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• Modelling highly specific business requirements

  - by AndyBursh

  How can one go about modelling highly specific business requirements, which have no precedent in the system? Take for example the following requirement: When a purchase order contains N lines, is over X value in total and is being recorded against project Y, an email needs to be sent to persons A and B with the details This requirement supplements other requirements surrounding purchase orders, but comes in at a much later date in response to some ongoing problem elsewhere in the business. Persons A and B are not part of any role or group in the system, and don't hold any specific responsibility; they are simply the two people the business has appointed to receive these emails in this very specific case. Projects are also data driven, so project Y has no special properties to distinguish it from any other project. The only way to identify it is to compare its identifier to a magic number. How can one go about modelling this kind of case without introducing too much additional complexity? That I can think of right now, there are a couple of options. Perform the checks and actions inline with the existing code. Here we find the correct spot in the code, check the conditions in the requirement and send the emails to hardcoded addresses. Of course this is fraught with issues. At the very least it stops working if one of these people leaves or changes their email address. At worst you have to ensure that any tests and test data are aware that additional actions are taken for a specific set of criteria. Introduce some form of events system. Here we introduce an eventing system, so that we might react to some event, and fulfil the requirement outside of the usual path of execution. This sounds like a cleaner solution than option 1, but the work involved is ultimately probably slightly overkill for this one small requirement. That said, having it in place does allow the system to handle these kinds of specific requirements consistently and easily in the future. Are there any other (good/better) ways of handling highly specific requirements? I mean other than telling the other parts of the business no!

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• Innovation for Retailers

  - by David Dorf

  One of my main objectives for this blog is to point out emerging technologies and how they might apply to the retail industry.  But ideas are just the beginning; retailers either have to rely on vendors or have their own lab to explore these ideas and see which ones work.  (A healthy dose of both is probably the best solution.)  The Nordstrom Innovation Lab is a fine example of dedicating resources to cultivate ideas and test prototypes. The video below, from 2011, is a case study in which the team builds an iPad app that helps customers purchase sunglasses in the store.  Customers take pictures of themselves wearing different sunglasses, then can do side-by-side comparisons. There are a few interesting take-aways from their process.  First, they are working in the store alongside employees and customers.  There's no concept of documenting all the requirements then building the product.  Instead, they work closely with those that will be using the app in order to fully understand what's needed.  When they find an issue, they change the software onsite and try again.  This iterative prototyping ensures their product hits the mark.  Feels like Extreme Programming if you recall that movement. Second, they have time-boxed the project to one week.  Either it works or it doesn't, and either way they've only expended a week's worth of resources.  Innovation always entails failure, and those that succeed are often good at detecting failure quickly then adjusting.  Fail fast and fail often. Third, its not always about technology.  I was impressed they used paper designs to walk through user stories and help understand the needs of the customer.  Pen and paper is the innovator's most powerful tool. Our Retail Applied Research (RAR) team uses some of these concepts in our development process.  (Calling it a process is probably overkill.)  We try to give life to concepts quickly so the rest of organization can help us decide if we're heading the right direction.  It takes many failures before finding a successful product.

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• Variable number of GUI Buttons

  - by Wakaka

  I have a generic HTML5 Canvas GUI Button class and a Scene class. The Scene class has a method called createButton(), which will create a new Button with onclick parameter and store it in a list of buttons. I call createButton() for all UI buttons when initializing the Scene. Because buttons can appear and disappear very often during rendering, Scene would first deactivate all buttons (temporarily remove their onclick, onmouseover etc property) before each render frame. During rendering, the renderer would then activate the required buttons for that frame. The problem is that part of the UI requires a variable number of buttons, and their onclick, onmouseover etc properties change frequently. An example is a buffs system. The UI will list all buffs as square sprites for the current unit selected, and mousing over each square will bring up a tooltip with some information on the buff. But the number of buffs is variable thus I won't know how many buttons to create at the start. What's the best way to solve this problem? P.S. My game is in Javascript, and I know I can use HTML buttons, but would like to make my game purely Canvas-based. Create buttons on-the-fly during rendering. Thus I will only have buttons when I require them. After the render frame these buttons would be useless and removed. Create a fixed set of buttons that I'm going to assume the number of buffs per unit won't exceed. During each render frame activate the buttons accordingly and set their onmouseover property. Assign a button to each Buff instance. This sounds wrong as the buff button is a part of the GUI which can only have one unit selected. Assigning a button to every single Buff in the game seems to be overkill. Also, I would need to change the button's position every render frame since its order in the unit's list of buffs matter. Any other solutions? I'm actually quite for idea (1) but am worried about the memory/time issues of creating a new Button() object every render frame. But this is in Javascript where object creation is oh-so-common ({} mainly) due to automatic garbage collection. What is your take on this? Thanks!

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• Optionally Running SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges with Delgates

  - by Damon Armstrong

  I was writing some SharePoint code today where I needed to give people the option of running some code with elevated permission.  When you run code in an elevated fashion it normally looks like this: SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(()=> {     //Code to run }); It wasn’t a lot of code so I was initially inclined to do something horrible like this: public void SomeMethod(bool runElevated) {     if(runElevated)     {         SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(()=>         {             //Code to run         });     }     else     {         //Copy of code to run     } } Easy enough, but I did not want to draw the ire of my coworkers for employing the CTRL+C CTRL+V design pattern.  Extracting the code into a whole new method would have been overkill because it was a pretty brief piece of code.  But then I thought, hey, wait, I’m basically just running a delegate, so why not define the delegate once and run it either in an elevated context or stand alone, which resulted in this version which I think is much cleaner because the code is only defined once and it didn’t require a bunch of extra lines of code to define a method: public void SomeMethod(bool runElevated) {     var code = new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(()=>     {         //Code to run     });     if(runElevated)     {         SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPermissions(code);         }     else     {         Code();     } }

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• Are there new flexible texteditors? [closed]

  - by RParadox

  Vi(m) and Emacs are almost 40 years old. Why are they still the standard, and what attempts have been made at coming up with a new flexible editor? Are there any features which can not be built into vim/emacs? My question is similar to this one: Time to drop Emacs and vi? No one had a suggestion, which surprises me. I would have thought that the core of a texteditor is very small and that people brew their own. Perhaps nobody wants to deal with supporting all the modes? Edit to clarify my question: Instead of writing modes and scripts I ask myself, why there is not a much lightweight project, which lets people custom the editor more directly? Vim has 365395 LOC (C lines all included), Emacs 1.5 million LOC. Why is there a project with say 50k LOC, which is the core, why people can use more freely? Perhaps there is such project, I haven't looked very far. I thought about putting together modules from Vim myself and experimenting with some ideas. The core of editing shouldn't be more than 10k? Vim has a lot optimizations which is really an overkill nowadays. Basically I'm looking for a code base for my own editor and Vi/Emacs are I believe not intended to be used in this way. Bill Joy said the following about vi. http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html The fundamental problem with vi is that it doesn't have a mouse and therefore you've got all these commands. In some sense, its backwards from the kind of thing you'd get from a mouse-oriented thing. I think multiple levels of undo would be wonderful, too. But fundamentally, vi is still ed inside. You can't really fool it. Its like one of those pinatas - things that have candy inside but has layer after layer of paper mache on top. It doesn't really have a unified concept. I think if I were going to go back - I wouldn't go back, but start over again.

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• pGina with automatic Kerberos ticket and OpenAFS token/ticket

  - by rolands

  I am currently updating our educational Windows lab images from XP to 7, In doing so we are also migrating from Comtarsia to pGina. Unfortunately somewhere in the transition our automation that fetched kerberos and OpenAFS tickets/tokens on login has completely stopped functioning. Basically what used to happen was, using kfw-3.2.2 and the old OpenAFS release (loopback adapter days), either comtarsia would share password or something with the NIM (Network Identity Manager) which would authenticate against the kerberos server gaining a ticket and AFS token needed to access the users file, this was aided by the fact that our ldap database that windows authenticates against is also what kerberos uses to authenticate so usernames/passwords are the same across both services. I have set up all of the tools, albeit newer 64bit versions which seem to have given me less trouble than the previous releases of NIM/OpenAFS/Krb5, as well as setting their configurations back to what we used to use. Unfortunately this seems to be fubar'd in some way, instead all we get now is a OpenAFS token, most likely I assume from the AFScreds tool which operates some kind of integrated login process, although this does not help in getting a kerberos ticket or a afs ticket for which a login box is provided be NIM after the user logs in. Does anyone know IF it is possible to do what we are trying, and if so how? I was considering writing a pGina plugin which would interact with the server itself but this seems slightly like overkill considering that all these applications already exist...

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• Is there any way to tweak / rotate mouse orientation? Any applications? Registry edits?

  - by calbar

  I've got a very frustrating issue with my new Logitech Marathon Mouse M705. It is absolutely perfect for what I need, with the exception that it tracks on an angle for some reason. What I mean is when you slide the cursor to the left, it trends upward - when you slide to the right, it trends down. Moving the cursor along a flat horizontal line is no longer a natural motion - you need to fight what I suspect is a mechanical error of some kind. Unfortunately, I've already exchanged this mouse once and tested both on different Windows 7 and Mac OS machines - the problem continues to occur. So is there a software solution for me? I'm incredibly surprised there is no simple way to adjust the orientation... How can every mouse manufacturer possibly adjust their hardware to track to everyone's tastes? What about those who need to flip orientation a full 90 or 180 degrees? I only need to adjust mine a few degrees, but I'm sure that need has arisen as well. Anyway, I'm running the latest SetPoint drivers (6.00) on Windows 7 and there are no orientation options available. I've checked out uberOptions (http://uberoptions.net/) and the M705 isn't supported yet (with the last version update over 6 months ago). MAF Mouse (http://www.maf-soft.de/mafmouse/) instructions are a very strange series of mouse clicks to activate? This app also seems a little overkill and costs $$ (which I'm willing to pay as a last resort). Is there no universal registry value for mouse orientation? How about for SetPoint drivers specifically? I've done a simple search in regedit without any luck. An XML file somewhere? Anything?? Thanks a million for any help - it's driving me nuts!

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• Simple P2V help from Linux to Windows

  - by Ke.

  I have two OS's installed on different drives in my PC. One linux (Centos 5.4) and one windows 7. Its getting tiresome to constantly have to stop and restart the PC when I want to use either OS. I would very much like to use Windows 7 as my host OS and access my linux OS from within Windows. However, im having trouble deciphering exactly how to do this (many of the articles seem confusing and a bit overkill) From what i have seen its possible to use VMWare converter to convert the physical linux image to a virtual image so that I can use it in windows. As im having problems understanding how this is done, I would really appreciate a step by step guide (for a newbie), or any simple tutorials that you can point me at. Some questions beforehand: 1) My linux image is around 80gb, do i need to take this into consideration? The linux drive is around 180gb in total. All my other drives are NTFS non writeable in linux (as I use them in windows and ntfs is dodgy in linux), so probably not possible to move the image over to my ntfs drives 2) Can I just zip the linux files up somehow and transfer it to windows to create the p2v? 3) Is it possible to do the P2V conversion while I am logged into windows. I can see the actual linux drive loaded in disk manager, but windows doesnt read linux file systems so im confused as to how to access the linux drive if this is possible. 4) Or will i need to do the whole p2v conversion inside linux? Cheers, any help is much appreciated Ke (a confused p2v newbie)

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• Properly force SSL with .htaccess, no double authentication

  - by cwd

  I'm trying to force SSL with .htaccess on a shared host. This means there I only have access to .htaccess and not the vhosts config. I know you can put a rule in the VirtualHost config file to force SSL which will be picked up there (and acted upon first), preventing double authentication, but I can't get to that. Here's the progress I've made: Config 1 This works pretty well but it does force double authentication if you visit http://site.com - once for http and then once for https. Once you are logged in, it automatically redirects http://site.com/page1.html to the https coutnerpart just fine: RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301] RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !(^www\.site\.com*)$ RewriteRule (.*) https://www.site.com$1 [R=301,L] AuthName "Locked" AuthUserFile "/home/.htpasswd" AuthType Basic require valid-user Config 2 If I add this to the top of the file, it works a lot better in that it will switch to SSL before prompting for the password: SSLOptions +StrictRequire SSLRequireSSL SSLRequire %{HTTP_HOST} eq "site.com" ErrorDocument 403 https://site.com It's clever how it will use the SSLRequireSSL option and the ErrorDocument403 to redirect to the secure version of the site. My only complaint is that if you try and access http://site.com/page1.html it will redirect to https://site.com/ So it is forcing SSL without a double-login, but it is not properly forwarding non-SSL resources to their SSL counterparts. Regarding the first config, Insyte mentioned "using mod_rewrite to perform a simple redirect is a bit of overkill. Use the Redirect directive instead. It's possible this may even fix your problem, as I believe mod_rewrite rules are some of the last directives to be processed, just before the file is actually grabbed from the filesystem" I have not had no such luck on finding a force-ssl config option with the redirect directive and so have been unable to test this theory.

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• Outlook 2007 / 2010 Calendar: hide meetings in specific category

  - by Jeroen

  Question Is there any easy way in Outlook 2007/2010 to show/hide meetings in a specific category? Preferably only for a specific view (the Month view, in this case). Note: I was almost done writing this question, adding just one more "What I've tried" option, when I found an acceptable (though imperfect) solution. Remembering this SE blog post I figured I might as well post it after all and answer it myself. And who knows, perhaps someone else has a more elegant solution. The reason for me personally is that I'd like to hide the "small, recurring meetings" like our daily stand-up meeting in the month view. I'd prefer an Outlook feature that is meant for this (there must be one for this, right?), but I'm open to workarounds or plugin suggestions as well. What I expected to find somewhere was a list of categories (with added option "No category") where you could select/deselect from which categories you'd see meetings. Something like this mock-up: What I've tried Edit "View Settings", and use a "Filter..." on categories. This has several disadvantages, the major one is that the filter only allows me to choose what I want to show, but not what I want to hide. Even if I tick all categories but one for the filter it would still hide any uncategorized meeting. Similar to 1, but then using Advanced filters. Still a bit clumsy as changing views can be up to three clicks, but this is the best solution so far (see the corresponding answer below). Creating a sub-calendar for these "small" meetings that I wish to hide. This felt a bit clumsy and like overkill, but did provide an easy "select/deselect" option to show/hide these meetings. Search for plug-ins that do this. Couldn't find one (yet).

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• Node.js, Nginx and Varnish with WebSockets

  - by Joe S

  I'm in the process of architecting the backend of a new Node.js web app that i'd like to be pretty scalable, but not overkill. In all of my previous Node.js deployments, I have used Nginx to serve static assets such as JS/CSS and reverse proxy to Node (As i've heard Nginx does a much better job of this / express is not really production ready). However, Nginx does not support WebSockets. I am making extensive use of Socket.IO for the first time and discovered many articles detailing this limitation. Most of them suggest using Varnish to direct the WebSockets traffic directly to node, bypassing Nginx. This is my current setup: Varnish : Port 80 - Routing HTTP requests to Nginx and WebSockets directly to node Nginx : Port 8080 - Serving Static Assets like CSS/JS Node.js Express: Port 3000 - Serving the App, over HTTP + WebSockets However, there is now the added complexity that Varnish doesn't support HTTPS, which requires Stunnel or some other solution, it's also not load balanced yet (Perhaps i will use HAProxy or something). The complexity is stacking up! I would like to keep things simpler than this if possible. Is it still necessary to reverse proxy Node.js using Nginx when Varnish is also present? As even if express is slow at serving static files, they should theoretically be cached by Varnish. Or are there better ways to implement this?

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• A separate user for each task?

  - by Mark Tomlin

  I just got a VPS sver the other day, I'm new to server administration, but not that new to Ubuntu (11.04). I use it in my living room as the HTPC, and I had a previous VPS that I used on and off for a team speak server. This one I'm setting up for long term use. So I would like to know the best practice when it comes to websites and tasks that I have the server proforming. I understand that it could be beneficial to separate each website into it's own usergroup or under its own username. I would setup nginx so that it could read all of the users directors (and thus each website) but could not touch anything else. The same with the TeamSpeak, should I make a user for TeamSpeak so that it operates within its own confined area or is this overkill? I do have access to root on the sever and my current plan is to run about 4 websites and a TeamSpeak server. My stack is Linux (Ubuntu 11.04 LTS), nginx, and PHP 5.4.3 (using the PDO SQLite 3 built in driver for the database). Should PHP have it's own user group or is it ok to place it in with nginx?

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• Time not propagating to machines on Windows domain

  - by rbeier

  We have a two-domain Active Directory forest: ourcompany.com at the root, and prod.ourcompany.com for production servers. Time is propagating properly through the root domain, but servers in the child domain are unable to sync via NTP. So the time on these servers is starting to drift, since they're relying only on the hardware clock. WHen I type "net time" on one of the production servers, I get the following error: Could not locate a time-server. More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 3912. When I type "w32tm /resync", i get the following: Sending resync command to local computer The computer did not resync because no time data was available. "w32tm /query /source" shows the following: Free-running System Clock We have three domain controllers in the prod.ourcompany.com subdomain (overkill, but the result of a migration - we haven't gotten rid of one of the old ones yet.) To complicate matters, the domain controllers are all virtualized, running on two different physical hosts. But the time on the domain controllers themselves is accurate - the servers that aren't DCs are the ones having problems. Two of the DCs are running Server 2003, including the PDC emulator. The third DC is running Server 2008. (I could move the PDC emulator role to the 2008 machine if that would help.) The non-DC servers are all running Server 2008. All other Active Directory functionality works fine in the production domain - we're only seeing problems with NTP. I can manually sync each machine to the time source (the PDC emulator) by doing the following: net time \\dc1.prod.ourcompany.com /set /y But this is just a one-off, and it doesn't cause automated time syncing to start working. I guess I could create a scheduled task which runs the above command periodically, but I'm hoping there's a better way. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this isn't working, and what we can do to fix it? Thanks for your help, Richard

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• puppet master --compile logs errors to stdout

  - by danny

  I see a bug about this that was accepted and then closed a year ago: http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/3670 but I'm using puppet 2.7.14 and am getting the same issue. I'm trying to use "puppet solo" (i.e. just running puppet apply on each server to be configured) as I only have 2 or 3 servers in this project and adding another server as a puppetmaster would be completely overkill. Unless I'm mistaken, the best way to apply a node manually to a server is to do: puppet master --compile=mynode > catalog.json puppet apply --catalog catalog.json But the puppet master command outputs a couple of warnings and notices to stdout, mixed in with the desired json content. And it uses colored output so I can't just pipe it through egrep -v '^warning:' EDIT: I guess it's not too big of a deal to use grep - since puppet 2.7 pretty-prints the actual content and the warnings don't ever start with spaces, piping the output through egrep '^( |{|})' works So my questions are basically: Is there a better way than this to apply a puppet node without using a puppetmaster? I can't really find any good references online to using puppet without a puppetmaster, even though that seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do for a small project. Is there a setting or flag that I'm missing that will get puppet master to stop being an asshole and send its errors to stderr instead of stdout? Or do I really have to turn off color logging, then grep to exclude warning: and notice: lines?

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• Simple P2V help from Linux to Windows

  - by Ke

  Hi, I have two OS's installed on different drives in my PC. One linux (Centos 5.4) and one windows 7. Its getting tiresome to constantly have to stop and restart the PC when I want to use either OS. I would very much like to use Windows 7 as my host OS and access my linux OS from within Windows. However, im having trouble deciphering exactly how to do this (many of the articles seem confusing and a bit overkill) From what i have seen its possible to use VMWare converter to convert the physical linux image to a virtual image so that I can use it in windows. As im having problems understanding how this is done, I would really appreciate a step by step guide (for a newbie), or any simple tutorials that you can point me at. Some questions beforehand: 1) My linux image is around 80gb, do i need to take this into consideration? The linux drive is around 180gb in total. All my other drives are NTFS non writeable in linux (as I use them in windows and ntfs is dodgy in linux), so probably not possible to move the image over to my ntfs drives 2) Can I just zip the linux files up somehow and transfer it to windows to create the p2v? 3) Is it possible to do the P2V conversion while I am logged into windows. I can see the actual linux drive loaded in disk manager, but windows doesnt read linux file systems so im confused as to how to access the linux drive if this is possible. 4) Or will i need to do the whole p2v conversion inside linux? Cheers, any help is much appreciated Ke (a confused p2v newbie)

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• Confused about the Windows 7 Preinstallation Kit

  - by David Brown

  I build custom PCs and would like to use the Windows 7 Preinstallation Kit to make installation go a little quicker and customize the Windows image. However, since each PC is built to a particular customer's specifications, the hardware will rarely be the same. So, I would like to have a single answer file that will work for everything. I'm not sure if that's possible, however. What I mostly want to do for now is add my support information as well as pre-set anything that I would normally change after each installation completes. I have a Windows 7 Professional Upgrade DVD set (both 32-bit and 64-bit), but no OEM disks. I copied the Install.wim file to my local drive and opened it in the Windows System Image Manager, but it asks me to choose a catalog file specifically for each edition of Windows 7. Will this limit the answer file to whichever edition I choose? I would think choosing Starter would give me the most basic settings, which would apply to all other editions, but I'm not entirely sure of this. I don't intend to install any extra applications or drivers. I merely want to insert an OEM disk, my OPK USB drive, and have it work for whatever edition of Windows 7 I'm installing. If a large number of similarly-configured PCs need to be built, I'll go ahead and create a custom answer file in that case, but for a single machine order, that seems like overkill. In addition, do I need a separate answer file for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7? Or will it work for both, even though I copied the Install.wim file from the 32-bit disk? Thanks!

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• EC2 Configuration

  - by user123683

  I am trying to create a server structure for my EC2 account. The design I have chosen consists of 2 instances running in different availability zones, elastic load balancer, an auto-scaling group with cloudwatch monitoring configured and a security group defining rules for access to the instances. This setup is to support an online web application written in PHP. I am trying to decide what is a better policy: Store MySQL DB on a separate Instance Store MySQL DB on an attached EBS volume (from what i know auto-scaling will not replicate the attached EBS volume but will generate new instances from a chosen AMI - is this view correct?) Regards the AMI I plan to use a basic Amazon linux 64 bit AMI, and install bastille (maybe OSSEC) but I am looking to also use an encrypted file system. Are there any issues using an encrypted file system and communication between the DB and webapp i neeed to be aware of? Are there any comms issues using the encrypted filesystem on the instance housing the webapp I was going to launch a second instance or attach a second volume in the second availability zone to act as a standby for the database - I'm just looking for some suggestions about how to get the two DB's to talk - will this be a big task Regards updates for security is it best to create a recent snapshot and just relaunch and allow Amazon to install updates on launch or is the yum update mechanism a suitable alternative - is it better practice to relaunch instead of updates being installed which force a restart. I plan to create two AMI snapshots one for the app server and one for the DB each with the same security measures in place - is this a reasonable - I just figure it is a better policy than having additional applications that are unnecessary included in a AMI that I intend on using. My plan for backup is to create periodic snapshots of the webapp and DB instances (if I use an additional EBS volume instead of separate instances my understanding is that the EBS volume will persist in S3 storage in the event of an unexpected termination and I can create snapshots of the volume backup purposes). Thanks in advance for suggestions and advice. I am new to EC2 and I may have described unnecessary overkill but I want to try implement what can be considered a best practice solution so all advice is appreciated.

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• How does the LeftHand SAN perform in a Production environment?

  - by Keith Sirmons

  Howdy, I previously asked this ServerFault question: Does anyone have experience with lefthands VSA SAN The general consensus looks like it does not perform well enough for a production SQL server even at a light load. So the new question is, How does LeftHand's SAN perform on the HP or Dell dedicated Hardware boxes? We are looking at the Starter SAN with 2 HP nodes in a 2-way replication, 2 ESX servers hosting a total of 2 Active Directory server, 1 MS SQL server, 1 File Server, and 1 General Purpose Server for things like Virus Scan (All Microsoft Server 2005 or 2008). The reason I am looking at LeftHand is for the complete software package. I plan to have a DR site and like how the SAN can perform an Async Replication to the offsite location without having to go back to the Vendor for more licenses. I also like the redundancy built into the Network Raid architecture. I have looked at other SANS and found different faults with them. For example, Dell's EqualLogic: Found that although the individual box is very redundant in hardware, the Data once spanned across multiple boxes is not redundant, if a node goes down you have lost the only copy of the data sitting on that hardware (One thing is certain, all hardware fails... When? is the only question.). I have used an XioTech SAN as well.. Well worth the money BTW, but I think it is overkill for the size of the office I am targeting. The cost to get the hardware redundancy in the XioTech makes it a little out of reach for the budget I am working in. Thank you, Keith

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• Advice needed: warm backup solution for SQL Server 2008 Express?

  - by Mikey Cee

  What are my options for achieving a warm backup server for a SQL Server Express instance running a single database? Sitting beside my production SQL Server 2008 Express box I have a second physical box currently doing nothing. I want to use this second box as a warm backup server by somehow replicating my production database in near real time (a little bit of data loss is acceptable). The database is very small and resources are utilized very lightly. In the case that the production server dies, I would manually reconfigure my application to point to the backup server instead. Although Express doesn't support log shipping natively, I am thinking that I could manually script a poor man's version of it, where I use batch files to take the logs and copy them across the network and apply them to the second server at 5 minute intervals. Does anyone have any advice on whether this is technically achievable, or if there is a better way to do what I am trying to do? Note that I want to avoid having to pay for the full version of SQL Server and configure mirroring as I think it is an overkill for this application. I understand that other DB platforms may present suitable options (eg. a MySQL Cluster), but for the purposes of this discussion, let's assume we have to stick to SQL Server.

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• Is the sysadmin/netadmin the defacto project planner at your organization?

  - by gft74

  At my company it has somehow over the past few years slowly become my job to come up with a project plan, milestones and time lines for deployment of developer applications. Typical scenario: My team receives a request for a new website/db combo and date for deployment. I send back a questionnaire for the developer to fill out on all the reqs for the site (ssl? db? growth projections etc.) After I get back all the information, the head of development wants a well developed document of what servers will it live on why those servers what is the time line for creating the resources step-by-step SOP for getting the application on the server and all related resources created (dns, firewall, load balancer etc.) I maybe just whining but it feels like this is something better suited to our Project Management staff (which we have) or to the developer. I understand that I need to give them a time-line on creating the resources, but still feel like this is overkill. We already produce documentation on where everything lives and track configuration changes to equipment. How do other sysadmin folks handle this?

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• Tracking Security Vulnerability remediation

  - by Zypher

  I've been looking into this for a little while, but havn't really found anything suitable. What I am looking for is a system to track security vulnerability remdiation status. Something like "bugzilla for IT" What I am looking for is something pretty simple that allows the following: batch entry of new vulnerabilities that need to be remediated Per user assignment AD/LDAP Authentiation Simple interface to track progress - research, change control status, remediated, etc. Historical search ability Ability to divide by division Ability to store proof of resolution for the Security Team to access Dependency tracking Linux based is best (that's my group :) ) Free is good, but cost doesn't matter so much if the system is worth it The systems doesn't have to have all of these features, but if it did that would be great. yes we could use our helpdesk software, but that has a bunch of pitfalls such as triggering SLA alerts and penalties as well as not easily searchable outside of a group. Most of what I have found are bug tracking systems that are geared towards developers, and are honstely way overkill for what I am looking for. Server Faults input is greatly appreciated as always!

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• Using modem for sending voice recording

  - by ircmaxell

  I've got an interesting one for you. I've been going over my server monitoring and notification systems (Nagios based), and realized that if our internet connection goes down, there's no way for it to notify me. I already have a modem listening (Via CentOS 5) on a spare POTS line so that I can dial-in in case our internet goes down. I was wondering if I could come up with a script (Shell, Python, etc) that can dial out and play a recorded message (wave file I'm guessing) when it's picked up. I know Windows supports voice calls over a voice modem, I was wondering if a solution existed for Linux... I know asterisk can probably do it, but isn't that overkill (A full blown VOIP system just for a notification mechanism that will hopefully never be used)? And wouldn't it interfere with the modem's primary function as a backup network interface (PPP spawned via mgetty)? I've done some searching, and haven't really come up with much. I know how to dial out from the command line, but only as a modem (not as voice). Worst case, I could set it up to dial out as a modem, and then just realize that if I get a call with modem sounds from that number that it's the notification... Any insight would be appreciated...

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• Virtual Fileserver

  - by Sergei

  Hi, We are planning to move our production servers to the datacenter and virtualize remaining servers in the process.Datacenter will have HP blades with vSphere on top.Currentliy we are using Celerra NS20 as fileserver.Since datacenter is using HP kit and EVA 4400 as SAN, we cannot have Celerra there, as EMC supoprt for Celerra does not work for non EMC array. I have searched for possible options and one of them was to have HP NAS blade X3800sb instead of Celerra.However this seems like overkill for me.We are only using Celerra for about 100 users and 50 servers and I think having X3800sb could be waste of resources. The other option would be to have a virtual fileserver as a part of vmware environment in datacenter.We only need CIFS to be provided.The only option I can think of is Windows Storage server.We had a bad expirience with Windows servers used as fileservers ( memory leaks one thing) in the past and this was one of the reasons we moved to Celerra. What are the other options?We need something as reliable as Celerra with as many options as possible.For example , Celerra has per folder quotas, deduplication, dynamic volume allocation, automatic failover, VTLU, replication. Also we would need to replicate NAS data to the failover site.We could use block level replication , SAN-to-SAN, but this would mean wasted bandwidth, as we need only subset of folders to be replicated.We used CA XSoft for windows servers in the past and Celerra has option for Celerra replication. Thank you very much in advance, Please ask me if I missed any details!

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• Load balanced IIS. Should I use NLB, or linux-based reverse proxy, or something else?

  - by growse

  What would be the best approach for load-balancing at least 2-3 Windows 2008 R2 IIS webservers running a multitude of .NET applications? My choices appear to be: 1) Hardware-based network device load balancer, like a Cisco CSS 2) Windows NLB 3) Some sort of linux based proxy, either haproxy or other The three servers sit as VMs on a vSphere farm, so I have the ability to clone to up the instance count in times of high load. I control the switch that the vSphere hosts are plugged into (Cisco 3750), but don't control the switching/routing infrastructure beyond that to the clients. (1) Is too expensive, and probably overkill for my needs. I've included this in case someone figures out a cunning way to do it on my existing network kit, which I doubt. (2) would seem to be the obvious "built-in" option, but seems to be quite fiddly messing around with network interfaces, multicast, and generally other things that seem to be needlessly complex. It's also fairly stupid, in that it can't remove hosts from the pool if they start throwing 500 errors or otherwise go wrong (3) is the most interesting option, as it would appear to offer the most flexibility and customizability, but without having to mess around with the network. However, while I'm familiar with the reverse-proxy capabilities of lighttpd etc, I'm not that well read on other options like HAProxy, which might be able to offer a lot more. Which would you go for, and is there anything I've not thought of?

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• Is the sysadmin/netadmin the defacto project planner at your organization?

  - by user31459

  At my company it has somehow over the past few years slowly become my job to come up with a project plan, milestones and time lines for deployment of developer applications. Typical scenario: My team receives a request for a new website/db combo and date for deployment. I send back a questionnaire for the developer to fill out on all the reqs for the site (ssl? db? growth projections etc.) After I get back all the information, the head of development wants a well developed document of what servers will it live on why those servers what is the time line for creating the resources step-by-step SOP for getting the application on the server and all related resources created (dns, firewall, load balancer etc.) I maybe just whining but it feels like this is something better suited to our Project Management staff (which we have) or to the developer. I understand that I need to give them a time-line on creating the resources, but still feel like this is overkill. We already produce documentation on where everything lives and track configuration changes to equipment. How do other sysadmin folks handle this?

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