blackberry enterprise - Page 250

Windows Service Limit Crashes Services on Startup

- by Paul Williams

We have developed a custom Windows service in C# as part of a large Enterprise application. Our QA department tests multiple versions of this service. The QA lab has several (over 20) copies of this service installed on one Windows 2003 test box. Each copy is in its own folder and has a unique service name, though each executable file is named the same (OurWindowsService.exe, for example). Each service uses the same Windows credentials (a domain user). The purpose of this service is to handle MSMQ messages. The queued messages do all sorts of important stuff. For some reason, they can run only 5 of these services at a time. When we start a 6th, the service crashes on startup. For example, I can start #1, #2, #3, #4, and #5. When I start #6, it crashes. However, if I stop #1 and start #6, #6 runs fine, and now #1 fails to start. When the services crash, the following error appears in the Windows event log: Faulting application OurWindowsService.exe, version 5.40.1.1, faulting module kernel32.dll, version 5.2.3790.4480, fault address 0x0000bef7. I was able to use WinDbg to generate a postmortem dump file. The dump file revealed that the crash occurs trying to delay load SHLWAPI.dll: 0:000> kb100 ChildEBP RetAddr Args to Child 0012ece4 79037966 c06d007e 00000000 00000001 KERNEL32!RaiseException+0x53 0012ed4c 790099ba 00000008 0012ed08 7c82860c mscoree!__delayLoadHelper2+0x139 0012ed98 790075b1 001550c8 0012edac 0012fb34 mscoree!_tailMerge_**SHLWAPI_dll**+0xd 0012edb0 79007623 001550c8 0012edf8 0012edf4 mscoree!XMLGetVersionWithSupported+0x22 0012ee00 790069a4 aa06f1b0 00000000 000001fe mscoree!RuntimeRequest::GetRuntimeVersion+0x56 0012f478 790077aa 00000001 7903fb4c 0012fb34 mscoree!RuntimeRequest::ComputeVersionString+0x5bd 0012f89c 79007802 00000001 0012f8b4 7903fb4c mscoree!RuntimeRequest::FindVersionedRuntime+0x11c 0012f8b8 79007b19 00000001 00000000 aa06fa6c mscoree!RuntimeRequest::RequestRuntimeDll+0x2c 0012ffa4 79007c02 00000001 0012ffbc 00000000 mscoree!GetInstallation+0x72 0012ffc0 77e6f23b 00000000 00000000 7ffdf000 mscoree!_CorExeMain+0x12 0012fff0 00000000 79007bf0 00000000 78746341 KERNEL32!BaseProcessStart+0x23 I believe the error code handed to Kernel32.RaiseException, c06d007e, means Module Not Found, but I'm not certain. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Are we hitting some limit on the number of service instances on some file name? Does MSMQ dislike more than 5 listening services?

Read the article

OS X server large scale storage and backup

- by user135217

I really hope this question doesn't come across as trolling or asking for buying advice. It's not intended. I've just started working for a small ad agency (40 employees). I actually quit being a system administrator a few years ago (too stressful!), but the company we're currently outsourcing our IT stuff to is doing such a bad job that I've felt compelled to get involved and do what I can to improve things. At the moment, all the company's data is stored on an 8TB external firewire drive attached to a Mac Mini running OS X Server 10.6, which provides filesharing (using AFP) for the whole company. There is a single backup drive, which is actually a caddy containing two 3TB hard drives arranged in RAID 0 (arrggghhhh!), which someone brings in as and when and copies over all the data using Carbon Copy Cloner. That's the entirety of the infrastructure, and the whole backup and restore strategy. I've been having sleepless nights. I've just started augmenting the backup process with FreeBSD, ZFS, sparse bundles and snapshot sends to get everything offsite. I think this is a workable behind the scenes solution, but for people's day to day use I'm struggling. Given the quantity and importance of the data, I think we should really be looking towards enterprise level storage solutions, high availability and so on, but the whole company is all Mac all the time, and I cannot find equipment that will do what we need. No more Xserve; no rack storage; no large scale storage at all apart from that Pegasus R6 that doesn't seem all that great; the Mac Pro has fibre channel, but it's not a real server and it's ludicrously expensive; Xsan looks like it's on the way out; things like heartbeatd and failoverd have apparently been removed from Lion Server; the new Mac Mini only has thunderbolt which severely limits our choices; the list goes on and on. I'm really, really not trying to troll here. I love Macs, but I just genuinely don't know where I'm supposed to look for server stuff. I have considered Linux or FreeBSD and netatalk for serving files with all the server-y goodness those OSes bring, but some the things I've read make me wonder if it's really the way to go. Also, in my own (admittedly quite cursory) experiments with it, I've struggled to get decent transfer speeds. I guess there's also the possibility of switching everyone off AFP and making them use SMB or NFS, but I understand that this can cause big problems with resource forks and file locks. I figure there must be plenty of all Mac companies out there. If you're the sysadmin at one, what do you use? Any suggestions very gratefully received.

Read the article

Suggestions for splitting server roles amongst Hyper-V virtual servers / RAID6 or RAID10? / AppAssure

- by Anon

We have 2 Hyper-V hosts at present running 1 virtual server that was converted from a physical box running all roles. My plan is to split the roles over various virtual machines, upgrading to the latest software versions as I go, and use the backup server as a standby in case the main server fails. AppAssure backup software has a feature called Virtual Standby, so the VHD's can be ready to be fired up on the backup server if necessary. Off-site backups will be done via external USB drive for now. I'm just seeking some input/suggestions into how I'm planning to split the roles out amongst various virtual servers. Also, I'm curious how to setup the storage on the servers. We do not have any NAS's, SAN'S or any budget for this. What would the best RAID level be to use? I'm thinking either RAID6 (which is currently used) however I'm concerned about the write speeds, or RAID10 but again I'm worried that I can only lose 1 drive (from the same mirror) as opposed to any 2 with RAID6. I realise I have a hot swap for this, but what if a further drive fails during a rebuild? Is the write penalty of RAID6 worth the extra reliability over RAID10? Or will it be too slow with all the roles I am planning, therefore RAID10 is my only real option? The reason for the needed redundancy is I am the only technician and I'm not always on-site. Options I've considered: 1) 5 drives in RAID6 set, 200gb for host OS, rest for VM storage. 1 drive for hot swap - this is how it is currently setup 2) 4 drives in RAID10 set, 200gb for host OS, rest for VM storage. 2 drives for hot swap 3) 4 drives in RAID10 set for VM storage, 2 drives in RAID1 set for host OS. No drives for hot swap - While this is probably the best option with the amount of drives I have, I don't like the idea of having no hot swap 4) 3 drives in RAID6 set for VM storage, 2 drives in RAID1 set for host OS. 1 drive for hot swap All options give us enough storage capacity for our files, etc. We don't have any budget for extra drives or extra hot swap HD chassis for the servers. We have about 70 clients and about 150 users. MAIN SERVER Intel Xeon 5520 @ 2.27 GHz (2 processors) 16GB RAM 6 x 1TB Seagate Barracuda ES.2 Enterprise SATA drives Intel SRCSATAWB RAID controller Virtual machine workload using Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2: DC01 - Active Directory Domain Controller / DNS server / Global catalog - 1GB RAM DC02 - Active Directory Domain Controller / DNS server / Global catalog - 1GB RAM Member Server - DHCP server, File server, Print server - 1GB RAM SCCM Member Server - 4GB RAM Third Party Software Member Server - A/V server, Ticketing software, etc - 4GB RAM Exchange 2007 - 4GB RAM - however we are probably migrating to a hosted solution, therefore freeing up resources BACKUP SERVER Intel Xeon E5410 @ 2.33GHz (2 processors) 16GB RAM 6 x 2TB WD RE4 SATA drives Intel SRCSASRB RAID controller Virtual machine workload using Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2: AppAssure backup software - 8GB RAM

Read the article

Asus M4A79XTD-EVO / AMD Phenom II X4 965 Crashes / BSOD / Hangs / Restarts

- by Tiby

I'll try to be as concise as possible because I have a lot to say about my problem, but I'd rather say it when asked or when I feel it's necessary, just to make this initial reading clearer. For about a year and a half I have periods when my system has all the problems in the title (I'll use the word 'crash' for either one). I'll list some patterns and what I tried to do and what were the results, but the list is not exclusive: usually it crashes when a CPU-intensive operation is in progress, like a game or video encoding or HD movie rendering, but also sometimes crashes when I'm doing nothing after a first crash the system is very unstable and sometimes it crashes even during POST, or doesn't boot at all Some months ago I went to a local service (one that you just put your computer on the table and sit there with a guy and trying to figure out the problem, very rare these days) and they used OCCT and it crashed every time he changed some part to test it out (PSU, RAM, video card, HDD). The last one was the CPU. They changed the CPU and it didn't crash any more. Then when they put my CPU back, it also didn't crash. We figured that the trouble was the thermal paste (probably some 2 years old) because it was the only thing changed while testing. Up until 2 weeks ago, I haven't had any more problems. 2 weeks ago the problems reappeared. I changed again the thermal paste, put some Arctic Silver 5, and for about a week everything worked perfect (tried some games, video encoding, no more crashes). But again it started crashing in the same fashion as the first time. But now, instead, I figured out a very odd behaviour: when I start some of the apps above, in most cases it crashes if I start OCCT and turn on the CPU test, and run any of the programs above, it doesn't crash, even if the CPU is on 100% load (and 65-70 degrees Celsius temperature) if I shut down OCCT and continue using the programs, it crashes in a very short period of time (even if the CPU is on 5-10% load and 40 degrees) There are so many patterns and temporary solutions that I figured out in this year and a half period of time, that I can't include them all because I don't know which one are more relevant, but I'll happily provide any details you ask. My system is: CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 965 (3400 MHz - 125W) MB: ASUS M4A79XTD - EVO RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8 GB (2 x 4GB) CL8 1600MHz Video: HIS Radeon HD5770 1GB PSU: Corsair 750W HDD: Western Digital 1TB OS: Win 7 Enterprise 64 BIT (also tried with Windows Server 2008 R2 Trial and Win XP)

Read the article

2nd Year College - Learning - Microsoft Server Products

- by Ryan

As the title says, I just finished my first year of college (majoring in Software Engineering). Fortunately my school likes Microsoft enough, and I can get pretty much anything I want that Microsoft sells. I also can get IBM Websphere and the like for free as well. Earlier this year, I set up an oldish computer (2.6 Pentium D, x64) to run ubuntu server headless. I'm predominately a Java developer, so Apache, Maven, Nexus, Sonar, SVN, etc made it onto the machine. It worked really well for personal and school projects, especially team projects (quick ramp up). Anyways, I started to pick up C# to complement my Java knowledge (don't judge me :P), and am interested in working with some of the associated Microsoft equivalents. The machine currently has the Ubuntu install, as well as Windows 7 Ultimate. I do all of my actual development work off my laptop, also running Windows 7 Ultimate. I was wondering what software you would recommend putting on the machine. I’m not actually serving anything off the machine itself, but in Ubuntu I had it doing integration tests with Hudson on every commit, and profiling my applications, etc, etc. The machine would be running headless, and I would remote into it. Here is what I am currently leaning towards / wondering about: Windows 7 Ultimate vs Windows Server 2008 (R2) (no one is really clear why I should go with one over the other) Windows Team Foundation Sharepoint (Never used it before, kind of meh about it) IBM Websphere or Glassfish (Some Java EE web server) SQL Server 2008 A DVCS In order to better control product conflicts / limit resource use, I’m wondering if I should install things into virtual machines (I can get VmWare or Microsoft Virtualization Products) I also plan on installing everything I had running under Linux (it’s almost entirely Java based development software, so it’ll run on both, only reason I went with ubuntu during the year was because the apache build seemed better). I’m primarily looking to become familiar with enterprise software development tools, as well as get something functional that will help my development process. (IE, I’ll still use project and assign tasks even though I might be the only one to assign tasks to, just to practice doing so). Is there any other software / configuration details I should explore? Opinions on my current list? I primarily use C#, Java, and PHP. I'm familiar with ruby, and python as well. Thanks!

Read the article

What the best way to achieve RPO of zero and lowest possible RTO (less than 15 minutes) with SQL 2008 R2?

- by Adrian Hope-Bailie

We are running a payments (EFT transaction processing) application which is processing high volumes of transactions 24/7 and are currently investigating a better way of doing DB replication to our disaster recovery site. Our current and previous strategies have included using both DoubleTake and Redgate to replicate data to a warm stand-by. DoubleTake is the supported solution from the payments software vendor however their (DoubleTake's) support in South Africa is very poor. We had a few issues and simply couldn't ever resolve them so we had to give up on DoubleTake. We have been using Redgate to manually read the data from the primary site (via queries) and write to the DR site but this is: A bad solution Getting the software vendor hot and bothered whenever we have support issues as it has a tendency to interfere with the payment application which is very DB intensive. We recently upgraded the whole system to run on SQL 2008 R2 Enterprise which means we should probably be looking at using some of the built-in replication features. The server has 2 fairly large databases with a mixture of tables containing highly volatile transactional data and pretty static configuration data. Replication would be done over a WAN link to a separate physical site and needs to achieve the following objectives. RPO: Zero loss - This is transactional data with financial impact so we can't lose anything. RTO: Tending to zero - The business depends on our ability to process transactions every minute we are down we are losing money I have looked at a few of the other questions/answers but none meet our case exactly: SQL Server 2008 failover strategy - Log shipping or replication? How to achieve the following RTO & RPO with logshipping only using SQL Server? What is the best of two approaches to achieve DB Replication? My current thinking is that we should use mirroring but I am concerned that for RPO:0 we will need to do delayed commits and this could impact the performance of the primary DB which is not an option. Our current DR process is to: Stop incoming traffic to the primary site and allow all in-flight transaction to complete. Allow the replication to DR to complete. Change network routing to route to DR site. Start all applications and services on the secondary site (Ideally we can change this to a warmer stand-by whereby the applications are already running but not processing any transactions). In other words the DR database needs to, as quickly as possible, catch up with primary and be ready for processing as the new primary. We would then need to be able to reverse this when we are ready to switch back. Is there a better option than mirroring (should we be doing log-shipping too) and can anyone suggest other considerations that we should keep in mind?

Read the article

One user sometimes gets an unknown certificate error opening Outlook

- by Chris

Let me clarify a little. This isn't an unknown certificate error it's an unknown certificate error in so much as I can't figure out where the certificate comes from. This happens on a Win 7 Enterprise machine connecting to Exchange 2010 with Outlook 2010. The error he gets is that the root is not trusted because it's a self-signed cert. Take a look at this screenshot because even if I had generated this myself I wouldn't have put "SomeOrganizationalUnit" or "SomeCity" or "SomeState", etc. (Red block covers our domain name.) I'm a little concerned this is a symptom of a security breach. Exchange 2010 has three certificates installed but none of them are this certificate. They all have different expiration dates (one is expired) and different meta-data. edit: There are two scenarios that I see the certificate warning and one of them I can reliably repeat. When the user leaves his computer on over night Outlook pops the Security Warning window. I don't know what time this happens. Using Outlook Anywhere if I connect to Exchange externally via a cellular USB modem the Security Warning window will appear every time I close and reopen Outlook. Whether I say Yes or No does not make a difference on whether or not I can connect to Exchange and send/receive email. In other words, I can always connect to Exchange. I've checked my two Exchange servers and my Cisco router for a certificate that matches this one and I can't find it. edit 2: Here is a screenshot of the Security Alert window. (I've been calling it Security Warning... My mistake.) edit 3: I stopped seeing this error several weeks ago but I can't tie it to any single event (because I just sort of realized that warning had stopped showing up) but I think I found the source of the certificate. Last week I found out that the certificate on our website DomainA.com was invalid. I knew that our web admin had installed a valid certificate so when I look into the problem I found out I was being presented with the invalid certificate that this posting is in regards to. The Exchange server's domain is mail.DomainA.com so I can only guess that Outlook was passing this invalid certificate through as it did some kind of check on DomainA.com. This issue is still a mystery because the certificate warning stopped appearing several weeks ago whereas the invalid certificate issue on the website was only fixed last week. It ended up being a problem with the website control panel. The valid certificate was installed but not being served for some reason and instead the self-signed cert was being served.

Read the article

Linux bonded Interfaces hanging periodically

- by David

I've several hosts that are showing problems with connectivity. When working from the command line, for example, typing is frozen for a second or so, then recovers - then it does it again. The most egregious example host would freeze (input) for 15-30 seconds, then recover and go out 5 seconds later. Switching cables didn't do anything - but removing one of the physical cables caused everything to clear up instantly (which why I think this is a network problem). Looking at the network I couldn't see any packets floating that would explain this. These ethernet interfaces (Gigabit Dell) were working normally previously, but since we moved the systems - and put them on a new set of switches - this has been a problem on multiple theoretically identically-configured hosts. The original switches were an HP Procurve 1810-24G and an HP Procurve 1800-24G connected with LLDP; the new switches are both Cisco SG 200-26, which I understand are rebranded Linksys switches. Is this caused by a problem with the switches? Is it the switch configurations? Are the Cisco switches incapable of handling this? I don't see where the configuration is located; I searched the usual /etc/sysconfig/network/devices but there's nothing in there about options (like mii polling) and nothing about the method of balancing the two. Searching scripts, I can't find anything in /etc/init.d/network either. The hosts are almost all Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.x systems (5.6, 5.7) but some are Ubuntu Server 10.04.3 Lucid Lynx. I need help with both if it comes to that. UPDATE: We're also seeing some problems with servers on the original switches. The HP switches and the Cisco switches are also interconnected (temporarily); there is a cable run from one switch to the next. Pings on any of these hosts show about one ICMP packet out of every 5-6 getting dropped (timed out). Could there be an interaction between the two switches? Oh, and the hosts are using bonding with Balance-RR as the method.

Read the article

linux disk usage report inconsistancy after removing file. cpanel inaccurate disk usage report

- by brando

relevant software: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.3 (Santiago) cpanel installed 11.34.0 (build 7) background and problem: I was getting a disk usage warning (via cpanel) because /var seemed to be filling up on my server. The assumption would be that there was a log file growing too large and filling up the partition. I recently removed a large log file and changed my syslog config to rotate the log files more regularly. I removed something like /var/log/somefile and edited /etc/rsyslog.conf. This is the reason I was suspicious of the disk usage report warning issued by cpanel that I was getting because it didn't seem right. This is what df was reporting for the partitions: $ [/var]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 9.9G 511M 8.9G 6% / tmpfs 5.9G 0 5.9G 0% /dev/shm /dev/sda1 99M 53M 42M 56% /boot /dev/sda8 883G 384G 455G 46% /home /dev/sdb1 9.9G 151M 9.3G 2% /tmp /dev/sda3 9.9G 7.8G 1.6G 84% /usr /dev/sda5 9.9G 9.3G 108M 99% /var This is what du was reporting for /var mount point: $ [/var]# du -sh 528M . clearly something funky was going on. I had a similar kind of reporting inconsistency in the past and I restarted the server and df reporting seemed to be correct after that. I decided to reboot the server to see if the same thing would happpen. This is what df reports now: $ [~]# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda2 9.9G 511M 8.9G 6% / tmpfs 5.9G 0 5.9G 0% /dev/shm /dev/sda1 99M 53M 42M 56% /boot /dev/sda8 883G 384G 455G 46% /home /dev/sdb1 9.9G 151M 9.3G 2% /tmp /dev/sda3 9.9G 7.8G 1.6G 84% /usr /dev/sda5 9.9G 697M 8.7G 8% /var This looks more like what I'd expect to get. For consistency this is what du reports for /var: $ [/var]# du -sh 638M . question: This is a nuisance. I'm not sure where the disk usage reports issued by cpanel get their info but it clearly isn't correct. How can I avoid this inaccurate reporting in the future? It seems like df reporting wrong disk usage is a strong indicator of the source problem but I'm not sure. Is there a way to 'refresh' the filesystem somehow so that the df report is accurate without restarting the server? Any other ideas for resolving this issue?

Read the article

Pushing Large Files to 500+ Computers [closed]

- by WMIF

I work with a team to manage 500-600 rented Windows 7 computers for an annual conference. We have a large amount of data that needs to be synced to these computers, up to 1 TiB. The computers are divided into rooms and connected through unmanaged gigabit switches. We prepare these computers ahead of time with the Windows installation and configuration, plus any files that we have available to us before we send the base image in for replication by the rental company. Every year, we have presenters approach on site with up to gigs of data that need to be pushed to the room that they will be presenting in. Sometimes they only have a few files that are small sizes, such as a slide PDF, but can sometimes be much larger 5 GiB. Our current strategy for pushing these files is using batch scripts and RoboCopy. For the large pushes, we actually use a BitTorrent client to generate a torrent file, and then we use the batch-RoboCopy to push the torrent into a folder on the remote machines that is being monitored by an installed BT client. Often times, this data needs to be pushed immediately with a small time window. We have several machines in a control room that are identical to the machines on the floor that we use for these pushes. We occasionally have a need to execute a program on the remote machines, and we currently use batch and PSexec to handle this task. We would love to be able to respond to these last minute pushes with "sorry, your own fault", but it won't happen. The BT method has allowed us to have a much faster response time, but the whole batch process can get messy when there are multiple jobs being pushed. We use Enterprise Ghost for other processes, and it doesn't work well in this large of scale, plus it is really quite expensive for a once-a-year task like this. EDIT: There is a hard requirement that the remote machines on the floor are running Windows. The control machines do not have a hard OS requirement. I would really like to stay away from Multicast because of complications with upstream routers. Is Multicast or BitTorrent the better way to go on this? Is there another protocol that might work better?

Read the article

Install XP Mode with VirtualBox Using the VMLite Plugin

- by Mysticgeek

Would you like to run XP Mode, but prefer Sun’s VirtualBox for virtualization? Thanks to the free VMLite plugin, you can quickly and easily run XP Mode in or alongside VirtualBox. Yesterday we showed you one method to install XP Mode in VirtualBox, unfortunately in that situation you lose XP’s activation, and it isn’t possible to reactivate it. Today we show you a tried and true method for running XP mode in VirtualBox and integrating it seamlessly with Windows 7. Note: You need to have Windows 7 Professional or above to use XP Mode in this manner. Install XP Mode Make sure you’re logged in with Administrator rights for the entire process. The first thing you’ll want to do is install XP Mode on your system (link below). You don’t need to install Windows Virtual PC. Go through and install XP Mode using the defaults. Install VirtualBox Next you’ll need to install VirtualBox 3.1.2 or higher if it isn’t installed already. If you have an older version of VirtualBox installed, make sure to update it. During setup you’re notified that your network connection will be reset. Check the box next to Always trust software from “Sun Microsystems, Inc.” then click Install. Setup only takes a couple of minutes, and does not require a reboot…which is always nice. Install VMLite XP Mode Plugin The next thing we’ll need to install is the VMLite XP Mode Plugin. Again Installation is simple following the install wizard. During the install like with VirtualBox you’ll be asked to install the device software. After it’s installed go to the Start menu and run VMLite Wizard as Administrator. Select the location of the XP Mode Package which by default should be in C:\Program Files\Windows XP Mode. Accept the EULA…and notice that it’s meant for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions. Next, name the machine, choose the install folder, and type in a password. Select if you want Automatic Updates turned on or not. Wait while the process completes then click Finish. The VMLite XP Mode will set up to run the first time. That is all there is to this section. You can run XP Mode from within the VMLite Workstation right away. XP Mode is fully activated already, and the Guest Additions are already installed, so there’s nothing else you need to do! XP Mode is the whole way ready to use. Integration with VirtualBox Since we installed the VMLite Plugin, when you open VirtualBox you’ll see it listed as one of your machines and you can start it up from here. Here we see VMLite XP Mode running in Sun VirtualBox. Integrate with Windows 7 To integrate it with Windows 7 click on Machine \ Seamless Mode… Here you can see the XP menu and Taskbar will be placed on top of Windows 7. From here you can access what you need from XP Mode. Here we see XP running on Virtual Box in Seamless Mode. We have the old XP WordPad sitting next to the new Windows 7 version of WordPad. This works so seamlessly you forget if your working in XP or Windows 7. In this example we have Windows Home Server Console running in Windows 7, while installing MSE from IE 6 in XP Mode. At the top of the screen you will still have access to the VMs controls. You can click the button to exit Seamless Mode, or simply hit the right “CTRL+L” Conclusion This is a very slick way to run XP Mode in VirtualBox on any machine that doesn’t have Hardware Virtualization. This method also doesn’t lose the XP Mode activation and is actually extremely easy to set up. If you prefer VMware (like we do), Check out how to run XP Mode on machines without Hardware Virtualization capability, and also how to create an XP Mode for Vista and Windows 7 Home Premium. Links Download XP Mode Download VirtualBox Download VMLite XP Mode Plugin for VirtualBox (Site Registration Required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Search for Install Packages from the Ubuntu Command LineHow To Run XP Mode in VirtualBox on Windows 7 (sort of)Install and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu LinuxInstall Monodevelop on Ubuntu LinuxInstall Flash Plugin Manually in Firefox on Vista 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

Read the article

Install XP Mode with VirtualBox Using the VMLite Plugin

- by Mysticgeek

Would you like to run XP Mode, but prefer Sun’s VirtualBox for virtualization? Thanks to the free VMLite plugin, you can quickly and easily run XP Mode in or alongside VirtualBox. Yesterday we showed you one method to install XP Mode in VirtualBox, unfortunately in that situation you lose XP’s activation, and it isn’t possible to reactivate it. Today we show you a tried and true method for running XP mode in VirtualBox and integrating it seamlessly with Windows 7. Note: You need to have Windows 7 Professional or above to use XP Mode in this manner. Install XP Mode Make sure you’re logged in with Administrator rights for the entire process. The first thing you’ll want to do is install XP Mode on your system (link below). You don’t need to install Windows Virtual PC. Go through and install XP Mode using the defaults. Install VirtualBox Next you’ll need to install VirtualBox 3.1.2 or higher if it isn’t installed already. If you have an older version of VirtualBox installed, make sure to update it. During setup you’re notified that your network connection will be reset. Check the box next to Always trust software from “Sun Microsystems, Inc.” then click Install. Setup only takes a couple of minutes, and does not require a reboot…which is always nice. Install VMLite XP Mode Plugin The next thing we’ll need to install is the VMLite XP Mode Plugin. Again Installation is simple following the install wizard. During the install like with VirtualBox you’ll be asked to install the device software. After it’s installed go to the Start menu and run VMLite Wizard as Administrator. Select the location of the XP Mode Package which by default should be in C:\Program Files\Windows XP Mode. Accept the EULA…and notice that it’s meant for Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions. Next, name the machine, choose the install folder, and type in a password. Select if you want Automatic Updates turned on or not. Wait while the process completes then click Finish. The VMLite XP Mode will set up to run the first time. That is all there is to this section. You can run XP Mode from within the VMLite Workstation right away. XP Mode is fully activated already, and the Guest Additions are already installed, so there’s nothing else you need to do! XP Mode is the whole way ready to use. Integration with VirtualBox Since we installed the VMLite Plugin, when you open VirtualBox you’ll see it listed as one of your machines and you can start it up from here. Here we see VMLite XP Mode running in Sun VirtualBox. Integrate with Windows 7 To integrate it with Windows 7 click on Machine \ Seamless Mode… Here you can see the XP menu and Taskbar will be placed on top of Windows 7. From here you can access what you need from XP Mode. Here we see XP running on Virtual Box in Seamless Mode. We have the old XP WordPad sitting next to the new Windows 7 version of WordPad. This works so seamlessly you forget if your working in XP or Windows 7. In this example we have Windows Home Server Console running in Windows 7, while installing MSE from IE 6 in XP Mode. At the top of the screen you will still have access to the VMs controls. You can click the button to exit Seamless Mode, or simply hit the right “CTRL+L” Conclusion This is a very slick way to run XP Mode in VirtualBox on any machine that doesn’t have Hardware Virtualization. This method also doesn’t lose the XP Mode activation and is actually extremely easy to set up. If you prefer VMware (like we do), Check out how to run XP Mode on machines without Hardware Virtualization capability, and also how to create an XP Mode for Vista and Windows 7 Home Premium. Links Download XP Mode Download VirtualBox Download VMLite XP Mode Plugin for VirtualBox (Site Registration Required) Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Search for Install Packages from the Ubuntu Command LineHow To Run XP Mode in VirtualBox on Windows 7 (sort of)Install and Use the VLC Media Player on Ubuntu LinuxInstall Monodevelop on Ubuntu LinuxInstall Flash Plugin Manually in Firefox on Vista 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 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Enable Check Box Selection in Windows 7 OnlineOCR – Free OCR Service Betting on the Blind Side, a Vanity Fair article 30 Minimal Logo Designs that Say More with Less LEGO Digital Designer – Free Create a Personal Website Quickly using Flavors.me

Read the article

Aggregate SharePoint Event/Items into your Calendar view using Calendar Overlay

- by eJugnoo

One of the most common features I have seen in common use for SharePoint (prior to 2010) in Intranet environments for Team site is Calendar’s. Not only the Calendar list type, but also the ability to add a Calendar view to any list that has the desired columns to construct a Calendar – such as Start, End, Title etc. While this was all great for a single site/calendar, the problem of having to track numerous calendar’s remained. With introduction of Outlook 2007 bi-directional integration with SharePoint, and particularly the ability of Outlook to overlay calendar helped bridge the gap. Now one could connect to number of team sites, and setup Calendar overlays in Outlook using varying colours, to easily identify event source and yet benefit from the plotting of events on single Calendar view. This was all good, but each user in your Enterprise was supposed to setup in a “pull” fashion. This is good for flexibility, not so good when you need to “push” consistency and productivity (re-use). So, what was missing on SharePoint is the ability to have server-side overlay’s that everyone can see – in a single place, aggregating multiple sources. Until SharePoint 2010 arrived! Calendars Overlay in SharePoint 2010 There are Calendar lists and Calendar views. View can be created for almost all lists, as far as you have desired column’s in a list like Start, End, Title etc. to be able to describe and plot an item in a Calendar format. In SharePoint 2010, create a new Calendar list. Go to Calendar ribbon tab, and click Calendar Overlay. You get the screen with list of existing Overlay’s associated with current Calendar (list – in our case). Click on “New Calendar”… Notice the breadcrumb! You are adding Overlay to existing list (Team Calendar – in our case). You have choice of “pulling” Calendar info from an existing Calendar (list/view) in SharePoint or even from Exchange! Set standard info like a name, description and decide the colour you want for the items in aggregated Calendar overlay. Select the source site/list/view, anywhere in farm. When you select Exchange as source of Calendar, you get option to add OWA and Exchange Web Service url. I will cover details of connecting with Exchange in another post, and focus on Overlay’s with SharePoint for this one. Once you have added a new Calendar overlay to existing Calendar veiw, you get something like below for Day view, Week view, and Month view respectively Notice the Overlay colours: Now, if you decide to connect this Calendar to Outlook to sync the items, it will only sync items from main view, and not from Overlay source. So such Overlay of calendar’s is server-side aggregation only. That increases my curiosity, so I try adding the Calendar list view as a web-part on a new page. As you see, this instance of view didn’t include item from source that we had added to default Calendar view. This is – probably – due to the fact that this is a new web-part view for the page. If you want to add overlay to this one, you have to redo that from Ribbon. This also means, subject to purpose and context you get the flexibility to decide what overlay is suited. Also you can only add 10 Overlay’s to an existing view instance. Conclusion Calendar Overlay is clearly a very useful feature that fills a gap of not being able to aggregate information from multiple sources into a Calendar view within context of current items. Source of items can be existing SharePoint calendar views on any site, or even Exchange (via OWA/Exchange web services). List type for source doesn’t matter, it just need a Calendar view type available. You can have 10 overlays. Overlays are for the specific view only, and are server-side only – which means they do not get synced in Outlook. While you can drag-drop current list items, you cannot edit overlay items as they are read-only within scope of current Calendar view. You can of course click on source Overlay item to edit at the source. I’d like to hear, how you think Overlay’s will help you in your case, or how you are already using them... Enjoy SharePoint! --Sharad

Read the article

Help with Design for Vacation Tracking System (C#/.NET/Access/WebServices/SOA/Excel) [closed]

- by Aaronaught

I have been tasked with developing a system for tracking our company's paid time-off (vacation, sick days, etc.) At the moment we are using an Excel spreadsheet on a shared network drive, and it works pretty well, but we are concerned that we won't be able to "trust" employees forever and sometimes we run into locking issues when two people try to open the spreadsheet at once. So we are trying to build something a little more robust. I would like some input on this design in terms of maintainability, scalability, extensibility, etc. It's a pretty simple workflow we need to represent right now: I started with a basic MS Access schema like this: Employees (EmpID int, EmpName varchar(50), AllowedDays int) Vacations (VacationID int, EmpID int, BeginDate datetime, EndDate datetime) But we don't want to spend a lot of time building a schema and database like this and have to change it later, so I think I am going to go with something that will be easier to expand through configuration. Right now the vacation table has this schema: Vacations (VacationID int, PropName varchar(50), PropValue varchar(50)) And the table will be populated with data like this: VacationID | PropName | PropValue -----------+--------------+------------------ 1 | EmpID | 4 1 | EmpName | James Jones 1 | Reason | Vacation 1 | BeginDate | 2/24/2010 1 | EndDate | 2/30/2010 1 | Destination | Spectate Swamp 2 | ... | ... I think this is a pretty good, extensible design, we can easily add new properties to the vacation like the destination or maybe approval status, etc. I wasn't too sure how to go about managing the database of valid properties, I thought of putting them in a separate PropNames table but it gets complicated to manage all the different data types and people say that you shouldn't put CLR type names into a SQL database, so I decided to use XML instead, here is the schema: <VacationProperties> <PropertyNames>EmpID,EmpName,Reason,BeginDate,EndDate,Destination</PropertyNames> <PropertyTypes>System.Int32,System.String,System.String,System.DateTime,System.DateTime,System.String</PropertyTypes> <PropertiesRequired>true,true,false,true,true,false</PropertiesRequired> </VacationProperties> I might need more fields than that, I'm not completely sure. I'm parsing the XML like this (would like some feedback on the parsing code): string xml = File.ReadAllText("properties.xml"); Match m = Regex.Match(xml, "<(PropertyNames)>(.*?)</PropertyNames>"; string[] pn = m.Value.Split(','); // do the same for PropertyTypes, PropertiesRequired Then I use the following code to persist configuration changes to the database: string sql = "DROP TABLE VacationProperties"; sql = sql + " CREATE TABLE VacationProperties "; sql = sql + "(PropertyName varchar(100), PropertyType varchar(100) "; sql = sql + "IsRequired varchar(100))"; for (int i = 0; i < pn.Length; i++) { sql = sql + " INSERT VacationProperties VALUES (" + pn[i] + "," + pt[i] + "," + pv[i] + ")"; } // GlobalConnection is a singleton new SqlCommand(sql, GlobalConnection.Instance).ExecuteReader(); So far so good, but after a few days of this I then realized that a lot of this was just a more specific kind of a generic workflow which could be further abstracted, and instead of writing all of this boilerplate plumbing code I could just come up with a workflow and plug it into a workflow engine like Windows Workflow Foundation and have the users configure it: In order to support routing these configurations throw the workflow system, it seemed natural to implement generic XML Web Services for this instead of just using an XML file as above. I've used this code to implement the Web Services: public class VacationConfigurationService : WebService { [WebMethod] public void UpdateConfiguration(string xml) { // Above code goes here } } Which was pretty easy, although I'm still working on a way to validate that XML against some kind of schema as there's no error-checking yet. I also created a few different services for other operations like VacationSubmissionService, VacationReportService, VacationDataService, VacationAuthenticationService, etc. The whole Service Oriented Architecture looks like this: And because the workflow itself might change, I have been working on a way to integrate the WF workflow system with MS Visio, which everybody at the office already knows how to use so they could make changes pretty easily. We have a diagram that looks like the following (it's kind of hard to read but the main items are Activities, Authenticators, Validators, Transformers, Processors, and Data Connections, they're all analogous to the services in the SOA diagram above). The requirements for this system are: (Note - I don't control these, they were given to me by management) Main workflow must interface with Excel spreadsheet, probably through VBA macros (to ease the transition to the new system) Alerts should integrate with MS Outlook, Lotus Notes, and SMS (text messages). We also want to interface it with the company Voice Mail system but that is not a "hard" requirement. Performance requirements: Must handle 250,000 Transactions Per Second Should be able to handle up to 20,000 employees (right now we have 3) 99.99% uptime ("four nines") expected Must be secure against outside hacking, but users cannot be required to enter a username/password. Platforms: Must support Windows XP/Vista/7, Linux, iPhone, Blackberry, DOS 2.0, VAX, IRIX, PDP-11, Apple IIc. Time to complete: 6 to 8 weeks. My questions are: Is this a good design for the system so far? Am I using all of the recommended best practices for these technologies? How do I integrate the Visio diagram above with the Windows Workflow Foundation to call the ConfigurationService and persist workflow changes? Am I missing any important components? Will this be extensible enough to support any scenario via end-user configuration? Will the system scale to the above performance requirements? Will we need any expensive hardware to run it? Are there any "gotchas" I should know about with respect to cross-platform compatibility? For example would it be difficult to convert this to an iPhone app? How long would you expect this to take? (We've dedicated 1 week for testing so I'm thinking maybe 5 weeks?) Many thanks for your advices, Aaron

Read the article

OBIEE 11.1.1 - OBIEE 11g Full Sample App on VMware Player 4

- by user809526

The Full Sample App is designed to run on Virtual Box. Let's describe how to run it on VMware Player 4. Open Virtualization Format Tool http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/automationtools/ovf VMware Player Documentation https://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/player_pubs.html Full Sample App Deployment Guide sampleapp107-vbimage-deployguide-453583.pdf INSTALL VMplayer 4.0.0 as root LINUX # sh VMware-Player-4.0.0-471780.x86_64.bundle (A new VM is not needed and can be deleted later after that installation is completed. "I will install OS later" - blank hard disk Guest: linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5-64bits => rename to RHEL target: eg /a/root/vmware/ Max disk size: 5 GB (will be deleted) Disk: Single file Dummy RHEL.vmk, RHEL.vmdk is generated. "Delete VM from Disk" in VM Player.) Copy Full Sample App files to target /a/root/vmware/ WARNING: Select a target eg /a/root/vmware/ with lots of free space, 95 GB. Check checksums (md5sum). Please do it! ff85c7eacf7fb8c382e98da875e879e1 Sampleapp_v107_GA-disk1.vmdk 973258cb3c7d64ab03ae853278cf2233 Sampleapp_v107_GA-disk2.vmdk e576be16e36d810479736bfb15d050f5 Sampleapp_v107_GA-disk3.vmdk 3455df77279e53e07d5fee6712f1597d Sampleapp_v107_GA-disk4.vmdk OVF FILE Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf CONVERSION $ cd /a/root/vmware/ LINUX $ /usr/bin/ovftool -tt=ovf --compress=1 -dm=monolithicSparse Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf . [dot] Opening OVF source: Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf Warning: No manifest file Opening OVF target: . Writing OVF package: Sampleapp_v107_GA/Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf Disk Transfer Completed Completed successfully WINDOWS CYGWIN $ /cygdrive/c/VMwarePlayer/OVFTool/ovftool.exe -tt=ovf --compress=1 -dm=monolithicSparse Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf . [dot] Opening OVF source: Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf Warning: No manifest file Opening OVF target: . Writing OVF package: Sampleapp_v107_GA\Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf Disk Transfer Completed Completed successfully /a/root/vmware$ du -sk 49095328 . [50 GB already occupied] IMPORT - First start of VM Player 4: /usr/bin/vmplayer "Open a Virtual Machine" Browse to /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf [the new generated .ovf] "Import Virtual Machine" dialog Name: Sampleapp_v107_GA Location: /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/storage [was /home/tdubois/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA] "Import" "The import failed because /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/Sampleapp_v107_GA.ovf did not pass OVF specification conformance or virtual hardware compliance checks. Click Retry to relax OVF specification..." "Retry" ; Long import /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/storage/Sampleapp_v107_GA.vmx and new .vmdk files are created. /a/root/vmware$ du -sk 95551384 . [95 GB occupied] Full Sample App GUEST SETUP "Edit VM settings" min 3GB, 2+ processors, network bridged. For OBIEE + Essbase testing use 8 GB RAM hardware. At first time lauch of Full Sample App, leave OEL booting for several minutes undisturbed. Problem with X display server may occur [/usr/bin/Xorg ; man Xorg]. "Failed to start the X server.... Would you like to view the X server output to diagnose the problem?" "No" [tab key] "Would you like to try to configure the X server? Note that you will need the root password for this." "Yes" [oracle] X Display Settings 800x600 saved in /etc/X11/xorg.conf "Trying to restart the X server" Login as root/oracle in guest OEL. In guest OEL, Virtual Machine > Install VMware Tools... Extract archive VMwareTools-8.8.0-471268.tar.gz all files in writable local directory eg /root In Terminal run Perl script # cd /root/vmware-tools-distrib ; ./vmware-install.pl [keep all default answers] Set keyboard layout System > Preferences > Keyboard > Layouts Restart X server eg System > Log Out root... , relogin Modify X resolution System > Preferences > Screen Resolution Full Sample App OEL login: oracle/oracle ; root/oracle [default US keyboard layout] Credentials are described in the 'sampleapp107-vbimage-deployguide-453583.pdf' The large files in /a/root/vmware/ /a/root/vmware/Sampleapp_v107_GA/ may be removed. FAILURE REMARK: Adding the 4 original Sampleapp_v107_GA-disks[1234].vmdk to VM Player does NOT work as described below. "Edit VM settings" "Remove" "Hard Disk" "Edit VM settings" "Add" "Hard Disk" "Next" "Use an existing virtual disk" "Browse" "Finish" "Keep existing format" "Ok" for each 4 disks settings one by one. Start VM Player 4. "You do not have write access to a partition" Allow all Sampleapp_v107 OEL linux launches. OEL stalls silently after 'Checking filesystems'.

Read the article

Oracle Announces New Oracle Exastack Program for ISV Partners

- by pfolgado

Oracle Exastack Program Enables ISV Partners to Leverage a Scalable, Integrated Infrastructure to Deliver Their Applications Tuned and Optimized for High-Performance News Facts Enabling Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and other members of Oracle Partner Network (OPN) to rapidly build and deliver faster, more reliable applications to end customers, Oracle today introduced Oracle Exastack Ready, available now, and Oracle Exastack Optimized, available in fall 2011 through OPN. The Oracle Exastack Program focuses on helping ISVs run their solutions on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud -- integrated systems in which the software and hardware are engineered to work together. These products provide partners with a lower cost and high performance infrastructure for database and application workloads across on-premise and cloud based environments. Leveraging the new Oracle Exastack Program in which applications can qualify as Oracle Exastack Ready or Oracle Exastack Optimized, partners can use available OPN resources to optimize their applications to run faster and more reliably -- providing increased performance to their end users. By deploying their applications on Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, ISVs can reduce the cost, time and support complexities typically associated with building and maintaining a disparate application infrastructure -- enabling them to focus more on their core competencies, accelerating innovation and delivering superior value to customers. After qualifying their applications as Oracle Exastack Ready, partners can note to customers that their applications run on and support Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud component products including Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux, Oracle Database and Oracle WebLogic Server. Customers can be confident when choosing a partner's Oracle Exastack Optimized application, knowing it has been tuned by the OPN member on Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud with a goal of delivering optimum speed, scalability and reliability. Partners participating in the Oracle Exastack Program can also leverage their Oracle Exastack Ready and Oracle Exastack Optimized applications to advance to Platinum or Diamond level in OPN. Oracle Exastack Programs Provide ISVs a Reliable, High-Performance Application Infrastructure With the Oracle Exastack Program ISVs have several options to qualify and tune their applications with Oracle Exastack, including: Oracle Exastack Ready: Oracle Exastack Ready provides qualifying partners with specific branding and promotional benefits based on their adoption of Oracle products. If a partner application supports the latest major release of one of these products, the partner may use the corresponding logo with their product marketing materials: Oracle Solaris Ready, Oracle Linux Ready, Oracle Database Ready, and Oracle WebLogic Ready. Oracle Exastack Ready is available to OPN members at the Gold level or above. Additionally, OPN members participating in the program can leverage their Oracle Exastack Ready applications toward advancement to the Platinum or Diamond levels in the OPN Specialized program and toward achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status. Oracle Exastack Optimized: When available, for OPN members at the Gold level or above, Oracle Exastack Optimized will provide direct access to Oracle technical resources and dedicated Oracle Exastack lab environments so OPN members can test and tune their applications to deliver optimal performance and scalability on Oracle Exadata Database Machine or Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. Oracle Exastack Optimized will provide OPN members with specific branding and promotional benefits including the use of the Oracle Exastack Optimized logo. OPN members participating in the program will also be able to leverage their Oracle Exastack Optimized applications toward advancement to Platinum or Diamond level in the OPN Specialized program. Oracle Exastack Labs and ISV Enablement: Dedicated Oracle Exastack lab environments and related technical enablement resources (including Guided Learning Paths and Boot Camps) will be available through OPN for OPN members to further their knowledge of Oracle Exastack offerings, and qualify their applications for Oracle Exastack Optimized or Oracle Exastack Ready. Oracle Exastack labs will be available to qualifying OPN members at the Gold level or above. Partners are eligible to participate in the Oracle Exastack Ready program immediately, which will help them meet the requirements to attain Oracle Exastack Optimized status in the future. Guidelines for Oracle Exastack Optimized, as well as Oracle Exastack Labs will be available in fall 2011. Supporting Quotes "In order to effectively differentiate their software applications in the marketplace, ISVs need to rapidly deliver new capabilities and performance improvements," said Judson Althoff, Oracle senior vice president of Worldwide Alliances and Channels and Embedded Sales. "With Oracle Exastack, ISVs have the ability to optimize and deploy their applications with a complete, integrated and cloud-ready infrastructure that will help them accelerate innovation, unlock new features and functionality, and deliver superior value to customers." "We view performance as absolutely critical and a key differentiator," said Tom Stock, SVP of Product Management, GoldenSource. "As a leading provider of enterprise data management solutions for securities and investment management firms, with Oracle Exadata Database Machine, we see an opportunity to notably improve data processing performance -- providing high quality 'golden copy' data in a reduced timeframe. Achieving Oracle Exastack Optimized status will be a stamp of approval that our solution will provide the performance and scalability that our customers demand." "As a leading provider of Revenue Intelligence solutions for telecommunications, media and entertainment service providers, our customers continually demand more readily accessible, enriched and pre-analyzed information to minimize their financial risks and maximize their margins," said Alon Aginsky, President and CEO of cVidya Networks. "Oracle Exastack enables our solutions to deliver the power, infrastructure, and innovation required to transform our customers' business operations and stay ahead of the game." Supporting Resources Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Oracle Exastack Datasheet Judson Althoff blog Connect with the Oracle Partner community at OPN on Facebook, OPN on LinkedIn, OPN on YouTube, or OPN on Twitter

Read the article

SQL SERVER – Database Dynamic Caching by Automatic SQL Server Performance Acceleration

- by pinaldave

My second look at SafePeak’s new version (2.1) revealed to me few additional interesting features. For those of you who hadn’t read my previous reviews SafePeak and not familiar with it, here is a quick brief: SafePeak is in business of accelerating performance of SQL Server applications, as well as their scalability, without making code changes to the applications or to the databases. SafePeak performs database dynamic caching, by caching in memory result sets of queries and stored procedures while keeping all those cache correct and up to date. Cached queries are retrieved from the SafePeak RAM in microsecond speed and not send to the SQL Server. The application gets much faster results (100-500 micro seconds), the load on the SQL Server is reduced (less CPU and IO) and the application or the infrastructure gets better scalability. SafePeak solution is hosted either within your cloud servers, hosted servers or your enterprise servers, as part of the application architecture. Connection of the application is done via change of connection strings or adding reroute line in the c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file on all application servers. For those who would like to learn more on SafePeak architecture and how it works, I suggest to read this vendor’s webpage: SafePeak Architecture. More interesting new features in SafePeak 2.1 In my previous review of SafePeak new I covered the first 4 things I noticed in the new SafePeak (check out my article “SQLAuthority News – SafePeak Releases a Major Update: SafePeak version 2.1 for SQL Server Performance Acceleration”): Cache setup and fine-tuning – a critical part for getting good caching results Database templates Choosing which database to cache Monitoring and analysis options by SafePeak Since then I had a chance to play with SafePeak some more and here is what I found. 5. Analysis of SQL Performance (present and history): In SafePeak v.2.1 the tools for understanding of performance became more comprehensive. Every 15 minutes SafePeak creates and updates various performance statistics. Each query (or a procedure execute) that arrives to SafePeak gets a SQL pattern, and after it is used again there are statistics for such pattern. An important part of this product is that it understands the dependencies of every pattern (list of tables, views, user defined functions and procs). From this understanding SafePeak creates important analysis information on performance of every object: response time from the database, response time from SafePeak cache, average response time, percent of traffic and break down of behavior. One of the interesting things this behavior column shows is how often the object is actually pdated. The break down analysis allows knowing the above information for: queries and procedures, tables, views, databases and even instances level. The data is show now on all arriving queries, both read queries (that can be cached), but also any types of updates like DMLs, DDLs, DCLs, and even session settings queries. The stats are being updated every 15 minutes and SafePeak dashboard allows going back in time and investigating what happened within any time frame. 6. Logon trigger, for making sure nothing corrupts SafePeak cache data If you have an application with many parts, many servers many possible locations that can actually update the database, or the SQL Server is accessible to many DBAs or software engineers, each can access some database directly and do some changes without going thru SafePeak – this can create a potential corruption of the data stored in SafePeak cache. To make sure SafePeak cache is correct it needs to get all updates to arrive to SafePeak, and if a DBA will access the database directly and do some changes, for example, then SafePeak will simply not know about it and will not clean SafePeak cache. In the new version, SafePeak brought a new feature called “Logon Trigger” to solve the above challenge. By special click of a button SafePeak can deploy a special server logon trigger (with a CLR object) on your SQL Server that actually monitors all connections and informs SafePeak on any connection that is coming not from SafePeak. In SafePeak dashboard there is an interface that allows to control which logins can be ignored based on login names and IPs, while the rest will invoke cache cleanup of SafePeak and actually locks SafePeak cache until this connection will not be closed. Important to note, that this does not interrupt any logins, only informs SafePeak on such connection. On the Dashboard screen in SafePeak you will be able to see those connections and then decide what to do with them. Configuration of this feature in SafePeak dashboard can be done here: Settings -> SQL instances management -> click on instance -> Logon Trigger tab. Other features: 7. User management ability to grant permissions to someone without changing its configuration and only use SafePeak as performance analysis tool. 8. Better reports for analysis of performance using 15 minute resolution charts. 9. Caching of client cursors 10. Support for IPv6 Summary SafePeak is a great SQL Server performance acceleration solution for users who want immediate results for sites with performance, scalability and peak spikes challenges. Especially if your apps are packaged or 3rd party, since no code changes are done. SafePeak can significantly increase response times, by reducing network roundtrip to the database, decreasing CPU resource usage, eliminating I/O and storage access. SafePeak team provides a free fully functional trial www.safepeak.com/download and actually provides a one-on-one assistance during such trial. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology

Read the article

Ich bin jetzt Oracle Certified Associate!

- by britta.wolf

Jan Peuker, Absolvent der Hochschule Augsburg und University of Melbourne, hat vor kurzem das Zertifikat Oracle Database 10g Administrator Certified Associate erworben. Er hat uns netterweise mit diesem kleinen Text versorgt: "Die Oracle Zertifizierung beginnt üblicherweise mit dem Oracle Certified Associate. Für diese Zertifizierung ist noch keine tiefgehende Praxiserfahrung notwendig. Um den Titel des Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Associate zu erlangen, muss man eine Prüfung zu SQL (z.B. 1Z0-051) sowie eine Prüfung zur Administration (1Z0-045) ablegen. Beide Prüfungen dauern 2 Stunden und haben ca. 80 Fragen von denen etwa drei Viertel richtig beantwortet werden müssen, um zu bestehen. Eine Note gibt es nicht. Die Prüfungen finden immer elektronisch statt, die Software erlaubt das Überspringen und Markieren von Fragen. Während meiner Arbeitszeit nach meinem ersten Studium hatte ich häufig mit dem Oracle Datenbanksystem zu tun. Als ich mein Aufbaustudium an der University of Melbourne absolvierte, wurde mir von der Studienberaterin vorgeschlagen, den Kurs „Advanced Database Administration" zu belegen. Dieser beruht vollständig auf den offiziellen Oracle Trainings-Unterlagen zur Prüfung in Oracle Administration und erlaubt daher die Teilnahme an der offiziellen Zertifizierung. Im Gegensatz zur SQL Prüfung, deren Inhalt man sich gut selbst aneignen kann, hilft bei der Administrator-Zertifizierung ein echter Kurs mit Seminar ungemein. Viele Konzepte lassen sich schwer aus einem Buch lernen. Die Bestandteile der SGA oder das Anlegen von Benutzern mögen leicht zugänglich sein, Redo- und Undo-Management sowie Backup und Recovery kann man nur verstehen, wenn man Beispiele hat und diese an einem Testsystem (keine "kleine" XE-Datenbank, sondern eine "richtige" Datenbank mit Enterprise Manager) ausprobieren kann. Übermäßig viel Zeit habe ich keinesfalls investiert, weil das Grundsystem sehr logisch ist. Für die weniger nachvollziehbaren Bereiche, besonders die neuen Features, habe ich mir Fachbegriffe auf Lernkarten geschrieben und die Trainingsunterlagen am System durchgespielt. Die Prüfung war für mich überraschend schwer, weil das einfache "Tagesgeschäft" deutlich unterrepräsentiert ist. In den Multiple-Choice-Fragen werden viele Besonderheiten und Use-Cases abgefragt (online findet man viele Beispielfragen). Da beide Tests in Englisch sind, sollte man nicht nur in der Terminologie des Oracle Datenbanksystems sondern auch in Fachbegriffen der Datenbankwelt allgemein bewandert sein. Oft machen einzelne Wörter (z.B. redundant oder synchronized, redo log oder redo log buffer) die richtige Antwort aus, ein signifikanter Anteil der Fragen beruht auf Zeichnungen oder Diagrammen, die beschrieben werden müssen. So muss man z.B. anhand eines Log-Auszugs beurteilen, warum die Datenbank nicht sauber geschlossen wurde. Allgemeines Wissen über Datenbanksysteme hilft leider nicht viel, da überproportional viele Fragen zu Oracle-spezifischen Themen gestellt werden, wie z.B. Optimierungs-Dienste (ADDM), Flashback, SQL Loader und ein wenig PL/SQL. Die SQL Prüfung ist dagegen sehr geradlinig - was aber nicht einfacher heißt. Hier kommt es mehr auf Auswendiglernen von Syntax an, was mir persönlich nicht liegt. Vor allem als Anwendungsprogrammierer kennt man oft proprietäre SQL-Funktionen nicht, es fällt schwer, sich einzelne Datumsberechnungsfunktionen, Typkonvertierungen, Namespaces oder krude Join-Methoden zu merken. Auf all dies wird in der Prüfung aber sehr viel Wert gelegt. Auch hier wird man wieder mit zweideutigen Multiple-Choice Fragen konfrontiert, bei denen sich z.B. nur die Reihenfolge der Parameter unterscheidet. Zudem sind die Parameter auch nicht ausgeschrieben, sondern in einem Entity-Relationship-Diagramm gegeben, wobei man auf die richtigen Datentypen achten muss. Mir persönlich war die Zeit fast zu knapp bemessen, weil man bei vielen Fragen erst ein Diagramm, einen Datenauszug oder einen längeren Text lesen muss, um dann die richtigen Statements zu finden. Hier helfen Lernkarten also nur bedingt - stattdessen üben, üben, üben. Durch den relativ niedrigen Pass-Score von 70% kann man es sich leisten, unsichere Fragen zuerst zu überspringen und erst nachdem alle sicheren beantwortet sind, zu überdenken. Die Prüfung ist auf jeden Fall fair. Ich habe durch das Oracle-Zertifizierungsprogramm viel gelernt. Die Datenbanken unter meiner Aufsicht laufen deutlich performanter und liefern höhere Verfügbarkeit, weil ich Probleme eliminieren konnte, die mir vorher nicht klar waren. Eine klassische Misskonfiguration, volle Archive Logs, weil diese mit zu lange gehaltenem Flashback-Speicher kollidieren, konnte ich bereits in einer der ersten Stunden meines Kurses an der Uni Melbourne mit Hilfe meines Professors klären. Beide Prüfungen waren problemlos parallel zu anderen Prüfungen zu absolvieren. Empfehlen kann ich eine gründliche Online-Recherche aber auch die Oracle Press-Bücher, welche mit Prüfungsfragen am Ende jedes Kapitels aufwarten. So spart man sich Zeit und ist trotzdem gut vorbereitet. Auch wenn ich keine Laufbahn als Administrator einschlagen werde, bin ich froh die zugrundeliegende Technologie vieler Anwendungen besser zu verstehen. Für meine tägliche Arbeit als Anwendungsentwickler hat es mir vor allem geholfen, Oracle-Konzepte z.B. im Bereich der Transaktionssteuerung und Wiederherstellung zu verstehen und damit viele Open Source Produkte jetzt sinnvoller bewerten und empfehlen zu können." Eine Übersicht der Zertifizierungspfade finden Sie auf der Oracle University Webseite (dann einfach "Deutschland""auswählen und anschließend auf den Punkt "Zertifizierungen" klicken).

Read the article

Test Drive Windows 7 Online with Virtual Labs

- by Matthew Guay

Did you miss out on the Windows 7 public beta and want to try it out before you actually make the leap and upgrade? Maybe you want to learn how to deploy new features in a business environment. Here’s how you can test drive Windows 7 directly from your browser. Whether you manage 10,000 desktops or simply manage your own laptop, it’s usually best to test out a new OS before installing it. If you’re upgrading from Windows XP you may find many things unfamiliar. Microsoft has setup a special Windows 7 Test Drive website with resources to help IT professionals test and deploy Windows 7 in their workplaces. This is a great resource to try out Windows 7 from the comfort of your browser, and look at some of the new features without even installing it. Please note that the online version is not nearly as responsive as a full standard install of Windows 7. It also does not run the full Aero interface or desktop effects, and may refresh slowly depending on your Internet connection. So don’t judge Windows 7’s performance based on this virtual lab, but use it as a way to learn more about Windows 7 without installing it. Getting Started To test drive Windows 7, visit Microsoft’s Windows 7 Test Drive website (link below). You will need to run the Windows 7 Test Drive in Internet Explorer, as it requires Active X support. We received this error when attempting to run the Test Drive in Firefox: Now, click the “Take a Test Drive” link on the bottom left of the page. This site includes several test drives to demonstrate different features of Windows 7 and its related ecosystem of products including Windows Server 2008 R2, some of which, including the XP Mode test drive, are not yet ready. For this test, we selected the MED-V Test drive, as this includes Office 2007 and 2010 so you can test them in Windows 7 as well. Simply select the test drive you want, and click “Try it now!” If you haven’t run a Windows test drive before, you will be asked to install an ActiveX control. Click the link to install. Click the yellow bar at the top of the page in Internet Explorer, and select to Install the add-on. You may have to approve a UAC prompt to finish the install. Once this is finished, click the link on the bottom of the page to return to your test drive. The test drive page should automatically refresh; if it doesn’t, click refresh to reload it. Now the test drive will load the components. Once its fully loaded, click the link to launch Windows 7 in a new window. You may see a prompt warning that the server may have been impersonated. Simply click Yes to proceed. The test lab will give you some getting started directions; click Close Window when you’re ready to try out Windows 7. Here’s the default desktop in the Windows 7 test drive. You can use it just like a normal Windows computer, but do note that it may function slowly depending on your internet connection. This test drive includes both Office 2007 and Office 2010 Tech Preview, so you can try out both in Windows 7 as well. You can try out the new Windows 7 applications such as the reworked Paint with the Ribbon interface from Office. Or you can even test the newest version of Media Center, though it will warn you that it may not function good with the down-scaled graphics in the test drive. Most importantly, you can try out the new features in Windows 7, such as Jumplists and even Aero Snap. Once again, these features will not function the quickest, but it does let you test them out. While working with the Virtual Lab, there are different tasks it walks you through. You can also download a copy of the lab manual in PDF format to help you navigate through the various objectives. The test drive system is running Microsoft Forefront Security, the enterprise security solution from which Microsoft Security Essentials has adapted components from. Conclusion These virtual labs are great for tech students, or those of you who want to get a first-hand trial of the new features. Also, if you’re not sure on how to deploy something and want to practice in a virtual environment, these labs are quite valuable.While these labs are geared toward IT professionals, it’s a good way for anyone to try out Windows 7 features from the comfort of your current computer. Test Drive Windows 7 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Mount Multiple ISO Images Using Virtual CloneDriveHow To Delete a VHD in Windows 7Keyboard Shortcuts for VMware WorkstationMount an ISO image in Windows 7 or VistaHow To Turn a Physical Computer Into A Virtual Machine with Disk2vhd 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 DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 If it were only this easy SyncToy syncs Files and Folders across Computers on a Network (or partitions on the same drive) Classic Cinema Online offers 100’s of OnDemand Movies OutSync will Sync Photos of your Friends on Facebook and Outlook Windows 7 Easter Theme YoWindoW, a real time weather screensaver

Read the article

SQL Developer at Oracle Open World 2012

- by thatjeffsmith

We have a lot going on in San Francisco this fall. One of the most personal exciting bits, for what will be my 4th or 5th Open World, is that this will be my FIRST as a member of Team Oracle. I’ve presented once before, but most years it was just me pressing flesh at the vendor booths. After 3-4 days of standing and talking, you’re ready to just go home and not do anything for a few weeks. This time I’ll have a chance to walk around and talk with our users and get a good idea of what’s working and what’s not. Of course it will be a great opportunity for you to find us and get to know your SQL Developer team! 3.4 miles across and back – thanks Ashley for signing me up for the run! This year is going to be a bit crazy. Work wise I’ll be presenting twice, working a booth, and proctoring several of our Hands-On Labs. The fun parts will be equally crazy though – running across the Bay Bridge (I don’t run), swimming the Bay (I don’t swim), having my wife fly out on Wednesday for the concert, and then our first WhiskyFest on Friday (I do drink whisky though.) But back to work – let’s talk about EVERYTHING you can expect from the SQL Developer team. Booth Hours We’ll have 2 ‘demo pods’ in the Exhibition Hall over at Moscone South. Look for the farm of Oracle booths, we’ll be there under the signs that say ‘SQL Developer.’ There will be several people on hand, mostly developers (yes, they still count as people), who can answer your questions or demo the latest features. Come by and say ‘Hi!’, and let us know what you like and what you think we can do better. Seriously. Monday 10AM – 6PM Tuesday 9:45AM – 6PM Wednesday 9:45AM – 4PM Presentations Stop by for an hour, pull up a chair, sit back and soak in all the SQL Developer goodness. You’ll only have to suffer my bad jokes for two of the presentations, so please at least try to come to the other ones. We’ll be talking about data modeling, migrations, source control, and new features in versions 3.1 and 3.2 of SQL Developer and SQL Developer Data Modeler. Day Time Event Monday 10:454:45 What’s New in SQL Developer Why Move to Oracle Application Express Listener Tueday 10:1511:455:00 Using Subversion in Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Oracle SQL Developer Tips & Tricks Database Design with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Wednesday 11:453:30 Migrating Third-Party Databases and Applications to Oracle Exadata 11g Enterprise Options and Management Packs for Developers Hands On Labs (HOLs) The Hands On Labs allow you to come into a classroom environment, sit down at a computer, and run through some exercises. We’ll provide the hardware, software, and training materials. It’s self-paced, but we’ll have several helpers walking around to answer questions and chat up any SQL Developer or database topic that comes to mind. If your employer is sending you to Open World for all that great training, the HOLs are a great opportunity to capitalize on that. They are only 60 minutes each, so you don’t have to worry about burning out. And there’s no homework! Of course, if you do want to take the labs home with you, many are already available via the Developer Day Hands-On Database Applications Developer Lab. You will need your own computer for those, but we’ll take care of the rest. Wednesday PL/SQL Development and Unit Testing with Oracle SQL Developer 10:15 Performance Tuning with Oracle SQL Developer 11:45 Thursday The Soup to Nuts of Data Modeling with Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler 11:15 Some Parting Advice Always wanted to meet your favorite Oracle authors, speakers, and thought-leaders? Don’t be shy, walk right up to them and introduce yourself. Normal social rules still apply, but at the conference everyone is open and up for meeting and talking with attendees. Just understand if there’s a line that you might only get a minute or two. It’s a LONG conference though, so you’ll have plenty of time to catch up with everyone. If you’re going to be around on Tuesday evening, head on over to the OTN Lounge from 4:30 to 6:30 and hang out for our Tweet Meet. That’s right, all the Oracle nerds on Twitter will be there in one place. Be sure to put your Twitter handle on your name tag so we know who you are!

Read the article

Seriously, It’s Time to Get Your Content Act Together

- by Mike Stiles

Branded content, content marketing, social content, brand journalism, we’re seeing those terms more and more. Why? The technology tools are coming together. We should know. We can gather big data, crunch it, listen to the public, moderate, respond, get to know the customer intimately, know what they like, know what they want, we can target, distribute, amplify, measure engagement and reaction, modify strategy and even automate a great deal of all that. An amazing machine, a sleek, smooth-running engine has been built such that all the parts can interact and work together to deliver peak performance and maximum output. But that engine isn’t going anywhere without any gas. Content is the gas. Yes, we curate other people’s content. We can siphon their gas. There’s tech to help with that too. But as for the creation of original, worthwhile content made for a specific audience, our audience, machines can’t do that…at least not yet. Curated content is great. But somebody has to originate the content for it to be curated and shared. And since the need for good, curated content is obviously large and the desire to share is there, it’s a winning proposition for a brand to be a consistent producer of original content. And yet, it feels like content is an issue we’re avoiding. There’s a reluctance to build a massive pipeline if you have no idea what you’re going to run through it. The C-suite often doesn’t know what content is, that it’s different from ads, where to get it, who makes it, how long it should be, what the point of it is if there’s no hard sell of the product, what it costs, how to use it, how to measure it, how to make sure it’s good, or how to make sure it will keep flowing. It could be the reason many brands aren’t pulling the trigger on socially enabling the enterprise. And that’s a shame, because there are a lot of creative, daring, experimental, uniquely talented entertainers and journalists chomping at the bit to execute content for brands. But for many corporate executives, content is “weird,” and the people who make it are even weirder. The content side of the equation is human. It’s art, but art that can be informed by data. The natural inclination is for brands to turn to their agencies for such creative endeavors. But agencies are falling into one of two categories. They’re failing to transition from ads to content. In “Content Era, What’s the Role of Agencies?” Alexander Jutkowitz says agencies were made for one-hit campaigns, not ongoing content. Or, they’re ready and capable but can’t get clients to do the right things. Agencies have to make money, even if it means continuing to do the wrong things because that’s all the client will agree to. So what we wind up with in the pipeline is advertising, marketing-heavy content, content that was obviously created or spearheaded by non-creative executives, random & inconsistent content, copy written for SEO bots, and other completely uninteresting nightmares. Frank Rose, author of “The Art of Immersion,” writes, “Content without story and excitement is noise pollution.” In the old days, you made an ad and inserted it into shows made by people who knew what they were doing. You could bask in that show’s success and leverage their audience. Now, you are tasked with attracting, amassing and holding your own audience. You may just want to make, advertise and sell your widgets. But now there’s a war on for a precious commodity, attention. People are busy. They have filters to keep uninteresting and irrelevant things out. They value their time and expect value back when they give it up. Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, says, "Your customers don't care about you, your products, your services…they care about themselves, their wants and their needs." Is it worth getting serious about content and doing it right? 61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers custom content (Custom Content Council). Interesting content is one of the top 3 reasons people follow brands on social (Content+). 78% of consumers think organizations that provide custom content want to build good relationships with them (TMG Custom Media). On the B2B side, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company info in a series of articles vs. an ad. So what’s the hang-up? Cited barriers to content marketing are lack of human resources (42%) and lack of budget (35%). 54% of brands don’t have a single on-site, dedicated content creator. And only 38% of brands have a content marketing strategy. Tech has built the biggest, most incredible stage for brands that’s ever been built. Putting something on that stage is your responsibility. Do a bad show, or no show at all, and you’ll be the beautiful, talented actress that never got discovered. @mikestilesPhoto: Gabriella Fabbri, stock.xchng

Read the article

Connecting to DB2 from SSIS

- by Christopher House

The project I'm currently working on involves moving various pieces of data from a legacy DB2 environment to some SQL Server and flat file locations. Most of the data flows are real time, so they were a natural fit for the client's MQSeries on their iSeries servers and BizTalk to handle the messaging. Some of the data flows, however, are daily batch type transmissions. For the daily batch transmissions, it was decided that we'd use SSIS to pull the data direct from DB2 to either a SQL Server or flat file. I'm not at all an SSIS guy, I've done a bit here and there, but mainly for situations were we needed to move data from a dev environment to QA, mostly informal stuff like that. And, as much as I'm not an SSIS guy, I'm even less a DB2/iSeries guy. Prior to this engagement, my knowledge of DB2 was limited to the fact that it's an IBM product and that it was probably a DBMS flatform (that's what the DB in DB2 means, right?). One of my first goals when I came onto this project was to develop of POC SSIS package to pull some data from DB2 and dump it to a flat file. It sounded like a pretty straight forward task. As always, the devil is in the details. Configuring the DB2 connection manager took a bit of trial and error. As such, I thought I'd post my experiences here in hopes that they might save someone the efforts I went through. That being said, please keep in mind, as I pointed out, I'm not at all a DB2 guy, so my terminology and explanations may not be 100% spot on. Before you get started, you need to figure out how you're going to connect to DB2. From the research I did, it looks like there are a few options. IBM has both an OLE DB and .Net data provider which can be found here. I installed their client access tools and tried to use both the .Net and OLE DB providers but I received an error message from both when attempting to connect to the iSeries that indicated I needed a license for a product called DB2 Connect. I inquired with one of my client's iSeries resources about a license for this product and it appears they didn't have one, so that meant the IBM drivers were out. The other option that I found quite a bit of discussion around was Microsoft's OLE DB Provider for DB2. This driver is part of the feature pack for SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition and can be downloaded here. As it turns out, I already had Microsoft's driver installed on my dev VM, which stuck me as odd since I hadn't installed it. I discovered that the driver is installed with the BizTalk adapter pack for host systems, which was also installed on my VM. However, it looks like the version used by the adapter pack is newer than the version provided in the SQL Server feature pack. Once you get the driver installed, create a connection manager in your package just like you normally would and select the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for DB2 from the list of available drivers. After you select the driver, you'll need to enter in your host name, login credentials and initial catalog. A couple of things to note here. First, the Initial catalog needs to be the same as your host name. Not sure why that is, but trust me, it just does. Second, for credentials, in my environment, we're using what the client's iSeries people refer to as "profiles". I guess this is similar to SQL auth in the SQL Server world. In other words, they've given me a username and password for connecting to DB, so I've entered it here. Next, click the Data Links button. On the Data Links screen, enter your package collection on the first tab. Package collection is one of those DB2 concepts I'm still trying to figure out. From the little bit I've read, packages are used to control SQL compilation and each DB2 connection needs one. The package collection, I believe, controls where your package is created. One of the iSeries folks I've been working with told me that I should always use QGPL for my package collection, as QGPL is "general purpose" and doesn't require any additional authority. Next click the ellipsis next to the Network drop-down. Here you'll want to enter your host name again. Again, not sure why you need to do this, but trust me, my connection wouldn't work until I entered my hostname here. Finally, go to the Advanced tab, select your DBMS platform and check Process binary as character. My environment is DB2 on the iSeries and iSeries is the replacement for AS/400, so I selected DB2/AS400 for my platform. Process binary as character was necessary to handle some of the DB2 data types. I had a few columns that showed all their data as "System.Byte[]". Checking Process binary as character resolved this. At this point, you should be good to go. You can go back to the Connection tab on the Data Links dialog to perform a couple of tests to validate your configuration. The Test Connection button is obvious, this just verifies you can connect to the host using the configuration data you've entered. The Packages button will attempt to connect to the host and create the packages required to execute queries. This isn't meant to be a comprehensive look SSIS and DB2, these are just some of the notes I've come up with since I've started working with DB2 and SSIS. I'm sure as I continue developing my packages, I'll find more quirks and will post them here.

Read the article

How to Modify Data Security in Fusion Applications

- by Elie Wazen

The reference implementation in Fusion Applications is designed with built-in data security on business objects that implement the most common business practices. For example, the “Sales Representative” job has the following two data security rules implemented on an “Opportunity” to restrict the list of Opportunities that are visible to an Sales Representative: Can view all the Opportunities where they are a member of the Opportunity Team Can view all the Opportunities where they are a resource of a territory in the Opportunity territory team While the above conditions may represent the most common access requirements of an Opportunity, some customers may have additional access constraints. This blog post explains: How to discover the data security implemented in Fusion Applications. How to customize data security Illustrative example. a.) How to discover seeded data security definitions The Security Reference Manuals explain the Function and Data Security implemented on each job role. Security Reference Manuals are available on Oracle Enterprise Repository for Oracle Fusion Applications. The following is a snap shot of the security documented for the “Sales Representative” Job. The two data security policies define the list of Opportunities a Sales Representative can view. Here is a sample of data security policies on an Opportunity. Business Object Policy Description Policy Store Implementation Opportunity A Sales Representative can view opportunity where they are a territory resource in the opportunity territory team Role: Opportunity Territory Resource Duty Privilege: View Opportunity (Data) Resource: Opportunity A Sales Representative can view opportunity where they are an opportunity sales team member with view, edit, or full access Role: Opportunity Sales Representative Duty Privilege: View Opportunity (Data) Resource: Opportunity Description of Columns Column Name Description Policy Description Explains the data filters that are implemented as a SQL Where Clause in a Data Security Grant Policy Store Implementation Provides the implementation details of the Data Security Grant for this policy. In this example the Opportunities listed for a “Sales Representative” job role are derived from a combination of two grants defined on two separate duty roles at are inherited by the Sales Representative job role. b.) How to customize data security Requirement 1: Opportunities should be viewed only by members of the opportunity team and not by all the members of all the territories on the opportunity. Solution: Remove the role “Opportunity Territory Resource Duty” from the hierarchy of the “Sales Representative” job role. Best Practice: Do not modify the seeded role hierarchy. Create a custom “Sales Representative” job role and build the role hierarchy with the seeded duty roles. Requirement 2: Opportunities must be more restrictive based on a custom attribute that identifies if a Opportunity is confidential or not. Confidential Opportunities must be visible only the owner of the Opportunity. Solution: Modify the (2) data security policy in the above example as follows: A Sales Representative can view opportunity where they are a territory resource in the opportunity territory team and the opportunity is not confidential. Implementation of this policy is more invasive. The seeded SQL where clause of the data security grant on “Opportunity Territory Resource Duty” has to be modified and the condition that checks for the confidential flag must be added. Best Practice: Do not modify the seeded grant. Create a new grant with the modified condition. End Date the seeded grant. c.) Illustrative Example (Implementing Requirement 2) A data security policy contains the following components: Role Object Instance Set Action Of the above four components, the Role and Instance Set are the only components that are customizable. Object and Actions for that object are seed data and cannot be modified. To customize a seeded policy, “A Sales Representative can view opportunity where they are a territory resource in the opportunity territory team”, Find the seeded policy Identify the Role, Object, Instance Set and Action components of the policy Create a new custom instance set based on the seeded instance set. End Date the seeded policies Create a new data security policy with custom instance set c-1: Find the seeded policy Step 1: 1. Find the Role 2. Open 3. Find Policies Step 2: Click on the Data Security Tab Sort by “Resource Name” Find all the policies with the “Condition” as “where they are a territory resource in the opportunity territory team” In this example, we can see there are 5 policies for “Opportunity Territory Resource Duty” on Opportunity object. Step 3: Now that we know the policy details, we need to create new instance set with the custom condition. All instance sets are linked to the object. Find the object using global search option. Open it and click on “condition” tab Sort by Display name Find the Instance set Edit the instance set and copy the “SQL Predicate” to a notepad. Create a new instance set with the modified SQL Predicate from above by clicking on the icon as shown below. Step 4: End date the seeded data security policies on the duty role and create new policies with your custom instance set. Repeat the navigation in step Edit each of the 5 policies and end date them 3. Create new custom policies with the same information as the seeded policies in the “General Information”, “Roles” and “Action” tabs. 4. In the “Rules” tab, please pick the new instance set that was created in Step 3.

Read the article

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 08, 2011

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, February 08, 2011Popular ReleasesyoutubeFisher: youtubeFisher 3.0 [beta]: What's new: Supports YouTube's new layout Complete internal refactoringNearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v5.0: Version 5.0 of the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine, containing the following improvements: .NET 4.0 as target framework using ASP.NET MVC 3. All views migrated to Razor for cleaner markup. Alternate template (Layout file) for mobile devices 4 Bug Fixes since Version 4.1 Visit the project Roadmap for more details.fuv: 1.0 release, codename Chopper Joe: features: search/replace :o to open file :s to save file :q to quitASP.NET MVC Project Awesome, jQuery Ajax helpers (controls): 1.7: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager html generation optimized new features for the lookup (add additional search data ) live demo went aeroEnhSim: EnhSim 2.3.6 BETA: 2.3.6 BETAThis release supports WoW patch 4.06 at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 Changes since 2.3.0 ...TestApi - a library of Test APIs: TestApi v0.6: TestApi v0.6 comes with the following changes: TestApi code development has been moved to Codeplex: Moved TestApi soluton to VS 2010; Moved all source code to Codeplex. All development work is done there now. Fault Injection API: Integrated the unmanaged FaultInjectionEngine.dll COM component in the build; Cleaned up FaultInjectionEngine.dll to build at warning level 4; Implemented “FaultScope” which allows for in-process fault injection; Added automation scripts & sample program; ...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.5.5: AutoChat now allows up to 6 items. Items with nr. 7-0 will be removed! News page url's are now opened in the default browser Added a context menu to the system tray icon (thanks to Alex Banagos) AutoChat now allows configuring the Chat Keys and the Modifier Key The recent files list now supports compact and full mode Fix: Swapped mouse buttons are now properly detected Fix: Sometimes the Play button was pressed while still greyed out Champion: Karma Note: You can also run the u...mojoPortal: 2.3.6.2: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2362-released.aspx Note that we have separate deployment packages for .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0 The deployment package downloads on this page are pre-compiled and ready for production deployment, they contain no C# source code. To download the source code see the Source Code Tab I recommend getting the latest source code using TortoiseHG, you can get the source code corresponding to this release here.Rawr: Rawr 4.0.19 Beta: Rawr is now web-based. The link to use Rawr4 is: http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.phpThis is the Cataclysm Beta Release. More details can be found at the following link http://rawr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=237262 As of the 4.0.16 release, you can now also begin using the new Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!This is a pre-alpha release of the WPF version, there are likely to be a lot of issues. If you have a problem, please follow the Posting Guidelines and put it into the Issue Trac...IronRuby: 1.1.2: IronRuby 1.1.2 is a servicing release that keeps on improving compatibility with Ruby 1.9.2 and includes IronRuby integration to Visual Studio 2010. We decided to drop 1.8.6 compatibility mode in all post-1.0 releases. We recommend using IronRuby 1.0 if you need 1.8.6 compatibility. In this release we fixed several major issues: - problems that blocked Gem installation in certain cases - regex syntax: the parser was replaced with a new one that is much more compatible with Ruby 1.9.2 - cras...Pyxis 2: Production Release: Pyxis 2.0.0.13 - Full Production Release This release of Pyxis 2 offers you a wide range of features: Launch Applications in their own threads & domains Render alpha-blended icons on the desktop Support for SD & USB drives Online App Store Dynamic & Static IP support Menus & Modals Over a dozen GUI controls File selection dialogs Folder selection dialog Application, Bootloader, and Firmware Updating Update Release Notes Much More!Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Sample Browser v2 (CTP Release): Sample Browser v2 (CTP Release) http://i3.codeplex.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=1code&DownloadId=205917MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1 (4): There was a small issue with the previous release that caused errors when installing the templates in VS10 Express. This release corrects the error. Only use this if you encountered issues when installing the previous release. No changes in the binaries.Finestra Virtual Desktops: 1.0: Finally the version 1.0 release! Sorry for the long delay since the last release, but I think that you'll find this release to be really smooth, really stable, and a really great enhancement to Windows. New features include: Windows 7 taskbar integration Major performance and usability improvements Redesigned look and feel New name: Finestra Better automatic updating Much faster full-screen switcher Fixes Windows 7 hotkey collisions by default Updated installerFacebook C# SDK: 5.0.2 (BETA): PLEASE TAKE A FEW MINUTES TO GIVE US SOME FEEDBACK: Facebook C# SDK Survey This is third BETA release of the version 5 branch of the Facebook C# SDK. Remember this is a BETA build. Some things may change or not work exactly as planned. We are absolutely looking for feedback on this release to help us improve the final 5.X.X release. This release contains some breaking changes. Particularly with authentication. After spending time reviewing the trouble areas that people are having using th...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 for MVC3: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. ChangelogTargeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4.0 Additional UpdatePriority options for generating XML sitemaps Allow to specify target on SiteMapTitleAttribute One action with multiple routes and breadcrumbs Medium Trust optimizations Create SiteMapTitleAttribute for setting parent title IntelliSense for your sitemap with MvcSiteMapSchem...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab: SharePoint Guidance 2010 Hands On Lab consists of six labs: one for logging, one for service location, and four for application setting manager. Each lab takes about 20 minutes to walk through. Each lab consists of a PDF document. You can go through the steps in the doc to create solution and then build/deploy the solution and run the lab. For those of you who wants to save the time, we included the final solution so you can just build/deploy the solution and run the lab.Value Injecter - object(s) to -> object mapper: 2.3: it lets you define your own convention-based matching algorithms (ValueInjections) in order to match up (inject) source values to destination values. inject from multiple sources in one InjectFrom added ConventionInjectionMobile Device Detection and Redirection: 0.1.11.11: Improvements to Beta Release The following changes have been made in version 0.1.11.11: BlackBerry Version 6 devices (such as the 9800 Torch) are now correctly identified with a dedicated handler. Android powered devices are now correctly identified. Minor change to Provider.cs to improve performance and optimise data sent to 51Degrees.mobi if the option is enabled. GC.collect is no longer called at any point. All garbage collection now happens automatically IMPORTANT CHANGES This rele...TweetSharp: TweetSharp v2.0.0.0 - Preview 10: Documentation for this release may be found at http://tweetsharp.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=UserGuide&referringTitle=Documentation. Note: This code is currently preview quality. Preview 9 ChangesAdded support for trends Added support for Silverlight 4 Elevated WP7 fixes Third Party Library VersionsHammock v1.1.7: http://hammock.codeplex.com Json.NET 4.0 Release 1: http://json.codeplex.comNew Projectsbisolu_sendus: bisolu smsBlack & Scholes: Black & Scholes OptionsCosLabs: CosLabs makes it easy to see the full capabilities of the Cosmos operating system toolkit. CosLabs has a number of experiments to find new and unique uses for Cosmos. It's developed in C#.DeployToAzure: DeployToAzure allows automating deployment of Windows Azure project and making it a part of TFS 2010 build process without using PowerShell and Azure Management CmdLets. Digital: Educational purposesDiscogsNet: DiscogsNet is a .NET library to query the Discogs.com API and parse the Discogs XML data dump files. It's developed in C# and usable from any .NET language. The API of the library is focused on ease of use and intuitiveness.DJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC: DJME - The jQuery extensions for ASP.NET MVC is a lightweight framework which helps you build rich user interfaces for ASP.NET MVC while enjoying great developer productivity. DokuDB: Visio AddIn to document different versions of a databaseDtsConfig Explorer: This project is a windows froms application that helps explore a SSIS dtsconfig file with an easy wayEveryDNS Service: Windows service to automatically send your current IP address to everydns.net for dynamic domains. Automatically monitors and sends IP address changes without having to be logged in. The project is built in C# targeting the .NET 4.0 framework.EvoSim - Evolution Simulation: EvoSim is a pet project to learn aspects of MVVM, WPF/Silverlight, and Parallel Processing features of .NET 4. The goal is to simulate a world filled with creatures that move, eat, reproduce, and die according to Darwinian evolutionary principles. It is tile and turn based.EZStorage: A storage library for XNA based on EasyStorage but abstracting in an XML based file list for each folder, allowing file listings on all folders and details like file creation dates which are no longer possible in XNA 4.0ForeverBell's Snake: A snake game written in VB.NET.Glauca Browser: This is a browser with a webkit core inside.Grauers SharePoint 2010 Custom MasterPage Feature: This is a SharePoint 2010 Custom MastePage feature. Custom Master and custom CSS Blog post about the project: http://www.grauers.net/archive/2011/02/07/build-a-sharepoint-2010-custom-mastepage-with-visual-studio-2010.aspxHamming Code Sample: HamCode demonstrate how the hamming code work, result of coded and decoded data. Shows the benefits of hamming method/codeHydroDesktop Mercurial Test: This is a trial version of the HydroDesktop project (hydrodesktop.codeplex.com) running on Mercurial source code repository. We first want to test whether the data update/download is happening fine before switching the official HydroDesktop website to the new system.LateBindingApi: Creates .Net Proxy Components from COM Type Libraries.Middlesex County College Library Wireless Auto Login: The Middlesex County College Library Wireless Auto Login automatically logs a computer in to the Middlesex County College (Edison, NJ) Library's WifiMobility: Mobility is a small program that reads from a text file. The text file includes everything about the program, right down to that cute little bunny on your desktop! Try Mobility today!OpenMFC: OpenMFC is opensource version of MFC for using with C/C++ compiler without MFC.Orchard Content Sharing: This Orchard module adds content sharing functionality via integration with AddThis.com sharing service.Orchard Wunder Weather Widget: This project is used to maintain the source code for the Wunder Weather widget in the Orchard gallery.Professional Audio Recorder: Professional Audio Recorder is a Audio Recorder for Windows Phone 7Python Node Info for Umbraco: Designed to assist Umbraco macro authors who are writing their macros in Python. Provides a helper macro that, when inserted into a page, will enable the display of an info panel showing the page node properties as represented in Python.Softina.Graphs: Softina.Graphs is a graph managment and algorithm utility. It includes a set of libraries to work with graph processing. It is written using .net framework with c# language and MS Visual Studio 2008. Client applications is created using devexpress components.spangesharp: Application to help people learn c#Visual Studio Private Extension Gallery: Add a new tab in the Visual Studio extension manager to manage private extensions.WCF Home Framework: Home Framework is a service-oriented framework able to facilitate deploy and management of wcf services in a mid-size scenario project.Windows Phone 7 Video Player: This project contains all the source of an application for Windows Phone 7 to consume an RSS Media exposed by our Smooth Streaming Video Player plugin for WordPress (http://smooth.codeplex.com).WOL Shopping List: This is a shoppingList version of WOL's NearMeWP7RSSReader: Updated RSSReader project for Windows Phone 7 using the RTM tools with the October 2010 update.Xen (XNA Extended) Framework: The Xen Framework is a set of libraries that provides and extends XNA 4.0 functionality to make game development easier and faster while producing clean, maintainable code. Xen frees you up to spend more time building your game.

Read the article

Three Steps to Becoming an Expert Oracle Linux System Administrator

- by Antoinette O'Sullivan

Oracle provides a complete system administration curriculum to take you from your initial experience of Unix to being an expert Oracle Linux system administrator. You can take these live instructor-led courses from your own desk through live-virtual events or by traveling to an education center through in-class events. Step 1: Unix and Linux Essentials This 3-day course is designed for users and administrators who are new to Oracle Linux. It will help you develop the basic UNIX skills needed to interact comfortably and confidently with the operating system. Below is a sample of the in-class events already on the schedule. Location Date Delivery Language Vivoorde, Belgium 28 October 2013 English Berlin, Germany 15 July 2013 German Utrecht, Netherlands 19 August 2013 Dutch Bucarest, Romania 12 August 2013 Romanian Ankara, Turkey 6 January 2013 Turkish Nairobi, Kenya 5 August 2013 English Kaduna, Nigeria 15 July 2013 English Woodmead, South Africa 15 July 2013 English Jakarta, Indonesia 23 September 2013 English Petaling Jaya, Malaysia 22 July 2013 English Makati City, Philippines 3 July 2013 English Bangkok, Thailand 20 November 2013 English Auckland, New Zealand 5 August 2013 English Melbourne, Australia 12 August 2013 English Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Canada 3 September 2013 English San Francisco and San Jose, CA, United States 15 July 2013 English Reston, VA, United States 7 August 2013 English Edison, NJ, and King of Prussia, PA, United States 3 September 2013 English Denver, CO, United States 25 September 2013 English Cambridge, MA, and Roseville MN, United States 6 November 2013 English Phoenix, AZ, and Sacramento, CA, United States 25 November 2013 English Step 2: Oracle Linux System Administration Through this 5-day course, become a knowledgeable Oracle Linux system administrator, learning how to install Oracle Linux and the benefits of Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel and Ksplice. Below is a sample of in-class events already on the schedule. Location Date Delivery Language Vienna, Austria 1 July 2013 German Vivoorde, Belgium 18 November 2013 English Zagreb, Croatia 16 September 2013 Croatian London, England 3 September 2013 English Manchester, England 9 September 2013 English Paris, France 29 July 2013 French Budapest, Hungary 8 July 2013 Hungarian Utrecht, Netherland 2 September 2013 Dutch Warsaw, Poland 15 July 2013 Polish Bucharest, Romania 2 December 2013 Romanian Ankara, Turkey 7 October 2013 Turkish Istanbul, Turkey 9 September 2013 Turkish Nairobi, Kenya 12 August 2013 English Petaling Jaya, Malaysia 29 July 2013 English Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 21 October 2013 English Makati City, Philippines 8 July 2013 English Singapore 24 July 2013 English Bangkok, Thailand 26 July 2013 English Canberra, Australia 19 August 2013 English Melbourne, Australia 16 September 2013 English Sydney, Australia 19 August 2013 English Mississauga, Canada 26 August 2013 English Ottawa, Canada 4 November 2013 English Phoenix, AZ, United States 7 October 2013 English Belmont, CA, United States 23 September 2013 English Irvine, CA, United States 18 November 2013 English Sacramento, CA, United States 19 August 2013 English San Francisco, CA, United States 15 July 2013 English Denver, CO, United States 19 August 2013 English Schaumburg, IL, United States 26 August 2013 English Indianapolis, IN, United States 14 October 2013 English Columbia, MD, United States 30 September 2013 English Roseville, MN, United States 19 August 2013 English St Louis, MO, United States 7 October 2013 English Edison, NJ, United States 28 October 2013 English Beaverton, OR, United States 12 August 2013 English Pittsburg, PA, United States 9 December 2013 English Reston, VA, United States 12 August 2013 English Brookfield, WI, United States 30 September 2013 English Sao Paolo, Brazil 15 July 2013 Brazilian Portugese Step 3: Oracle Linux Advanced System Administration This new 3-day course is ideal for administrators who want to learn about managing resources and file systems while developing troubleshooting and advanced storage administration skills. You will learn about Linux Containers, Cgroups, btrfs, DTrace and more. Below is a sample of in-class events already on the schedule. Location Date Delivery Language Melbourne, Australia 9 October 2013 English Roseville, MN, United States 3 September 2013 English To register for or learn more about these courses, go to http://oracle.com/education/linux. Watch this video to learn more about Oracle's operating system training.

Search Results

Search found 6716 results on 269 pages for 'blackberry enterprise'.

Page 250/269 | < Previous Page | 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 | Next Page >

- by Paul Williams

- by user135217

- by Anon

- by Tiby

- by Ryan

- by Adrian Hope-Bailie

- by Chris

- by David

- by brando

- by WMIF

- by Mysticgeek

- by Mysticgeek

- by eJugnoo

- by Aaronaught

- by user809526

- by pfolgado

- by pinaldave

- by britta.wolf

- by Matthew Guay

- by thatjeffsmith

- by Mike Stiles

- by Christopher House

- by Elie Wazen

- by Antoinette O'Sullivan

< Previous Page | 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 | Next Page >