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• getpriority() function in linux

  - by inquisitive

  Hi all.. may i know the exact usage of getpriority() call used in linux.. even after searching thru net, i couldnt understand it exactly.. can someone explain it with an example.. thnx in advance :)

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• When I do ""+1 I get a String - Why

  - by steve

  Hi, Please understand firstly that I fully understand that Java will return a String when I use ""+int. What I'm really not sure about is what exactly is happening down at the memory aspect. How exactly is java performing this conversion. I mean this in a very indepth way, not 'auto boxing' or anything like that :) I'm hoping someone with a deeper understanding can explain what exactly is done.

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• Look up or insert new element to string list in Haskell

  - by nightscream

  So I want to have a function that takes a String and a list as an argument, and checks if that element is already on the list, if it is, returns the same list, if it isnt, adds it to the list and returns it, 'im a begginer with haskell so heres what I have tried with no sucess: check:: String ->[String] ->[String] check x [] = []++[x] check x (y:xs) | x==y = (y:xs) | otherwise = check x xs Can someone point me the way ? thks

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• The method replaceVariables(String) is undefined for the type

  - by kate

  I get this message for as many times as I have used replaceVariables in my code. I have added the referenced libraries, but I don't know what else to do. Can someone please help me?

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• When do we use windows service ?

  - by M.H

  Are there situations that we should use a windows service ? I am building a client-server project (c#) and the server supposed to work alone without any user so someone advised me to use a windows service to run the server, is this right ? or there are a better solutions ?

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• How can I register a DLL which I created in C++

  - by Jannibelli

  I created a DLL in C++ using Visual Studio 2005. My problem is that I cannot register this DLL. Show me the error: "LoadLibrary(MyDll.dll) failed. The specified module could not be found." Someone help me? Thanks

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• Android programming help

  - by Tuffy G

  I want to start making a program for a local charity on the Android platform. Where can go I for resources and tutorials to learn? I'm very new at this, so would like something simple that can be followed by someone with minimal technical knowledge.

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• Regular expression on range

  - by user1515425

  Sorry for these silly Question but i couldn't find a clue on my own I am a beginner at regexp language and I want someone help to find and replace the following value in content-range Http=Header Content-Range: bytes x-xxxxx/xxxx i want to find the xxxx value and replace it with yyyyy so the value will be x-xxxxxx/yyyy for example 0-423423/7777777 to be 0-423423/9999999 Can anyone help me in it thanks in advance

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• % operator for time calculation

  - by Chris

  I am trying to display minutes and seconds based on a number of seconds. I have: float seconds = 200; float mins = seconds / 60.0; float sec = mins % 60.0; [timeIndexLabel setText:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%.2f , %.2f", mins,seconds]]; But I get an error: invalid operands of types 'float' and 'double' to binary 'operator%' And I don't understand why... Can someone throw me a bone!?

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Dealing with HTTP w00tw00t attacks

  - by Saif Bechan

  I have a server with apache and I recently installed mod_security2 because I get attacked a lot by this: My apache version is apache v2.2.3 and I use mod_security2.c This were the entries from the error log: [Wed Mar 24 02:35:41 2010] [error] [client 88.191.109.38] client sent HTTP/1.1 request without hostname (see RFC2616 section 14.23): /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:) [Wed Mar 24 02:47:31 2010] [error] [client 202.75.211.90] client sent HTTP/1.1 request without hostname (see RFC2616 section 14.23): /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:) [Wed Mar 24 02:47:49 2010] [error] [client 95.228.153.177] client sent HTTP/1.1 request without hostname (see RFC2616 section 14.23): /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:) [Wed Mar 24 02:48:03 2010] [error] [client 88.191.109.38] client sent HTTP/1.1 request without hostname (see RFC2616 section 14.23): /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:) Here are the errors from the access_log: 202.75.211.90 - - [29/Mar/2010:10:43:15 +0200] "GET /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:) HTTP/1.1" 400 392 "-" "-" 211.155.228.169 - - [29/Mar/2010:11:40:41 +0200] "GET /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:) HTTP/1.1" 400 392 "-" "-" 211.155.228.169 - - [29/Mar/2010:12:37:19 +0200] "GET /w00tw00t.at.ISC.SANS.DFind:) HTTP/1.1" 400 392 "-" "-" I tried configuring mod_security2 like this: SecFilterSelective REQUEST_URI "w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS\.DFind" SecFilterSelective REQUEST_URI "\w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS" SecFilterSelective REQUEST_URI "w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS" SecFilterSelective REQUEST_URI "w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS\.DFind:" SecFilterSelective REQUEST_URI "w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS\.DFind:\)" The thing in mod_security2 is that SecFilterSelective can not be used, it gives me errors. Instead I use a rule like this: SecRule REQUEST_URI "w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS\.DFind" SecRule REQUEST_URI "\w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS" SecRule REQUEST_URI "w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS" SecRule REQUEST_URI "w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS\.DFind:" SecRule REQUEST_URI "w00tw00t\.at\.ISC\.SANS\.DFind:\)" Even this does not work. I don't know what to do anymore. Anyone have any advice? Update 1 I see that nobody can solve this problem using mod_security. So far using ip-tables seems like the best option to do this but I think the file will become extremely large because the ip changes serveral times a day. I came up with 2 other solutions, can someone comment on them on being good or not. The first solution that comes to my mind is excluding these attacks from my apache error logs. This will make is easier for me to spot other urgent errors as they occur and don't have to spit trough a long log. The second option is better i think, and that is blocking hosts that are not sent in the correct way. In this example the w00tw00t attack is send without hostname, so i think i can block the hosts that are not in the correct form. Update 2 After going trough the answers I came to the following conclusions. To have custom logging for apache will consume some unnecessary recourses, and if there really is a problem you probably will want to look at the full log without anything missing. It is better to just ignore the hits and concentrate on a better way of analyzing your error logs. Using filters for your logs a good approach for this. Final thoughts on the subject The attack mentioned above will not reach your machine if you at least have an up to date system so there are basically no worries. It can be hard to filter out all the bogus attacks from the real ones after a while, because both the error logs and access logs get extremely large. Preventing this from happening in any way will cost you resources and they it is a good practice not to waste your resources on unimportant stuff. The solution i use now is Linux logwatch. It sends me summaries of the logs and they are filtered and grouped. This way you can easily separate the important from the unimportant. Thank you all for the help, and I hope this post can be helpful to someone else too.

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• NTFS Permissions - Access Denied even though Explicit Allow and no Deny

  - by chris613

  I'm hoping someone can help me with this NTFS permissions problem. The short version is that I can't write a new file in F:\SomeDir even though I seem to be granted full permissions via both the "Domain Admins" group and a second unprivileged group. The "Effective Permissions" tab in the explorer permissions UI shows that I have full control, and there are no "Deny"s anywhere in the ACL or anything else that looks unusual. I am logged into the machine over RDP and accessing the disk directly, not through a share. F:\SomeDir>set U USERDNSDOMAIN=THEOFFICE.LOCAL USERDOMAIN=THEOFFICE USERNAME=thisisme USERPROFILE=C:\Users\thisisme F:\SomeDir>icacls . . BUILTIN\Administrators:(I)(F) CREATOR OWNER:(I)(OI)(CI)(IO)(F) THEOFFICE\Domain Admins:(I)(OI)(CI)(F) NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:(I)(OI)(CI)(F) BUILTIN\Administrators:(I)(OI)(CI)(IO)(F) BUILTIN\Users:(I)(OI)(CI)(RX) Successfully processed 1 files; Failed processing 0 files F:\SomeDir>net group /domain "Domain Admins" The request will be processed at a domain controller for domain THEOFFICE.local. Group name Domain Admins Comment Designated administrators of the domain Members ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Administrator thatguy thisisme The command completed successfully. F:\SomeDir>echo "whyUNoCreateFile?" > whyUNoCreateFile.txt Access is denied. I searched for answers and came across similar problems that lead to UAC (ex. Why does removing the EVERYONE group prevent domain admins from accessing a drive? ). I can't turn off UAC at the moment, so I try a "regular" group that I'm also part of. This group has no special rights assignments and is not part of any administrative groups. Still no dice: [***** This one command executed in an elevated shell *****] F:\SomeDir>icacls . /grant THEOFFICE\iteveryone:(OI)(CI)F processed file: . Successfully processed 1 files; Failed processing 0 files F:\SomeDir>net group /domain "iteveryone" The request will be processed at a domain controller for domain THEOFFICE.local. Group name ITeveryone Comment Members ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Administrator thatguy thisisme otherguy someitguy The command completed successfully. F:\ScanningVMsForIBM>echo y > u Access is denied. As you can see, using a "regular" group didn't help. I have logged out and back in to the server to ensure my login token is up to date, and at any rate I belonged to these groups before the server was created. If I grant explicit permission to myself, it does allow me to write files: [***** This one command executed in an elevated shell *****] F:\SomeDir>icacls . /grant THEOFFICE\thisisme:(OI)(CI)F processed file: . Successfully processed 1 files; Failed processing 0 files F:\SomeDir>echo y > u F:\SomeDir>type u y My requirement is for the "Domain Admins" group to have Full Control, or if that's not possible without disabling UAC, then a second group will do, but I can't get either to work. I'm really stumped. Can someone please point out what I could be overlooking?

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• Blocking 'good' bots in nginx with multiple conditions for certain off-limits URL's where humans can go

  - by Glenn Plas

  After 2 days of searching/trying/failing I decided to post this here, I haven't found any example of someone doing the same nor what I tried seems to be working OK. I'm trying to send a 403 to bots not respecting the robots.txt file (even after downloading it several times). Specifically Googlebot. It will support the following robots.txt definition. User-agent: * Disallow: /*/*/page/ The intent is to allow Google to browse whatever they can find on the site but return a 403 for the following type of request. Googlebot seems to keep on nesting these links eternally adding paging block after block: my_domain.com:80 - 66.x.67.x - - [25/Apr/2012:11:13:54 +0200] "GET /2011/06/ page/3/?/page/2//page/3//page/2//page/3//page/2//page/2//page/4//page/4//pag e/1/&wpmp_switcher=desktop HTTP/1.1" 403 135 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; G ooglebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" It's a wordpress site btw. I don't want those pages to show up, even though after the robots.txt info got through, they stopped for a while only to begin crawling again later. It just never stops .... I do want real people to see this. As you can see, google get a 403 but when I try this myself in a browser I get a 404 back. I want browsers to pass. root@my_domain:# nginx -V nginx version: nginx/1.2.0 I tried different approaches, using a map and plain old nono if's and they both act the same: (under http section) map $http_user_agent $is_bot { default 0; ~crawl|Googlebot|Slurp|spider|bingbot|tracker|click|parser|spider 1; } (under the server section) location ~ /(\d+)/(\d+)/page/ { if ($is_bot) { return 403; # Please respect the robots.txt file ! } } I recently had to polish up my Apache skills for a client where I did about the same thing like this : # Block real Engines , not respecting robots.txt but allowing correct calls to pass # Google RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/5\.0\ \(compatible;\ Googlebot/2\.[01];\ \+http://www\.google\.com/bot\.html\)$ [NC,OR] # Bing RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/5\.0\ \(compatible;\ bingbot/2\.[01];\ \+http://www\.bing\.com/bingbot\.htm\)$ [NC,OR] # msnbot RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^msnbot-media/1\.[01]\ \(\+http://search\.msn\.com/msnbot\.htm\)$ [NC,OR] # Slurp RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^Mozilla/5\.0\ \(compatible;\ Yahoo!\ Slurp;\ http://help\.yahoo\.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp\)$ [NC] # block all page searches, the rest may pass RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/page/) [OR] # or with the wpmp_switcher=mobile parameter set RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} wpmp_switcher=mobile # ISSUE 403 / SERVE ERRORDOCUMENT RewriteRule .* - [F,L] # End if match This does a bit more than I asked nginx to do but it's about the same principle, I'm having a hard time figuring this out for nginx. So my question would be, why would nginx serve my browser a 404 ? Why isn't it passing, The regex isn't matching for my UA: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.5 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/19.0.1084.30 Safari/536.5" There are tons of example to block based on UA alone, and that's easy. It also looks like the matchin location is final, e.g. it's not 'falling' through for regular user, I'm pretty certain that this has some correlation with the 404 I get in the browser. As a cherry on top of things, I also want google to disregard the parameter wpmp_switcher=mobile , wpmp_switcher=desktop is fine but I just don't want the same content being crawled multiple times. Even though I ended up adding wpmp_switcher=mobile via the google webmaster tools pages (requiring me to sign up ....). that also stopped for a while but today they are back spidering the mobile sections. So in short, I need to find a way for nginx to enforce the robots.txt definitions. Can someone shell out a few minutes of their lives and push me in the right direction please ? I really appreciate ANY response that makes me think harder ;-)

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• 2 drives, slow software RAID1 (md)

  - by bart613

  Hello, I've got a server from hetzner.de (EQ4) with 2* SAMSUNG HD753LJ drives (750G 32MB cache). OS is CentOS 5 (x86_64). Drives are combined together into two RAID1 partitions: /dev/md0 which is 512MB big and has only /boot partitions /dev/md1 which is over 700GB big and is one big LVM which hosts other partitions Now, I've been running some benchmarks and it seems like even though exactly the same drives, speed differs a bit on each of them. # hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 25612 MB in 1.99 seconds = 12860.70 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 352 MB in 3.01 seconds = 116.80 MB/sec # hdparm -tT /dev/sdb /dev/sdb: Timing cached reads: 25524 MB in 1.99 seconds = 12815.99 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 342 MB in 3.01 seconds = 113.64 MB/sec Also, when I run eg. pgbench which is stressing IO quite heavily, I can see following from iostat output: Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 0.00 231.40 0.00 298.00 0.00 9683.20 32.49 0.17 0.58 0.34 10.24 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sda2 0.00 231.40 0.00 298.00 0.00 9683.20 32.49 0.17 0.58 0.34 10.24 sdb 0.00 231.40 0.00 301.80 0.00 9740.80 32.28 14.19 51.17 3.10 93.68 sdb1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sdb2 0.00 231.40 0.00 301.80 0.00 9740.80 32.28 14.19 51.17 3.10 93.68 md1 0.00 0.00 0.00 529.60 0.00 9692.80 18.30 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.60 0.00 4.80 8.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-1 0.00 0.00 0.00 529.00 0.00 9688.00 18.31 24.51 49.91 1.81 95.92 Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 0.00 152.40 0.00 330.60 0.00 5176.00 15.66 0.19 0.57 0.19 6.24 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sda2 0.00 152.40 0.00 330.60 0.00 5176.00 15.66 0.19 0.57 0.19 6.24 sdb 0.00 152.40 0.00 326.20 0.00 5118.40 15.69 19.96 55.36 3.01 98.16 sdb1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sdb2 0.00 152.40 0.00 326.20 0.00 5118.40 15.69 19.96 55.36 3.01 98.16 md1 0.00 0.00 0.00 482.80 0.00 5166.40 10.70 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-1 0.00 0.00 0.00 482.80 0.00 5166.40 10.70 30.19 56.92 2.05 99.04 Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 0.00 181.64 0.00 324.55 0.00 5445.11 16.78 0.15 0.45 0.21 6.87 sda1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sda2 0.00 181.64 0.00 324.55 0.00 5445.11 16.78 0.15 0.45 0.21 6.87 sdb 0.00 181.84 0.00 328.54 0.00 5493.01 16.72 18.34 61.57 3.01 99.00 sdb1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 sdb2 0.00 181.84 0.00 328.54 0.00 5493.01 16.72 18.34 61.57 3.01 99.00 md1 0.00 0.00 0.00 506.39 0.00 5477.05 10.82 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-1 0.00 0.00 0.00 506.39 0.00 5477.05 10.82 28.77 62.15 1.96 99.00 And this is completely getting me confused. How come two exactly the same specced drives have such a difference in write speed (see util%)? I haven't really paid attention to those speeds before, so perhaps that something normal -- if someone could confirm I would be really grateful. Otherwise, if someone have seen such behavior again or knows what is causing such behavior I would really appreciate answer. I'll also add that both "smartctl -a" and "hdparm -I" output are exactly the same and are not indicating any hardware problems. The slower drive was changed already two times (to new ones). Also I asked to change the drives with places, and then sda were slower and sdb quicker (so the slow one was the same drive). SATA cables were changed two times already.

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• Install Intel USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver for Windows Server 2008 R2 x64

  - by ffrugone

  According to Intel and Dell, by board is technically a 'desktop' board and they therefore do not support Intel USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller drivers for Windows Server 2008 (R2 x64). I'm trying to find a workaround. I found an entry on someone who tried to tackle this, but I can't make his fix work for me. Below, I have copied both his entry, and my reply. I'm a loyal stackoverflow user, and hopefully the people here at serverfault can help me: anyforumuser Re: GA-Z77X-UD5H USB3 Drivers not installing? « Reply #6 on: July 05, 2012, 04:12:59 am » Thanks to JoeMiner , his process for the network drivers gave me the clues to figure out to get the USB3 drivers working. I have got the intel USB3 drivers working at full speed in win server 2008r2 you have to edit the following file : 1. mup.xml in change the "Windows7" to "W2K8" 2. in setup.if2 under [groups] line starting with "HSCSDRIVER " change the "IsOS( ... )" entry to "IsOS(WIN2008_R2,WIN2008_R2_MAXSP)" inf files for all copy the content of the [Intel.NTAMD64.6.1] group to the [Intel.NTAMD64.6.2] group driver folders. here i am not entirely sure which is correct so there are some double up's. in the drivers folder copy the "Win7" folder to "win2008" , "win2008_r2" and "x64" ie your drivers folder should now contain the "win2008" , "win2008_r2" and "x64" folders and they contain contents of the win7 folder (the inf files should of already been fixed) Run install , It should install properly and work now. You will have to reboot If it doesn't work remove the intel usb3 controllers from device manager and get it to "scan for hardware changes" Good luck !!! benevida Re: GA-Z77X-UD5H Intel Network Drivers not installing? « Reply #7 on: August 13, 2012, 02:21:14 pm » Thank you anyforumuser! A process for getting this driver installed was exactly what I needed. However, I've hit a snag. I believe I've followed every step exactly as written, but I'm getting an error during installation. I get the message "One or more files that are required for installation are either missing or corrupted. Setup will exit." Behind the error, the 'Setup Progress' shows the current step as "Copying File: C:\Program Files (x86)\Intel\Intel(R) USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller Driver\Drivers\iusb3xhc.man". I've checked the installation files, and iusb3xhc.man seems to be a viable file in all of the Windows 2008 sub-directories of the Drivers folder. Therefore I don't see how the file could be missing and I doubt that it is corrupted, (although it does NOT exist in the \Drivers\HCSwitch folder). I opened 'Setup.if2', and there are two aspects to the step of copying iusb3xhc.man that caught my eye. First, the steps immediately preceding are set to 'error=ignore'. If they hadn't completed successfully, this is the first step where we'd hear about it. Second, this is the first step where the relative path '%source%\drivers\%_os%\%_ia%\' is used. If I haven't named the Windows 2008 sub-directories correctly, I could see where things are fouling up. In any event, if someone could take a look and make suggestions I'd appreciate it. Thank you.

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• Why do we need different CPU architecture for server & mini/mainframe & mixed-core?

  - by claws

  Hello, I was just wondering what other CPU architectures are available other than INTEL & AMD. So, found List of CPU architectures on Wikipedia. It categorizes notable CPU architectures into following categories. Embedded CPU architectures Microcomputer CPU architectures Workstation/Server CPU architectures Mini/Mainframe CPU architectures Mixed core CPU architectures I was analyzing the purposes and have few doubts. I taking Microcomputer CPU (PC) architecture as reference and comparing others. Embedded CPU architecture: They are a completely new world. Embedded systems are small & do very specific task mostly real time & low power consuming so we do not need so many & such wide registers available in a microcomputer CPU (typical PC). In other words we do need a new small & tiny architecture. Hence new architecture & new instruction RISC. The above point also clarifies why do we need a separate operating system (RTOS). Workstation/Server CPU architectures I don't know what is a workstation. Someone clarify regarding the workstation. As of the server. It is dedicated to run a specific software (server software like httpd, mysql etc.). Even if other processes run we need to give server process priority therefore there is a need for new scheduling scheme and thus we need operating system different than general purpose one. If you have any more points for the need of server OS please mention. But I don't get why do we need a new CPU Architecture. Why cant Microcomputer CPU architecture do the job. Can someone please clarify? Mini/Mainframe CPU architectures Again I don't know what are these & what miniframes or mainframes used for? I just know they are very big and occupy complete floor. But I never read about some real world problems they are trying to solve. If any one working on one of these. Share your knowledge. Can some one clarify its purpose & why is it that microcomputer CPU archicture not suitable for it? Is there a new kind of operating system for this too? Why? Mixed core CPU architectures Never heard of these. If possible please keep your answer in this format: XYZ CPU architectures Purpose of XYZ Need for a new architecture. why can't current microcomputer CPU architecture work? They go upto 3GHZ & have upto 8 cores. Need for a new Operating System Why do we need a new kind of operating system for this kind of archictures?

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• Home ADSL Modem Dropping Packets?

  - by Cody

  I know this is supposed to be a "pro" forum, but I'm hoping someone can help since my ISP isn't doing much to try and fix things. My ISP has given me a DSL modem / Router combo - a ADB / Pirelli P.DG A2100N and I have a 4096 / 767 kbps connection. I use it purely as modem and router, and have the wireless AP feature turned off. I run it to a Ubiquiti Networks Toughswitch and use a Ubiquiti UAP as the wireless access point - although I've ran tests directly wired to the router with nothing else connected, and still see the same issues. I've been having issues where latency suddenly spikes from 8ms to google.com to 250+ if someone does anything on the internet. If I run a speedtest or something, I can see latencies above 3000ms. Regularly when downloading something, even if the speed is throttled to , it can get random drops to 0kbps every few seconds. Online gaming is impossible because I notice the sudden lag-outs in the connection, and video streams or VoIP drop out as well - it's not at all consistent. I managed to find the password to my modem and I don't think I see anything wrong with the settings - but I looked for the logs and found this: Jun 6 17:10:30 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:10:30 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:10:31 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:10:40 user warn kernel: __ratelimit: 63 callbacks suppressed Jun 6 17:10:40 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:10:40 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:10:40 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:10:40 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:10:40 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:10:40 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:22 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:23 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:24 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:24 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:24 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:24 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:24 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:25 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:25 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:25 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:29 user warn kernel: __ratelimit: 15 callbacks suppressed Jun 6 17:11:29 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:29 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:30 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:11:30 user warn kernel: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet. Jun 6 17:55:26 user warn kernel: bcmxtmcfg: OAM loopback response not received on VCC 1.1.3 Jun 6 17:55:27 user warn kernel: bcmxtmcfg: OAM loopback response not received on VCC 1.1.4 So, as I understand it, it appears the router is dropping packets? If that's the case, is there anything in the config that I can change? Or should I buy a new router, a new modem, or both?

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• How to set up a centralized backup server with lots of offsite workstations, intermittent internet connectivity, and stubborn users?

  - by Zac B

  This might be an impossible question. Context: We have a bunch of computers across around 1000 users. We have a centralized office where 900 of the users work, most of the time. Most of the computers are laptops. They are very frequently coming on and off the network for hours at a time. Users often take their computers home and do lots of work from home. In addition, there are a handful of users who work elsewhere in the country, who are offline (no internet connection whatsoever) for more than half of the time they use their machines. All of the machines are Windows 7/XP. Problem: People are always losing data. One day someone accidentally deletes a bunch of files. The next day someone else installs a bad driver or tries to mess with something in system32 and needs a personal data backup/reinstall of Windows. Because of how many of our business operations are done without an internet connection, and how frequently computers come on- and offline, it's unfeasible to make users use network storage for all of their data. We tried giving them Dropboxes, and they stored their files elsewhere. We bought and deployed Altiris, and they uninstalled it and blamed us when they couldn't get files back that they accidentally deleted while they were offline and hadn't taken a backup in months. We tried teaching them backup best-practices, and using scheduled sync tools to upload things to the network drives, and they turned them off because they "looked like viruses". It doesn't help that many of these users are pretty high up in the business and are not amicable to any sort of "you need to do something regularly because we say so" solution. Question: Other than finding another job where IT is treated differently and users are willing to follow best practices, how would people recommend I implement a file backup solution that supports the following: Backs up to a centralized server over LAN or WAN whenever a network link becomes available, or on a schedule. Supports interrupted/resumed backups (and hopefully file-delta only backups), since connections to the network (WAN or LAN) are often slow and only open for half an hour or so. Supports relatively rapid, "I accidentally deleted the TPS reports! Oh no!" single-file recovery, ideally administered from the central backup server rather than the client PC. Supports local-to-local file delta backup on a schedule, so that users without a network connection for a few days can still retrieve accidental deletions or whatnot. Ideally, the local stored backups would be pushed up to the server whenever network link is available. Isn't configurable on the clients without certain credentials. Because the CFOs (who won't give up their admin rights on the domain) will disable it if they can. Backs up the entire hard drive. There are people who are self-righteous about storing things in C:\, or in the recycle bin, or in the C:\Windows dir (yes, I know). I'm fine integrating multiple products/solutions, or scripting different programs together myself (I'm a somewhat competent programmer), but I've been drawing a blank on where to start. Dropbox is folder-specific, Altiris doesn't cope with LAN outages or interrupted/resumed backups, Volume Shadow Copy is awesome for a local-to-local solution, but I don't know how to push days of stored shadow copies up to a server in a 2 hour window of network access. The company is fine with spending decent money on this, thousands (USD) on a server, and hundreds on clients, if necessary. I want to emphasize that this isn't a shopping list request. While I wish there was a program out there that did what I want, I've looked pretty hard, and not found anything that fits the bill. Instead, I'm hoping for ideas on where to start hacking things together from scratch/from different technologies to make something stable that works. Cheers!

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• Expert iptables help needed?

  - by Asad Moeen

  After a detailed analysis, I collected these details. I am under a UDP Flood which is more of application dependent. I run a Game-Server and an attacker is flooding me with "getstatus" query which makes the GameServer respond by making the replies to the query which cause output to the attacker's IP as high as 30mb/s and server lag. Here are the packet details, Packet starts with 4 bytes 0xff and then getstatus. Theoretically, the packet is like "\xff\xff\xff\xffgetstatus " Now that I've tried a lot of iptables variations like state and rate-limiting along side but those didn't work. Rate Limit works good but only when the Server is not started. As soon as the server starts, no iptables rule seems to block it. Anyone else got more solutions? someone asked me to contact the provider and get it done at the Network/Router but that looks very odd and I believe they might not do it since that would also affect other clients. Responding to all those answers, I'd say: Firstly, its a VPS so they can't do it for me. Secondly, I don't care if something is coming in but since its application generated so there has to be a OS level solution to block the outgoing packets. At least the outgoing ones must be stopped. Secondly, its not Ddos since just 400kb/s input generates 30mb/s output from my GameServer. That never happens in a D-dos. Asking the provider/hardware level solution should be used in that case but this one is different. And Yes, Banning his IP stops the flood of outgoing packets but he has many more IP-Addresses as he spoofs his original so I just need something to block him automatically. Even tried a lot of Firewalls but as you know they are just front-ends to iptables so if something doesn't work on iptables, what would the firewalls do? These were the rules I tried, iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name DDOS --rsource iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 1 --hitcount 5 --name DDOS --rsource -j DROP It works for the attacks on un-used ports but when the server is listening and responding to the incoming queries by the attacker, it never works. Okay Tom.H, your rules were working when I modified them somehow like this: iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m length --length 1:1024 -m recent --set --name XXXX --rsource iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m string --string "xxxxxxxxxx" --algo bm --to 65535 -m recent --update --seconds 1 --hitcount 15 --name XXXX --rsource -j DROP They worked for about 3 days very good where the string "xxxxxxxxx" would be rate-limited, blocked if someone flooded and also didn't affect the clients. But just today, I tried updating the chain to try to remove a previously blocked IP so for that I had to flush the chain and restore this rule ( iptables -X and iptables -F ), some clients were already connected to servers including me. So restoring the rules now would also block some of the clients string completely while some are not affected. So does this mean I need to restart the server or why else would this happen because the last time the rules were working, there was no one connected?

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• Apache access.log interpretation

  - by Pantelis Sopasakis

  In the log file of apache (access.log) I find log entries like the following: 10.20.30.40 - - [18/Mar/2011:02:12:44 +0200] "GET /index.php HTTP/1.1" 404 505 "-" "Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; en) Presto/2.7.62 Version/11.01" Whose meaning is clear: The client with IP 10.20.30.40 applied a GET HTTP method on /index.php (that is to say http://mysite.org/index.php) receiving a status code 404 using Opera as client/browser. What I don't understand is entries like the following: 174.34.231.19 - - [18/Mar/2011:02:24:56 +0200] "GET http://www.siasatema.com HTTP/1.1" 200 469 "-" "Python-urllib/2.4" So here what I see is that someone (client with IP 174.34.231.19) accessed http://www.siasatema.com and got a 200 HTTP status code(?). It doesn't make sense to me... the only interpretation I can think of is that my apache server acts like proxy! Here are some other requests that don't have my site as destination... 187.35.50.61 - - [18/Mar/2011:01:28:20 +0200] "POST http://72.26.198.222:80/log/normal/ HTTP/1.0" 404 491 "-" "Octoshape-sua/1010120" 87.117.203.177 - - [18/Mar/2011:01:29:59 +0200] "CONNECT 64.12.244.203:80 HTTP/1.0" 405 556 "-" "-" 87.117.203.177 - - [18/Mar/2011:01:29:59 +0200] "open 64.12.244.203 80" 400 506 "-" "-" 87.117.203.177 - - [18/Mar/2011:01:30:04 +0200] "telnet 64.12.244.203 80" 400 506 "-" "-" 87.117.203.177 - - [18/Mar/2011:01:30:09 +0200] "64.12.244.203 80" 400 301 "-" "-" I believe that all these are related to some kind of attack or abuse of the server. Could someone explain to may what is going on and how to cope with this situation? Update 1: I disabled mod_proxy to make sure that I don't have an open proxy: # a2dismod proxy Where from I got the message: Module proxy already disabled I made sure that there is no file proxy.conf under $APACHE/mods-enabled. Finally, I set on my browser (Mozzila) my IP as a proxy and tried to access http://google.com. I was not redirected to google.com but instead my web page appeared. The same happened with trying to access http://a.b (!). So my server does not really work as a proxy since it does not forward the requests... But I think it would be better if somehow I could configure it to return a status code 403. Here is my apache configuration file: <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName mysite.org ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost DocumentRoot /var/www/ <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None </Directory> <Directory /var/www/> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews AllowOverride None Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log LogLevel warn CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/" <Directory "/usr/share/doc/"> Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128 </Directory> </VirtualHost> Update 2: Using a block, I restrict the use of other methods than GET and POST... <Limit POST PUT CONNECT HEAD OPTIONS DELETE PATCH PROPFIND PROPPATCH MKCOL COPY MOVE LOCK UNLOCK> Order deny,allow Deny from all </Limit> <LimitExcept GET> Order deny,allow Deny from all </LimitExcept> Now methods other that GET are forbidden (403). My only question now is whether there is some trick to boot those how try to use my server as a proxy out...

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• Publishing an Excel spreadsheet using Microsoft SBS 2008 to a web page that is viewable by mobile ph

  - by Dave Heath

  I am getting well out of my “superuser” depth here and would love some support. At work we have an Excel workbook (*.xls format circa Office 2003) which maintains our “engineers” timesheet. This handles what events we are doing across the year and how many “work units” it is. As far as a workbook goes, it is fairly simple with just a few =SUM(range) cells and some linked across sheets (12 sheets, one for each month) It is stored on a server, in a folder that provides “management” with full access and “engineers” with read-only access. The workbook itself is read-only for “engineers” and full access for “management”. I think these permissions are controlled through Active Directory. The workbook is protected with a password, assumingly to allow “management” to edit it even if they are working at a terminal logged in as an “engineer”. This protection prevents “engineers” from going to certain cells to see formulae and therefore editing them. The workbook has a macro which saves and closes it ten minutes after opening. This is to stop other “management” from being locked out by any one person who has logged in with editing privileges. I hope this is making sense to someone... :S Now then, we have Microsoft Small Business Server 2008. We have a shiny new web-based login for when we are offsite so we can get to Exchange webmail and our internal site (which uses Sharepoint 3.0). “Management” would like to be able to publish this timesheet automatically after changes (they don’t want to have to do anything different to what they are currently doing) so that using an iPhone “engineers” can check on it while out of the office. I am currently having a look at “Excel Services” for Office 2007 on TechNet but I am not sure if I am running down the right garden path at the moment. < EDIT This seems to suggest that I have to have Sharepoint Server 2007, with no mention of Sharepoint 3.0... ... "MOSS builds on WSS by adding both core features as well as end user web parts" - Wikipedia entry for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) this is not good news... "...and using the ASP.NET APIs, web parts can be written to extend the functionality of WSS." Wikipedia entry for Windows Sharepoint Services. Could this bring back what I need? Is this good news? Do I need to start learning ASP.NET? This link here implies that we need MOSS to do what I want and the bosses say we aint' getting it. http://serverfault.com/questions/20198/what-is-some-cool-things-you-can-do-with-sharepoint-2007/22128#22128 Back to the drawing board. < /EDIT Please could someone suggest some “further reading” for me to help point me in the right direction or to put me back on the right track. Many thanks. I will try to keep this up to date with how I get on.

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• What is the best server or Ip address to use for prolonged testing?

  - by eldorel

  I usually run uptime/latency tests against (and from) two servers that we own at different sites and until recently I've used the google dns servers as a control group. However, I've realized there is a potential problem with monitoring latency over extended periods of time. Almost all of the major service providers are using ANYCAST. For short tests this doesn't matter, but I need to run a set of tests for at least a week to try and catch an intermittent problem, and a change in the anycast priority while trying to test latency will cause the latency values for that server to change accordingly. Since I'm submitting graphs of this data to the ISP, I need to avoid/account for as many variables as possible. Spikes in the data for only one of the tested servers will only cause headaches. So can anyone recommend servers that: are not using anycast are owned by an entity that has a good uptime reputation (so they can't claim that the problem is server-side) will respond to ICMP requests Have an available service that runs on TCP/UDP (http or dns preferably) Wont consider an automated request every 10 minutes to be abuse Are accessible from anywhere in the world Are not local to the isp ( consider this an investigation of a hostile party ) Thanks in advance. Edit: added #6 and #7 above. More info: I am attempting to demonstrate a network problem for an entire node of our local ISP's network. They are actively blaming the issue on the equipment installed at the customer sites (our backup site is one of these), and refuse to escalate the problem. (even though 2 of these businesses have ISP provided modems, and all of us have completely different routers/services running) I am already quite familiar with the need to test an isp controlled IP, but they are actively dropping all packets targeted at gateway ip addresses and are only passing traffic addressed beyond the gateways. So to demonstrate the issue, I am sending packets to other systems in the same node, systems one hop away from the affected node, and systems completely outside the network. Unfortunately, all of the systems I have currently are either administered directly by myself, or by people who are biased enough to assist me. I need to have several systems included in the trace/log/graphs that are 100% not in the control of either myself or the isp so that the graphs have a stable/unbiased control group. These requirements are straight from legal, I'm just trying to make sure that everything that could be argued to invalidate the data is already covered. In Summary: I need to be able to show tcp/udp/icmp as 3 separate data points, and I need to be able to show the connections inside the local node, from local node to another nearby node, from those 2 nodes to the internet, and through the internet to both verifiable servers and a control group that I have no control over whatsoever. Again, Google/opendns/yahoo/msn/facebook/etc all use anycast, which throws the numbers off every time the anycast caches expire, so I need suggestions of an IP or server that is available for this type of testing. I was hoping someone knew of a system run by someone such as ISC or ICANN, or perhaps even a .gov server (fcc or nsa maybe?) setup for this type of testing. Thanks again.

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• Distributed and/or Parallel SSIS processing

  - by Jeff

  Background: Our company hosts SaaS DSS applications, where clients provide us data Daily and/or Weekly, which we process & merge into their existing database. During business hours, load in the servers are pretty minimal as it's mostly users running simple pre-defined queries via the website, or running drill-through reports that mostly hit the SSAS OLAP cube. I manage the IT Operations Team, and so far this has presented an interesting "scaling" issue for us. For our daily-refreshed clients, the server is only "busy" for about 4-6 hrs at night. For our weekly-refresh clients, the server is only "busy" for maybe 8-10 hrs per week! We've done our best to use some simple methods of distributing the load by spreading the daily clients evenly among the servers such that we're not trying to process daily clients back-to-back over night. But long-term this scaling strategy creates two notable issues. First, it's going to consume a pretty immense amount of hardware that sits idle for large periods of time. Second, it takes significant Production Support over-head to basically "schedule" the ETL such that they don't over-lap, and move clients/schedules around if they out-grow the resources on a particular server or allocated time-slot. As the title would imply, one option we've tried is running multiple SSIS packages in parallel, but in most cases this has yielded VERY inconsistent results. The most common failures are DTExec, SQL, and SSAS fighting for physical memory and throwing out-of-memory errors, and ETLs running 3,4,5x longer than expected. So from my practical experience thus far, it seems like running multiple ETL packages on the same hardware isn't a good idea, but I can't be the first person that doesn't want to scale multiple ETLs around manual scheduling, and sequential processing. One option we've considered is virtualizing the servers, which obviously doesn't give you any additional resources, but moves the resource contention onto the hypervisor, which (from my experience) seems to manage simultaneous CPU/RAM/Disk I/O a little more gracefully than letting DTExec, SQL, and SSAS battle it out within Windows. Question to the forum: So my question to the forum is, are we missing something obvious here? Are there tools out there that can help manage running multiple SSIS packages on the same hardware? Would it be more "efficient" in terms of parallel execution if instead of running DTExec, SQL, and SSAS same machine (with every machine running that configuration), we run in pairs of three machines with SSIS running on one machine, SQL on another, and SSAS on a third? Obviously that would only make sense if we could process more than the three ETL we were able to process on the machine independently. Another option we've considered is completely re-architecting our SSIS package to have one "master" package for all clients that attempts to intelligently chose a server based off how "busy" it already is in terms of CPU/Memory/Disk utilization, but that would be a herculean effort, and seems like we're trying to reinvent something that you would think someone would sell (although I haven't had any luck finding it). So in summary, are we missing an obvious solution for this, and does anyone know if any tools (for free or for purchase, doesn't matter) that facilitate running multiple SSIS ETL packages in parallel and on multiple servers? (What I would call a "queue & node based" system, but that's not an official term). Ultimately VMWare's Distributed Resource Scheduler addresses this as you simply run a consistent number of clients per VM that you know will never conflict scheduleing-wise, then leave it up to VMWare to move the VMs around to balance out hardware usage. I'm definitely not against using VMWare to do this, but since we're a 100% Microsoft app stack, it seems like -someone- out there would have solved this problem at the application layer instead of the hypervisor layer by checking on resource utilization at the OS, SQL, SSAS levels. I'm open to ANY discussion on this, and remember no suggestion is too crazy or radical! :-) Right now, VMWare is the only option we've found to get away from "manually" balancing our resources, so any suggestions that leave us on a pure Microsoft stack would be great. Thanks guys, Jeff

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• SQL SERVER – Developer Training Resources and Summary Roundup

  - by pinaldave

  It is always pleasure for any author when other renowned authors in the industry write about you. Earlier I wrote a five part blog series on Developer Training and I have received a phenomenal response to the series. I have received plenty of comments, questions and feedback. I thought it would be nice to sum up the whole series as well answer a few of the questions received. Quick Recap Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 In this part we discussed the importance of training in the real world. The most important and valuable resource any company is its employee. Employees who have been well-trained will be better at their jobs and produce a better product.  An employee who is well trained obviously knows more about their job and all the technical aspects. I have a very high opinion about training employees and it is the most important task. Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 In this part we discussed the most crucial components of training. Often employees are expecting the company to pay for their training and the company expresses no interest in training the employee. Quite often training expenses are the real issue for both the employee and employer. There are companies that pay for 100% of the expenses and there are employees who opt for training on their own expense during their personal time. Training is often looked at as vacation by employee and employers and we need to change this mind-set. One of the ways is to report back the learning to your manager and implement newly learned knowledge in day-to-day work. Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 This part was the most difficult to write as I tried to address a few difficult questions and answers. Training is such a sensitive issue that many developers when not receiving chance for training think about leaving the organization. The manager often feels pressure to accommodate every single employee for training even though his training budget is limited. It is indeed the responsibility of the developer to get maximum advantage from the training. Training immediately helps organizations but stays as a part of an employee’s knowledge forever. Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 In this part I tried to explore a few methods and options for training. The generic feedback I received on this blog post was short and I should have explored each of the subject of the training in details. I believe there are two big buckets of training 1) Instructor Lead Training and 2) Self Lead Training. The common element between both the methods is “learning material”. Learning material can be of any format – videos, books, paper notes or just a plain black board. Instructor-led training is a very effective mode but not possible every single time. During the course of the developer’s career, one has to learn lots of new technology and it is almost impossible to have a quality trainer available on that subject at that time. Books are most effective and proven methods, however, it always helps if someone explains the concepts of the book with a demonstration. In recent times I have started to believe in online trainings which leads to a hybrid experience. Online trainings take the best part of the books and the best part of the instructor-led training and gives effective training in a matter of hours. Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 In this part, I shared what I was continuously thinking about developer training. There is no better teacher than oneself. There is no better motivation than a personal desire to learn new technology. Honestly there is nothing more personal learning. That “change is the only constant” and “adapt & overcome” are the essential lessons of life. One cannot stop the learning and resist the change. In the IT industry “ego of knowing all” and the “resistance to change” are the most challenging issues. Once someone overcomes them, life is much easier. I believe that proper and appropriate high quality training can help to address the burning issues. Opinion of Friends I invited a few of my friends to express their opinion about developer training and here are their opinions. I am listing them here in the order of the blog post publishing date. Nakul Vachhrajani - Developer Trainings-Importance, Benefits, Tips and follow-up Nakul’s sums of many of the concepts which are complementary to my blog posts. Nakul addresses the burning question of developer training with different angles. I am personally very impressed by his following statement - “Being skilled does not mean having just a stack of certifications, but it also means having an understanding about the internals of the products that you are working on – and using that knowledge to improve the efficiency & productivity at the workplace in turn resulting in better products, better consulting abilities and a happier self.” Nakul also suggests the online training options of Pluralsight. Vinod Kumar - Training–a necessity or bonus Vinod Kumar comes up with excellent follow up on developer training. Vinod is known for his inspirational writing about SQL Server. Vinod starts with a story of a student who is extremely eager to learn the wisdom of life from a monk but the monk does not accept him as a disciple for a long time. The conversation between student and monk is indeed an essence of all learning. We all want to learn quickly and be successful but the most important thing in life is to have the right attitude towards learning and more so towards life. The blog post end with a very important thought about how to avoid the famous excuse – “I don’t have enough time.” Ritesh Shah - Training – useful or useless? Ritesh brings up very important concept related to training. Ritesh in his meticulous style explains why training is an important and lifelong process. Training must not stop at any age but should continue forever. The moment training stops, progress stops along with. Paras Doshi - Professional Development Resource Paras is known for his to–the-point writing, and has summarized the five part series very precisely. He read the five part series and created a digest summary of the blog post. If you are in a rush and have no time to read my five series – I suggest you read his blog post. Training Resources I am often asked what the best resources for learning new technology are. This is the most difficult question EVER. There are plenty of good training resources available. When it is about training our needs are different, our preference of learning is different and we all have an opinion. Additionally, we all are located in different geographic locations worldwide and there is no way one solution will fit all. However, let me list a few of the training resources which I have built so far and you can consume them if you find it relevant to your need. SQL Server Books SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers SQL Wait Stats SQL Programming Joes 2 Pros SQL Server Video Tutorials SQL Server Questions and Answers SQL Server Performance: Indexing Basics SQL Server Performance: Introduction to Query Tuning SQL in Sixty Seconds Series of Sixty Seconds Learning Video on YouTube Trust me worldwide web is very big and there are plenty of high quality learning materials available worldwide – trainer-led as well online. I suggest you explore various options and make the best choice for yourself. Remember, training is your personal journey and it should never stop. Are you ready? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Top 10 Reasons SQL Developer is Perfect for Oracle Beginners

  - by thatjeffsmith

  Learning new technologies can be daunting. If you’ve never used a Mac before, you’ll probably be a bit baffled at first. But, you’re probably at least coming from a desktop computing background (Windows), so you common frame of reference. But what if you’re just now learning to use a relational database? Yes, you’ve played with Access a bit, but now your employer or college instructor has charged you with becoming proficient with Oracle database. Here’s 10 reasons why I think Oracle SQL Developer is the perfect vehicle to help get you started. 1. It’s free No need to break into one of these… No start-up costs, no need to wrangle budget dollars from your company. Students don’t have any money after books and lab fees anyway. And most employees don’t like having to ask for ‘special’ software anyway. So avoid all of that and make sure the free stuff doesn’t suit your needs first. Upgrades are available on a regular base, also at no cost, and support is freely available via our public forums. 2. It will run pretty much anywhere Windows – check. OSX (Apple) – check. Unix – check. Linux – check. No need to start up a windows VM to run your Windows-only software in your lab machine. 3. Anyone can install it There’s no installer, no registry to be updated, no admin privs to be obtained. If you can download and extract files to your machine or USB storage device, you can run it. You can be up and running with SQL Developer in under 5 minutes. Here’s a video tutorial to see how to get started. 4. It’s ubiquitous I admit it, I learned a new word yesterday and I wanted an excuse to use it. SQL Developer’s everywhere. It’s had over 2,500,000 downloads in the past year, and is the one of the most downloaded items from OTN. This means if you need help, there’s someone sitting nearby you that can assist, and since they’re in the same tool as you, they’ll be speaking the same language. 5. Simple User Interface Up-up-down-down-Left-right-left-right-A-B-A-B-START will get you 30 lives, but you already knew that, right? You connect, you see your objects, you click on your objects. Or, you can use the worksheet to write your queries and programs in. There’s only one toolbar, and just a few buttons. If you’re like me, video games became less fun when each button had 6 action items mapped to it. I just want the good ole ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘SELECT’, and ‘START’ controls. If you’re new to Oracle, you shouldn’t have the double-workload of learning a new complicated tool as well. 6. It’s not a ‘black box’ Click through your objects, but also get the SQL that drives the GUI As you use the wizards to accomplish tasks for you, you can view the SQL statement being generated on your behalf. Just because you have a GUI, doesn’t mean you’re ceding your responsibility to learn the underlying code that makes the database work. 7. It’s four tools in one It’s not just a query tool. Maybe you need to design a data model first? Or maybe you need to migrate your Sybase ASE database to Oracle for a new project? Or maybe you need to create some reports? SQL Developer does all of that. So once you get comfortable with one part of the tool, the others will be much easier to pick up as your needs change. 8. Great learning resources available Videos, blogs, hands-on learning labs – you name it, we got it. Why wait for someone to train you, when you can train yourself at your own pace? 9. You can use it to teach yourself SQL Instead of being faced with the white-screen-of-panic, you can visually build your queries by dragging and dropping tables and views into the Query Builder. Yes, ‘just like Access’ – only better. And as you build your query, toggle to the Worksheet panel and see the SQL statement. Again, SQL Developer is not a black box. If you prefer to learn by trial and error, the worksheet will attempt to suggest the next bit of your SQL statement with it’s completion insight feature. And if you have syntax errors, those will be highlighted – just like your misspelled words in your favorite word processor. 10. It scales to match your experience level You won’t be a n00b forever. In 6-8 months, when you’re ready to tackle something a bit more complicated, like XML DB or Oracle Spatial, the tool is already there waiting on you. No need to go out and find the ‘advanced’ tool. 11. Wait, you said this was a ‘Top 10′ list? Yes. Yes, I did. I’m using this ‘trick’ to get you to continue reading because I’m going to say something you might not want to hear. Are you ready? Tools won’t replace experience, failure, hard work, and training. Just because you have the keys to the car, doesn’t mean you’re ready to head out on the race track. While SQL Developer reduces the barriers to entry, it does not completely remove them. Many experienced folks simply do not like tools. Rather, they don’t like the people that pick up tools without the know-how to properly use them. If you don’t understand what ‘TRUNCATE’ means, don’t try it out. Try picking up a book first. Of course, it’s very nice to have your own sandbox to play in, so you don’t upset the other children. That’s why I really like our Dev Days Database Virtual Box image. It’s your own database to learn and experiment with.

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