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• Vacations on Rodrigues 2014

  And now something completely different compared to the usual technical or community related articles here on this blog. Yes, this time I'm writing some lines on my (and my family's) activities during our long weekend stay on Rodrigues. So, please bear with me, it's eventually a bit more personal... Grab a soda, some popcorn and a cosy place to continue to read. var googleAlbumLink = "https://plus.google.com/photos/117698191428446859536/albums/6047895311458281985"; //optional----------------------- var mySlideWidth = 580; var mySlideHeight = 340; var mySlideDelay = 7000; //delay in milliseconds Special promotions during school holidays Originally, our children started to ask more frequently about going on the plane again. Obviously, after their aunty from Germany was around during May, they were really eager to travel again. So, we decided that it might be a great opportunity to book some vacations during their school holidays. And just in time the local hotels and hotel groups started to advertise their special promotions for citizens and residents. After collecting multiple brochures over several days, we got attracted by various hotel packages on Rodrigues - most interestingly the expenses for the stay and flight ticket were less compared to other resorts here on the main island. As we have been to Rodrigues already back in 2008, we followed up on this idea and got in touch with a couple travel agencies. Well, I have to report that you should be really careful about the promotions from some of them. We had a very negative experience with Shamal Travel Agency in Quatre Bornes regarding their adverts and the actual price levels and age definition for children. Please, stay away from them if you are interested in transparent cost and services. Anyway, after some arrangements with two other close families we managed to confirm our stay at the Cotton Bay Hotel in Rodrigues. Given the fact that we already stayed there, and the hotel has been renovated recently, and it is under new management all looked very promising and relaxed for our vacation. Counting the days... As we already booked in July our children were counting down the days. And it got more interesting as soon as they were on school holidays finally. Well, the day arrived and waking them up at 2:30 hrs wasn't a problem after all. Quite the opposite it was fascinating for us parents to watch them waiting for the transport and later on during the airport transfer. Despite the early hours both didn't fall asleep and it was all so exciting. We are taking the plane! Well organised by the Cotton Bay Hotel Honestly, it was a breeze and a smooth ride during our stay at the hotel. From the airport transfer, the cleanliness of our bungalow, the organisation of our day trips, and the SPA - all very well and enjoyable. The children had great fun, and although it was a bit too windy to plunge into the pool they had a lot of fun with other activities on the beach and at the Kid's Club. Oh, and we had our private petting zoo with cows, sheep and goats just close to the terrace. Some of us went to check out the SPA facilities and I have to admit that the services regarding Hammam and Sauna are better than at some other hotels in Mauritius. I don't know after how many months or years I was once again enjoying a very hot sauna. Little draw-back but nothing to worry about... There is no cold water or at least ice cubes to cool down the body, but hey there was a nice breeze coming over the hills. Some day trips to mention Based on a friend's recommendation we walked to a "restaurant" called Chez Solange & Robert. Hahaha, restaurant is widely stretched in this case, as we enjoyed a great BBQ with fresh lobster, whole fish, and pieces of chicken breast in an open cottage. Just some wooden structure covered with dried palm leaves on the roof - island feeling pure! The other day we went to the Giant Tortoise & Cave Reserve Francois Leguat to observe the giant Aldabra turtles and to visit the Grande Caverne. The biggest limestone cave on the island. Compared to our last visit this was a novelty after checking out the Caverne Partate. The formations of stalactites and stalagmites are very impressive and imaginative. Our guide had lots of funny terms and despite the low light conditions the kids had a great time wandering around on the narrow wooden paths and stairs. And last but not least, we decided to check out the Tyrodrig zip lines... Everyone was allowed to join the trip through the air, and our little ones stayed close to our field guides. But finally went on their own on the very last traversal. Puuuh, it was astounishing to glide over the valley, and for sure something to repeat next time. Impressions of our vacation on Rodrigues 2014   Next stay has been discussed already Oh yes, Rodrigues baby! We are going to come again! Tentative dates have been discussed already and now it's up to us to earn enough our next holiday on that wonderful remote piece of paradise. Eventually, a little bit longer than this time. We'll see...

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• Inside Red Gate - Be Reasonable!

  - by Simon Cooper

  As I discussed in my previous posts, divisions and project teams within Red Gate are allowed a lot of autonomy to manage themselves. It's not just the teams though, there's an awful lot of freedom given to individual employees within the company as well. Reasonableness How Red Gate treats it's employees is embodied in the phrase 'You will be reasonable with us, and we will be reasonable with you'. As an employee, you are trusted to do your job to the best of you ability. There's no one looking over your shoulder, no one clocking you in and out each day. Everyone is working at the company because they want to, and one of the core ideas of Red Gate is that the company exists to 'let people do the best work of their lives'. Everything is geared towards that. To help you do your job, office services and the IT department are there. If you need something to help you work better (a third or fourth monitor, footrests, or a new keyboard) then ask people in Information Systems (IS) or Office Services and you will be given it, no questions asked. Everyone has administrator access to their own machines, and you can install whatever you want on it. If there's a particular bit of software you need, then ask IS and they will buy it. As an example, last year I wanted to replace my main hard drive with an SSD; I had a summer job at school working in a computer repair shop, so knew what to do. I went to IS and asked for 'an SSD, a SATA cable, and a screwdriver'. And I got it there and then, even the screwdriver. Awesome. I screwed it in myself, copied all my main drive files across, and I was good to go. Of course, if you're not happy doing that yourself, then IS will sort it all out for you, no problems. If you need something that the company doesn't have (say, a book off Amazon, or you need some specifications printing off & bound), then everyone has a expense limit of £100 that you can use without any sign-off needed from your managers. If you need a company credit card for whatever reason, then you can get it. This freedom extends to working hours and holiday; you're expected to be in the office 11am-3pm each day, but outside those times you can work whenever you want. If you need a half-day holiday on a days notice, or even the same day, then you'll get it, unless there's a good reason you're needed that day. If you need to work from home for a day or so for whatever reason, then you can. If it's reasonable, then it's allowed. Trust issues? A lot of trust, and a lot of leeway, is given to all the people in Red Gate. Everyone is expected to work hard, do their jobs to the best of their ability, and there will be a minimum of bureaucratic obstacles that stop you doing your work. What happens if you abuse this trust? Well, an example is company trip expenses. You're free to expense what you like; food, drink, transport, etc, but if you expenses are not reasonable, then you will never travel with the company again. Simple as that. Everyone knows when they're abusing the system, so simply don't do it. Along with reasonableness, another phrase used is 'Don't be a ***'. If you act like a ***, and abuse any of the trust placed in you, even if you're the best tester, salesperson, dev, or manager in the company, then you won't be a part of the company any more. From what I know about other companies, employee trust is highly variable between companies, all the way up to CCTV trained on employee's monitors. As a dev, I want to produce well-written & useful code that solves people's problems. Being able to get whatever I need - install whatever tools I need, get time off when I need to, obtain reference books within a day - all let me do my job, and so let Red Gate help other people do their own jobs through the tools we produce. Plus, I don't think I would like working for a company that doesn't allow admin access to your own machine and blocks Facebook!

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• SSAS Maestro Training in July 2012 #ssasmaestro #ssas

  - by Marco Russo (SQLBI)

  A few hours ago Chris Webb blogged about SSAS Maestro and I’d like to propagate the news, adding also some background info. SSAS Maestro is the premier certification on Analysis Services that selects the best experts in Analysis Services around the world. In 2011 Microsoft organized two rounds of training/exams for SSAS Maestros and up to now only 11 people from the first wave have been announced – around 10% of attendees of the course! In the next few days the new Maestros from the second round should be announced and this long process is caused by many factors that I’m going to explain. First, the course is just a step in the process. Before the course you receive a list of topics to study, including the slides of the course. During the course, students receive a lot of information that might not have been included in the slides and the best part of the course is class interaction. Students are expected to bring their experience to the table and comparing case studies, experiences and having long debates is an important part of the learning process. And it is also a part of the evaluation: good questions might be also more important than good answers! Finally, after the course, students have their homework and this may require one or two months to be completed. After that, a long (very long) evaluation process begins, taking into account homework, labs, participation… And for this reason the final evaluation may arrive months later after the course. We are going to improve and shorten this process with the next courses. The first wave of SSAS Maestro had been made by invitation only and now the program is opening, requiring a fee to participate in order to cover the cost of preparation, training and exam. The number of attendees will be limited and candidates will have to send their CV in order to be admitted to the course. Only experienced Analysis Services developers will be able to participate to this challenging program. So why you should do that? Well, only 10% of students passed the exam until now. So if you need 100% guarantee to pass the exam, you need to study a lot, before, during and after the course. But the course by itself is a precious opportunity to share experience, create networking and learn mission-critical enterprise-level best practices that it’s hard to find written on books. Oh, well, many existing white papers are a required reading *before* the course! The course is now 5 days long, and every day can be *very* long. We’ll have lectures and discussions in the morning and labs in the afternoon/evening. Plus some more lectures in one or two afternoons. A heavy part of the course is about performance optimization, capacity planning, monitoring. This edition will introduce also Tabular models, and don’t expect something you might find in the SSAS Tabular Workshop – only performance, scalability monitoring and optimization will be covered, knowing Analysis Services is a requirement just to be accepted! I and Chris Webb will be the teachers for this edition. The course is expensive. Applying for SSAS Maestro will cost around 7000€ plus taxes (reduced to 5000€ for students of a previous SSAS Maestro edition). And you will be locked in a training room for the large part of the week. So why you should do that? Well, as I said, this is a challenging course. You will not find the time to check your email – the content is just too much interesting to think you can be distracted by something else. Another good reason is that this course will take place in Italy. Well, the course will take place in the brand new Microsoft Innovation Campus, but in general we’ll be able to provide you hints to get great food and, if you are willing to attach one week-end to your trip, there are plenty of places to visit (and I’m not talking about the classic Rome-Florence-Venice) – you might really need to relax after such a week! Finally, the marking process after the course will be faster – we’d like to complete the evaluation within three months after the course, considering that 1-2 months might be required to complete the homework. If at this point you are not scared: registration will open in mid-April, but you can already write to [email protected] sending your CV/resume and a short description of your level of SSAS knowledge and experience. The selection process will start early and you may want to put your admission form on top of the FIFO queue!

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• Video games, content strategy, and failure - oh my.

  - by Roger Hart

  Last night was the CS London group's event Content Strategy, Manhattan Style. Yes, it's a terrible title, feeling like a self-conscious grasp for chic, sadly commensurate with the venue. Fortunately, this was not commensurate with the event itself, which was lively, relevant, and engaging. Although mostly if you're a consultant. This is a strong strain in current content strategy discourse, and I think we're going to see it remedied quite soon. Not least in Paris on Friday. A lot of the bloggers, speakers, and commentators in the sphere are consultants, or part of agencies and other consulting organisations. A lot of the talk is about how you sell content strategy to your clients. This is completely acceptable. Of course it is. And it's actually useful if that's something you regularly have to do. To an extent, it's even portable to those of us who have to sell content strategy within an organisation. We're still competing for credibility and resource. What we're doing less is living in the beginning of a project. This was touched on by Jeffrey MacIntyre (albeit in a your-clients kind of a way) who described "the day two problem". Companies, he suggested, build websites for launch day, and forget about the need for them to be ongoing entities. Consultants, agencies, or even internal folks on short projects will live through Day Two quite often: the trainwreck moment where somebody realises that even if the content is right (which it often isn't), and on time (which it often isn't), it'll be redundant, outdated, or inaccurate by the end of the week/month/fickle social media attention cycle. The thing about living through a lot of Day Two is that you see a lot of failure. Nothing succeeds like failure? Failure is good. When it's structured right, it's an awesome tool for learning - that's kind of how video games work. I'm chewing over a whole blog post about this, but basically in game-like learning, you try, fail, go round the loop again. Success eventually yields joy. It's a relatively well-known phenomenon. It works best when that failing step is acutely felt, but extremely inexpensive. Dying in Portal is highly frustrating and surprisingly characterful, but the save-points are well designed and the reload unintrusive. The barrier to re-entry into the loop is very low, as is the cost of your failure out in meatspace. So it's easy (and fun) to learn. Yeah, spot the difference with business failure. As an external content strategist, you get to rock up with a big old folder full of other companies' Day Two (and ongoing day two hundred) failures. You can't send the client round the learning loop - although you may well be there because they've been round it once - but you can show other people's round trip. It's not as compelling, but it's not bad. What about internal content strategists? We can still point to things that are wrong, and there are some very compelling tools at our disposal - content inventories, user testing, and analytics, for instance. But if we're picking up big organically sprawling legacy content, Day Two may well be a distant memory, and the felt experience of web content failure is unlikely to be immediate to many people in the organisation. What to do? My hunch here is that the first task is to create something immediate and felt, but that it probably needs to be a success. Something quickly doable and visible - a content problem solved with a measurable business result. Now, that's a tall order; but scrape of the "quickly" and it's the whole reason we're here. At Red Gate, I've started with the text book fear and passion introduction to content strategy. In fact, I just typo'd that as "contempt strategy", and it isn't a bad description. Yelling "look at this, our website is rubbish!" gets you the initial attention, but it doesn't make you many friends. And if you don't produce something pretty sharp-ish, it's easy to lose the momentum you built up for change. The first thing I've done - after the visual content inventory - is to delete a bunch of stuff. About 70% of the SQL Compare web content has gone, in fact. This is a really, really cheap operation. It's visible, and it's powerful. It's cheap because you don't have to create any new content. It's not free, however, because you do have to validate your deletions. This means analytics, actually reading that content, and talking to people whose business purposes that content has to serve. If nobody outside the company uses it, and nobody inside the company thinks they ought to, that's a no-brainer for the delete list. The payoff here is twofold. There's the nebulous hard-to-illustrate "bad content does user experience and brand damage" argument; and there's the "nobody has to spend time (money) maintaining this now" argument. One or both are easily felt, and the second at least should be measurable. But that's just one approach, and I'd be interested to hear from any other internal content strategy folks about how they get buy-in, maintain momentum, and generally get things done.

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• Branching and Merging Improvements in TFS2010

  - by jehan

  Introducing the concept of “first class branches” is a significant improvement as part of the 2010 release with respect to version control.  Not only does it help to distinguish between folders and branches, but it enables branch visualizations. Let us see improvements in detail. ·         In TFS2008, you don’t know which of the folders are Branches: All folders looks the same, all have the folder icon. Now, In TFS 2010 there is a new icon that shows which of the folder is a Branch.       ·      There is no visual means to manage branches in TFS2008:   You dont have any means to identify which branches are related and the relation type. Now, In TFS 2010 you have visual tools to see the Branches Hierarchy. In order to see a Branch Hierarchy just Right Click the Branch and choose: Branching and Merging –> View Hierarchy     ·         In TFS2008, there is no option to track changes path between the Branches:  If you have made a merge in a Branch you can’t track from which Branch this Merge came from. Now, you have the tools that shows the path of change between the Branches, you can also see where change was added on a timeline.  In order to track a change do the following: Step1: Right click the Branch and click View History   Step 2: Choose a changeset to track and click the “Track Changeset” button.     Step 3: Choose the branches that will be in the view and click “Visualize”. In above visual, you can see that Changesets 108,109,110 and 119 where merged from Main to Release1.0 Branch and then “Release_1.0” Branched to “Dev1.0. Step4: You can also see the Merges on a Timeline by clicking on the “Timeline Tracking” button.   Creating New Branches: In TFS 2010, the creation of branches has been streamlined a bit from the process in 2008.  In 2008, creating a new branch was like every other action in the system – changes were pended on the client, and then checked in to the server. Because of this creating new branch in TFS2008 was time-consuming process.  In TFS2010, the step where changes are pended has been bypassed and now performing the branch creation is entirely on the server.  With this approach, the round trip time for downloading a copy of each file on the branch and then uploading each file again has been eliminated.  Note: In TFS2010, the new branch will be created and committed as a single operation on the server. Pending changes will not be created, it doesn’t require a check-in as it will be carried out as a single operation and it’s not possible to cancel.     Manage Branch Permissions: The properties view for branches is also different than that of ordinary folders or file, containing some metadata for the branch, relationship information, and permissions for the branch. In TFS2008, the users who have checkout and Check-in permissions can create a branch. But, In TFS2010 you can control the permissions for Branches using Manage Branch permissions.   Reparent option in TFS2010: In TFS2008, if we have two branches which don’t have parent-child relation and we want perform merge between these two branches then we have to perform baseless merge using tf.exe command line. I have two branches Release_1.0 and Dev1.0_F2 which don’t have any relation between them, that’s why when I click on merge option in Release_1.0, in Target Branch it’s not showing Dev1.0_F2 branch to perform the merges.     Let us see what can we do for this in TFS2010, first perform a TFS baseless merge to establish a relationship between the parent branch and the child branches.  It will only merge the folder, not its contents. TFS baseless merges are performed via the command line using VS2010 command prompt and do the following:   tf merge /baseless <ParentBranch> <childBranch> Check in your pending changes. It will create the link between the branches but the relationships are still not completed.  Now, select the child branch in Source Control Explorer and from the File menu choose Source Control –> Branching and Merging –> Reparent.      In the dialog box,  choose the appropriate branch as the new parent.   Click Reparent and then go to parent branch and click merge. Now, will see that in Target Branch option Dev1.0_F2 branch is added.         Converting Folders to Branches and Branches to Folders: You can convert any Folder as Branch from Context Menu by performing right click on the folderàBranching and MergingàConvert to Branch. In similar way, you can convert the Branches to Folder using Convert to Folder option available in File Menu (FileàSource ControlàBranching and MergingàConvert to Branch). This option is not available in context menu.

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• Columnstore Case Study #2: Columnstore faster than SSAS Cube at DevCon Security

  - by aspiringgeek

  Preamble This is the second in a series of posts documenting big wins encountered using columnstore indexes in SQL Server 2012 & 2014.  Many of these can be found in my big deck along with details such as internals, best practices, caveats, etc.  The purpose of sharing the case studies in this context is to provide an easy-to-consume quick-reference alternative. See also Columnstore Case Study #1: MSIT SONAR Aggregations Why Columnstore? As stated previously, If we’re looking for a subset of columns from one or a few rows, given the right indexes, SQL Server can do a superlative job of providing an answer. If we’re asking a question which by design needs to hit lots of rows—DW, reporting, aggregations, grouping, scans, etc., SQL Server has never had a good mechanism—until columnstore. Columnstore indexes were introduced in SQL Server 2012. However, they're still largely unknown. Some adoption blockers existed; yet columnstore was nonetheless a game changer for many apps.  In SQL Server 2014, potential blockers have been largely removed & they're going to profoundly change the way we interact with our data.  The purpose of this series is to share the performance benefits of columnstore & documenting columnstore is a compelling reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2014. The Customer DevCon Security provides home & business security services & has been in business for 135 years. I met DevCon personnel while speaking to the Utah County SQL User Group on 20 February 2012. (Thanks to TJ Belt (b|@tjaybelt) & Ben Miller (b|@DBADuck) for the invitation which serendipitously coincided with the height of ski season.) The App: DevCon Security Reporting: Optimized & Ad Hoc Queries DevCon users interrogate a SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services cube via SSRS. In addition, the SQL Server 2012 relational back end is the target of ad hoc queries; this DW back end is refreshed nightly during a brief maintenance window via conventional table partition switching. SSRS, SSAS, & MDX Conventional relational structures were unable to provide adequate performance for user interaction for the SSRS reports. An SSAS solution was implemented requiring personnel to ramp up technically, including learning enough MDX to satisfy requirements. Ad Hoc Queries Even though the fact table is relatively small—only 22 million rows & 33GB—the table was a typical DW table in terms of its width: 137 columns, any of which could be the target of ad hoc interrogation. As is common in DW reporting scenarios such as this, it is often nearly to optimize for such queries using conventional indexing. DevCon DBAs & developers attended PASS 2012 & were introduced to the marvels of columnstore in a session presented by Klaus Aschenbrenner (b|@Aschenbrenner) The Details Classic vs. columnstore before-&-after metrics are impressive. Scenario Conventional Structures Columnstore ? SSRS via SSAS 10 - 12 seconds 1 second >10x Ad Hoc 5-7 minutes (300 - 420 seconds) 1 - 2 seconds >100x Here are two charts characterizing this data graphically.  The first is a linear representation of Report Duration (in seconds) for Conventional Structures vs. Columnstore Indexes.  As is so often the case when we chart such significant deltas, the linear scale doesn’t expose some the dramatically improved values corresponding to the columnstore metrics.  Just to make it fair here’s the same data represented logarithmically; yet even here the values corresponding to 1 –2 seconds aren’t visible.  The Wins Performance: Even prior to columnstore implementation, at 10 - 12 seconds canned report performance against the SSAS cube was tolerable. Yet the 1 second performance afterward is clearly better. As significant as that is, imagine the user experience re: ad hoc interrogation. The difference between several minutes vs. one or two seconds is a game changer, literally changing the way users interact with their data—no mental context switching, no wondering when the results will appear, no preoccupation with the spinning mind-numbing hurry-up-&-wait indicators.  As we’ve commonly found elsewhere, columnstore indexes here provided performance improvements of one, two, or more orders of magnitude. Simplified Infrastructure: Because in this case a nonclustered columnstore index on a conventional DW table was faster than an Analysis Services cube, the entire SSAS infrastructure was rendered superfluous & was retired. PASS Rocks: Once again, the value of attending PASS is proven out. The trip to Charlotte combined with eager & enquiring minds let directly to this success story. Find out more about the next PASS Summit here, hosted this year in Seattle on November 4 - 7, 2014. DevCon BI Team Lead Nathan Allan provided this unsolicited feedback: “What we found was pretty awesome. It has been a game changer for us in terms of the flexibility we can offer people that would like to get to the data in different ways.” Summary For DW, reports, & other BI workloads, columnstore often provides significant performance enhancements relative to conventional indexing.  I have documented here, the second in a series of reports on columnstore implementations, results from DevCon Security, a live customer production app for which performance increased by factors of from 10x to 100x for all report queries, including canned queries as well as reducing time for results for ad hoc queries from 5 - 7 minutes to 1 - 2 seconds. As a result of columnstore performance, the customer retired their SSAS infrastructure. I invite you to consider leveraging columnstore in your own environment. Let me know if you have any questions.

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• Disaster Recovery Discovery

  - by Rodney Landrum

  Last weekend I joined several of my IT staff on a mission to perform a DR test in our remote CoLo center in a large South East city of the US. Can I be more obtuse? The goal was simple for me as the sole DBA in a throng of Windows, Storage, Network and SAN admins – restore the databases and make them work. There were 4 applications that back ended to 7 SQL Server databases on 4 different SQL Server instances. We would maintain the original server names, but beyond that it was fair game. We had time to prepare so I was able to script out or otherwise automate the recovery process. I used sp_help_revlogin for three of the servers, a bit of a cheat actually because restoring the Master database on the target DR servers was the specified course of action according to the DR procedures ( the caveat “IF REQUIRED” left it open to interpretation. I really wanted to avoid the step of restoring Master for a number of reasons but mainly because I did not want to deal with issues starting SQL Services afterward. Having to account for the location of TempDB and the version conflicts of the resource DBs were just two of the battles I chose not to fight. Not to mention other system database location problems that might arise and prevent SQL from starting.  I was going to have to restore all of the user databases anyway, so I would not really gain any benefit, outside of logins, for taking the time to restore the source Master database over the newly installed one on the fresh server. What I wanted was the ability to restore the Master database as a user database, call it Master_Mine, from a backup on the source system and then use that restored database to script the SQL Logins and passwords on the DR systems. While I did not attempt this on the trip, the thought stuck in my mind and this past week I succeeded at scripting user accounts and passwords using only a restored copy of the Master database. Granted there were several challenges to overcome.  Also, as is usual for any work like this the usual disclaimers apply:  This is not something that I would imagine Microsoft would condone or support and this was really only an experiment for me to learn if it was even possible. While I have tested the process with success, I do not know that I would use this technique in a documented procedure because future updates for SQL Server will render this technique non-functional. I thought at first, incorrectly of course, that I could use sp_help_revlogin on a restored copy of the master database I named Master_Mine.   Since sp_help_revlogin uses system schema objects, sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals, this was not going to work because all results would come from the main Master database. To test this I added a SQL login via SSMS, backed up Master, restored  it as Master_Mine, and then deleted the login.  Even though the test account I created should presumably still be in the Master_Mine database, I should be able to get to it and script out its creation with its password hash so that I would not need to know the password, but any applications that stored that password would not have to be altered in the DR scenario. They would just work as expected. Once I realized that would not work I began looking deeper.  Knowing that sys.syslogins and sys.server_principals are system views, their underlying code should be available with sp_helptext, right? They were. And this led me to discover the two tables sys.sysxlgns and sys.sysprivs, where the data I needed was stored. These tables existed in both the real Master and the restored copy, Master_Mine.  I used this information to tweak the sp_help_revlogin stored procedure to use these tables instead to create the logins cursor used in sp_help_revlogin. For the password hash,  sp_help_revlogin uses the function LoginProperty() which takes a user name and option ‘passwordhash’ to return the hash for the user. Unfortunately, it requires the login to exist in the Master database. This would not work. So another slight modification I had to make was to pull the password hash itself (pwdhash from sys.sysxlgns) into the logins cursor and comment out the section of sp_help_revlogin that uses LoginProperty. Instead, I pass the pwdhash value as the variable @PWD_varbinary to the sp_hexadecimal stored procedure which is also created by and used within the code provided by Microsoft in the link above for sp_help_revlogin. The final challenge: sys.sysxlgns and sys.server_principals are visible only within a Dedicated Administrator Connection (DAC) query window in SSMS or within SQLCDMD.  To open a DAC connection you have to be logged in on the SQL Server itself, via RDP in my case,  and you preface the server name in the query connection with ADMIN:, so that the server connection looks like ADMIN:ServerName. From there you can create the modified stored procedure in the restored copy of a Master database from a source system as whatever name you like, and then run the modified stored procedure. I named my new stored procedure usp_help_revlogin_MyMaster. Upon execution I was happy to see the logins and password hashes that I needed to apply from the source Master database without having to restore over the new Master system database and without the need to access the original server (assuming it was down due to whatever disaster put it in that state). You will note that I am not providing full code samples here of the modifications. I will say that it was a slight bit of work and anyone who needed to do this for whatever reason, could fairly easily roll their own solution with the information provided herein.  My goal, as I said was to prove that this could be done and provide another option if required to ease the burden of getting SQL Servers up and available in an emergency situation where alternatives may be more challenging or otherwise unavailable.  

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• Automating custom software installation in a zone

  - by mgerdts

  In Solaris 11, the internals of zone installation are quite different than they were in Solaris 10.  This difference allows the administrator far greater control of what software is installed in a zone.  The rules in Solaris 10 are simple and inflexible: if it is installed in the global zone and is not specifically excluded by package metadata from being installed in a zone, it is installed in the zone.  In Solaris 11, the rules are still simple, but are much more flexible:  the packages you tell it to install and the packages on which they depend will be installed. So, where does the default list of packages come from?  From the AI (auto installer) manifest, of course.  The default AI manifest is /usr/share/auto_install/manifest/zone_default.xml.  Within that file you will find:             <software_data action="install">                 <name>pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server</name>             </software_data> So, the default installation will install pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server.  Cool.  What is that?  You can figure out what is in the package by looking for it in the repository with your web browser (click the manifest link), or use pkg(1).  In this case, it is a group package (pkg:/group/), so we know that it just has a bunch of dependencies to name the packages that really wants installed. $ pkg contents -t depend -o fmri -s fmri -r solaris-small-server FMRI compress/bzip2 compress/gzip compress/p7zip ... terminal/luit terminal/resize text/doctools text/doctools/ja text/less text/spelling-utilities web/wget If you would like to see the entire manifest from the command line, use pkg contents -r -m solaris-small-server. Let's suppose that you want to install a zone that also has mercurial and a full-fledged installation of vim rather than just the minimal vim-core that is part of solaris-small-server.  That's pretty easy. First, copy the default AI manifest somewhere where you will edit it and make it writable. # cp /usr/share/auto_install/manifest/zone_default.xml ~/myzone-ai.xml # chmod 644 ~/myzone-ai.xml Next, edit the file, changing the software_data section as follows:             <software_data action="install">                 <name>pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server</name>                 <name>pkg:/developer/versioning/mercurial</name>                <name>pkg:/editor/vim</name>             </software_data> To figure out  the names of the packages, either search the repository using your browser, or use a command like pkg search hg. Now we are all ready to install the zone.  If it has not yet been configured, that must be done as well. # zonecfg -z myzone 'create; set zonepath=/zones/myzone' # zoneadm -z myzone install -m ~/myzone-ai.xml A ZFS file system has been created for this zone. Progress being logged to /var/log/zones/zoneadm.20111113T004303Z.myzone.install Image: Preparing at /zones/myzone/root. Install Log: /system/volatile/install.15496/install_log AI Manifest: /tmp/manifest.xml.XfaWpE SC Profile: /usr/share/auto_install/sc_profiles/enable_sci.xml Zonename: myzone Installation: Starting ... Creating IPS image Installing packages from: solaris origin: http://localhost:1008/solaris/54453f3545de891d4daa841ddb3c844fe8804f55/ DOWNLOAD PKGS FILES XFER (MB) Completed 169/169 34047/34047 185.6/185.6 PHASE ACTIONS Install Phase 46498/46498 PHASE ITEMS Package State Update Phase 169/169 Image State Update Phase 2/2 Installation: Succeeded Note: Man pages can be obtained by installing pkg:/system/manual done. Done: Installation completed in 531.813 seconds. Next Steps: Boot the zone, then log into the zone console (zlogin -C) to complete the configuration process. Log saved in non-global zone as /zones/myzone/root/var/log/zones/zoneadm.20111113T004303Z.myzone.install Now, for a few things that I've seen people trip over: Ignore that bit about man pages - it's wrong.  Man pages are already installed so long as the right facet is set properly.  And that's a topic for another blog entry. If you boot the zone then just use zlogin myzone, you will see that services you care about haven't started and that svc:/milestone/config:default is starting.  That is because you have not yet logged into the console with zlogin -C myzone. If the zone has been booted for more than a very short while when you first connect to the zone console, it will seem like the console is hung.  That's not really the case - hit ^L (control-L) to refresh the sysconfig(1M) screen that is prompting you for information.

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• .NET Security Part 4

  - by Simon Cooper

  Finally, in this series, I am going to cover some of the security issues that can trip you up when using sandboxed appdomains. DISCLAIMER: I am not a security expert, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. If you actually are writing security-critical code, then get a proper security audit of your code by a professional. The examples below are just illustrations of the sort of things that can go wrong. 1. AppDomainSetup.ApplicationBase The most obvious one is the issue covered in the MSDN documentation on creating a sandbox, in step 3 – the sandboxed appdomain has the same ApplicationBase as the controlling appdomain. So let’s explore what happens when they are the same, and an exception is thrown. In the sandboxed assembly, Sandboxed.dll (IPlugin is an interface in a partially-trusted assembly, with a single MethodToDoThings on it): public class UntrustedPlugin : MarshalByRefObject, IPlugin { // implements IPlugin.MethodToDoThings() public void MethodToDoThings() { throw new EvilException(); } } [Serializable] internal class EvilException : Exception { public override string ToString() { // show we have read access to C:\Windows // read the first 5 directories Console.WriteLine("Pwned! Mwuahahah!"); foreach (var d in Directory.EnumerateDirectories(@"C:\Windows").Take(5)) { Console.WriteLine(d.FullName); } return base.ToString(); } } And in the controlling assembly: // what can possibly go wrong? AppDomainSetup appDomainSetup = new AppDomainSetup { ApplicationBase = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.SetupInformation.ApplicationBase } // only grant permissions to execute // and to read the application base, nothing else PermissionSet restrictedPerms = new PermissionSet(PermissionState.None); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new SecurityPermission(SecurityPermissionFlag.Execution)); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); restrictedPerms.AddPermission( new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.pathDiscovery, appDomainSetup.ApplicationBase); // create the sandbox AppDomain sandbox = AppDomain.CreateDomain("Sandbox", null, appDomainSetup, restrictedPerms); // execute UntrustedPlugin in the sandbox // don't crash the application if the sandbox throws an exception IPlugin o = (IPlugin)sandbox.CreateInstanceFromAndUnwrap("Sandboxed.dll", "UntrustedPlugin"); try { o.MethodToDoThings() } catch (Exception e) { Console.WriteLine(e.ToString()); } And the result? Oops. We’ve allowed a class that should be sandboxed to execute code with fully-trusted permissions! How did this happen? Well, the key is the exact meaning of the ApplicationBase property: The application base directory is where the assembly manager begins probing for assemblies. When EvilException is thrown, it propagates from the sandboxed appdomain into the controlling assembly’s appdomain (as it’s marked as Serializable). When the exception is deserialized, the CLR finds and loads the sandboxed dll into the fully-trusted appdomain. Since the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory contains the sandboxed assembly, the CLR finds and loads the assembly into a full-trust appdomain, and the evil code is executed. So the problem isn’t exactly that the sandboxed appdomain’s ApplicationBase is the same as the controlling appdomain’s, it’s that the sandboxed dll was in such a place that the controlling appdomain could find it as part of the standard assembly resolution mechanism. The sandbox then forced the assembly to load in the controlling appdomain by throwing a serializable exception that propagated outside the sandbox. The easiest fix for this is to keep the sandbox ApplicationBase well away from the ApplicationBase of the controlling appdomain, and don’t allow the sandbox permissions to access the controlling appdomain’s ApplicationBase directory. If you do this, then the sandboxed assembly can’t be accidentally loaded into the fully-trusted appdomain, and the code can’t be executed. If the plugin does try to induce the controlling appdomain to load an assembly it shouldn’t, a SerializationException will be thrown when it tries to load the assembly to deserialize the exception, and no damage will be done. 2. Loading the sandboxed dll into the application appdomain As an extension of the previous point, you shouldn’t directly reference types or methods in the sandboxed dll from your application code. That loads the assembly into the fully-trusted appdomain, and from there code in the assembly could be executed. Instead, pull out methods you want the sandboxed dll to have into an interface or class in a partially-trusted assembly you control, and execute methods via that instead (similar to the example above with the IPlugin interface). If you need to have a look at the assembly before executing it in the sandbox, either examine the assembly using reflection from within the sandbox, or load the assembly into the Reflection-only context in the application’s appdomain. The code in assemblies in the reflection-only context can’t be executed, it can only be reflected upon, thus protecting your appdomain from malicious code. 3. Incorrectly asserting permissions You should only assert permissions when you are absolutely sure they’re safe. For example, this method allows a caller read-access to any file they call this method with, including your documents, any network shares, the C:\Windows directory, etc: [SecuritySafeCritical] public static string GetFileText(string filePath) { new FileIOPermission(FileIOPermissionAccess.Read, filePath).Assert(); return File.ReadAllText(filePath); } Be careful when asserting permissions, and ensure you’re not providing a loophole sandboxed dlls can use to gain access to things they shouldn’t be able to. Conclusion Hopefully, that’s given you an idea of some of the ways it’s possible to get past the .NET security system. As I said before, this post is not exhaustive, and you certainly shouldn’t base any security-critical applications on the contents of this blog post. What this series should help with is understanding the possibilities of the security system, and what all the security attributes and classes mean and what they are used for, if you were to use the security system in the future.

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• Synergy - easy share of keyboard and mouse between multiple computers

  Did you ever have the urge to share one set of keyboard and mouse between multiple machines? If so, please read on... Using multiple machines Honestly, as a software craftsman it is my daily business to run multiple machines - either physical or virtual - to be able to solve my customers' requirements. Recent hardware equipment allows this very easily. For laptops it's a no-brainer to attach a second or even a third screen in order to extend your native display. This works quite handy and in my case I used to attached two additional screens - one via HD15 connector, the other via HDMI. But... as it's a laptop and therefore a mobile unit there are slight restrictions. Detaching and re-attaching all cables when changing locations is one of them but hardware limitations, too. After all, it's a laptop and not a workstation. I guess, that anyone working in IT (or ICT) has more than one machine at their workplace or their home office and at least I find it quite annoying to have multiple sets of keyboard and mouse conquering my remaining space on my desk. Despite the ugly looks of all those cables and whatsoever 'chaos of distraction' I prefer a more clean solution and working environment. This allows me to actually focus on my work and tasks to do rather than to worry about choosing the right combination of keyboard/mouse. My current workplace is a patch work of various pieces of hardware (approx. 2-3 years): DIY desktop on Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit, Core2 Duo (E7400, 2.8GHz), 4GB RAM, 2x 250GB HDD, nVidia GPU 512MB Dell Inspiron 1525 on Windows 8 64-bit, 4GB RAM, 200GB HDD HP Compaq 6720s on Windows Vista 32-bit, Core2 Duo (T5670, 1.8GHz), 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD Mac mini on Mac OS X 10.7, Core i5 (2.3 GHz), 2GB RAM, 500GB HDD I know... Not the latest and greatest but a decent combination to work with. New system(s) is/are already on the shopping list but I live in the 'wrong' country to buy computer hardware. So, the next trip abroad will provide me with some new stuff. Using multiple operating systems The list of hardware above already names different operating systems, and actually I have only one preference: Linux. But still my job as a software craftsman for Visual FoxPro and .NET development requires other OSes, too. Not a big deal, it's just like this. Additionally to those physical machines, there are a bunch of virtual machines around. Most of them running either Windows XP or Windows 7. Since years I have the practice that each development for one customer is isolated into its own virtual machine and environment. This keeps it clean and version-safe. But as you can easily imagine with that setup there are a couple of constraints referring to keyboard and mouse. Usually, those systems require their own pieces of hardware attached. As stated, I don't like clutter on my desk's surface, so a cross-platform solution has to come in here. In the past, I tried it with various applications, hardware or network protocols like X11, RDP, NX, TeamViewer, RAdmin, KVM switch, etc. but the problem in this case is that they either allow you to remotely connect to the other system or exclusively 'bind' your peripherals to the active system. Not optimal after all. Synergy to the rescue Quote from their website: "Synergy lets you easily share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers on your desk, and it's Free and Open Source. Just move your mouse off the edge of one computer's screen on to another. You can even share all of your clipboards. All you need is a network connection. Synergy is cross-platform (works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)." Yep, that's it! All I need for my setup here... Actually, I couldn't believe it myself that I didn't stumble over synergy earlier but 'Get over it' and there we go. And despite the fact that it is Open Source, no, it's also for free. Donations for the developers are very welcome and recently they introduced Synergy Premium. A possibility to buy so-called premium votes that can be used to put more weight / importance on specific issues or bugs that you would like the developers to look into. Installation and configuration Simply download the installation packages for your systems of choice, run the installer and enter some minor information about your network setup. I chose my desktop machine for the role of the Synergy server and configured my screen setup as follows: The screen setup allows you currently to build or connect up to 15 machines. The number of screens can be higher as those machine might have multiple screens physically attached. Synergy takes this into the overall calculations and simply works as expected. I tried it for fun with a second monitor each connected to both laptops to have a total number of 6 active screens. No flaws after all - stunning! All the other machines are configured as clients like so: Side note: The screenshot was taken on Windows 8 and pasted via clipboard into Gimp running on Ubuntu. Resume Synergy is now definitely in my box of tools for my daily work, and amongst the first pieces of software I install after the operating system. It just simplifies my life and cleans my desk. Never again without Synergy!Now, only waiting for an Android version to integrate my Galaxy Tab 10.1, too. ;-) Please, check out that superb product and enjoy sharing one keyboard, one mouse and one clipboard between your various machines and operating systems.

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• Inside Red Gate - Be Reasonable!

  - by simonc

  As I discussed in my previous posts, divisions and project teams within Red Gate are allowed a lot of autonomy to manage themselves. It's not just the teams though, there's an awful lot of freedom given to individual employees within the company as well. Reasonableness How Red Gate treats it's employees is embodied in the phrase 'You will be reasonable with us, and we will be reasonable with you'. As an employee, you are trusted to do your job to the best of you ability. There's no one looking over your shoulder, no one clocking you in and out each day. Everyone is working at the company because they want to, and one of the core ideas of Red Gate is that the company exists to 'let people do the best work of their lives'. Everything is geared towards that. To help you do your job, office services and the IT department are there. If you need something to help you work better (a third or fourth monitor, footrests, or a new keyboard) then ask people in Information Systems (IS) or Office Services and you will be given it, no questions asked. Everyone has administrator access to their own machines, and you can install whatever you want on it. If there's a particular bit of software you need, then ask IS and they will buy it. As an example, last year I wanted to replace my main hard drive with an SSD; I had a summer job at school working in a computer repair shop, so knew what to do. I went to IS and asked for 'an SSD, a SATA cable, and a screwdriver'. And I got it there and then, even the screwdriver. Awesome. I screwed it in myself, copied all my main drive files across, and I was good to go. Of course, if you're not happy doing that yourself, then IS will sort it all out for you, no problems. If you need something that the company doesn't have (say, a book off Amazon, or you need some specifications printing off & bound), then everyone has a expense limit of £100 that you can use without any sign-off needed from your managers. If you need a company credit card for whatever reason, then you can get it. This freedom extends to working hours and holiday; you're expected to be in the office 11am-3pm each day, but outside those times you can work whenever you want. If you need a half-day holiday on a days notice, or even the same day, then you'll get it, unless there's a good reason you're needed that day. If you need to work from home for a day or so for whatever reason, then you can. If it's reasonable, then it's allowed. Trust issues? A lot of trust, and a lot of leeway, is given to all the people in Red Gate. Everyone is expected to work hard, do their jobs to the best of their ability, and there will be a minimum of bureaucratic obstacles that stop you doing your work. What happens if you abuse this trust? Well, an example is company trip expenses. You're free to expense what you like; food, drink, transport, etc, but if you expenses are not reasonable, then you will never travel with the company again. Simple as that. Everyone knows when they're abusing the system, so simply don't do it. Along with reasonableness, another phrase used is 'Don't be an a**hole'. If you act like an a**hole, and abuse any of the trust placed in you, even if you're the best tester, salesperson, dev, or manager in the company, then you won't be a part of the company any more. From what I know about other companies, employee trust is highly variable between companies, all the way up to CCTV trained on employee's monitors. As a dev, I want to produce well-written & useful code that solves people's problems. Being able to get whatever I need - install whatever tools I need, get time off when I need to, obtain reference books within a day - all let me do my job, and so let Red Gate help other people do their own jobs through the tools we produce. Plus, I don't think I would like working for a company that doesn't allow admin access to your own machine and blocks Facebook! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• Network outside internal not reaching TMG Forefront 2010 (Hyper-V environment)

  - by Pascal

  Below is my environment: I have 1 physical machine running Windows 2008 R2, with the Hyper-V role. This machine has 3 physical NICs: One for Internet One for Internal Network One for Wireless Network All 3 have their respective Virtual Networks in Hyper-V, and I have an extra Private virutal machine network for a DMZ Network. In one of the virtual machines, I have TMG Forefront 2010 SP1 installed, with all 4 networks available to it. Below is the IPCONFIG /ALL at the firewall: Windows IP Configuration Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : FRW-EXP1-02 Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . : exp1.eti.br Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Hybrid IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : Yes WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : exp1.eti.br Ethernet adapter Internet: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter #4 Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-15-5D-01-06-0E DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::6d05:6033:4cfc:bdf5%15(Preferred) IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 189.100.110.xxx(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.240.0 Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : quarta-feira, 5 de janeiro de 2011 11:17:24 Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : quarta-feira, 5 de janeiro de 2011 16:07:02 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 189.100.96.xxx DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 201.6.2.43 DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 436213085 DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-14-6D-75-6F-00-15-5D-01-06-0B DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 201.6.2.163 201.6.2.43 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled Ethernet adapter Rede Interna: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter #3 Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-15-5D-01-06-0C DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::51ff:4723:ce4c:bbc3%14(Preferred) IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 10.50.75.10(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 352327005 DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-14-6D-75-6F-00-15-5D-01-06-0B DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.50.75.1 10.50.75.2 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled Ethernet adapter DMZ: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter #2 Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-15-5D-01-06-0A DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::d4c5:75cf:e9aa:73e1%13(Preferred) IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.10.1(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 301995357 DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-14-6D-75-6F-00-15-5D-01-06-0B DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : fec0:0:0:ffff::1%1 fec0:0:0:ffff::2%1 fec0:0:0:ffff::3%1 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled Ethernet adapter Wireless: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-15-5D-01-06-0B DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::459:8ca6:d02:8da1%11(Preferred) IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.10(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 234886493 DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-14-6D-75-6F-00-15-5D-01-06-0B DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : fec0:0:0:ffff::1%1 fec0:0:0:ffff::2%1 fec0:0:0:ffff::3%1 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled I have the Networks below at Forefront: External: IP addresses external to the Forefront TMG Networks Internal: 10.50.75.0 - 10.50.75.255 Local Host: Perimiter: 192.168.10.0 - 192.168.10.255 Wireless: 192.168.1.0 - 192.168.1.255 In the Networks Rules, I have: 1 => Route => Local Host => All Networks 2 => Route => Quarantined; VPN => Internal 3 => NAT => Internal; VPN => Perimiter 4 => NAT => Internal; Perimiter; Quarantined; VPN; Wireless => External My problem is that I can only communicate with the Internal and External networks. If a ping www.google.com or 10.50.75.21 from the Forefront VM, I get answer backs without a problem. If I try to ping a machine at the Perimiter network or the Wireless network, it doesn't get routed back to Forefront, and it's the default gateway on all Networks. Here as ping samples: PS C:\Users\Administrator.TPB1> ping www.google.com Pinging www.l.google.com [64.233.163.104] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 64.233.163.104: bytes=32 time=11ms TTL=58 Reply from 64.233.163.104: bytes=32 time=8ms TTL=58 Ping statistics for 64.233.163.104: Packets: Sent = 2, Received = 2, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 8ms, Maximum = 11ms, Average = 9ms Control-C PS C:\Users\Administrator.TPB1> ping 10.50.75.21 Pinging 10.50.75.21 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 10.50.75.21: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128 Reply from 10.50.75.21: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128 Reply from 10.50.75.21: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128 Reply from 10.50.75.21: bytes=32 time=1ms TTL=128 Ping statistics for 10.50.75.21: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 1ms, Maximum = 1ms, Average = 1ms PS C:\Users\Administrator.TPB1> ping 192.168.10.3 Pinging 192.168.10.3 with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 192.168.10.1: Destination host unreachable. Request timed out. Request timed out. Request timed out. Ping statistics for 192.168.10.3: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 1, Lost = 3 (75% loss), PS C:\Users\Administrator.TPB1> The ping to the 192.168.10.3 gets the Destination host unreachable. Below is the ipconfig for the perimiter VM: PS C:\Users\Administrator.Administrator> ipconfig /all Windows IP Configuration Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : app-exp1-02 Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . : Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Unkown IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Microsoft Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-15-5D-01-06-08 DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.10.3 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.10.1 DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 201.6.2.163 201.6.2.43 Trying to ping 192.168.10.1 ( the gateway ) from the DMZ machine also does not work. When I use Log & Reports to monitor packets from Wireless network and Perimiter network, I don't get any packets link PING or HTTP that I try to send. But I do get a lot of spoofing messages for NETBIOS broadcasts... it's like Forefront thinks it's coming from a different network, but I don't know why. Please Help! Tks

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• Most efficient algorithm for merging sorted IEnumerable<T>

  - by franck

  Hello, I have several huge sorted enumerable sequences that I want to merge. Theses lists are manipulated as IEnumerable but are already sorted. Since input lists are sorted, it should be possible to merge them in one trip, without re-sorting anything. I would like to keep the defered execution behavior. I tried to write a naive algorithm which do that (see below). However, it looks pretty ugly and I'm sure it can be optimized. It may exist a more academical algorithm... IEnumerable<T> MergeOrderedLists<T, TOrder>(IEnumerable<IEnumerable<T>> orderedlists, Func<T, TOrder> orderBy) { var enumerators = orderedlists.ToDictionary(l => l.GetEnumerator(), l => default(T)); IEnumerator<T> tag = null; var firstRun = true; while (true) { var toRemove = new List<IEnumerator<T>>(); var toAdd = new List<KeyValuePair<IEnumerator<T>, T>>(); foreach (var pair in enumerators.Where(pair => firstRun || tag == pair.Key)) { if (pair.Key.MoveNext()) toAdd.Add(pair); else toRemove.Add(pair.Key); } foreach (var enumerator in toRemove) enumerators.Remove(enumerator); foreach (var pair in toAdd) enumerators[pair.Key] = pair.Key.Current; if (enumerators.Count == 0) yield break; var min = enumerators.OrderBy(t => orderBy(t.Value)).FirstOrDefault(); tag = min.Key; yield return min.Value; firstRun = false; } } The method can be used like that: // Person lists are already sorted by age MergeOrderedLists(orderedList, p => p.Age); assuming the following Person class exists somewhere: public class Person { public int Age { get; set; } } Duplicates should be conserved, we don't care about their order in the new sequence. Do you see any obvious optimization I could use?

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• Why is cell phone software still so primitive?

  - by Tomislav Nakic-Alfirevic

  I don't do mobile development, but it strikes me as odd that features like this aren't available by default on most phones: full text search: searches all address book contents, messages, anything else being a plus better call management: e.g. a rotating audio call log, meaning you always have the last N calls recorded for your listening pleasure later (your little girl just said her first "da-da" while you were on a business trip, you had a telephone job interview, you received complex instructions to do something etc.) bluetooth remote control (like e.g. anyRemote, but available by default on a bluetooth phone) no multitasking capabilities worth mentioning and in general no e.g. weekly software updates, making the phone much more usable (even if it had to be done over USB, rather than over the network). I'm sure I was dumbfounded by the lack or design of other features as well, but they don't come to mind right now. To clarify, I'm not talking about smartphones here: my plain, 2-year old phone has a CPU an order of magnitude faster than my first PC, about as much storage space and it's ridiculous how bad (slow, unwieldy) the software is and it's not one phone or one manufacturer. What keeps the (to me) obvious software functionality vacuum on a capable hardware platform from being filled up? Edit: I believe a clarification on the multitasking point might be beneficial. I'll use my phone as an example, although the point is much more general. The phone can multitask and in fact does: you can listen to music and do something else at the same time. On the other hand, the way the software has been designed makes multitasking next to useless. (Ditto with the external touch screen: it can take touch commands, but only one application makes use of it, and only with 3 commands.) To take the multitasking example to the extreme, if I plug my phone into my laptop and it registers as an external disk, it doesn't allow any kind of operation: messages, calling, calendar, everything out of reach, although I can receive a call. No "battery life" issue there: it's charging while connected. BTW, another example of design below the current state of the art: I don't see a phone on the horizon which will remember where in an audio or video file you were when you stopped listening/watching it last time (podcasts are a good use case). Simplistic rewind/fast forward functionality only aggravates the problem.

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• Publishing/subscribing multiple subsets of the same server collection

  - by matb33

  How does one go about publishing different subsets (or "views") of a single collection on the server as multiple collections on the client? Here is some pseudo-code to help illustrate my question: items collection on the server Assume that I have an items collection on the server with millions of records. Let's also assume that: 50 records have the enabled property set to true, and; 100 records have the processed property set to true. All others are set to false. items: { "_id": "uniqueid1", "title": "item #1", "enabled": false, "processed": false }, { "_id": "uniqueid2", "title": "item #2", "enabled": false, "processed": true }, ... { "_id": "uniqueid458734958", "title": "item #458734958", "enabled": true, "processed": true } Server code Let's publish two "views" of the same server collection. One will send down a cursor with 50 records, and the other will send down a cursor with 100 records. There are over 458 million records in this fictitious server-side database, and the client does not need to know about all of those (in fact, sending them all down would probably take several hours in this example): var Items = new Meteor.Collection("items"); Meteor.publish("enabled_items", function () { // Only 50 "Items" have enabled set to true return Items.find({enabled: true}); }); Meteor.publish("processed_items", function () { // Only 100 "Items" have processed set to true return Items.find({processed: true}); }); Client code In order to support the latency compensation technique, we are forced to declare a single collection Items on the client. It should become apparent where the flaw is: how does one differentiate between Items for enabled_items and Items for processed_items? var Items = new Meteor.Collection("items"); Meteor.subscribe("enabled_items", function () { // This will output 50, fine console.log(Items.find().count()); }); Meteor.subscribe("processed_items", function () { // This will also output 50, since we have no choice but to use // the same "Items" collection. console.log(Items.find().count()); }); My current solution involves monkey-patching _publishCursor to allow the subscription name to be used instead of the collection name. But that won't do any latency compensation. Every write has to round-trip to the server: // On the client: var EnabledItems = new Meteor.Collection("enabled_items"); var ProcessedItems = new Meteor.Collection("processed_items"); With the monkey-patch in place, this will work. But go into Offline mode and changes won't appear on the client right away -- we'll need to be connected to the server to see changes. What's the correct approach?

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• Apple Airport Express, Extreme and Time Capsules, BT Home Hub, Wireless Extenders confusion

  - by Jamie Hartnoll

  I post quite frequently in Stack Overflow, but use Superuser less frequently. Mainly as I don't change hardware often and rarely have software issues! I live in a small stone cottage, and have an office in a separate building across a yard. I have a BT Homehub which is located in the cottage and a series of Ethernet cables running across the yard to the office. This is fine for my wired stuff. My main office computers are PCs running Windows 7 Ultimate, and one on Win7 Home, all working fine. I also have an old laptop on Win XP which works fine wirelessly in the house for those evenings in front of the TV catching up on a bit of work. I also have an iPhone and an iPad. Recently, I have been trying to get WiFi in the office so I can use Adobe Shadow (or whatever it now is!) to improve mobile web development efficiency using my iPhone and iPad, so I bought this: http://www.ebuyer.com/393462-zyxel-wre2205-500mbps-powerline-wireless-n300-range-extender-wre2205-gb0101f Thinking that would be lovely just plugged into the socket by the door in the office, extending the perimeter of the WiFi from my Homehub. I can't get it to work properly! If I plug a laptop into its ethernet port I can get it to connect to the Homehub and give me a kinda of wired, wireless extender. If, however, I plug the ethernet port into my home hub, it then seems to extend the network, but only my iOs devices work, and all my wired stuff stops working, and seems to create an infinite loop where windows connects to my homehob, and then rather to the internet, it then connects back to the extender thing. Anyway... in the meantime, I took a fatal trip to the Apple Store, where I purchased an Airport Express... solely for the purpose of hooking my iOs devices up as wireless music players in the house. I knew it had WiFi, but didn't want to use that part as an extender, I didn't think it would work on a Homehub anyway. It doesn't work on a Homehub! I now have a new wireless network in the house, which, when anything connects to it cannot connect to the Internet, so it works ONLY as a wireless music player. I then borrowed some Powerline Adaptors from someone and realised that this whole thing was getting totally out of control! It seems all the technology is out there but it's so complicated to get the right series of devices. To further add to the confusion, I wouldn't mind a network hard drive. I bought one that broke and lost everything, so now we're on to looking at the Apple Time Capsules. So my question is... IF... I buy an Apple Time Capsule, can I: Hook that up to my Homehub, leaving the homehub connected to the Internet so my Hub phones still work, then disable wireless on the homehub Link up my Airport Express to the Time Capsule PROPERLY so it will connect to the Internet Do the above with an Apple TV box should I buy one in future Use the Time Capsule as a network hard drive to store video and music that can be viewed/listened to via my iOS devices/Apple TV/Aiport Express anywhere even with my main PC off (this currently stores all this data) Hope that the IOS devices like the WiFi from the TimeCapsule better than the Homehub and work without extension, or buy another Airport Express to get WiFI in the office. Or... should I buy an Airport Extreme and use a USB hard drive for the network drive?

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• Tunnel is up but cannot ping directly connected network

  - by drmanalo

  We configured a site-to-site VPN and here is the topology. I control the network on the left but not the one on the right. All devices in our network has public IPs. Server---ASA5505---Cisco887======Internet=====ASA5510---devices I can see the tunnel is up and can do extended ping using a loopback interface. From the 10.175 and 10.165 networks, they can also ping my loopback address. I can also dial in using a Cisco VPN client, and can connect to the devices on the right. #show crypto session Crypto session current status Interface: Vlan3 Profile: xxx-profile Session status: UP-ACTIVE Peer: 213.121.x.x port 500 IKEv1 SA: local 77.245.x.x/500 remote 213.121.x.x/500 Active IPSEC FLOW: permit ip 10.0.20.0/255.255.255.240 10.175.0.0/255.255.128.0 Active SAs: 0, origin: crypto map IPSEC FLOW: permit ip 10.0.20.0/255.255.255.240 10.165.0.0/255.255.192.0 Active SAs: 2, origin: crypto map #ping 10.165.29.39 source loopback 2 Type escape sequence to abort. Sending 5, 100-byte ICMP Echos to 10.165.29.39, timeout is 2 seconds: Packet sent with a source address of 10.0.20.1 !!!!! Success rate is 100 percent (5/5), round-trip min/avg/max = 16/17/20 ms My problem is the devices on the right cannot reach my server. They could only ping the loopback address and nothing else. I'm pasting some diagnostics related to routing thinking perhaps routing is my issue. I can paste all the running-config on my side of network if needed. #show ip int brief Interface IP-Address OK? Method Status Protocol ATM0 unassigned YES NVRAM administratively down down Ethernet0 unassigned YES NVRAM administratively down down FastEthernet0 unassigned YES unset up up connected to ASA FastEthernet1 unassigned YES unset administratively down down FastEthernet2 unassigned YES unset administratively down down FastEthernet3 unassigned YES unset up up Loopback1 10.0.20.65 YES NVRAM up up Loopback2 10.0.20.1 YES NVRAM up up Virtual-Template1 77.245.x.x YES unset up down Virtual-Template2 77.245.x.x YES unset up down Vlan1 unassigned YES unset down down Vlan3 77.245.x.x YES NVRAM up up connected to the Internet #show run | section ip route ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 77.245.x.x ip route 213.121.240.36 255.255.255.255 Vlan3 #show access-list Extended IP access list 102 10 permit ip 10.0.20.0 0.0.0.15 10.175.0.0 0.0.127.255 (3332 matches) 20 permit ip 10.0.20.0 0.0.0.15 10.165.0.0 0.0.63.255 (3498 matches) #show vlan-switch VLAN Name Status Ports ---- -------------------------------- --------- ------------------------------- 1 default active 3 VLAN0003 active Fa0, Fa1, Fa2, Fa3 1002 fddi-default act/unsup 1003 token-ring-default act/unsup 1004 fddinet-default act/unsup 1005 trnet-default act/unsup #show ip route Codes: L - local, C - connected, S - static, R - RIP, M - mobile, B - BGP D - EIGRP, EX - EIGRP external, O - OSPF, IA - OSPF inter area N1 - OSPF NSSA external type 1, N2 - OSPF NSSA external type 2 E1 - OSPF external type 1, E2 - OSPF external type 2 i - IS-IS, su - IS-IS summary, L1 - IS-IS level-1, L2 - IS-IS level-2 ia - IS-IS inter area, * - candidate default, U - per-user static route o - ODR, P - periodic downloaded static route, H - NHRP, l - LISP + - replicated route, % - next hop override Gateway of last resort is 77.245.x.x to network 0.0.0.0 S* 0.0.0.0/0 [1/0] via 77.245.x.x 10.0.0.0/8 is variably subnetted, 5 subnets, 3 masks C 10.0.20.0/28 is directly connected, Loopback2 L 10.0.20.1/32 is directly connected, Loopback2 C 10.0.20.64/28 is directly connected, Loopback1 L 10.0.20.65/32 is directly connected, Loopback1 S 10.165.0.0/18 [1/0] via 213.121.x.x 77.0.0.0/8 is variably subnetted, 3 subnets, 3 masks S 77.0.0.0/8 [1/0] via 77.245.x.x C 77.245.x.x/29 is directly connected, Vlan3 L 77.245.x.x/32 is directly connected, Vlan3 213.121.x.0/32 is subnetted, 1 subnets S 213.121.x.x is directly connected, Vlan3 I read some of the posts here which lead to NATing issue but I'not sure of my next step. Should I translate my public address to private and route it to the loopback address? (only guessing) CISCO VPN site to site Site-to-Site VPN between two ASA 5505s only working in one direction Hope someone could help. Thanks in advance!

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• Diagnosing packet loss / high latency in Ubuntu

  - by Sam Gammon

  We have a Linux box (Ubuntu 12.04) running Nginx (1.5.2), which acts as a reverse proxy/load balancer to some Tornado and Apache hosts. The upstream servers are physically and logically close (same DC, sometimes same-rack) and show sub-millisecond latency between them: PING appserver (10.xx.xx.112) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from appserver (10.xx.xx.112): icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.180 ms 64 bytes from appserver (10.xx.xx.112): icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.165 ms 64 bytes from appserver (10.xx.xx.112): icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.153 ms We receive a sustained load of about 500 requests per second, and are currently seeing regular packet loss / latency spikes from the Internet, even from basic pings: sam@AM-KEEN ~> ping -c 1000 loadbalancer PING 50.xx.xx.16 (50.xx.xx.16): 56 data bytes 64 bytes from loadbalancer: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=11.624 ms 64 bytes from loadbalancer: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=10.494 ms ... many packets later ... Request timeout for icmp_seq 2 64 bytes from loadbalancer: icmp_seq=2 ttl=56 time=1536.516 ms 64 bytes from loadbalancer: icmp_seq=3 ttl=56 time=536.907 ms 64 bytes from loadbalancer: icmp_seq=4 ttl=56 time=9.389 ms ... many packets later ... Request timeout for icmp_seq 919 64 bytes from loadbalancer: icmp_seq=918 ttl=56 time=2932.571 ms 64 bytes from loadbalancer: icmp_seq=919 ttl=56 time=1932.174 ms 64 bytes from loadbalancer: icmp_seq=920 ttl=56 time=932.018 ms 64 bytes from loadbalancer: icmp_seq=921 ttl=56 time=6.157 ms --- 50.xx.xx.16 ping statistics --- 1000 packets transmitted, 997 packets received, 0.3% packet loss round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 5.119/52.712/2932.571/224.629 ms The pattern is always the same: things operate fine for a while (<20ms), then a ping drops completely, then three or four high-latency pings (1000ms), then it settles down again. Traffic comes in through a bonded public interface (we will call it bond0) configured as such: bond0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:5d inet addr:50.xx.xx.16 Bcast:50.xx.xx.31 Mask:255.255.255.224 inet6 addr: <ipv6 address> Scope:Global inet6 addr: <ipv6 address> Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:527181270 errors:1 dropped:4 overruns:0 frame:1 TX packets:413335045 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:240016223540 (240.0 GB) TX bytes:104301759647 (104.3 GB) Requests are then submitted via HTTP to upstream servers on the private network (we can call it bond1), which is configured like so: bond1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:5c inet addr:10.xx.xx.70 Bcast:10.xx.xx.127 Mask:255.255.255.192 inet6 addr: <ipv6 address> Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:430293342 errors:1 dropped:2 overruns:0 frame:1 TX packets:466983986 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:77714410892 (77.7 GB) TX bytes:227349392334 (227.3 GB) Output of uname -a: Linux <hostname> 3.5.0-42-generic #65~precise1-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 2 20:57:18 UTC 2013 x86_64 GNU/Linux We have customized sysctl.conf in an attempt to fix the problem, with no success. Output of /etc/sysctl.conf (with irrelevant configs omitted): # net: core net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 10000 # net: ipv4 stack net.ipv4.tcp_ecn = 2 net.ipv4.tcp_sack = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_fack = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle = 0 net.ipv4.tcp_timestamps = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_no_metrics_save = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 10000 net.ipv4.tcp_congestion_control = cubic net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range = 8000 65535 net.ipv4.tcp_syncookies = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_synack_retries = 2 net.ipv4.tcp_thin_dupack = 1 net.ipv4.tcp_thin_linear_timeouts = 1 net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_max = 99999999 net.netfilter.nf_conntrack_tcp_timeout_established = 300 Output of dmesg -d, with non-ICMP UFW messages suppressed: [508315.349295 < 19.852453>] [UFW BLOCK] IN=bond1 OUT= MAC=<mac addresses> SRC=118.xx.xx.143 DST=50.xx.xx.16 LEN=68 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=51 ID=43221 PROTO=ICMP TYPE=3 CODE=1 [SRC=50.xx.xx.16 DST=118.xx.xx.143 LEN=40 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=249 ID=10220 DF PROTO=TCP SPT=80 DPT=53817 WINDOW=8190 RES=0x00 ACK FIN URGP=0 ] [517787.732242 < 0.443127>] Peer 190.xx.xx.131:59705/80 unexpectedly shrunk window 1155488866:1155489425 (repaired) How can I go about diagnosing the cause of this problem, on a Debian-family Linux box?

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• Win 7 Netbook refuses to ping JetDirect card (all other PCs work)

  - by Luke Puplett

  I have an odd thing occuring here. From a Windows 7 netbook, I cannot ping an HP printer on the network, while all other machines (Win7/Vista) can. And the netbook can also ping everything else on the LAN. Example showing that the netbook can ping 192.168.3.4 but not 3.6. C:\Users\backdoor>ping w7ue1m Pinging w7ue1m.corp.biz.co.uk [192.168.3.4] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 192.168.3.4: bytes=32 time=7ms TTL=128 Reply from 192.168.3.4: bytes=32 time=4ms TTL=128 Reply from 192.168.3.4: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128 Reply from 192.168.3.4: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=128 Ping statistics for 192.168.3.4: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss), Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds: Minimum = 2ms, Maximum = 7ms, Average = 3ms C:\Users\backdoor>ping uktnprint1 Pinging uktnprint1.corp.biz.co.uk [192.168.3.6] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 192.168.3.0: Destination host unreachable. Reply from 192.168.3.0: Destination host unreachable. Reply from 192.168.3.0: Destination host unreachable. Reply from 192.168.3.0: Destination host unreachable. Ping statistics for 192.168.3.6: Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),`enter code here` The IPCONFIG result for the netbook is fine. IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.3.0 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 Most unusual network thing I've seen in years. I must reiterate that only this netbook is having trouble pinging/printing. Thanks, Luke ** UPDATE ** Am now on a Vista box, and here's the IPCONFIG: IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.3.3 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 Pinging uktnprint1.corp.biz.co.uk [192.168.3.6] with 32 bytes of data: Reply from 192.168.3.6: bytes=32 time=2ms TTL=60 Firewall is off. I'll look into the chance of an IP conflict because it's the only thing I can think of - compare arp caches of each machine. Cheers!

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• DropDownList and SelectListItem Array Item Updates in MVC

  - by Rick Strahl

  So I ran into an interesting behavior today as I deployed my first MVC 4 app tonight. I have a list form that has a filter drop down that allows selection of categories. This list is static and rarely changes so rather than loading these items from the database each time I load the items once and then cache the actual SelectListItem[] array in a static property. However, when we put the site online tonight we immediately noticed that the drop down list was coming up with pre-set values that randomly changed. Didn't take me long to trace this back to the cached list of SelectListItem[]. Clearly the list was getting updated - apparently through the model binding process in the selection postback. To clarify the scenario here's the drop down list definition in the Razor View:@Html.DropDownListFor(mod => mod.QueryParameters.Category, Model.CategoryList, "All Categories") where Model.CategoryList gets set with:[HttpPost] [CompressContent] public ActionResult List(MessageListViewModel model) { InitializeViewModel(model); busEntry entryBus = new busEntry(); var entries = entryBus.GetEntryList(model.QueryParameters); model.Entries = entries; model.DisplayMode = ApplicationDisplayModes.Standard; model.CategoryList = AppUtils.GetCachedCategoryList(); return View(model); } The AppUtils.GetCachedCategoryList() method gets the cached list or loads the list on the first access. The code to load up the list is housed in a Web utility class. The method looks like this:/// <summary> /// Returns a static category list that is cached /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static SelectListItem[] GetCachedCategoryList() { if (_CategoryList != null) return _CategoryList; lock (_SyncLock) { if (_CategoryList != null) return _CategoryList; var catBus = new busCategory(); var categories = catBus.GetCategories().ToList(); // Turn list into a SelectItem list var catList= categories .Select(cat => new SelectListItem() { Text = cat.Name, Value = cat.Id.ToString() }) .ToList(); catList.Insert(0, new SelectListItem() { Value = ((int)SpecialCategories.AllCategoriesButRealEstate).ToString(), Text = "All Categories except Real Estate" }); catList.Insert(1, new SelectListItem() { Value = "-1", Text = "--------------------------------" }); _CategoryList = catList.ToArray(); } return _CategoryList; } private static SelectListItem[] _CategoryList ; This seemed normal enough to me - I've been doing stuff like this forever caching smallish lists in memory to avoid an extra trip to the database. This list is used in various places throughout the application - for the list display and also when adding new items and setting up for notifications etc.. Watch that ModelBinder! However, it turns out that this code is clearly causing a problem. It appears that the model binder on the [HttpPost] method is actually updating the list that's bound to and changing the actual entry item in the list and setting its selected value. If you look at the code above I'm not setting the SelectListItem.Selected value anywhere - the only place this value can get set is through ModelBinding. Sure enough when stepping through the code I see that when an item is selected the actual model - model.CategoryList[x].Selected - reflects that. This is bad on several levels: First it's obviously affecting the application behavior - nobody wants to see their drop down list values jump all over the place randomly. But it's also a problem because the array is getting updated by multiple ASP.NET threads which likely would lead to odd crashes from time to time. Not good! In retrospect the modelbinding behavior makes perfect sense. The actual items and the Selected property is the ModelBinder's way of keeping track of one or more selected values. So while I assumed the list to be read-only, the ModelBinder is actually updating it on a post back producing the rather surprising results. Totally missed this during testing and is another one of those little - "Did you know?" moments. So, is there a way around this? Yes but it's maybe not quite obvious. I can't change the behavior of the ModelBinder, but I can certainly change the way that the list is generated. Rather than returning the cached list, I can return a brand new cloned list from the cached items like this:/// <summary> /// Returns a static category list that is cached /// </summary> /// <returns></returns> public static SelectListItem[] GetCachedCategoryList() { if (_CategoryList != null) { // Have to create new instances via projection // to avoid ModelBinding updates to affect this // globally return _CategoryList .Select(cat => new SelectListItem() { Value = cat.Value, Text = cat.Text }) .ToArray(); } …}  The key is that newly created instances of SelectListItems are returned not just filtered instances of the original list. The key here is 'new instances' so that the ModelBinding updates do not update the actual static instance. The code above uses LINQ and a projection into new SelectListItem instances to create this array of fresh instances. And this code works correctly - no more cross-talk between users. Unfortunately this code is also less efficient - it has to reselect the items and uses extra memory for the new array. Knowing what I know now I probably would have not cached the list and just take the hit to read from the database. If there is even a possibility of thread clashes I'm very wary of creating code like this. But since the method already exists and handles this load in one place this fix was easy enough to put in. Live and learn. It's little things like this that can cause some interesting head scratchers sometimes…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC  ASP.NET  .NET   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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• I Hereby Resolve… (T-SQL Tuesday #14)

  - by smisner

  It’s time for another T-SQL Tuesday, hosted this month by Jen McCown (blog|twitter), on the topic of resolutions. Specifically, “what techie resolutions have you been pondering, and why?” I like that word – pondering – because I ponder a lot. And while there are many things that I do already because of my job, there are many more things that I ponder about doing…if only I had the time. Then I ponder about making time, but then it’s back to work! In 2010, I was moderately more successful in making time for things that I ponder about than I had been in years past, and I hope to continue that trend in 2011. If Jen hadn’t settled on this topic, I could keep my ponderings to myself and no one would ever know the outcome, but she’s egged me on (and everyone else that chooses to participate)! So here goes… For me, having resolve to do something means that I wouldn’t be doing that something as part of my ordinary routine. It takes extra effort to make time for it. It’s not something that I do once and check off a list, but something that I need to commit to over a period of time. So with that in mind, I hereby resolve… To Learn Something New… One of the things I love about my job is that I get to do a lot of things outside of my ordinary routine. It’s a veritable smorgasbord of opportunity! So what more could I possibly add to that list of things to do? Well, the more I learn, the more I realize I have so much more to learn. It would be much easier to remain in ignorant bliss, but I was born to learn. Constantly. (And apparently to teach, too– my father will tell you that as a small child, I had the neighborhood kids gathered together to play school – in the summer. I’m sure they loved that – but they did it!) These are some of things that I want to dedicate some time to learning this year: Spatial data. I have a good understanding of how maps in Reporting Services works, and I can cobble together a simple T-SQL spatial query, but I know I’m only scratching the surface here. Rob Farley (blog|twitter) posted interesting examples of combining maps and PivotViewer, and I think there’s so many more creative possibilities. I’ve always felt that pictures (including charts and maps) really help people get their minds wrapped around data better, and because a lot of data has a geographic aspect to it, I believe developing some expertise here will be beneficial to my work. PivotViewer. Not only is PivotViewer combined with maps a useful way to visualize data, but it’s an interesting way to work with data. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out this interactive demonstration using Netflx OData feed. According to Rob Farley, learning how to work with PivotViewer isn’t trivial. Just the type of challenge I like! Security. You’ve heard of the accidental DBA? Well, I am the accidental security person – is there a word for that role? My eyes used to glaze over when having to study about security, or  when reading anything about it. Then I had a problem long ago that no one could figure out – not even the vendor’s tech support – until I rolled up my sleeves and painstakingly worked through the myriad of potential problems to resolve a very thorny security issue. I learned a lot in the process, and have been able to share what I’ve learned with a lot of people. But I’m not convinced their eyes weren’t glazing over, too. I don’t take it personally – it’s just a very dry topic! So in addition to deepening my understanding about security, I want to find a way to make the subject as it relates to SQL Server and business intelligence more accessible and less boring. Well, there’s actually a lot more that I could put on this list, and a lot more things I have plans to do this coming year, but I run the risk of overcommitting myself. And then I wouldn’t have time… To Have Fun! My name is Stacia and I’m a workaholic. When I love what I do, it’s difficult to separate out the work time from the fun time. But there are some things that I’ve been meaning to do that aren’t related to business intelligence for which I really need to develop some resolve. And they are techie resolutions, too, in a roundabout sort of way! Photography. When my husband and I went on an extended camping trip in 2009 to Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, I had a nice little digital camera that took decent pictures. But then I saw the gorgeous cameras that other tourists were toting around and decided I needed one too. So I bought a Nikon D90 and have started to learn to use it, but I’m definitely still in the beginning stages. I traveled so much in 2010 and worked on two book projects that I didn’t have a lot of free time to devote to it. I was very inspired by Kimberly Tripp’s (blog|twitter) and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) photo-adventure in Alaska, though, and plan to spend some dedicated time with my camera this year. (And hopefully before I move to Alaska – nothing set in stone yet, but we hope to move to a remote location – with Internet access – later this year!) Astronomy. I have this cool telescope, but it suffers the same fate as my camera. I have been gone too much and busy with other things that I haven’t had time to work with it. I’ll figure out how it works, and then so much time passes by that I forget how to use it. I have this crazy idea that I can actually put the camera and the telescope together for astrophotography, but I think I need to start simple by learning how to use each component individually. As long as I’m living in Las Vegas, I know I’ll have clear skies for nighttime viewing, but when we move to Alaska, we’ll be living in a rain forest. I have no idea what my opportunities will be like there – except I know that when the sky is clear, it will be far more amazing than anything I can see in Vegas – even out in the desert - because I’ll be so far away from city light pollution. I’ve been contemplating putting together a blog on these topics as I learn. As many of my fellow bloggers in the SQL Server community know, sometimes the best way to learn something is to sit down and write about it. I’m just stumped by coming up with a clever name for the new blog, which I was thinking about inaugurating with my move to Alaska. Except that I don’t know when that will be exactly, so we’ll just have to wait and see which comes first!

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• C#/.NET Little Pitfalls: The Dangers of Casting Boxed Values

  - by James Michael Hare

  Starting a new series to parallel the Little Wonders series.  In this series, I will examine some of the small pitfalls that can occasionally trip up developers. Introduction: Of Casts and Conversions What happens when we try to assign from an int and a double and vice-versa? 1: double pi = 3.14; 2: int theAnswer = 42; 3:  4: // implicit widening conversion, compiles! 5: double doubleAnswer = theAnswer; 6:  7: // implicit narrowing conversion, compiler error! 8: int intPi = pi; As you can see from the comments above, a conversion from a value type where there is no potential data loss is can be done with an implicit conversion.  However, when converting from one value type to another may result in a loss of data, you must make the conversion explicit so the compiler knows you accept this risk.  That is why the conversion from double to int will not compile with an implicit conversion, we can make the conversion explicit by adding a cast: 1: // explicit narrowing conversion using a cast, compiler 2: // succeeds, but results may have data loss: 3: int intPi = (int)pi; So for value types, the conversions (implicit and explicit) both convert the original value to a new value of the given type.  With widening and narrowing references, however, this is not the case.  Converting reference types is a bit different from converting value types.  First of all when you perform a widening or narrowing you don’t really convert the instance of the object, you just convert the reference itself to the wider or narrower reference type, but both the original and new reference type both refer back to the same object. Secondly, widening and narrowing for reference types refers the going down and up the class hierarchy instead of referring to precision as in value types.  That is, a narrowing conversion for a reference type means you are going down the class hierarchy (for example from Shape to Square) whereas a widening conversion means you are going up the class hierarchy (from Square to Shape).  1: var square = new Square(); 2:  3: // implicitly convers because all squares are shapes 4: // (that is, all subclasses can be referenced by a superclass reference) 5: Shape myShape = square; 6:  7: // implicit conversion not possible, not all shapes are squares! 8: // (that is, not all superclasses can be referenced by a subclass reference) 9: Square mySquare = (Square) myShape; So we had to cast the Shape back to Square because at that point the compiler has no way of knowing until runtime whether the Shape in question is truly a Square.  But, because the compiler knows that it’s possible for a Shape to be a Square, it will compile.  However, if the object referenced by myShape is not truly a Square at runtime, you will get an invalid cast exception. Of course, there are other forms of conversions as well such as user-specified conversions and helper class conversions which are beyond the scope of this post.  The main thing we want to focus on is this seemingly innocuous casting method of widening and narrowing conversions that we come to depend on every day and, in some cases, can bite us if we don’t fully understand what is going on!  The Pitfall: Conversions on Boxed Value Types Can Fail What if you saw the following code and – knowing nothing else – you were asked if it was legal or not, what would you think: 1: // assuming x is defined above this and this 2: // assignment is syntactically legal. 3: x = 3.14; 4:  5: // convert 3.14 to int. 6: int truncated = (int)x; You may think that since x is obviously a double (can’t be a float) because 3.14 is a double literal, but this is inaccurate.  Our x could also be dynamic and this would work as well, or there could be user-defined conversions in play.  But there is another, even simpler option that can often bite us: what if x is object? 1: object x; 2:  3: x = 3.14; 4:  5: int truncated = (int) x; On the surface, this seems fine.  We have a double and we place it into an object which can be done implicitly through boxing (no cast) because all types inherit from object.  Then we cast it to int.  This theoretically should be possible because we know we can explicitly convert a double to an int through a conversion process which involves truncation. But here’s the pitfall: when casting an object to another type, we are casting a reference type, not a value type!  This means that it will attempt to see at runtime if the value boxed and referred to by x is of type int or derived from type int.  Since it obviously isn’t (it’s a double after all) we get an invalid cast exception! Now, you may say this looks awfully contrived, but in truth we can run into this a lot if we’re not careful.  Consider using an IDataReader to read from a database, and then attempting to select a result row of a particular column type: 1: using (var connection = new SqlConnection("some connection string")) 2: using (var command = new SqlCommand("select * from employee", connection)) 3: using (var reader = command.ExecuteReader()) 4: { 5: while (reader.Read()) 6: { 7: // if the salary is not an int32 in the SQL database, this is an error! 8: // doesn't matter if short, long, double, float, reader [] returns object! 9: total += (int) reader["annual_salary"]; 10: } 11: } Notice that since the reader indexer returns object, if we attempt to convert using a cast to a type, we have to make darn sure we use the true, actual type or this will fail!  If the SQL database column is a double, float, short, etc this will fail at runtime with an invalid cast exception because it attempts to convert the object reference! So, how do you get around this?  There are two ways, you could first cast the object to its actual type (double), and then do a narrowing cast to on the value to int.  Or you could use a helper class like Convert which analyzes the actual run-time type and will perform a conversion as long as the type implements IConvertible. 1: object x; 2:  3: x = 3.14; 4:  5: // if you want to cast, must cast out of object to double, then 6: // cast convert. 7: int truncated = (int)(double) x; 8:  9: // or you can call a helper class like Convert which examines runtime 10: // type of the value being converted 11: int anotherTruncated = Convert.ToInt32(x); Summary You should always be careful when performing a conversion cast from values boxed in object that you are actually casting to the true type (or a sub-type). Since casting from object is a widening of the reference, be careful that you either know the exact, explicit type you expect to be held in the object, or instead avoid the cast and use a helper class to perform a safe conversion to the type you desire. Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Pitfalls,Little Pitfalls,BlackRabbitCoder

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• .NET to iOS: From WinForms to the iPad

  - by RobertChipperfield

  One of the great things about working at Red Gate is getting to play with new technology - and right now, that means mobile. A few weeks ago, we decided that a little research into the tablet computing arena was due, and purely from a numbers point of view, that suggested the iPad as a good target device. A quick trip to iPhoneDevCon in San Diego later, and Marine and I came back full of ideas, and with some concept of how iOS development was meant to work. Here's how we went from there to the release of Stacks & Heaps, our geeky take on the classic "Snakes & Ladders" game. Step 1: Buy a Mac I've played with many operating systems in my time: from the original BBC Model B, through DOS, Windows, Linux, and others, but I'd so far managed to avoid buying fruit-flavoured computer hardware! If you want to develop for the iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, that's the first thing that needs to change. If you've not used OS X before, the first thing you'll realise is that everything is different! In the interests of avoiding a flame war in the comments section, I'll only go so far as to say that a lot of my Windows-flavoured muscle memory no longer worked. If you're in the UK, you'll also realise your keyboard is lacking a # key, and that " and @ are the other way around from normal. The wonderful Ukelele keyboard layout editor restores some sanity here, as long as you don't look at the keyboard when you're typing. I couldn't give up the PC entirely, but a handy application called Synergy comes to the rescue - it lets you share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple machines. There's a few limitations: Alt-Tab always seems to go to the Mac, and Windows 7's UAC dialogs require the local mouse for security reasons, but it gets you a long way at least. Step 2: Register as an Apple Developer You can register as an Apple Developer free of charge, and that lets you download XCode and the iOS SDK. You also get the iPhone / iPad emulator, which is handy, since you'll need to be a paid member before you can deploy your apps to a real device. You can either enroll as an individual, or as a company. They both cost the same ($99/year), but there's a few differences between them. If you register as a company, you can add multiple developers to your team (all for the same $99 - not $99 per developer), and you get to use your company name in the App Store. However, you'll need to send off significantly more documentation to Apple, and I suspect the process takes rather longer than for an individual, where they just need to verify some credit card details. Here's a tip: if you're registering as a company, do so as early as possible. The approval process can take a while to complete, so get the application in in plenty of time. Step 3: Learn to love the square brackets! Objective-C is the language of the iPad. C and C++ are also supported, and if you're doing some serious game development, you'll probably spend most of your time in C++ talking OpenGL, but for forms-based apps, you'll be interacting with a lot of the Objective-C SDK. Like shifting from Ctrl-C to Cmd-C, it feels a little odd at first, with the familiar string.format(.) turning into: NSString *myString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Hello world, it's %@", [NSDate date]]; Thankfully XCode's auto-complete is normally passable, if not up to Visual Studio's standards, which coupled with a huge amount of content on Stack Overflow means you'll soon get to grips with the API. You'll need to get used to some terminology changes, though; here's an incomplete approximation: Coming from a .NET background, there's some luxuries you no longer have developing Objective C in XCode: Generics! Remember back in .NET 1.1, when all collections were just objects? Yup, we're back there now. ReSharper. Or, more generally, very much refactoring support. The not-many-keystrokes to rename a class, its file, and al references to it in Visual Studio turns into a much more painful experience in XCode. Garbage collection. This is actually rather less of an issue than you might expect: if you follow the rules, the reference counting provided by Objective C gets you a long way without too much pain. Circular references are their usual problematic self, though. Decent exception handling. You do have exceptions, but they're nowhere near as widely used. Generally, if something goes wrong, you get nil (see translation table above) back. Which brings me on to. Calling a method on a nil object isn't a failure - it just returns nil itself! There's many arguments for and against this, but personally I fall into the "stuff should fail as quickly and explicitly as possible" camp. Less specifically, I found that there's more chance of code failing at runtime rather than getting caught at compile-time: using the @selector(.) syntax to pass a method signature isn't (can't be) checked at compile-time, so the first you know about a typo is a crash when you try and call it. The solution to this is of course lots of great testing, both automated and manual, but I still find comfort in provably correct type safety being enforced in addition to testing. Step 4: Submit to the App Store Assuming you want to distribute to more than a handful of devices, you're going to need to submit your app to the Apple App Store. There's a few gotchas in terms of getting builds signed with the right certificates, and you'll be bouncing around between XCode and iTunes Connect a fair bit, but eventually you get everything checked off the to-do list, and are ready to upload your first binary! With some amount of anticipation, I pressed the Upload button in XCode, ready to release our creation into the world, but was instead greeted by an error informing me my XML file was malformed. Uh. A little Googling later, and it turned out that a simple rename from "Stacks&Heaps.app" to "StacksAndHeaps.app" worked around an XML escaping bug, and we were good to go. The next step is to wait for approval (or otherwise). After a couple of weeks of intensive development, this part is agonising. Did we make it? The Apple jury is still out at the moment, but our fingers are firmly crossed! In the meantime, you can see some screenshots and leave us your email address if you'd like us to get in touch when it does go live at the MobileFoo website. Step 5: Profit! Actually, that wasn't the idea here: Stacks & Heaps is free; there's no adverts, and we're not going to sell all your data either. So why did we do it? We wanted to get an idea of what it's like to move from coding for a desktop environment, to something completely different. We don't know whether in a year's time, the iPad will still be the dominant force, or whether Android will have smoothed out some bugs, tweaked the performance, and polished the UI, but I think it's a fairly sure bet that the tablet form factor is here to stay. We want to meet people who are using it, start chatting to them, and find out about some of the pain they're feeling. What better way to do that than do it ourselves, and get to write a cool game in the process?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 17, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 17, 2010New ProjectsAstalanumerator: A JavaScript based recursive DOM/JS object inspector. Uses a simple tree menu to enumerate all properties of a object.BDD Log Converter: A simple .NET class and console application that will convert BDD logs (MDT) into XML format.CastleInvestProj: Castle Investigating project Easy Callback: This library facilitates the use of multiple asynchronous calls on the same page, and asynchronous calls from a user control also have a clean cod...Easy Wings: Small webApp to manage aircraft booking in flying club. French only for the moment.EPiServer Template Foundation: EPiServer Template Foundation builds on top of Page Type Builder to provide a framework for common site features such as basic page type properties...guidebook: a project to plan your road trip.Look into documents for e-discovery: Search, browse, tag, annotate documents such as MS Word, PDF, e-mail, etc. Good for legal professionals do e-discovery. One Bus Away for Windows Phone: A Windows Phone 7 application written in Silverlight for the OneBusAway (www.onebusaway.org) website. Allows mobile users to search for public tra...OneBusAway for Windows Phone 7: OneBusAway is a service with transit information for the Seattle, WA region. We are creating a mobile application for Windows Phone 7 utilizing th...PoFabLab - Poetry Generation Library and Editor in .NET: PoFabLab is an open source library and word processor designed for digital poets. The library can scan lines, perform Markov analysis, filter text...Project Axure: More details coming soon.Чат кутежа 2.0: ИРЦ чат специально для форума ЕНЕ简易代码生成器: 初次使用CodePlex，这只是一个测试项目。打算用WPF做一个简单的代码生成器，兼具SQL Server Client功能。使用.Net 4.0, C#开发。运营工作系统: TRAS(Team resource assist system) is a toolkit that help the studio to manage and distribute the daily work, like publish the news, GM broadcast a...New ReleasesAmuse - A New MU* Client For Windows: 2010 June: Important Notice to TestersPlease uninstall any previous versions of Amuse prior to this one before installing. Changes and InformationFirst relea...ASP.NET Generic Data Source Control: V1.0: GenericDataSource - Version 1.0Binary This is the first official binary release of the GenericDataSource for ASP.NET - stable and ready for product...Astalanumerator: Astalanumerator 0.7: I wanted to map all properties in javascript and inspect them regardless if they were objects or not. IE doesn’t support for(i in..) for native pro...BDD Log Converter: BDD Log Converter 0.1.0: First release (0.1.0).DVD Swarm: 0.8.10.616: Major update with improvements to encoding speed.Easy Callback: Easy Callback 1.0.0.0: Easy Callback library 1.0.0.0Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET: Facebook Connect Authentication for ASP.NET - v1.0: Now supporting Facebook's new Open Graph API JavaScript SDK, this release of FBConnectAuth also adds support for running in partially trusted envir...FlickrNet API Library: 3.0 Beta 3: Another small Beta. Changed parsing code so exceptions aren't raised when new attributes are added by Flickr. This affects searches where you are ...Infragistics Analytics Framework: Infragistics Analytics Framework 10.2: An updated version of Infragistics Analytics Framework, which utilizes the newest version (v.1.4.4) of MSAF as well as the newest release (v.10.2) ...NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications: NUnit Add-in for Growl Notifications 1.0 build 1: Version 1.0 build 1:[change] Test run failure notification now disappears automaticallyOpen Source PLM Activities: 3dxml player integration for Aras Innovator: This is just a simple html file you need to add to your Aras Innovator install directory. It loads the 3Dxml player for your 3dxml files. Tested o...patterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: WAAG - Part 2 - Drop 1: First code and docs drop for Part 2 of the Windows Azure Architecture Guide Part 1 of the Guide is released here. Highlights of this release are:...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (June 2010): Installer of the latest binaries of Phalanger 2.0 (June 2010) and its integration into Visual Studio 2008 SP1. * Improved compatibility with P...RIA Services Essentials: Book Club Application (June 16, 2010): Added some XAML to hide/show link to BookShelf page based on whether the user is logged in or not. Updated IsBookOwner authorization rule implement...secs4net: Relase 1.01: version 1.01 releasesELedit: sELedit v1.1c: Added: Tool for exporting NPC/Mob database file that is used by sNPCeditSharePoint Ad Rotator: SPAdRotator 2.0 Beta 2: Added: Open tool pane link to default Web Part text Made all images except the first hidden by default, so the Web Part will degrade gracefully w...sMAPtool: sMAPtool v0.7f (without Maps): Added: 3rd party magnifier softwaresNPCedit: sNPCedit v0.9c: Added: npc/mob names and corresponding datbaseSolidWorks Addin Development: GenericAddinFrameworkR1-06.17.2010: .sTASKedit: sTASKedit v0.8: Important BugFix: there was an mistake in the structure, team-member block and get-items block was swapped internally. Tasks that contains both blo...stefvanhooijdonk.com: UnitTesting-SP2010-TFS2010: Files for my post on TFS2010 and NUnit testing with SP2010 projects. see the post here: http://wp.me/pMnlQ-88 The XSLT here is from http://nunit4t...Telerik CAB Enabling Kit for RadControls for WinForms: TCEK 2010.1.10.504: What's new in v2010.1.0610 (Beta): RadDocking component has been replaced with the latest RadDock control Requirements: Visual Studio 2005+ Tele...TFS Buddy: TFS Buddy 1.2: Fixes a problem with notificationsThales Simulator Library: Version 0.9: The Thales Simulator Library is an implementation of a software emulation of the Thales (formerly Zaxus & Racal) Hardware Security Module cryptogra...Triton Application Framework: Tools - Code Generator - Build 1.0: This is the first release of the Generator. This is buggy but works.VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30616.0: Automatic drop of latest buildXsltDb - DotNetNuke Module Builder: 01.01.27: Code completion for XsltDb, HTML and XSL stuff!! Full screen editing Some bugs are still in EditArea component and object lists in code completi...Чат кутежа 2.0: 0.9a build 2 версия: вторая сборка первой альфа-версии ирц-клиента.Most Popular ProjectsWBFS ManagerRawrAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsdotSpatialpatterns & practices: Enterprise Library Contribpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETLightweight Fluent WorkflowRhyduino - Arduino and Managed CodeSunlit World SchemeNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSolidWorks Addin DevelopmentN2 CMS

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• Taking the training wheels off: Accelerating the Business with Oracle IAM by Brian Mozinski (Accenture)

  - by Greg Jensen

  Today, technical requirements for IAM are evolving rapidly, and the bar is continuously raised for high performance IAM solutions as organizations look to roll out high volume use cases on the back of legacy systems.  Existing solutions were often designed and architected to support offline transactions and manual processes, and the business owners today demand globally scalable infrastructure to support the growth their business cases are expected to deliver. To help IAM practitioners address these challenges and make their organizations and themselves more successful, this series we will outline the: • Taking the training wheels off: Accelerating the Business with Oracle IAM The explosive growth in expectations for IAM infrastructure, and the business cases they support to gain investment in new security programs. • "Necessity is the mother of invention": Technical solutions developed in the field Well proven tricks of the trade, used by IAM guru’s to maximize your solution while addressing the requirements of global organizations. • The Art & Science of Performance Tuning of Oracle IAM 11gR2 Real world examples of performance tuning with Oracle IAM • No Where to go but up: Extending the benefits of accelerated IAM Anything is possible, compelling new solutions organizations are unlocking with accelerated Oracle IAM Let’s get started … by talking about the changing dynamics driving these discussions. Big Companies are getting bigger everyday, and increasingly organizations operate across state lines, multiple times zones, and in many countries or continents at the same time.  No longer is midnight to 6am a safe time to take down the system for upgrades, to run recon’s and import or update user accounts and attributes.  Further IT organizations are operating as shared services with SLA’s similar to telephone carrier levels expected by their “clients”.  Workers are moved in and out of roles on a weekly, daily, or even hourly rate and IAM is expected to support those rapid changes.  End users registering for services during business hours in Singapore are expected their access to be green-lighted in custom apps hosted in Portugal within the hour.  Many of the expectations of asynchronous systems and batched updates are not adequate and the number and types of users is growing. When organizations acted more like independent teams at functional or geographic levels it was manageable to have processes that relied on a handful of people who knew how to make things work …. Knew how to get you access to the key systems to get your job done.  Today everyone is expected to do more with less, the finance administrator previously supporting their local Atlanta sales office might now be asked to help close the books for the Johannesburg team, and access certification process once completed monthly by Joan on the 3rd floor is now done by a shared pool of resources in Sao Paulo.   Fragmented processes that rely on institutional knowledge to get access to systems and get work done quickly break down in these scenarios.  Highly robust processes that have automated workflows for connected or disconnected systems give organizations the dynamic flexibility to share work across these lines and cut costs or increase productivity. As the IT industry computing paradigms continue to change with the passing of time, and as mature or proven approaches become clear, it is normal for organizations to adjust accordingly. Businesses must manage identity in an increasingly hybrid world in which legacy on-premises IAM infrastructures are extended or replaced to support more and more interconnected and interdependent services to a wider range of users. The old legacy IAM implementation models we had relied on to manage identities no longer apply. End users expect to self-request access to services from their tablet, get supervisor approval over mobile devices and email, and launch the application even if is hosted on the cloud, or run by a partner, vendor, or service provider. While user expectations are higher, they are also simpler … logging into custom desktop apps to request approvals, or going through email or paper based processes for certification is unacceptable.  Users expect security to operate within the paradigm of the application … i.e. feel like the application they are using. Citizen and customer facing applications have evolved from every where, with custom applications, 3rd party tools, and merging in from acquired entities or 3rd party OEM’s resold to expand your portfolio of services.  These all have their own user stores, authentication models, user lifecycles, session management, etc.  Often the designers/developers are no longer accessible and the documentation is limited.  Bringing together underlying directories to scale for growth, and improve user experience is critical for revenue … but also for operations. Job functions are more dynamic.... take the Olympics for example.  Endless organizations from corporations broadcasting, endorsing, or marketing through the event … to non-profit athletic foundations and public/government entities for athletes and public safety, all operate simultaneously on the world stage.  Each organization needs to spin up short-term teams, often dealing with proprietary information from hot ads to racing strategies or security plans.  IAM is expected to enable team’s to spin up, enable new applications, protect privacy, and secure critical infrastructure.  Then it needs to be disabled just as quickly as users go back to their previous responsibilities. On a more technical level … Optimized system directory; tuning guidelines and parameters are needed by businesses today. Business’s need to be making the right choices (virtual directories) and considerations via choosing the correct architectural patterns (virtual, direct, replicated, and tuning), challenge is that business need to assess and chose the correct architectural patters (centralized, virtualized, and distributed) Today's Business organizations have very complex heterogeneous enterprises that contain diverse and multifaceted information. With today's ever changing global landscape, the strategic end goal in challenging times for business is business agility. The business of identity management requires enterprise's to be more agile and more responsive than ever before. The continued proliferation of networking devices (PC, tablet, PDA's, notebooks, etc.) has caused the number of devices and users to be granted access to these devices to grow exponentially. Business needs to deploy an IAM system that can account for the demands for authentication and authorizations to these devices. Increased innovation is forcing business and organizations to centralize their identity management services. Access management needs to handle traditional web based access as well as handle new innovations around mobile, as well as address insufficient governance processes which can lead to rouge identity accounts, which can then become a source of vulnerabilities within a business’s identity platform. Risk based decisions are providing challenges to business, for an adaptive risk model to make proper access decisions via standard Web single sign on for internal and external customers,. Organizations have to move beyond simple login and passwords to address trusted relationship questions such as: Is this a trusted customer, client, or citizen? Is this a trusted employee, vendor, or partner? Is this a trusted device? Without a solid technological foundation, organizational performance, collaboration, constituent services, or any other organizational processes will languish. A Single server location presents not only network concerns for distributed user base, but identity challenges. The network risks are centered on latency of the long trip that the traffic has to take. Other risks are a performance around availability and if the single identity server is lost, all access is lost. As you can see, there are many reasons why performance tuning IAM will have a substantial impact on the success of your organization.  In our next installment in the series we roll up our sleeves and get into detailed tuning techniques used everyday by thought leaders in the field implementing Oracle Identity & Access Management Solutions.

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