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• Application Performance Episode 2: Announcing the Judges!

  - by Michaela Murray

  The story so far… We’re writing a new book for ASP.NET developers, and we want you to be a part of it! If you work with ASP.NET applications, and have top tips, hard-won lessons, or sage advice for avoiding, finding, and fixing performance problems, we want to hear from you! And if your app uses SQL Server, even better – interaction with the database is critical to application performance, so we’re looking for database top tips too. There’s a Microsoft Surface apiece for the person who comes up with the best tip for SQL Server and the best tip for .NET. Of course, if your suggestion is selected for the book, you’ll get full credit, by name, Twitter handle, GitHub repository, or whatever you like. To get involved, just email your nuggets of performance wisdom to [email protected] – there are examples of what we’re looking for and full competition details at Application Performance: The Best of the Web. Enter the judges… As mentioned in my last blogpost, we have a mystery panel of celebrity judges lined up to select the prize-winning performance pointers. We’re now ready to reveal their secret identities! Judging your ASP.NET  tips will be: Jean-Phillippe Gouigoux, MCTS/MCPD Enterprise Architect and MVP Connected System Developer. He’s a board member at French software company MGDIS, and teaches algorithms, security, software tests, and ALM at the Université de Bretagne Sud. Jean-Philippe also lectures at IT conferences and writes articles for programming magazines. His book Practical Performance Profiling is published by Simple-Talk. Nik Molnar,  a New Yorker, ASP Insider, and co-founder of Glimpse, an open source ASP.NET diagnostics and debugging tool. Originally from Florida, Nik specializes in web development, building scalable, client-centric solutions. In his spare time, Nik can be found cooking up a storm in the kitchen, hanging with his wife, speaking at conferences, and working on other open source projects. Mitchel Sellers, Microsoft C# and DotNetNuke MVP. Mitchel is an experienced software architect, business leader, public speaker, and educator. He works with companies across the globe, as CEO of IowaComputerGurus Inc. Mitchel writes technical articles for online and print publications and is the author of Professional DotNetNuke Module Programming. He frequently answers questions on StackOverflow and MSDN and is an active participant in the .NET and DotNetNuke communities. Clive Tong, Software Engineer at Red Gate. In previous roles, Clive spent a lot of time working with Common LISP and enthusing about functional languages, and he’s worked with managed languages since before his first real job (which was a long time ago). Long convinced of the productivity benefits of managed languages, Clive is very interested in getting good runtime performance to keep managed languages practical for real-world development. And our trio of SQL Server specialists, ready to select your top suggestion, are (drumroll): Rodney Landrum, a SQL Server MVP who writes regularly about Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. He’s authored SQL Server Tacklebox, three Reporting Services books, and contributes regularly to SQLServerCentral, SQL Server Magazine, and Simple–Talk. His day job involves overseeing a large SQL Server infrastructure in Orlando. Grant Fritchey, Product Evangelist at Red Gate and SQL Server MVP. In an IT career spanning more than 20 years, Grant has written VB, VB.NET, C#, and Java. He’s been working with SQL Server since version 6.0. Grant volunteers with the Editorial Committee at PASS and has written books for Apress and Simple-Talk. Jonathan Allen, leader and founder of the PASS SQL South West user group. He’s been working with SQL Server since 1999 and enjoys performance tuning, development, and using SQL Server for business solutions. He’s spoken at SQLBits and SQL in the City, as well as local user groups across the UK. He’s also a moderator at ask.sqlservercentral.com.

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• A tiny Utility to recycle an IIS Application Pool

  - by Rick Strahl

  In the last few weeks I've annoyingly been having problems with an area on my Web site. It's basically ancient articles that are using ASP classic pages and for reasons unknown ASP classic locks up on these pages frequently. It's not an individual page, but ALL ASP classic pages lock up. Ah yes, gotta old tech gone bad. It's not super critical since the content is really old, but still a hassle since it's linked content that still gets quite a bit of traffic. When it happens all ASP classic in that AppPool dies. I've been having a hard time tracking this one down - I suspect an errant COM object I have a Web Monitor running on the server that's checking for failures and while the monitor can detect the failures when the timeouts occur, I didn't have a good way to just restart that particular application pool. I started putzing around with PowerShell, but - as so often seems the case - I can never get the PowerShell syntax right - I just don't use it enough and have to dig out cheat sheets etc. In any case, after about 20 minutes of that I decided to just create a small .NET Console Application that does the trick instead, and in a few minutes I had this:using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using System.DirectoryServices; namespace RecycleApplicationPool { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { string appPoolName = "DefaultAppPool"; string machineName = "LOCALHOST"; if (args.Length > 0) appPoolName = args[0]; if (args.Length > 1) machineName = args[1]; string error = null; DirectoryEntry root = null; try { Console.WriteLine("Restarting Application Pool " + appPoolName + " on " + machineName + "..."); root = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://" + machineName + "/W3SVC/AppPools/" +appPoolName); Console.WriteLine(root.InvokeGet("Name")); root.Invoke("Recycle"); Console.WriteLine("Application Pool recycling complete..."); } catch(Exception ex) { error = "Error: Unable to access AppPool: " + ex.Message; } if ( !string.IsNullOrEmpty(error) ) { Console.WriteLine(error); return; } } } } To run in you basically provide the name of the ApplicationPool and optionally a machine name if it's not on the local box. RecyleApplicationPool.exe "WestWindArticles" And off it goes. What's nice about AppPool recycling versus doing a full IISRESET is that it only affects the AppPool, and more importantly AppPool recycles happen in a staggered fashion - the existing instance isn't shut down immediately until requests finish while a new instance is fired up to handle new requests. So, now I can easily plug this Executable into my West Wind Web Monitor as an action to take when the site is not responding or timing out which is a big improvement than hanging for an unspecified amount of time. I'm posting this fairly trivial bit of code just in case somebody (maybe myself a few months down the road) is searching for ApplicationPool recyling code. It's clearly trivial, but I've written batch files for this a bunch of times before and actually having a small utility around without having to worry whether Powershell is installed and configured right is actually an improvement. Next time I think about using PowerShell remind me that it's just easier to just build a small .NET Console app, 'k? :-) Resources Download Executable and VS Project© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in IIS7  .NET  Windows   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Free RAM disappears - Memory leak?

  - by Izzy

  On a fresh started system, free reports about 1.5G used RAM (8G RAM alltogether, Ubuntu 12.04 with lightdm and plasma desktop, one konsole window started). Having the apps running I use, it still consumes not more than 2G. However, having the system running for a couple of days, more and more of my free RAM disappears -- without showing up in the list of used apps: while smem --pie=name reports less than 20% used (and 80% being available), everything else says differently. free -m for example reports on about day 7: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 7013 446 0 178 997 -/+ buffers/cache: 5836 1623 Swap: 9536 296 9240 (so you can see, it's not the buffers or the cache). Today this finally ended with the system crashing completely: the windows manager being gone, apps "hanging in the air" (frameless) -- and a popup notifying me about "too many open files". Syslog reports: kernel: [856738.020829] VFS: file-max limit 752838 reached So I closed those applications I was able to close, and killed X using Ctrl-Alt-backspace. X tried to come up again after that with failsafeX, but was unable to do so as it could no longer detect its configuration. So I switched to a console using Ctrl-Alt-F2, captured all information I could think of (vmstat, free, smem, proc/meminfo, lsof, ps aux), and finally rebooted. X again came up with failsafeX; this time I told it to "recover from my backed-up configuration", then switched to a console and successfully used startx to bring up the graphical environment. I have no real clue to what is causing this issue -- though it must have to do either with X itself, or with some user processes running on X -- as after killing X, free -m output looked like this: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 2677 4781 0 62 419 -/+ buffers/cache: 2195 5263 Swap: 9536 59 9477 (~3.5GB being freed) -- to compare with the output after a fresh start: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 7459 1483 5975 0 63 730 -/+ buffers/cache: 689 6769 Swap: 9536 0 9536 Two more helpful outputs are provided by memstat -u. Shortly before the crash: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 200 207 616 whoopsie 1 764 740 817 2300 colord 1 3200 836 894 2156 root 62 70404 352996 382260 569920 izzy 80 177508 1465416 1519266 1851840 After having X killed: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 184 188 356 izzy 1 1400 708 739 1080 whoopsie 1 848 668 826 1772 colord 1 3204 804 888 1728 root 62 54876 131708 149950 267860 And after a restart, back in X: User Count Swap USS PSS RSS mail 1 0 212 217 628 whoopsie 1 0 1536 1880 5096 colord 1 0 3740 4217 7936 root 54 0 148668 180911 345132 izzy 47 0 370928 437562 915056 Edit: Just added two graphs from my monitoring system. Interesting to see: everytime when there's a "jump" in memory consumption, CPU peaks as well. Just found this right now -- and it reminds me of another indicator pointing to X itself: Often when returning to my machine and unlocking the screen, I found something doing heavvy work on my CPU. Checking with top, it always turned out to be /usr/bin/X :0 -auth /var/run/lightdm/root/:0 -nolisten tcp vt7 -novtswitch -background none. So after this long explanation, finally my questions: What could be the possible causes? How can I better identify involved processes/applications? What steps could be taken to avoid this behaviour -- short from rebooting the machine all X days? I was running 8.04 (Hardy) for about 5 years on my old machine, never having experienced the like (always more than 100 days uptime, before rebooting for e.g. kernel updates). This now is a complete new machine with a fresh install of 8.04. In case it matters, some specs: AMD A4-3400 APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, using the open-source ati/radeon driver (so no fglrx installed), 8GB RAM, WDC WD1002FAEX-0 hdd (1TB), Asus F1A75-V Evo mainboard. Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit with KDE4/Plasma. Apps usually open more or less permanently include Evolution, Firefox, konsole (with Midnight Commander running inside, about 4 tabs), and LibreOffice -- plus occasionally Calibre, Gimp and Moneyplex (banking software I'm already using for almost 20 years now, in a version which did fine on Hardy).

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• Opening a new Windows from ASP.NET code behind

  - by TATWORTH

  At http://weblogs.asp.net/infinitiesloop/archive/2007/09/25/response-redirect-into-a-new-window-with-extension-methods.aspx there is an excellent post on how to open a new windows from code behind. The purists may not like it but it helped solve a problem for a client's client. Here is an update for VS2010 users: using System; using System.Web; using System.Web.UI; /// <summary> /// Response Helper for opening popup windo from code behind. /// </summary> public static class ResponseHelper {   /// <summary>   /// Redirect to popup window   /// </summary>   /// <param name="response">The response.</param>   /// <param name="url">URL to open to</param>   /// <param name="target">Target of window _self or _blank</param>   /// <param name="windowFeatures">Features such as window bar</param>   /// <remarks>   ///     <list type="bullet">   ///         <item>   /// From http://weblogs.asp.net/infinitiesloop/archive/2007/09/25/response-redirect-into-a-new-window-with-extension-methods.aspx   /// </item>   /// <item>   /// Note: If you use it outside the context of a Page request, you can't redirect to a new window. The reason is the need to call the ResolveClientUrl method on Page, which I can't do if there is no Page. I could have just built my own version of that method, but it's more involved than you might think to do it right. So if you need to use this from an HttpHandler other than a Page, you are on your own.   /// </item>   ///         <item>   /// Beware of popup blockers.   /// </item>   /// <item>   /// Note: Obviously when you are redirecting to a new window, the current window will still be hanging around. Normally redirects abort the current request -- no further processing occurs. But for these redirects, processing continues, since we still have to serve the response for the current window (which also happens to contain the script to open the new window, so it is important that it completes).   /// </item>   /// <item>   /// Sample call Response.Redirect("popup.aspx", "_blank", "menubar=0,width=100,height=100");   /// </item>   ///     </list>   /// </remarks>   public static void Redirect(this HttpResponse response, string url, string target, string windowFeatures)   {     if ((String.IsNullOrEmpty(target) || target.Equals("_self", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) && String.IsNullOrEmpty(windowFeatures))     {       response.Redirect(url);     }     else     {       Page page = (Page)HttpContext.Current.Handler;       if (page == null)       {         throw new InvalidOperationException("Cannot redirect to new window outside Page context.");       }       url = page.ResolveClientUrl(url);       string script;       if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(windowFeatures))       {         script = @"window.open(""{0}"", ""{1}"", ""{2}"");";       }       else       {         script = @"window.open(""{0}"", ""{1}"");";       }       script = String.Format(script, url, target, windowFeatures);       ScriptManager.RegisterStartupScript(page, typeof(Page), "Redirect", script, true);     }   } }

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• Cannot run a VM with more than three network interfaces with KVM

  - by Bostonvaulter

  I'm running KVM on top of Ubuntu 10.10 Server I can create VM's (Virtual Machine) and network interfaces fine but I cannot seem to add more than three network interfaces. As soon as I have a VM with four network interfaces it gets stuck on startup at the starting SeaBIOS page with this message: Starting SeaBIOS (version pre-0.6.1-20100702_143500-palmer) So far I've verified this with two VM's, a Ubuntu 10.10 desktop and a Vyatta router. The specific network hardware I assign to the VM's doesn't seem to matter. I'm trying to have one bridged interface and three private networks using Vyatta to route between them. Does anyone know why I can't run a VM with more than three network interfaces? Edit: Additionally the KVM thread responsible for the specific VM hangs using ~100% CPU (i.e. one core). Here's the command for the process that is hanging: /usr/bin/kvm -S -M pc-0.12 -enable-kvm -m 512 -smp 1,sockets=1,cores=1,threads=1 -name vyatta -uuid 6dff7c94-6810-423e-5fea-fec10da0e9b7 -nodefaults -chardev socket,id=monitor,path=/var/lib/libvirt/qemu/vyatta.monitor,server,nowait -mon chardev=monitor,mode=readline -rtc base=utc -boot c -drive file=/home/rams/virtual-machines/vyatta.img,if=none,id=drive-ide0-0-0,boot=on,format=raw -device ide-drive,bus=ide.0,unit=0,drive=drive-ide0-0-0,id=ide0-0-0 -drive if=none,media=cdrom,id=drive-ide0-1-0,readonly=on,format=raw -device ide-drive,bus=ide.1,unit=0,drive=drive-ide0-1-0,id=ide0-1-0 -device rtl8139,vlan=0,id=net0,mac=00:54:00:be:cc:4b,bus=pci.0,addr=0x3 -net tap,fd=97,vlan=0,name=hostnet0 -device rtl8139,vlan=1,id=net1,mac=52:54:00:da:59:ed,bus=pci.0,addr=0x5 -net tap,fd=98,vlan=1,name=hostnet1 -device rtl8139,vlan=2,id=net2,mac=52:54:00:ce:22:b6,bus=pci.0,addr=0x6 -net tap,fd=99,vlan=2,name=hostnet2 -device rtl8139,vlan=3,id=net3,mac=52:54:00:1e:bc:46,bus=pci.0,addr=0x7 -net tap,fd=101,vlan=3,name=hostnet3 -chardev pty,id=serial0 -device isa-serial,chardev=serial0 -usb -vnc 127.0.0.1:0 -k en-us -vga cirrus -device virtio-balloon-pci,id=balloon0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x4 Edit: I've also found an error in dmesg that might be related (it also shows up when running virtd in verbose mode): 14:47:24.399: warning : qemudParsePCIDeviceStrs:1422 : Unexpected exit status '1', qemu probably failed I've also tried disabling app armor but that doesn't seem to make a difference.

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• Using an SSD with no AHCI [ICH7 base] - Windows 7 hangs frequently

  - by h4xnoodle

  I have a Shuttle Intel G31 + ICH7 (base -- not M/R etc) system. I just bought an OCZ Vertex 3 120gb [VTX3-25SAT3-120G] which includes the Sandforce 2218 firmware. The ICH7 does not support AHCI. I understand that this can be a problem. What I don't understand, is if it's necessary to have the proper performance of this drive. I know that without AHCI I may get a limited read/write speed -- this is fine. What my concern is, is the constant freezing/hangs I'm getting with Windows 7 on any disk activity. The 'Highest Active Time' flip-flops from 0 to 100% every minute or so regardless of large or small files. EDIT: The threads/processes with the highest response time is the kernel. I've been reading about other people with Shuttle SG31G2s, and they seem to be using SSDs no problem. Is this the controller's fault? The fact that I do not have AHCI enabled? It makes sense to me that if this SSD requires AHCI features that it would cause Windows to hang, but I would like to fully determine my situation before returning things/reformatting. To initially have my drive recognise the SSD at all, I had to change the BIOS option to Force Gen II instead of Auto for the SATA controller. I then installed Windows with no problem. There were no errors in the event log related to disk usage, but watching the perfmon I could see the highest active time and the processes (usually pagefile.sys being written to, or chrome/firefox caching) which was correlated to the hanging. So now what I need answered is: should I be returning this SSD and getting one with a different controller, or returning the SSD all-together as it will never work out and I will continue to get these hangs. Posts I've read: Windows 7 New SSD SATA AHCI? -- suggests to use AHCI http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2189868 -- Sandforce issues Windows 7 freezes with SSD -- and attached posts Why does my Windows 7 PC / SSD drive keep freezing? -- this is not the controller I have, but still a related issue. Windows 7 hangs after longer inactivity of user -- also tried messing with power settings with no luck. It was already set to 'Never' for turning off HDDs.

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• Setting Timeouts: SQL Server 2008/IIS 7.5

  - by Julie

  We have recently migrated from a Win 2003/SQL Server 2000 system to Win 2008 64 bit R2, SQL Server 2008 R2. Our websites are in classic asp, and this can't be changed to another scripting language at this time. On the old server, if I got stuck in some kind of endless loop, the page would throw an error. On the new server, I have a page that has some sort of looping problem, that even though the SQL SP is called only once (and runs fine run as a query on the server) it pegs SQL server and therefore locks all of our websites. I'll get my code figured out, no biggie. But I need to make sure the server times out when this happens. (The page I'm working on runs fine with certain instances of the query, and locks with others using a different query variable. I can't have something like that sneak up on me on a page I haven't touched for three years.) I can't figure out how an SP that runs once on the server, from an ASP page, is tying up SQL server this way. It's obviously some sort of a timeout issue, but I can't figure out where/which timeout values to change. I actually have to remote desktop to the server and kill the process in SQL server. I'm afraid I'm a generalist, and server management is not my thing, even though it's my responsibility, so I am almost certain to have questions about any answer that I receive. How can I track this down? What settings do I need to change? More info: It's not SQL Server On our test site, I created an ASP file that just did an endless loop (do while 1=1) and had the same problem - the other websites wouldn't load - without SQL server being involved. So I think the reason the process was hanging is that the page wasn't timing out as it should, and so the connection to SQL was never closed. Killing the process in SQL server would reset the page somehow. For my intentional endless loop, I had to refresh the app pool to get rid of it. This points more to either IIS or the ASP settings. The ASP timeouts are set to whatever the default were when the server was first loaded. I still can't figure out why one file is locking up all websites, though. Again, that didn't happen on the old server.

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• fink hangs while compiling Octave on OS X

  - by Mark Bennett

  Disclaimer: I'm totally new to Fink. I'm trying to install Octave (Matlab open source clone) on Mountain Lion using Fink, following instructions at http://wiki.octave.org/Octave_for_MacOS_X It's a new installation of Fink, and I've also installed X11 per instructions. I'm using this command (which I believe is correct since everything's 64 bit now): sudo fink install octave-atlas It's hanging after a while, showing this as it's last output: ... Setting up xft2-dev (2.2.0-2) ... Clearing dependency_libs of .la files being installed Reading buildlock packages... All buildlocks accounted for. /sw/bin/dpkg-lockwait -i /sw/fink/dists/stable/main/binary-darwin-x86_64/x11/xinitrc_1.5-1_darwin-x86_64.deb (Reading database ... 14871 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to replace xinitrc 1.5-1 (using .../xinitrc_1.5-1_darwin-x86_64.deb) ... Unpacking replacement xinitrc ... Setting up xinitrc (1.5-1) ... I did notice the process name on the terminal's tab was "sort", so the second time I hit this I tried Control-D (End-of-File), and this did seem to unstick it. I'm wondering if there's some misformed command and sort was trying to read from stdin? Questions: 1: Has anybody else seen this? Google wasn't helpful 2: Fink outputs a LOT of warnings and errors.... is that normal? 3: wondering if anybody's got Fink to compile Octave on Mountain Lion specifically? And whether they used just "octave" or "octave-atlas". Or if you got it working with MacPorts or Homebrew? 4: later Fink failed with "Failed: phase compiling: gnuplot-minimal-4.6.1-1 failed". I haven't started googling that yet... but wondering if anybody's see that? Also tried MacPorts but got other errors with Octave. And reading online it looks like HomeBrew also has issues with Octave on Mountain Lion. 5: Generally looking for anybody who's got Octave running on Mountain Lion with any of the package managers. I've been at this for a couple days ;-)

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• Intermittently, IIS7 requests get stuck in WindowsAuthenticationModule

  - by rbeier

  Hi, We're running an IIS7 server hosting several dozen websites. Several of these websites are all part of the same legacy app we've developed. These sites all run the same code and run in the same app pool. Roughly once a month over the past few months, we've found that all requests for this app pool start hanging indefinitely. When this happens, we receive an alert and we recycle the app pool. After that, the sites start working again. This only ever affects this one app pool - never any others on the same server. A couple times, before recycling the pool, I've looked at the currently-executing requests in the worker process. They all show up as executing inside the WindowsAuthenticationModule. Which is strange, because the vast majority of the application does not require authentication. There is a small admin section which uses Windows auth... but all the other requests should be anonymous. Does anyone have any idea as to what might be causing this? There are several unusual things about the way these sites are set up. As I mentioned, they all run the same code - multiple sites point at the same physical directory. The only difference is the host header bindings. I'm not sure why there isn't just one site with all the host headers, but that's how it works. In several of these sites, the same physical directory is mapped at two levels - as the root of the site and again as an application within the site. So if a user goes to http://oursite.com/index.aspx, that maps to c:\files\oursite\index.aspx. If a user goes to http://oursite.com/foo/index.aspx, that also maps to c:\files\oursite\index.aspx. I think there is code which looks at the request URL and handles the two requests differently. This is strange because the same web.config ends up being interpreted as a site config file, and also as an application config file within the site. I don't know if this might be related to the authentication problem. If we can't find the cause, we're thinking of a few workarounds we could try: Move the admin section into a separate site, and give the client a new admin URL. Run that separate site in its own app pool. Then in the web.config shared by all the other sites, remove the WindowsAuthenticationModule. That way there should be no possibility of a hang within the WindowsAuthenticationModule. Try running all these sites in the classic pipeline instead of the integrated pipeline. They were working fine on our old IIS6 server... (If we get desperate) Set up a watchdog script which monitors the sites and auto-recycles the app pool when it detects that requests are getting stuck. What do you think? Thanks for your help, Richard

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• PC freezing when used to print labels

  - by Will

  Hi I have a windows XP machine that is used to print labels from a Zebra label printer. It is connected a member of the domain. I am getting reports that when people try to use the computer it will sometimes be frozen to the point where they have to physically shut the machine down and boot to get it responding. (this happens about once a day). I took a look in Event Viewer and nabbed some of these errors out of it: Event Type: Error Event Source: Userenv Event Category: None Event ID: 1054 Date: 11/12/2010 Time: 9:13:04 AM User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM Computer: FS-LABELMACHINE Description: Windows cannot obtain the domain controller name for your computer network. (A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host. ). Group Policy processing aborted. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. Event Type: Error Event Source: AutoEnrollment Event Category: None Event ID: 15 Date: 11/11/2010 Time: 11:08:25 PM User: N/A Computer: FS-LABELMACHINE Description: Automatic certificate enrollment for local system failed to contact the active directory (0x80072751). A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable host. Enrollment will not be performed. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. Hanging application MSACCESS.EXE, version 11.0.8166.0, hang module hungapp, version 0.0.0.0, hang address 0x00000000. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.... SearchIndexer (2420) Unable to write a shadowed header for file C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\MSS.chk. Error -1032. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. Failed auto update retrieval of third-party root list sequence number from: <http://www.download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/authrootseq.txt> with error: A connection with the server could not be established For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. I'm not really sure what to make out of this... Thanks for the help in advanced, Will

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• Problems migrating an EBS backed instance over AWS Regions

  - by gshankar

  Note: I asked this question on the EC2 forums too but haven't received any love there. Hopefully the ServerFault community will be more awesome. The new AWS Sydney region opening up is something that we've been waiting for for a long time but I'm having a lot of trouble migrating our instances over from N. California. I managed to migrate 1 instance over using CloudyScripts to move a snapshot and then firing up a new instance in the Sydney region. This was a very new instance so both the source and destination were running on a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server and I had no issues there. However, the rest of our instances are all Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and with these, I'm having a lot of problems. I've tried following: 1- following the AWS whitepaper on moving instances which was given to us at the recent Customer Appreciation Day in Sydney where the new region was launched. The problem with this approach was with the last step (Step 19) here you register the image: ec2-register -s snap-0f62ec3f -n "Wombat" -d "migrated Wombat" --region ap-southeast-2 -a x86_64 --kernel aki-937e2ed6 --block-device-mapping "/dev/sdk=ephemeral0" I keep getting this error: Client.InvalidAMIID.NotFound: The AMI ID 'ami-937e2ed6' does not exist which I think is due to the kernel_id not existing in the Sydney region? 2- Using CloudyScripts to move a snapshot and then creating a new volume and attaching to a new instance in Sydney This results in the instance just hanging on boot and failing the status checks. I can't SSH in or look at the server log I suspect that my issue is with finding the right kernel_id for the volume in the new region. However I can't seem to work out how to go about finding this kernel_id, the ones I've tried (from the original instance) don't result in the Client.InvalidAMIID.NotFound: The AMI ID 'ami-937e2ed6' error and any other kernel_id just won't boot. I've tried both 12.04 and 10.04 versions of Ubuntu. Nothing seems to work, I've been banging my head against a wall for a while now, please help! New (broken) instance i-a1acda9b ami-9b8611a1 aki-31990e0b Source instance i-08a6664e ami-b37e2ef6 aki-937e2ed6 p.s. I also tried following this guide on updating my Ubuntu LTS version to 12.04 before doing the migration but it didn't seem to work either, still getting stuck on updating the kernel_id http://ubuntu-smoser.blogspot.com.au/2010/04/upgrading-ebs-instance.html

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• Intermittently, IIS7 requests get stuck in WindowsAuthenticationModule

  - by Richard Beier

  We're running an IIS7 server hosting several dozen websites. Several of these websites are all part of the same legacy app we've developed. These sites all run the same code and run in the same app pool. Roughly once a month over the past few months, we've found that all requests for this app pool start hanging indefinitely. When this happens, we receive an alert and we recycle the app pool. After that, the sites start working again. This only ever affects this one app pool - never any others on the same server. A couple times, before recycling the pool, I've looked at the currently-executing requests in the worker process. They all show up as executing inside the WindowsAuthenticationModule. Which is strange, because the vast majority of the application does not require authentication. There is a small admin section which uses Windows auth... but all the other requests should be anonymous. Does anyone have any idea as to what might be causing this? There are several unusual things about the way these sites are set up. As I mentioned, they all run the same code - multiple sites point at the same physical directory. The only difference is the host header bindings. I'm not sure why there isn't just one site with all the host headers, but that's how it works. In several of these sites, the same physical directory is mapped at two levels - as the root of the site and again as an application within the site. So if a user goes to http://oursite.com/index.aspx, that maps to c:\files\oursite\index.aspx. If a user goes to http://oursite.com/foo/index.aspx, that also maps to c:\files\oursite\index.aspx. I think there is code which looks at the request URL and handles the two requests differently. This is strange because the same web.config ends up being interpreted as a site config file, and also as an application config file within the site. I don't know if this might be related to the authentication problem. If we can't find the cause, we're thinking of a few workarounds we could try: Move the admin section into a separate site, and give the client a new admin URL. Run that separate site in its own app pool. Then in the web.config shared by all the other sites, remove the WindowsAuthenticationModule. That way there should be no possibility of a hang within the WindowsAuthenticationModule. Try running all these sites in the classic pipeline instead of the integrated pipeline. They were working fine on our old IIS6 server... (If we get desperate) Set up a watchdog script which monitors the sites and auto-recycles the app pool when it detects that requests are getting stuck. What do you think? Thanks for your help, Richard

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• How should I convert a physical drive to a VHD for use with VirtualPC?

  - by RBerteig

  I have the hard disks from a PC that was happily running Windows Me until is it suffered an unknown hardware failure. The drives are intact, and can be mounted and read on other PCs. We have data backups, but there is licensed software installed that may not be possible to migrate to newer versions running on a more modern platform making the idea of just booting a virtual image attractive. Is it possible to make VHDs from the drives such that I can boot them in VirtualPC? If not VirtualPC, would it be possible in any other virtualization tool? Edit: Some more details.... The system was running Windows Me, but upgraded from Windows 95 (or possibly 98). It can't have been more than a Pentium II, but I will have to look at the motherboard to confirm that. There were no "exotic" devices installed, and nothing beyond the usual legacy stuff that would need to survive into a virtual machine. The licensed software did not have a dongle, so I won't need to worry about virtualizing a physical dongle of some kind. Licenses were probably died to the disk serial number. There were two HDs, both IDE. The boot disk is about 6GB, and the spare data disk is 12GB, but nearly empty. I have a small bias in favor of VirtualPC just because its free and I've used it successfully in the past. But this is a good excuse to revisit the state of the art. I do know from direct experience that it is possible to install and boot DOS 5.0 and Win95 in VirtualPC, but the VM extensions weren't available so the experience isn't as seamless as I would have liked. A very old DirectX game that failed miserably under XP SP2 runs really nicely on that VM, and actually plays better in a lot of ways than it did on period hardware, so that gives me hope that this is possible. Edit 2: Well, I'm closer than I was when I asked... so thanks to all for helpful suggestions and hints to what I should be trying. I used WinImage to copy the disks, and VirtualPC 2007 to attempt to boot. So far, I have it booting in safe mode, but hanging with a black screen otherwise. I strongly suspect that the copy of Artisoft Lantastic 8.0 (anyone else remember them?) that is still installed for networking with even older PCs that mostly don't exist any more is the culprit there. In my infinite free time, I will try to resolve the differences between a Safe Mode boot and a normal boot, and feel that it is likely to yield to pressure. I'd accept more than one answer if I could... this isn't as black and white a question as the one accepted answer convention assumes.

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• Seeking past end of file causes Apache hang, and it never restarts.

  - by talkingnews

  I've actually solved my problem with a better script, but I'm still left wondering why Apache2 hung completely - this is an out-of-the-box ISPCONFIG 3.03 install, everything bang up to date, running perfectly. Until... The troublesome but innocent-looking script: $fp = fopen("/var/log/ispconfig/cron.log", "r"); fseek($fp, -5000, SEEK_END); $line_buffer = array(); while (!feof($fp)) { $line = fgets($fp, 1024); $line_buffer[] = $line; $line_buffer = array_slice($line_buffer, -10, 10); } foreach ($line_buffer as $line) { echo $line; } You get the idea, just a script I found on a forum somwehere. I did this for various logs, since it's a nice easy window on what's occurring (in a protect dir, of course!). One day, the logs having grown large an me having sorted all my cron, scripting and mail queue errors, I thought I was time to start afresh. updated, rebooted, archived and deleted the logs. When I ran my script a couple of hours later, it hung. And hung. 8 minutes I waited. Chrome timed the page out, of course, but the server never came back to life. htop showed /usr/sbin/apache2 -k restart using 100% CPU. Never came back until I did a service apache2 restart. Ran fine, as soon as I hit that logfile again...dead. So, I worked out it was the logfile script, and I worked out that seeking beyond the end of the file wasn't good, and I found a better script http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.fseek.php#90450 But what I'm left wondering is... why didn't something restart or kill the process? How was one hanging page able to bring down the whole server? It's running suphp. I say "out of the box", I've tweaked mysql and apache to fork and reserve sensible amounts of processes for the 512Mb RAM the VPS has, and it'll handle multiple refreshes of large pages, and hadn't hung before. Any ideas how I'd avoid this? Google isn't my friend in this instance beyond the reccs. above about number of processes vs RAM available.

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• Windows server detected error with hard disk

  - by user53864

  We have hosting Windows server 2008 R2 and I am working as admin in small company. The server is hanging and restarting as the hard disk seems to be damaged due to power fluctutaion(though having inverter) as it's showing the below error message on server reboot: Problem detected with the hard disk Press any key to continue It's Seagate 1TB SATA hard disk and it's booting after pressing enter. So it's clear that the hard disk is dying. Yes, it's in warranty but it's fact that warranty won't recover the lincesed windows server 2008 and it's data. As it's booting now, I backed up required things and I am thinking to clone the entire hard disk. The first thing it striked me is checking on the Seagate site if any tool available for cloning and I found Seagate DiskWizard but not specified it for windows server 2008. Please anybody could help me giving your best ideas for the below: Urgently, What's the best way(free of cost) for me to clone in my case with the new same sized hard disk? It's a one time lincenced and I cannot use the same key again if I reinstall the server. Will the lincense be carried with new disk if cloned? else there is a way to contact Microsoft explaining the problem occurred, to obtain new key for no charge?. I want to take measure for future. How do I keep two disks in continuous sync? mirrored & raid are the only options converting the disks to dynamic? or is there a best way I could do with no additional charge?. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you! EDIT:1 I started cloning the disk with CloneZilla and it was going proper showing in GUI. But after some time there is no GUI but a black screen with some codes(looks like disk location numbers) going page by page(I have attached the screenshots below captured from my phone). Do you people think it's actually cloning?. I started in the morning and it's evening now. I left the office now to let it finish what it's trying to do and I'll go & check it tomorrow. Slowly lost hope, don't know what face it's going to show tomorrow. Any ideas?

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• Analysing and measuring the performance of a .NET application (survey results)

  - by Laila

  Back in December last year, I asked myself: could it be that .NET developers think that you need three days and a PhD to do performance profiling on their code? What if developers are shunning profilers because they perceive them as too complex to use? If so, then what method do they use to measure and analyse the performance of their .NET applications? Do they even care about performance? So, a few weeks ago, I decided to get a 1-minute survey up and running in the hopes that some good, hard data would clear the matter up once and for all. I posted the survey on Simple Talk and got help from a few people to promote it. The survey consisted of 3 simple questions: Amazingly, 533 developers took the time to respond - which means I had enough data to get representative results! So before I go any further, I would like to thank all of you who contributed, because I now have some pretty good answers to the troubling questions I was asking myself. To thank you properly, I thought I would share some of the results with you. First of all, application performance is indeed important to most of you. In fact, performance is an intrinsic part of the development cycle for a good 40% of you, which is much higher than I had anticipated, I have to admit. (I know, "Have a little faith Laila!") When asked what tool you use to measure and analyse application performance, I found that nearly half of the respondents use logging statements, a third use performance counters, and 70% of respondents use a profiler of some sort (a 3rd party performance profilers, the CLR profiler or the Visual Studio profiler). The importance attributed to logging statements did surprise me a little. I am still not sure why somebody would go to the trouble of manually instrumenting code in order to measure its performance, instead of just using a profiler. I personally find the process of annotating code, calculating times from log files, and relating it all back to your source terrifyingly laborious. Not to mention that you then need to remember to turn it all off later! Even when you have logging in place throughout all your code anyway, you still have a fair amount of potentially error-prone calculation to sift through the results; in addition, you'll only get method-level rather than line-level timings, and you won't get timings from any framework or library methods you don't have source for. To top it all, we all know that bottlenecks are rarely where you would expect them to be, so you could be wasting time looking for a performance problem in the wrong place. On the other hand, profilers do all the work for you: they automatically collect the CPU and wall-clock timings, and present the results from method timing all the way down to individual lines of code. Maybe I'm missing a trick. I would love to know about the types of scenarios where you actively prefer to use logging statements. Finally, while a third of the respondents didn't have a strong opinion about code performance profilers, those who had an opinion thought that they were mainly complex to use and time consuming. Three respondents in particular summarised this perfectly: "sometimes, they are rather complex to use, adding an additional time-sink to the process of trying to resolve the existing problem". "they are simple to use, but the results are hard to understand" "Complex to find the more advanced things, easy to find some low hanging fruit". These results confirmed my suspicions: Profilers are seen to be designed for more advanced users who can use them effectively and make sense of the results. I found yet more interesting information when I started comparing samples of "developers for whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle", with those "to whom performance is only looked at in times of crisis", and "developers to whom performance is not important, as long as the app works". See the three graphs below. Sample of developers to whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle: Sample of developers to whom performance is important only in times of crisis: Sample of developers to whom performance is not important, as long as the app works: As you can see, there is a strong correlation between the usage of a profiler and the importance attributed to performance: indeed, the more important performance is to a development team, the more likely they are to use a profiler. In addition, developers to whom performance is an important part of the dev cycle have a higher tendency to use a much wider range of methods for performance measurement and analysis. And, unsurprisingly, the less important performance is, the less varied the methods of measurement are. So all in all, to come back to my random questions: .NET developers do care about performance. Those who care the most use a wider range of performance measurement methods than those who care less. But overall, logging statements, performance counters and third party performance profilers are the performance measurement methods of choice for most developers. Finally, although most of you find code profilers complex to use, those of you who care the most about performance tend to use profilers more than those of you to whom performance is not so important.

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• Financial Management: Why Move to the Cloud?

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A guest post by Terrance Wampler, Vice President, Financials Product Strategy, Oracle I’ve spent my career designing and developing financial management systems, most of it at Oracle. Every single day I either meet with our customers or talk to them on the phone. The time is usually spent discussing various business challenges facing CFOs and Controllers, who are running Oracle’s Financials. Lately, we’ve been talking a lot about cloud computing and whether it makes sense for finance to go to the cloud. Here are some pros and cons that might help you make that decision. Let’s start with the benefits of cloud solutions. The first is savings. With cloud services, you pay only for those commodities that you use. That makes you feel like you're getting better value for your money. Plus, you can preserve your cash for your core business and you can get a better matching of expenses and revenues. So, at the top of the list is lower total cost of ownership. The second point has to do with optimization. With cloud services, you’ll need less IT infrastructure so you can optimize your IT resources for better-value, higher-end projects. This also leads to greater financial visibility, where there's a clear cost for the set of services or features replaced by cloud services. And, the last benefit is what I call acceleration. You can save money by speeding up the initialization and deployment of the project. You don't have to deal with IT infrastructure and you can start implementing right away. We did a quick survey of about 70 CFOs at the CFO Summit last month in New York City. We asked them why they were looking at cloud services, and not necessarily just for financials. The No. 1 response was perceived lower cost of ownership. But of course there are risks to consider. The first thing most people think about in the cloud is security and ownership of data. So, will your data really be safe? Can you meet your own privacy policy requirements? Do you really want your private financial data exposed? Do you trust the provider? Is what you see really your data? Do you own it or is it managed by someone else? Security is a big concern that comes with an emotional component. The next thing in the risk category is reliability. Is the provider proven? You’re taking what you have control over – for example, standards and policies and internal service level agreements – away from your IT department and giving it to someone else. Will you still be able to adapt to shifts in your business? Will the provider be able to grow with your business effectively? Reliability means having a provider that can give you the service infrastructure that you need. And then there’s performance, which has two components in terms of risk. Going forward, will the provider be able to scale the infrastructure or service level if you have new employees or new businesses? And second, will the price you negotiate and the rate you lock in cover additional costs and rising service fees? Another piece is cost. What happens if you don't get the service level you want? What if you end the service? What happens, if after a few years, you send the service out for bid and change service? Can you move your data? Can you move the applications? Do the integrations work? These are cost components people don’t always take into account. And, the final piece is the business case. The perception is that you can get started really quickly with cloud. It has a perceived lower cost of total ownership and it feels cool because it's cloud. But do you have a good business case for moving to the cloud? Your total cost of ownership is over three years; then you’ll renew it, so your TCO is six years. Have you compared that to other internal services that you’re offering? You might already have product that you can run this new business or division on. In that same survey at the CFO Summit, the execs thought the biggest perceived risks were security of data, ability to move data back, and the ability to create a business case to actually justify the risks. So that’s the list of pros and cons. Not to leave you hanging, I will do another post on how to balance these pros and cons and make the right decision for your business.

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• Easy Made Easier

  - by dragonfly

      How easy is it to deploy a 2 node, fully redundant Oracle RAC cluster? Not very. Unless you use an Oracle Database Appliance. The focus of this member of Oracle's Engineered Systems family is to simplify the configuration, management and maintenance throughout the life of the system, while offering pay-as-you-grow scaling. Getting a 2-node RAC cluster up and running in under 2 hours has been made possible by the Oracle Database Appliance. Don't take my word for it, just check out these blog posts from partners and end users. The Oracle Database Appliance Experience - Zip Zoom Zoom http://www.fuadarshad.com/2012/02/oracle-database-appliance-experience.html Off-the-shelf Oracle database servers http://normanweaver.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/off-the-shelf-oracle-database-servers/ Oracle Database Appliance – Deployment Steps http://marcel.vandewaters.nl/oracle/database-appliance/oracle-database-appliance-deployment-steps     See how easy it is to deploy an Oracle Database Appliance for high availability with RAC? Now for the meat of this post, which is the first in a series of posts describing tips for making the deployment of an ODA even easier. The key to the easy deployment of an Oracle Database Appliance is the Appliance Manager software, which does the actual software deployment and configuration, based on best practices. But in order for it to do that, it needs some basic information first, including system name, IP addresses, etc. That's where the Appliance Manager GUI comes in to play, taking a wizard approach to specifying the information needed.     Using the Appliance Manager GUI is pretty straight forward, stepping through several screens of information to enter data in typical wizard style. Like most configuration tasks, it helps to gather the required information before hand. But before you rush out to a committee meeting on what to use for host names, and rely on whatever IP addresses might be hanging around, make sure you are familiar with some of the auto-fill defaults for the Appliance Manager. I'll step through the key screens below to highlight the results of the auto-fill capability of the Appliance Manager GUI.     Depending on which of the 2 Configuration Types (Config Type screen) you choose, you will get a slightly different set of screens. The Typical configuration assumes certain default configuration choices and has the fewest screens, where as the Custom configuration gives you the most flexibility in what you configure from the start. In the examples below, I have used the Custom config type.     One of the first items you are asked for is the System Name (System Info screen). This is used to identify the system, but also as the base for the default hostnames on following screens. In this screen shot, the System Name is "oda".     When you get to the next screen (Generic Network screen), you enter your domain name, DNS IP address(es), and NTP IP address(es). Next up is the Public Network screen, seen below, where you will see the host name fields are automatically filled in with default host names based on the System Name, in this case "oda". The System Name is also the basis for default host names for the extra ethernet ports available for configuration as part of a Custom configuration, as seen in the 2nd screen shot below (Other Network). There is no requirement to use these host names, as you can easily edit any of the host names. This does make filling in the configuration details easier and less prone to "fat fingers" if you are OK with these host names. Here is a full list of the automatically filled in host names. 1 2 1-vip 2-vip -scan 1-ilom 2-ilom 1-net1 2-net1 1-net2 2-net2 1-net3 2-net3     Another auto-fill feature of the Appliance Manager GUI follows a common practice of deploying IP Addresses for a RAC cluster in sequential order. In the screen shot below, I entered the first IP address (Node1-IP), then hit Tab to move to the next field. As a result, the next 5 IP address fields were automatically filled in with the next 5 IP addresses sequentially from the first one I entered. As with the host names, these are not required, and can be changed to whatever your IP address values are. One note of caution though, if the first IP Address field (Node1-IP) is filled out and you click in that field and back out, the following 5 IP addresses will be set to the sequential default. If you don't use the sequential IP addresses, pay attention to where you click that mouse. :-)     In the screen shot below, by entering the netmask value in the Netmask field, in this case 255.255.255.0, the gateway value was auto-filled into the Gateway field, based on the IP addresses and netmask previously entered. As always, you can change this value.     My last 2 screen shots illustrate that the same sequential IP address autofill and netmask to gateway autofill works when entering the IP configuration details for the Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM) for both nodes. The time these auto-fill capabilities save in entering data is nice, but from my perspective not as important as the opportunity to avoid data entry errors. In my next post in this series, I will touch on the benefit of using the network validation capability of the Appliance Manager GUI prior to deploying an Oracle Database Appliance.

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• SSIS Reporting Pack v0.4 – Execution Report updated

  - by jamiet

  SSIS Reporting Pack is a suite of reports that I maintain at http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/ that provide visualisation over the SSIS Catalog in SQL Server 2012 and attempt to add value over the reports that ship in the box. Work on the reports has stalled (my last SSIS Reporting Pack blog post was on 4th September 2011) as I’ve had rather more important things going on my life of late however I have recently checked-in a fix that couldn’t really be delayed. I discovered a problem with the Execution report that was causing the report to effectively hang, it was caused by this bit of SQL hidden away in the report definition: [generated_executables] AS (   SELECT  [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]   FROM    (           SELECT  [execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_close_square] + 1)           ,       [parent_execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_open_square])           FROM    (                   SELECT  [execution_path]                   ,       [char_index_open_square] = CHARINDEX('[',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [char_index_close_square] = CHARINDEX(']',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [length_exec_path] = LEN([execution_path])                   FROM    [exec_stats] es                   WHERE   execution_path LIKE '%\[%]%'  ESCAPE '\'                   )AS [loop_iteration]           ) AS [new_executable]   GROUP   BY [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]) It was there because SSIS does not currently treat a loop iteration as an executable yet I figured there was still value in being able to view it as such – this SQL essentially “invents” new executables for those loop iterations; its what enabled the following visualisation: where each of the three iterations of a For Each Loop called “FEL Loop over top performing regions” appear in the report. Unfortunately, as I alluded, this could under certain circumstances (most likely when there were many loop iterations) cause the report to hang as it waited for the results to be constructed and returned. The change that I have made eradicates this generation of “fake” executables and thus produces this visualisation instead: Notice that the three “children” of the For Each Loop are no longer the three iterations but actually the task (“EPT Call Data Export Package”) contained within that For Each Loop. The problem here is of course that there is no longer a visual distinction between those three iterations; I have instead made the full execution path viewable via a tooltip:   If you preferred the “old” way of presenting this information and are happy to put up with the performance degradation then I have kept the old version of the report hanging around in the reporting pack as “execution loop with iterations” however none of the other reports link to it so you will have to browse to it manually if you want to use it. Please let me know if you ARE using it – I would be very interested to hear about your experiences.   The last change to make you aware of in the execution report is that by default I no longer show OnPreValidate or OnPostValidate messages as I consider them to be superfluous and only serve to clutter up the results. If you want to put them back, well, its open source so go right ahead!   The latest release of SSIS Reporting Pack that contains all of these changes is v0.4 and can be downloaded from http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/releases/view/88178   Feedback on all of the above changes would be very much appreciated. @Jamiet

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• The Linux powered LAN Gaming House

  - by sachinghalot

  LAN parties offer the enjoyment of head to head gaming in a real-life social environment. In general, they are experiencing decline thanks to the convenience of Internet gaming, but Kenton Varda is a man who takes his LAN gaming very seriously. His LAN gaming house is a fascinating project, and best of all, Linux plays a part in making it all work.Varda has done his own write ups (short, long), so I'm only going to give an overview here. The setup is a large house with 12 gaming stations and a single server computer.The client computers themselves are rack mounted in a server room, and they are linked to the gaming stations on the floor above via extension cables (HDMI for video and audio and USB for mouse and keyboard). Each client computer, built into a 3U rack mount case, is a well specced gaming rig in its own right, sporting an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 560 along with a 60GB SSD drive.Originally, the client computers ran Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows and the games executed under WINE, but Varda had to abandon this scheme. As he explains on his site:"Amazingly, a majority of games worked fine, although many had minor bugs (e.g. flickering mouse cursor, minor rendering artifacts, etc.). Some games, however, did not work, or had bad bugs that made them annoying to play."Subsequently, the gaming computers have been moved onto a more conventional gaming choice, Windows 7. It's a shame that WINE couldn't be made to work, but I can sympathize as it's rare to find modern games that work perfectly and at full native speed. Another problem with WINE is that it tends to suffer from regressions, which is hardly surprising when considering the difficulty of constantly improving the emulation of the Windows API. Varda points out that he preferred working with Linux clients as they were easier to modify and came with less licensing baggage.Linux still runs the server and all of the tools used are open source software. The hardware here is a Intel Xeon E3-1230 with 4GB of RAM. The storage hanging off this machine is a bit more complex than the clients. In addition to the 60GB SSD, it also has 2x1TB drives and a 240GB SDD.When the clients were running Linux, they booted over PXE using a toolchain that will be familiar to anyone who has setup Linux network booting. DHCP pointed the clients to the server which then supplied PXELINUX using TFTP. When booted, file access was accomplished through network block device (NBD). This is a very easy to use system that allows you to serve the contents of a file as a block device over the network. The client computer runs a user mode device driver and the device can be mounted within the file system using the mount command.One snag with offering file access via NBD is that it's difficult to impose any security restrictions on different areas of the file system as the server only sees a single file. The advantage is perfomance as the client operating system simply sees a block device, and besides, these security issues aren't relevant in this setup.Unfortunately, Windows 7 can't use NBD, so, Varda had to switch to iSCSI (which works in both server and client mode under Linux). His network cards are not compliant with this standard when doing a netboot, but fortunately, gPXE came to the rescue, and he boostraps it over PXE. gPXE is also available as an ISO image and is worth knowing about if you encounter an awkward machine that can't manage a network boot. It can also optionally boot from a HTTP server rather than the more traditional TFTP server.According to Varda, booting all 12 machines over the Gigabit Ethernet network is surprisingly fast, and once booted, the machines don't seem noticeably slower than if they were using local storage. Once loaded, most games attempt to load in as much data as possible, filling the RAM, and the the disk and network bandwidth required is small. It's worth noting that these are aspects of this project that might differ from some other thin client scenarios.At time of writing, it doesn't seem as though the local storage of the client machines is being utilized. Instead, the clients boot into Windows from an image on the server that contains the operating system and the games themselves. It uses the copy on write feature of LVM so that any writes from a client are added to a differencing image allocated to that client. As the administrator, Varda can log into the Linux server and authorize changes to the master image for updates etc.SummaryOverall, Varda estimates the total cost of the project at about $40,000, and of course, he needed a property that offered a large physical space in order to house the computers and the gaming workstations. Obviously, this project has stark differences to most thin client projects. The balance between storage, network usage, GPU power and security would not be typical of an office installation, for example. The only letdown is that WINE proved to be insufficiently compatible to run a wide variety of modern games, but that is, perhaps, asking too much of it, and hats off to Varda for trying to make it work.

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• Converting LINQ to Twitter to Twitter API v1.1

  - by Joe Mayo

  Twitter recently updated their API to v1.1 (Current status: API v1.1). Naturally, LINQ to Twitter  needed to be updated too. This blog post outlines the changes made to LINQ to Twitter during this conversion and highlights important features that LINQ to Twitter developers will want to know. Overall Impact Generally speaking, Twitter API v1.1 is semantically very much the same as it’s predecessor. The base URL changed and so did a few resource segments, but the resources themselves are still intact. The good news is that LINQ to Twitter has always shielded the developer from this plumbing, so the entities, types, and filters didn’t change much at all.  The following sections describe what did  change. Authentication In Twitter API v1.0 authentication was not required for some resources, such as user timelines and search. However, that’s all changed because *all* queries must be authenticated in Twitter API v1.1. LINQ to Twitter has various types of authorizers you can use, supporting whatever OAuth options are available via Twitter.  You can see the LINQ to Twitter documentation, Securing Your Applications, for more info on OAuth support. The New Search One of the larger changes to the API was Search. To be more specific, the Search entity now contains a List<Status>, named Statuses, to hold results.  Additionally, any meta-data associated with the search is now in a property named SearchMetaData. The change to the Search entity and responses is the big change, but the good news is that your Search query syntax doesn’t change. Different Rate Limits The issue of rate limits itself is contentious, but this discussion is focused on the coding experience and I’ll leave the politics to those who prefer to engage in that activity. What’s important here is that both headers and resources have changed. You should review Twitter’s Rate Limit documentation to understand what the changes mean.  A quick explanation is that rate limits are applied individually to each resource in 15 minute time intervals. In LINQ to Twitter these changes surface on the Help entity, via HelpType.RateLimits. The RateLimits query has a Resources filter where you can specify a comma-separated list of categories to return rate limit info for.  The results materialize in the RateLimits dictionary, keyed on category. The Help entity also has a RateLimitsAuthorizationContext, holding the Access Token for the user performing queries – and to whom the rate limits apply. In addition to the new RateLimits query, there are new RateLimit headers that appear in the query response, whose HTTP header name is of the form X-Rate-Limit… which is different from the previous header name. LINQ to Twitter surfaces these headers via the existing properties of the TwitterContext instance. For anyone who retrieved rate limit information via the Headers property of TwitterContext, you should be aware of the new header names.  I haven’t done anything with Feature rate limit properties yet, but they appear to no longer be available – this will require more follow-up. Error Handling Twitter API v1.1 has a new format for Error Codes & Responses. LINQ to Twitter wraps these messages in the TwitterQueryException, which has been updated appropriately. The Message property of TwitterQueryException now reflects the Twitter error message, when available. There’s also a new ErrorCode that’s populated with the message error code. Parameters Most parameters stayed the same, but one of interest is Include Entities (different from LINQ to Twitter data object entities). Entities are metadata hanging off tweets, that provide start/end position in the tweet and other information for mentions, urls, hash tags, and media. Entities used to not be included unless you specified you wanted them. Now, in v1.1, entities are included by default for all APIs that return a Status.  If you were always setting IncludeEntities to true, then you won’t see a change. However, be aware that you’ll now be receiving additional data in your response from Twitter, which will explain a sudden increase in bandwidth utilization. This might or might not  matter to you  depending on the requirements of your application, but you should be aware of it. Everything Else There might be small changes here and there that I haven’t mentioned, but these were the ones you should be most aware of.  Streams didn’t change, but Twitter will be deprecating username/password authentication on public streams, in favor of OAuth, so you’ll be seeing me make that change some time in the future.  Also, Twitter will continue to evolve the API and you can expect that LINQ to Twitter will change accordingly. Summary The big changes to Twitter API were Authentication, Search, Rate Limits, and Error Handling. All API calls must be authenticated. You’ll need to change your code to read Search results differently, but the query is much the same as you use now. There’s a new RateLimits API, one of the Help queries.  Also, the new error messages are integrated into TwitterQueryException. Besides these changes, I expect  most others to be small or affect a smaller percentage of developers.  You can get the latest version of LINQ to Twitter from NuGet or visit the LINQ to Twitter download page at CodePlex.com.   @JoeMayo

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• SSIS Reporting Pack v0.4 – Execution Report updated

  - by jamiet

  SSIS Reporting Pack is a suite of reports that I maintain at http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/ that provide visualisation over the SSIS Catalog in SQL Server 2012 and attempt to add value over the reports that ship in the box. Work on the reports has stalled (my last SSIS Reporting Pack blog post was on 4th September 2011) as I’ve had rather more important things going on my life of late however I have recently checked-in a fix that couldn’t really be delayed. I discovered a problem with the Execution report that was causing the report to effectively hang, it was caused by this bit of SQL hidden away in the report definition: [generated_executables] AS (   SELECT  [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]   FROM    (           SELECT  [execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_close_square] + 1)           ,       [parent_execution_path] = SUBSTRING([loop_iteration].[execution_path] ,1, [loop_iteration].length_exec_path - [loop_iteration].[char_index_open_square])           FROM    (                   SELECT  [execution_path]                   ,       [char_index_open_square] = CHARINDEX('[',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [char_index_close_square] = CHARINDEX(']',REVERSE([execution_path]),1)                   ,       [length_exec_path] = LEN([execution_path])                   FROM    [exec_stats] es                   WHERE   execution_path LIKE '%\[%]%'  ESCAPE '\'                   )AS [loop_iteration]           ) AS [new_executable]   GROUP   BY [new_executable].[execution_path],[new_executable].[parent_execution_path]) It was there because SSIS does not currently treat a loop iteration as an executable yet I figured there was still value in being able to view it as such – this SQL essentially “invents” new executables for those loop iterations; its what enabled the following visualisation: where each of the three iterations of a For Each Loop called “FEL Loop over top performing regions” appear in the report. Unfortunately, as I alluded, this could under certain circumstances (most likely when there were many loop iterations) cause the report to hang as it waited for the results to be constructed and returned. The change that I have made eradicates this generation of “fake” executables and thus produces this visualisation instead: Notice that the three “children” of the For Each Loop are no longer the three iterations but actually the task (“EPT Call Data Export Package”) contained within that For Each Loop. The problem here is of course that there is no longer a visual distinction between those three iterations; I have instead made the full execution path viewable via a tooltip:   If you preferred the “old” way of presenting this information and are happy to put up with the performance degradation then I have kept the old version of the report hanging around in the reporting pack as “execution loop with iterations” however none of the other reports link to it so you will have to browse to it manually if you want to use it. Please let me know if you ARE using it – I would be very interested to hear about your experiences.   The last change to make you aware of in the execution report is that by default I no longer show OnPreValidate or OnPostValidate messages as I consider them to be superfluous and only serve to clutter up the results. If you want to put them back, well, its open source so go right ahead!   The latest release of SSIS Reporting Pack that contains all of these changes is v0.4 and can be downloaded from http://ssisreportingpack.codeplex.com/releases/view/88178   Feedback on all of the above changes would be very much appreciated. @Jamiet

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• The Unintended Consequences of Sound Security Policy

  - by Tanu Sood

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Author: Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM Meet the Author: Kevin Moulton, Senior Sales Consulting Manager, Oracle Kevin Moulton, CISSP, CISM, has been in the security space for more than 25 years, and with Oracle for 7 years. He manages the East Enterprise Security Sales Consulting Team. He is also a Distinguished Toastmaster. Follow Kevin on Twitter at twitter.com/kevin_moulton, where he sometimes tweets about security, but might also tweet about running, beer, food, baseball, football, good books, or whatever else grabs his attention. Kevin will be a regular contributor to this blog so stay tuned for more posts from him. When I speak to a room of IT administrators, I like to begin by asking them if they have implemented a complex password policy. Generally, they all nod their heads enthusiastically. I ask them if that password policy requires long passwords. More nodding. I ask if that policy requires upper and lower case letters – faster nodding – numbers – even faster – special characters – enthusiastic nodding all around! I then ask them if their policy also includes a requirement for users to regularly change their passwords. Now we have smiles with the nodding! I ask them if the users have different IDs and passwords on the many systems that they have access to. Of course! I then ask them if, when they walk around the building, they see something like this: Thanks to Jake Ludington for the nice example. Can these administrators be faulted for their policies? Probably not but, in the end, end-users will find a way to get their job done efficiently. Post-It Notes to the rescue! I was visiting a business in New York City one day which was a perfect example of this problem. First I walked up to the security desk and told them where I was headed. They asked me if they should call upstairs to have someone escort me. Is that my call? Is that policy? I said that I knew where I was going, so they let me go. Having the conference room number handy, I wandered around the place in a search of my destination. As I walked around, unescorted, I noticed the post-it note problem in abundance. Had I been so inclined, I could have logged in on almost any machine and into any number of systems. When I reached my intended conference room, I mentioned my post-it note observation to the two gentlemen with whom I was meeting. One of them said, “You mean like this,” and he produced a post it note full of login IDs and passwords from his breast pocket! I gave him kudos for not hanging the list on his monitor. We then talked for the rest of the meeting about the difficulties faced by the employees due to the security policies. These policies, although well-intended, made life very difficult for the end-users. Most users had access to 8 to 12 systems, and the passwords for each expired at a different times. The post-it note solution was understandable. Who could remember even half of them? What could this customer have done differently? I am a fan of using a provisioning system, such as Oracle Identity Manager, to manage all of the target systems. With OIM, and email could be automatically sent to all users when it was time to change their password. The end-users would follow a link to change their password on a web page, and then OIM would propagate that password out to all of the systems that the user had access to, even if the login IDs were different. Another option would be an Enterprise Single-Sign On Solution. With Oracle eSSO, all of a user’s credentials would be stored in a central, encrypted credential store. The end-user would only have to login to their machine each morning and then, as they moved to each new system, Oracle eSSO would supply the credentials. Good-bye post-it notes! 3M may be disappointed, but your end users will thank you. I hear people say that this post-it note problem is not a big deal, because the only people who would see the passwords are fellow employees. Do you really know who is walking around your building? What are the password policies in your business? How do the end-users respond?

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• Subterranean IL: The ThreadLocal type

  - by Simon Cooper

  I came across ThreadLocal<T> while I was researching ConcurrentBag. To look at it, it doesn't really make much sense. What's all those extra Cn classes doing in there? Why is there a GenericHolder<T,U,V,W> class? What's going on? However, digging deeper, it's a rather ingenious solution to a tricky problem. Thread statics Declaring that a variable is thread static, that is, values assigned and read from the field is specific to the thread doing the reading, is quite easy in .NET: [ThreadStatic] private static string s_ThreadStaticField; ThreadStaticAttribute is not a pseudo-custom attribute; it is compiled as a normal attribute, but the CLR has in-built magic, activated by that attribute, to redirect accesses to the field based on the executing thread's identity. TheadStaticAttribute provides a simple solution when you want to use a single field as thread-static. What if you want to create an arbitary number of thread static variables at runtime? Thread-static fields can only be declared, and are fixed, at compile time. Prior to .NET 4, you only had one solution - thread local data slots. This is a lesser-known function of Thread that has existed since .NET 1.1: LocalDataStoreSlot threadSlot = Thread.AllocateNamedDataSlot("slot1"); string value = "foo"; Thread.SetData(threadSlot, value); string gettedValue = (string)Thread.GetData(threadSlot); Each instance of LocalStoreDataSlot mediates access to a single slot, and each slot acts like a separate thread-static field. As you can see, using thread data slots is quite cumbersome. You need to keep track of LocalDataStoreSlot objects, it's not obvious how instances of LocalDataStoreSlot correspond to individual thread-static variables, and it's not type safe. It's also relatively slow and complicated; the internal implementation consists of a whole series of classes hanging off a single thread-static field in Thread itself, using various arrays, lists, and locks for synchronization. ThreadLocal<T> is far simpler and easier to use. ThreadLocal ThreadLocal provides an abstraction around thread-static fields that allows it to be used just like any other class; it can be used as a replacement for a thread-static field, it can be used in a List<ThreadLocal<T>>, you can create as many as you need at runtime. So what does it do? It can't just have an instance-specific thread-static field, because thread-static fields have to be declared as static, and so shared between all instances of the declaring type. There's something else going on here. The values stored in instances of ThreadLocal<T> are stored in instantiations of the GenericHolder<T,U,V,W> class, which contains a single ThreadStatic field (s_value) to store the actual value. This class is then instantiated with various combinations of the Cn types for generic arguments. In .NET, each separate instantiation of a generic type has its own static state. For example, GenericHolder<int,C0,C1,C2> has a completely separate s_value field to GenericHolder<int,C1,C14,C1>. This feature is (ab)used by ThreadLocal to emulate instance thread-static fields. Every time an instance of ThreadLocal is constructed, it is assigned a unique number from the static s_currentTypeId field using Interlocked.Increment, in the FindNextTypeIndex method. The hexadecimal representation of that number then defines the specific Cn types that instantiates the GenericHolder class. That instantiation is therefore 'owned' by that instance of ThreadLocal. This gives each instance of ThreadLocal its own ThreadStatic field through a specific unique instantiation of the GenericHolder class. Although GenericHolder has four type variables, the first one is always instantiated to the type stored in the ThreadLocal<T>. This gives three free type variables, each of which can be instantiated to one of 16 types (C0 to C15). This puts an upper limit of 4096 (163) on the number of ThreadLocal<T> instances that can be created for each value of T. That is, there can be a maximum of 4096 instances of ThreadLocal<string>, and separately a maximum of 4096 instances of ThreadLocal<object>, etc. However, there is an upper limit of 16384 enforced on the total number of ThreadLocal instances in the AppDomain. This is to stop too much memory being used by thousands of instantiations of GenericHolder<T,U,V,W>, as once a type is loaded into an AppDomain it cannot be unloaded, and will continue to sit there taking up memory until the AppDomain is unloaded. The total number of ThreadLocal instances created is tracked by the ThreadLocalGlobalCounter class. So what happens when either limit is reached? Firstly, to try and stop this limit being reached, it recycles GenericHolder type indexes of ThreadLocal instances that get disposed using the s_availableIndices concurrent stack. This allows GenericHolder instantiations of disposed ThreadLocal instances to be re-used. But if there aren't any available instantiations, then ThreadLocal falls back on a standard thread local slot using TLSHolder. This makes it very important to dispose of your ThreadLocal instances if you'll be using lots of them, so the type instantiations can be recycled. The previous way of creating arbitary thread-static variables, thread data slots, was slow, clunky, and hard to use. In comparison, ThreadLocal can be used just like any other type, and each instance appears from the outside to be a non-static thread-static variable. It does this by using the CLR type system to assign each instance of ThreadLocal its own instantiated type containing a thread-static field, and so delegating a lot of the bookkeeping that thread data slots had to do to the CLR type system itself! That's a very clever use of the CLR type system.

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• SSIS package randomly hangs during execution

  - by Adam MacLeod

  Hi Guys, I am having an ongoing and painful problem with an SSIS package. The package runs every 5 minutes as an SQL Agent Job and every 2-10 days the package will start running and never stop (thus preventing further executions). If I stop the hung job manually it will begin working perfectly again in the next 5 minute interval. The SSIS package is for moving data from an Oracle database to a MSSQL 2005 database. It has 7 steps: Step 1 calls an Oracle Stored Procedure to prepare the temporary tables inside ORACLE Steps 2-6 process the data from the ORACLE tables to the MSSQL tables ORACLE - MSSQL Step 7 calls an Oracle Stored Procedure to clear the ORACLE temporary tables I suspect that the issue is caused by a communications error between the MSSQL server and the ORACLE server. Both the MSSQL database and Agent/package run on one machine with the ORACLE database running over the network. I have enabled logging of the SQL package and after more than 2GB of log file I have captured the instant where the package stops responding: OnPreValidate,ADV-SRV5,NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM,CallistaIntegrationToMonashCRM_delta,{F88F6C45-CFA2-4801-A2F2-DDF03D458A48},{3A1FB1E3-B76D-444D-876B-D1FBBB9BA246},6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,0,0x,(null) OnPreValidate,ADV-SRV5,NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM,Address,{c5907799-f918-43da-818a-d4bd7f188367},{3A1FB1E3-B76D-444D-876B-D1FBBB9BA246},6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,0,0x,(null) OnInformation,ADV-SRV5,NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM,Address,{c5907799-f918-43da-818a-d4bd7f188367},{3A1FB1E3-B76D-444D-876B-D1FBBB9BA246},6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,1074016266,0x,Validation phase is beginning. OnProgress,ADV-SRV5,NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM,Address,{c5907799-f918-43da-818a-d4bd7f188367},{3A1FB1E3-B76D-444D-876B-D1FBBB9BA246},6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,0,0x,Validating Diagnostic,ADV-SRV5,NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM,Callista,{cb5d6fe3-3ea4-4453-8e5a-965818021df7},{3A1FB1E3-B76D-444D-876B-D1FBBB9BA246},6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,0,0x,ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: 'IDataInitialize::GetDataSource'. Diagnostic,ADV-SRV5,NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM,Callista,{cb5d6fe3-3ea4-4453-8e5a-965818021df7},{3A1FB1E3-B76D-444D-876B-D1FBBB9BA246},6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,0,0x,ExternalRequest_post: 'IDataInitialize::GetDataSource succeeded'. The external request has completed. Diagnostic,ADV-SRV5,NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM,Callista,{cb5d6fe3-3ea4-4453-8e5a-965818021df7},{3A1FB1E3-B76D-444D-876B-D1FBBB9BA246},6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,6/06/2010 10:15:01 AM,0,0x,ExternalRequest_pre: The object is ready to make the following external request: 'IDBInitialize::Initialize'. These messages show the entire log generated for the failed run, for a successful run the output is typically ~2500 lines. I can see that the package is hanging during the initialize operation on the Callista connection (ORACLE database). I have not been able to work out a way to either fix this issue or have the package die gracefully (an error to the log would be A-OK with me). Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

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