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• How to sell Agile development to (waterfall) clients

  - by Sander Marechal

  Our development shop would really like to do more agile projects but we have a problem getting clients on board. Many clients want a budget and a deadline. It's hard to sell a client on an agile project when our competitors do come up with waterfall-based fixed deadlines and fixed prices. We know their fixed numbers are bad, but the client doesn't know that. So, we end up looking bad to the client because we can't fix the price or a deadline but our competitors can. So, how can you get your sales force to successfully sell a project that uses agile development methods, or a product that is developed using such methods? All the information I found seems to focus on project management and developers.

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• How to sell Agile development to clients [on hold]

  - by Sander Marechal

  Our development shop would really like to do more agile projects but we have a problem getting clients on board. Many clients want a budget and a deadline. It's hard to sell a client on an agile project when our competitors do come up with waterfall-based fixed deadlines and fixed prices. We know their fixed numbers are bad, but the client doesn't know that. So, we end up looking bad to the client because we can't fix the price or a deadline but our competitors can. So, how can you get your sales force to successfully sell a project that uses agile development methods, or a product that is developed using such methods? All the information I found seems to focus on project management and developers.

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• Review before or after code commit, which is better?

  - by fifth

  Traditionally we performed code review before commit, I had an argument with my colleague today, who preferred code review after commit. First, here's some background, we got some experienced developers and we also got new hires with almost zero programming practice. we'd like to perform fast and short iterations to release our product. we all team members locate at same site. The advantages of code review before commit I've learned, mentor new hires try to prevent errors, failures, bad designs in early developing cycle learn from others knowledge backup if someone quits But I also got some bad experience, like low efficiency, some changes may be reviewed over days hard to balance speed and quality, especially for newbies some guy felt distrust As to post-review, I just knew little about this, but the most thing I worried about is the risk of losing control, people never review. Any opinions?

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• How to deal with MySQL Connector/ODBC error "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock'"

  - by user12653020

  I am sure many users run into a mysterious problem when perfectly working ODBC configurations started failing with errors like: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' The above error message might be preceded with something like [nxDc[yQ]. At the same time odbc.ini specifies in its DSN different SOCKET=/tmp/mysql.sock or a TCP connection SERVER=<remote_host_or_ip>. The question is, what had happened that the ODBC driver started to ignore the DSN options? The clue lies in the corrupted string [nxDc[yQ], which actually was [UnixODBC][MySQL] with each 2nd symbol removed. This is the case of bad conversion from SQLCHAR to SQLWCHAR. The UnixODBC driver manager took a single-byte character string from the client application and tried to convert it into the wide (multi-byte) characters for the Unicode version of MyODBC driver: Initially the piece of the connection string was represented by 1-byte chars like: [S][E][R][V][E][R][=][m][y][h][o][s][t][;] after the bad conversion to wide chars (commonly 2-byte UTF-16) [SE][RV][ER][=m][yh][os][t;] instead of [S\0][E\0][R\0][V\0][E\0][R\0][=\0][m\0][y\0][h\0][o\0][s\0][t\0][;\0] Naturally, the MyODBC driver could not parse the bad string and tried to use the default connection type (SOCKET) with the default value (/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock) Now we know what happened, but why it happened? In most cases it happened because of using ODBCManageDataSourcesQ4 utility or its older analog ODBCConfig. When registering ODBC drivers they put lots of additional options and one of these options badly affects the UnixODBC driver manager itself. The solution is simple - remove or comment out the option in odbcinst.ini file (it is empty by default) set for the driver: [MySQL ODBC 5.2.6 Driver] Description    = Driver         = /home/dbs/myodbc526/lib/libmyodbc5w.so Driver64       = /home/dbs/myodbc526/lib/libmyodbc5w.so Setup          = /home/dbs/myodbc526/lib/libmyodbc5S.so Setup64        = /home/dbs/myodbc526/lib/libmyodbc5S.so UsageCount     = 1 CPTimeout      = 0 CPTimeToLive   = 0 IconvEncoding  =  # <--------- remove this line Trace          = TraceFile      = TraceLibrary   = After applying this simple solution (remove the line with IconvEncoding = ) everything came to normal. Prior to removing that line I tried putting different encoding names there, but the result was not good, so I really don't know how to properly use it. Unfortunately, UnixODBC manuals say nothing about it. Therefore, removing this option was the only way to get things done.

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• Code Design question, circular reference across classes?

  - by dsollen

  I have no code here, as this is more of a design question (I assume this is still the best place to ask it). I have a very simple server in java which stores a mapping between certain values and UUID which are to be used by many systems across multiple platforms. It accepts a connection from a client and creates a clientSocket which stores the socket and all the other relevant data unique to that connection. Each clientSocket will run in their own thread and will block on the socket waiting for a read. I expect very little strain on this system, it will rarely get called, but when it does get a call it will need to respond quickly and due to the risk of it having a peak time with multiple calls coming in at once threaded is still better. Each thread has a reference to a Mapper class which stores the mapping of UUID which it's reporting to others (with proper synchronization of course). This all works until I have to add a new UUID to the list. When this happens I want to report to all clients that care about that particular UUID that a new one was added. I can't multicast (limitation of the system I'm running on) so I'm having each socket send the message to the client through the established socket. However, since each thread only knows about the socket it's waiting on I didn't have a clear method of looking up every thread/socket that cares about the data to inform them of the new UUID. Polling is out mostly because it seems a little too convoluted to try to maintain a list of newly added UUID. My solution as of now is to have the 'parent' class which creates the mapper class and spawns all the threads pass itself as an argument to the mapper. Then when the mapper creates a new UUID it can make a call to the parent class telling it to send out updates to all the other sockets that care about the change. I'm concerned that this may be a bad design due to the use of a circular reference; parent has a reference to mapper (to pass it to new ClientSocket threads) and mapper points to parent. It doesn't really feel like a bad design to me but I wanted to check since circular references are suppose to be bad. Note: I realize this means that the thread associated with whatever socket originally received the request that spawned the creation of a UUID is going to pay the 'cost' of outputting to all the other clients that care about the new UUID. I don't care about this; as I said I suspect the client to receive only intermittent messages. It's unlikely for one socket to receive multiple messages at one time, and there won't be that many sockets so it shouldn't take too long to send messages to each of them. Perhaps later I'll fix the fact that I'm saddling higher work load on whatever unfortunate thread gets the first request; but for now I think it's fine.

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• Agile books for sales people? [on hold]

  - by Sander Marechal

  Are there any good books or other resources on how to sell agile to your clients? Our development shop would really like to do more agile projects but we have a problem getting clients on board. Many clients want a budget and a deadline. It's hard to sell a client on an agile project when our competitors do come up with waterfall-based fixed deadlines and fixed prices. We know their fixed numbers are bad, but the client doesn't know that. So, we end up looking bad to the client because we can't fix the price or a deadline but our competitors can. So, are there any sales-oriented agile resources that cover this? All the books I read focus on project management and developers.

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• Does it make the game more fun when the user is forced to progress through the levels sequentially rather than letting them pick and play?

  - by BeachRunnerJoe

  Hello. For the first time in my game, I'm stuck with a real design dilemma. I guess that's a good thing ;) I'm building a word puzzle game that has five levels, each with 30 puzzles. Currently, the user has to solve one puzzle at a time before moving to the next. However, I'm finding the user occasionally gets stuck on a puzzle, at which point they can no longer play until they solve it. This is obviously bad because many people will probably just quit playing the game and delete the app. The only elegant solution I can find to helping the player get unstuck is changing the design of the game to allow the users to pick any puzzle to play at any time. This way, if they get stuck, they can come back to it later and at least they have other puzzles to play in the meantime. It's my opinion, however, that this new flow design doesn't make the game as fun as the original flow design where the player has to complete a puzzle before moving to the next. To me, it's like anything else, when you only have one of something, it's more enjoyable, but when you have 30 of something, it's far less enjoyable. In fact, when I present the user with 30 puzzles to choose from, I'm concerned I might be making them feel like it's a lot of work they have to do and that's bad. I even had a tester voluntarily tell me that being forced to complete a puzzle before moving to the next is actually motivating. My questions are... Do you agree/disagree? Do you have any suggestions for how I can help the player get unstuck? Thanks so much in advance for your thoughts! EDIT: I should mention that I've already considered a few other solutions to helping the user get unstuck, but none of them seem like good ideas. They are... Add more hints: Currently, the user gets two hints per puzzle. If I increase the hint count, it only makes the game more easy and still leaves the possibility of the user getting stuck. Add a "Show Solution" button: This seems like a bad idea because it's my opinion this takes the fun out of the game for many people who would probably otherwise solve the puzzle if they didn't have the quick option to see the solution.

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• About languages strongly typed with late binding, do they make sense?

  - by llazzaro

  I never learnt anything about VB6 (and I dont want to) but I wanted to search for bad things in computer software, so my first though was VB6. So for example, VB6 was strongly typed with late binding. Makes some sense to have a language with that combination? (I dont think so). I want to know reasons of why VB6 was like this! or why is good idea for a lenguage to be like this. Bad things that happend with a lengugage like this? good things?

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• melonJS: Entity and solid block on collision layer

  - by Arthur Halma

  Actually I have my player entity with 64x64 sprite animation and 18x60 hitbox also the map is maded by 16x16 tiles. When my player goes some way he can pass through blocks (but not all of them). For example there are 4 situations: Good (player can't pass the tile with isSolid property on collision layer) Good (player can't pass the tile with isSolid property on collision layer) Bad (player pass the tile with isSolid property on collision layer) Bad (player pass the tile with isSolid property on collision layer) Looks like melonJS checks only corners of hitbox instead of whole rectangle. Can anyone help me in this situation.

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• Bluetooth connectivity on Ubuntu 11.04

  - by Andy Wiz

  I tried to connect to a device via Bluetooth from my laptop running Ubuntu 11.04, and I have some difficulty. I had to write a script to restart the Bluetooth dongle (it does not activate Bluetooth automatically). An icon appears in the top status bar on Ubuntu (good). Pairing of the devices happen easily enough (good). Trying to view files on the device from the laptop, the window that comes up does not show the paired devices. There is a window, but it's too small, and you dont know which device is selected (bad). If you choose the wrong device (I only knew it was the wrong device when my cell phone lit up), the icon on the status bar disappears, and doesn't come back, even though the devices are still paired (bad). Does anyone have that problem, and is there a fix? A.

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• How can I refactor my code to use fewer singletons?

  - by fish

  I started a component based, networked game (so far only working on the server). I know why singletons can be bad, but I can't think of another way to implement the same thing. So far I have: A GameState singleton (for managing the global state of the game, i.e. pre-game, running, exiting). A World singleton, which is the root entity for my entity graph An EntityFactory A ComponentFactory I'm thinking about adding a "MessageDispatcher" so individual components can subscribe to network messages. The factories do not have state, so I suppose they aren't so bad. However, the others do have global state, which is asking for trouble. How can I refactor my code so it uses fewer singletons?

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• How do you get users to rank their software enhancement needs?

  - by Lego Stormtroopr

  I've inherited a legacy software system, and have been tasked with performing usability and system upgrades. While there's nothing bad with the system, from discussions with the users, there are "small" usabilty issues that need to be addressed. At this stage I'm the lone developer on this system, and apart from testing I don't use the system at all, so its difficult for me to know what issues may exist or are percieved to exist. I'm going to have some time to speak with them all and discuss what they percieve to be good/bad or indifferent about the system. Since its essentially just me for the time being my time is limit. So I was considering asking them to imagine that I'd only be able to do one change, have them all write privately what they'd want that one change to be, and then helping them rank those, but I'm hoping for other tips as well. What techniques exist for getting users to explain their wants, needs, and requirements, while also having them rank them by importance or desirability?

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• Most regrettable design or programming decision you made? [closed]

  - by VNarasimhaM

  I would like to hear what kind of design decisions you took and how did they backfire. Because of a bad design decision, I ended up having to support that bad decision forever (I also had a part in it). This made me realize that one single design mistake can haunt you forever. I want to learn from the more experienced people what kind of blunders have they experienced and what did they learn from them. I'm sure this will be a lot of help to other programmers by helping them to not repeat those decisions. Thanks for sharing your experience.

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• Will rel=canonical break site: queries ?

  - by Justin Grant

  Our company publishes our software product's documentation using a custom-built content management system using a dynamic URL namespace like this: http://ourproduct.com/documentation/version/pageid Where "version" is the version number to which the documentation applies, and "pageid" is a unique string which identifies that page in our back-end content management system. For example, if content (e.g. a page about configuration best practices) is unchanged from version 3.0 and 4.0 of our product, it'd be reachable by two different URLs: http://ourproduct.com/documentation/3.0/configuration-best-practices http://ourproduct.com/documentation/4.0/configuration-best-practices This URL scheme allows us to scope Google search results to see only documentaiton for a particular product version, like this: configuration site:ourproduct.com/documentation/4.0 But when the user is searching across all versions, we don't want Google to arbitrarily choose one of the URLs to show in results. Instead, we always want the latest version to show up. Hence our planned use of rel=canonical so we can proscriptively tell Google which URL we want to show up if multiple versions are being searched. (Users who do oddball things like searching 2 versions but not all of them are a corner case, so we don't care which version(s) show up in that case-- the primary use-cases we care about is searching one version or searching all versions) But what will happen to scoped searches if we do this? If my rel=canonical URL points to version 4.0, but my search is scoped to 3.0, will Google return a result? Even if you don't know the answer offhand, do you know a site which uses rel=canonical to redirect across folders in a URL namespace. If so, I could run a few Google searches and figure out the answer.

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• super light software development process

  - by Walty

  hi, For the development process I have involved so far, most have teams of SINGLE member, or occasionally two. We used python + django for the major development, the development process is actually very fast, and we do have code reviews, design pattern discussions, and constant refactoring. Though team size is small, I do think there are some development processes / best practices that could be enforced. For example, using svn would be definitely better than regular copy backup. I did read some articles & books about Agile, XP & continuous integration, I think they are nice, but still too heavy for this case (team of 1 or 2, and fast coding). For example, IMHO, with nice design pattern, and iterative development + refactoring, the TDD MIGHT be an overkill, or at least the overhead does not out-weight the advantages. And so is the pair programming. The automated testing is a nice idea, but it seems not technically feasible for every project. our current practices are: svn + milestone + code review I wonder if there are development processes / best practices specifically targeted on such super light teams? thanks.

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives - The Gotchas, The Do's and Don'ts for IDM Implementations

  - by Tanu Sood

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6 {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:1; mso-tstyle-colband-size:1; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; border-top:solid #E0301E 1.0pt; 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mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; font-family:"Arial Narrow","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Georgia; mso-ascii-theme-font:major-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:major-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Georgia; mso-hansi-theme-font:major-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:major-bidi;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; color:#968C6D; mso-themecolor:text2; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6FirstCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:first-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6LastCol {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:last-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-border-top:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-top-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-border-bottom:1.0pt solid #E0301E; mso-tstyle-border-bottom-themecolor:accent6; mso-ansi-font-weight:bold; mso-bidi-font-weight:bold;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddColumn {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-column; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} table.MsoTableMediumList1Accent6OddRow {mso-style-name:"Medium List 1 - Accent 6"; mso-table-condition:odd-row; mso-style-priority:65; mso-style-unhide:no; mso-tstyle-shading:#F7CBC7; mso-tstyle-shading-themecolor:accent6; mso-tstyle-shading-themetint:63;} It is generally accepted among business communities that technology by itself is not a silver bullet to all problems, but when it is combined with leading practices, strategy, careful planning and execution, it can create a recipe for success. This post attempts to highlight some of the best practices along with dos & don’ts that our practice has accumulated over the years in the identity & access management space in general, and also in the context of R2, in particular. Best Practices The following section illustrates the leading practices in “How” to plan, implement and sustain a successful OIM deployment, based on our collective experience. Planning is critical, but often overlooked A common approach to planning an IAM program that we identify with our clients is the three step process involving a current state assessment, a future state roadmap and an executable strategy to get there. It is extremely beneficial for clients to assess their current IAM state, perform gap analysis, document the recommended controls to address the gaps, align future state roadmap to business initiatives and get buy in from all stakeholders involved to improve the chances of success. When designing an enterprise-wide solution, the scalability of the technology must accommodate the future growth of the enterprise and the projected identity transactions over several years. Aligning the implementation schedule of OIM to related information technology projects increases the chances of success. As a baseline, it is recommended to match hardware specifications to the sizing guide for R2 published by Oracle. Adherence to this will help ensure that the hardware used to support OIM will not become a bottleneck as the adoption of new services increases. If your Organization has numerous connected applications that rely on reconciliation to synchronize the access data into OIM, consider hosting dedicated instances to handle reconciliation. Finally, ensure the use of clustered environment for development and have at least three total environments to help facilitate a controlled migration to production. If your Organization is planning to implement role based access control, we recommend performing a role mining exercise and consolidate your enterprise roles to keep them manageable. In addition, many Organizations have multiple approval flows to control access to critical roles, applications and entitlements. If your Organization falls into this category, we highly recommend that you limit the number of approval workflows to a small set. Most Organizations have operations managed across data centers with backend database synchronization, if your Organization falls into this category, ensure that the overall latency between the datacenters when replicating the databases is less than ten milliseconds to ensure that there are no front office performance impacts. Ingredients for a successful implementation During the development phase of your project, there are a number of guidelines that can be followed to help increase the chances for success. Most implementations cannot be completed without the use of customizations. If your implementation requires this, it’s a good practice to perform code reviews to help ensure quality and reduce code bottlenecks related to performance. We have observed at our clients that the development process works best when team members adhere to coding leading practices. Plan for time to correct coding defects and ensure developers are empowered to report their own bugs for maximum transparency. Many organizations struggle with defining a consistent approach to managing logs. This is particularly important due to the amount of information that can be logged by OIM. We recommend Oracle Diagnostics Logging (ODL) as an alternative to be used for logging. ODL allows log files to be formatted in XML for easy parsing and does not require a server restart when the log levels are changed during troubleshooting. Testing is a vital part of any large project, and an OIM R2 implementation is no exception. We suggest that at least one lower environment should use production-like data and connectors. Configurations should match as closely as possible. For example, use secure channels between OIM and target platforms in pre-production environments to test the configurations, the migration processes of certificates, and the additional overhead that encryption could impose. Finally, we ask our clients to perform database backups regularly and before any major change event, such as a patch or migration between environments. In the lowest environments, we recommend to have at least a weekly backup in order to prevent significant loss of time and effort. Similarly, if your organization is using virtual machines for one or more of the environments, it is recommended to take frequent snapshots so that rollbacks can occur in the event of improper configuration. Operate & sustain the solution to derive maximum benefits When migrating OIM R2 to production, it is important to perform certain activities that will help achieve a smoother transition. At our clients, we have seen that splitting the OIM tables into their own tablespaces by categories (physical tables, indexes, etc.) can help manage database growth effectively. If we notice that a client hasn’t enabled the Oracle-recommended indexing in the applicable database, we strongly suggest doing so to improve performance. Additionally, we work with our clients to make sure that the audit level is set to fit the organization’s auditing needs and sometimes even allocate UPA tables and indexes into their own table-space for better maintenance. Finally, many of our clients have set up schedules for reconciliation tables to be archived at regular intervals in order to keep the size of the database(s) reasonable and result in optimal database performance. For our clients that anticipate availability issues with target applications, we strongly encourage the use of the offline provisioning capabilities of OIM R2. This reduces the provisioning process for a given target application dependency on target availability and help avoid broken workflows. To account for this and other abnormalities, we also advocate that OIM’s monitoring controls be configured to alert administrators on any abnormal situations. Within OIM R2, we have begun advising our clients to utilize the ‘profile’ feature to encapsulate multiple commonly requested accounts, roles, and/or entitlements into a single item. By setting up a number of profiles that can be searched for and used, users will spend less time performing the same exact steps for common tasks. We advise our clients to follow the Oracle recommended guides for database and application server tuning which provides a good baseline configuration. It offers guidance on database connection pools, connection timeouts, user interface threads and proper handling of adapters/plug-ins. All of these can be important configurations that will allow faster provisioning and web page response times. Many of our clients have begun to recognize the value of data mining and a remediation process during the initial phases of an implementation (to help ensure high quality data gets loaded) and beyond (to support ongoing maintenance and business-as-usual processes). A successful program always begins with identifying the data elements and assigning a classification level based on criticality, risk, and availability. It should finish by following through with a remediation process. Dos & Don’ts Here are the most common dos and don'ts that we socialize with our clients, derived from our experience implementing the solution. Dos Don’ts Scope the project into phases with realistic goals. Look for quick wins to show success and value to the stake holders. Avoid “boiling the ocean” and trying to integrate all enterprise applications in the first phase. Establish an enterprise ID (universal unique ID across the enterprise) earlier in the program. Avoid major UI customizations that require code changes. Have a plan in place to patch during the project, which helps alleviate any major issues or roadblocks (product and database). Avoid publishing all the target entitlements if you don't anticipate their usage during access request. Assess your current state and prepare a roadmap to address your operations, tactical and strategic goals, align it with your business priorities. Avoid integrating non-production environments with your production target systems. Defer complex integrations to the later phases and take advantage of lessons learned from previous phases Avoid creating multiple accounts for the same user on the same system, if there is an opportunity to do so. Have an identity and access data quality initiative built into your plan to identify and remediate data related issues early on. Avoid creating complex approval workflows that would negative impact productivity and SLAs. Identify the owner of the identity systems with fair IdM knowledge and empower them with authority to make product related decisions. This will help ensure overcome any design hurdles. Avoid creating complex designs that are not sustainable long term and would need major overhaul during upgrades. Shadow your internal or external consulting resources during the implementation to build the necessary product skills needed to operate and sustain the solution. Avoid treating IAM as a point solution and have appropriate level of communication and training plan for the IT and business users alike. Conclusion In our experience, Identity programs will struggle with scope, proper resourcing, and more. We suggest that companies consider the suggestions discussed in this post and leverage them to help enable their identity and access program. This concludes PwC blog series on R2 for the month and we sincerely hope that the information we have shared thus far has been beneficial. For more information or if you have questions, you can reach out to Rex Thexton, Senior Managing Director, PwC and or Dharma Padala, Director, PwC. We look forward to hearing from you. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:12.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:12.0pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Arial","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Arial; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Arial; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Meet the Writers: Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL).

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• Network monitoring tools with API features

  - by Kev

  We use ks-soft's Advanced Hostmonitor package to monitor around 2000 items on our network. We think it's great, the chap that supports it is fantastic, the product is fast, stable and mature but I feel as as we grow as a company it's beginning to show some friction points in the area of integration with our back office admin systems. One of the things we'd like to do is be able to add new tests to whatever monitoring tool we use via an API. For example, when orders for servers come from our retail interface, the server gets built automatically, and as part of the automated build process we'd like to automatically add new tests to the network monitoring systems. Hostmonitor has some support for this via a feature called HM Script but we're starting to encounter some speedbumps - we can't add new operators/users we can't define new "Action Profiles" - these are the actions to be taken when a test goes good or bad. What we love about hostmonitor though are the Action Profiles. For example if a Windows IIS box goes bad our action profile for a bad test does something like: Check host again (one time) Wait another 30 seconds then test again Try restart app pool on remote machine (up to two times) Send an email to ops about the restart failure Try restarting IIS on remote machine (up to four times) Page duty admin (up to 5 times - stops after duty admin ACKS alert) Page backup duty admin (5 times - stops after duty admin ACKS alert) I'm starting to look around at other network monitoring tools and I'm looking for: a comprehensive API to be able to add/remove/control tests/test "action profiles"/operators (not just plugins, we need control and admin interfaces) the ability to have quite detailed action/escalation profiles (and define these via an API) I've looked at Nagios and Icinga but Ican't seem to glean from their documentation whether we could have these features or not, or if we could, how much work would be involved to implement/customise. Can anyone provide any advice, guidance or experiences?

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• I used disk copy to clone my drive, now my windows 7 profile won't load correctly

  - by RzK

  I used easeuse disk copy, after acronis, clonezilla, windows image restore failed me. Basically it copys all sectors, I set it to skip bad sectors(40). The source drive works, it just gave me a couple errors and stopped booting at one point. The drive is an identical copy, minus 40 bad errors. The drive is set to C and active partition, I rebuilt the boot order. I've ran sfc /scannow and ran chkdsk /r chkdsk found 20kb of bad sectors if I remember right. Now the issue I get is when I log into my profile which was saved right, I get a blank light blue wallpaper (non-license) explorer.exe is not running, and there are only 4 processes running in taskmanager, including taskmanager. I would try a repair install but CRTL-E would not open, nothing will open once I force start explorer.exe, almost like all services are down. What should I do? Fresh install is almost not a possibility I will try and fix this issue. sfc /scannow /offbootdir=c:\ /offwindir=c:\windows returns "Windows Resource Protection could not perform the requested operation"

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• nf_conntrack complaints in dmesg

  - by Alexander Gladysh

  While investigating complains on bad HTTP server performance, I've discovered these lines in dmesg of my Xen XCP host that contains a guest OS with said server: [11458852.811070] net_ratelimit: 321 callbacks suppressed [11458852.811075] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. [11458852.819957] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. [11458852.821083] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. [11458852.822195] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. [11458852.824987] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. [11458852.825298] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. [11458852.825891] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. [11458852.826225] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. [11458852.826234] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. [11458852.826814] nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Complains are repeated every five seconds (number of suppressed callbacks is different each time). What can these sympthoms mean? Is that bad? Any hints? (Note that the question is more narrow than "how to solve specific case of bad HTTP server performance", so I do not give more details on that.) Additional info: $ uname -a Linux MYHOST 3.2.0-24-generic #37-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 25 08:43:22 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux $ lsb_release -a No LSB modules are available. Distributor ID: Ubuntu Description: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Release: 12.04 Codename: precise $ cat /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_max 1548576 The server is under about 10M hits / day load.

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• ext4 filesystem corruption -- maybe hardware error?

  - by pts

  I'm getting these errors in dmesg after about half an hour after I turn on the computer: [ 1355.677957] EXT4-fs error (device sda2): htree_dirblock_to_tree: inode #1318420: (comm updatedb.mlocat) bad entry in directory: directory entry across blocks - block=5251700offset=0(0), inode=1802725748, rec_len=179136, name_len=32 [ 1355.677973] Aborting journal on device sda2-8. [ 1355.678101] EXT4-fs (sda2): Remounting filesystem read-only [ 1355.690144] EXT4-fs error (device sda2): htree_dirblock_to_tree: inode #1318416: (comm updatedb.mlocat) bad entry in directory: directory entry across blocks - block=5251699offset=0(0), inode=2194783952, rec_len=53280, name_len=152 [ 1356.864720] EXT4-fs error (device sda2): htree_dirblock_to_tree: inode #1312795: (comm updatedb.mlocat) bad entry in directory: directory entry across blocks - block=5251176offset=1460(13748), inode=1432317541, rec_len=208208, name_len=119 /dev/sda is an SSD, and it's using the noop scheduler. /etc/fstab entry: UUID=acb4eefa-48ff-4ee1-bb5f-2dccce7d011f / ext4 errors=remount-ro,noatime,discard,user_xattr 0 1 System information: $ cat /proc/mounts | grep /dev/sd /dev/sda1 /boot ext2 rw,noatime,errors=continue 0 0 $ cat /etc/lsb-release DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04 DISTRIB_CODENAME=lucid DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS" $ uname -a Linux leetpad 2.6.35-30-generic-pae #61~lucid1-Ubuntu SMP Thu Oct 13 21:14:29 UTC 2011 i686 GNU/Linux I've run memtest for 7 hours, it didn't found any memory errors. Any obvious ideas what can go wrong in this case? The most reasonable thing I can imagine is that the SSD is silently dropping some write requests, which eventually leads to an EXT4 filesystem inconsistency (but no disk I/O errors). How can this happen? Is there a relevant configuration option I should ensure to be set correctly? What tools should I use to diagnose the hardware failures? Would it be possible to diagnose the SSD failure without overwriting data?

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• Two instances of Windows Vista on boot up after failed clean install

  - by Dwayne

  I tried to install a clean version of Vista but failed. I ended up with Windows and Windows.old on my C: drive and a dual boot option on boot up. I gave up and booted up the old version and tried to rename the Windows.old to Windows and was asked if I wanted to merge the two folders. I answered yes and all seemed OK until I booted up this morning and was given the choice of two versions of Vista. The first one is the one that failed to installed correctly and the second one is the old version. How can I get rid of the failed installation? I got rid of the bad boot via MSCONFIG. Here is my current situation: several hard drives installed Using C: as my boot drive a much larger drive (H:) for storing most of my files. I found a subfolder in my C:\windows folder named windows. Upon inspection I determined it to be older than the C:\windows folder and therefore it must be the older, working version of the boot. I renamed the C:\windows folder to c:\windows.bad and moved the sub windows to the C: root directory. I also copied it to the h: drive. Now MSCONFIG reports that the copy that is booting is the h: copy. How can I change it back to the C:\ copy and can I delete the C:\windows.bad file set?

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• Mac OS X printing to CUPS - More intuitive authentication failure?

  - by Moduspwnens

  We have a network-wide CUPS server that offers authenticated printer access to all our campus users. We've been pretty disappointed with the way Mac clients handle bad printing authentication, though. In any other authentication dialog, when a user types in a bad username or password, the window shakes briefly, allowing the user to re-enter. With printers, this isn't the case. It'll happily accept (and even save to the keychain, if specified) bad credentials. The authentication dialog is dismissed, and the user then has to deal with the print jobs showing up as "On hold (authentication required)". To get their job printed, they need to select it in the printer's queue, click "Resume", then re-enter appropriate credentials. Is there a way to get failed printing authentication to work more intuitively for Mac OS X clients? We're trying to support a BYOD environment, but our end users have been really confused by this. It's made even worse by the way it pre-populates the user's full login name (e.g. "Smith, John"), which tends to make them think to use their local machine passwords.

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• Is it possible to mount a disk image, created with dd, to a directory on a mounted external usb hdd?

  - by Keeper Hood

  I have an image of my home (/dev/sda3) partition, which I've created using the "dd" command. dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/path/to/disk.img I've deleted the home partition via gparted in order to enlarge my /dev/root partition. Then I've recreated the /dev/sda3 partition which is smaller in size then the one I've backed up to the image. I was wondering since I have a 2TB external HDD, could it be possible to mount my backed up image on the external HDD and then copy the files into the /home directory. Since the external HDD would be already in a "mounted state", I'm unsure whether this is a good idea, mounting on a mounted device. I'm running Slackware 13.37 (64bit). used ext4 on all the partitions. resized the root partition with gparted live cd. I've tried mount -t ext4 /path/to/disk.img /mng/image -o loop It gave me an fs error (wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on dev/loop/0) Then i did dmesg | tail which outputs: EXT4-fs (loop0) : bad geometry: block count 29009610 exceeds size of defice (1679229 blocks) I have no idea what to do, I want to restore my /home data from the image I've backed up.

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• Windows Media Based video audio converter?

  - by acidzombie24

  This may seem like an odd question. Right now ONLY windows media player, VLC and media player classic opens and plays my audio video correctly. Virtualdub plays it back with the wrong framerate and losses the audio, Avidemux 2.5 seems to be able to dump the audio/video but the video (like all other apps) is either a bad framerate or is wrong (glitches and bad framerate or bad dump). Nothing recognizes the audio file and when playing the video Avidemux (and most other things) die. FFMPEG cant seem to split the video or audio (using copy -an and etc) and this is getting me very angry. VLC dumps the video incorrectly when i try dumping it with that too. What can i use to convert the video? its streaming so it starts at 26mins in and ends at 28 (this is where apps have the problem. They dont know this and fudge everything or crash). I manage to dump the audio with Avidemux but virtualdub and ffmpeg says unreconized codec. Even if i cant convert it (it seems compressed enough) i want to at least attach it back into an AVI.

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• How long will a USB key with an OS installed on it last?

  - by Xananax

  I've heard numerous times that installing an OS on a USB key is a bad thing to do, as USBs typically have a certain number of writes before dying, and installing an OS on it will wear it out (unless it's used sporadically for rescue purposes). Nonetheless, I am very tempted to install some flavour of Linux (Ubuntu or Arch, I haven't decided yet) on a small, transportable, USB Key. My problem is, although you read a lot that it's "bad", you are never told how bad. How long would it last (provided, say, a pc that is 24/7 on)? A month? A year? Five years? Is there recipes to make it last longer? Is there any reason beside weariness that should prevent me from attempting this? I mean, if it can be calculated, then I could theoretically shield myself by doing regular backups on another key when the deadline gets close (for example). Notes I am not talking of using a USB as a live CD, but actually installing the OS on it.) When I say "USB Key", I refer to the little USBs with a flash memory, not an external USB hard drive. For the curious, my reason is that I work in a lot of different places, on different PCs, and I have a very customized session, with my own WM, my own key bindings, my own scripts, , a selection of plugins for firefox and chrome, etc, and currently I am synchronizing all this through a mix of dropbox, git, and transporting files on USBs, and and it's becoming a chore. It would be much simpler for me to just plug the USB and mount the hard disk of the PC I am using and use it's processing power without actually needing to install any OS on it.

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