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  • Redundancy and Automated failover using Forefront TMG 2010 Standard between Production-DR site ?

    - by Albert Widjaja
    Hi, I'm using MS TMG 2010 Standard as my single firewall to publish my Exchange Server and IIS website to the internet, however it is just one VM in the DMZ network with just one network card (vNIC), what sort of redundancy method that is suitable for making this firewall VM redundant / automatically failover in my DR site ? Because it is very important in the event of disaster recovery all important email through various mobile device will still need to operate and it is impossible if this TMG 2010 VM is offline. is it by using: 1. Multicast NLB 2. Any other clustering 3. VMware HA / FT (one VM in production, the other VM in DR site with different subnet ?) Any suggestion and idea willl be appreciated. Thanks

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  • Is there an AUTOMATED way to pin items to the taskbar in a windows 2008 TS environment?

    - by l0c0b0x
    We have a Windows 2008 (R2) Terminal Server environment and would like to find a way to automate the addition (Pinning) of programs to the Windows taskbar for our users. My first thought was to do this from a Group Policy, but haven't been able to find a setting for this. I've heard you can 'probably' do it via a script, but haven't seen any examples yet (I'm not a programmer, but have worked with batch scripts before). Please advice. Thanks!

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  • What are some good, free tools to run automated security audits for PHP code?

    - by James Simpson
    I've been looking for some time now and have come up short. The most promising I found was Spike PHP, which seems to no longer work. I'm looking to scan my code for potential risks of SQL Injection, XSS, etc. I've gone through most of my code manually, but with a few hundred thousand lines of code, I'm sure I missed things. If possible, are there any tools that can be downloaded and analyze code on my local machine rather than installing to the live server (this isn't a requirement if not)?

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  • Automated monitoring of a remote system that sends email alerts.

    - by user23105
    I need to monitor a remote system where the only access I have is that I can subscribe to email alerts of completed/failed jobs. I would like a system that can monitor these emails and provide an SMS or other alert when: An email indicates failure. A process that was expected to complete by a given time has not. A process that was expected to complete N minutes after completion of another process has not completed. Are there any existing tools that allow this? I'd consider any option - SaaS, open-source, COTS, as long as I don't have to write it myself! Cheers, Blake

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  • How do I retrieve an automated report and save it to a database?

    - by Mason Wheeler
    I've got a web server that will take scripts in Python, PHP or Perl. I don't know much about any of those languages, but of the three, Python seems the least scary. It has a MySql database set up, and I know enough SQL to manage it and write queries for it. I also have a program that I want to add automated error reporting to. Something goes wrong, it sends a bug report to my server. What I don't know how to do is write a Python script that will sit on the web server and, when my program sends in a bug report, do the following: Receive the bug report. Parse it out into sections. Insert it into the database. Have the server send me an email. From what little I understand, this seems like it shouldn't be too difficult if I only knew what I was doing. Could someone point me to a site that explains the basic principles I'd need to create a script like this?

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  • Can Hudson branch promotion get based on project stability?

    - by Wayne
    Hudson CI server displays stability "weather" which is cool. And it allows one project build to kick off based on the successful build of another. However, how can you make that secondary project dependent additionally on the stability of multiple builds of the first project? Specifically, project "stable_deploy" needs to only kick off to promote a version to "stable" if project "integrate" with version 8.3.4.1233 has built and tested successfully at least 8 times--in a row. Until then, it's still in integration mode. IMPORTANT: A significant caveat to this is that a single set of Hudson projects gets used as a "pipeline" to process each new version through to release. So a project may have built successfully 8 times in a rolw but the latest version 8.3.4.1233 may be only the 2 most recent builds. The builds prior to that may be an earlier version. We're open to completely reorganizing this but the pipeline idea seemed to greatly reduce the amount of manually project creation and deletion. Is there a better way to track version release "pipeline"? In particular, we will have multiple versions in this pipeline simultaneously in the future due to fixes or patches to older versions. We don't see how to do that yet, except to create new pipeline projects for each version which is a real hassle. Here's some background details: The TickZoom application has some very complete unit tests some of which simulates real time trading environments. Add to that TickZoom makes elaborate use of parallelization for leveraging multi-core computers. Needless to say, during development of a new version, there can be stability issues during integration testing which get uncovered by running the build and auto tests repeatedly. A version which builds and tests cleanly 8 times in a row without change plus has undergone some real world testing by users can be deemed "stable" and promoted to the stable branch. Our Hudson projects look like this: test - Only for testing a build, zero user visibility. integrate_deploy - Promotes a test project build to integrate branch and makes it available to public for UA testing. integrate - Repeatedly builds the integrate branch to determine if it's stable enough to promote to stable branch. This runs the builds and test hourly throughout every night. stable_deploy - Promotes an integrate project build to the stable branch and makes it public for users who want the latest and greatest. stable - Builds the stable branch once every night. After 2 weeks of successful builds (14 builds) it can go to "release candidate". And so on... it continues with "release candidate" and then "release".

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  • What are some tips for troubleshooting builds of complicated software?

    - by Goose Bumper
    Sometimes I want to build Python or GCC from scratch just for fun, but I can't parse the errors I get, or don't understand statements like "libtool link error # XYZ". What are some tricks that unix/systems gurus use to compile software of this size from scratch? Of course I already do things like read config.log (if there is one), google around, and post in newsgroups. I'm looking for things that either make the process go smoother or get me more information about the error to help me understand and fix it. It's a little tough to get this information sometimes, because some compile bugs can be quite obscure. What can I do at that point?

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  • MS Build Server 2010 - Buffer Overflow

    - by user329005
    Hey everybody, I try to build an solution in MS Build Server (MS Visual Studio 2010 ver 10.0.30319.1) about ServerTasks - Builds - Server Task Builder - Queue new Built and go, 47 seconds later I get an error output: CSC: Unexpected error creating debug information file 'c:\Builds\1\ServerTasks\Server-Tasks Builder\Sources\ThirdParty\Sources\samus-mongodb-csharp-2b8934f\MongoDB.Linq\obj\Debug\MongoDB.Linq.PDB' -- 'c:\Builds\1\ServerTasks\Server-Tasks Builder\Sources\ThirdParty\Sources\samus-mongodb-csharp-2b8934f\MongoDB.Linq\obj\Debug\MongoDB.Linq.pdb: Access denied I checked the permissions of directory and set it (for debug purposes only) to grant access for all users, but still having an issue. Running the Procmon and filter file access for directory: 'c:\Builds\1\ServerTasks\Server-Tasks Builder\Sources\ThirdParty\Sources\samus-mongodb-csharp-2b8934f\MongoDB.Linq\obj\Debug\' tells me: 16:41:00,5449813 TFSBuildServiceHost.exe 3528 QuerySecurityFile C:\Builds\1\ServerTasks\Server-Tasks Builder\Sources\ThirdParty\Sources\samus-mongodb-csharp-2b8934f\MongoDB.Linq\obj\Debug BUFFER OVERFLOW Information: DACL, 0x20000000 and 16:41:00,5462119 TFSBuildServiceHost.exe 3528 QueryOpen C:\Builds\1\ServerTasks\Server-Tasks Builder\Sources\ThirdParty\Sources\samus-mongodb-csharp-2b8934f\MongoDB.Linq\obj\Debug FAST IO DISALLOWED Any ideas?

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  • When building a web application project, TFS 2008 builds two separate projects in _PublishedFolder.

    - by Steve Johnson
    I am trying to perform build automation on one of my web application projects built using VS 2008. The _PublishedWebSites contains two folders: Web and Deploy. I want TFS 2008 to generate only the deploy folder and not the web folder. Here is my TFSBuild.proj file: <Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Compile" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\TeamBuild\Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Build.targets" /> <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\WebDeployment\v9.0\Microsoft.WebDeployment.targets" /> <ItemGroup> <SolutionToBuild Include="$(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../Development/Main/MySoftware.sln"> <Targets></Targets> <Properties></Properties> </SolutionToBuild> </ItemGroup> <ItemGroup> <ConfigurationToBuild Include="Release|AnyCPU"> <FlavorToBuild>Release</FlavorToBuild> <PlatformToBuild>Any CPU</PlatformToBuild> </ConfigurationToBuild> </ItemGroup> <!--<ItemGroup> <SolutionToBuild Include="$(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../Development/Main/MySoftware.sln"> <Targets></Targets> <Properties></Properties> </SolutionToBuild> </ItemGroup> <ItemGroup> <ConfigurationToBuild Include="Release|x64"> <FlavorToBuild>Release</FlavorToBuild> <PlatformToBuild>x64</PlatformToBuild> </ConfigurationToBuild> </ItemGroup>--> <ItemGroup> <AdditionalReferencePath Include="C:\3PR" /> </ItemGroup> <Target Name="GetCopyToOutputDirectoryItems" Outputs="@(AllItemsFullPathWithTargetPath)" DependsOnTargets="AssignTargetPaths;_SplitProjectReferencesByFileExistence"> <!-- Get items from child projects first. --> <MSBuild Projects="@(_MSBuildProjectReferenceExistent)" Targets="GetCopyToOutputDirectoryItems" Properties="%(_MSBuildProjectReferenceExistent.SetConfiguration); %(_MSBuildProjectReferenceExistent.SetPlatform)" Condition="'@(_MSBuildProjectReferenceExistent)'!=''"> <Output TaskParameter="TargetOutputs" ItemName="_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPathNotFiltered"/> </MSBuild> <!-- Remove duplicates. --> <RemoveDuplicates Inputs="@(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPathNotFiltered)"> <Output TaskParameter="Filtered" ItemName="_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath"/> </RemoveDuplicates> <!-- Target outputs must be full paths because they will be consumed by a different project. --> <CreateItem Include="@(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath->'%(FullPath)')" Exclude= "$(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../Development/Main/Web/Bin*.pdb; *.refresh; *.vshost.exe; *.manifest; *.compiled; $(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../Development/Main/Web/Auth/MySoftware.dll; $(BuildProjectFolderPath)/../../Development/Main/Web/BinApp_Web_*.dll;" Condition="'%(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath.CopyToOutputDirectory)'=='Always' or '%(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath.CopyToOutputDirectory)'=='PreserveNewest'" > <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="AllItemsFullPathWithTargetPath"/> <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="_SourceItemsToCopyToOutputDirectoryAlways" Condition="'%(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath.CopyToOutputDirectory)'=='Always'"/> <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="_SourceItemsToCopyToOutputDirectory" Condition="'%(_AllChildProjectItemsWithTargetPath.CopyToOutputDirectory)'=='PreserveNewest'"/> </CreateItem> </Target> <!-- To modify your build process, add your task inside one of the targets below and uncomment it. Other similar extension points exist, see Microsoft.WebDeployment.targets. <Target Name="BeforeBuild"> </Target> <Target Name="BeforeMerge"> </Target> <Target Name="AfterMerge"> </Target> <Target Name="AfterBuild"> </Target> --> </Project> I want to build everything that the builtin Deploy project is doing for me. But I don't want the generated web project as it contains App_Web_xxxx.dll assemblies instead of a single compiled assembly. How can I do this?

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  • How to generate one large dependency map for the whole project that builds with makefiles?

    - by Stan
    I have a gigantic project that is built using makefiles. Running make at the root of the project takes over 20 minutes when no files have changed (i.e. just traversing the project and checking for updated files). I'd like to create a dependency map that will tell me which directories I need to run 'make' in based on the file(s) changed. I already have a list of updated files that I can get from my version control system, and I'd like to skip the 20 minutes of traversing and get straight to the locations that do need to be recompiled. The project has a mix of several languages and custom tools, so this would ideally be language-independent (i.e. it would only process all makefiles to generate dependencies). I'll settle for a C/C++-specific solution, too, as the majority of the project is in C++. The project is built on Linux.

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  • C++'s std::string pools, debug builds? std::string and valgrind problems

    - by Den.Jekk
    Hello, I have a problem with many valgrind warnings about possible memory leaks in std::string, like this one: 120 bytes in 4 blocks are possibly lost in loss record 4,192 of 4,687 at 0x4A06819: operator new(unsigned long) (vg_replace_malloc.c:230) by 0x383B89B8B0: std::string::_Rep::_S_create(unsigned long, unsigned long, std::allocator<char> const&) (in /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.8) by 0x383B89C3B4: (within /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.8) by 0x383B89C4A9: std::basic_string<char, std::char_traits<char>, std::allocator<char> >::basic_string(char const*, unsigned long, std::allocator<char> const&) (in /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.8) I'm wondering: does std::string (GCC 4.1.2) use any memory pools? if so, is there any way to disable the pools (in form of a debug build etc.)? Regards, Den

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  • How do you manage your sqlserver database projects for new builds and migrations?

    - by Rory
    How do you manage your sql server database build/deploy/migrate for visual studio projects? We have a product that includes a reasonable database part (~100 tables, ~500 procs/functions/views), so we need to be able to deploy new databases of the current version as well as upgrade older databases up to the current version. Currently we maintain separate scripts for creation of new databases and migration between versions. Clearly not ideal, but how is anyone else dealing with this? This is complicated for us by having many customers who each have their own db instance, rather than say just having dev/test/live instances on our own web servers, but the processes around managing dev/test/live for others must be similar.

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  • How do I send automated e-mails from Drupal using Messaging and Notifications?

    - by Adrian
    I am working on a Notifications plugin, and after starting to write my notes down about how to do this, decided to just post them here. Please feel free to come make modifications and changes. Eventually I hope to post this on the Drupal handbook as well. Thanks. --Adrian Sending automated e-mails from Drupal using Messaging and Notifications To implement a notifications plugin, you must implement the following functions: Use hook_messaging, hook_token_list and hook_token_values to create the messages that will be sent. Use hook_notifications to create the subscription types Add code to fire events (eg in hook_nodeapi) Add all UI elements to allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe Understanding Messaging The Messaging module is used to compose messages that can be delivered using various formats, such as simple mail, HTML mail, Twitter updates, etc. These formats are called "send methods." The backend details do not concern us here; what is important are the following concepts: TOKENS: tokens are provided by the "tokens" module. They allow you to write keywords in square brackets, [like-this], that can be replaced by any arbitrary value. Note: the token groups you create must match the keys you add to the $events-objects[$key] array. MESSAGE KEYS: A key is a part of a message, such as the greetings line. Keys can be different for each send method. For example, a plaintext mail's greeting might be "Hi, [user]," while an HTML greeing might be "Hi, [user]," and Twitter's might just be "[user-firstname]: ". Keys can have any arbitrary name. Keys are very simple and only have a machine-readable name and a user-readable description, the latter of which is only seen by admins. MESSAGE GROUPS: A group is a bunch of keys that often, but not always, might be used together to make up a complete message. For example, a generic group might include keys for a greeting, body, closing and footer. Groups can also be "subclassed" by selecting a "fallback" group that will supply any keys that are missing. Groups are also associated with modules; I'm not sure what these are used for. Understanding Notifications The Notifications module revolves around the following concepts: SUBSCRIPTIONS: Notifications plugins may define one or more types of subscriptions. For example, notifications_content defines subscriptions for: Threads (users are notified whenever a node or its comments change) Content types (users are notified whenever a node of a certain type is created or is changed) Users (users are notified whenever another user is changed) Subscriptions refer to both the user who's subscribed, how often they wish to be notified, the send method (for Messaging) and what's being subscribed to. This last part is defined in two steps. Firstly, a plugin defines several "subscription fields" (through a hook_notifications op of the same name), and secondly, "subscription types" (also an op) defines which fields apply to each type of subscription. For example, notifications_content defines the fields "nid," "author" and "type," and the subscriptions "thread" (nid), "nodetype" (type), "author" (author) and "typeauthor" (type and author), the latter referring to something like "any STORY by JOE." Fields are used to link events to subscriptions; an event must match all fields of a subscription (for all normal subscriptions) to be delivered to the recipient. The $subscriptions object is defined in subsequent sections. Notifications prefers that you don't create these objects yourself, preferring you to call the notifications_get_link() function to create a link that users may click on, but you can also use notifications_save_subscription and notifications_delete_subscription to do it yourself. EVENTS: An event is something that users may be notified about. Plugins create the $event object then call notifications_event($event). This either sends out notifications immediately, queues them to send out later, or both. Events include the type of thing that's changed (eg 'node', 'user'), the ID of the thing that's changed (eg $node-nid, $user-uid) and what's happened to it (eg 'create'). These are, respectively, $event-type, $event-oid (object ID) and $event-action. Warning: notifications_content_nodeapi also adds a $event-node field, referring to the node itself and not just $event-oid = $node-nid. This is not used anywhere in the core notifications module; however, when the $event is passed back to the 'query' op (see below), we assume the node is still present. Events do not refer to the user they will be referred to; instead, Notifications makes the connection between subscriptions and events, using the subscriptions' fields. MATCHING EVENTS TO SUBSCRIPTIONS: An event matches a subscription if it has the same type as the event (eg "node") and if the event matches all the correct fields. This second step is determined by the "query" hook op, which is called with the $event object as a parameter. The query op is responsible for giving Notifications a value for all the fields defined by the plugin. For example, notifications_content defines the 'nid', 'type' and 'author' fields, so its query op looks like this (ignore the case where $event_or_user = 'user' for now): $event_or_user = $arg0; $event_type = $arg1; $event_or_object = $arg2; if ($event_or_user == 'event' && $event_type == 'node' && ($node = $event_or_object->node) || $event_or_user == 'user' && $event_type == 'node' && ($node = $event_or_object)) { $query[]['fields'] = array( 'nid' => $node->nid, 'type' => $node->type, 'author' => $node->uid, ); return $query; After extracting the $node from the $event, we set $query[]['fields'] to a dictionary defining, for this event, all the fields defined by the module. As you can tell from the presence of the $query object, there's way more you can do with this op, but they are not covered here. DIGESTING AND DEDUPING: Understanding the relationship between Messaging and Notifications Usually, the name of a message group doesn't matter, but when being used with Notifications, the names must follow very strict patterns. Firstly, they must start with the name "notifications," and then are followed by either "event" or "digest," depending on whether the message group is being used to represent either a single event or a group of events. For 'events,' the third part of the name is the "type," which we get from Notification's $event-type (eg: notifications_content uses 'node'). The last part of the name is the operation being performed, which comes from Notification's $event-action. For example: notifications-event-node-comment might refer to the message group used when someone comments on a node notifications-event-user-update to a user who's updated their profile Hyphens cannot appear anywhere other than to separate the parts of these words. For 'digest' messages, the third and fourth part of the name come from hook_notification's "event types" callback, specifically this line: $types[] = array( 'type' => 'node', 'action' => 'insert', ... 'digest' => array('node', 'type'), ); $types[] = array( 'type' => 'node', 'action' => 'update', ... 'digest' => array('node', 'nid'), ); In this case, the first event type (node insertion) will be digested with the notifications-digest-node-type message template providing the header and footer, likely saying something like "the following [type] was created." The second event type (node update) will be digested with the notifications-digest-node-nid message template. Data Structure and Callback Reference $event The $event object has the following members: $event-type: The type of event. Must match the type in hook_notification::"event types". {notifications_event} $event-action: The action the event describes. Most events are sorted by [$event-type][$event-action]. {notifications_event}. $event-object[$object_type]: All objects relevant to the event. For example, $event-object['node'] might be the node that the event describes. $object_type can come from the 'event types' hook (see below). The main purpose appears to be to be passed to token_replace_multiple as the second parameter. $event-object[$event-type] is assumed to exist in the short digest processing functions, but this doesn't appear to be used anywhere. Not saved in the database; loaded by hook_notifications::"event load" $event-oid: apparently unused. The id of the primary object relevant to this event (eg the node's nid). $event-module: apparently unused $event-params[$key]: Mainly a place for plugins to save random data. The main module will serialize the contents of this array but does not use it in any way. However, notifications_ui appears to do something weird with it, possibly by using subscriptions' fields as keys into this array. I'm not sure why though. hook_notifications op 'subscription types': returns an array of subscription types provided by the plugin, in the form $key = array(...) with the following members: event_type: this subscription can only match events whose $event-type has this value. Stored in the database as notifications.event_type for every individual subscription. Apparently, this can be overiden in code but I wouldn't try it (see notifications_save_subscription). fields: an unkeyed array of fields that must be matched by an event (in addition to the event_type) for it to match this subscription. Each element of this array must be a key of the array returned by op 'subscription fields' which in turn must be used by op 'query' to actually perform the matching. title: user-readable title for their subscriptions page (eg the 'type' column in user/%uid/notifications/subscriptions) description: a user-readable description. page callback: used to add a supplementary page at user/%uid/notifications/blah. This and the following are used by notifications_ui as a part of hook_menu_alter. Appears to be partially deprecated. user page: user/%uid/notifications/blah. op 'event types': returns an array of event types, with each event type being an array with the following members: type: this will match $event-type action: this will match $event-action digest: an array with two ordered (non-keyed) elements, "type" and "field." 'type' is used as an index into $event-objects. 'field' is also used to group events like so: $event-objects[$type]-$field. For example, 'field' might be 'nid' - if the object is a node, the digest lines will be grouped by node ID. Finally, both are used to find the correct Messaging template; see discussion above. description: used on the admin "Notifications-Events" page name: unused, use Messaging instead line: deprecated, use Messaging instead Other Stuff This is an example of the main query that inserts an event into the queue: INSERT INTO {notifications_queue} (uid, destination, sid, module, eid, send_interval, send_method, cron, created, conditions) SELECT DISTINCT s.uid, s.destination, s.sid, s.module, %d, // event ID s.send_interval, s.send_method, s.cron, %d, // time of the event s.conditions FROM {notifications} s INNER JOIN {notifications_fields} f ON s.sid = f.sid WHERE (s.status = 1) AND (s.event_type = '%s') // subscription type AND (s.send_interval >= 0) AND (s.uid <> %d) AND ( (f.field = '%s' AND f.intval IN (%d)) // everything from 'query' op OR (f.field = '%s' AND f.intval = %d) OR (f.field = '%s' AND f.value = '%s') OR (f.field = '%s' AND f.intval = %d)) GROUP BY s.uid, s.destination, s.sid, s.module, s.send_interval, s.send_method, s.cron, s.conditions HAVING s.conditions = count(f.sid)

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  • TechEd 2012: Day 3 &ndash; Build Me A Solution

    - by Tim Murphy
    While digesting my lunch it was time to digest some TFS Build information. While much of my time is spent wearing my developer’s hat I am still a jack of all trades and automated builds are an important aspect of any project.  Because of this I was looking forward to finding out what new features are available in the latest release of Team Foundation Server. The first feature that caught my attention is the TFS Admin Client.  After being used to dealing with NAnt in the past it is nice to see a build a configuration GUI that is so flexible and well thought out.  The bonus is that it the tools that are incorporated in Visual Studio 2012 are just as feature rich.  Life is good. Since automated builds are the hub of your development process in a continuous integration shop I was really interested in the process related options. The biggest value add that I noticed was merge gated check-ins.  Merge or batch gated check-ins are an interesting concept.  If the build breaks with all the changes then TFS will run separate builds for each of the check-ins.  This ability to identify the actual offending check-in can save a lot of time and gray hair. The safari of TFS Build that was this session was packed with attractions.  How do you set it up builds, what are the different flavors of builds, how does the system report how the build went?  I would suggest anyone who is responsible for build automation spend some serious time with TFS 2012 and VS2012. del.icio.us Tags: Team Foundation Server 2012,TFS,Build,TechEd,TechEd 2012,Visual Studio 2012

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  • Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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  • Security Updates Available for SQL Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2014

    - by AaronBertrand
    If you are running 2008 SP3, 2008 R2 SP2, 2012 SP1 (SP2 is not affected, RTM is no longer supported), or 2014, you'll want to check out Security Bulletin MS14-044 for details on a denial of service / privilege escalation issue that has been patched: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/MS14-044 For SQL Server 2012 and SQL Server 2014, I've blogged about recent builds and recommendations here: http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/team-posts/latest-builds-sql-server-2012/ http://blogs.sqlsentry.com/team-posts/latest-builds-sql-server-2014...(read more)

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  • GlassFish Downloads - Where? (reminder)

    - by alexismp
    Whether you're looking for the open source edition, stable and supported builds, promoted or event nightly builds, they are all in one place on this download page which is linked off of the main glassfish.org welcome page. At the time of this writing (Nov. 2011), the latest stable release is GlassFish 3.1.1 (open source bits, supported Oracle GlassFish Server). The all-in-one Download page also contains links to the developer builds of both 3.1.2 (see plans here) as well as the promoted builds for the 4.0 version (plans) which was used to deliver the keynote "PaaS" demo at the recent JavaOne and Devoxx conferences.

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