate the visual design and javascript to the point where I can change the design side without touching the JS side. This would only work where the design stays roughly the same(i would like to use it for rapid protyping) Here is an example. <table> <tr><td>record-123</td><td>I am line 123</td><td>delete row</td></tr> <tr><td>record-124</td><td>I am line 124</td><td>delete row</td></tr> <tr><td>record-125</td><td>I am line 125</td><td>delete row</td></tr> <tr><td>add new record</td></tr> </table> Now, when I add a new record, I would like to insert a new row of html, but I would rather not put this html into the javascript file. What I am considering is creating a row like this on the page, near the table. <tr style='visble:none;' id='template-row'><td>record-id</td><td>content-area</td><td>delete row</td></tr> And when I come to add the new row, I search the page for the tags with the id=template-row , and then grab it, do a string replace on it, and then put it in the right place in the page. As long as the design doesn't shift radically, and I keep the placeholder strings the same, it means designs can be quickly modified without touching the js. Can any give any advice on a methodology like this?

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