infrastructure as a service - Page 207

WCF TCP Protocol

- by jobless-spt

I want to host a WCF service with TCP Protocol. I can host the service using IIS or Windows Service. I need to know what port I need to open for this service for it to be accessible by client?

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Jaxws notifications

- by akmer

Hi, Could you please help in the following? Is there an acceptable design guideline to implement WS Notification Messaging in java? My scenario is the following: a web service client makes a web service call to a web service. After that, the web service should be able to send asynchronous notifications to the web client (as a result of the first web method call). What approach should be used? Thank you, Regards

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What is the best strategy for licensing a desktop application using a web service, when all I need to know is when people use the product?

- by user1667022

Our company's main application is a desktop program that is used at warehouses and written in C# and Windows Presentation Forms. The next thing we want to be able to do is track when customers open up the application and when it is being used. The reason for this is so we can charge them per month, based on if they are/arn't using the application. My boss is having me research different ways to "license" the product under these requirements. Not having any experience doing this, a few things come to mind. I could create a web application that runs on a server, and every time the desktop application is opened and the user logs in, the application connects to the server and marks a database with the DateTime. Or is there licensing software that I can use to accomplish this? Just looking for tips/advice from people who have experience with this type of stuff.

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Today at Oracle OpenWorld 2012

- by Scott McNeil

We have another full day of great Oracle OpenWorld keynotes, sessions, demos and customer presentations in the Seen and Be Heard threater. Here's a quick run down of what's happening today with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c OpenWorld schedule (PDF) Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c (and Private Cloud) General Session Tues 2 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM General Session: Using Oracle Enterprise Manager to Manage Your Own Private Cloud Moscone South - 103* 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM General Session: Breakthrough Efficiency in Private Cloud Infrastructure Moscone West - 3014 Conference Session Tues 2 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Oracle Exadata/Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Journey into Oracle Database Cloud Moscone West - 3018 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Bulletproof Your Application Upgrades with Secure Data Masking and Subsetting Moscone West - 3020 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: Architecture Deep Dive, Tips, and Techniques Moscone South - 303 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM RDBMS Forensics: Troubleshooting with Active Session History Moscone West - 3018 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Building and Operationalizing Your Data Center Environment with Oracle Exalogic Moscone South - 309 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Securely Building a National Electronic Health Record: Singapore Case Study Westin San Francisco - Concordia 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Managing Heterogeneous Environments with Oracle Enterprise Manager Moscone West - 3018 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Complete Oracle WebLogic Server Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Moscone South - 309 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Database Lifecycle Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Moscone West - 3020 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Best Practices, Key Features, Tips, Techniques for Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Upgrade Moscone South - 307 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Enterprise Cloud with CSC’s Foundation Services for Oracle and Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Moscone South - 236 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Deep Dive 3-D on Oracle Exadata Management: From Discovery to Deployment to Diagnostics Moscone West - 3018 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Everything You Need to Know About Monitoring and Troubleshooting Oracle GoldenGate Moscone West - 3005 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c: The Nerve Center of Oracle Cloud Moscone West - 3020 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Advanced Management of Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Enterprise Manager Moscone West - 2016 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud Control Performance Pages: Falling in Love Again Moscone West - 3014 Hands-on Labs Tues 2 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 10:15 AM - 12:45 PM Managing the Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Marriott Marquis - Salon 5/6 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Database Performance Tuning Hands-on Lab Marriott Marquis - Salon 5/6 Scene and Be Heard Theater Session Tues 2 Oct, 2012 Time Title Location 10:30 AM - 10:50 AM Start Small, Grow Big: Hands-On Oracle Private Cloud—A Step-by-Step Guide Moscone South Exhibition Hall - Booth 2407 12:30 PM - 12:50 PM Blue Medora’s Oracle Enterprise Manager Plug-in for VMware vSphere Monitoring Moscone South Exhibition Hall - Booth 2407 Demos Demo Location Application and Infrastructure Testing Moscone West - W-092 Automatic Application and SQL Tuning Moscone South, Left - S-042 Automatic Fault Diagnostics Moscone South, Left - S-036 Automatic Performance Diagnostics Moscone South, Left - S-033 Complete Care for Oracle Using My Oracle Support Moscone South, Left - S-031 Complete Cloud Lifecycle Management Moscone North, Upper Lobby - N-019 Complete Database Lifecycle Management Moscone South, Left - S-030 Comprehensive Infrastructure as a Service via Oracle Enterprise Manager Moscone South, Left - S-045 Data Masking and Data Subsetting Moscone South, Left - S-034 Database Testing with Oracle Real Application Testing Moscone South, Left - S-041 Identity Management Monitoring with Oracle Enterprise Manager Moscone South, Right - S-212 Mission-Critical, SPARC-Powered Infrastructure as a Service Moscone South, Center - S-157 Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft Management Moscone West - W-084 Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Overview Moscone South, Left - S-039 Oracle Enterprise Manager: Complete Data Center Management Moscone South, Left - S-040 Oracle Exadata Management Moscone South, Center - Oracle Exalogic Management Moscone South, Center - Oracle Fusion Applications Management Moscone West - W-018 Oracle Real User Experience Insight Moscone South, Right - S-226 Oracle WebLogic Server Management and Java Diagnostics Moscone South, Right - S-206 Platform as a Service Using Oracle Enterprise Manager Moscone North, Upper Lobby - N-020 SOA Management Moscone South, Right - S-225 Self-Service Application Testing on Private and Public Clouds Moscone West - W-110 Oracle OpenWorld Music Festival New this year is Oracle’s first annual Oracle OpenWorld Musical Festival, featuring some of today's breakthrough musicians from around the country and the world. It's five nights of back-to-back performances in the heart of San Francisco—free to registered attendees. See the lineup Not Heading to OpenWorld—Watch it Live! Stay Connected: Twitter | Facebook | YouTube | Linkedin | Newsletter Download the Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control12c Mobile app

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Oracle and Partners release CAMP specification for PaaS Management

- by macoracle

Cloud Application Management for Platforms The public release of the Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP) specification, an initial draft of what is expected to become an industry standard self service interface specification for Platform as a Service (PaaS) management, represents a significant milestone in cloud standards development. Created by several players in the emerging cloud industry, including Oracle, the specification is being submitted to the OASIS standards organization (draft charter) where it will be finalized in an open development process. CAMP is targeted at application developers and deployers for self service management of their application on a Platform-as-a-Service cloud. It is closely aligned with the application development process where applications are typically developed in an Application Development Environment (ADE) and then deployed into a private or public platform cloud. CAMP standardizes the model behind an application’s dependencies on platform components and provides a standardized format for moving applications between the ADE and the cloud, and if and when desirable, between clouds. Once an application is deployed, CAMP provides users with a standardized self service interface to the PaaS offering, allowing the cloud consumer to manage the lifecycle of the application on that platform and the use of the underlying platform services. The CAMP interface includes a RESTful binding of the CAMP model onto the standard HTTP protocol, using JSON as the encoding for the model resources. The model for CAMP includes resources that represent the Application, its Components and any Platform Components that they depend on. It's important PaaS Cloud consumers understand that for a PaaS cloud, these are the abstractions that the user would prefer to work with, not Virtual Machines and the various resources such as compute power, storage and networking. PaaS cloud consumers would also not like to become system administrators for the infrastructure that is hosting their applications and component services. CAMP works on this more abstract level, and yet still accommodates platforms that are built using an underlying infrastructure cloud. With CAMP, it is up to the cloud provider whether or not this underlying infrastructure is exposed to the consumer. One major challenge addressed by the CAMP specification is that of ensuring that application deployment on a new platform is as seamless and error free as possible. This becomes even more difficult when the application may have been developed for a different platform and is now moving to a new one. In CAMP this is accomplished by matching the requirements of the application and its components to the specific capabilities of the underlying platform. This needs to be done regardless of whether there are existing pools of virtualized platform resources (such as a database pool) which are provisioned(on the basis of a schema for example), or whether the platform component is really just a set of virtual machines drawn from an infrastructure pool. The interoperability between platform clouds that CAMP offers means that a CAMP client such as an ADE can target multiple clouds with a single common interface. Applications can even be spread across multiple platform clouds and then managed without needing to create a specialized adapter to manage the components running in each cloud. The development of CAMP has been an effort by a small set of companies, but there are significant advantages to this approach. For example, the way that each of these companies creates their platforms is different enough, to ensure that CAMP can cover a wide range of actual deployments. CAMP is now entering the next phase of development under the guidance of an open standards organization, OASIS, which will likely broaden it’s capabilities. We hope is to keep it concise and minimal, however, to ease implementation and adoption. Over time there will be many different types of platform components that applications can use and which need management. CAMP at this point only includes one example of this (in an appendix) – DataBase as a Service. I am looking forward to the start of the CAMP Technical Committee in OASIS and will do my best to ensure a successful development process. Hope to see you there.

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Building a better mouse-trap – Improving the creation of XML Message Requests using Reflection, XML & XSLT

- by paulschapman

Introduction The way I previously created messages to send to the GovTalk service I used the XMLDocument to create the request. While this worked it left a number of problems; not least that for every message a special function would need to created. This is OK for the short term but the biggest cost in any software project is maintenance and this would be a headache to maintain. So the following is a somewhat better way of achieving the same thing. For the purposes of this article I am going to be using the CompanyNumberSearch request of the GovTalk service – although this technique would work for any service that accepted XML. The C# functions which send and receive the messages remain the same. The magic sauce in this is the XSLT which defines the structure of the request, and the use of objects in conjunction with reflection to provide the content. It is a bit like Sweet Chilli Sauce added to Chicken on a bed of rice. So on to the Sweet Chilli Sauce The Sweet Chilli Sauce The request to search for a company based on it’s number is as follows; <GovTalkMessage xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/Egov_ch-v2-0.xsd" xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" > <EnvelopeVersion>1.0</EnvelopeVersion> <Header> <MessageDetails> <Class>NumberSearch</Class> <Qualifier>request</Qualifier> <TransactionID>1</TransactionID> </MessageDetails> <SenderDetails> <IDAuthentication> <SenderID>????????????????????????????????</SenderID> <Authentication> <Method>CHMD5</Method> <Value>????????????????????????????????</Value> </Authentication> </IDAuthentication> </SenderDetails> </Header> <GovTalkDetails> <Keys/> </GovTalkDetails> <Body> <NumberSearchRequest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/NumberSearch.xsd"> <PartialCompanyNumber>99999999</PartialCompanyNumber> <DataSet>LIVE</DataSet> <SearchRows>1</SearchRows> </NumberSearchRequest> </Body> </GovTalkMessage> This is the XML that we send to the GovTalk Service and we get back a list of companies that match the criteria passed A message is structured in two parts; The envelope which identifies the person sending the request, with the name of the request, and the body which gives the detail of the company we are looking for. The Chilli What makes it possible is the use of XSLT to define the message – and serialization to convert each request object into XML. To start we need to create an object which will represent the contents of the message we are sending. However there is a common properties in all the messages that we send to Companies House. These properties are as follows SenderId – the id of the person sending the message SenderPassword – the password associated with Id TransactionId – Unique identifier for the message AuthenticationValue – authenticates the request Because these properties are unique to the Companies House message, and because they are shared with all messages they are perfect candidates for a base class. The class is as follows; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; using System.Security.Cryptography; using System.Text; using System.Text.RegularExpressions; using Microsoft.WindowsAzure.ServiceRuntime; namespace CompanyHub.Services { public class GovTalkRequest { public GovTalkRequest() { try { SenderID = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("SenderId"); SenderPassword = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("SenderPassword"); TransactionId = DateTime.Now.Ticks.ToString(); AuthenticationValue = EncodePassword(String.Format("{0}{1}{2}", SenderID, SenderPassword, TransactionId)); } catch (System.Exception ex) { throw ex; } } /// <summary> /// returns the Sender ID to be used when communicating with the GovTalk Service /// </summary> public String SenderID { get; set; } /// <summary> /// return the password to be used when communicating with the GovTalk Service /// </summary> public String SenderPassword { get; set; } // end SenderPassword /// <summary> /// Transaction Id - uses the Time and Date converted to Ticks /// </summary> public String TransactionId { get; set; } // end TransactionId /// <summary> /// calculate the authentication value that will be used when /// communicating with /// </summary> public String AuthenticationValue { get; set; } // end AuthenticationValue property /// <summary> /// encodes password(s) using MD5 /// </summary> /// <param name="clearPassword"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static String EncodePassword(String clearPassword) { MD5CryptoServiceProvider md5Hasher = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider(); byte[] hashedBytes; UTF32Encoding encoder = new UTF32Encoding(); hashedBytes = md5Hasher.ComputeHash(ASCIIEncoding.Default.GetBytes(clearPassword)); String result = Regex.Replace(BitConverter.ToString(hashedBytes), "-", "").ToLower(); return result; } } } There is nothing particularly clever here, except for the EncodePassword method which hashes the value made up of the SenderId, Password and Transaction id. Each message inherits from this object. So for the Company Number Search in addition to the properties above we need a partial number, which dataset to search – for the purposes of the project we only need to search the LIVE set so this can be set in the constructor and the SearchRows. Again all are set as properties. With the SearchRows and DataSet initialized in the constructor. public class CompanyNumberSearchRequest : GovTalkRequest, IDisposable { /// <summary> /// /// </summary> public CompanyNumberSearchRequest() : base() { DataSet = "LIVE"; SearchRows = 1; } /// <summary> /// Company Number to search against /// </summary> public String PartialCompanyNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// What DataSet should be searched for the company /// </summary> public String DataSet { get; set; } /// <summary> /// How many rows should be returned /// </summary> public int SearchRows { get; set; } public void Dispose() { DataSet = String.Empty; PartialCompanyNumber = String.Empty; DataSet = "LIVE"; SearchRows = 1; } } As well as inheriting from our base class, I have also inherited from IDisposable – not just because it is just plain good practice to dispose of objects when coding, but it gives also gives us more versatility when using the object. There are four stages in making a request and this is reflected in the four methods we execute in making a call to the Companies House service; Create a request Send a request Check the status If OK then get the results of the request I’ve implemented each of these stages within a static class called Toolbox – which also means I don’t need to create an instance of the class to use it. When making a request there are three stages; Get the template for the message Serialize the object representing the message Transform the serialized object using a predefined XSLT file. Each of my templates I have defined as an embedded resource. When retrieving a resource of this kind we have to include the full namespace to the resource. In making the code re-usable as much as possible I defined the full ‘path’ within the GetRequest method. requestFile = String.Format("CompanyHub.Services.Schemas.{0}", RequestFile); So we now have the full path of the file within the assembly. Now all we need do is retrieve the assembly and get the resource. asm = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); sr = asm.GetManifestResourceStream(requestFile); Once retrieved So this can be returned to the calling function and we now have a stream of XSLT to define the message. Time now to serialize the request to create the other side of this message. // Serialize object containing Request, Load into XML Document t = Obj.GetType(); ms = new MemoryStream(); serializer = new XmlSerializer(t); xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.ASCII); serializer.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, Obj); ms = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream; GovTalkRequest = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(ms.ToArray()); First off we need the type of the object so we make a call to the GetType method of the object containing the Message properties. Next we need a MemoryStream, XmlSerializer and an XMLTextWriter so these can be initialized. The object is serialized by making the call to the Serialize method of the serializer object. The result of that is then converted into a MemoryStream. That MemoryStream is then converted into a string. ConvertByteArrayToString This is a fairly simple function which uses an ASCIIEncoding object found within the System.Text namespace to convert an array of bytes into a string. public static String ConvertByteArrayToString(byte[] bytes) { System.Text.ASCIIEncoding enc = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding(); return enc.GetString(bytes); } I only put it into a function because I will be using this in various places. The Sauce When adding support for other messages outside of creating a new object to store the properties of the message, the C# components do not need to change. It is in the XSLT file that the versatility of the technique lies. The XSLT file determines the format of the message. For the CompanyNumberSearch the XSLT file is as follows; <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"> <xsl:template match="/"> <GovTalkMessage xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/Egov_ch-v2-0.xsd" xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" > <EnvelopeVersion>1.0</EnvelopeVersion> <Header> <MessageDetails> <Class>NumberSearch</Class> <Qualifier>request</Qualifier> <TransactionID> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/TransactionId"/> </TransactionID> </MessageDetails> <SenderDetails> <IDAuthentication> <SenderID><xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/SenderID"/></SenderID> <Authentication> <Method>CHMD5</Method> <Value> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/AuthenticationValue"/> </Value> </Authentication> </IDAuthentication> </SenderDetails> </Header> <GovTalkDetails> <Keys/> </GovTalkDetails> <Body> <NumberSearchRequest xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/NumberSearch.xsd"> <PartialCompanyNumber> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/PartialCompanyNumber"/> </PartialCompanyNumber> <DataSet> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/DataSet"/> </DataSet> <SearchRows> <xsl:value-of select="CompanyNumberSearchRequest/SearchRows"/> </SearchRows> </NumberSearchRequest> </Body> </GovTalkMessage> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> The outer two tags define that this is a XSLT stylesheet and the root tag from which the nodes are searched for. The GovTalkMessage is the format of the message that will be sent to Companies House. We first set up the XslCompiledTransform object which will transform the XSLT template and the serialized object into the request to Companies House. xslt = new XslCompiledTransform(); resultStream = new MemoryStream(); writer = new XmlTextWriter(resultStream, Encoding.ASCII); doc = new XmlDocument(); The Serialize method require XmlTextWriter to write the XML (writer) and a stream to place the transferred object into (writer). The XML will be loaded into an XMLDocument object (doc) prior to the transformation. // create XSLT Template xslTemplate = Toolbox.GetRequest(Template); xslTemplate.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); templateReader = XmlReader.Create(xslTemplate); xslt.Load(templateReader); I have stored all the templates as a series of Embedded Resources and the GetRequestCall takes the name of the template and extracts the relevent XSLT file. /// <summary> /// Gets the framwork XML which makes the request /// </summary> /// <param name="RequestFile"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Stream GetRequest(String RequestFile) { String requestFile = String.Empty; Stream sr = null; Assembly asm = null; try { requestFile = String.Format("CompanyHub.Services.Schemas.{0}", RequestFile); asm = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly(); sr = asm.GetManifestResourceStream(requestFile); } catch (Exception) { throw; } finally { asm = null; } return sr; } // end private static stream GetRequest We first take the template name and expand it to include the full namespace to the Embedded Resource I like to keep all my schemas in the same directory and so the namespace reflects this. The rest is the default namespace for the project. Then we get the currently executing assembly (which will contain the resources with the call to GetExecutingAssembly() ) Finally we get a stream which contains the XSLT file. We use this stream and then load an XmlReader with the contents of the template, and that is in turn loaded into the XslCompiledTransform object. We convert the object containing the message properties into Xml by serializing it; calling the Serialize() method of the XmlSerializer object. To set up the object we do the following; t = Obj.GetType(); ms = new MemoryStream(); serializer = new XmlSerializer(t); xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.ASCII); We first determine the type of the object being transferred by calling GetType() We create an XmlSerializer object by passing the type of the object being serialized. The serializer writes to a memory stream and that is linked to an XmlTextWriter. Next job is to serialize the object and load it into an XmlDocument. serializer.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, Obj); ms = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream; xmlRequest = new XmlTextReader(ms); GovTalkRequest = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(ms.ToArray()); doc.LoadXml(GovTalkRequest); Time to transform the XML to construct the full request. xslt.Transform(doc, writer); resultStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin); request = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(resultStream.ToArray()); So that creates the full request to be sent to Companies House. Sending the request So far we have a string with a request for the Companies House service. Now we need to send the request to the Companies House Service. Configuration within an Azure project There are entire blog entries written about configuration within an Azure project – most of this is out of scope for this article but the following is a summary. Configuration is defined in two files within the parent project *.csdef which contains the definition of configuration setting. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="OnlineCompanyHub" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WebRole name="CompanyHub.Host"> <InputEndpoints> <InputEndpoint name="HttpIn" protocol="http" port="80" /> </InputEndpoints> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" /> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </WebRole> <WebRole name="CompanyHub.Services"> <InputEndpoints> <InputEndpoint name="HttpIn" protocol="http" port="8080" /> </InputEndpoints> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" /> <Setting name="SenderId"/> <Setting name="SenderPassword" /> <Setting name="GovTalkUrl"/> </ConfigurationSettings> </WebRole> <WorkerRole name="CompanyHub.Worker"> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Above is the configuration definition from the project. What we are interested in however is the ConfigurationSettings tag of the CompanyHub.Services WebRole. There are four configuration settings here, but at the moment we are interested in the second to forth settings; SenderId, SenderPassword and GovTalkUrl The value of these settings are defined in the ServiceDefinition.cscfg file; <?xml version="1.0"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="OnlineCompanyHub" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration"> <Role name="CompanyHub.Host"> <Instances count="2" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> <Role name="CompanyHub.Services"> <Instances count="2" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="SenderId" value="UserID"/> <Setting name="SenderPassword" value="Password"/> <Setting name="GovTalkUrl" value="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/xmlgw/Gateway"/> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> <Role name="CompanyHub.Worker"> <Instances count="2" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DiagnosticsConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Look for the Role tag that contains our project name (CompanyHub.Services). Having configured the parameters we can now transmit the request. This is done by ‘POST’ing a stream of XML to the Companies House servers. govTalkUrl = RoleEnvironment.GetConfigurationSettingValue("GovTalkUrl"); request = WebRequest.Create(govTalkUrl); request.Method = "POST"; request.ContentType = "text/xml"; writer = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream()); writer.WriteLine(RequestMessage); writer.Close(); We use the WebRequest object to send the object. Set the method of sending to ‘POST’ and the type of data as text/xml. Once set up all we do is write the request to the writer – this sends the request to Companies House. Did the Request Work Part I – Getting the response Having sent a request – we now need the result of that request. response = request.GetResponse(); reader = response.GetResponseStream(); result = Toolbox.ConvertByteArrayToString(Toolbox.ReadFully(reader)); The WebRequest object has a GetResponse() method which allows us to get the response sent back. Like many of these calls the results come in the form of a stream which we convert into a string. Did the Request Work Part II – Translating the Response Much like XSLT and XML were used to create the original request, so it can be used to extract the response and by deserializing the result we create an object that contains the response. Did it work? It would be really great if everything worked all the time. Of course if it did then I don’t suppose people would pay me and others the big bucks so that our programmes do not a) Collapse in a heap (this is an area of memory) b) Blow every fuse in the place in a shower of sparks (this will probably not happen this being real life and not a Hollywood movie, but it was possible to blow the sound system of a BBC Model B with a poorly coded setting) c) Go nuts and trap everyone outside the airlock (this was from a movie, and unless NASA get a manned moon/mars mission set up unlikely to happen) d) Go nuts and take over the world (this was also from a movie, but please note life has a habit of being of exceeding the wildest imaginations of Hollywood writers (note writers – Hollywood executives have no imagination and judging by recent output of that town have turned plagiarism into an art form). e) Freeze in total confusion because the cleaner pulled the plug to the internet router (this has happened) So anyway – we need to check to see if our request actually worked. Within the GovTalk response there is a section that details the status of the message and a description of what went wrong (if anything did). I have defined an XSLT template which will extract these into an XML document. <?xml version="1.0"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:ev="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <xsl:template match="/"> <GovTalkStatus xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <Status> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:Header/ev:MessageDetails/ev:Qualifier"/> </Status> <Text> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Text"/> </Text> <Location> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Location"/> </Location> <Number> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Number"/> </Number> <Type> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:GovTalkDetails/ev:GovTalkErrors/ev:Error/ev:Type"/> </Type> </GovTalkStatus> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> Only thing different about previous XSL files is the references to two namespaces ev & gt. These are defined in the GovTalk response at the top of the response; xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema/Egov_ch-v2-0.xsd" xmlns="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:gt="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/schemas/govtalk/core" If we do not put these references into the XSLT template then the XslCompiledTransform object will not be able to find the relevant tags. Deserialization is a fairly simple activity. encoder = new ASCIIEncoding(); ms = new MemoryStream(encoder.GetBytes(statusXML)); serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(GovTalkStatus)); xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(ms, Encoding.ASCII); messageStatus = (GovTalkStatus)serializer.Deserialize(ms); We set up a serialization object using the object type containing the error state and pass to it the results of a transformation between the XSLT above and the GovTalk response. Now we have an object containing any error state, and the error message. All we need to do is check the status. If there is an error then we can flag an error. If not then we extract the results and pass that as an object back to the calling function. We go this by guess what – defining an XSLT template for the result and using that to create an Xml Stream which can be deserialized into a .Net object. In this instance the XSLT to create the result of a Company Number Search is; <?xml version="1.0" encoding="us-ascii"?> <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:ev="http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/CM/envelope" xmlns:sch="http://xmlgw.companieshouse.gov.uk/v1-0/schema" exclude-result-prefixes="ev"> <xsl:template match="/"> <CompanySearchResult xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <CompanyNumber> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:Body/sch:NumberSearch/sch:CoSearchItem/sch:CompanyNumber"/> </CompanyNumber> <CompanyName> <xsl:value-of select="ev:GovTalkMessage/ev:Body/sch:NumberSearch/sch:CoSearchItem/sch:CompanyName"/> </CompanyName> </CompanySearchResult> </xsl:template> </xsl:stylesheet> and the object definition is; using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Web; namespace CompanyHub.Services { public class CompanySearchResult { public CompanySearchResult() { CompanyNumber = String.Empty; CompanyName = String.Empty; } public String CompanyNumber { get; set; } public String CompanyName { get; set; } } } Our entire code to make calls to send a request, and interpret the results are; String request = String.Empty; String response = String.Empty; GovTalkStatus status = null; fault = null; try { using (CompanyNumberSearchRequest requestObj = new CompanyNumberSearchRequest()) { requestObj.PartialCompanyNumber = CompanyNumber; request = Toolbox.CreateRequest(requestObj, "CompanyNumberSearch.xsl"); response = Toolbox.SendGovTalkRequest(request); status = Toolbox.GetMessageStatus(response); if (status.Status.ToLower() == "error") { fault = new HubFault() { Message = status.Text }; } else { Object obj = Toolbox.GetGovTalkResponse(response, "CompanyNumberSearchResult.xsl", typeof(CompanySearchResult)); } } } catch (FaultException<ArgumentException> ex) { fault = new HubFault() { FaultType = ex.Detail.GetType().FullName, Message = ex.Detail.Message }; } catch (System.Exception ex) { fault = new HubFault() { FaultType = ex.GetType().FullName, Message = ex.Message }; } finally { } Wrap up So there we have it – a reusable set of functions to send and interpret XML results from an internet based service. The code is reusable with a little change with any service which uses XML as a transport mechanism – and as for the Companies House GovTalk service all I need to do is create various objects for the result and message sent and the relevent XSLT files. I might need minor changes for other services but something like 70-90% will be exactly the same.

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What's up with LDoms: Part 9 - Direct IO

- by Stefan Hinker

In the last article of this series, we discussed the most general of all physical IO options available for LDoms, root domains. Now, let's have a short look at the next level of granularity: Virtualizing individual PCIe slots. In the LDoms terminology, this feature is called "Direct IO" or DIO. It is very similar to root domains, but instead of reassigning ownership of a complete root complex, it only moves a single PCIe slot or endpoint device to a different domain. Let's look again at hardware available to mars in the original configuration: root@sun:~# ldm ls-io NAME TYPE BUS DOMAIN STATUS ---- ---- --- ------ ------ pci_0 BUS pci_0 primary pci_1 BUS pci_1 primary pci_2 BUS pci_2 primary pci_3 BUS pci_3 primary /SYS/MB/PCIE1 PCIE pci_0 primary EMP /SYS/MB/SASHBA0 PCIE pci_0 primary OCC /SYS/MB/NET0 PCIE pci_0 primary OCC /SYS/MB/PCIE5 PCIE pci_1 primary EMP /SYS/MB/PCIE6 PCIE pci_1 primary EMP /SYS/MB/PCIE7 PCIE pci_1 primary EMP /SYS/MB/PCIE2 PCIE pci_2 primary EMP /SYS/MB/PCIE3 PCIE pci_2 primary OCC /SYS/MB/PCIE4 PCIE pci_2 primary EMP /SYS/MB/PCIE8 PCIE pci_3 primary EMP /SYS/MB/SASHBA1 PCIE pci_3 primary OCC /SYS/MB/NET2 PCIE pci_3 primary OCC /SYS/MB/NET0/IOVNET.PF0 PF pci_0 primary /SYS/MB/NET0/IOVNET.PF1 PF pci_0 primary /SYS/MB/NET2/IOVNET.PF0 PF pci_3 primary /SYS/MB/NET2/IOVNET.PF1 PF pci_3 primary All of the "PCIE" type devices are available for SDIO, with a few limitations. If the device is a slot, the card in that slot must support the DIO feature. The documentation lists all such cards. Moving a slot to a different domain works just like moving a PCI root complex. Again, this is not a dynamic process and includes reboots of the affected domains. The resulting configuration is nicely shown in a diagram in the Admin Guide: There are several important things to note and consider here: The domain receiving the slot/endpoint device turns into an IO domain in LDoms terminology, because it now owns some physical IO hardware. Solaris will create nodes for this hardware under /devices. This includes entries for the virtual PCI root complex (pci_0 in the diagram) and anything between it and the actual endpoint device. It is very important to understand that all of this PCIe infrastructure is virtual only! Only the actual endpoint devices are true physical hardware. There is an implicit dependency between the guest owning the endpoint device and the root domain owning the real PCIe infrastructure: Only if the root domain is up and running, will the guest domain have access to the endpoint device. The root domain is still responsible for resetting and configuring the PCIe infrastructure (root complex, PCIe level configurations, error handling etc.) because it owns this part of the physical infrastructure. This also means that if the root domain needs to reset the PCIe root complex for any reason (typically a reboot of the root domain) it will reset and thus disrupt the operation of the endpoint device owned by the guest domain. The result in the guest is not predictable. I recommend to configure the resulting behaviour of the guest using domain dependencies as described in the Admin Guide in Chapter "Configuring Domain Dependencies". Please consult the Admin Guide in Section "Creating an I/O Domain by Assigning PCIe Endpoint Devices" for all the details! As you can see, there are several restrictions for this feature. It was introduced in LDoms 2.0, mainly to allow the configuration of guest domains that need access to tape devices. Today, with the higher number of PCIe root complexes and the availability of SR-IOV, the need to use this feature is declining. I personally do not recommend to use it, mainly because of the drawbacks of the depencies on the root domain and because it can be replaced with SR-IOV (although then with similar limitations). This was a rather short entry, more for completeness. I believe that DIO can usually be replaced by SR-IOV, which is much more flexible. I will cover SR-IOV in the next section of this blog series.

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How can I automatically update Flash Player whenever a new version is released? [closed]

- by user219950

Summary: Flash Player Update Service doesn't run on a reliable schedule, and doesn't automatically download and apply updates when it does run. Given the importance of having an up-to-date version of Flash Player installed (for those of us who don't use Chrome with its built-in player), I would like to find a way to ensure that new updates are promptly detected and installed. What follows are the details of my efforts to solve this problem on my own... Appendix A: Flash Player Update Service OK, way back in Flash Player 11.2 (or so?) Adobe added the Flash Player Update Service (FlashPlayerUpdateService.exe), it was supposed to keep the Flash Player updated... Upon installation, FPUS is configured to run as a Windows Service, with Start Type set to Manual. A Scheduled Task (Adobe Flash Player Updater.job) is added to start this service every hour. So far, so good - this set-up avoids having a constantly-running service, but makes sure that the checks are run often enough to catch any updates quickly. Google's software updater is configured in a similar fashion, and that works just fine... ...And yet, when I checked the version of my installed Flash Player, I found it was 11.6.602.180, which, based on looking at the timestamps of the files in C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash was last updated (or installed) on Tue, Mar 12, 2013 --- 3/12/13, 5:00:08pm. I made this observation on Thu, Apr 25, 2013 --- 4/25/13, 7:00:00pm, and upon checking Adobe's website found that the current version of Flash Player was 11.7.700.169. That's over a month since the last update, with a new one clearly available on the website but with no indication that the hourly check running on my machine has noticed it or has any intention of downloading it. Appendix B: running the Flash Player updater manually Once upon a time, running FlashUtil32_<version_Plugin.exe -update plugin would give you a window with an Install button; pressing it would download the installer for the current version (automatically, without opening a browser) and run it, then you'd click thru that installer & be done. It was manual, but it worked! Finding my current installation out of date (see Appendix A), I first tried this manual update process. However... Running FlashUtil32_<version_ActiveX.exe -update activex (in my case, that's FlashUtil32_11_6_602_180_ActiveX.exe -update activex) ...only presents a window with a Download button, clicking that Download button opens my browser to the URL https://get3.adobe.com/flashplayer/update/activex. Running FlashUtil32_<version_Plugin.exe -update plugin (in my case, that's FlashUtil32_11_6_602_180_Plugin.exe -update plugin) ...only presents a window with a Download button, clicking that Download button opens my browser to the URL https://get3.adobe.com/flashplayer/update/plugin. I could continue with the Download page it sent me to, uncheck the foistware box ("Free! McAfee Security Scan Plus"), download that installer (ActiveX, no foistware: install_flashplayer11x32axau_mssd_aih.exe, Plugin, no foistware: install_flashplayer11x32au_mssd_aih.exe) & probably have an updated Flash...but then, what is the point of the Flash Player Update Service if I have to manually download & run another exe? Epilogue I've since come to suspect that the update service is intentionally hobbled to drive early adopters to the manual download page. If this is true, there's probably no solution to this short of writing my own updater; hopefully I am wrong.

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Delaying NIS & NFS startup till after network interface is fully ready on Fedora 17

- by obmarg

I've recently set up a fedora 17 server for our network, and I've been having trouble getting the NIS service to work on startup. Here's some logs from the system: Aug 21 12:57:12 cairnwell ypbind-pre-setdomain[718]: Setting NIS domain: 'indigo-nis' (environment variable) Aug 21 12:57:13 cairnwell ypbind: Binding NIS service Aug 21 12:57:13 cairnwell rpc.statd[730]: Unable to prune capability 0 from bounding set: Operation not permitted Aug 21 12:57:13 cairnwell systemd[1]: nfs-lock.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1 Aug 21 12:57:13 cairnwell systemd[1]: Unit nfs-lock.service entered failed state. Aug 21 12:57:14 cairnwell setroubleshoot: SELinux is preventing /usr/sbin/rpc.statd from using the setpcap capability. For complete SELinux messages. run sealert -l 024bba8a-b0ef-43dc-b195-5c9a2d4c4d41 Aug 21 12:57:15 cairnwell kernel: [ 18.822282] bnx2 0000:02:00.0: em1: NIC Copper Link is Up, 1000 Mbps full duplex Aug 21 12:57:15 cairnwell kernel: [ 18.822925] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): em1: link becomes ready Aug 21 12:57:15 cairnwell NetworkManager[621]: <info> (em1): carrier now ON (device state 20) Aug 21 12:57:15 cairnwell NetworkManager[621]: <info> (em1): device state change: unavailable -> disconnected (reason 'carrier-changed') [20 30 40] Aug 21 12:57:15 cairnwell NetworkManager[621]: <info> Auto-activating connection 'System em1'. Aug 21 12:57:15 cairnwell NetworkManager[621]: <info> Activation (em1) starting connection 'System em1' Aug 21 12:57:15 cairnwell NetworkManager[621]: <info> (em1): device state change: disconnected -> prepare (reason 'none') [30 40 0] ....... Aug 21 12:57:19 cairnwell sendmail[790]: YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound Aug 21 12:57:26 cairnwell sendmail[790]: YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound Aug 21 12:57:31 cairnwell sendmail[790]: YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound Aug 21 12:57:35 cairnwell sendmail[790]: YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound Aug 21 12:58:00 cairnwell ypbind: Binding took 47 seconds Aug 21 12:58:00 cairnwell ypbind: NIS server for domain indigo-nis is not responding. Aug 21 12:58:01 cairnwell ypbind: Killing ypbind with PID 733. Aug 21 12:58:01 cairnwell ypbind-post-waitbind[734]: /usr/lib/ypbind/ypbind-post-waitbind: line 51: kill: SIGTERM: invalid signal specification Aug 21 12:58:01 cairnwell systemd[1]: ypbind.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1 Aug 21 12:58:01 cairnwell systemd[1]: Unit ypbind.service entered failed state. By the looks of these logs the ypbind service is starting up at 12:57:12 but the network interface isn't coming up till 12:57:15. My guess is that this is causing ypbind to time out when trying to connect. As a knock-on effect the NIS failure is causing problems with NFS which is no longer able to map UIDs properly. This problem doesn't seem to be fixed by actually starting ypbind etc. so I've had to set all my NFS shares to noauto. I have tried manually adding NETWORKDELAY and NETWORKWAIT in /etc/sysconfig/network and also running systemctl enable NetworkManager-wait-online.service as I've seen suggested in some places, but neither of these have had any effect. It is relatively easy to fix manually by restarting ypbind & mounting NFS shares after the network has started up, but it's less than ideal to have to do this every time the server has been rebooted. Does anyone know of an easy (and preferably hack-free) way of delaying the ypbind startup till after the network interface is fully ready?

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Centos 7. Freeradius fails to start on boot

- by Alex

I was messing around with FreeRADIUS and MySQL (MariaDB) and it seems FreeRADIUS service can't start properly on startup. But it starts fine using root user or in debug mode (radiusd -X) and works just fine! Debug mode shows no errors. systemctl command shows that radiusd.service has failed to start. /var/log/messages output: Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test systemd: Starting The Apache HTTP Server... Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test systemd: Starting MariaDB database server... Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test systemd: Starting FreeRADIUS high performance RADIUS server.... Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test systemd: Started OpenSSH server daemon. Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test mysqld_safe: 140821 15:52:29 mysqld_safe Logging to '/var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log'. Aug 21 15:52:29 nexus-test mysqld_safe: 140821 15:52:29 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /var/lib/mysql Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test systemd: Started Postfix Mail Transport Agent. Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test avahi-daemon[604]: Registering new address record for fe80::250:56ff:fe85:e4af on eth0.*. Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test systemd: radiusd.service: control process exited, code=exited status=1 Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test systemd: Failed to start FreeRADIUS high performance RADIUS server.. Aug 21 15:52:30 nexus-test systemd: Unit radiusd.service entered failed state. Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test kdumpctl: kexec: loaded kdump kernel Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test kdumpctl: Starting kdump: [OK] Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test systemd: Started Crash recovery kernel arming. Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test systemd: Started The Apache HTTP Server. Aug 21 15:52:31 nexus-test systemd: Started MariaDB database server. /var/log/radius/radius.log output: Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Info: rlm_sql (sql): Driver rlm_sql_mysql (module rlm_sql_mysql) loaded and linked Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Info: rlm_sql (sql): Attempting to connect to database "radius" Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Info: rlm_sql (sql): Opening additional connection (0) Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Error: rlm_sql_mysql: Couldn't connect socket to MySQL server radius@localhost:radius Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Error: rlm_sql_mysql: Mysql error 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)' Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Error: rlm_sql (sql): Opening connection failed (0) Thu Aug 21 15:24:16 2014 : Error: /etc/raddb/mods-enabled/sql[47]: Instantiation failed for module "sql" After seeing this I tried to replicate the problem, killed mariadb.service and started to run debug mode again. And it spits out the same problem as in the radius.log. I tried disabling iptables and firewalld and rebooting, but no luck: systemctl disable iptables systemctl disable firewalld So maybe the problem is in the process startup order or delay of some kind. Maybe FreeRADIUS's SQL module can't connect to not yet started MariaDB? If it, how can I fix this? In earlier versions of RHEL/CENTOS I know you easily see service start order in like rc.d or stuff, now IDK. I am new to this fancy "systemd", "systemctl", "firewalld" stuff Centos 7 introduced so sorry I'm a little bit confused. Also this new FreeRADIUS 3 structure... PS. MariaDB is enabled on startup, credentials in FR DB configuration are correct A little update: cat /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/radiusd.service output: [Unit] Description=FreeRADIUS high performance RADIUS server. After=syslog.target network.target [Service] Type=forking PIDFile=/var/run/radiusd/radiusd.pid ExecStartPre=-/bin/chown -R radiusd.radiusd /var/run/radiusd ExecStartPre=/usr/sbin/radiusd -C ExecStart=/usr/sbin/radiusd -d /etc/raddb ExecReload=/usr/sbin/radiusd -C ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target

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Integrating WIF with WCF Data Services

- by cibrax

A time ago I discussed how a custom REST Starter kit interceptor could be used to parse a SAML token in the Http Authorization header and wrap that into a ClaimsPrincipal that the WCF services could use. The thing is that code was initially created for Geneva framework, so it got deprecated quickly. I recently needed that piece of code for one of projects where I am currently working on so I decided to update it for WIF. As this interceptor can be injected in any host for WCF REST services, also represents an excellent solution for integrating claim-based security into WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.NET Data Services). The interceptor basically expects a SAML token in the Authorization header. If a token is found, it is parsed and a new ClaimsPrincipal is initialized and injected in the WCF authorization context. public class SamlAuthenticationInterceptor : RequestInterceptor { SecurityTokenHandlerCollection handlers; public SamlAuthenticationInterceptor() : base(false) { this.handlers = FederatedAuthentication.ServiceConfiguration.SecurityTokenHandlers; } public override void ProcessRequest(ref RequestContext requestContext) { SecurityToken token = ExtractCredentials(requestContext.RequestMessage); if (token != null) { ClaimsIdentityCollection claims = handlers.ValidateToken(token); var principal = new ClaimsPrincipal(claims); InitializeSecurityContext(requestContext.RequestMessage, principal); } else { DenyAccess(ref requestContext); } } private void DenyAccess(ref RequestContext requestContext) { Message reply = Message.CreateMessage(MessageVersion.None, null); HttpResponseMessageProperty responseProperty = new HttpResponseMessageProperty() { StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized }; responseProperty.Headers.Add("WWW-Authenticate", String.Format("Basic realm=\"{0}\"", "")); reply.Properties[HttpResponseMessageProperty.Name] = responseProperty; requestContext.Reply(reply); requestContext = null; } private SecurityToken ExtractCredentials(Message requestMessage) { HttpRequestMessageProperty request = (HttpRequestMessageProperty) requestMessage.Properties[HttpRequestMessageProperty.Name]; string authHeader = request.Headers["Authorization"]; if (authHeader != null && authHeader.Contains("<saml")) { XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(new StringReader(authHeader)); var col = SecurityTokenHandlerCollection.CreateDefaultSecurityTokenHandlerCollection(); SecurityToken token = col.ReadToken(xmlReader); return token; } return null; } private void InitializeSecurityContext(Message request, IPrincipal principal) { List<IAuthorizationPolicy> policies = new List<IAuthorizationPolicy>(); policies.Add(new PrincipalAuthorizationPolicy(principal)); ServiceSecurityContext securityContext = new ServiceSecurityContext(policies.AsReadOnly()); if (request.Properties.Security != null) { request.Properties.Security.ServiceSecurityContext = securityContext; } else { request.Properties.Security = new SecurityMessageProperty() { ServiceSecurityContext = securityContext }; } } class PrincipalAuthorizationPolicy : IAuthorizationPolicy { string id = Guid.NewGuid().ToString(); IPrincipal user; public PrincipalAuthorizationPolicy(IPrincipal user) { this.user = user; } public ClaimSet Issuer { get { return ClaimSet.System; } } public string Id { get { return this.id; } } public bool Evaluate(EvaluationContext evaluationContext, ref object state) { evaluationContext.AddClaimSet(this, new DefaultClaimSet(System.IdentityModel.Claims.Claim.CreateNameClaim(user.Identity.Name))); evaluationContext.Properties["Identities"] = new List<IIdentity>(new IIdentity[] { user.Identity }); evaluationContext.Properties["Principal"] = user; return true; } } A WCF Data Service, as any other WCF Service, contains a service host where this interceptor can be injected. The following code illustrates how that can be done in the “svc” file. <%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="ContactsDataService" Factory="AppServiceHostFactory" %> using System; using System.ServiceModel; using System.ServiceModel.Activation; using Microsoft.ServiceModel.Web; class AppServiceHostFactory : ServiceHostFactory { protected override ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) { WebServiceHost2 result = new WebServiceHost2(serviceType, true, baseAddresses); result.Interceptors.Add(new SamlAuthenticationInterceptor()); return result; } } WCF Data Services includes an specific WCF host of out the box (DataServiceHost). However, the service is not affected at all if you replace it with a custom one as I am doing in the code above (WebServiceHost2 is part of the REST Starter kit). Finally, the client application needs to pass the SAML token somehow to the data service. In case you are using any Http client library for consuming the data service, that’s easy to do, you only need to include the SAML token as part of the “Authorization” header. If you are using the auto-generated data service proxy, a little piece of code is needed to inject a SAML token into the DataServiceContext instance. That class provides an event “SendingRequest” that any client application can leverage to include custom code that modified the Http request before it is sent to the service. So, you can easily create an extension method for the DataServiceContext that negotiates the SAML token with an existing STS, and adds that token as part of the “Authorization” header. public static class DataServiceContextExtensions { public static void ConfigureFederatedCredentials(this DataServiceContext context, string baseStsAddress, string realm) { string address = string.Format(STSAddressFormat, baseStsAddress, realm); string token = NegotiateSecurityToken(address); context.SendingRequest += (source, args) => { args.RequestHeaders.Add("Authorization", token); }; } private string NegotiateSecurityToken(string address) { } } I left the NegociateSecurityToken method empty for this extension as it depends pretty much on how you are negotiating tokens from an existing STS. In case you want to end-to-end REST solution that involves an Http endpoint for the STS, you should definitely take a look at the Thinktecture starter STS project in codeplex.

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Communication Between Your PC and Azure VM via Windows Azure Connect

- by Shaun

With the new release of the Windows Azure platform there are a lot of new features available. In my previous post I introduced a little bit about one of them, the remote desktop access to azure virtual machine. Now I would like to talk about another cool stuff – Windows Azure Connect. What’s Windows Azure Connect I would like to quote the definition of the Windows Azure Connect in MSDN With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IP-sec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. IP-sec protects communications over Internet Protocol (IP) networks through the use of cryptographic security services. There’s an image available at the MSDN as well that I would like to forward here As we can see, using the Windows Azure Connect the Worker Role 1 and Web Role 1 are connected with the development machines and database servers which some of them are inside the organization some are not. With the Windows Azure Connect, the roles deployed on the cloud could consume the resource which located inside our Intranet or anywhere in the world. That means the roles can connect to the local database, access the local shared resource such as share files, folders and printers, etc. Difference between Windows Azure Connect and AppFabric It seems that the Windows Azure Connect are duplicated with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Both of them are aiming to solve the problem on how to communication between the resource in the cloud and inside the local network. The table below lists the differences in my understanding. Category Windows Azure Connect Windows Azure AppFabric Purpose An IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure roles. An application service running on the cloud. Connectivity IP-sec, Domain-joint Net Tcp, Http, Https Components Windows Azure Connect Driver Service Bus, Access Control, Caching Usage Azure roles connect to local database server Azure roles use local shared files, folders and printers, etc. Azure roles join the local AD. Expose the local service to Internet. Move the authorization process to the cloud. Integrate with existing identities such as Live ID, Google ID, etc. with existing local services. Utilize the distributed cache. And also some scenarios on which of them should be used. Scenario Connect AppFabric I have a service deployed in the Intranet and I want the people can use it from the Internet. Y I have a website deployed on Azure and need to use a database which deployed inside the company. And I don’t want to expose the database to the Internet. Y I have a service deployed in the Intranet and is using AD authorization. I have a website deployed on Azure which needs to use this service. Y I have a service deployed in the Intranet and some people on the Internet can use it but need to be authorized and authenticated. Y I have a service in Intranet, and a website deployed on Azure. This service can be used from Internet and that website should be able to use it as well by AD authorization for more functionalities. Y Y How to Enable Windows Azure Connect OK we talked a lot information about the Windows Azure Connect and differences with the Windows Azure AppFabric. Now let’s see how to enable and use the Windows Azure Connect. First of all, since this feature is in CTP stage we should apply before use it. On the Windows Azure Portal we can see our CTP features status under Home, Beta Program page. You can send the apply to join the Beta Programs to Microsoft in this page. After a few days the Microsoft will send an email to you (the email of your Live ID) when it’s available. In my case we can see that the Windows Azure Connect had been activated by Microsoft and then we can click the Connect button on top, or we can click the Virtual Network item from the left navigation bar. The first thing we need, if it’s our first time to enter the Connect page, is to enable the Windows Azure Connect. After that we can see our Windows Azure Connect information in this page. Add a Local Machine to Azure Connect As we explained below the Windows Azure Connect can make an IP-sec connection between the local machines and azure role instances. So that we firstly add a local machine into our Azure Connect. To do this we will click the Install Local Endpoint button on top and then the portal will give us an URL. Copy this URL to the machine we want to add and it will download the software to us. This software will be installed in the local machines which we want to join the Connect. After installed there will be a tray-icon appeared to indicate this machine had been joint our Connect. The local application will be refreshed to the Windows Azure Platform every 5 minutes but we can click the Refresh button to let it retrieve the latest status at once. Currently my local machine is ready for connect and we can see my machine in the Windows Azure Portal if we switched back to the portal and selected back Activated Endpoints node. Add a Windows Azure Role to Azure Connect Let’s create a very simple azure project with a basic ASP.NET web role inside. To make it available on Windows Azure Connect we will open the azure project property of this role from the solution explorer in the Visual Studio, and select the Virtual Network tab, check the Activate Windows Azure Connect. The next step is to get the activation token from the Windows Azure Portal. In the same page there is a button named Get Activation Token. Click this button then the portal will display the token to me. We copied this token and pasted to the box in the Visual Studio tab. Then we deployed this application to azure. After completed the deployment we can see the role instance was listed in the Windows Azure Portal - Virtual Connect section. Establish the Connect Group The final task is to create a connect group which contains the machines and role instances need to be connected each other. This can be done in the portal very easy. The machines and instances will NOT be connected until we created the group for them. The machines and instances can be used in one or more groups. In the Virtual Connect section click the Groups and Roles node from the left side navigation bar and clicked the Create Group button on top. This will bring up a dialog to us. What we need to do is to specify a group name, description; and then we need to select the local computers and azure role instances into this group. After the Azure Fabric updated the group setting we can see the groups and the endpoints in the page. And if we switch back to the local machine we can see that the tray-icon have been changed and the status turned connected. The Windows Azure Connect will update the group information every 5 minutes. If you find the status was still in Disconnected please right-click the tray-icon and select the Refresh menu to retrieve the latest group policy to make it connected. Test the Azure Connect between the Local Machine and the Azure Role Instance Now our local machine and azure role instance had been connected. This means each of them can communication to others in IP level. For example we can open the SQL Server port so that our azure role can connect to it by using the machine name or the IP address. The Windows Azure Connect uses IPv6 to connect between the local machines and role instances. You can get the IP address from the Windows Azure Portal Virtual Network section when select an endpoint. I don’t want to take a full example for how to use the Connect but would like to have two very simple tests. The first one would be PING. When a local machine and role instance are connected through the Windows Azure Connect we can PING any of them if we opened the ICMP protocol in the Filewall setting. To do this we need to run a command line before test. Open the command window on the local machine and the role instance, execute the command as following netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="ICMPv6" dir=in action=allow enable=yes protocol=icmpv6 Thanks to Jason Chen, Patriek van Dorp, Anton Staykov and Steve Marx, they helped me to enable the ICMPv6 setting. For the full discussion we made please visit here. You can use the Remote Desktop Access feature to logon the azure role instance. Please refer my previous blog post to get to know how to use the Remote Desktop Access in Windows Azure. Then we can PING the machine or the role instance by specifying its name. Below is the screen I PING my local machine from my azure instance. We can use the IPv6 address to PING each other as well. Like the image following I PING to my role instance from my local machine thought the IPv6 address. Another example I would like to demonstrate here is folder sharing. I shared a folder in my local machine and then if we logged on the role instance we can see the folder content from the file explorer window. Summary In this blog post I introduced about another new feature – Windows Azure Connect. With this feature our local resources and role instances (virtual machines) can be connected to each other. In this way we can make our azure application using our local stuff such as database servers, printers, etc. without expose them to Internet. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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What's up with LDoms: Part 1 - Introduction & Basic Concepts

- by Stefan Hinker

LDoms - the correct name is Oracle VM Server for SPARC - have been around for quite a while now. But to my surprise, I get more and more requests to explain how they work or to give advise on how to make good use of them. This made me think that writing up a few articles discussing the different features would be a good idea. Now - I don't intend to rewrite the LDoms Admin Guide or to copy and reformat the (hopefully) well known "Beginners Guide to LDoms" by Tony Shoumack from 2007. Those documents are very recommendable - especially the Beginners Guide, although based on LDoms 1.0, is still a good place to begin with. However, LDoms have come a long way since then, and I hope to contribute to their adoption by discussing how they work and what features there are today. In this and the following posts, I will use the term "LDoms" as a common abbreviation for Oracle VM Server for SPARC, just because it's a lot shorter and easier to type (and presumably, read). So, just to get everyone on the same baseline, lets briefly discuss the basic concepts of virtualization with LDoms. LDoms make use of a hypervisor as a layer of abstraction between real, physical hardware and virtual hardware. This virtual hardware is then used to create a number of guest systems which each behave very similar to a system running on bare metal: Each has its own OBP, each will install its own copy of the Solaris OS and each will see a certain amount of CPU, memory, disk and network resources available to it. Unlike some other type 1 hypervisors running on x86 hardware, the SPARC hypervisor is embedded in the system firmware and makes use both of supporting functions in the sun4v SPARC instruction set as well as the overall CPU architecture to fulfill its function. The CMT architecture of the supporting CPUs (T1 through T4) provide a large number of cores and threads to the OS. For example, the current T4 CPU has eight cores, each running 8 threads, for a total of 64 threads per socket. To the OS, this looks like 64 CPUs. The SPARC hypervisor, when creating guest systems, simply assigns a certain number of these threads exclusively to one guest, thus avoiding the overhead of having to schedule OS threads to CPUs, as do typical x86 hypervisors. The hypervisor only assigns CPUs and then steps aside. It is not involved in the actual work being dispatched from the OS to the CPU, all it does is maintain isolation between different guests. Likewise, memory is assigned exclusively to individual guests. Here, the hypervisor provides generic mappings between the physical hardware addresses and the guest's views on memory. Again, the hypervisor is not involved in the actual memory access, it only maintains isolation between guests. During the inital setup of a system with LDoms, you start with one special domain, called the Control Domain. Initially, this domain owns all the hardware available in the system, including all CPUs, all RAM and all IO resources. If you'd be running the system un-virtualized, this would be what you'd be working with. To allow for guests, you first resize this initial domain (also called a primary domain in LDoms speak), assigning it a small amount of CPU and memory. This frees up most of the available CPU and memory resources for guest domains. IO is a little more complex, but very straightforward. When LDoms 1.0 first came out, the only way to provide IO to guest systems was to create virtual disk and network services and attach guests to these services. In the meantime, several different ways to connect guest domains to IO have been developed, the most recent one being SR-IOV support for network devices released in version 2.2 of Oracle VM Server for SPARC. I will cover these more advanced features in detail later. For now, lets have a short look at the initial way IO was virtualized in LDoms: For virtualized IO, you create two services, one "Virtual Disk Service" or vds, and one "Virtual Switch" or vswitch. You can, of course, also create more of these, but that's more advanced than I want to cover in this introduction. These IO services now connect real, physical IO resources like a disk LUN or a networt port to the virtual devices that are assigned to guest domains. For disk IO, the normal case would be to connect a physical LUN (or some other storage option that I'll discuss later) to one specific guest. That guest would be assigned a virtual disk, which would appear to be just like a real LUN to the guest, while the IO is actually routed through the virtual disk service down to the physical device. For network, the vswitch acts very much like a real, physical ethernet switch - you connect one physical port to it for outside connectivity and define one or more connections per guest, just like you would plug cables between a real switch and a real system. For completeness, there is another service that provides console access to guest domains which mimics the behavior of serial terminal servers. The connections between the virtual devices on the guest's side and the virtual IO services in the primary domain are created by the hypervisor. It uses so called "Logical Domain Channels" or LDCs to create point-to-point connections between all of these devices and services. These LDCs work very similar to high speed serial connections and are configured automatically whenever the Control Domain adds or removes virtual IO. To see all this in action, now lets look at a first example. I will start with a newly installed machine and configure the control domain so that it's ready to create guest systems. In a first step, after we've installed the software, let's start the virtual console service and downsize the primary domain. root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-c-- UART 512 261632M 0.3% 2d 13h 58m root@sun # ldm add-vconscon port-range=5000-5100 \ primary-console primary root@sun # svcadm enable vntsd root@sun # svcs vntsd STATE STIME FMRI online 9:53:21 svc:/ldoms/vntsd:default root@sun # ldm set-vcpu 16 primary root@sun # ldm set-mau 1 primary root@sun # ldm start-reconf primary root@sun # ldm set-memory 7680m primary root@sun # ldm add-config initial root@sun # shutdown -y -g0 -i6 So what have I done: I've defined a range of ports (5000-5100) for the virtual network terminal service and then started that service. The vnts will later provide console connections to guest systems, very much like serial NTS's do in the physical world. Next, I assigned 16 vCPUs (on this platform, a T3-4, that's two cores) to the primary domain, freeing the rest up for future guest systems. I also assigned one MAU to this domain. A MAU is a crypto unit in the T3 CPU. These need to be explicitly assigned to domains, just like CPU or memory. (This is no longer the case with T4 systems, where crypto is always available everywhere.) Before I reassigned the memory, I started what's called a "delayed reconfiguration" session. That avoids actually doing the change right away, which would take a considerable amount of time in this case. Instead, I'll need to reboot once I'm all done. I've assigned 7680MB of RAM to the primary. That's 8GB less the 512MB which the hypervisor uses for it's own private purposes. You can, depending on your needs, work with less. I'll spend a dedicated article on sizing, discussing the pros and cons in detail. Finally, just before the reboot, I saved my work on the ILOM, to make this configuration available after a powercycle of the box. (It'll always be available after a simple reboot, but the ILOM needs to know the configuration of the hypervisor after a power-cycle, before the primary domain is booted.) Now, lets create a first disk service and a first virtual switch which is connected to the physical network device igb2. We will later use these to connect virtual disks and virtual network ports of our guest systems to real world storage and network. root@sun # ldm add-vds primary-vds root@sun # ldm add-vswitch net-dev=igb2 switch-primary primary You are free to choose whatever names you like for the virtual disk service and the virtual switch. I strongly recommend that you choose names that make sense to you and describe the function of each service in the context of your implementation. For the vswitch, for example, you could choose names like "admin-vswitch" or "production-network" etc. This already concludes the configuration of the control domain. We've freed up considerable amounts of CPU and RAM for guest systems and created the necessary infrastructure - console, vts and vswitch - so that guests systems can actually interact with the outside world. The system is now ready to create guests, which I'll describe in the next section. For further reading, here are some recommendable links: The LDoms 2.2 Admin Guide The "Beginners Guide to LDoms" The LDoms Information Center on MOS LDoms on OTN

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Windows Azure: Announcing release of Windows Azure SDK 2.2 (with lots of goodies)

- by ScottGu

Earlier today I blogged about a big update we made today to Windows Azure, and some of the great new features it provides. Today I’m also excited to also announce the release of the Windows Azure SDK 2.2. Today’s SDK release adds even more great features including: Visual Studio 2013 Support Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter The below post has more details on what’s available in today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release. Also head over to Channel 9 to see the new episode of the Visual Studio Toolbox show that will be available shortly, and which highlights these features in a video demonstration. Visual Studio 2013 Support Version 2.2 of the Window Azure SDK is the first official version of the SDK to support the final RTM release of Visual Studio 2013. If you installed the 2.1 SDK with the Preview of Visual Studio 2013 we recommend that you upgrade your projects to SDK 2.2. SDK 2.2 also works side by side with the SDK 2.0 and SDK 2.1 releases on Visual Studio 2012: Integrated Windows Azure Sign In within Visual Studio Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio is one of the big improvements added with this Windows Azure SDK release. Integrated sign-in support enables developers to develop/test/manage Windows Azure resources within Visual Studio without having to download or use management certificates. You can now just right-click on the “Windows Azure” icon within the Server Explorer inside Visual Studio and choose the “Connect to Windows Azure” context menu option to connect to Windows Azure: Doing this will prompt you to enter the email address of the account you wish to sign-in with: You can use either a Microsoft Account (e.g. Windows Live ID) or an Organizational account (e.g. Active Directory) as the email. The dialog will update with an appropriate login prompt depending on which type of email address you enter: Once you sign-in you’ll see the Windows Azure resources that you have permissions to manage show up automatically within the Visual Studio Server Explorer (and you can start using them): With this new integrated sign in experience you are now able to publish web apps, deploy VMs and cloud services, use Windows Azure diagnostics, and fully interact with your Windows Azure services within Visual Studio without the need for a management certificate. All of the authentication is handled using the Windows Azure Active Directory associated with your Windows Azure account (details on this can be found in my earlier blog post). Integrating authentication this way end-to-end across the Service Management APIs + Dev Tools + Management Portal + PowerShell automation scripts enables a much more secure and flexible security model within Windows Azure, and makes it much more convenient to securely manage multiple developers + administrators working on a project. It also allows organizations and enterprises to use the same authentication model that they use for their developers on-premises in the cloud. It also ensures that employees who leave an organization immediately lose access to their company’s cloud based resources once their Active Directory account is suspended. Filtering/Subscription Management Once you login within Visual Studio, you can filter which Windows Azure subscriptions/regions are visible within the Server Explorer by right-clicking the “Filter Services” context menu within the Server Explorer. You can also use the “Manage Subscriptions” context menu to mange your Windows Azure Subscriptions: Bringing up the “Manage Subscriptions” dialog allows you to see which accounts you are currently using, as well as which subscriptions are within them: The “Certificates” tab allows you to continue to import and use management certificates to manage Windows Azure resources as well. We have not removed any functionality with today’s update – all of the existing scenarios that previously supported management certificates within Visual Studio continue to work just fine. The new integrated sign-in support provided with today’s release is purely additive. Note: the SQL Database node and the Mobile Service node in Server Explorer do not support integrated sign-in at this time. Therefore, you will only see databases and mobile services under those nodes if you have a management certificate to authorize access to them. We will enable them with integrated sign-in in a future update. Remote Debugging Cloud Resources within Visual Studio Today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release adds support for remote debugging many types of Windows Azure resources. With live, remote debugging support from within Visual Studio, you are now able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. Let’s walkthrough how to enable remote debugging for a Cloud Service: Remote Debugging of Cloud Services To enable remote debugging for your cloud service, select Debug as the Build Configuration on the Common Settings tab of your Cloud Service’s publish dialog wizard: Then click the Advanced Settings tab and check the Enable Remote Debugging for all roles checkbox: Once your cloud service is published and running live in the cloud, simply set a breakpoint in your local source code: Then use Visual Studio’s Server Explorer to select the Cloud Service instance deployed in the cloud, and then use the Attach Debugger context menu on the role or to a specific VM instance of it: Once the debugger attaches to the Cloud Service, and a breakpoint is hit, you’ll be able to use the rich debugging capabilities of Visual Studio to debug the cloud instance remotely, in real-time, and see exactly how your app is running in the cloud. Today’s remote debugging support is super powerful, and makes it much easier to develop and test applications for the cloud. Support for remote debugging Cloud Services is available as of today, and we’ll also enable support for remote debugging Web Sites shortly. Firewall Management Support with SQL Databases By default we enable a security firewall around SQL Databases hosted within Windows Azure. This ensures that only your application (or IP addresses you approve) can connect to them and helps make your infrastructure secure by default. This is great for protection at runtime, but can sometimes be a pain at development time (since by default you can’t connect/manage the database remotely within Visual Studio if the security firewall blocks your instance of VS from connecting to it). One of the cool features we’ve added with today’s release is support that makes it easy to enable and configure the security firewall directly within Visual Studio. Now with the SDK 2.2 release, when you try and connect to a SQL Database using the Visual Studio Server Explorer, and a firewall rule prevents access to the database from your machine, you will be prompted to add a firewall rule to enable access from your local IP address: You can simply click Add Firewall Rule and a new rule will be automatically added for you. In some cases, the logic to detect your local IP may not be sufficient (for example: you are behind a corporate firewall that uses a range of IP addresses) and you may need to set up a firewall rule for a range of IP addresses in order to gain access. The new Add Firewall Rule dialog also makes this easy to do. Once connected you’ll be able to manage your SQL Database directly within the Visual Studio Server Explorer: This makes it much easier to work with databases in the cloud. Visual Studio 2013 RTM Virtual Machine Images Available for MSDN Subscribers Last week we released the General Availability Release of Visual Studio 2013 to the web. This is an awesome release with a ton of new features. With today’s Windows Azure update we now have a set of pre-configured VM images of VS 2013 available within the Windows Azure Management Portal for use by MSDN customers. This enables you to create a VM in the cloud with VS 2013 pre-installed on it in with only a few clicks: Windows Azure now provides the fastest and easiest way to get started doing development with Visual Studio 2013. Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET (Preview) Having the ability to automate the creation, deployment, and tear down of resources is a key requirement for applications running in the cloud. It also helps immensely when running dev/test scenarios and coded UI tests against pre-production environments. Today we are releasing a preview of a new set of Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET. These new libraries make it easy to automate tasks using any .NET language (e.g. C#, VB, F#, etc). Previously this automation capability was only available through the Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets or to developers who were willing to write their own wrappers for the Windows Azure Service Management REST API. Modern .NET Developer Experience We’ve worked to design easy-to-understand .NET APIs that still map well to the underlying REST endpoints, making sure to use and expose the modern .NET functionality that developers expect today: Portable Class Library (PCL) support targeting applications built for any .NET Platform (no platform restriction) Shipped as a set of focused NuGet packages with minimal dependencies to simplify versioning Support async/await task based asynchrony (with easy sync overloads) Shared infrastructure for common error handling, tracing, configuration, HTTP pipeline manipulation, etc. Factored for easy testability and mocking Built on top of popular libraries like HttpClient and Json.NET Below is a list of a few of the management client classes that are shipping with today’s initial preview release: .NET Class Name Supports Operations for these Assets (and potentially more) ManagementClient Locations Credentials Subscriptions Certificates ComputeManagementClient Hosted Services Deployments Virtual Machines Virtual Machine Images & Disks StorageManagementClient Storage Accounts WebSiteManagementClient Web Sites Web Site Publish Profiles Usage Metrics Repositories VirtualNetworkManagementClient Networks Gateways Automating Creating a Virtual Machine using .NET Let’s walkthrough an example of how we can use the new Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET to fully automate creating a Virtual Machine. I’m deliberately showing a scenario with a lot of custom options configured – including VHD image gallery enumeration, attaching data drives, network endpoints + firewall rules setup - to show off the full power and richness of what the new library provides. We’ll begin with some code that demonstrates how to enumerate through the built-in Windows images within the standard Windows Azure VM Gallery. We’ll search for the first VM image that has the word “Windows” in it and use that as our base image to build the VM from. We’ll then create a cloud service container in the West US region to host it within: We can then customize some options on it such as setting up a computer name, admin username/password, and hostname. We’ll also open up a remote desktop (RDP) endpoint through its security firewall: We’ll then specify the VHD host and data drives that we want to mount on the Virtual Machine, and specify the size of the VM we want to run it in: Once everything has been set up the call to create the virtual machine is executed asynchronously In a few minutes we’ll then have a completely deployed VM running on Windows Azure with all of the settings (hard drives, VM size, machine name, username/password, network endpoints + firewall settings) fully configured and ready for us to use: Preview Availability via NuGet The Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET are now available via NuGet. Because they are still in preview form, you’ll need to add the –IncludePrerelease switch when you go to retrieve the packages. The Package Manager Console screen shot below demonstrates how to get the entire set of libraries to manage your Windows Azure assets: You can also install them within your .NET projects by right clicking on the VS Solution Explorer and using the Manage NuGet Packages context menu command. Make sure to select the “Include Prerelease” drop-down for them to show up, and then you can install the specific management libraries you need for your particular scenarios: Open Source License The new Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET make it super easy to automate management operations within Windows Azure – whether they are for Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Storage Accounts, Web Sites, and more. Like the rest of the Windows Azure SDK, we are releasing the source code under an open source (Apache 2) license and it is hosted at https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-net/tree/master/libraries if you wish to contribute. PowerShell Enhancements and our New Script Center Today, we are also shipping Windows Azure PowerShell 0.7.0 (which is a separate download). You can find the full change log here. Here are some of the improvements provided with it: Windows Azure Active Directory authentication support Script Center providing many sample scripts to automate common tasks on Windows Azure New cmdlets for Media Services and SQL Database Script Center Windows Azure enables you to script and automate a lot of tasks using PowerShell. People often ask for more pre-built samples of common scenarios so that they can use them to learn and tweak/customize. With this in mind, we are excited to introduce a new Script Center that we are launching for Windows Azure. You can learn about how to scripting with Windows Azure with a get started article. You can then find many sample scripts across different solutions, including infrastructure, data management, web, and more: All of the sample scripts are hosted on TechNet with links from the Windows Azure Script Center. Each script is complete with good code comments, detailed descriptions, and examples of usage. Summary Visual Studio 2013 and the Windows Azure SDK 2.2 make it easier than ever to get started developing rich cloud applications. Along with the Windows Azure Developer Center’s growing set of .NET developer resources to guide your development efforts, today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release should make your development experience more enjoyable and efficient. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Right-Time Retail Part 3

- by David Dorf

This is part three of the three-part series. Read Part 1 and Part 2 first. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Marketing Real-time isn’t just about executing faster; it extends to interactions with customers as well. As an industry, we’ve spent many years analyzing all the data that’s been collected. Yes, that data has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions like where to open new stores, how to assort those stores, and how to price our products. But the recent advances in technology are now making it possible to analyze and deliver that data very quickly… fast enough to impact a potential sale in near real-time. Let me give you two examples. Salesmen in car dealerships get pretty good at sizing people up. When a potential customer walks in the door, it doesn’t take long for the salesman to figure out the revenue at stake. Is this person a real buyer, or just looking for a fun test drive? Will this person buy today or three months from now? Will this person opt for the expensive packages, or go bare bones? While the salesman certainly asks some leading questions, much of information is discerned through body language. But body language doesn’t translate very well over the web. Eloqua, which was acquired by Oracle earlier this year, reads internet body language. By tracking the behavior of the people visiting your web site, Eloqua categorizes visitors based on their propensity to buy. While Eloqua’s roots have been in B2B, we’ve been looking at leveraging the technology with ATG to target B2C. Knowing what sites were previously visited, how often the customer has been to your site recently, and how long they’ve spent searching can help understand where the customer is in their purchase journey. And knowing that bit of information may be enough to help close the deal with a real-time offer, follow-up email, or online customer service pop-up. This isn’t so different from the days gone by when the clerk behind the counter of the corner store noticed you were lingering in a particular aisle, so he walked over to help you compare two products and close the sale. You appreciated the personalized service, and he knew the value of the long-term relationship. Move that same concept into the digital world and you have Oracle’s CX Suite, a cloud-based offering of end-to-end customer experience tools, assembled primarily from acquisitions. Those tools are Oracle Marketing (Eloqua), Oracle Commerce (ATG, Endeca), Oracle Sales (Oracle CRM On Demand), Oracle Service (RightNow), Oracle Social (Collective Intellect, Vitrue, Involver), and Oracle Content (Fatwire). We are providing the glue that binds the CIO and CMO together to unleash synergies that drive the top-line higher, and by virtue of the cloud-approach, keep costs at bay. My second example of real-time marketing takes place in the store but leverages the concepts of Web marketing. In 1962 the decline of personalized service in retail began. Anyone know the significance of that year? That’s when Target, K-Mart, and Walmart each opened their first stores, and over the succeeding years the industry chose scale over personal service. No longer were you known as “Jane with the snotty kid so make sure we check her out fast,” but you suddenly became “time-starved female age 20-30 with kids.” I’m not saying that was a bad thing – it was the right thing for our industry at the time, and it enabled a huge amount of growth, cheaper prices, and more variety of products. But scale alone is no longer good enough. Today’s sophisticated consumer demands scale, experience, and personal attention. To some extent we’ve delivered that on websites via the magic of cookies, your willingness to log in, and sophisticated data analytics. What store manager wouldn’t love a report detailing all the visitors to his store, where they came from, and which products that examined? People trackers are getting more sophisticated, incorporating infrared, video analytics, and even face recognition. (Next time you walk in front on a mannequin, don’t be surprised if it’s looking back.) But the ultimate marketing conduit is the mobile phone. Since each mobile phone emits a unique number on WiFi networks, it becomes the cookie of the physical world. Assuming congress keeps privacy safeguards reasonable, we’ll have a win-win situation for both retailers and consumers. Retailers get to know more about the consumer’s purchase journey, and consumers get higher levels of service with the retailer. When I call my bank, a couple things happen before the call is connected. A reverse look-up on my phone number identifies me so my accounts can be retrieved from Siebel CRM. Then the system anticipates why I’m calling based on recent transactions. In this example, it sees that I was just charged a foreign currency fee, so it assumes that’s the reason I’m calling. It puts all the relevant information on the customer service rep’s screen as it connects the call. When I complain about the fee, the rep immediately sees I’m a great customer and I travel lots, so she suggests switching me to their traveler’s card that doesn’t have foreign transaction fees. That technology is powered by a product called Oracle Real-Time Decisions, a rules engine built to execute very quickly, basically in the time it takes the phone to ring once. So let’s combine the power of that product with our new-found mobile cookie and provide contextual customer interactions in real-time. Our first opportunity comes when a customer crosses a pre-defined geo-fence, typically a boundary around the store. Context is the key to our interaction: that’s the customer (known or anonymous), the time of day and day of week, and location. Thomas near the downtown store on a Wednesday at noon means he’s heading to lunch. If he were near the mall location on a Saturday morning, that’s a completely different context. But on his way to lunch, we’ll let Thomas know that we’ve got a new shipment of ASICS running shoes on display with a simple text message. We used the context to look-up Thomas’ past purchases and understood he was an avid runner. We used the fact that this was lunchtime to select the type of message, in this case an informational message instead of an offer. Thomas enters the store, phone in hand, and walks to the shoe department. He scans one of the new ASICS shoes using the convenient QR Codes we provided on the shelf-tags, but then he starts scanning low-end Nikes. Each scan is another opportunity to both learn from Thomas and potentially interact via another message. Since he historically buys low-end Nikes and keeps scanning them, he’s likely falling back into his old ways. Our marketing rules are currently set to move loyal customer to higher margin products. We could have set the dials to increase visit frequency, move overstocked items, increase basket size, or many other settings, but today we are trying to move Thomas to higher-margin products. We send Thomas another text message, this time it’s a personalized offer for 10% off ASICS good for 24 hours. Offering him a discount on Nikes would be throwing margin away since he buys those anyway. We are using our marketing dollars to change behavior that increases the long-term value of Thomas. He decides to buy the ASICS and scans the discount code on his phone at checkout. Checkout is yet another opportunity to interact with Thomas, so the transaction is sent back to Oracle RTD for evaluation. Since Thomas didn’t buy anything with the shoes, we’ll print a bounce-back coupon on the receipt offering 30% off ASICS socks if he returns within seven days. We have successfully started moving Thomas from low-margin to high-margin products. In both of these marketing scenarios, we are able to leverage data in near real-time to decide how best to interact with the customer and lead to an increase in the lifetime value of the customer. The key here is acting at the moment the customer shows interest using the context of the situation. We aren’t pushing random products at haphazard times. We are tailoring the marketing to be very specific to this customer, and it’s the technology that allows this to happen in near real-time. Conclusion As we enable more right-time integrations and interactions, retailers will begin to offer increased service to their customers. Localized and personalized service at scale will drive loyalty and lead to meaningful revenue growth for the retailers that execute well. Our industry needs to support Commerce Anywhere…and commerce anytime as well.

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When pointing to new DNS servers is there any chance of E-mails being lost if the old E-mail hosting service is still up?

- by LaserBeak

I am changing webhosts and will be using the new hosts mail servers instead of the old ones. I have created all the correctly named mailboxes on the new service but have also not yet cut ties with the old webhost. I am expecting that even if the new DNS values which point to the new hosts DNS servers and respective SOA\zone file with the new MX values have not yet propagated and an E-mail is directed at the old hosts mail servers as per the mx records in the SOA\zone records which the old hosting provider holds, the E-mail would still come through to the mailbox that's on the old host providers mail servers. So I am just trying to reaffirm if I got this right and it's essentially impossible for me to loose an E-mail since it will hit either the old hosts mail servers or the new ones ? Also is it possible to configure the same E-mail account to check and collect mail from different mail servers by entering multiple pop3 addresses ? And if I choose to keep the old web hosts mail hosting services as a backup by specifying the mx records for it with a lower priority in the SOA records hosted by the new webhost, is it possible to have any incoming E-mails sent to both servers by the mail daemon so I have two copies? Or is my only option having the primary mail server forward the E-mail somehow to the old mailserver ?

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Ports do not open after rules appended in iptables

- by user2699451

I have a server that I am trying to setup for OpenVPN. I have followed all the steps, but I see that when I try to connect to it in Windows, it doesn't allow me, it just hangs on connecting, so I did a nmap scan and I see that port 1194 is not open so naturally I append the rule to open 1194 with: iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 1194 -j ACCEPT followed by service iptables save and service iptables restart which all executed successfully. Then I try again, but it doesn't work and another nmap scan says that port 1194 is closed. Here is the iptables configuration: # Generated by iptables-save v1.4.7 on Thu Oct 31 09:47:38 2013 *nat :PREROUTING ACCEPT [27410:3091993] :POSTROUTING ACCEPT [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [5042:376160] -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE -A POSTROUTING -j SNAT --to-source 41.185.26.238 -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE COMMIT # Completed on Thu Oct 31 09:47:38 2013 # Generated by iptables-save v1.4.7 on Thu Oct 31 09:47:38 2013 *filter :INPUT ACCEPT [23571:2869068] :FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [27558:3656524] :vl - [0:0] -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 5252 -m comment --comment "SSH Secure" -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type 8 -m state --state NEW,RELATED,ESTABLISHED -$ -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -m comment --comment "SSH" -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -m comment --comment "HTTP" -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 8080 -m comment --comment "HTTPS" -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 443 -m comment --comment "HTTP Encrypted" -j ACCEP$ -A INPUT -i eth0 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 1723 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -i eth0 -p gre -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 1194 -j ACCEPT -A FORWARD -i ppp+ -o eth0 -j ACCEPT -A FORWARD -i eth0 -o ppp+ -j ACCEPT -A FORWARD -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A FORWARD -s 10.8.0.0/24 -j ACCEPT -A FORWARD -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-port-unreachable -A OUTPUT -p icmp -m icmp --icmp-type 0 -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j A$ COMMIT # Completed on Thu Oct 31 09:47:38 2013 and my nmap scan from: localhost: nmap localhost Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-10-31 09:53 SAST Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1) Host is up (0.000011s latency). Other addresses for localhost (not scanned): 127.0.0.1 Not shown: 996 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 25/tcp open smtp 443/tcp open https 1723/tcp open pptp Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.06 seconds remote pc: nmap [server ip] Starting Nmap 6.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-10-31 09:53 SAST Nmap scan report for rla04-nix1.wadns.net (41.185.26.238) Host is up (0.025s latency). Not shown: 858 filtered ports, 139 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 443/tcp open https 8008/tcp open http Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 15.70 seconds So, I do not know what is causing this, any assistance will be appreciated! UPDATE AFTER FIRST ANSWER::: [root@RLA04-NIX1 ~]# iptables -A FORWARD -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT [root@RLA04-NIX1 ~]# iptables -A FORWARD -s 10.8.0.0/24 -j ACCEPT [root@RLA04-NIX1 ~]# iptables -A FORWARD -j REJECT [root@RLA04-NIX1 ~]# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 10.8.0.0/24 -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE [root@RLA04-NIX1 ~]# service iptables save iptables: Saving firewall rules to /etc/sysconfig/iptables:[ OK ] [root@RLA04-NIX1 ~]# service iptables restart iptables: Flushing firewall rules: [ OK ] iptables: Setting chains to policy ACCEPT: filter nat [ OK ] iptables: Unloading modules: [ OK ] iptables: Applying firewall rules: [ OK ] [root@RLA04-NIX1 ~]# lsof -i :1194 -bash: lsof: command not found iptables -L -n Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:5252 /* SSH Secure */ ACCEPT icmp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 icmp type 8 state NEW,RELATED,ESTABLISHED ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:22 /* SSH */ ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:80 /* HTTP */ ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:8080 /* HTTPS */ ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:443 /* HTTP Encrypted */ ACCEPT tcp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 tcp dpt:1723 ACCEPT 47 -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 ACCEPT udp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 udp dpt:1194 Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED ACCEPT all -- 10.8.0.0/24 0.0.0.0/0 REJECT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 reject-with icmp-port-unreachable ACCEPT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED ACCEPT all -- 10.8.0.0/24 0.0.0.0/0 REJECT all -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 reject-with icmp-port-unreachable Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT) target prot opt source destination ACCEPT icmp -- 0.0.0.0/0 0.0.0.0/0 icmp type 0 state RELATED,ESTABLISHED Chain vl (0 references) target prot opt source destination [root@RLA04-NIX1 ~]# nmap localhostt Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-10-31 11:13 SAST remote pc nmap [server ip] Starting Nmap 6.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-10-31 11:11 SAST Nmap scan report for rla04-nix1.wadns.net (41.185.26.238) Host is up (0.020s latency). Not shown: 858 filtered ports, 139 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 443/tcp open https 8008/tcp open http Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.18 seconds localhost nmap localhost Starting Nmap 5.51 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-10-31 11:13 SAST Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1) Host is up (0.000011s latency). Other addresses for localhost (not scanned): 127.0.0.1 Not shown: 996 closed ports PORT STATE SERVICE 22/tcp open ssh 25/tcp open smtp 443/tcp open https 1723/tcp open pptp Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.06 seconds UPDATE AFTER SCANNING UDP PORTS Sorry, I am noob, I am still learning, but here is the output for: nmap -sU [server ip] Starting Nmap 6.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-10-31 11:33 SAST Nmap scan report for [server address] ([server ip]) Host is up (0.021s latency). Not shown: 997 open|filtered ports PORT STATE SERVICE 53/udp closed domain 123/udp closed ntp 33459/udp closed unknown Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 8.57 seconds btw, no changes have been made since post started (except for iptables changes)

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Problems with shutting down JBoss in Eclipse if I change JNDI port

- by Balint Pato

1st phase I have a problem shutting down my running JBoss instance under Eclipse since I changed the JNDI port of JBoss. Of course I can shut it down from the console view but not with the stop button (it still searches JNDI port at the default 1099 port). I'm looking forward to any solutions. Thank you! Used environment: JBoss 4.0.2 (using default) Eclipse 3.4.0. (using JBoss Tools 2.1.1.GA) Default ports: 1098, 1099 Changed ports: 11098, 11099 I changed the following part in jbosspath/server/default/conf/jboss-service.xml:    <mbean code="org.jboss.naming.NamingService" name="jboss:service=Naming" xmbean-dd="resource:xmdesc/NamingService-xmbean.xml">  <attribute name="CallByValue">false</attribute>  <attribute name="Port">11099</attribute>  <attribute name="BindAddress">${jboss.bind.address}</attribute>  <attribute name="RmiPort">11098</attribute>  <attribute name="RmiBindAddress">${jboss.bind.address}</attribute>  <depends optional-attribute-name="LookupPool" proxy-type="attribute">jboss.system:service=ThreadPool</depends> </mbean> <mbean code="org.jboss.naming.JNDIView" name="jboss:service=JNDIView" xmbean-dd="resource:xmdesc/JNDIView-xmbean.xml"> </mbean> Eclipse setup: About my JBoss Tools preferences: I had a previous version, I got this problem, I read about some bugfix in JbossTools, so updated to 2.1.1.GA. Now the buttons changed, and I've got a new preferences view, but I cannot modify anything...seems to be abnormal as well: Error dialog: The stacktrace: javax.naming.CommunicationException: Could not obtain connection to any of these urls: localhost:1099 [Root exception is javax.naming.CommunicationException: Failed to connect to server localhost:1099 [Root exception is javax.naming.ServiceUnavailableException: Failed to connect to server localhost:1099 [Root exception is java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect]]] at org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContext.checkRef(NamingContext.java:1385) at org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContext.lookup(NamingContext.java:579) at org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContext.lookup(NamingContext.java:572) at javax.naming.InitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:347) at org.jboss.Shutdown.main(Shutdown.java:202) Caused by: javax.naming.CommunicationException: Failed to connect to server localhost:1099 [Root exception is javax.naming.ServiceUnavailableException: Failed to connect to server localhost:1099 [Root exception is java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect]] at org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContext.getServer(NamingContext.java:254) at org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContext.checkRef(NamingContext.java:1370) ... 4 more Caused by: javax.naming.ServiceUnavailableException: Failed to connect to server localhost:1099 [Root exception is java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect] at org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContext.getServer(NamingContext.java:228) ... 5 more Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused: connect at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.socketConnect(Native Method) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.doConnect(PlainSocketImpl.java:305) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connectToAddress(PlainSocketImpl.java:171) at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.connect(PlainSocketImpl.java:158) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:452) at java.net.Socket.connect(Socket.java:402) at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:309) at java.net.Socket.<init>(Socket.java:211) at org.jnp.interfaces.TimedSocketFactory.createSocket(TimedSocketFactory.java:69) at org.jnp.interfaces.TimedSocketFactory.createSocket(TimedSocketFactory.java:62) at org.jnp.interfaces.NamingContext.getServer(NamingContext.java:224) ... 5 more Exception in thread "main" 2nd phase: After creating a new Server in File/new/other/server, it did appear in the preferences tab. Now the stop button is working (the server receives the shutdown messages without any additional modification of the jndi port -- there is no opportunity for it now) but it still throws an error message, though different, it's without exception stack trace: "Server JBoss 4.0 Server failed to stop."

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 19, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, February 19, 2010New ProjectsApplication Management Library: Application Management makes your application life easier. It will automatic do memory management, handle and log unhandled exceptions, profiling y...Audio Service - Play Wave Files From Windows Service: This is a windows service that Check a registry key, when the key is updated with a new wave file path the service plays the wave file.Aviamodels: 3d drawing AviamodelsControl of payment proofs program for Greek citizens: This is a program that is used for Greek citizens who want to keep track of their payment proofs.Cover Creator: Cover Creator gives you the possibility to create and print CD covers. Content of CD is taken from http://www.freedb.org/ or can be added/modyfied ...DevBoard: DevBoard is a webbased scrum tool that helps developers/team get a clear overview of the project progress. It's developed in C# and silverlight.Flex AdventureWorks: The is mostly a skunk-works application to help me get acclimated to CodePlex. The long term goal is to integrate a Flex UI with the AdventureWor...GRE Wordlist: An intuitive and customizable word list for GRE aspirants. Developed in Java using a word list similar to Barron's.Indexer: A desktop file Index and Search tool which allows you to choose a list of folders to index, and then search on later. It is based on Lucene.net an...Project Management Office (PMO) for SharePoint: Sample web part for the Code Mastery event in Boston, February 11, 2010.Restart SQL Audit Policy and Job: Resolve SQL 2008 Audit Network Connectivity Issue.Rounded Corners / DIV Container: The RoundedDiv round corners container is a skin-able, CSS compliant UI control. Select which corners should be rounded, collapse and expand the c...Silverlight Google Search Application: The Silverlight Google Search Application uses Google Search API and behaves like Internet Search Application with option to preview desired page i...Weather Forecast Control: MyWeather forecast control pulls up to date weather forecast information from The Weather Channel for your website.New ReleasesApplication Management Library: ApplicationManagement v1.0: First ReleaseAudio Service - Play Wave Files From Windows Service: Audio Service v1.0: This is a working version of the Audio Service. Please use as you need to.AutoMapper: 1.0.1 for Silverlight 3.0 Alpha: AutoMapper for Silverlight 3.0. Features not supported: IDataReader mapping IListSource mapping All other features are supported.Buzz Dot Net: Buzz Dot Net v.1.10219: Buzz Dot Net Library (Parser & Objects) + WPF Example (using MVVM & Threading)Canvas VSDOC Intellisense: V 1.0.0.0a: This release contains two JavaScript files: canvas-utils.js (can be referenced in both runtime and development environment) canvas-vsdoc.js (must ...Control of payment proofs program for Greek citizens: Payment Proofs: source codeCourier: Beta 2: Added Rx Framework support and re-factored how message registration and un-registration works Blog post explaining the updates and re-factoring c...Cover Creator: Initial release: This is initial stable release. For now only in Polish language.Employee Scheduler: Employee Scheduler 2.2: Small Bug found. Small total hour calculation bug. See http://employeescheduler.codeplex.com/WorkItem/View.aspx?WorkItemId=6059 Extract the files...EnhSim: Release v1.9.7.1: Release v1.9.7.1Implemented Dislodged Foreign Object trinket Whispering Fanged Skull now also procs off Flame shock dots You can toggle bloodlust o...Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.007: added SimpleSquareTest added Tortoise.Approve() for virtual proctor how to use virtual proctor: change the path in the proctor.txt file (located i...FolderSize: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.1.0: FolderSize.Win32.1.0.1.0 A simple utility intended to be used to scan harddrives for the folders that take most place and display this to the user...GLB Virtual Player Builder: v0.4.0 Beta: Allows for user to import and use archetypes for building players. The archetypes are contained in the file "archetypes.xml". This file is editab...Google Map WebPart from SharePoint List: GMap Stable Release: GMap Stable ReleaseHenge3D Physics Library for XNA: Henge3D Source (2010-02 R2): Fixed a build error related to an assembly attribute in XBOX 360 builds. Tweaked the controls in the sample when targeting the 360. Reduced the...Indexer: Beta Release 1: Just the initial/rough cut.NukeCS: NukeCS 5.2.3 Source Code: update version to 5.2.3ODOS: ODOS STABLE 1.5.0: Thank you for your patience while we develop this version. Not that much has been added, though. Just doing some sub-conscious stuff to make life...PoshBoard: PoshBoard 3.0 Beta 1: Welcome to the first beta release of PoshBoard 3.0 ! IMPORTANT WARNING : this release is absolutly not feature complete and is error-prone. Okay, ...Restart SQL Audit Policy and Job: Restart SQL 2008 Audit Policy and Job: This folder contains three pieces of source code: Server Audit Status (Started).xml - Import this on-schedule policy into your server's Policy-Ba...SAL- Self Artificial Learning: Artificial Learning 2AQV Working Proof Of Concept: This is the Simulation proof of concept version that comes after the 1aq version. AQ stands for Anwering Questions.SharePoint 2010 Word Automation: SP 2010 Word Automation - Workflow Actions 1.1: This release includes two new custom workflow activities for SharePoint designer Convert Folder Convert Library More information about these new...SharePoint Outlook Connector: Version 1.0.1.1: Exception Logging has been improved.Sharpy: Sharpy 1.2 Alpha: This is the third Sharpy release. A change has been made to allow overriding the master page from the controller. The release contains the single ...Silverlight Google Search Application: SL Google Search App Alpha: This is just a first alpha version of the application, as it looks like when I uploaded it to CodePlex. The application works, requires Silverlight...Starter Kit Mytrip.Mvc.Entity: Mytrip.Mvc.Entity 1.0 RC: EF Membership UserManager FileManager Localization Captcha ClientValidation Theme CrossBrowser VS 2010 RC MVC 2 RC db MSSQL2008thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.6): This release is an update for WSCF.blue V1. Below are the bug fixes made since the V1.0.5 release: The data contract type filter was not including...TS3QueryLib.Net: TS3QueryLib.Net Version 0.18.13.0: Changelog Added overloads to all methods of QueryRunenr class handling permission tasks to allow passing of permission name instead of permissionid...Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.1 Beta 2: This is the second beta of Umbraco 4.1. Umbraco 4.1 is more advanced than ever, yet faster, lighter and simpler to use than ever. We, on behalf of...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30218.0: Automatic drop of latest buildZack's Fiasco - Code Generated DAL: v1.2.4: Enhancements: SQL Server CRUD Stored Procedures added option for USE <db> added option to create or not create INSERT sprocs added option to cr...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)Image Resizer Powertoy Clone for WindowsASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsRawrSharpyDinnerNow.netBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Modulepatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelFacebook Developer ToolkitFluent Ribbon Control Suite

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Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 1

- by rajbk

The Open Data Protocol, referred to as OData, is a new data-sharing standard that breaks down silos and fosters an interoperative ecosystem for data consumers (clients) and producers (services) that is far more powerful than currently possible. It enables more applications to make sense of a broader set of data, and helps every data service and client add value to the whole ecosystem. WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.NET Data Services), then, was the first Microsoft technology to support the Open Data Protocol in Visual Studio 2008 SP1. It provides developers with client libraries for .NET, Silverlight, AJAX, PHP and Java. Microsoft now also supports OData in SQL Server 2008 R2, Windows Azure Storage, Excel 2010 (through PowerPivot), and SharePoint 2010. Many other other applications in the works. * This post walks you through how to create an OData feed, define a shape for the data and pre-filter the data using Visual Studio 2010, WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework. A sample project is attached at the bottom of Part 2 of this post. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Create the Web Application File –› New –› Project, Select “ASP.NET Empty Web Application” Add the Entity Data Model Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “ADO.NET Entity Data Model” under "Data”. Name the Model “Northwind” and click “Add”. In the “Choose Model Contents”, select “Generate Model From Database” and click “Next” Define a connection to your database containing the Northwind database in the next screen. We are going to expose the Products table through our OData feed. Select “Products” in the “Choose your Database Object” screen. Click “Finish”. We are done creating our Entity Data Model. Save the Northwind.edmx file created. Add the WCF Data Service Right click on the Web Application in the Solution Explorer and select “Add New Item..” Select “WCF Data Service” from the list and call the service “DataService” (creative, huh?). Click “Add”. Enable Access to the Data Service Open the DataService.svc.cs class. The class is well commented and instructs us on the next steps. public class DataService : DataService< /* TODO: put your data source class name here */ > { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { // TODO: set rules to indicate which entity sets and service operations are visible, updatable, etc. // Examples: // config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("MyEntityset", EntitySetRights.AllRead); // config.SetServiceOperationAccessRule("MyServiceOperation", ServiceOperationRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } Replace the comment that starts with “/* TODO:” with “NorthwindEntities” (the entity container name of the Model we created earlier). WCF Data Services is initially locked down by default, FTW! No data is exposed without you explicitly setting it. You have explicitly specify which Entity sets you wish to expose and what rights are allowed by using the SetEntitySetAccessRule. The SetServiceOperationAccessRule on the other hand sets rules for a specified operation. Let us define an access rule to expose the Products Entity we created earlier. We use the EnititySetRights.AllRead since we want to give read only access. Our modified code is shown below. public class DataService : DataService<NorthwindEntities> { public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("Products", EntitySetRights.AllRead); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } } We are done setting up our ODataFeed! Compile your project. Right click on DataService.svc and select “View in Browser” to see the OData feed. To view the feed in IE, you must make sure that "Feed Reading View" is turned off. You set this under Tools -› Internet Options -› Content tab. If you navigate to “Products”, you should see the Products feed. Note also that URIs are case sensitive. ie. Products work but products doesn’t. Filtering our data OData has a set of system query operations you can use to perform common operations against data exposed by the model. For example, to see only Products in CategoryID 2, we can use the following request: /DataService.svc/Products?$filter=CategoryID eq 2 At the time of this writing, supported operations are $orderby, $top, $skip, $filter, $expand, $format†, $select, $inlinecount. Pre-filtering our data using Query Interceptors The Product feed currently returns all Products. We want to change that so that it contains only Products that have not been discontinued. WCF introduces the concept of interceptors which allows us to inject custom validation/policy logic into the request/response pipeline of a WCF data service. We will use a QueryInterceptor to pre-filter the data so that it returns only Products that are not discontinued. To create a QueryInterceptor, write a method that returns an Expression<Func<T, bool>> and mark it with the QueryInterceptor attribute as shown below. [QueryInterceptor("Products")] public Expression<Func<Product, bool>> OnReadProducts() { return o => o.Discontinued == false; } Viewing the feed after compilation will only show products that have not been discontinued. We also confirm this by looking at the WHERE clause in the SQL generated by the entity framework. SELECT [Extent1].[ProductID] AS [ProductID], ... ... [Extent1].[Discontinued] AS [Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [Extent1] WHERE 0 = [Extent1].[Discontinued] Other examples of Query/Change interceptors can be seen here including an example to filter data based on the identity of the authenticated user. We are done pre-filtering our data. In the next part of this post, we will see how to shape our data. Pre-filtering and shaping OData feeds using WCF Data Services and the Entity Framework - Part 2 Foot Notes * http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/aa937697.aspx † $format did not work for me. The way to get a Json response is to include the following in the request header “Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*” when making the request. This is easily done with most JavaScript libraries.

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Windows Azure VMs - New "Stopped" VM Options Provide Cost-effective Flexibility for On-Demand Workloads

- by KeithMayer

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/KeithMayer/archive/2013/06/22/windows-azure-vms---new-stopped-vm-options-provide-cost-effective.aspxDidn’t make it to TechEd this year? Don’t worry! This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros. Today’s article focuses on a new, much-heralded enhancement to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to make it more cost-effective for spinning VMs up and down on-demand on the Windows Azure cloud platform. NEW! VMs that are shutdown from the Windows Azure Management Portal will no longer continue to accumulate compute charges while stopped! Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future. And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges. In this article, I'll provide more details on the scenarios that this enhancement best fits, and I'll also review the new options and considerations that we now have for performing safe shutdowns of Windows Azure VMs. Which scenarios does the new enhancement best fit? Being able to easily shutdown VMs from the Windows Azure Management Portal without continued compute charges is a great enhancement for certain cloud use cases, such as: On-demand dev/test/lab environments - Freely start and stop lab VMs so that they are only accumulating compute charges when being actively used. "Bursting" load-balanced web applications - Provision a number of load-balanced VMs, but keep the minimum number of VMs running to support "normal" loads. Easily start-up the remaining VMs only when needed to support peak loads. Disaster Recovery - Start-up "cold" VMs when needed to recover from disaster scenarios. BUT ... there is a consideration to keep in mind when using the Windows Azure Management Portal to shutdown VMs: although performing a VM shutdown via the Windows Azure Management Portal causes that VM to no longer accumulate compute charges, it also deallocates the VM from fabric resources to which it was previously assigned. These fabric resources include compute resources such as virtual CPU cores and memory, as well as network resources, such as IP addresses. This means that when the VM is later started after being shutdown from the portal, the VM could be assigned a different IP address or placed on a different compute node within the fabric. In some cases, you may want to shutdown VMs using the old approach, where fabric resource assignments are maintained while the VM is in a shutdown state. Specifically, you may wish to do this when temporarily shutting down or restarting a "7x24" VM as part of a maintenance activity. Good news - you can still revert back to the old VM shutdown behavior when necessary by using the alternate VM shutdown approaches listed below. Let's walk through each approach for performing a VM Shutdown action on Windows Azure so that we can understand the benefits and considerations of each... How many ways can I shutdown a VM? In Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, there's three general ways that can be used to safely shutdown VMs: Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM Stop VM via Windows PowerShell using Windows Azure PowerShell Module Although each of these options performs a safe shutdown of the guest operation system and the VM itself, each option handles the VM shutdown end state differently. Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal When clicking the Shutdown button at the bottom of the Virtual Machines page in the Windows Azure Management Portal, the VM is safely shutdown and "deallocated" from fabric resources. Shutdown button on Virtual Machines page in Windows Azure Management Portal When the shutdown process completes, the VM will be shown on the Virtual Machines page with a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status as shown in the figure below. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped (Deallocated)" Status "Deallocated" means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address ( called "Dynamic IPs" or "DIPs" in Windows Azure ) the next time it is started. TIP: If you are leveraging this shutdown option and consistency of DIPs is important to applications running inside your VMs, you should consider using virtual networks with your VMs. Virtual networks permit you to assign a specific IP Address Space for use with VMs that are assigned to that virtual network. As long as you start VMs in the same order in which they were originally provisioned, each VM should be reassigned the same DIP that it was previously using. What about consistency of External IP Addresses? Great question! External IP addresses ( called "Virtual IPs" or "VIPs" in Windows Azure ) are associated with the cloud service in which one or more Windows Azure VMs are running. As long as at least 1 VM inside a cloud service remains in a "Running" state, the VIP assigned to a cloud service will be preserved. If all VMs inside a cloud service are in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status, then the cloud service may receive a different VIP when VMs are next restarted. TIP: If consistency of VIPs is important for the cloud services in which you are running VMs, consider keeping one VM inside each cloud service in the alternate VM shutdown state listed below to preserve the VIP associated with the cloud service. Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM When performing a Guest OS shutdown or restart ( ie., a shutdown or restart operation initiated from the Guest OS running inside the VM ), the VM configuration will not be deallocated from fabric resources. In the figure below, the VM has been shutdown from within the Guest OS and is shown with a "Stopped" VM status rather than the "Stopped ( Deallocated )" VM status that was shown in the previous figure. Note that it may require a few minutes for the Windows Azure Management Portal to reflect that the VM is in a "Stopped" state in this scenario, because we are performing an OS shutdown inside the VM rather than through an Azure management endpoint. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped" Status VMs shown in a "Stopped" status will continue to accumulate compute charges, because fabric resources are still being reserved for these VMs. However, this also means that DIPs and VIPs are preserved for VMs in this state, so you don't have to worry about VMs and cloud services getting different IP addresses when they are started in the future. Stop VM via Windows PowerShell In the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module, a new -StayProvisioned parameter has been added to the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet. This new parameter provides the flexibility to choose the VM configuration end result when stopping VMs using PowerShell: When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet without the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped and deallocated; that is, the VM will be left in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status just like the end result when a VM Shutdown operation is performed via the Windows Azure Management Portal. When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet with the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped but fabric resource reservations will be preserved; that is the VM will be left in a "Stopped" status just like the end result when performing a Guest OS shutdown operation. So, with PowerShell, you can choose how Windows Azure should handle VM configuration and fabric resource reservations when stopping VMs on a case-by-case basis. TIP: It's important to note that the -StayProvisioned parameter is only available in the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module. So, if you've previously downloaded this module, be sure to download and install the latest version to get this new functionality. Want to Learn More about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services? To learn more about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, be sure to check-out these additional FREE resources: Become our next "Early Expert"! Complete the Early Experts "Cloud Quest" and build a multi-VM lab network in the cloud for FREE! Build some cool scenarios! Check out our list of over 20+ Step-by-Step Lab Guides based on key scenarios that IT Pros are implementing on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services TODAY! Looking forward to seeing you in the Cloud! - Keith Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012 Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines Want to Get Certified? Join our Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Study Group

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Master Data Management and Cloud Computing

- by david.butler(at)oracle.com

Cloud Computing is all the rage these days. There are many reasons why this is so. But like its predecessor, Service Oriented Architecture, it can fall on hard times if the underlying data is left unmanaged. Master Data Management is the perfect Cloud companion. It can materially increase the chances for successful Cloud initiatives. In this blog, I'll review the nature of the Cloud and show how MDM fits in. Here's the National Institute of Standards and Technology Cloud definition: • Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. Cloud architectures have three main layers: applications or Software as a Service (SaaS), Platforms as a Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). SaaS generally refers to applications that are delivered to end-users over the Internet. Oracle CRM On Demand is an example of a SaaS application. Today there are hundreds of SaaS providers covering a wide variety of applications including Salesforce.com, Workday, and Netsuite. Oracle MDM applications are located in this layer of Oracle's On Demand enterprise Cloud platform. We call it Master Data as a Service (MDaaS). PaaS generally refers to an application deployment platform delivered as a service. They are often built on a grid computing architecture and include database and middleware. Oracle Fusion Middleware is in this category and includes the SOA and Data Integration products used to connect SaaS applications including MDM. Finally, IaaS generally refers to computing hardware (servers, storage and network) delivered as a service. This typically includes the associated software as well: operating systems, virtualization, clustering, etc. Cloud Computing benefits are compelling for a large number of organizations. These include significant cost savings, increased flexibility, and fast deployments. Cost advantages include paying for just what you use. This is especially critical for organizations with variable or seasonal usage. Companies don't have to invest to support peak computing periods. Costs are also more predictable and controllable. Increased agility includes access to the latest technology and experts without making significant up front investments. While Cloud Computing is certainly very alluring with a clear value proposition, it is not without its challenges. An IDC survey of 244 IT executives/CIOs and their line-of-business (LOB) colleagues identified a number of issues: Security - 74% identified security as an issue involving data privacy and resource access control. Integration - 61% found that it is hard to integrate Cloud Apps with in-house applications. Operational Costs - 50% are worried that On Demand will actually cost more given the impact of poor data quality on the rest of the enterprise. Compliance - 49% felt that compliance with required regulatory, legal and general industry requirements (such as PCI, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley) would be a major issue. When control is lost, the ability of a provider to directly manage how and where data is deployed, used and destroyed is negatively impacted. There are others, but I singled out these four top issues because Master Data Management, properly incorporated into a Cloud Computing infrastructure, can significantly ameliorate all of these problems. Cloud Computing can literally rain raw data across the enterprise. According to fellow blogger, Mike Ferguson, "the fracturing of data caused by the adoption of cloud computing raises the importance of MDM in keeping disparate data synchronized." David Linthicum, CTO Blue Mountain Labs blogs that "the lack of MDM will become more of an issue as cloud computing rises. We're moving from complex federated on-premise systems, to complex federated on-premise and cloud-delivered systems." Left unmanaged, non-standard, inconsistent, ungoverned data with questionable quality can pollute analytical systems, increase operational costs, and reduce the ROI in Cloud and On-Premise applications. As cloud computing becomes more relevant, and more data, applications, services, and processes are moved out to cloud computing platforms, the need for MDM becomes ever more important. Oracle's MDM suite is designed to deal with all four of the above Cloud issues listed in the IDC survey. Security - MDM manages all master data attribute privacy and resource access control issues. Integration - MDM pre-integrates Cloud Apps with each other and with On Premise applications at the data level. Operational Costs - MDM significantly reduces operational costs by increasing data quality, thereby improving enterprise business processes efficiency. Compliance - MDM, with its built in Data Governance capabilities, insures that the data is governed according to organizational standards. This facilitates rapid and accurate reporting for compliance purposes. Oracle MDM creates governed high quality master data. A unified cleansed and standardized data view is produced. The Oracle Customer Hub creates a single view of the customer. The Oracle Product Hub creates high quality product data designed to support all go-to-market processes. Oracle Supplier Hub dramatically reduces the chances of 'supplier exceptions'. Oracle Site Hub masters locations. And Oracle Hyperion Data Relationship Management masters financial reference data and manages enterprise hierarchies across operational areas from ERP to EPM and CRM to SCM. Oracle Fusion Middleware connects Cloud and On Premise applications to MDM Hubs and brings high quality master data to your enterprise business processes. An independent analyst once said "Poor data quality is like dirt on the windshield. You may be able to drive for a long time with slowly degrading vision, but at some point, you either have to stop and clear the windshield or risk everything." Cloud Computing has the potential to significantly degrade data quality across the enterprise over time. Deploying a Master Data Management solution prior to or in conjunction with a move to the Cloud can insure that the data flowing into the enterprise from the Cloud is clean and governed. This will in turn insure that expected returns on the investment in Cloud Computing will be realized. Oracle MDM has proven its metal in this area and has the customers to back that up. In fact, I will be hosting a webcast on Tuesday, April 10th at 10 am PT with one of our top Cloud customers, the Church Pension Group. They have moved all mainline applications to a hosted model and use Oracle MDM to insure the master data is managed and cleansed before it is propagated to other cloud and internal systems. I invite you join Martin Hossfeld, VP, IT Operations, and Danette Patterson, Enterprise Data Manager as they review business drivers for MDM and hosted applications, how they did it, the benefits achieved, and lessons learned. You can register for this free webcast here. Hope to see you there.

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Improved Performance on PeopleSoft Combined Benchmark using SPARC T4-4

- by Brian

Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle's PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 combined online and batch benchmark achieved a world record 18,000 concurrent users experiencing subsecond response time while executing a PeopleSoft Payroll batch job of 500,000 employees in 32.4 minutes. This result was obtained with a SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Database 11g Release 2, a SPARC T4-4 server running PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 application server and a SPARC T4-2 server running Oracle WebLogic Server in the web tier. The SPARC T4-4 server running the application tier used Oracle Solaris Zones which provide a flexible, scalable and manageable virtualization environment. The average CPU utilization on the SPARC T4-2 server in the web tier was 17%, on the SPARC T4-4 server in the application tier it was 59%, and on the SPARC T4-4 server in the database tier was 47% (online and batch) leaving significant headroom for additional processing across the three tiers. The SPARC T4-4 server used for the database tier hosted Oracle Database 11g Release 2 using Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) for database files management with I/O performance equivalent to raw devices. Performance Landscape Results are presented for the PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service and Payroll combined benchmark. The new result with 128 streams shows significant improvement in the payroll batch processing time with little impact on the self-service component response time. PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service and Payroll Benchmark Systems Users Ave Response Search (sec) Ave Response Save (sec) Batch Time (min) Streams SPARC T4-2 (web) SPARC T4-4 (app) SPARC T4-4 (db) 18,000 0.988 0.539 32.4 128 SPARC T4-2 (web) SPARC T4-4 (app) SPARC T4-4 (db) 18,000 0.944 0.503 43.3 64 The following results are for the PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service benchmark that was previous run. The results are not directly comparable with the combined results because they do not include the payroll component. PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service 9.1 Benchmark Systems Users Ave Response Search (sec) Ave Response Save (sec) Batch Time (min) Streams SPARC T4-2 (web) SPARC T4-4 (app) 2x SPARC T4-2 (db) 18,000 1.048 0.742 N/A N/A The following results are for the PeopleSoft Payroll benchmark that was previous run. The results are not directly comparable with the combined results because they do not include the self-service component. PeopleSoft Payroll (N.A.) 9.1 - 500K Employees (7 Million SQL PayCalc, Unicode) Systems Users Ave Response Search (sec) Ave Response Save (sec) Batch Time (min) Streams SPARC T4-4 (db) N/A N/A N/A 30.84 96 Configuration Summary Application Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 512 GB memory Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 PeopleTools 8.52 PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 Oracle Tuxedo, Version 10.3.0.0, 64-bit, Patch Level 031 Java Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit 6 Update 32 Database Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-4 server with 4 x SPARC T4 processors, 3.0 GHz 256 GB memory Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Oracle Database 11g Release 2 PeopleTools 8.52 Oracle Tuxedo, Version 10.3.0.0, 64-bit, Patch Level 031 Micro Focus Server Express (COBOL v 5.1.00) Web Tier Configuration: 1 x SPARC T4-2 server with 2 x SPARC T4 processors, 2.85 GHz 256 GB memory Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 PeopleTools 8.52 Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3.4 Java Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit 6 Update 32 Storage Configuration: 1 x Sun Server X2-4 as a COMSTAR head for data 4 x Intel Xeon X7550, 2.0 GHz 128 GB memory 1 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (80 flash modules) 1 x Sun Storage F5100 Flash Array (40 flash modules) 1 x Sun Fire X4275 as a COMSTAR head for redo logs 12 x 2 TB SAS disks with Niwot Raid controller Benchmark Description This benchmark combines PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 HR Self Service online and PeopleSoft Payroll batch workloads to run on a unified database deployed on Oracle Database 11g Release 2. The PeopleSoft HRSS benchmark kit is a Oracle standard benchmark kit run by all platform vendors to measure the performance. It's an OLTP benchmark where DB SQLs are moderately complex. The results are certified by Oracle and a white paper is published. PeopleSoft HR SS defines a business transaction as a series of HTML pages that guide a user through a particular scenario. Users are defined as corporate Employees, Managers and HR administrators. The benchmark consist of 14 scenarios which emulate users performing typical HCM transactions such as viewing paycheck, promoting and hiring employees, updating employee profile and other typical HCM application transactions. All these transactions are well-defined in the PeopleSoft HR Self-Service 9.1 benchmark kit. This benchmark metric is the weighted average response search/save time for all the transactions. The PeopleSoft 9.1 Payroll (North America) benchmark demonstrates system performance for a range of processing volumes in a specific configuration. This workload represents large batch runs typical of a ERP environment during a mass update. The benchmark measures five application business process run times for a database representing large organization. They are Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation, Payroll Confirmation, Print Advice forms, and Create Direct Deposit File. The benchmark metric is the cumulative elapsed time taken to complete the Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation and Payroll Confirmation business application processes. The benchmark metrics are taken for each respective benchmark while running simultaneously on the same database back-end. Specifically, the payroll batch processes are started when the online workload reaches steady state (the maximum number of online users) and overlap with online transactions for the duration of the steady state. Key Points and Best Practices Two PeopleSoft Domain sets with 200 application servers each on a SPARC T4-4 server were hosted in 2 separate Oracle Solaris Zones to demonstrate consolidation of multiple application servers, ease of administration and performance tuning. Each Oracle Solaris Zone was bound to a separate processor set, each containing 15 cores (total 120 threads). The default set (1 core from first and third processor socket, total 16 threads) was used for network and disk interrupt handling. This was done to improve performance by reducing memory access latency by using the physical memory closest to the processors and offload I/O interrupt handling to default set threads, freeing up cpu resources for Application Servers threads and balancing application workload across 240 threads. A total of 128 PeopleSoft streams server processes where used on the database node to complete payroll batch job of 500,000 employees in 32.4 minutes. See Also Oracle PeopleSoft Benchmark White Papers oracle.com SPARC T4-2 Server oracle.com OTN SPARC T4-4 Server oracle.com OTN PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Managementoracle.com OTN PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management (Payroll) oracle.com OTN Oracle Solaris oracle.com OTN Oracle Database 11g Release 2 oracle.com OTN Disclosure Statement Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 8 November 2012.

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The Application Architecture Domain

- by Michael Glas

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about Application Architecture in the context of EA. More specifically, as an Enterprise Architect, what do I need to consider when looking at/defining/designing the Application Architecture Domain?There are several definitions of Application Architecture. TOGAF says “The objective here [in Application Architecture] is to define the major kinds of application system necessary to process the data and support the business”. FEA says the Application Architecture “Defines the applications needed to manage the data and support the business functions”.I agree with these definitions. They reflect what the Application Architecture domain does. However, they need to be decomposed to be practical.I find it useful to define a set of views into the Application Architecture domain. These views reflect what an EA needs to consider when working with/in the Applications Architecture domain. These viewpoints are, at a high level:Capability View: This view reflects how applications alignment with business capabilities. It is a super set of the following views when viewed in aggregate. By looking at the Application Architecture domain in terms of the business capabilities it supports, you get a good perspective on how those applications are directly supporting the business.Technology View: The technology view reflects the underlying technology that makes up the applications. Based on the number of rationalization activities I have seen (more specifically application rationalization), the phrase “complexity equals cost” drives the importance of the technology view, especially when attempting to reduce that complexity through standardization type activities. Some of the technology components to be considered are: Software: The application itself as well as the software the application relies on to function (web servers, application servers). Infrastructure: The underlying hardware and network components required by the application and supporting application software. Development: How the application is created and maintained. This encompasses development components that are part of the application itself (i.e. customizable functions), as well as bolt on development through web services, API’s, etc. The maintenance process itself also falls under this view. Integration: The interfaces that the application provides for integration as well as the integrations to other applications and data sources the application requires to function. Type: Reflects the kind of application (mash-up, 3 tiered, etc). (Note: functional type [CRM, HCM, etc.] are reflected under the capability view). Organization View: Organizations are comprised of people and those people use applications to do their jobs. Trying to define the application architecture domain without taking the organization that will use/fund/change it into consideration is like trying to design a car without thinking about who will drive it (i.e. you may end up building a formula 1 car for a family of 5 that is really looking for a minivan). This view reflects the people aspect of the application. It includes: Ownership: Who ‘owns’ the application? This will usually reflect primary funding and utilization but not always. Funding: Who funds both the acquisition/creation as well as the on-going maintenance (funding to create/change/operate)? Change: Who can/does request changes to the application and what process to the follow? Utilization: Who uses the application, how often do they use it, and how do they use it? Support: Which organization is responsible for the on-going support of the application? Information View: Whether or not you subscribe to the view that “information drives the enterprise”, it is a fact that information is critical. The management, creation, and organization of that information are primary functions of enterprise applications. This view reflects how the applications are tied to information (or at a higher level – how the Application Architecture domain relates to the Information Architecture domain). It includes: Access: The application is the mechanism by which end users access information. This could be through a primary application (i.e. CRM application), or through an information access type application (a BI application as an example). Creation: Applications create data in order to provide information to end-users. (I.e. an application creates an order to be used by an end-user as part of the fulfillment process). Consumption: Describes the data required by applications to function (i.e. a product id is required by a purchasing application to create an order. Application Service View: Organizations today are striving to be more agile. As an EA, I need to provide an architecture that supports this agility. One of the primary ways to achieve the required agility in the application architecture domain is through the use of ‘services’ (think SOA, web services, etc.). Whether it is through building applications from the ground up utilizing services, service enabling an existing application, or buying applications that are already ‘service enabled’, compartmentalizing application functions for re-use helps enable flexibility in the use of those applications in support of the required business agility. The applications service view consists of: Services: Here, I refer to the generic definition of a service “a set of related software functionalities that can be reused for different purposes, together with the policies that should control its usage”. Functions: The activities within an application that are not available / applicable for re-use. This view is helpful when identifying duplication functions between applications that are not service enabled. Delivery Model View: It is hard to talk about EA today without hearing the terms ‘cloud’ or shared services. Organizations are looking at the ways their applications are delivered for several reasons, to reduce cost (both CAPEX and OPEX), to improve agility (time to market as an example), etc. From an EA perspective, where/how an application is deployed has impacts on the overall enterprise architecture. From integration concerns to SLA requirements to security and compliance issues, the Enterprise Architect needs to factor in how applications are delivered when designing the Enterprise Architecture. This view reflects how applications are delivered to end-users. The delivery model view consists of different types of delivery mechanisms/deployment options for applications: Traditional: Reflects non-cloud type delivery options. The most prevalent consists of an application running on dedicated hardware (usually specific to an environment) for a single consumer. Private Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers. Public Cloud: The application runs on infrastructure provisioned for open use by the general public. Hybrid: The application is deployed on two or more distinct cloud infrastructures (private, community, or public) that remain unique entities, but are bound together by standardized or proprietary technology that enables data and application portability. While by no means comprehensive, I find that applying these views to the application domain gives a good understanding of what an EA needs to consider when effecting changes to the Application Architecture domain.Finally, the application architecture domain is one of several architecture domains that an EA must consider when developing an overall Enterprise Architecture. The Oracle Enterprise Architecture Framework defines four Primary domains: Business Architecture, Application Architecture, Information Architecture, and Technology Architecture. Each domain links to the others either directly or indirectly at some point. Oracle links them at a high level as follows:Business Capabilities and/or Business Processes (Business Architecture), links to the Applications that enable the capability/process (Applications Architecture – COTS, Custom), links to the Information Assets managed/maintained by the Applications (Information Architecture), links to the technology infrastructure upon which all this runs (Technology Architecture - integration, security, BI/DW, DB infrastructure, deployment model). There are however, times when the EA needs to narrow focus to a particular domain for some period of time. These views help me to do just that.

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Fraud Detection with the SQL Server Suite Part 2

- by Dejan Sarka

This is the second part of the fraud detection whitepaper. You can find the first part in my previous blog post about this topic. My Approach to Data Mining Projects It is impossible to evaluate the time and money needed for a complete fraud detection infrastructure in advance. Personally, I do not know the customer’s data in advance. I don’t know whether there is already an existing infrastructure, like a data warehouse, in place, or whether we would need to build one from scratch. Therefore, I always suggest to start with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. A POC takes something between 5 and 10 working days, and involves personnel from the customer’s site – either employees or outsourced consultants. The team should include a subject matter expert (SME) and at least one information technology (IT) expert. The SME must be familiar with both the domain in question as well as the meaning of data at hand, while the IT expert should be familiar with the structure of data, how to access it, and have some programming (preferably Transact-SQL) knowledge. With more than one IT expert the most time consuming work, namely data preparation and overview, can be completed sooner. I assume that the relevant data is already extracted and available at the very beginning of the POC project. If a customer wants to have their people involved in the project directly and requests the transfer of knowledge, the project begins with training. I strongly advise this approach as it offers the establishment of a common background for all people involved, the understanding of how the algorithms work and the understanding of how the results should be interpreted, a way of becoming familiar with the SQL Server suite, and more. Once the data has been extracted, the customer’s SME (i.e. the analyst), and the IT expert assigned to the project will learn how to prepare the data in an efficient manner. Together with me, knowledge and expertise allow us to focus immediately on the most interesting attributes and identify any additional, calculated, ones soon after. By employing our programming knowledge, we can, for example, prepare tens of derived variables, detect outliers, identify the relationships between pairs of input variables, and more, in only two or three days, depending on the quantity and the quality of input data. I favor the customer’s decision of assigning additional personnel to the project. For example, I actually prefer to work with two teams simultaneously. I demonstrate and explain the subject matter by applying techniques directly on the data managed by each team, and then both teams continue to work on the data overview and data preparation under our supervision. I explain to the teams what kind of results we expect, the reasons why they are needed, and how to achieve them. Afterwards we review and explain the results, and continue with new instructions, until we resolve all known problems. Simultaneously with the data preparation the data overview is performed. The logic behind this task is the same – again I show to the teams involved the expected results, how to achieve them and what they mean. This is also done in multiple cycles as is the case with data preparation, because, quite frankly, both tasks are completely interleaved. A specific objective of the data overview is of principal importance – it is represented by a simple star schema and a simple OLAP cube that will first of all simplify data discovery and interpretation of the results, and will also prove useful in the following tasks. The presence of the customer’s SME is the key to resolving possible issues with the actual meaning of the data. We can always replace the IT part of the team with another database developer; however, we cannot conduct this kind of a project without the customer’s SME. After the data preparation and when the data overview is available, we begin the scientific part of the project. I assist the team in developing a variety of models, and in interpreting the results. The results are presented graphically, in an intuitive way. While it is possible to interpret the results on the fly, a much more appropriate alternative is possible if the initial training was also performed, because it allows the customer’s personnel to interpret the results by themselves, with only some guidance from me. The models are evaluated immediately by using several different techniques. One of the techniques includes evaluation over time, where we use an OLAP cube. After evaluating the models, we select the most appropriate model to be deployed for a production test; this allows the team to understand the deployment process. There are many possibilities of deploying data mining models into production; at the POC stage, we select the one that can be completed quickly. Typically, this means that we add the mining model as an additional dimension to an existing DW or OLAP cube, or to the OLAP cube developed during the data overview phase. Finally, we spend some time presenting the results of the POC project to the stakeholders and managers. Even from a POC, the customer will receive lots of benefits, all at the sole risk of spending money and time for a single 5 to 10 day project: The customer learns the basic patterns of frauds and fraud detection The customer learns how to do the entire cycle with their own people, only relying on me for the most complex problems The customer’s analysts learn how to perform much more in-depth analyses than they ever thought possible The customer’s IT experts learn how to perform data extraction and preparation much more efficiently than they did before All of the attendees of this training learn how to use their own creativity to implement further improvements of the process and procedures, even after the solution has been deployed to production The POC output for a smaller company or for a subsidiary of a larger company can actually be considered a finished, production-ready solution It is possible to utilize the results of the POC project at subsidiary level, as a finished POC project for the entire enterprise Typically, the project results in several important “side effects” Improved data quality Improved employee job satisfaction, as they are able to proactively contribute to the central knowledge about fraud patterns in the organization Because eventually more minds get to be involved in the enterprise, the company should expect more and better fraud detection patterns After the POC project is completed as described above, the actual project would not need months of engagement from my side. This is possible due to our preference to transfer the knowledge onto the customer’s employees: typically, the customer will use the results of the POC project for some time, and only engage me again to complete the project, or to ask for additional expertise if the complexity of the problem increases significantly. I usually expect to perform the following tasks: Establish the final infrastructure to measure the efficiency of the deployed models Deploy the models in additional scenarios Through reports By including Data Mining Extensions (DMX) queries in OLTP applications to support real-time early warnings Include data mining models as dimensions in OLAP cubes, if this was not done already during the POC project Create smart ETL applications that divert suspicious data for immediate or later inspection I would also offer to investigate how the outcome could be transferred automatically to the central system; for instance, if the POC project was performed in a subsidiary whereas a central system is available as well Of course, for the actual project, I would repeat the data and model preparation as needed It is virtually impossible to tell in advance how much time the deployment would take, before we decide together with customer what exactly the deployment process should cover. Without considering the deployment part, and with the POC project conducted as suggested above (including the transfer of knowledge), the actual project should still only take additional 5 to 10 days. The approximate timeline for the POC project is, as follows: 1-2 days of training 2-3 days for data preparation and data overview 2 days for creating and evaluating the models 1 day for initial preparation of the continuous learning infrastructure 1 day for presentation of the results and discussion of further actions Quite frequently I receive the following question: are we going to find the best possible model during the POC project, or during the actual project? My answer is always quite simple: I do not know. Maybe, if we would spend just one hour more for data preparation, or create just one more model, we could get better patterns and predictions. However, we simply must stop somewhere, and the best possible way to do this, according to my experience, is to restrict the time spent on the project in advance, after an agreement with the customer. You must also never forget that, because we build the complete learning infrastructure and transfer the knowledge, the customer will be capable of doing further investigations independently and improve the models and predictions over time without the need for a constant engagement with me.

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