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• Setting up VPN client: L2TP with IPsec

  - by zachar

  I've got to connect to vpn server. It works on Windows, but in Ubuntu 10.04 not. Number of options is confusing for me. There is the input that I have: IP Address of VPN Pre-shared key to authenticate Information that MS-CHAPv2 is used Login and Password to VPN I was trying to achive that with network manager and with L2TP IPsec VPN Manager 1.0.9 but at failed. There is some logged information from L2TP IPsec VPN Manager 1.0.9: Nov 09 15:21:46.854 ipsec_setup: Stopping Openswan IPsec... Nov 09 15:21:48.088 Stopping xl2tpd: xl2tpd. Nov 09 15:21:48.132 ipsec_setup: Starting Openswan IPsec U2.6.23/K2.6.32-49-generic... Nov 09 15:21:48.308 ipsec__plutorun: Starting Pluto subsystem... Nov 09 15:21:48.318 ipsec__plutorun: adjusting ipsec.d to /etc/ipsec.d Nov 09 15:21:48.338 ipsec__plutorun: 002 added connection description "my_vpn_name" Nov 09 15:21:48.348 ipsec__plutorun: 003 NAT-Traversal: Trying new style NAT-T Nov 09 15:21:48.348 ipsec__plutorun: 003 NAT-Traversal: ESPINUDP(1) setup failed for new style NAT-T family IPv4 (errno=19) Nov 09 15:21:48.349 ipsec__plutorun: 003 NAT-Traversal: Trying old style NAT-T Nov 09 15:21:48.994 104 "my_vpn_name" #1: STATE_MAIN_I1: initiate Nov 09 15:21:48.994 003 "my_vpn_name" #1: received Vendor ID payload [RFC 3947] method set to=109 Nov 09 15:21:48.994 003 "my_vpn_name" #1: received Vendor ID payload [Dead Peer Detection] Nov 09 15:21:48.994 106 "my_vpn_name" #1: STATE_MAIN_I2: sent MI2, expecting MR2 Nov 09 15:21:48.994 003 "my_vpn_name" #1: NAT-Traversal: Result using RFC 3947 (NAT-Traversal): i am NATed Nov 09 15:21:48.994 108 "my_vpn_name" #1: STATE_MAIN_I3: sent MI3, expecting MR3 Nov 09 15:21:48.994 004 "my_vpn_name" #1: STATE_MAIN_I4: ISAKMP SA established {auth=OAKLEY_PRESHARED_KEY cipher=oakley_3des_cbc_192 prf=oakley_sha group=modp1024} Nov 09 15:21:48.995 117 "my_vpn_name" #2: STATE_QUICK_I1: initiate Nov 09 15:21:48.995 004 "my_vpn_name" #2: STATE_QUICK_I2: sent QI2, IPsec SA established transport mode {ESP=>0x0c96795d <0x483e1a42 xfrm=AES_128-HMAC_SHA1 NATOA=none NATD=none DPD=none} Nov 09 15:21:49.996 [ERROR 210] Failed to open l2tp control file 'c my_vpn_name' and from syslog: Nov 9 15:21:46 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Opening client connection Nov 9 15:21:46 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Executing command ipsec setup stop Nov 9 15:21:46 o99 ipsec_setup: Stopping Openswan IPsec... Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 kernel: [ 4350.245171] NET: Unregistered protocol family 15 Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 ipsec_setup: ...Openswan IPsec stopped Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Command ipsec setup stop finished with exit code 0 Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Executing command invoke-rc.d xl2tpd stop Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Command invoke-rc.d xl2tpd stop finished with exit code 0 Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Opening client connection Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Closing client connection Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Executing command ipsec setup start Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 kernel: [ 4350.312483] NET: Registered protocol family 15 Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 ipsec_setup: Starting Openswan IPsec U2.6.23/K2.6.32-49-generic... Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 ipsec_setup: Using NETKEY(XFRM) stack Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 kernel: [ 4350.410774] Initializing XFRM netlink socket Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 kernel: [ 4350.413601] padlock: VIA PadLock not detected. Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 kernel: [ 4350.427311] padlock: VIA PadLock Hash Engine not detected. Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 kernel: [ 4350.441533] padlock: VIA PadLock not detected. Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 ipsec_setup: ...Openswan IPsec started Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Command ipsec setup start finished with exit code 0 Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Executing command invoke-rc.d xl2tpd start Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 ipsec__plutorun: adjusting ipsec.d to /etc/ipsec.d Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 pluto: adjusting ipsec.d to /etc/ipsec.d Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Command invoke-rc.d xl2tpd start finished with exit code 0 Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 ipsec__plutorun: 002 added connection description "my_vpn_name" Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Executing command ipsec auto --ready Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 ipsec__plutorun: 003 NAT-Traversal: Trying new style NAT-T Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 ipsec__plutorun: 003 NAT-Traversal: ESPINUDP(1) setup failed for new style NAT-T family IPv4 (errno=19) Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 ipsec__plutorun: 003 NAT-Traversal: Trying old style NAT-T Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Command ipsec auto --ready finished with exit code 0 Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Executing command ipsec auto --up my_vpn_name Nov 9 15:21:48 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Command ipsec auto --up my_vpn_name finished with exit code 0 Nov 9 15:21:49 o99 L2tpIPsecVpnControlDaemon: Closing client connection Can anyone tell me something more about that? Where is the mistake?

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• Sunshine after the iCloud release?

  - by Laila

  "Why should I believe them? They're the ones that brought us MobileMe? It was not our finest hour, but we learned a lot." Steve Jobs June 6th 2011 Apple's new cloud service has been met with uncritical excitement by industry commentators.  It is wonderful what a rename can do.  Apple has had a 'cloud' offering for three years called MobileMe, successor to .MAC and  iTools, so iCloud is now the fourth internet service Apple have attempted. If this had been Microsoft, there would have been catcalls all around the blogosphere.  I'll admit that there is a lot more functionality announced for iCloud than MobileMe has ever managed to achieve, but then almost anything has more functionality than MobileMe.  It's an expensive service (£120 a year in the UK, $90 in the states), launched as far back as  June 9, 2008, that has delivered very little and suffered a string of technical problems; the documentation was mainly  a community effort, built up gradually by the frustrated and angry users. It was supposed to synchronise PC Outlook calendars but couldn't manage Microsoft Exchange (Google could, of course). It used WebDAV to allow Windows users to attach to the filestore, but didn't document how to do it. The method for downloading and uploading files to the cloud-based filestore was ridiculously clunky. It allowed you to post photos on a public site, but forgot to include a way of deleting photos. I could go on with the list, but you can explore the many sites that have flourished to inhabit the support-vacuum left by Apple. MobileMe should have had all the bright new clever things announced for iCloud. Apple dropped the ball, and allowed services such as Flickr to fill the void. However, their PR skills are such that, a name-change later (the .ME.com email address remains), it has turned a rout into a victory, and hundreds of earnest bloggers have been extolling Apple's expertise in cloud matters. This must be frustrating for the other cloud providers who have quietly got the technology working right. I wish iCloud well, even though I resent the expensive mess they made of MobileMe. Apple promise that iCloud will sync files, apps, app data, and media across all the different iOS5 devices, Macs, and PCs. It also hopes to sync music across devices, but not video content. They've offered existing MobileMe users free use of the MobileMe service for a year as the product is morphed, and they will be able to transfer to iCloud when it is launched in the autumn.  On June 30, 2012, MobileMe will die, and Apple's iWeb is also soon to join iTools and .MAC in the hereafter. So why get excited about iCloud? That all depends on the level of PC integration. Whereas iOS5 machines will be full participants in the new world of data-sharing (Sorry iPod Touch users) what about .NET libraries? There is talk of synchronising 'My Pictures' libraries with iOS5 and iMac machines, but little more detail as yet. Apple has a lot to prove with iCloud and anyone with actual experience of their past attempts to get into cloud services will be wary.

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups had completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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• Changes in Language Punctuation [closed]

  - by Wes Miller

  More social curiosity than actual programming question... (I got shot for posting this on Stack Overflow. They sent me here. At least i hope here is where they meant.) Based on the few responses I got before the content police ran me off Stack Overflow, I should note that I am legally blind and neatness and consistency in programming are my best friends. A thousand years ago when I took my first programming class (Fortran 66) and a mere 500 years ago when I tokk my first C and C++ classes, there were some pretty standard punctuation practices across languages. I saw them in Basic (shudder), PL/1, PL/AS, Rexx even Pascal. Ok, APL2 is not part of this discussion. Each language has its own peculiar punctuation. Pascal's periods, Fortran's comma separated do loops, almost everybody else's semicolons. As I learned it, each language also has KEYWORDS (if, for, do, while, until, etc.) which are set off by whitespace (or the left margin) if, etc. Each language has function, subroutines of whatever they're called. Some built-in some user coded. They were set off by function_name( parameters );. As in sqrt( x ) or rand( y ); Lately, there seems to be a new set of punctuation rules. Especially in c++ where initializers get glued onto the end of variable declarations int x(0); or auto_ptr p(new gizmo); This usually, briefly fools me into thinking someone is declaring a function prototype or using a function as a integer. Then "if" and 'for' seems to have grown parens; if(true) for(;;), etc. Since when did keywords become functions. I realize some people think they ARE functions with iterators as parameters. But if "for" is a function, where did the arg separating commas go? And finally, functions seem to have shed their parens; sqrt (2) select (...) I know, I koow, loosening whitespace rules is good. Keep reading. Question: when did the old ways disappear and this new way come into vogue? Does anyone besides me find it irritating to read and that the information that the placement of punctuation used to convey is gone? I know full well that K&R put the { at the end of the "if" or "for" to save a byte here and there. Can't use that excuse here. Space as an excuse for loss of readability died as HDD space soared past 100 MiB. Your thoughts are solicited. If there is a good reason to do this, I'll gladly learn it and maybe in another 50 years I'll get used to it. Of course it's good that compilers recognize these (IMHO) typos and keep right on going, but just because you CAN code it that way doesn't mean you HAVE to, right?

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• Don't Forget To Enjoy Life

  - by Justin

  I have a pretty clear stance on posting personal information in my blogs. I tend to avoid it almost instinctively. Part of that is because I am a somewhat private person. And the other is because I know how easy it is for personal information to be gathered and collected from sources such as blogs. So, this has remained a tech only blog for me. I've only posted topics mostly related to issues I have encountered at work. In a way this blog is a 'bookmark' for me. If I post something here and run into the issue again it allows me to refer back to a convenient place where the 'fix' is documented in a way that I understand. But today, I am posting something that speaks to everyone. Something PERSONAL. Honestly, I expect this entry to receive zero views. But if nothing else, I can come back to this blog one day when I'm having a bad day or something and run across this post. And I will be reminded... DON'T FORGET TO ENJOY LIFE. Say this to yourself out loud, right now. People, we can get caught up in some rather mundane details as we trek through life. It's so easy to lose track of what really matters that it should be no surprise to find yourself reading something like this and thinking to yourself 'Yeah. You are right, man. Some of this crap I'm clinging on to right now is so small in the grand scheme of things'. I have no reservation, no shame, in saying that I am more often than not caught up in the ever evolving world of 'shit that does not matter'. When you work in technology, you are surrounded by deadlines, upgrades, new versions, support 'end of life', etc. And by time you get done with your 8 hours you go home and put in a few more because you are STILL CAUGHT UP in the things you dealt with at work all day. DO YOURSELF A FAVOR. DO YOUR FAMILY AND FRIEND A FAVOR. When you are done for the day, and you drive home, get those work-related things out of your head before you pull into the driveway. If you are still thinking on them when you park the car, leave the engine running, close your eyes and take a deep breath. If you believe in God, pray. If you don't then meditate for a second with the INTENTION of letting go of the day and becoming the 'real you'. You may have forgotten who the real you is so I'll remind you.... THE REAL YOU IS THAT GUY OR GAL THAT LAUGHS, LOVES, AND LIVES. Be the real you as often as possible. If you can't do it during your 9 - 5, do it at home. YOUR RELATIONSHIPS AND YOUR PERSONAL HAPPINESS DEPEND ON IT. I am going to make you a promise right now. If you do what I've just said, your days will be longer and your joy will be exponential. I can't explain why I know this to be true. But I do know it. And if you are there reading this right now, you know it is true too. We both know it is true because it COMES FROM WITHIN EVERY MAN, WOMAN and CHILD. We are born into love and happiness. Lets not fade away into the darkness so easily found in this world. Lets keep the flame burning. The flame of passion. Passion for LIFE. Peace be with you.

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• Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service

  - by David Dorf

  When most people discuss mobile in retail, they immediately go to shopping applications.  While I agree the consumer side of mobile is huge, I believe its also important to arm store associates with mobile tools.  There are around a dozen major roll-outs of mobile POS to chain retailers, and all have been successful.  This does not, however, signal the demise of traditional registers.  Retailers will adopt mobile POS slowly and reduce the number of fixed registers over time, but there's likely to be a combination of both for the foreseeable future.  Even Apple retains at least one fixed register in every store, you just have to know where to look. The business benefits for mobile POS are pretty straightforward: 1. Faster checkout.  Walmart's CFO recently reported that for every second they shave off the average transaction time, they can potentially save $12M a year in labor.  I think its more likely that labor will be redeployed to enhance the customer experience. 2. Smarter associates.  The sales associates on the floor need the same access to information that consumers have, if not more.  They need ready access to product details, reviews, inventory, etc. to meet consumer expectations.  In a recent study, 40% of consumers said a savvy store associate can impact their final product selection more than a website. 3. Lower costs.  Mobile POS hardware (iPod touch + sled) costs about a fifth of fixed registers, not to mention the reclaimed space that can be used for product displays. But almost all Mobile POS solutions can claim those benefits equally.  Where there's differentiation is on the technical side.  Oracle recently announced availability of the Oracle Retail Mobile Point-of-Service, and it has three big technology advantages in the market: 1. Portable. We used a popular open-source component called PhoneGap that abstracts the app from the underlying OS and hardware so that iOS, Android, and other platforms could be supported.  Further, we used Web technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript, which are commonly known by many programmers, as opposed to ObjectiveC which is more difficult to find.  The screen can adjust to different form-factors and sizes, just like you see with browsers.  In the future when a new, zippy device gets released, retailers will have the option to move to that device more easily than if they used a native app. 2. Flexible.  Our Mobile POS is free with the Oracle Retail Point-of-Service product.  Retailers can use any combination of fixed and mobile registers, and those ratios can change as required.  Perhaps start with 1 mobile and 4 fixed per store, then transition over time to 4 mobile and 1 fixed without any additional software licenses.  Our scalable solution supports lots of combinations. 3. Consistent.  Because our Mobile POS is fully integrated to our traditional POS, the same business logic is reused.  Third-party Mobile POS solutions often handle pricing, promotions, and tax calculations separately leading to possible inconsistencies within the store.  That won't happen with Oracle's solution. For many retailers, Mobile POS can lower costs, increase customer service, and generally enhance a consumer's in-store experience.  Apple led the way, but lots of other retailers are discovering the many benefits of adding mobile capabilities in their stores.  Just be sure to examine both the business and technology benefits so you get the most value from your solution for the longest period of time.

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• Games development with a game loop that's abstracted away

  - by Davy8

  Most game development happens with a main game loop. Are there any good articles/blog posts/discussions about games without a game loop? I imagine they'd mostly be web games, but I'd be interested in hearing otherwise. (As a side note, I think it's really interesting that the concept is almost exclusively used in gaming as far as I'm aware, perhaps that may be another question.) Edit: I realize there's probably a redraw loop somewhere. I guess what I really mean is a loop that is hidden to you. Frames are something you as the developer are not concerned with as you're working on a higher level of abstraction. E.g. someLootItem.moveTo(inventory, someAnimatationType) and that will move from the loot box to your inventory using the specified animation type without the game developer having to worry about the implementation details of that animation. Maybe that's how "real" games end up working, but from reading most tutorials they seem to imply a much more granular level of control is used, but that might just be an artifact of being a tutorial. Edit2: I think most people are misunderstanding what I'm trying to ask, likely because I'm having trouble describing exactly what I'm trying to ask. After some more thinking perhaps what I'm referring to is more along the lines of what I believe is referred to as "scripting" where you're working at a very high level and having some game engine take care of the low level details. For example, take custom maps in Starcraft II or Warcraft III. Many of the "maps" have gameplay that deviates enough from the primary game that they could be considered a separate game written on the same engine. What I'm referring to then is along those lines. I may be wrong because I only dabbed in the Warcraft III editor, but as far as I remember no where in the map editor do you control the game loop, and yet you can create many different games out of it. In my mind, these are games in their own right. If you're playing DotA you don't say you're playing Warcraft III, you say you're playing DotA because that's the actual game you're playing. Such a system may impose limitations that don't exist if you're creating a game from scratch, but it greatly reduces development time because much of the "hard" work has already been done for you. Hopefully that clarifies what I'm asking. Another example of what is I mean, is when you write a web app, of course it communicates through sockets and TCP. But does the average web developer doesn't explicitly write code for connecting sockets. They just need to know about receiving a request and sending a response. There are unique scenarios where you do occasionally need to use raw sockets, but it's generally rare in web development. In a similar fashion, it's very possible to write a game without directly using the game loop, even though one is used behind the scenes. Probably not a AAA title, but there must be hundreds of smaller scale games that can and possibly are written this way. Are there any good resources on writing these "simpler" games?

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• Dell 3721 Wifi problem Ubuntu 13.04

  - by Sebastian

  I have a Dell 3721 which comes original with windows 8. I managed it to install ubuntu 12.10 on this laptop, even there was no out of the box drivers. With 12.10 I was forces to install this .deb package couple of times. After installing it, it was ok for some weeks before I have to install it again. Maybe some security updates destroy something which made in necessary to install it again... http://jas.gemnetworks.com/debian/pool/main/w/wireless-bcm43142/wireless-bcm43142-dkms_6.20.55.19-1_amd64.deb My problem is, that this package isnt working with ubuntu 13.04 anymore. So I cant use Wifi now. Also my display is almost dark, I cant change the brightness level with ubuntu 13.04. Hope you can give me some advice. Dell:~$ sudo lspci -nn 00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller [8086:0154] (rev 09) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0166] (rev 09) 00:14.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller [8086:1e31] (rev 04) 00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 [8086:1e3a] (rev 04) 00:1a.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 [8086:1e2d] (rev 04) 00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:1e20] (rev 04) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 [8086:1e10] (rev c4) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 [8086:1e12] (rev c4) 00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 [8086:1e26] (rev 04) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation HM76 Express Chipset LPC Controller [8086:1e59] (rev 04) 00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation 7 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] [8086:1e03] (rev 04) 00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller [8086:1e22] (rev 04) 01:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller [10ec:8136] (rev 05) 02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM43142 802.11b/g/n [14e4:4365] (rev 01) @Dell:~$ lsusb Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0a5c:21d7 Broadcom Corp. Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:0129 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. Bus 001 Device 005: ID 0c45:64ad Microdia @Dell:~$ lspci -nn | grep VGA 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 3rd Gen Core processor Graphics Controller [8086:0166] (rev 09) @Dell:~$ sudo lshw -class network *-network Beschreibung: Ethernet interface Produkt: RTL8101E/RTL8102E PCI Express Fast Ethernet controller Hersteller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Physische ID: 0 Bus-Informationen: pci@0000:01:00.0 Logischer Name: eth0 Version: 05 Seriennummer: xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx Größe: 100Mbit/s Kapazität: 100Mbit/s Breite: 64 bits Takt: 33MHz Fähigkeiten: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation Konfiguration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=full firmware=rtl_nic/rtl8105e-1.fw ip=192.168.2.103 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100Mbit/s Ressourcen: irq:42 ioport:2000(Größe=256) memory:c0404000-c0404fff memory:c0400000-c0403fff *-network UNGEFORDERT Beschreibung: Network controller Produkt: BCM43142 802.11b/g/n Hersteller: Broadcom Corporation Physische ID: 0 Bus-Informationen: pci@0000:02:00.0 Version: 01 Breite: 64 bits Takt: 33MHz Fähigkeiten: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list Konfiguration: latency=0 Ressourcen: memory:c0500000-c0507fff

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• Screen Aspect Ratio

  - by Bill Evjen

  Jeffrey Dean, Pixar Aspect Ratio is very important to home video. What is aspect ratio – the ratio from the height to the width 2.35:1 The image is 2.35 times wide as it is high Pixar uses this for half of our movies This is called a widescreen image When modified to fit your television screen They cut this to fit the box of your screen When a comparison is made huge chunks of picture is missing It is harder to find what is going on when these pieces are missing The whole is greater than the pieces themselves. If you are missing pieces – you are missing the movie The soul and the mood is in the film shots. Cutting it to fit a screen, you are losing 30% of the movie Why different aspect ratios? Film before the 1950s 1.33:1 Academy Standard There were all aspects of images though. There was no standard. Thomas Edison developed projecting images onto a wall/screen He didn’t patent it as he saw no value in it. Then 1.37:1 came about to add a strip of sound This is the same size as a 35mm film Around 1952 – TV comes along NTSC Television followed the Academy Standard (4x3) Once TV came out, movie theater attendance plummets So Film brought forth color to combat this. Also early 3D Also Widescreen was brought forth. Cinema-Scope Studios at the time made movies bigger and bigger There was a Napoleon movie that was actually 4x1 … really wide. 1.85:1 Academy Flat 2.35:1 Anamorphic Scope (aka Panavision/Cinemascope) Almost all movies are made in these two aspect ratios Pixar has done half in one and half in the other Why choose one over the other? Artist choice It is part of the story the director wants to tell Can we preserve the story outside of the theaters? TVs before 1998 – they were very square Now TVs are very wide Historical options Toy Story released as it was and people cut it in a way that wasn’t liked by the studio Pan and Scan is another option Cut and then scan left or right depending on where the action is Frame Height Pixar can go back and animate more picture to account for the bottom/top bars. You end up with more sky and more ground The characters seem to get lost in the picture You lose what the director original intended Re-staging For animated movies, you can move characters around – restage the scene. It is a new completely different version of the film This is the best possible option that Pixar came up with They have stopped doing this really as the demand as pretty much dropped off Why not 1.33 today? There has been an evolution of taste and demands. VHS is a linear item The focus is about portability and not about quality Most was pan and scan and the quality was so bad – but people didn’t notice DVD was introduced in 1996 You could have more content – two versions of the film You could have the widescreen version and the 1.33 version People realized that they are seeing more of the movie with the widescreen High Def Televisions (16x9 monitors) This was introduced in 2005 Blu-ray Disc was introduced in 2006 This is all widescreen You cannot find a square TV anymore TVs are roughly 1.85:1 aspect ratio There is a change in demand Users are used to black bars and are used to widescreen Users are educated now What’s next for in-flight entertainment? High Def IFE Personal Electronic Devices 3D inflight

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• DBA Best Practices - A Blog Series: Episode 1 - Backups

  - by Argenis

    This blog post is part of the DBA Best Practices series, on which various topics of concern for daily database operations are discussed. Your feedback and comments are very much welcome, so please drop by the comments section and be sure to leave your thoughts on the subject. Morning Coffee When I was a DBA, the first thing I did when I sat down at my desk at work was checking that all backups have completed successfully. It really was more of a ritual, since I had a dual system in place to check for backup completion: 1) the scheduled agent jobs to back up the databases were set to alert the NOC in failure, and 2) I had a script run from a central server every so often to check for any backup failures. Why the redundancy, you might ask. Well, for one I was once bitten by the fact that database mail doesn't work 100% of the time. Potential causes for failure include issues on the SMTP box that relays your server email, firewall problems, DNS issues, etc. And so to be sure that my backups completed fine, I needed to rely on a mechanism other than having the servers do the taking - I needed to interrogate the servers and ask each one if an issue had occurred. This is why I had a script run every so often. Some of you might have monitoring tools in place like Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) or similar 3rd party products that would track all these things for you. But at that moment, we had no resort but to write our own Powershell scripts to do it. Now it goes without saying that if you don't have backups in place, you might as well find another career. Your most sacred job as a DBA is to protect the data from a disaster, and only properly safeguarded backups can offer you peace of mind here. "But, we have a cluster...we don't need backups" Sadly I've heard this line more than I would have liked to. You need to understand that a cluster is comprised of shared storage, and that is precisely your single point of failure. A cluster will protect you from an issue at the Operating System level, and also under an outage of any SQL-related service or dependent devices. But it will most definitely NOT protect you against corruption, nor will it protect you against somebody deleting data from a table - accidentally or otherwise. Backup, fine. How often do I take a backup? The answer to this is something you will hear frequently when working with databases: it depends. What does it depend on? For one, you need to understand how much data your business is willing to lose. This is what's called Recovery Point Objective, or RPO. If you don't know how much data your business is willing to lose, you need to have an honest and realistic conversation about data loss expectations with your customers, internal or external. From my experience, their first answer to the question "how much data loss can you withstand?" will be "zero". In that case, you will need to explain how zero data loss is very difficult and very costly to achieve, even in today's computing environments. Do you want to go ahead and take full backups of all your databases every hour, or even every day? Probably not, because of the impact that taking a full backup can have on a system. That's what differential and transaction log backups are for. Have I answered the question of how often to take a backup? No, and I did that on purpose. You need to think about how much time you have to recover from any event that requires you to restore your databases. This is what's called Recovery Time Objective. Again, if you go ask your customer how long of an outage they can withstand, at first you will get a completely unrealistic number - and that will be your starting point for discussing a solution that is cost effective. The point that I'm trying to get across is that you need to have a plan. This plan needs to be practiced, and tested. Like a football playbook, you need to rehearse the moves you'll perform when the time comes. How often is up to you, and the objective is that you feel better about yourself and the steps you need to follow when emergency strikes. A backup is nothing more than an untested restore Backups are files. Files are prone to corruption. Put those two together and realize how you feel about those backups sitting on that network drive. When was the last time you restored any of those? Restoring your backups on another box - that, by the way, doesn't have to match the specs of your production server - will give you two things: 1) peace of mind, because now you know that your backups are good and 2) a place to offload your consistency checks with DBCC CHECKDB or any of the other DBCC commands like CHECKTABLE or CHECKCATALOG. This is a great strategy for VLDBs that cannot withstand the additional load created by the consistency checks. If you choose to offload your consistency checks to another server though, be sure to run DBCC CHECKDB WITH PHYSICALONLY on the production server, and if you're using SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 CU4 and above, be sure to enable traceflags 2562 and/or 2549, which will speed up the PHYSICALONLY checks further - you can read more about this enhancement here. Back to the "How Often" question for a second. If you have the disk, and the network latency, and the system resources to do so, why not backup the transaction log often? As in, every 5 minutes, or even less than that? There's not much downside to doing it, as you will have to clear the log with a backup sooner than later, lest you risk running out space on your tlog, or even your drive. The one drawback to this approach is that you will have more files to deal with at restore time, and processing each file will add a bit of extra time to the entire process. But it might be worth that time knowing that you minimized the amount of data lost. Again, test your plan to make sure that it matches your particular needs. Where to back up to? Network share? Locally? SAN volume? This is another topic where everybody has a favorite choice. So, I'll stick to mentioning what I like to do and what I consider to be the best practice in this regard. I like to backup to a SAN volume, i.e., a drive that actually lives in the SAN, and can be easily attached to another server in a pinch, saving you valuable time - you wouldn't need to restore files on the network (slow) or pull out drives out a dead server (been there, done that, it’s also slow!). The key is to have a copy of those backup files made quickly, and, if at all possible, to a remote target on a different datacenter - or even the cloud. There are plenty of solutions out there that can help you put such a solution together. That right there is the first step towards a practical Disaster Recovery plan. But there's much more to DR, and that's material for a different blog post in this series.

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• Crime Scene Investigation: SQL Server

  - by Rodney Landrum

  “The packages are running slower in Prod than they are in Dev” My week began with this simple declaration from one of our lead BI developers, quickly followed by an emailed spreadsheet demonstrating that, over 5 executions, an extensive ETL process was running average 630 seconds faster on Dev than on Prod. The situation needed some scientific investigation to determine why the same code, the same data, the same schema would yield consistently slower results on a more powerful server. Prod had yet to be officially christened with a “Go Live” date so I had the time, and having recently been binge watching CSI: New York, I also had the inclination. An inspection of the two systems, Prod and Dev, revealed the first surprise: although Prod was indeed a “bigger” system, with double the amount of RAM of Dev, the latter actually had twice as many processor cores. On neither system did I see much sign of resources being heavily taxed, while the ETL process was running. Without any real supporting evidence, I jumped to a conclusion that my years of performance tuning should have helped me avoid, and that was that the hardware differences explained the better performance on Dev. We spent time setting up a Test system, similarly scoped to Prod except with 4 times the cores, and ported everything across. The results of our careful benchmarks left us truly bemused; the ETL process on the new server was slower than on both other systems. We burned more time tweaking server configurations, monitoring IO and network latency, several times believing we’d uncovered the smoking gun, until the results of subsequent test runs pitched us back into confusion. Finally, I decided, enough was enough. Hadn’t I learned very early in my DBA career that almost all bottlenecks were caused by code and database design, not hardware? It was time to get back to basics. With over 100 SSIS packages and hundreds of queries, each handling specific tasks such as file loads, bulk inserts, transforms, logging, and so on, the task seemed formidable. And yet, after barely an hour spent with Profiler, Extended Events, and wait statistics DMVs, I had a lead in the shape of a query that joined three tables, containing millions of rows, returned 3279 results, but performed 239K logical reads. As soon as I looked at the execution plans for the query in Dev and Test I saw the culprit, an implicit conversion warning on a join predicate field that was numeric in one table and a varchar(50) in another! I turned this information over to the BI developers who quickly resolved the data type mismatches and found and fixed “several” others as well. After the schema changes the same query with the same databases ran in under 1 second on all systems and reduced the logical reads down to fewer than 300. The analysis also revealed that on Dev, the ETL task was pulling data across a LAN, whereas Prod and Test were connected across slower WAN, in large part explaining why the same process ran slower on the latter two systems. Loading the data locally on Prod delivered a further 20% gain in performance. As we progress through our DBA careers we learn valuable lessons. Sometimes, with a project deadline looming and pressure mounting, we choose to forget them. I was close to giving into the temptation to throw more hardware at the problem. I’m pleased at least that I resisted, though I still kick myself for not looking at the code on day one. It can seem a daunting prospect to return to the fundamentals of the code so close to roll out, but with the right tools, and surprisingly little time, you can collect the evidence that reveals the true problem. It is a lesson I trust I will remember for my next 20 years as a DBA, if I’m ever again tempted to bypass the evidence.

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• Single page not appearing in Google Search

  - by Dan

  Description I have a static franchise website which has various sub pages each dedicated to an individual franchisee. For each franchisee the page, the only thing slightly similar between all of them are the page titles, they follow this structure: <title> Welcome to THE_COMPANY - PRODUCT_DESCRIPTION Services, THE_LOCATION </title> THE_COMPANY and PRODUCT_DESCRIPTION are the same across all franchisees, however THE_LOCATION changes depeding on where they are located in the UK. Each franchisee page has the following <meta /> tags: <meta name="DC.creator" content="user"/> <meta name="DC.format" content="text/html"/> <meta name="DC.language" content="en"/> <meta name="DC.date.modified" content="2014-01-23T11:22:31+00:00"/> <meta name="DC.date.created" content="2014-01-23T11:22:09+00:00"/> <meta name="DC.type" content="Page"/> <meta name="DC.distribution" content="Global"/> <meta name="robots" content="ALL"/> <meta name="distribution" content="Global"/> The main content on each franchisee page is completely different. The Problem There is one particular franchisee page, located in Area A.. Which will not appear in Google Search results at all. However every single other franchisee (if you Google Search for "THE_COMPANY, THE_LOCATION" is number 1). And if I do the same search on Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, the Area A franchisee is the first result on all of them. Has Google for some reason black listed one page on the site? What I Have Tried Ensuring the page is referenced in my sitemap.xml file 'Fetching as Google Bot' the link www.the_company.co.uk/areaa When that came back as OK I would submit to index Resubmitting the sitemap.xml file in Webmaster Tools Linking to the Area A page from another pages content For this I also waited about 3 weeks before checking again to give Google time to re-index Making a change to the page content and waiting another 2 / 3 weeks Removing the page completely and recreating it with an alternative URL The closest thing I have found to this issue is this StackOverflow question but this particular franchisee has existed for almost a year, it used to appear on Google searches however no longer does. I'm guessing the Panda update wasn't too happy with something on the page, but it hasn't effected anything else on the site and I am at a loss for things to try. I would greatly appreciate any information or thoughts as to what could have caused this Thanks. Update In line with Daniel Fukudas answer below, I have followed some of his steps but everything seems to check out alright: HTTP Headers HTTP/1.1 200 OK => Date => Tue, 25 Feb 2014 16:31:29 GMT Server => Zope/(2.12.16, python 2.6.6, linux2) ZServer/1.1 Content-Length => 40078 Expires => Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT Content-Type => text/html;charset=utf-8 Content-Language => en Vary => Accept-Encoding Connection => close Robots <meta /> tag: <meta name="robots" content="ALL"/> I have updated this <meta /> tag to read content="INDEX" instead now. robots.txt: User-agent: * Disallow: User-Agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*sendto_form$ Disallow: /*folder_factories$ Using site:THE_COMPANY.co.uk: Searching for 'AREA A site:THE_COMPANY.co.uk' does not return the page, but regardless of that searching just for site:THE_COMPANY.co.uk will not necessarily return every indexed page, or so I understand... Update It appears Google likes to drop pages every now and then from the index, despite my steps above, I left the site alone and the page appeared back in the SERPs by itself.

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• Need WIF Training?

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  I spend numerous hours every month answering questions about WIF and identity in general. This made me realize that this is still quite a complicated topic once you go beyond the standard fedutil stuff. My good friend Brock and I put together a two day training course about WIF that covers everything we think is important. The course includes extensive lab material where you take standard application and apply all kinds of claims and federation techniques and technologies like WS-Federation, WS-Trust, session management, delegation, home realm discovery, multiple identity providers, Access Control Service, REST, SWT and OAuth. The lab also includes the latest version of the thinktecture identityserver and you will learn how to use and customize it. If you are looking for an open enrollment style of training, have a look here. Or contact me directly! The course outline looks as follows: Day 1 Intro to Claims-based Identity & the Windows Identity Foundation WIF introduces important concepts like conversion of security tokens and credentials to claims, claims transformation and claims-based authorization. In this module you will learn the basics of the WIF programming model and how WIF integrates into existing .NET code. Externalizing Authentication for Web Applications WIF includes support for the WS-Federation protocol. This protocol allows separating business and authentication logic into separate (distributed) applications. The authentication part is called identity provider or in more general terms - a security token service. This module looks at this scenario both from an application and identity provider point of view and walks you through the necessary concepts to centralize application login logic both using a standard product like Active Directory Federation Services as well as a custom token service using WIF’s API support. Externalizing Authentication for SOAP Services One big benefit of WIF is that it unifies the security programming model for ASP.NET and WCF. In the spirit of the preceding modules, we will have a look at how WIF integrates into the (SOAP) web service world. You will learn how to separate authentication into a separate service using the WS-Trust protocol and how WIF can simplify the WCF security model and extensibility API. Day 2 Advanced Topics:  Security Token Service Architecture, Delegation and Federation The preceding modules covered the 80/20 cases of WIF in combination with ASP.NET and WCF. In many scenarios this is just the tip of the iceberg. Especially when two business partners decide to federate, you usually have to deal with multiple token services and their implications in application design. Identity delegation is a feature that allows transporting the client identity over a chain of service invocations to make authorization decisions over multiple hops. In addition you will learn about the principal architecture of a STS, how to customize the one that comes with this training course, as well as how to build your own. Outsourcing Authentication:  Windows Azure & the Azure AppFabric Access Control Service Microsoft provides a multi-tenant security token service as part of the Azure platform cloud offering. This is an interesting product because it allows to outsource vital infrastructure services to a managed environment that guarantees uptime and scalability. Another advantage of the Access Control Service is, that it allows easy integration of both the “enterprise” protocols like WS-* as well as “web identities” like LiveID, Google or Facebook into your applications. ACS acts as a protocol bridge in this case where the application developer doesn’t need to implement all these protocols, but simply uses a service to make it happen. Claims & Federation for the Web and Mobile World Also the web & mobile world moves to a token and claims-based model. While the mechanics are almost identical, other protocols and token types are used to achieve better HTTP (REST) and JavaScript integration for in-browser applications and small footprint devices. Also patterns like how to allow third party applications to work with your data without having to disclose your credentials are important concepts in these application types. The nice thing about WIF and its powerful base APIs and abstractions is that it can shield application logic from these details while you can focus on implementing the actual application. HTH

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• Book Review (Book 12) - 20 Master Plots

  - by BuckWoody

  This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for a year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for May 2012 was:20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias. This is my final book review - at least for this year. I'll explain what I've learned in this book in particular, and in the last twelve months in general. Why I chose this book: Stories and themes are part of software, presenting, and working in teams. This book claims there are only 20 plots, ever. I wanted to find out. What I learned: Probably my most favorite read of the year. Deceptively small, amazingly insightful. The premise is that there are only a few "base" themes, and that once you learn them you can put together an interesting set of stories on most any topic. Yes, the author admits that this number has been different throughout history - some have said 50, others 14, and still others claim only one or two basic plots. This doesn't change the fact that you can build very complex stories from a simple set of circumstances and characters. Be warned - if you read this book it takes away much of the wonder from almost every movie or book you'll read from here on! I loved it. My favorite part is that the author gives you exercises to build stories, right from the start. I've actually used these as the start of a meeting to foster creativity. Amazing stuff. One of my favorite sections of the book deals with plot and story. Plot: The king died, and the queen died. Story: The king died, and the queen died of heartbreak. Add one or two words, and you have the essence of storytelling. A highly recommended read, for all folks of all ages. You'll like it, your spouse will like it, and your kids will like it. I learned to be a better storyteller, and it helped me understand that plots and stories are not just things in books - they are a direct reflection of human nature. That makes me a better manager of myself and others.   And this is the last of the reviews - at least for this year. I probably won't post many more book reviews here, but I will keep up the practice. As a reminder, the goal was to select 12 books that will help you reach your career goals. They don't have to be technical, or even apply directly to your job - but they do need to be books that you mindfully select as getting you closer to what you want to be. Each month, jot down what you learned from the work. And see if it doesn't in fact get you closer to your goals. These readings helped me - I got a promotion this year, and I attribute at least some of that to the things I learned.

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• Take Snapshots of Your Favorite Movie Scenes in VLC

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Have you ever wanted to grab a screenshot of your favorite TV or movie scene? Today we’ll show you how to do so with VLC Media Player. If you don’t have it already, download and install the latest version of VLC (link below). Start playing your movie, and to grab a snapshot, select Video from the menu and click Snapshot.   When you take a snapshot, by default a preview is displayed at the top left and the folder where the file is saved is briefly displayed on the screen. If you enable the Advanced Controls, you can take a snapshot with a click of a button, and advance the video frame by frame to get a more accurate shot. To enable the Advanced Controls, select View and Advanced Controls.   You’ll see the Advanced Controls buttons appear below the slider. Now just click on the Snapshot button to grab an image.   You can more easily control the frame you wish to grab by pressing the Frame by Frame button. You can pause the movie when it is near the perfect spot for your snapshot, and then press the Frame by Frame button to advance a single frame at a time. By default, the snapshots are saved as PNG files in your My Pictures folder in Windows. You can change those setting in the Preferences. First, you’ll need to select All under Show settings at the bottom. Then click on Video on the left. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the Snapshot section. Here you can change the format from PNG to JPG, change the directory to which the snapshots are stored, turn on and off the preview, and change the filename prefix. Click Save when finished.   Now you have nice screenshots of your favorite movie to display as you wish…such as a Desktop Background!   VLC is an excellent media player that runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. In addition to playing almost any media file, it also makes grabbing screenshots of your videos a breeze. Want to know more about VLC? Check out some of our previous articles like how to rip DVDs and how to set a video as your desktop wallpaper. Download the Latest version of VLC Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Desktop Fun: Rural Scenes WallpapersAutomatically Mount and View ISO files in Windows 7 Media CenterHow to Make/Edit a movie with Windows Movie Maker in Windows VistaAdd Images and Metadata to Windows 7 Media Center Movie LibraryQuickly Find Movies to Watch at Hello Movies TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Snagit 10 tinysong gives a shortened URL for you to post on Twitter (or anywhere) 10 Superb Firefox Wallpapers OpenDNS Guide Google TV The iPod Revolution Ultimate Boot CD can help when disaster strikes

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• Cloud hosted CI for .NET projects

  - by Scott Dorman

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/sdorman/archive/2014/06/02/cloud-hosted-ci-for-.net-projects.aspxContinuous integration (CI) is important. If you don’t have it set up…you should. There are a lot of different options available for hosting your own CI server, but they all require you to maintain your own infrastructure. If you’re a business, that generally isn’t a problem. However, if you have some open source projects hosted, for example on GitHub, there haven’t really been any options. That has changed with the latest release of AppVeyor, which bills itself as “Continuous integration for busy developers.” What’s different about AppVeyor is that it’s a hosted solution. Why is that important? By being a hosted solution, it means that I don’t have to maintain my own infrastructure for a build server. How does that help if you’re hosting an open source project? AppVeyor has a really competitive pricing plan. For an unlimited amount of public repositories, it’s free. That gives you a cloud hosted CI system for all of your GitHub projects for the cost of some time to set them up, which actually isn’t hard to do at all. I have several open source projects (hosted at https://github.com/scottdorman), so I signed up using my GitHub credentials. AppVeyor fully supported my two-factor authentication with GitHub, so I never once had to enter my password for GitHub into AppVeyor. Once it was done, I authorized GitHub and it instantly found all of the repositories I have (both the ones I created and the ones I cloned from elsewhere). You can even add “build badges” to your markdown files in GitHub, so anyone who visits your project can see the status of the lasted build. Out of the box, you can simply select a repository, add the build project, click New Build and wait for the build to complete. You now have a complete CI server running for your project. The best part of this, besides the fact that it “just worked” with almost zero configuration is that you can configure it through a web-based interface which is very streamlined, clean and easy to use or you can use a appveyor.yml file. This means that you can define your CI build process (including any scripts that might need to be run, etc.) in a standard file format (the YAML format) and store it in your repository. The benefits to that are huge. The file becomes a versioned artifact in your source control system, so it can be branched, merged, and is completely transparent to anyone working on the project. By the way, AppVeyor isn’t limited to just GitHub. It currently supports GitHub, BitBucket, Visual Studio Online, and Kiln. I did have a few issues getting one of my projects to build, but the same day I posted the problem to the support forum a fix was deployed, and I had a functioning CI build about 5 minutes after that. Since then, I’ve provided some additional feature requests and had a few other questions, all of which have seen responses within a 24-hour period. I have to say that it’s easily been one of the best customer support experiences I’ve seen in a long time. AppVeyor is still young, so it doesn’t yet have full feature parity with some of the older (more established) CI systems available,  but it’s getting better all the time and I have no doubt that it will quickly catch up to those other CI systems and then pass them. The bottom line, if you’re looking for a good cloud-hosted CI system for your .NET-based projects, look at AppVeyor.

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• Book Review (Book 12) - 20 Master Plots

  - by BuckWoody

  This is a continuation of the books I challenged myself to read to help my career - one a month, for a year. You can read my first book review here, and the entire list is here. The book I chose for May 2012 was:20 Master Plots by Ronald B. Tobias. This is my final book review - at least for this year. I'll explain what I've learned in this book in particular, and in the last twelve months in general. Why I chose this book: Stories and themes are part of software, presenting, and working in teams. This book claims there are only 20 plots, ever. I wanted to find out. What I learned: Probably my most favorite read of the year. Deceptively small, amazingly insightful. The premise is that there are only a few "base" themes, and that once you learn them you can put together an interesting set of stories on most any topic. Yes, the author admits that this number has been different throughout history - some have said 50, others 14, and still others claim only one or two basic plots. This doesn't change the fact that you can build very complex stories from a simple set of circumstances and characters. Be warned - if you read this book it takes away much of the wonder from almost every movie or book you'll read from here on! I loved it. My favorite part is that the author gives you exercises to build stories, right from the start. I've actually used these as the start of a meeting to foster creativity. Amazing stuff. One of my favorite sections of the book deals with plot and story. Plot: The king died, and the queen died. Story: The king died, and the queen died of heartbreak. Add one or two words, and you have the essence of storytelling. A highly recommended read, for all folks of all ages. You'll like it, your spouse will like it, and your kids will like it. I learned to be a better storyteller, and it helped me understand that plots and stories are not just things in books - they are a direct reflection of human nature. That makes me a better manager of myself and others.   And this is the last of the reviews - at least for this year. I probably won't post many more book reviews here, but I will keep up the practice. As a reminder, the goal was to select 12 books that will help you reach your career goals. They don't have to be technical, or even apply directly to your job - but they do need to be books that you mindfully select as getting you closer to what you want to be. Each month, jot down what you learned from the work. And see if it doesn't in fact get you closer to your goals. These readings helped me - I got a promotion this year, and I attribute at least some of that to the things I learned.

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• PowerShell Script To Find Where SharePoint 2010 Features Are Activated

  - by Brian Jackett

  The script on this post will find where features are activated within your SharePoint 2010 farm.   Problem    Over the past few months I’ve gotten literally dozens of emails, blog comments, or personal requests from people asking “how do I find where a SharePoint feature has been activated?”  I wrote a script to find which features are installed on your farm almost 3 years ago.  There is also the Get-SPFeature PowerShell commandlet in SharePoint 2010.  The problem is that these only tell you if a feature is installed not where they have been activated.  This is especially important to know if you have multiple web applications, site collections, and /or sites.   Solution    The default call (no parameters) for Get-SPFeature will return all features in the farm.  Many of the parameter sets accept filters for specific scopes such as web application, site collection, and site.  If those are supplied then only the enabled / activated features are returned for that filtered scope.  Taking the concept of recursively traversing a SharePoint farm and merging that with calls to Get-SPFeature at all levels of the farm you can find out what features are activated at that level.  Store the results into a variable and you end up with all features that are activated at every level.    Below is the script I came up with (slight edits for posting on blog).  With no parameters the function lists all features activated at all scopes.  If you provide an Identity parameter you will find where a specific feature is activated.  Note that the display name for a feature you see in the SharePoint UI rarely matches the “internal” display name.  I would recommend using the feature id instead.  You can download a full copy of the script by clicking on the link below.    Note: This script is not optimized for medium to large farms.  In my testing it took 1-3 minutes to recurse through my demo environment.  This script is provided as-is with no warranty.  Run this in a smaller dev / test environment first.   001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042 043 044 045 046 047 048 049 050 051 052 053 054 055 056 057 058 059 060 061 062 063 064 065 066 067 068 function Get-SPFeatureActivated { # see full script for help info, removed for formatting [CmdletBinding()] param(   [Parameter(position = 1, valueFromPipeline=$true)]   [Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPFeatureDefinitionPipeBind]   $Identity )#end param   Begin   {     # declare empty array to hold results. Will add custom member `     # for Url to show where activated at on objects returned from Get-SPFeature.     $results = @()         $params = @{}   }   Process   {     if([string]::IsNullOrEmpty($Identity) -eq $false)     {       $params = @{Identity = $Identity             ErrorAction = "SilentlyContinue"       }     }       # check farm features     $results += (Get-SPFeature -Farm -Limit All @params |              % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty `                 -Name Url -Value ([string]::Empty) -PassThru} |              Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url)     # check web application features     foreach($webApp in (Get-SPWebApplication))     {       $results += (Get-SPFeature -WebApplication $webApp -Limit All @params |                % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty `                   -Name Url -Value $webApp.Url -PassThru} |                Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url)       # check site collection features in current web app       foreach($site in ($webApp.Sites))       {         $results += (Get-SPFeature -Site $site -Limit All @params |                  % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty `                     -Name Url -Value $site.Url -PassThru} |                  Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url)                          $site.Dispose()         # check site features in current site collection         foreach($web in ($site.AllWebs))         {           $results += (Get-SPFeature -Web $web -Limit All @params |                    % {Add-Member -InputObject $_ -MemberType noteproperty `                       -Name Url -Value $web.Url -PassThru} |                    Select-Object -Property Scope, DisplayName, Id, Url)           $web.Dispose()         }       }     }   }   End   {     $results   } } #end Get-SPFeatureActivated   Snippet of output from Get-SPFeatureActivated   Conclusion    This script has been requested for a long time and I’m glad to finally getting a working “clean” version.  If you find any bugs or issues with the script please let me know.  I’ll be posting this to the TechNet Script Center after some internal review.  Enjoy the script and I hope it helps with your admin / developer needs.         -Frog Out

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• Reducing Deadlocks - not a DBA issue ?

  - by steveh99999

   As a DBA, I'm involved on an almost daily basis troubleshooting 'SQL Server' performance issues. Often, this troubleshooting soon veers away from a 'its a SQL Server issue' to instead become a wider application/database design/coding issue.One common perception with SQL Server is that deadlocking is an application design issue - and is fixed by recoding...  I see this reinforced by MCP-type questions/scenarios where the answer to prevent deadlocking is simply to change the order in code in which tables are accessed....Whilst this is correct, I do think this has led to a situation where many 'operational' or 'production support' DBAs, when faced with a deadlock, are happy to throw the issue over to developers without analysing the issue further....A couple of 'war stories' on deadlocks which I think are interesting :- Case One , I had an issue recently on a third-party application that I support on SQL 2008.  This particular third-party application has an unusual support agreement where the customer is allowed to change the index design on the third-party provided database.  However, we are not allowed to alter application code or modify table structure..This third-party application is also known to encounter occasional deadlocks – indeed, I have documentation from the vendor that up to 50 deadlocks per day is not unusual !So, as a DBA I have to support an application which in my opinion has too many deadlocks - but, I cannot influence the design of the tables or stored procedures for the application. This should be the classic - blame the third-party developers scenario, and hope this issue gets addressed in a future application release - ie we could wait years for this to be resolved and implemented in our production environment...But, as DBAs  can change the index layout, is there anything I could do still to reduce the deadlocks in the application ?I initially used SQL traceflag 1222 to write deadlock detection output to the SQL Errorlog – using this I was able to identify one table heavily involved in the deadlocks.When I examined the table definition, I was surprised to see it was a heap – ie no clustered index existed on the table.Using SQL profiler to see locking behaviour and plan for the query involved in the deadlock, I was able to confirm a table scan was being performed.By creating an appropriate clustered index - it was possible to produce a more efficient plan and locking behaviour.So, less locks, held for less time = less possibility of deadlocks. I'm still unhappy about the overall number of deadlocks on this system - but that's something to be discussed further with the vendor.Case Two,  a system which hadn't changed for months suddenly started seeing deadlocks on a regular basis. I love the 'nothing's changed' scenario, as it gives me the opportunity to appear wise and say 'nothings changed on this system, except the data'.. This particular deadlock occurred on a table which had been growing rapidly. By using DBCC SHOW_STATISTICS - the DBA team were able to see that the deadlocks seemed to be occurring shortly after auto-update stats had regenerated the table statistics using it's default sampling behaviour.As a quick fix, we were able to schedule a nightly UPDATE STATISTICS WITH FULLSCAN on the table involved in the deadlock - thus, greatly reducing the potential for stats to be updated via auto_update_stats, consequently reducing the potential for a bad plan to be generated based on an unrepresentative sample of the data. This reduced the possibility of a deadlock occurring.  Not a perfect solution by any means, but quick, easy to implement, and needed no application code changes. This fix gave us some 'breathing space'  to properly fix the code during the next scheduled application release.   The moral of this post - don't dismiss deadlocks as issues that can only be fixed by developers...

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• Session Sharing with another User on *NIX and Windows

  - by Giri Mandalika

  Oracle Solaris Since Solaris is not widely known for its graphical interface, let's just focus on sharing a terminal session in read-only mode with another user on the same system. Here is an example. eg., % finger Login Name TTY Idle When Where root Super-User pts/1 Sat 16:57 dhcp-amer-vpn-rmdc-a sunperf ??? pts/2 4 Sat 16:41 pitcher.sfbay.sun.com In this example, two users root and sunperf are connected to the same system from two different terminals pts/1 and pts/2 respectively. If the root user wants to show something to sunperf user -- what s/he is doing in her/his terminal, for example, it can be accomplished with the following command. script -a /dev/null | tee -a <target_terminal eg., # script -a /dev/null | tee -a /dev/pts/2 Script started, file is /dev/null # # uptime 5:04pm up 1 day(s), 2:56, 2 users, load average: 0.81, 0.81, 0.81 # # isainfo -v 64-bit sparcv9 applications crc32c cbcond pause mont mpmul sha512 sha256 sha1 md5 camellia kasumi des aes ima hpc vis3 fmaf asi_blk_init vis2 vis popc 32-bit sparc applications crc32c cbcond pause mont mpmul sha512 sha256 sha1 md5 camellia kasumi des aes ima hpc vis3 fmaf asi_blk_init vis2 vis popc v8plus div32 mul32 # # exit Script done, file is /dev/null After the script .. | tee .. command, sunperf user should be able to see the root user's stdin and stdout contents in her/his own terminal until the script session exits in root user's terminal. Since this kind of sharing is based on capturing and redirecting the contents to the target terminal, the users on the receiving end won't be able to see whatever is being edited on initiators' terminal [using editors such as vi]. Also it is not possible to share the session with any connected user on the system unless the initiator has the necessary permissions and privileges. The script utility records everything printed in a terminal session, while the tee utility replicates the contents of the screen capture on to the standard output of the target terimal. The tee utility does not buffer the output - so, the screen capture from the initiators' terminal appears almost right away in the target terminal. Though I never tested, this technique may work on all *NIX and Linux flavors with little or no changes. Also there might be other ways to accomplish this. [Thanks to Sujeet for sharing this tip] Microsoft Windows Most of the Windows users may rely on VNC services to share a desktop session. Another way to share the desktop session is to use the Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) client. Here are the steps. Connect to the target Windows system using Remote Desktop Connection client Launch Windows Task Manager Navigate to the "Users" tab Find the user session that you want to connect to and have full control over as the other user who is currently holding that session Select the user name in Windows Task Manager, right click and choose the option "Remote Control" A window pops up on the other user's session with the message "<USER is requesting to control your session remotely. Do you accept the request?" Once the other user says "Yes", you will be granted access to that session. Since then both users should be able to see the same screen and even control the session from their respective workstations.

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• Feynman's inbox

  - by user12607414

  Here is Richard Feynman writing on the ease of criticizing theories, and the difficulty of forming them: The problem is not just to say something might be wrong, but to replace it by something — and that is not so easy. As soon as any really definite idea is substituted it becomes almost immediately apparent that it does not work. The second difficulty is that there is an infinite number of possibilities of these simple types. It is something like this. You are sitting working very hard, you have worked for a long time trying to open a safe. Then some Joe comes along who knows nothing about what you are doing, except that you are trying to open the safe. He says ‘Why don’t you try the combination 10:20:30?’ Because you are busy, you have tried a lot of things, maybe you have already tried 10:20:30. Maybe you know already that the middle number is 32 not 20. Maybe you know as a matter of fact that it is a five digit combination… So please do not send me any letters trying to tell me how the thing is going to work. I read them — I always read them to make sure that I have not already thought of what is suggested — but it takes too long to answer them, because they are usually in the class ‘try 10:20:30’. (“Seeking New Laws”, page 161 in The Character of Physical Law.) As a sometime designer (and longtime critic) of widely used computer systems, I have seen similar difficulties appear when anyone undertakes to publicly design a piece of software that may be used by many thousands of customers. (I have been on both sides of the fence, of course.) The design possibilities are endless, but the deep design problems are usually hidden beneath a mass of superfluous detail. The sheer numbers can be daunting. Even if only one customer out of a thousand feels a need to express a passionately held idea, it can take a long time to read all the mail. And it is a fact of life that many of those strong suggestions are only weakly supported by reason or evidence. Opinions are plentiful, but substantive research is time-consuming, and hence rare. A related phenomenon commonly seen with software is bike-shedding, where interlocutors focus on surface details like naming and syntax… or (come to think of it) like lock combinations. On the other hand, software is easier than quantum physics, and the population of people able to make substantial suggestions about software systems is several orders of magnitude bigger than Feynman’s circle of colleagues. My own work would be poorer without contributions — sometimes unsolicited, sometimes passionately urged on me — from the open source community. If a Nobel prize winner thought it was worthwhile to read his mail on the faint chance of learning a good idea, I am certainly not going to throw mine away. (In case anyone is still reading this, and is wondering what provoked a meditation on the quality of one’s inbox contents, I’ll simply point out that the volume has been very high, for many months, on the Lambda-Dev mailing list, where the next version of the Java language is being discussed. Bravo to those of my colleagues who are surfing that wave.) I started this note thinking there was an odd parallel between the life of the physicist and that of a software designer. On second thought, I’ll bet that is the story for anybody who works in public on something requiring special training. (And that would be pretty much anything worth doing.) In any case, Feynman saw it clearly and said it well.

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• 12.04 making BCM4313 card work with aircrack-ng?

  - by Charles Forest

  I'm a real Linux Noob, just started using it (this month) and until now i had no issues. now i'm trying to set-up aircrack-ng on my laptop, but it seems like it's using the worst card possible (or almost) there is a TON of tutorial on this card (seems to be hell to set-up) i have tryed some, but i ended up uninstalling my drivers, messing with my desktops, and ended by having no more "X" to close my windows (i have no clue how i ended there) i just re-installed my linux (took me 2 hours to setup everything again), but now i'm a bit "Scared" to try tutorials randomly again. Right now it says the driver is wl, wich is not the one i want (AFAIK it's not supported) i'm not sure what kind of informations are needed, but here's what i think could be usefull. lspci -knn 00:00.0 Host bridge [0600]: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller [8086:0104] (rev 09) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: agpgart-intel 00:01.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port [8086:0101] (rev 09) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller [8086:0116] (rev 09) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: i915 Kernel modules: i915 00:16.0 Communication controller [0780]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 [8086:1c3a] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: mei Kernel modules: mei 00:1a.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 [8086:1c2d] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd 00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller [8086:1c20] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel 00:1c.0 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 [8086:1c10] (rev b4) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1c.3 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 [8086:1c16] (rev b4) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1c.4 PCI bridge [0604]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 [8086:1c18] (rev b4) Kernel driver in use: pcieport Kernel modules: shpchp 00:1d.0 USB controller [0c03]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 [8086:1c26] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: ehci_hcd 00:1f.0 ISA bridge [0601]: Intel Corporation HM65 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller [8086:1c49] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel modules: iTCO_wdt 00:1f.2 SATA controller [0106]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller [8086:1c03] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: ahci 00:1f.3 SMBus [0c05]: Intel Corporation 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller [8086:1c22] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel modules: i2c-i801 01:00.0 3D controller [0302]: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 540M] [10de:0df4] (rev a1) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: nouveau Kernel modules: nouveau, nvidiafb WIRELESS CARD 02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4727] (rev 01) Subsystem: Wistron NeWeb Corp. Device [185f:051a] Kernel driver in use: wl Kernel modules: wl, bcma, brcmsmac REST... 03:00.0 Ethernet controller [0200]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller [10ec:8168] (rev 06) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: r8169 Kernel modules: r8169 04:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller [1033:0194] (rev 04) Subsystem: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd Device [144d:c0a5] Kernel driver in use: xhci_hcd Also, if i'm "screwed" with my hardware, just tell me.

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• Fresh Ubuntu Install - Grub not loading

  - by Ryan Sharp

  System Ubuntu 12.04 64-bit Windows 7 SP1 Samsung 64GB SSD - OS' Samsung 1TB HDD - Games, /Home, Swap WD 300'ishGB HDD - Backup Okay, so I'm very frustrated, so please excuse me if I miss anything out as my head is clouded by anger and impatience, etc. I'll try me best, though. First of all, I'll explain how I got to my predicament. I finally got my new SSD. I firstly installed Windows, which completed without a hitch. Afterwards, I tried to install Ubuntu, which failed several times due to problems irrelevant to this question, but I mention this to explain my frustrations, sorry. Anyway, I finally installed Ubuntu. However, I chose the 'bootloader' to be installed on the same partition as where I was installing the Ubuntu Root partition, as that was what I believed to be the best choice. It was of my thinking that it was supposed to go on the same partition and on the SSD, which is my OS drive, though with my problem, it apparently was wrong. So I tried to fix it by checking guides and following their directions, but seemed to have messed it up even more. Here is what I receive after I use the fdisk -l command: (I also added explanations for which I used each partition for) Disk /dev/sda: 64.0 GB, 64023257088 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7783 cylinders, total 125045424 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x324971d1 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 2048 206847 102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 208896 48957439 24374272 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 48959486 125044735 38042625 5 Extended /dev/sda5 48959488 125044735 38042624 83 Linux sda1 --/ Windows Recovery sda2 --/ Windows 7 sda3/5 --/ Ubuntu root [ / ] Disk /dev/sdb: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders, total 1953525168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xc0ee6a69 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 1024208894 1953523711 464657409 5 Extended /dev/sdb3 * 2048 1024206847 512102400 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sdb5 1024208896 1939851263 457821184 83 Linux /dev/sdb6 1939853312 1953523711 6835200 82 Linux swap / Solaris sdb3 --/ Partition for Steam games, etc. sdb5 --/ Ubuntu Home [ /home ] sdb6 --/ Ubuntu Swap Partition table entries are not in disk order Disk /dev/sdc: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x292eee23 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdc1 2048 625141759 312569856 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT sdc1 --/ Generic backup I also used a Boot Script that other users suggested, so that I can give more details on my partitions and also where Grub is located... ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos5)/boot/grub on this drive. => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos5)/boot/grub on this drive. => Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdc. Now that is weird... Why would Grub2 be installed on both my SSD and HDD? Even weirder is why is Windows on the MBR of my backup hard drive? Nothing I did should have done that... Anyway, here is the entire Output from that script... PASTEBIN So, to summarize what I need: How can I fix my setup so grub loads on startup? How can I clean my partitions to remove unnecessary grubs? What did I do wrong so that I don't do something so daft again? Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you can help me. I've been trying to have a successful setup since Friday, and I'm almost at the point that I'm really tempted to throw my computer out the window due to my frustration.

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• Heterogeneous Datacenter Management with Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Joe Diemer

  The following is a Guest Blog, contributed by Bryce Kaiser, Product Manager at Blue MedoraWhen I envision a perfect datacenter, it would consist of technologies acquired from a single vendor across the entire server, middleware, application, network, and storage stack - Apps to Disk - that meets your organization’s every IT requirement with absolute best-of-breed solutions in every category.   To quote a familiar motto, your datacenter would consist of "Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together".  In almost all cases, practical realities dictate something far less than the IT Utopia mentioned above.   You may wish to leverage multiple vendors to keep licensing costs down, a single vendor may not have an offering in the IT category you need, or your preferred vendor may quite simply not have the solution that meets your needs.    In other words, your IT needs dictate a heterogeneous IT environment.  Heterogeneity, however, comes with additional complexity. The following are two pretty typical challenges:1) No End-to-End Visibility into the Enterprise Wide Application Deployment. Each vendor solution which is added to an infrastructure may bring its own tooling creating different consoles for different vendor applications and platforms.2) No Visibility into Performance Bottlenecks. When multiple management tools operate independently, you lose diagnostic capabilities including identifying cross-tier issues with database, hung-requests, slowness, memory leaks and hardware errors/failures causing DB/MW issues. As adoption of Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) has increased, especially since the release of Enterprise Manager 12c, Oracle has seen an increase in the number of customers who want to leverage their investments in EM to manage non-Oracle workloads.  Enterprise Manager provides a single pane of glass view into their entire datacenter.  By creating a highly extensible framework via the Oracle EM Extensibility Development Kit (EDK), Oracle has provided the tooling for business partners such as my company Blue Medora as well as customers to easily fill gaps in the ecosystem and enhance existing solutions.  As mentioned in the previous post on the Enterprise Manager Extensibility Exchange, customers have access to an assortment of Oracle and Partner provided solutions through this Exchange, which is accessed at http://www.oracle.com/goto/emextensibility.  Currently, there are over 80 Oracle and partner provided plug-ins across the EM 11g and EM 12c versions.  Blue Medora is one of those contributing partners, for which you will find 3 of our solutions including our flagship plugin for VMware.  Let's look at Blue Medora’s VMware plug-in as an example to what I'm trying to convey.  Here is a common situation solved by true visibility into your entire stack:Symptoms•    My database is bogging down, however the database appears okay internally.  Maybe it’s starved for resources?•    My OS tooling is showing everything is “OK”.  Something doesn’t add up. Root cause•    Through the VMware plugin we can see the problem is actually on the virtualization layer Solution•    From within Enterprise Manager  -- the same tool you use for all of your database tuning -- we can overlay the data of the database target, host target, and virtual machine target for a true picture of the true root cause. Here is the console view: Perhaps your monitoring conditions are more specific to your environment.  No worries, Enterprise Manager still has you covered.  With Metric Extensions you have the “Next Generation” of User-Defined Metrics, which easily bring the power of your existing management scripts into a single console while leveraging the proven Enterprise Manager framework. Simply put, Oracle Enterprise manager boasts a growing ecosystem that provides the single pane of glass for your entire datacenter from the database and beyond.  Bryce can be contacted at [email protected]

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• Easy Made Easier - Networking

  - by dragonfly

      In my last post, I highlighted the feature of the Appliance Manager Configurator to auto-fill some fields based on previous field values, including host names based on System Name and sequential IP addresses from the first IP address entered. This can make configuration a little faster and a little less subject to data entry errors, particularly if you are doing the configuration on the Oracle Database Appliance itself.     The Oracle Database Appliance Appliance Manager Configurator is available for download here. But why would you download it, if it comes pre-installed on the Oracle Database Appliance? A common reason for customers interested in this new Engineered System is to get a good idea of how easy it is to configure. Beyond that, you can save the resulting configuration as a file, and use it on an Oracle Database Appliance. This allows you to verify the data entered in advance, and in the comfort of your office. In addition, the topic of this post is another strong reason to download and use the Appliance Manager Configurator prior to deploying your Oracle Database Appliance.     The most common source of hiccups in deploying an Oracle Database Appliance, based on my experiences with a variety of customers, involves the network configuration. It is during Step 11, when network validation occurs, that these come to light, which is almost half way through the 24 total steps, and can be frustrating, whether it was a typo, DNS mis-configuration or IP address already in use. This is why I recommend as a best practice taking advantage of the Appliance Manager Configurator prior to deploying an Oracle Database Appliance.     Why? Not only do you get the benefit of being able to double check your entries before you even start on the Oracle Database Appliance, you can also take advantage of the Network Validation step. This is the final step before you review all the data and can save it to a text file. It can be skipped, if you aren't ready or are not connected to the network that the Oracle Database Appliance will be on. My recommendation, though, is to run the Appliance Manager Configurator on your laptop, enter the data or re-load a previously saved file of the data, and then connect to the network that the Oracle Database Appliance will be on. Now run the Network Validation. It will check to make sure that the host names you entered are in DNS and do resolve to the IP addresses you specifiied. It will also ping the IP Addresses you specified, so that you can verify that no other machine is already using them (yes, that has happened at customer sites).     After you have completed the validation, as seen in the screen shot below, you can review the results and move on to saving your settings to a file for use on your Oracle Database Appliance, or if there are errors, you can use the Back button to return to the appropriate screen and correct the data. Once you are satisfied with the Network Validation, just check the Skip/Ignore Network Validation checkbox at the top of the screen, then click Next. Is the Network Validation in the Appliance Manager Configurator required? No, but it can save you time later. I should also note that the Network Validation screen is not part of the Appliance Manager Configurator that currently ships on the Oracle Database Appliance, so this is the easiest way to verify your network configuration.     I hope you are finding this series of posts useful. My next post will cover some aspects of the windowing environment that gets run by the 'startx' command on the Oracle Database Appliance, since this is needed to run the Appliance Manager Configurator via a direct connected monitor, keyboard and mouse, or via the ILOM. If it's been a while since you've used an OpenWindows environment, you'll want to check it out.

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