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  • How do I apply multiple subnets to a server with one NIC?

    - by Cosban
    I am trying to route multiple IPs through one physical NIC on my dedicated server for use with Proxmox KVM VMs. I have a dedicated server which is currently running Debian 4.4.5-8 with 3 available ip addresses for use, which will be displayed as 176.xxx.xxx.196 (main), 176.xxx.xxx.198 (on same subnet as main) and 5.xxx.xxx.166 (different subnet). I am currently trying to route the third IP address with the dedi for use with a vps that I have set up using proxmox v2.x but am having a really, really hard time doing so. Virtual interfaces binding the additional IP addresses work as expected, ruling out external routing problems. The provider has given the following information for the IP addresses on the main subnet: gateway: 176.xxx.xxx.193 netmask: 255.255.255.224 broadcast: 176.xxx.xxx.223 As well as the following information for the IP address on the second subnet: gateway: 5.xxx.xxx.161 netmask: 255.255.255.248 broadcast: 5.xxx.xxx.167 Everything I've tried with /etc/network/interfaces has either not worked, or has rendered the network completely useless. This is the current state of the file, which has the secondary IP address working on the same subnet as well as IPv6 working, but not the second subnet. # Nativen IPv6 Schnittstelle iface eth0 inet6 manual # Bridge IPv4 Schnittstelle (176.xxx.xxx.193/27) auto vmbr0 iface vmbr0 inet static address 176.xxx.xxx.196 netmask 255.255.255.224 gateway 176.xxx.xxx.193 broadcast 176.xxx.xxx.223 bridge_ports eth0 bridge_stp off bridge_fd 0 bridge_maxwait 0 post-up ip addr add 176.xxx.xxx.198/27 dev vmbr0 auto vmbr1 iface vmbr1 inet static address 5.xxx.xxx.166 netmask 255.255.255.248 gateway 5.xxx.xxx.161 broadcast 5.xxx.xxx.167 bridge_ports eth0 bridge_stp off bridge_fd 0 bridge_maxwait 0 post-up ip addr add 5.xxx.xxx.166/27 dev vmbr1 # Bridge IPv6 Schnittstelle (Reichweite: xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx::/64) iface vmbr0 inet6 static address xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx netmask 64 up ip -6 route add xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx dev vmbr0 down ip -6 route del xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx dev vmbr0 up ip -6 route add default via xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx dev vmbr0 down ip -6 route del default via xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx dev vmbr0

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  • Hyper-V VM Lab + RRAS + RDP

    - by Dennis Evans
    My background is primarily .NET Development with some System Administration skills. I'm trying to set up a VM Lab for me to test System Applications I'm developing but I've only ever done System Administration in already set up environments; I've never set up my own. My current setup: Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V Host on physical machine (only role enabled) with two NICs. First NIC dedicated for Management w/ DHCP address from company's network. Second NIC dedicated to RRAS VM w/ DHCP address from company's network. RRAS VM has two NICS, one is virtual private internal only NIC w/ static entry. The other is the physical NIC mentioned above. I've joined it to my VMLab.net internal domain. My Active Directory Domain Controller server (ADCT) also runs DNS, DHCP, and Certificate Services which I'm familiar with but don't understand completely. RRAS is already set up with NAT to provide the private internal network with Internet access. What I would like to do is be able to RDP into the servers/computers on the VMLab.net domain from my computer. Do I need to add the Remote Desktop Services role and enable the Remote Desktop Gateway service on RRAS in order to do this or is there a way to set up port forwarding on RRAS to just allow a direct connection to the internal servers...or both? What would the best practices be here? Network Diagram http://i.stack.imgur.com/4qfnk.png

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  • Diagnosing Microsoft SQL Server error 9001: The log for the database is not available.

    - by Scott Mitchell
    Over the weekend a website I run stopped functioning, recording the following error in the Event Viewer each time a request is made to the website: Event ID: 9001 The log for database 'database name' is not available. Check the event log for related error messages. Resolve any errors and restart the database. The website is hosted on a dedicated server, so I am able to RDP into the server and poke around. The LDF file for the database exists in the C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQL\DATA folder, but attempting to do any work with the database from Management Studio results in a dialog box reporting the same error - 9001: The log for database is not available... This is the first time I've received this error, and I've been hosting this site (and others) on this dedicated web server for over two years now. It is my understanding that this error indicates a corrupt log file. I was able to get the website back online by Detaching the database and then restoring a backup from a couple days ago, but my concern is that this error is indicative of a more sinister problem, namely a hard drive failure. I emailed support at the web hosting company and this was their reply: There doesn't appear to be any other indications of the cause in the Event Log, so it's possible that the log was corrupted. Currently the memory's resources is at 87%, which also may have an impact but is unlikely. Can the log just "become corrupted?" My question: What are the next steps I should take to diagnose this problem? How can I determine if this is, indeed, a hardware problem? And if it is, are there any options beyond replacing the disk? Thanks

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  • Install a KVM guest with LVM partitioning on an LVM partitioned host using virt-install fails, volume group already exists

    - by Rilik84
    our setup consists of a ubuntu 10.04 kvm host server with LVM, on top of which we install the ubuntu 10.04 virtual machines via virt-install and preseed. Each VM has a dedicated logical volume which we pass to virt-install via the "--disk path=/dev/sysvg/vm-name" parameter. The virtual machines themselves are using LVM as well. Virt-install seems to have a few issues with this setup. Say we want to install two virtual machines in parallel. The first vm installs correctly while the second halts during the partitioning, complaining with this error: "volume group name already in use". I tried removing the logical volumes, recreated them, rebooted the kvm host to clear any leftovers but the issue perists. The preseed is telling the vms to create a volume group named "sysvg", which is the same name used by the volume group of the kvm host. Considering this I did another test: I got rid of the preseed part taking care of the partitioning/lvm creation and started the creation of two vms in parallel. If, when prompted, I instruct the vms' installer to do a guided partitioning of the disk with LVM, it will still fail giving this different error on both the vms: Physical Volume /dev/sda5 is already in volume group sysvg. As I wrote, sysvg is the volume group used by the KVM host. So I thought the name clashing was the issue. By removing the preseed part I skipped the volume group naming. I can't understand how the virtual machines would be aware of the presence of that volume group since they're supposed to be isolated from it, especially after I removed and recreated the logical volumes dedicated to them. That detail should not be exposed at all to them! Thanks for the help. I'm clueless.

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  • Does MySQL have some kind of DoS protection or per-user query limit?

    - by Ghostrider
    I'm a bit at a loss. I'm running a MySQL database that's roughly 1GB data in indices combined on a dedicated Linux server. DB version is '5.0.89-community'. Configuration is controlled via cPanel. PHP actually runs elsewhere on a shared hosting. IP addresses are static and don't change. Access from remote IP address is properly configured. Website gets around 10K hits per day with each hit generating a a database query. Some of these queries are expensive (~1 sec execution time). All is fine and well until at some point DB server starts refusing connections from the client, claiming that specific user can't access the server from that IP. Resetting the server will always fix the problem for a day or two and then the same thing happens. There are some other DBs on that server, some of which are hit pretty hard on occasion but constantnly. One of the apps maintains several persistent connections since it does couple of updates per minute. Though I don't think it's related. What's driving me mad is that I can't figure out why server would start refusing connections. There is nothing in the logs. This server is a hosted dedicated server so hosting company created the OS image and I didn't write or go over every line of configuration. I'd do it but I'm at a loss as to where start looking. Any advice is appreciated.

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  • apache: can't renew ssl certificate

    - by Caballero
    I have Godaddy SSL certificate for one website on my dedicated server running Centos 5.3 / Apache 2.2.3. I have renewed certificate on Godaddy recently, however now it's showing as expired on my website. I've re-keyed certificate since and reuploaded domain.key, domain.crt and bundle.crt (example file names) files to the server, restarted apache, but the sertificate still shows as expired. I'm running out of clues. I've tried replacing content of .crt files with jiberish and restart apache - it's still showing that certificate is expired, even though it shouldn't be picked up at all. I eventually rebooted dedicated server, still no luck. I'm using free SSL check tool http://www.digicert.com/help/ which clearly shows all the green checks except one - certificate is expired. Has someone any idea what might be causing this? Could there be some kind of caching going on here? UPDATE: after running openssl x509 -in domain.crt -noout -enddate I'm getting this output: notAfter=Jun 2 08:16:51 2013 GMT So I asume this means I have the right certificate on the server and yet the old expired one shows on the web...

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  • Diagnosing Logon Audit Failure event log entries

    - by Scott Mitchell
    I help a client manage a website that is run on a dedicated web server at a hosting company. Recently, we noticed that over the last two weeks there have been tens of thousands of Audit Failure entries in the Security Event Log with Task Category of Logon - these have been coming in about every two seconds, but interesting stopped altogether as of two days ago. In general, the event description looks like the following: An account failed to log on. Subject: Security ID: SYSTEM Account Name: ...The Hosting Account... Account Domain: ...The Domain... Logon ID: 0x3e7 Logon Type: 10 Account For Which Logon Failed: Security ID: NULL SID Account Name: david Account Domain: ...The Domain... Failure Information: Failure Reason: Unknown user name or bad password. Status: 0xc000006d Sub Status: 0xc0000064 Process Information: Caller Process ID: 0x154c Caller Process Name: C:\Windows\System32\winlogon.exe Network Information: Workstation Name: ...The Domain... Source Network Address: 173.231.24.18 Source Port: 1605 The value in the Account Name field differs. Above you see "david" but there are ones with "john", "console", "sys", and even ones like "support83423" and whatnot. The Logon Type field indicates that the logon attempt was a remote interactive attempt via Terminal Services or Remote Desktop. My presumption is that these are some brute force attacks attempting to guess username/password combinations in order to log into our dedicated server. Are these presumptions correct? Are these types of attacks pretty common? Is there a way to help stop these types of attacks? We need to be able to access the desktop via Remote Desktop so simply turning off that service is not feasible. Thanks

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  • Windows ACL inheritance issues for FTP server and automated tools

    - by Martin Sall
    I have set up Cerberus FTP server. By default, Cerberus FTP service runs under SYSTEM ACCOUNT. Also I have some console applications which run as scheduled tasks. They are running under a dedicated "Utilities" user account which has "Log on as batch job" permissions. These console applications take uploaded FTP files, process them and then move them to some dedicated archive folder. The problem is that my console apps are throwing Security exceptions when trying to acces the uploaded files. I tried to give the Full control permissions on the ftproot folder for my "Utilities" account and I have checked that "Replace all Child object permissions with inheritable permissions from this object" checkbox, but it affects only current files. When new files are uploaded, they again are not accessible by my "Utilities" account. I tried to go another way and put Cerberus FTP service under "Utilities" account. Then I also needed to give "Utilities" account permissions on Cerberus Data folder in ProgramData. Still no luck - after this operation, Cerberus internal SOAP web service stopped working (although everything else seems to work). I need that SOAP service to be available, so running the Cerberus FTP under "Utilities" account seems to be not an option. Unless I find out, what else do I need to set up for that "Utilities" account to stop Cerberus from complaining. I guess, Cerberus is uploading files to some temporary folder and so those files get the permissions form that folder and keep the same permissions even after moved to the ftproot. What would be the right solution for this which would grant Cerberus FTP server and the "Utilities" account minimal needed permissions to access the contents of the ftproot folder?

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  • Best NIC config when virtual servers need iSCSI storage?

    - by icky2000
    I have a Windows 2008 server running Hyper-V. There are 6 NICs on the server configured like this: NIC01 & NIC02: teamed administrative interface (RDP, mgmt, etc) NIC03: connected to iSCSI VLAN #1 NIC04: connected to iSCSI VLAN #2 NIC05: dedicated to one virtual switch for VMs NIC06: dedicated to another virtual switch for VMs The iSCSI NICs are used obviously for storage to host the VMs. I put half the VMs on the host on the switch assigned to NIC05 and the other half on the switch assigned to NIC06. We have multiple production networks that the VMs could appear on so the switch ports that NIC05 & NIC06 are connected to are trunked and we then tag the NIC on the VM for the appropriate VLAN. No clustering on this host. Now I wish to assign some iSCSI storage direct to a VM. As I see it I have 2 options: Add the iSCSI VLANs to the trunked ports (NIC05 and NIC06), add two NICs to the VM that needs iSCSI storage, and tag them for the iSCSI VLANs Create two additional virtual switches on the host. Assign one to NIC03 and one to NIC04. Add two NICs to the VM that needs iSCSI storage and let them share that path to the SAN with the host. I'm wondering about how much overhead the VLAN tagging in Hyper-V has and haven't seen any discussion about that. I'm also a bit concerned that something funky on the iSCSI-connected VM could saturate the iSCSI NICs or cause some other problem that could threaten storage access for the entire host which would be bad. Any thoughts or suggestions? How do you configure your hosts when VMs connect direct to iSCSI?

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  • High speed network configuration

    - by Peter M
    Sorry if this seems to be a stupid question, I'm not sure how to specify what I want to know when checking google. I will have 2 or 3 devices pumping out data on a 100Base-T port. The combined data rate of all devices is about 15KB/S which exceeds the optimal 100Base-T channel capacity (12KB/S), but well within the realms of a 1000Base-T connection. Each device will be sending a burst of data in the form of an FTP transfer to a common, single host computer in a sequential manner ie: Device A establishes FTP connection and transfers data Device B establishes FTP connection and transfers data Device C establishes FTP connection and transfers data It may be that the A&B, B&C and C&A transfers overlap in the time domain to some extent. There will be minimal traffic going back from the computer to each device (in general what ever is needed to support the FTP transfers), and the network will be dedicated to transferring data between these devices and the host computer. Is it possible to use a switch to combine the multiple incoming 100Base-T streams into a single outgoing 1000Base-T stream? if so what features in a switch should I be looking for? Or would it be better to have 3 physical point-to-point 100Base-T dedicated connections between each device and the host computer? (thus having at least 3 physical Ethernet interfaces on that computer) Note that I can't change the interface on the devices, but I am free to choose the network and host computer configuration. Thanks for you help Peter

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  • How configure 2 Lan cards in Windows 7/8 pc one to connect to Internet and other to Local Network

    - by Maharshi Raval
        I am about to install a dedicated VOIP server in our office. It is a 3CX pbx system on Windows 7/8 machine. The environment currently is a Windows SBS 2011 with 8 client machines. I want to use a dedicated broadband connection for the PBX (3CX) box, but the box also needs to be accessible in the local network as we will be using IP Phones and software IP phones. How configure two network cards on PBX box, so that one will be always used to connect to our SIP host over the Internet and the other will be connected to local network accessible from other client pc to connect to the pbx system. It must be noted that currently the Windows SBS 2011 acts as the Primary Domain Controller and gateway for all the client machines.     I cannot use a load balancer as it will conflict and cause issues within the current setup of our SBS2011 as it is also our Exchange Server. Any input is much appreciated. thanks in advance

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  • How configure 2 Lan cards in Windows 7/8 pc one to connect to Internet and other to Local Network

    - by Maharshi Raval
        I am about to install a dedicated VOIP server in our office. It is a 3CX pbx system on Windows 7/8 machine. The environment currently is a Windows SBS 2011 with 8 client machines. I want to use a dedicated broadband connection for the PBX (3CX) box, but the box also needs to be accessible in the local network as we will be using IP Phones and software IP phones. How configure two network cards on PBX box, so that one will be always used to connect to our SIP host over the Internet and the other will be connected to local network accessible from other client pc to connect to the pbx system. It must be noted that currently the Windows SBS 2011 acts as the Primary Domain Controller and gateway for all the client machines.     I cannot use a load balancer as it will conflict and cause issues within the current setup of our SBS2011 as it is also our Exchange Server. Any input is much appreciated. thanks in advance

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  • Two VGA monitors on Lenovo IdeaCentre H520 Desktop

    - by Sebastian-Laurentiu Plesciuc
    I recently bought a Lenovo IdeaCentre H520 computer and two VGA LED monitors. This particular PC has a dedicated NVIDIA Geforce GT630 video card and an integrated Intel HD Graphics 2500 video card. Both cards have VGA out. The Geforce card also has a HDMI out. I have installed Windows 8 and I can't seem to use both cards. I have connected both monitors, one to the VGA out of the Geforce card and one to the VGA out of the integrated card. I looked through the BIOS options for Video and I can only select the dedicated one, the integrate one or the Auto option. This kinda sucks. I was wondering what kind of options I have available. I have a VGA female to DVI A male adaptor, I was wondering if it could work if I can hook it to a DVI A female to HDMI male adaptor and plug one monitor into the VGA out of the Geforce video card and the other through both adapters to the HDMI out. Any chance this could work? I was looking online for a VGA to HDMI live cable but it's kind of expensive.

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  • OpenVPN-based VPN server on same system it's "protecting": feasible?

    - by Johnny Utahh
    Scenario: hosted machine (typically a VPS) serving wiki, svn, git, forums, email lists (eg: GNU mailman), Bugzilla (etc) privately to < 20 people. People not on team not allowed access. Seeking VPN-restricted access to said server. Have good user experience with OpenVPN-based servers/clients, but have yet to server-admin such systems. Otherwise, experienced Linux sysadmin. Target system: Ubuntu, probably 12.04. Seeking to put an OpenVPN process on above server to "protect" all the above-mentioned services, enabling only OpenVPN-authorized clients/processes to access above services. (Can easily acquire additional IP address(es) as needed for this setup.) Option: if absolutely needed, can employ an additional, dedicated, "VPN server" VPS simply to be my VPN server "front end." But prefer to have all server processes (VPN server plus other server apps) all running on same machine, if possible. Will consider further if dedicated-VPN-machine setup enables 1. easier installation/administration, 2. better/easier end-user experience, and/or 3. makes system significantly more secure. Any of above feasible? The main intention: create a VPN from purely-hosted resources, and not spend all the effort to make a non-VPN, secure site--which typically means "SSL wrapping" + all the continual webserver-application-update management. Let the VPN server deal with access security, and spend list time pushing said security "down" in the other apps/Apache.

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  • RPC Server Unavailable on Hyper-V cluster when moving resources after the host adapter has failed

    - by Doug Luxem
    On a Windows 2008 R2 SP1 cluster running Hyper-V, a lost network connectivity on the primary host interface. The interface was rapidly flapping up and down, and this was later determined to be caused by a faulty switch port. As this was a clustered server, the host interface was not fault tolerant (seeing as how the whole server was fault tolerant), so connectivity to the host was going up and down. The Hyper-V guests were completely unaffected by the network outage as they used a dedicated trunk on the server separate from the host interface. Additionally, dedicated interfaces for the cluster and live migration networks were fine. In order to diagnose the server, I tried to move all resources (Hyper-V Guests) to other nodes through Failover Cluster Manager. These moves failed with an error RPC Server Unavailable. The only way to move resources was by shutting down the guests, stopping the cluster service on the Node A, allowing other nodes to take ownership of the resources, and restarting the guests. A few other notes: All nodes have Client for MS Networks and File & Printer Sharing enabled on the Cluster and LM networks. Node A was accessible over cluster and LM networks from other nodes (these are private, cluster-only networks); pingable, CIFs, etc. Accessing \\NODEA is done over the Host adapters, as you would expect in this case and is the reason for the RPC Server Unavailable error with that adapter being down. My questions here are - Is there a way to still use Live Migration in a failure scenario such as this to prevent shutting down the Hyper-V guests? How can the network be reconfigured in the future so that the cluster service attempts to use the cluster and/or live migration networks to issue the RPC requests?

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  • How to secure an Internet-facing Elastic Search implementation in a shared hosting environment?

    - by casperOne
    (Originally asked on StackOverflow, and recommended that I move it here) I've been going over the documentation for Elastic Search and I'm a big fan and I'd like to use it to handle the search for my ASP.NET MVC app. That introduces a few interesting twists, however. If the ASP.NET MVC application was on a dedicated machine, it would be simple to spool up an instance of Elastic Search and use the TCP Transport to connect locally. However, I'm not on a dedicated machine for the ASP.NET MVC application, nor does it look like I'll move to one anytime soon. That leaves hosting Elastic Search on another machine (in the *NIX world) and I would probably go with shared hosting there. One of the biggest things lacking from Elastic Search, however, is the fact that it doesn't support HTTPS and basic authentication out of the box. If it did, then this question wouldn't exist; I'd simply host it somewhere and make sure to have an incredibly secure password and HTTPS enabled (possibly with a self-signed certificate). But that's not the case. That given, what is a good way to expose Elastic Search over the Internet in a secure way? Note, I'm looking for something that hopefully, will not require writing code to provide shims for the methods that I want (in other words, writing forwarders).

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  • How to secure a group of Amazon EC2 instances

    - by ks78
    I have several Amazon EC2 instances running Ubuntu 10.04 and I've recently started using Amazon's Route 53 as my DNS. The purpose of doing that was to allow the instances to refer to each other by name rather than private IP (which can change). I've pointed my domain name (via GoDaddy) to Amazon's name servers, allowing me to access my EC2 webservers. However, I noticed I can now access the EC2 instances which I don't want to be public, such as the dedicated MySQL Server. I was thinking Amazon's Security Groups would still be in effect when using Route 53, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Before I started using Route 53, I was thinking of having one instance run a reverse proxy, which would help protect the web servers behind it. Then IP-restrict all the other instances. I know IP restricting can be done using the firewall within each instance, but should I ever need to access them from another IP address, I'd need a way in. Amazon's control panel made it a breeze to open a port when necessary. Does anyone have any suggestions for keeping EC2 instances secure, but also accessible to their administrator? Also, what's the best topology for a group of EC2 instances, consisting of web servers and a dedicated database server, from a security perspective? Does having a reverse proxy server even make sense?

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  • Have a set a cgi scripts shared by multiple domains

    - by rpat
    Goal: Have multiple domains share a set of cgi(perl) scripts Environment: Apache 2.0 on a dedicated Cent OS server. (Apache configuration files generated by cPanel) I have dozens of domains on the dedicated server. The domains set up by cPanel under VirtualHost section. I have almost no knowledge of Apache. Most of what I do is taken care of by cPanel. I would like to put a set of scripts under one directory (perhaps under / or /opt ) and for each of the domains, under the individual cgi-bin, I would like to create a symbolic link to this common directory. This way I am hoping to avoid having to keep a copy of scripts for every domain. Since Apache config files are generated by cPanel, I would not like to manually make changes to those. Beside, I could mess things up. I see that cPanel recommends use of include files rather than changing the httpd.conf Perhaps I need to have the following of symbolic links enabled in the cgi-bin directory and allow the web server user execute the scripts not owned by it. May be I am making things more complicated than they are. I would be glad to use any other means to achieve my goal. Thanks in advance for your help. *I asked this on stackoverflow and some one suggested that I could ask this on serverfault.

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  • Hosting options for data-enabled web application

    - by Hertfordian
    I am independently developing an asp.net business application with a MySQL database. I currently have a Windows web hosting account which includes MySQL and MS SQL as installed supported options. I am not yet finally committed to using MySQL and I want to keep my options open to evaluate MS SQL and possibly other options such as PostGreSQL later when more of the business logic is in place - my data access layer will handle the database connectivity. The web hosting setup I have now is fine for development purposes, but if in future I want to use, say, PostGreSQL Server, and a level of usage of, say, 10,000 hits per day concentrated in business hours, I'm assuming I'll need a dedicated server. But in that case, should I just install PostGreSQL on the dedicated server, or is best practice to have a separate database server - perhaps locked down so that it can only be accessed through the web server? And supposing it was only 2000 hits a day - how would that change things? I'd appreciate it if anyone could point me in the direction of a useful guide to these sorts of issues. Naturally if I start paying for separate servers, I would like to know exactly why I'm doing it and what the performance issues and thresholds are.

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  • Multiple SSL certificates on one server

    - by Kyle O'Brien
    We're hosting two websites on our fairly tiny but dedicated production server. Both website require SSL authentication. So, we have virtualhosts set up for both of them. They both reference their own domain.key, domain.crt and domain.intermediate.crt files. Each CSR and certificate file for each site was setup using its own unique information and nothing is shared between them (other than the server itself) However, which ever site's symbolic link (set up in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled) is reference first, is the site who's certificate is referenced even if we're visiting the second site. So for example, assume our companies are Cadbury and Nestle. We set up both sites with their own certificates but we create Cadbury's symbolic link in apache's site-enabled folder first and then Nestle's. You can visit Nestle perfectly fine but if you check the certificate installation, it reference's Cadbury's certificate. We're hosting these websites on a dedicated Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS server. Both certificates are provided by Thawte.com. I came across a few potential solutions with no degree of success. I'm hoping someone else has a decent solution? Thanks Edit: The only other solution that seems to have provided success to some people is using SNI with Apache. However, the setups here didn't seem to coincide with our setup at all.

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  • Revoke directory access for a particular user in Solaris

    - by permissiontomars
    I have a need to allow directory access to a particular user on my file system. I want this user to be unable to access any other directory in my file system (initially anyway. It may need access to some directories later). For example: I have a directory called /opt/mydir. - I want my dedicated user to only be able to access this directory, and nothing else. - I want all other users to be able to access this directory as normal. I'm new to Linux and its permissions. I've read a fair bit of background material but I'm a little confused. Is there anyway to revoke permissions to /opt/mydir for a single dedicated user? A possible flawed method would be to only allow access to /opt/mydir and exclude every other user. This won't work because I want all other users to work as normal; accessing the directory. I'm working on Solaris 10. Any suggestions are appreciated.

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  • Zen and the Art of File and Folder Organization

    - by Mark Virtue
    Is your desk a paragon of neatness, or does it look like a paper-bomb has gone off? If you’ve been putting off getting organized because the task is too huge or daunting, or you don’t know where to start, we’ve got 40 tips to get you on the path to zen mastery of your filing system. For all those readers who would like to get their files and folders organized, or, if they’re already organized, better organized—we have compiled a complete guide to getting organized and staying organized, a comprehensive article that will hopefully cover every possible tip you could want. Signs that Your Computer is Poorly Organized If your computer is a mess, you’re probably already aware of it.  But just in case you’re not, here are some tell-tale signs: Your Desktop has over 40 icons on it “My Documents” contains over 300 files and 60 folders, including MP3s and digital photos You use the Windows’ built-in search facility whenever you need to find a file You can’t find programs in the out-of-control list of programs in your Start Menu You save all your Word documents in one folder, all your spreadsheets in a second folder, etc Any given file that you’re looking for may be in any one of four different sets of folders But before we start, here are some quick notes: We’re going to assume you know what files and folders are, and how to create, save, rename, copy and delete them The organization principles described in this article apply equally to all computer systems.  However, the screenshots here will reflect how things look on Windows (usually Windows 7).  We will also mention some useful features of Windows that can help you get organized. Everyone has their own favorite methodology of organizing and filing, and it’s all too easy to get into “My Way is Better than Your Way” arguments.  The reality is that there is no perfect way of getting things organized.  When I wrote this article, I tried to keep a generalist and objective viewpoint.  I consider myself to be unusually well organized (to the point of obsession, truth be told), and I’ve had 25 years experience in collecting and organizing files on computers.  So I’ve got a lot to say on the subject.  But the tips I have described here are only one way of doing it.  Hopefully some of these tips will work for you too, but please don’t read this as any sort of “right” way to do it. At the end of the article we’ll be asking you, the reader, for your own organization tips. Why Bother Organizing At All? For some, the answer to this question is self-evident. And yet, in this era of powerful desktop search software (the search capabilities built into the Windows Vista and Windows 7 Start Menus, and third-party programs like Google Desktop Search), the question does need to be asked, and answered. I have a friend who puts every file he ever creates, receives or downloads into his My Documents folder and doesn’t bother filing them into subfolders at all.  He relies on the search functionality built into his Windows operating system to help him find whatever he’s looking for.  And he always finds it.  He’s a Search Samurai.  For him, filing is a waste of valuable time that could be spent enjoying life! It’s tempting to follow suit.  On the face of it, why would anyone bother to take the time to organize their hard disk when such excellent search software is available?  Well, if all you ever want to do with the files you own is to locate and open them individually (for listening, editing, etc), then there’s no reason to ever bother doing one scrap of organization.  But consider these common tasks that are not achievable with desktop search software: Find files manually.  Often it’s not convenient, speedy or even possible to utilize your desktop search software to find what you want.  It doesn’t work 100% of the time, or you may not even have it installed.  Sometimes its just plain faster to go straight to the file you want, if you know it’s in a particular sub-folder, rather than trawling through hundreds of search results. Find groups of similar files (e.g. all your “work” files, all the photos of your Europe holiday in 2008, all your music videos, all the MP3s from Dark Side of the Moon, all your letters you wrote to your wife, all your tax returns).  Clever naming of the files will only get you so far.  Sometimes it’s the date the file was created that’s important, other times it’s the file format, and other times it’s the purpose of the file.  How do you name a collection of files so that they’re easy to isolate based on any of the above criteria?  Short answer, you can’t. Move files to a new computer.  It’s time to upgrade your computer.  How do you quickly grab all the files that are important to you?  Or you decide to have two computers now – one for home and one for work.  How do you quickly isolate only the work-related files to move them to the work computer? Synchronize files to other computers.  If you have more than one computer, and you need to mirror some of your files onto the other computer (e.g. your music collection), then you need a way to quickly determine which files are to be synced and which are not.  Surely you don’t want to synchronize everything? Choose which files to back up.  If your backup regime calls for multiple backups, or requires speedy backups, then you’ll need to be able to specify which files are to be backed up, and which are not.  This is not possible if they’re all in the same folder. Finally, if you’re simply someone who takes pleasure in being organized, tidy and ordered (me! me!), then you don’t even need a reason.  Being disorganized is simply unthinkable. Tips on Getting Organized Here we present our 40 best tips on how to get organized.  Or, if you’re already organized, to get better organized. Tip #1.  Choose Your Organization System Carefully The reason that most people are not organized is that it takes time.  And the first thing that takes time is deciding upon a system of organization.  This is always a matter of personal preference, and is not something that a geek on a website can tell you.  You should always choose your own system, based on how your own brain is organized (which makes the assumption that your brain is, in fact, organized). We can’t instruct you, but we can make suggestions: You may want to start off with a system based on the users of the computer.  i.e. “My Files”, “My Wife’s Files”, My Son’s Files”, etc.  Inside “My Files”, you might then break it down into “Personal” and “Business”.  You may then realize that there are overlaps.  For example, everyone may want to share access to the music library, or the photos from the school play.  So you may create another folder called “Family”, for the “common” files. You may decide that the highest-level breakdown of your files is based on the “source” of each file.  In other words, who created the files.  You could have “Files created by ME (business or personal)”, “Files created by people I know (family, friends, etc)”, and finally “Files created by the rest of the world (MP3 music files, downloaded or ripped movies or TV shows, software installation files, gorgeous desktop wallpaper images you’ve collected, etc).”  This system happens to be the one I use myself.  See below:  Mark is for files created by meVC is for files created by my company (Virtual Creations)Others is for files created by my friends and familyData is the rest of the worldAlso, Settings is where I store the configuration files and other program data files for my installed software (more on this in tip #34, below). Each folder will present its own particular set of requirements for further sub-organization.  For example, you may decide to organize your music collection into sub-folders based on the artist’s name, while your digital photos might get organized based on the date they were taken.  It can be different for every sub-folder! Another strategy would be based on “currentness”.  Files you have yet to open and look at live in one folder.  Ones that have been looked at but not yet filed live in another place.  Current, active projects live in yet another place.  All other files (your “archive”, if you like) would live in a fourth folder. (And of course, within that last folder you’d need to create a further sub-system based on one of the previous bullet points). Put some thought into this – changing it when it proves incomplete can be a big hassle!  Before you go to the trouble of implementing any system you come up with, examine a wide cross-section of the files you own and see if they will all be able to find a nice logical place to sit within your system. Tip #2.  When You Decide on Your System, Stick to It! There’s nothing more pointless than going to all the trouble of creating a system and filing all your files, and then whenever you create, receive or download a new file, you simply dump it onto your Desktop.  You need to be disciplined – forever!  Every new file you get, spend those extra few seconds to file it where it belongs!  Otherwise, in just a month or two, you’ll be worse off than before – half your files will be organized and half will be disorganized – and you won’t know which is which! Tip #3.  Choose the Root Folder of Your Structure Carefully Every data file (document, photo, music file, etc) that you create, own or is important to you, no matter where it came from, should be found within one single folder, and that one single folder should be located at the root of your C: drive (as a sub-folder of C:\).  In other words, do not base your folder structure in standard folders like “My Documents”.  If you do, then you’re leaving it up to the operating system engineers to decide what folder structure is best for you.  And every operating system has a different system!  In Windows 7 your files are found in C:\Users\YourName, whilst on Windows XP it was C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\My Documents.  In UNIX systems it’s often /home/YourName. These standard default folders tend to fill up with junk files and folders that are not at all important to you.  “My Documents” is the worst offender.  Every second piece of software you install, it seems, likes to create its own folder in the “My Documents” folder.  These folders usually don’t fit within your organizational structure, so don’t use them!  In fact, don’t even use the “My Documents” folder at all.  Allow it to fill up with junk, and then simply ignore it.  It sounds heretical, but: Don’t ever visit your “My Documents” folder!  Remove your icons/links to “My Documents” and replace them with links to the folders you created and you care about! Create your own file system from scratch!  Probably the best place to put it would be on your D: drive – if you have one.  This way, all your files live on one drive, while all the operating system and software component files live on the C: drive – simply and elegantly separated.  The benefits of that are profound.  Not only are there obvious organizational benefits (see tip #10, below), but when it comes to migrate your data to a new computer, you can (sometimes) simply unplug your D: drive and plug it in as the D: drive of your new computer (this implies that the D: drive is actually a separate physical disk, and not a partition on the same disk as C:).  You also get a slight speed improvement (again, only if your C: and D: drives are on separate physical disks). Warning:  From tip #12, below, you will see that it’s actually a good idea to have exactly the same file system structure – including the drive it’s filed on – on all of the computers you own.  So if you decide to use the D: drive as the storage system for your own files, make sure you are able to use the D: drive on all the computers you own.  If you can’t ensure that, then you can still use a clever geeky trick to store your files on the D: drive, but still access them all via the C: drive (see tip #17, below). If you only have one hard disk (C:), then create a dedicated folder that will contain all your files – something like C:\Files.  The name of the folder is not important, but make it a single, brief word. There are several reasons for this: When creating a backup regime, it’s easy to decide what files should be backed up – they’re all in the one folder! If you ever decide to trade in your computer for a new one, you know exactly which files to migrate You will always know where to begin a search for any file If you synchronize files with other computers, it makes your synchronization routines very simple.   It also causes all your shortcuts to continue to work on the other machines (more about this in tip #24, below). Once you’ve decided where your files should go, then put all your files in there – Everything!  Completely disregard the standard, default folders that are created for you by the operating system (“My Music”, “My Pictures”, etc).  In fact, you can actually relocate many of those folders into your own structure (more about that below, in tip #6). The more completely you get all your data files (documents, photos, music, etc) and all your configuration settings into that one folder, then the easier it will be to perform all of the above tasks. Once this has been done, and all your files live in one folder, all the other folders in C:\ can be thought of as “operating system” folders, and therefore of little day-to-day interest for us. Here’s a screenshot of a nicely organized C: drive, where all user files are located within the \Files folder:   Tip #4.  Use Sub-Folders This would be our simplest and most obvious tip.  It almost goes without saying.  Any organizational system you decide upon (see tip #1) will require that you create sub-folders for your files.  Get used to creating folders on a regular basis. Tip #5.  Don’t be Shy About Depth Create as many levels of sub-folders as you need.  Don’t be scared to do so.  Every time you notice an opportunity to group a set of related files into a sub-folder, do so.  Examples might include:  All the MP3s from one music CD, all the photos from one holiday, or all the documents from one client. It’s perfectly okay to put files into a folder called C:\Files\Me\From Others\Services\WestCo Bank\Statements\2009.  That’s only seven levels deep.  Ten levels is not uncommon.  Of course, it’s possible to take this too far.  If you notice yourself creating a sub-folder to hold only one file, then you’ve probably become a little over-zealous.  On the other hand, if you simply create a structure with only two levels (for example C:\Files\Work) then you really haven’t achieved any level of organization at all (unless you own only six files!).  Your “Work” folder will have become a dumping ground, just like your Desktop was, with most likely hundreds of files in it. Tip #6.  Move the Standard User Folders into Your Own Folder Structure Most operating systems, including Windows, create a set of standard folders for each of its users.  These folders then become the default location for files such as documents, music files, digital photos and downloaded Internet files.  In Windows 7, the full list is shown below: Some of these folders you may never use nor care about (for example, the Favorites folder, if you’re not using Internet Explorer as your browser).  Those ones you can leave where they are.  But you may be using some of the other folders to store files that are important to you.  Even if you’re not using them, Windows will still often treat them as the default storage location for many types of files.  When you go to save a standard file type, it can become annoying to be automatically prompted to save it in a folder that’s not part of your own file structure. But there’s a simple solution:  Move the folders you care about into your own folder structure!  If you do, then the next time you go to save a file of the corresponding type, Windows will prompt you to save it in the new, moved location. Moving the folders is easy.  Simply drag-and-drop them to the new location.  Here’s a screenshot of the default My Music folder being moved to my custom personal folder (Mark): Tip #7.  Name Files and Folders Intelligently This is another one that almost goes without saying, but we’ll say it anyway:  Do not allow files to be created that have meaningless names like Document1.doc, or folders called New Folder (2).  Take that extra 20 seconds and come up with a meaningful name for the file/folder – one that accurately divulges its contents without repeating the entire contents in the name. Tip #8.  Watch Out for Long Filenames Another way to tell if you have not yet created enough depth to your folder hierarchy is that your files often require really long names.  If you need to call a file Johnson Sales Figures March 2009.xls (which might happen to live in the same folder as Abercrombie Budget Report 2008.xls), then you might want to create some sub-folders so that the first file could be simply called March.xls, and living in the Clients\Johnson\Sales Figures\2009 folder. A well-placed file needs only a brief filename! Tip #9.  Use Shortcuts!  Everywhere! This is probably the single most useful and important tip we can offer.  A shortcut allows a file to be in two places at once. Why would you want that?  Well, the file and folder structure of every popular operating system on the market today is hierarchical.  This means that all objects (files and folders) always live within exactly one parent folder.  It’s a bit like a tree.  A tree has branches (folders) and leaves (files).  Each leaf, and each branch, is supported by exactly one parent branch, all the way back to the root of the tree (which, incidentally, is exactly why C:\ is called the “root folder” of the C: drive). That hard disks are structured this way may seem obvious and even necessary, but it’s only one way of organizing data.  There are others:  Relational databases, for example, organize structured data entirely differently.  The main limitation of hierarchical filing structures is that a file can only ever be in one branch of the tree – in only one folder – at a time.  Why is this a problem?  Well, there are two main reasons why this limitation is a problem for computer users: The “correct” place for a file, according to our organizational rationale, is very often a very inconvenient place for that file to be located.  Just because it’s correctly filed doesn’t mean it’s easy to get to.  Your file may be “correctly” buried six levels deep in your sub-folder structure, but you may need regular and speedy access to this file every day.  You could always move it to a more convenient location, but that would mean that you would need to re-file back to its “correct” location it every time you’d finished working on it.  Most unsatisfactory. A file may simply “belong” in two or more different locations within your file structure.  For example, say you’re an accountant and you have just completed the 2009 tax return for John Smith.  It might make sense to you to call this file 2009 Tax Return.doc and file it under Clients\John Smith.  But it may also be important to you to have the 2009 tax returns from all your clients together in the one place.  So you might also want to call the file John Smith.doc and file it under Tax Returns\2009.  The problem is, in a purely hierarchical filing system, you can’t put it in both places.  Grrrrr! Fortunately, Windows (and most other operating systems) offers a way for you to do exactly that:  It’s called a “shortcut” (also known as an “alias” on Macs and a “symbolic link” on UNIX systems).  Shortcuts allow a file to exist in one place, and an icon that represents the file to be created and put anywhere else you please.  In fact, you can create a dozen such icons and scatter them all over your hard disk.  Double-clicking on one of these icons/shortcuts opens up the original file, just as if you had double-clicked on the original file itself. Consider the following two icons: The one on the left is the actual Word document, while the one on the right is a shortcut that represents the Word document.  Double-clicking on either icon will open the same file.  There are two main visual differences between the icons: The shortcut will have a small arrow in the lower-left-hand corner (on Windows, anyway) The shortcut is allowed to have a name that does not include the file extension (the “.docx” part, in this case) You can delete the shortcut at any time without losing any actual data.  The original is still intact.  All you lose is the ability to get to that data from wherever the shortcut was. So why are shortcuts so great?  Because they allow us to easily overcome the main limitation of hierarchical file systems, and put a file in two (or more) places at the same time.  You will always have files that don’t play nice with your organizational rationale, and can’t be filed in only one place.  They demand to exist in two places.  Shortcuts allow this!  Furthermore, they allow you to collect your most often-opened files and folders together in one spot for convenient access.  The cool part is that the original files stay where they are, safe forever in their perfectly organized location. So your collection of most often-opened files can – and should – become a collection of shortcuts! If you’re still not convinced of the utility of shortcuts, consider the following well-known areas of a typical Windows computer: The Start Menu (and all the programs that live within it) The Quick Launch bar (or the Superbar in Windows 7) The “Favorite folders” area in the top-left corner of the Windows Explorer window (in Windows Vista or Windows 7) Your Internet Explorer Favorites or Firefox Bookmarks Each item in each of these areas is a shortcut!  Each of those areas exist for one purpose only:  For convenience – to provide you with a collection of the files and folders you access most often. It should be easy to see by now that shortcuts are designed for one single purpose:  To make accessing your files more convenient.  Each time you double-click on a shortcut, you are saved the hassle of locating the file (or folder, or program, or drive, or control panel icon) that it represents. Shortcuts allow us to invent a golden rule of file and folder organization: “Only ever have one copy of a file – never have two copies of the same file.  Use a shortcut instead” (this rule doesn’t apply to copies created for backup purposes, of course!) There are also lesser rules, like “don’t move a file into your work area – create a shortcut there instead”, and “any time you find yourself frustrated with how long it takes to locate a file, create a shortcut to it and place that shortcut in a convenient location.” So how to we create these massively useful shortcuts?  There are two main ways: “Copy” the original file or folder (click on it and type Ctrl-C, or right-click on it and select Copy):  Then right-click in an empty area of the destination folder (the place where you want the shortcut to go) and select Paste shortcut: Right-drag (drag with the right mouse button) the file from the source folder to the destination folder.  When you let go of the mouse button at the destination folder, a menu pops up: Select Create shortcuts here. Note that when shortcuts are created, they are often named something like Shortcut to Budget Detail.doc (windows XP) or Budget Detail – Shortcut.doc (Windows 7).   If you don’t like those extra words, you can easily rename the shortcuts after they’re created, or you can configure Windows to never insert the extra words in the first place (see our article on how to do this). And of course, you can create shortcuts to folders too, not just to files! Bottom line: Whenever you have a file that you’d like to access from somewhere else (whether it’s convenience you’re after, or because the file simply belongs in two places), create a shortcut to the original file in the new location. Tip #10.  Separate Application Files from Data Files Any digital organization guru will drum this rule into you.  Application files are the components of the software you’ve installed (e.g. Microsoft Word, Adobe Photoshop or Internet Explorer).  Data files are the files that you’ve created for yourself using that software (e.g. Word Documents, digital photos, emails or playlists). Software gets installed, uninstalled and upgraded all the time.  Hopefully you always have the original installation media (or downloaded set-up file) kept somewhere safe, and can thus reinstall your software at any time.  This means that the software component files are of little importance.  Whereas the files you have created with that software is, by definition, important.  It’s a good rule to always separate unimportant files from important files. So when your software prompts you to save a file you’ve just created, take a moment and check out where it’s suggesting that you save the file.  If it’s suggesting that you save the file into the same folder as the software itself, then definitely don’t follow that suggestion.  File it in your own folder!  In fact, see if you can find the program’s configuration option that determines where files are saved by default (if it has one), and change it. Tip #11.  Organize Files Based on Purpose, Not on File Type If you have, for example a folder called Work\Clients\Johnson, and within that folder you have two sub-folders, Word Documents and Spreadsheets (in other words, you’re separating “.doc” files from “.xls” files), then chances are that you’re not optimally organized.  It makes little sense to organize your files based on the program that created them.  Instead, create your sub-folders based on the purpose of the file.  For example, it would make more sense to create sub-folders called Correspondence and Financials.  It may well be that all the files in a given sub-folder are of the same file-type, but this should be more of a coincidence and less of a design feature of your organization system. Tip #12.  Maintain the Same Folder Structure on All Your Computers In other words, whatever organizational system you create, apply it to every computer that you can.  There are several benefits to this: There’s less to remember.  No matter where you are, you always know where to look for your files If you copy or synchronize files from one computer to another, then setting up the synchronization job becomes very simple Shortcuts can be copied or moved from one computer to another with ease (assuming the original files are also copied/moved).  There’s no need to find the target of the shortcut all over again on the second computer Ditto for linked files (e.g Word documents that link to data in a separate Excel file), playlists, and any files that reference the exact file locations of other files. This applies even to the drive that your files are stored on.  If your files are stored on C: on one computer, make sure they’re stored on C: on all your computers.  Otherwise all your shortcuts, playlists and linked files will stop working! Tip #13.  Create an “Inbox” Folder Create yourself a folder where you store all files that you’re currently working on, or that you haven’t gotten around to filing yet.  You can think of this folder as your “to-do” list.  You can call it “Inbox” (making it the same metaphor as your email system), or “Work”, or “To-Do”, or “Scratch”, or whatever name makes sense to you.  It doesn’t matter what you call it – just make sure you have one! Once you have finished working on a file, you then move it from the “Inbox” to its correct location within your organizational structure. You may want to use your Desktop as this “Inbox” folder.  Rightly or wrongly, most people do.  It’s not a bad place to put such files, but be careful:  If you do decide that your Desktop represents your “to-do” list, then make sure that no other files find their way there.  In other words, make sure that your “Inbox”, wherever it is, Desktop or otherwise, is kept free of junk – stray files that don’t belong there. So where should you put this folder, which, almost by definition, lives outside the structure of the rest of your filing system?  Well, first and foremost, it has to be somewhere handy.  This will be one of your most-visited folders, so convenience is key.  Putting it on the Desktop is a great option – especially if you don’t have any other folders on your Desktop:  the folder then becomes supremely easy to find in Windows Explorer: You would then create shortcuts to this folder in convenient spots all over your computer (“Favorite Links”, “Quick Launch”, etc). Tip #14.  Ensure You have Only One “Inbox” Folder Once you’ve created your “Inbox” folder, don’t use any other folder location as your “to-do list”.  Throw every incoming or created file into the Inbox folder as you create/receive it.  This keeps the rest of your computer pristine and free of randomly created or downloaded junk.  The last thing you want to be doing is checking multiple folders to see all your current tasks and projects.  Gather them all together into one folder. Here are some tips to help ensure you only have one Inbox: Set the default “save” location of all your programs to this folder. Set the default “download” location for your browser to this folder. If this folder is not your desktop (recommended) then also see if you can make a point of not putting “to-do” files on your desktop.  This keeps your desktop uncluttered and Zen-like: (the Inbox folder is in the bottom-right corner) Tip #15.  Be Vigilant about Clearing Your “Inbox” Folder This is one of the keys to staying organized.  If you let your “Inbox” overflow (i.e. allow there to be more than, say, 30 files or folders in there), then you’re probably going to start feeling like you’re overwhelmed:  You’re not keeping up with your to-do list.  Once your Inbox gets beyond a certain point (around 30 files, studies have shown), then you’ll simply start to avoid it.  You may continue to put files in there, but you’ll be scared to look at it, fearing the “out of control” feeling that all overworked, chaotic or just plain disorganized people regularly feel. So, here’s what you can do: Visit your Inbox/to-do folder regularly (at least five times per day). Scan the folder regularly for files that you have completed working on and are ready for filing.  File them immediately. Make it a source of pride to keep the number of files in this folder as small as possible.  If you value peace of mind, then make the emptiness of this folder one of your highest (computer) priorities If you know that a particular file has been in the folder for more than, say, six weeks, then admit that you’re not actually going to get around to processing it, and move it to its final resting place. Tip #16.  File Everything Immediately, and Use Shortcuts for Your Active Projects As soon as you create, receive or download a new file, store it away in its “correct” folder immediately.  Then, whenever you need to work on it (possibly straight away), create a shortcut to it in your “Inbox” (“to-do”) folder or your desktop.  That way, all your files are always in their “correct” locations, yet you still have immediate, convenient access to your current, active files.  When you finish working on a file, simply delete the shortcut. Ideally, your “Inbox” folder – and your Desktop – should contain no actual files or folders.  They should simply contain shortcuts. Tip #17.  Use Directory Symbolic Links (or Junctions) to Maintain One Unified Folder Structure Using this tip, we can get around a potential hiccup that we can run into when creating our organizational structure – the issue of having more than one drive on our computer (C:, D:, etc).  We might have files we need to store on the D: drive for space reasons, and yet want to base our organized folder structure on the C: drive (or vice-versa). Your chosen organizational structure may dictate that all your files must be accessed from the C: drive (for example, the root folder of all your files may be something like C:\Files).  And yet you may still have a D: drive and wish to take advantage of the hundreds of spare Gigabytes that it offers.  Did you know that it’s actually possible to store your files on the D: drive and yet access them as if they were on the C: drive?  And no, we’re not talking about shortcuts here (although the concept is very similar). By using the shell command mklink, you can essentially take a folder that lives on one drive and create an alias for it on a different drive (you can do lots more than that with mklink – for a full rundown on this programs capabilities, see our dedicated article).  These aliases are called directory symbolic links (and used to be known as junctions).  You can think of them as “virtual” folders.  They function exactly like regular folders, except they’re physically located somewhere else. For example, you may decide that your entire D: drive contains your complete organizational file structure, but that you need to reference all those files as if they were on the C: drive, under C:\Files.  If that was the case you could create C:\Files as a directory symbolic link – a link to D:, as follows: mklink /d c:\files d:\ Or it may be that the only files you wish to store on the D: drive are your movie collection.  You could locate all your movie files in the root of your D: drive, and then link it to C:\Files\Media\Movies, as follows: mklink /d c:\files\media\movies d:\ (Needless to say, you must run these commands from a command prompt – click the Start button, type cmd and press Enter) Tip #18. Customize Your Folder Icons This is not strictly speaking an organizational tip, but having unique icons for each folder does allow you to more quickly visually identify which folder is which, and thus saves you time when you’re finding files.  An example is below (from my folder that contains all files downloaded from the Internet): To learn how to change your folder icons, please refer to our dedicated article on the subject. Tip #19.  Tidy Your Start Menu The Windows Start Menu is usually one of the messiest parts of any Windows computer.  Every program you install seems to adopt a completely different approach to placing icons in this menu.  Some simply put a single program icon.  Others create a folder based on the name of the software.  And others create a folder based on the name of the software manufacturer.  It’s chaos, and can make it hard to find the software you want to run. Thankfully we can avoid this chaos with useful operating system features like Quick Launch, the Superbar or pinned start menu items. Even so, it would make a lot of sense to get into the guts of the Start Menu itself and give it a good once-over.  All you really need to decide is how you’re going to organize your applications.  A structure based on the purpose of the application is an obvious candidate.  Below is an example of one such structure: In this structure, Utilities means software whose job it is to keep the computer itself running smoothly (configuration tools, backup software, Zip programs, etc).  Applications refers to any productivity software that doesn’t fit under the headings Multimedia, Graphics, Internet, etc. In case you’re not aware, every icon in your Start Menu is a shortcut and can be manipulated like any other shortcut (copied, moved, deleted, etc). With the Windows Start Menu (all version of Windows), Microsoft has decided that there be two parallel folder structures to store your Start Menu shortcuts.  One for you (the logged-in user of the computer) and one for all users of the computer.  Having two parallel structures can often be redundant:  If you are the only user of the computer, then having two parallel structures is totally redundant.  Even if you have several users that regularly log into the computer, most of your installed software will need to be made available to all users, and should thus be moved out of the “just you” version of the Start Menu and into the “all users” area. To take control of your Start Menu, so you can start organizing it, you’ll need to know how to access the actual folders and shortcut files that make up the Start Menu (both versions of it).  To find these folders and files, click the Start button and then right-click on the All Programs text (Windows XP users should right-click on the Start button itself): The Open option refers to the “just you” version of the Start Menu, while the Open All Users option refers to the “all users” version.  Click on the one you want to organize. A Windows Explorer window then opens with your chosen version of the Start Menu selected.  From there it’s easy.  Double-click on the Programs folder and you’ll see all your folders and shortcuts.  Now you can delete/rename/move until it’s just the way you want it. Note:  When you’re reorganizing your Start Menu, you may want to have two Explorer windows open at the same time – one showing the “just you” version and one showing the “all users” version.  You can drag-and-drop between the windows. Tip #20.  Keep Your Start Menu Tidy Once you have a perfectly organized Start Menu, try to be a little vigilant about keeping it that way.  Every time you install a new piece of software, the icons that get created will almost certainly violate your organizational structure. So to keep your Start Menu pristine and organized, make sure you do the following whenever you install a new piece of software: Check whether the software was installed into the “just you” area of the Start Menu, or the “all users” area, and then move it to the correct area. Remove all the unnecessary icons (like the “Read me” icon, the “Help” icon (you can always open the help from within the software itself when it’s running), the “Uninstall” icon, the link(s)to the manufacturer’s website, etc) Rename the main icon(s) of the software to something brief that makes sense to you.  For example, you might like to rename Microsoft Office Word 2010 to simply Word Move the icon(s) into the correct folder based on your Start Menu organizational structure And don’t forget:  when you uninstall a piece of software, the software’s uninstall routine is no longer going to be able to remove the software’s icon from the Start Menu (because you moved and/or renamed it), so you’ll need to remove that icon manually. Tip #21.  Tidy C:\ The root of your C: drive (C:\) is a common dumping ground for files and folders – both by the users of your computer and by the software that you install on your computer.  It can become a mess. There’s almost no software these days that requires itself to be installed in C:\.  99% of the time it can and should be installed into C:\Program Files.  And as for your own files, well, it’s clear that they can (and almost always should) be stored somewhere else. In an ideal world, your C:\ folder should look like this (on Windows 7): Note that there are some system files and folders in C:\ that are usually and deliberately “hidden” (such as the Windows virtual memory file pagefile.sys, the boot loader file bootmgr, and the System Volume Information folder).  Hiding these files and folders is a good idea, as they need to stay where they are and are almost never needed to be opened or even seen by you, the user.  Hiding them prevents you from accidentally messing with them, and enhances your sense of order and well-being when you look at your C: drive folder. Tip #22.  Tidy Your Desktop The Desktop is probably the most abused part of a Windows computer (from an organization point of view).  It usually serves as a dumping ground for all incoming files, as well as holding icons to oft-used applications, plus some regularly opened files and folders.  It often ends up becoming an uncontrolled mess.  See if you can avoid this.  Here’s why… Application icons (Word, Internet Explorer, etc) are often found on the Desktop, but it’s unlikely that this is the optimum place for them.  The “Quick Launch” bar (or the Superbar in Windows 7) is always visible and so represents a perfect location to put your icons.  You’ll only be able to see the icons on your Desktop when all your programs are minimized.  It might be time to get your application icons off your desktop… You may have decided that the Inbox/To-do folder on your computer (see tip #13, above) should be your Desktop.  If so, then enough said.  Simply be vigilant about clearing it and preventing it from being polluted by junk files (see tip #15, above).  On the other hand, if your Desktop is not acting as your “Inbox” folder, then there’s no reason for it to have any data files or folders on it at all, except perhaps a couple of shortcuts to often-opened files and folders (either ongoing or current projects).  Everything else should be moved to your “Inbox” folder. In an ideal world, it might look like this: Tip #23.  Move Permanent Items on Your Desktop Away from the Top-Left Corner When files/folders are dragged onto your desktop in a Windows Explorer window, or when shortcuts are created on your Desktop from Internet Explorer, those icons are always placed in the top-left corner – or as close as they can get.  If you have other files, folders or shortcuts that you keep on the Desktop permanently, then it’s a good idea to separate these permanent icons from the transient ones, so that you can quickly identify which ones the transients are.  An easy way to do this is to move all your permanent icons to the right-hand side of your Desktop.  That should keep them separated from incoming items. Tip #24.  Synchronize If you have more than one computer, you’ll almost certainly want to share files between them.  If the computers are permanently attached to the same local network, then there’s no need to store multiple copies of any one file or folder – shortcuts will suffice.  However, if the computers are not always on the same network, then you will at some point need to copy files between them.  For files that need to permanently live on both computers, the ideal way to do this is to synchronize the files, as opposed to simply copying them. We only have room here to write a brief summary of synchronization, not a full article.  In short, there are several different types of synchronization: Where the contents of one folder are accessible anywhere, such as with Dropbox Where the contents of any number of folders are accessible anywhere, such as with Windows Live Mesh Where any files or folders from anywhere on your computer are synchronized with exactly one other computer, such as with the Windows “Briefcase”, Microsoft SyncToy, or (much more powerful, yet still free) SyncBack from 2BrightSparks.  This only works when both computers are on the same local network, at least temporarily. A great advantage of synchronization solutions is that once you’ve got it configured the way you want it, then the sync process happens automatically, every time.  Click a button (or schedule it to happen automatically) and all your files are automagically put where they’re supposed to be. If you maintain the same file and folder structure on both computers, then you can also sync files depend upon the correct location of other files, like shortcuts, playlists and office documents that link to other office documents, and the synchronized files still work on the other computer! Tip #25.  Hide Files You Never Need to See If you have your files well organized, you will often be able to tell if a file is out of place just by glancing at the contents of a folder (for example, it should be pretty obvious if you look in a folder that contains all the MP3s from one music CD and see a Word document in there).  This is a good thing – it allows you to determine if there are files out of place with a quick glance.  Yet sometimes there are files in a folder that seem out of place but actually need to be there, such as the “folder art” JPEGs in music folders, and various files in the root of the C: drive.  If such files never need to be opened by you, then a good idea is to simply hide them.  Then, the next time you glance at the folder, you won’t have to remember whether that file was supposed to be there or not, because you won’t see it at all! To hide a file, simply right-click on it and choose Properties: Then simply tick the Hidden tick-box:   Tip #26.  Keep Every Setup File These days most software is downloaded from the Internet.  Whenever you download a piece of software, keep it.  You’ll never know when you need to reinstall the software. Further, keep with it an Internet shortcut that links back to the website where you originally downloaded it, in case you ever need to check for updates. See tip #33 below for a full description of the excellence of organizing your setup files. Tip #27.  Try to Minimize the Number of Folders that Contain Both Files and Sub-folders Some of the folders in your organizational structure will contain only files.  Others will contain only sub-folders.  And you will also have some folders that contain both files and sub-folders.  You will notice slight improvements in how long it takes you to locate a file if you try to avoid this third type of folder.  It’s not always possible, of course – you’ll always have some of these folders, but see if you can avoid it. One way of doing this is to take all the leftover files that didn’t end up getting stored in a sub-folder and create a special “Miscellaneous” or “Other” folder for them. Tip #28.  Starting a Filename with an Underscore Brings it to the Top of a List Further to the previous tip, if you name that “Miscellaneous” or “Other” folder in such a way that its name begins with an underscore “_”, then it will appear at the top of the list of files/folders. The screenshot below is an example of this.  Each folder in the list contains a set of digital photos.  The folder at the top of the list, _Misc, contains random photos that didn’t deserve their own dedicated folder: Tip #29.  Clean Up those CD-ROMs and (shudder!) Floppy Disks Have you got a pile of CD-ROMs stacked on a shelf of your office?  Old photos, or files you archived off onto CD-ROM (or even worse, floppy disks!) because you didn’t have enough disk space at the time?  In the meantime have you upgraded your computer and now have 500 Gigabytes of space you don’t know what to do with?  If so, isn’t it time you tidied up that stack of disks and filed them into your gorgeous new folder structure? So what are you waiting for?  Bite the bullet, copy them all back onto your computer, file them in their appropriate folders, and then back the whole lot up onto a shiny new 1000Gig external hard drive! Useful Folders to Create This next section suggests some useful folders that you might want to create within your folder structure.  I’ve personally found them to be indispensable. The first three are all about convenience – handy folders to create and then put somewhere that you can always access instantly.  For each one, it’s not so important where the actual folder is located, but it’s very important where you put the shortcut(s) to the folder.  You might want to locate the shortcuts: On your Desktop In your “Quick Launch” area (or pinned to your Windows 7 Superbar) In your Windows Explorer “Favorite Links” area Tip #30.  Create an “Inbox” (“To-Do”) Folder This has already been mentioned in depth (see tip #13), but we wanted to reiterate its importance here.  This folder contains all the recently created, received or downloaded files that you have not yet had a chance to file away properly, and it also may contain files that you have yet to process.  In effect, it becomes a sort of “to-do list”.  It doesn’t have to be called “Inbox” – you can call it whatever you want. Tip #31.  Create a Folder where Your Current Projects are Collected Rather than going hunting for them all the time, or dumping them all on your desktop, create a special folder where you put links (or work folders) for each of the projects you’re currently working on. You can locate this folder in your “Inbox” folder, on your desktop, or anywhere at all – just so long as there’s a way of getting to it quickly, such as putting a link to it in Windows Explorer’s “Favorite Links” area: Tip #32.  Create a Folder for Files and Folders that You Regularly Open You will always have a few files that you open regularly, whether it be a spreadsheet of your current accounts, or a favorite playlist.  These are not necessarily “current projects”, rather they’re simply files that you always find yourself opening.  Typically such files would be located on your desktop (or even better, shortcuts to those files).  Why not collect all such shortcuts together and put them in their own special folder? As with the “Current Projects” folder (above), you would want to locate that folder somewhere convenient.  Below is an example of a folder called “Quick links”, with about seven files (shortcuts) in it, that is accessible through the Windows Quick Launch bar: See tip #37 below for a full explanation of the power of the Quick Launch bar. Tip #33.  Create a “Set-ups” Folder A typical computer has dozens of applications installed on it.  For each piece of software, there are often many different pieces of information you need to keep track of, including: The original installation setup file(s).  This can be anything from a simple 100Kb setup.exe file you downloaded from a website, all the way up to a 4Gig ISO file that you copied from a DVD-ROM that you purchased. The home page of the software manufacturer (in case you need to look up something on their support pages, their forum or their online help) The page containing the download link for your actual file (in case you need to re-download it, or download an upgraded version) The serial number Your proof-of-purchase documentation Any other template files, plug-ins, themes, etc that also need to get installed For each piece of software, it’s a great idea to gather all of these files together and put them in a single folder.  The folder can be the name of the software (plus possibly a very brief description of what it’s for – in case you can’t remember what the software does based in its name).  Then you would gather all of these folders together into one place, and call it something like “Software” or “Setups”. If you have enough of these folders (I have several hundred, being a geek, collected over 20 years), then you may want to further categorize them.  My own categorization structure is based on “platform” (operating system): The last seven folders each represents one platform/operating system, while _Operating Systems contains set-up files for installing the operating systems themselves.  _Hardware contains ROMs for hardware I own, such as routers. Within the Windows folder (above), you can see the beginnings of the vast library of software I’ve compiled over the years: An example of a typical application folder looks like this: Tip #34.  Have a “Settings” Folder We all know that our documents are important.  So are our photos and music files.  We save all of these files into folders, and then locate them afterwards and double-click on them to open them.  But there are many files that are important to us that can’t be saved into folders, and then searched for and double-clicked later on.  These files certainly contain important information that we need, but are often created internally by an application, and saved wherever that application feels is appropriate. A good example of this is the “PST” file that Outlook creates for us and uses to store all our emails, contacts, appointments and so forth.  Another example would be the collection of Bookmarks that Firefox stores on your behalf. And yet another example would be the customized settings and configuration files of our all our software.  Granted, most Windows programs store their configuration in the Registry, but there are still many programs that use configuration files to store their settings. Imagine if you lost all of the above files!  And yet, when people are backing up their computers, they typically only back up the files they know about – those that are stored in the “My Documents” folder, etc.  If they had a hard disk failure or their computer was lost or stolen, their backup files would not include some of the most vital files they owned.  Also, when migrating to a new computer, it’s vital to ensure that these files make the journey. It can be a very useful idea to create yourself a folder to store all your “settings” – files that are important to you but which you never actually search for by name and double-click on to open them.  Otherwise, next time you go to set up a new computer just the way you want it, you’ll need to spend hours recreating the configuration of your previous computer! So how to we get our important files into this folder?  Well, we have a few options: Some programs (such as Outlook and its PST files) allow you to place these files wherever you want.  If you delve into the program’s options, you will find a setting somewhere that controls the location of the important settings files (or “personal storage” – PST – when it comes to Outlook) Some programs do not allow you to change such locations in any easy way, but if you get into the Registry, you can sometimes find a registry key that refers to the location of the file(s).  Simply move the file into your Settings folder and adjust the registry key to refer to the new location. Some programs stubbornly refuse to allow their settings files to be placed anywhere other then where they stipulate.  When faced with programs like these, you have three choices:  (1) You can ignore those files, (2) You can copy the files into your Settings folder (let’s face it – settings don’t change very often), or (3) you can use synchronization software, such as the Windows Briefcase, to make synchronized copies of all your files in your Settings folder.  All you then have to do is to remember to run your sync software periodically (perhaps just before you run your backup software!). There are some other things you may decide to locate inside this new “Settings” folder: Exports of registry keys (from the many applications that store their configurations in the Registry).  This is useful for backup purposes or for migrating to a new computer Notes you’ve made about all the specific customizations you have made to a particular piece of software (so that you’ll know how to do it all again on your next computer) Shortcuts to webpages that detail how to tweak certain aspects of your operating system or applications so they are just the way you like them (such as how to remove the words “Shortcut to” from the beginning of newly created shortcuts).  In other words, you’d want to create shortcuts to half the pages on the How-To Geek website! Here’s an example of a “Settings” folder: Windows Features that Help with Organization This section details some of the features of Microsoft Windows that are a boon to anyone hoping to stay optimally organized. Tip #35.  Use the “Favorite Links” Area to Access Oft-Used Folders Once you’ve created your great new filing system, work out which folders you access most regularly, or which serve as great starting points for locating the rest of the files in your folder structure, and then put links to those folders in your “Favorite Links” area of the left-hand side of the Windows Explorer window (simply called “Favorites” in Windows 7):   Some ideas for folders you might want to add there include: Your “Inbox” folder (or whatever you’ve called it) – most important! The base of your filing structure (e.g. C:\Files) A folder containing shortcuts to often-accessed folders on other computers around the network (shown above as Network Folders) A folder containing shortcuts to your current projects (unless that folder is in your “Inbox” folder) Getting folders into this area is very simple – just locate the folder you’re interested in and drag it there! Tip #36.  Customize the Places Bar in the File/Open and File/Save Boxes Consider the screenshot below: The highlighted icons (collectively known as the “Places Bar”) can be customized to refer to any folder location you want, allowing instant access to any part of your organizational structure. Note:  These File/Open and File/Save boxes have been superseded by new versions that use the Windows Vista/Windows 7 “Favorite Links”, but the older versions (shown above) are still used by a surprisingly large number of applications. The easiest way to customize these icons is to use the Group Policy Editor, but not everyone has access to this program.  If you do, open it up and navigate to: User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Explorer > Common Open File Dialog If you don’t have access to the Group Policy Editor, then you’ll need to get into the Registry.  Navigate to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft  \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ comdlg32 \ Placesbar It should then be easy to make the desired changes.  Log off and log on again to allow the changes to take effect. Tip #37.  Use the Quick Launch Bar as a Application and File Launcher That Quick Launch bar (to the right of the Start button) is a lot more useful than people give it credit for.  Most people simply have half a dozen icons in it, and use it to start just those programs.  But it can actually be used to instantly access just about anything in your filing system: For complete instructions on how to set this up, visit our dedicated article on this topic. Tip #38.  Put a Shortcut to Windows Explorer into Your Quick Launch Bar This is only necessary in Windows Vista and Windows XP.  The Microsoft boffins finally got wise and added it to the Windows 7 Superbar by default. Windows Explorer – the program used for managing your files and folders – is one of the most useful programs in Windows.  Anyone who considers themselves serious about being organized needs instant access to this program at any time.  A great place to create a shortcut to this program is in the Windows XP and Windows Vista “Quick Launch” bar: To get it there, locate it in your Start Menu (usually under “Accessories”) and then right-drag it down into your Quick Launch bar (and create a copy). Tip #39.  Customize the Starting Folder for Your Windows 7 Explorer Superbar Icon If you’re on Windows 7, your Superbar will include a Windows Explorer icon.  Clicking on the icon will launch Windows Explorer (of course), and will start you off in your “Libraries” folder.  Libraries may be fine as a starting point, but if you have created yourself an “Inbox” folder, then it would probably make more sense to start off in this folder every time you launch Windows Explorer. To change this default/starting folder location, then first right-click the Explorer icon in the Superbar, and then right-click Properties:Then, in Target field of the Windows Explorer Properties box that appears, type %windir%\explorer.exe followed by the path of the folder you wish to start in.  For example: %windir%\explorer.exe C:\Files If that folder happened to be on the Desktop (and called, say, “Inbox”), then you would use the following cleverness: %windir%\explorer.exe shell:desktop\Inbox Then click OK and test it out. Tip #40.  Ummmmm…. No, that’s it.  I can’t think of another one.  That’s all of the tips I can come up with.  I only created this one because 40 is such a nice round number… Case Study – An Organized PC To finish off the article, I have included a few screenshots of my (main) computer (running Vista).  The aim here is twofold: To give you a sense of what it looks like when the above, sometimes abstract, tips are applied to a real-life computer, and To offer some ideas about folders and structure that you may want to steal to use on your own PC. Let’s start with the C: drive itself.  Very minimal.  All my files are contained within C:\Files.  I’ll confine the rest of the case study to this folder: That folder contains the following: Mark: My personal files VC: My business (Virtual Creations, Australia) Others contains files created by friends and family Data contains files from the rest of the world (can be thought of as “public” files, usually downloaded from the Net) Settings is described above in tip #34 The Data folder contains the following sub-folders: Audio:  Radio plays, audio books, podcasts, etc Development:  Programmer and developer resources, sample source code, etc (see below) Humour:  Jokes, funnies (those emails that we all receive) Movies:  Downloaded and ripped movies (all legal, of course!), their scripts, DVD covers, etc. Music:  (see below) Setups:  Installation files for software (explained in full in tip #33) System:  (see below) TV:  Downloaded TV shows Writings:  Books, instruction manuals, etc (see below) The Music folder contains the following sub-folders: Album covers:  JPEG scans Guitar tabs:  Text files of guitar sheet music Lists:  e.g. “Top 1000 songs of all time” Lyrics:  Text files MIDI:  Electronic music files MP3 (representing 99% of the Music folder):  MP3s, either ripped from CDs or downloaded, sorted by artist/album name Music Video:  Video clips Sheet Music:  usually PDFs The Data\Writings folder contains the following sub-folders: (all pretty self-explanatory) The Data\Development folder contains the following sub-folders: Again, all pretty self-explanatory (if you’re a geek) The Data\System folder contains the following sub-folders: These are usually themes, plug-ins and other downloadable program-specific resources. The Mark folder contains the following sub-folders: From Others:  Usually letters that other people (friends, family, etc) have written to me For Others:  Letters and other things I have created for other people Green Book:  None of your business Playlists:  M3U files that I have compiled of my favorite songs (plus one M3U playlist file for every album I own) Writing:  Fiction, philosophy and other musings of mine Mark Docs:  Shortcut to C:\Users\Mark Settings:  Shortcut to C:\Files\Settings\Mark The Others folder contains the following sub-folders: The VC (Virtual Creations, my business – I develop websites) folder contains the following sub-folders: And again, all of those are pretty self-explanatory. Conclusion These tips have saved my sanity and helped keep me a productive geek, but what about you? What tips and tricks do you have to keep your files organized?  Please share them with us in the comments.  Come on, don’t be shy… Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Fix For When Windows Explorer in Vista Stops Showing File NamesWhy Did Windows Vista’s Music Folder Icon Turn Yellow?Print or Create a Text File List of the Contents in a Directory the Easy WayCustomize the Windows 7 or Vista Send To MenuAdd Copy To / Move To on Windows 7 or Vista Right-Click Menu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Track Daily Goals With 42Goals Video Toolbox is a Superb Online Video Editor Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics

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  • T-SQL Tuesday #53-Matt's Making Me Do This!

    - by Most Valuable Yak (Rob Volk)
    Hello everyone! It's that time again, time for T-SQL Tuesday, the wonderful blog series started by Adam Machanic (b|t). This month we are hosted by Matt Velic (b|t) who asks the question, "Why So Serious?", in celebration of April Fool's Day. He asks the contributors for their dirty tricks. And for some reason that escapes me, he and Jeff Verheul (b|t) seem to think I might be able to write about those. Shocked, I am! Nah, not really. They're absolutely right, this one is gonna be fun! I took some inspiration from Matt's suggestions, namely Resource Governor and Login Triggers.  I've done some interesting login trigger stuff for a presentation, but nothing yet with Resource Governor. Best way to learn it! One of my oldest pet peeves is abuse of the sa login. Don't get me wrong, I use it too, but typically only as SQL Agent job owner. It's been a while since I've been stuck with it, but back when I started using SQL Server, EVERY application needed sa to function. It was hard-coded and couldn't be changed. (welllllll, that is if you didn't use a hex editor on the EXE file, but who would do such a thing?) My standard warning applies: don't run anything on this page in production. In fact, back up whatever server you're testing this on, including the master database. Snapshotting a VM is a good idea. Also make sure you have other sysadmin level logins on that server. So here's a standard template for a logon trigger to address those pesky sa users: CREATE TRIGGER SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY ON ALL SERVER WITH ENCRYPTION, EXECUTE AS N'sa' AFTER LOGON AS IF ORIGINAL_LOGIN()<>N'sa' OR APP_NAME() LIKE N'SQL Agent%' RETURN; -- interesting stuff goes here GO   What can you do for "interesting stuff"? Books Online limits itself to merely rolling back the logon, which will throw an error (and alert the person that the logon trigger fired).  That's a good use for logon triggers, but really not tricky enough for this blog.  Some of my suggestions are below: WAITFOR DELAY '23:59:59';   Or: EXEC sp_MSforeach_db 'EXEC sp_detach_db ''?'';'   Or: EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_job @job_name=N'`', @enabled=1, @start_step_id=1, @notify_level_eventlog=0, @delete_level=3; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_jobserver @job_name=N'`', @server_name=@@SERVERNAME; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_add_jobstep @job_name=N'`', @step_id=1, @step_name=N'`', @command=N'SHUTDOWN;'; EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_start_job @job_name=N'`';   Really, I don't want to spoil your own exploration, try it yourself!  The thing I really like about these is it lets me promote the idea that "sa is SLOW, sa is BUGGY, don't use sa!".  Before we get into Resource Governor, make sure to drop or disable that logon trigger. They don't work well in combination. (Had to redo all the following code when SSMS locked up) Resource Governor is a feature that lets you control how many resources a single session can consume. The main goal is to limit the damage from a runaway query. But we're not here to read about its main goal or normal usage! I'm trying to make people stop using sa BECAUSE IT'S SLOW! Here's how RG can do that: USE master; GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY() RETURNS sysname WITH SCHEMABINDING, ENCRYPTION AS BEGIN RETURN CASE WHEN ORIGINAL_LOGIN()=N'sa' AND APP_NAME() NOT LIKE N'SQL Agent%' THEN N'SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY' ELSE N'default' END END GO CREATE RESOURCE POOL SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY WITH ( MIN_CPU_PERCENT = 0 ,MAX_CPU_PERCENT = 1 ,CAP_CPU_PERCENT = 1 ,AFFINITY SCHEDULER = (0) ,MIN_MEMORY_PERCENT = 0 ,MAX_MEMORY_PERCENT = 1 -- ,MIN_IOPS_PER_VOLUME = 1 ,MAX_IOPS_PER_VOLUME = 1 -- uncomment for SQL Server 2014 ); CREATE WORKLOAD GROUP SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY WITH ( IMPORTANCE = LOW ,REQUEST_MAX_MEMORY_GRANT_PERCENT = 1 ,REQUEST_MAX_CPU_TIME_SEC = 1 ,REQUEST_MEMORY_GRANT_TIMEOUT_SEC = 1 ,MAX_DOP = 1 ,GROUP_MAX_REQUESTS = 1 ) USING SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY; ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR WITH (CLASSIFIER_FUNCTION=dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY); ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR RECONFIGURE;   From top to bottom: Create a classifier function to determine which pool the session should go to. More info on classifier functions. Create the pool and provide a generous helping of resources for the sa login. Create the workload group and further prioritize those resources for the sa login. Apply the classifier function and reconfigure RG to use it. I have to say this one is a bit sneakier than the logon trigger, least of all you don't get any error messages.  I heartily recommend testing it in Management Studio, and click around the UI a lot, there's some fun behavior there. And DEFINITELY try it on SQL 2014 with the IO settings included!  You'll notice I made allowances for SQL Agent jobs owned by sa, they'll go into the default workload group.  You can add your own overrides to the classifier function if needed. Some interesting ideas I didn't have time for but expect you to get to before me: Set up different pools/workgroups with different settings and randomize which one the classifier chooses Do the same but base it on time of day (Books Online example covers this)... Or, which workstation it connects from. This can be modified for certain special people in your office who either don't listen, or are attracted (and attractive) to you. And if things go wrong you can always use the following from another sysadmin or Dedicated Admin connection: ALTER RESOURCE GOVERNOR DISABLE;   That will let you go in and either fix (or drop) the pools, workgroups and classifier function. So now that you know these types of things are possible, and if you are tired of your team using sa when they shouldn't, I expect you'll enjoy playing with these quite a bit! Unfortunately, the aforementioned Dedicated Admin Connection kinda poops on the party here.  Books Online for both topics will tell you that the DAC will not fire either feature. So if you have a crafty user who does their research, they can still sneak in with sa and do their bidding without being hampered. Of course, you can still detect their login via various methods, like a server trace, SQL Server Audit, extended events, and enabling "Audit Successful Logins" on the server.  These all have their downsides: traces take resources, extended events and SQL Audit can't fire off actions, and enabling successful logins will bloat your error log very quickly.  SQL Audit is also limited unless you have Enterprise Edition, and Resource Governor is Enterprise-only.  And WORST OF ALL, these features are all available and visible through the SSMS UI, so even a doofus developer or manager could find them. Fortunately there are Event Notifications! Event notifications are becoming one of my favorite features of SQL Server (keep an eye out for more blogs from me about them). They are practically unknown and heinously underutilized.  They are also a great gateway drug to using Service Broker, another great but underutilized feature. Hopefully this will get you to start using them, or at least your enemies in the office will once they read this, and then you'll have to learn them in order to fix things. So here's the setup: USE msdb; GO CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_act WITH ENCRYPTION AS DECLARE @x XML, @message nvarchar(max); RECEIVE @x=CAST(message_body AS XML) FROM SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q; IF @x.value('(//LoginName)[1]','sysname')=N'sa' AND @x.value('(//ApplicationName)[1]','sysname') NOT LIKE N'SQL Agent%' BEGIN -- interesting activation procedure stuff goes here END GO CREATE QUEUE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q WITH STATUS=ON, RETENTION=OFF, ACTIVATION (PROCEDURE_NAME=dbo.SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_act, MAX_QUEUE_READERS=1, EXECUTE AS OWNER); CREATE SERVICE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_s ON QUEUE SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_q([http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification]); CREATE EVENT NOTIFICATION SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_en ON SERVER WITH FAN_IN FOR AUDIT_LOGIN TO SERVICE N'SA_LOGIN_PRIORITY_s', N'current database' GO   From top to bottom: Create activation procedure for event notification queue. Create queue to accept messages from event notification, and activate the procedure to process those messages when received. Create service to send messages to that queue. Create event notification on AUDIT_LOGIN events that fire the service. I placed this in msdb as it is an available system database and already has Service Broker enabled by default. You should change this to another database if you can guarantee it won't get dropped. So what to put in place for "interesting activation procedure code"?  Hmmm, so far I haven't addressed Matt's suggestion of writing a lengthy script to send an annoying message: SET @[email protected]('(//HostName)[1]','sysname') + N' tried to log in to server ' + @x.value('(//ServerName)[1]','sysname') + N' as SA at ' + @x.value('(//StartTime)[1]','sysname') + N' using the ' + @x.value('(//ApplicationName)[1]','sysname') + N' program. That''s why you''re getting this message and the attached pornography which' + N' is bloating your inbox and violating company policy, among other things. If you know' + N' this person you can go to their desk and hit them, or use the following SQL to end their session: KILL ' + @x.value('(//SPID)[1]','sysname') + N'; Hopefully they''re in the middle of a huge query that they need to finish right away.' EXEC msdb.dbo.sp_send_dbmail @recipients=N'[email protected]', @subject=N'SA Login Alert', @query_result_width=32767, @body=@message, @query=N'EXEC sp_readerrorlog;', @attach_query_result_as_file=1, @query_attachment_filename=N'UtterlyGrossPorn_SeriouslyDontOpenIt.jpg' I'm not sure I'd call that a lengthy script, but the attachment should get pretty big, and I'm sure the email admins will love storing multiple copies of it.  The nice thing is that this also fires on Dedicated Admin connections! You can even identify DAC connections from the event data returned, I leave that as an exercise for you. You can use that info to change the action taken by the activation procedure, and since it's a stored procedure, it can pretty much do anything! Except KILL the SPID, or SHUTDOWN the server directly.  I'm still working on those.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 30, 2014

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, May 30, 2014Popular ReleasesSEToolbox: 01.032.014 Release 2: Fixed flaw in startup if second Toolbox was started. Added thumbnail zooming in load dialog. Added mirror for new ConveyorTubeCurvedMedium. Added dedicated server support :- Repair will not add missing player to dedicated server. Distances measured to origin (0,0,0) when no player exists. Dedicated Service Server game denied write access unless SEToolbox is run as Admin. Additional information in Load dialog. Installation of this version will replace older version.Vi-AIO SearchBar: Vi – AIO Search Bar: Version 1.0Composite Iconote: Composite Iconote: This is a composite has been made by Microsoft Visual Studio 2013. Requirement: To develop this composite or use this component in your application, your computer must have .NET framework 4.5 or newer.HigLabo: HigLabo_20140529: Fixed HttpClient ContentLength bug.Magick.NET: Magick.NET 6.8.9.101: Magick.NET linked with ImageMagick 6.8.9.1. Breaking changes: - Int/short Set methods of WritablePixelCollection are now unsigned. - The Q16 build no longer uses HDRI, switch to the new Q16-HDRI build if you need HDRI.StudioShell: StudioShell 1.6.6: placeholder release for WIX issue work artifactsMath.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v3.0.0-beta02: Full History Linear Algebra: optimized sparse-sparse and sparse-diagonal matrix products. ~Christian Woltering transpose at storage level, optimized sparse transpose. ~Christian Woltering optimized inplace-map, indexed submatrix-map. optimized clearing a set of rows or columns. matrix FoldRows/FoldColumns. matrix column/row norms, normalization. prefer enums over boolean parameters (e.g. `Zeros.AllowSkip`). IsSymmetric is now a method, add IsConjugateSymmetric. breaking Eigen...QuickMon: Version 3.13: 1. Adding an Audio/sound notifier that can be used to simply draw attention to the application of a warning pr error state is returned by a collector. 2. Adding a property for Notifiers so it can be set to 'Attended', 'Unattended' or 'Both' modes. 3. Adding a WCF method to remote agent host so the version can be checked remotely. 4. Adding some 'Sample' monitor packs to installer. Note: this release and the next release (3.14 aka Pie release) will have some breaking changes and will be incom...fnr.exe - Find And Replace Tool: 1.7: Bug fixes Refactored logic for encoding text values to command line to handle common edge cases where find/replace operation works in GUI but not in command line Fix for bug where selection in Encoding drop down was different when generating command line in some cases. It was reported in: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/workitem/34 Fix for "Backslash inserted before dot in replacement text" reported here: https://findandreplace.codeplex.com/discussions/541024 Fix for finding replacing...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.59: changes NEW: Added Support for 'GokoImage.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ViperII.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixxxView.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgRex.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'PixLiv.com' links NEW: Added Support for 'imgsee.me' links NEW: Added Support for 'ImgS.it' linksXsemmel - XML Editor and Viewer: 29-MAY-2014: WINDOWS XP IS NO LONGER SUPPORTED If you need support for WinXP, download release 15-MAR-2014 instead. FIX: Some minor issues NEW: Better visualisation of validation issues NEW: Printing CHG: Disabled Jumplist CHG: updated to .net 4.5, WinXP NO LONGER SUPPORTEDPerformance Analyzer for Microsoft Dynamics: DynamicsPerf 1.20: Version 1.20 Improved performance in PERFHOURLYROWDATA_VW Fixed error handling encrypted triggers Added logic ACTIVITYMONITORVW to handle Context_Info for Dynamics AX 2012 and above with this flag set on AOS Added logic to optional blocking to handle Context_Info for Dynamics AX 2012 and above with this flag set on AOS Added additional queries for investigating blocking Added logic to collect Baseline capture data (NOTE: QUERY_STATS table has entire procedure cache for that db during...Toolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011/2013: XrmToolBox (v1.2014.5.28): XrmToolbox improvement XrmToolBox updates (v1.2014.5.28)Fix connecting to a connection with custom authentication without saved password Tools improvement New tool!Solution Components Mover (v1.2014.5.22) Transfer solution components from one solution to another one Import/Export NN relationships (v1.2014.3.7) Allows you to import and export many to many relationships Tools updatesAttribute Bulk Updater (v1.2014.5.28) Audit Center (v1.2014.5.28) View Layout Replicator (v1.2014.5.28) Scrip...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.10: Fix for Issue #20875 - echo switch doesn't work for CSS CSS should honor the SASS source-file comments JS should allow multi-line comment directivesClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.71.1: More performance improvements. It's faster and consumes less memory.Kartris E-commerce: Kartris v2.6002: Minor release: Double check that Logins_GetList sproc is present, sometimes seems to get missed earlier if upgrading which can give error when viewing logins page Added CSV and TXT export option; this is not Google Products compatible, but can give a good base for creating a file for some other systems such as Amazon Fixed some minor combination and options issues to improve interface back and front Turn bitcoin and some other gateways off by default Minor CSS changes Fixed currenc...SimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.3.1.0: Main New Features: Fixed Importing of Instance Names (get rid of the Dutch translations) Added advanced editor for Decal Dictionaries Added possibility to import .PNG to generate new decals Added advanced editor for Path display entriesTiny Deduplicator: Tiny Deduplicator 1.0.1.0: Increased version number to 1.0.1.0 Moved all options to a separate 'Options' dialog window. Allows the user to specify a selection strategy which will help when dealing with large numbers of duplicate files. Available options are "None," "Keep First," and "Keep Last"Player Framework by Microsoft: Player Framework for Windows and WP v2.0: Support for new Universal and Windows Phone 8.1 projects for both Xaml and JavaScript projects. See a detailed list of improvements, breaking changes and a general overview of version 2 ADDITIONAL DOWNLOADSSmooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows 8 Applications Smooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows 8.1 Applications Smooth Streaming Client SDK for Windows Phone 8.1 Applications Microsoft PlayReady Client SDK for Windows 8 Applications Microsoft PlayReady Client SDK for Windows 8.1 Applicat...TerraMap (Terraria World Map Viewer): TerraMap 1.0.6: Added support for the new Terraria v1.2.4 update. New items, walls, and tiles Added the ability to select multiple highlighted block types. Added a dynamic, interactive highlight opacity slider, making it easier to find highlighted tiles with dark colors (and fixed blurriness from 1.0.5 alpha). Added ability to find Enchanted Swords (in the stone) and Water Bolt books Fixed Issue 35206: Hightlight/Find doesn't work for Demon Altars Fixed finding Demon Hearts/Shadow Orbs Fixed inst...New ProjectsBooki-Framework: A very super simple framework for develop application on .net (University assignment)C# Datalayer Using Stored Procedures for CRUD Operations: A C# .net data layer that uses stored procedures for crud operations working on any database, while still utilizing object orientated design practices.CoMaSy: Contact Management InfoComposite Iconote: Composite Iconote is a .NET composite. This is a Final Project of Component-Oriented Programming subject in Duta Wacana Christian University YogyakartaCredit Component: CreditComponent give you more attractive view to present who is the developer from any desktop software, many animation can introduce whom the developer isDaQiu: ?????????,??????????????????Database Helper: Rapid Development of CRUD Operationdi_academy_test: Test projectEasy Rent - Car rental software: Easy Rent software is an open source vehicle rental software.Excel Trader: Current project aims to provide an Excel(TM) interface through ExcelDNA for the IBRx, QFIXRx and SusicoTrader API.FXJ Learning Project: This is a learning project with TFS serviceImage View Slider: This is a .NET component. We create this using VB.NET. Here you can use an Image Viewer with several properties to your application form. Try this out!Indonesian Red-Letter Day Calendar: This is an Indonesian version of Red Letter Day Calendar, a final project for Component Oriented Programming course in Duta Wacana Christian University.jquery learning: jquery learningMakePanoForGoogle: Converts Panorama created by Microsoft ICE to format compatible to Google ViewsPWA_AppWeb: This page and all its content were developed by José Brazeta, Luis Carta and João Martins as an assignment for Advanced Web Programing (AEP).SoccerEvaluator: Proyecto para realizar evaluaciones de marcadores de futbolTooltip Web Preview: WebPreview is a component which was made to preview a web page before the link is clicked.Traditional Calendar Component: Hello this is a component which will help you to convert BC calendar to Javanese Calendar and Chinese Calendar. Hope this can help you on developing aps :)Typed YetiBowl The Game: Typescript Version of Yetibowl, intended for comparing Yetibowl in Javascript vs Typescript

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  • Getting a Database into Source Control

    - by Grant Fritchey
    For any number of reasons, from simple auditing, to change tracking, to automated deployment, to integration with application development processes, you’re going to want to place your database into source control. Using Red Gate SQL Source Control this process is extremely simple. SQL Source Control works within your SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) interface.  This means you can work with your databases in any way that you’re used to working with them. If you prefer scripts to using the GUI, not a problem. If you prefer using the GUI to having to learn T-SQL, again, that’s fine. After installing SQL Source Control, this is what you’ll see when you open SSMS:   SQL Source Control is now a direct piece of the SSMS environment. The key point initially is that I currently don’t have a database selected. You can even see that in the SQL Source Control window where it shows, in red, “No database selected – select a database in Object Explorer.” If I expand my Databases list in the Object Explorer, you’ll be able to immediately see which databases have been integrated with source control and which have not. There are visible differences between the databases as you can see here:   To add a database to source control, I first have to select it. For this example, I’m going to add the AdventureWorks2012 database to an instance of the SVN source control software (I’m using uberSVN). When I click on the AdventureWorks2012 database, the SQL Source Control screen changes:   I’m going to need to click on the “Link database to source control” text which will open up a window for connecting this database to the source control system of my choice.  You can pick from the default source control systems on the left, or define one of your own. I also have to provide the connection string for the location within the source control system where I’ll be storing my database code. I set these up in advance. You’ll need two. One for the main set of scripts and one for special scripts called Migrations that deal with different kinds of changes between versions of the code. Migrations help you solve problems like having to create or modify data in columns as part of a structural change. I’ll talk more about them another day. Finally, I have to determine if this is an isolated environment that I’m going to be the only one use, a dedicated database. Or, if I’m sharing the database in a shared environment with other developers, a shared database.  The main difference is, under a dedicated database, I will need to regularly get any changes that other developers have made from source control and integrate it into my database. While, under a shared database, all changes for all developers are made at the same time, which means you could commit other peoples work without proper testing. It all depends on the type of environment you work within. But, when it’s all set, it will look like this: SQL Source Control will compare the results between the empty folders in source control and the database, AdventureWorks2012. You’ll get a report showing exactly the list of differences and you can choose which ones will get checked into source control. Each of the database objects is scripted individually. You’ll be able to modify them later in the same way. Here’s the list of differences for my new database:   You can select/deselect all the objects or each object individually. You also get a report showing the differences between what’s in the database and what’s in source control. If there was already a database in source control, you’d only see changes to database objects rather than every single object. You can see that the database objects can be sorted by name, by type, or other choices. I’m going to add a comment such as “Initial creation of database in source control.” And then click on the Commit button which will put all the objects in my database into the source control system. That’s all it takes to get the objects into source control initially. Now is when things can get fun with breaking changes to code, automated deployments, unit testing and all the rest.

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