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  • Large, high performance object or key/value store for HTTP serving on Linux

    - by Tommy
    I have a service that serves images to end users at a very high rate using plain HTTP. The images vary between 4 and 64kbytes, and there are 1.300.000.000 of them in total. The dataset is about 30TiB in size and changes (new objects, updates, deletes) make out less than 1% of the requests. The number of requests pr. second vary from 240 to 9000 and is dispersed pretty much all over, with few objects being especially "hot". As of now, these images are files on a ext3 filesystem distributed read only across a large amount of mid range servers. This poses several problems: Using a fileysystem is very inefficient since the metadata size is large, the inode/dentry cache is volatile on linux and some daemons tend to stat()/readdir() it's way through the directory structure, which in my case becomes very expensive. Updating the dataset is very time consuming and requires remounting between set A and B. The only reasonable handling is operating on the block device for backup, copying, etc. What I would like is a deamon that: speaks HTTP (get, put, delete and perhaps update) stores data it in an efficient structure. The index should remain in memory, and considering the amount of objects, the overhead must be small. The software should be able to handle massive connections with slow (if any) time needed to ramp up. Index should be read in memory at startup. Statistics would be nice, but not mandatory. I have experimented a bit with riak, redis, mongodb, kyoto and varnish with persistent storage, but I haven't had the chance to dig in really deep yet.

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  • How I can recover files when the folder shows empty but the files are not deleted?

    - by Borror0
    Yesterday, my laptop caught a virus which caused massive damage. Since them, I have been trying to recover important files before reformatting my computer, a task the virus has not made easy. Restoration points predating the attack have been deleted. Most of my folders show empty. My Start menu is essentially empty, with the exception of Trillian and Mirror's Edge. The same goes for my Desktop, which only has programs which were installed after the attack. Searching for files though my computer is pretty much useless, as it only rarely brings up anything. I suspect most of my files have not been deleted. While my folders show empty, uTorrent still does display them and I can open them from here. Unfortunately, when I select Open Containing Folder, the folder still shows as completely empty even if I'm currently watching a video from that very folder. Further adding evidence to the not-deleted, just-missing theory, the data recovery software I'm using (Restoration) cannot find only find an handful of the missing files. If they were deleted, I could do a forensic recovery to get them back but since they're probably still somewhere on my computer, just out out of my reach, I can't find them. Under those circumstances, is there a way I can recover those files?

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  • How to allow users to transfer files to other users on linux

    - by Jon Bringhurst
    We have an environment of a few thousand users running applications on about 40 clusters ranging in size from 20 compute nodes to 98,000 compute nodes. Users on these systems generate massive files (sometimes 1PB) controlled by traditional unix permissions (ACLs usually aren't available or practical due to the specialized nature of the filesystem). We currently have a program called "give", which is a suid-root program that allows a user to "give" a file to another user when group permissions are insufficient. So, a user would type something like the following to give a file to another user: > give username-to-give-to filename-to-give ... The receiving user can then use a command called "take" (part of the give program) to receive the file: > take filename-to-receive The permissions of the file are then effectively transferred over to the receiving user. This program has been around for years and we'd like to revisit things from a security and functional point of view. Our current plan of action is to remove the bit rot in our current implementation of "give" and package it up as an open source app before we redeploy it into production. Does anyone have another method they use to transfer extremely large files between users when only traditional unix permissions are available?

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  • Packet flooding while configuring a Debian L2TP/IPSec client?

    - by Joseph B.
    I'm currently at my wits end trying to configure an L2TP over IPSec VPN connection on my Debian using openswan and xl2tp box connecting to a server of unknown configuration. I've managed to successfully establish the connection and everything appears to be working well until I attempt to set the VPN connection as my default route, at which point I see a massive flood of packets simultaneously being transmitted (on the tune of ~1.5 GB in about 2min) until the server drops my connection. Prior to this network traffic on all my interfaces is minimal. According to iftop the majority of this traffic appears to be coming out of port 12, although I can't seem to figure out how to finger a specific process. If I instead just route traffic destined for 74.0.0.0/8 through it I'm able to access Google's servers through the VPN without issue. My xl2tp.conf file is: [lac vpn-nl] lns = example.vpn.com name = myusername pppoptfile = /etc/ppp/options.l2tpd.client My options.l2tpd.client file is: ipcp-accept-local ipcp-accept-remote refuse-eap require-mschap-v2 noccp noauth idle 1800 mtu 1410 mru 1410 usepeerdns lock name myusername password mypassword connect-delay 5000 And my routing table looks like: Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 10.5.2.1 * 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 ppp0 10.0.50.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 10.50.0.0 * 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 10.0.0.0 * 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 192.168.0.0 * 255.255.0.0 U 0 0 0 eth0 loopback * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo default * 0.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 ppp0 I'm seeing absolutely nothing in auth.log and syslog during this time and can't seem to find any other log files it might be writing to. Any suggestions would be appreciated!

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  • Heavy write to Galera cluster - table locked, cluster practically unusable

    - by Joe
    I set up Galera Cluster on 3 nodes. It works perfectly for reading data. I have done simple application to make some test on the cluster. Unfortunately I have to say that the Cluster fails totally when I try to do some writing. Maybe it can be configured differently or I do sth wrong? I have a simple stored procedure: CREATE PROCEDURE testproc(IN p_idWorker INTEGER) BEGIN DECLARE t_id INT DEFAULT -1; DECLARE t_counter INT ; UPDATE test SET idWorker = p_idWorker WHERE counter = 0 AND idWorker IS NULL limit 1; SELECT id FROM test WHERE idWorker = p_idWorker LIMIT 1 INTO t_id; SELECT ABS(MAX(counter)/MIN(counter)) FROM TEST INTO t_counter; SELECT COUNT(*) FROM test WHERE counter = 0 INTO t_counter; IF t_id >= 0 THEN UPDATE test SET counter = counter + 1 WHERE id = t_id; UPDATE test SET idWorker = NULL WHERE id = t_id; SELECT t_counter AS res; ELSE SELECT 'end' AS res; END IF; END $$ Now my simple C# application creates for example 3 MySQL clients in separate threads and each one executes the procedure every 100ms until there is no record where column 'counter' = 0. Unfortunately - after about 10 seconds sth is going bad. On servers there is process 'query_end' that never ends. After that - you cannot make update on the test table, MySQL returns: ERROR 1205 (HY000): Lock wait timeout exceeded; try restarting transaction . You cant even restart mysql. What you can do is to restart server, sometimes whole cluster. Is Galera Cluster so unreliable when you do massive concucurrent writing/updates? Hard to believe.

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  • Mail-Merge on Steroids: Can Word 2003 do this?

    - by richardtallent
    I have a huge report to put together, made up of over 1,000 smaller, nearly-identical reports. Each report includes: General 1:1 information (basic mail-merge stuff) Lots of text, some of which may need to be disabled or have alternate text based on a boolean field. A few embedded images, preferably loaded via HTTP URL, but if they have to be on the a file system thing I can do that. (Filenames will be provided as a field in the data source.) Fortunately, all images are roughly the same size/shape. Several 1:m tables with a few fields apiece. The kicker is the master/child tables. I've seen examples for Word 2000 for doing this by left-joining the master and child table and using some IF/THEN logic to know whether to jump to the next master record. But in my case, I have several of these subtables, so that approach won't really work. So, can Word 2003 handle arbitrary master/child tables? If so, how? If not, I considered InfoPath, but I haven't used it before, and it seems to be made for data entry, not long formatted reports. I'm a software developer, so I could always hack something together with a massive VBA macro, or generating the report in HTML on the web server (where the data is coming from anyway). But I'm hoping Word will work without such gymnastics, since it will give the ultimate users of the report template better control over formatting and making minor changes.

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  • Remote offscreen rendering

    - by redmoskito
    My research lab recently added a server that has a beefy NVIDIA graphics card, which we would like to use to do scientific computations. Since it isn't a workstation, we'll have to run our jobs remotely, over an ssh connection. Most of our applications require doing opengl rendering to an offscreen buffer, then doing image analysis on the result in CUDA. My initial investigation suggests that X11 forwarding is a bad idea, because opengl rendering will occur on the client machine (or rather the X11 server--what a confusing naming convention!) and will suffer network bottlenecks when sending our massive textures. We will never need to display the output, so it seems like X11 forwarding shouldn't be necessary, but Opengl needs the $DISPLAY to be set to something valid or our applications won't run. I'm sure render farms exist that do this, but how is it accomplished? I think this is probably a simple X11 configuration issue, but I'm too unfamiliar with it to know where to start. We're running Ubuntu server 10.04, with no gdm, gnome, etc installed. However, xserver-xorg package is installed.

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  • Over gigabit connection, Teracopy does 31MB/s, but Windows 8 does it at ~109MB per second?

    - by Gaurang
    I got my brain-melting first taste of Gigabit networking today, between my 2011 MacMini and Windows 8 Pro desktop connected via Cat.5e to Linksys WRT320N(sporting dd-WRT). After making sure that the line speed on both systems showed 1Gbps, I proceeded to copying a 2.4GB MP4 from the Mini to the Win 8 desktop (SMB sharing). Although satisfied with the 30-34 MB/s that Teracopy was showing (that was a proper step-up for me from 10 MB/s), I still was curious about this massive difference in the advertised and real-world speed. 2 hours of Google had me believing that there were other factors that resulted in less speed, SMB being one. So just for the sake of doing it, I iPerf'd both the systems and guess what that showed - around 875mbps on both systems! I then stumbled upon this little piece of info after which I turned off Teracopy and copied the same file through Windows 8's regular copier. 109 MB/s. Molten brains :) What exactly is causing this? And can I enable such speeds via Teracopy? I really dig the extra features that Teracopy has, will surely miss them now :D

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  • Siege - running a stress test benchmark

    - by morgoth84
    I need to do a benchmark test of a HTTPS server using Siege, to see how it behaves under massive load. I'm initiating tests from another machine which is quite powerful and it is connected to the same physical switch the server is connected on. But when I initiate a test, I can't get it to make more than 170 requests per second. With this load the server's CPU usage is at 15-20% and the average response time for a request is approx. 0.03 seconds. Load of the client machine is approx. at 10%. So, I gradually increase the number of users in Siege (the number of worker threads) and request rate linearly increases up to 170 reqs/sec, but it never gets over it. No matter how many more worker threads I start, the load on the server is never more than 20% (and the client's load also doesn't increase any more). How can I overcome this? I've googled a bit and found out that after a request is completed, a socket associated with one ephermal port remains in WAIT_TIME state for some time during which it can't be reused. I tried to overcome this by doing these things: sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range="1024 65535" echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_tw_recycle Oh, and the client machine is a Linux (RedHat, I think, but I'm not sure). Any help would be appreciated.

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  • RedStation.com is heaven for ddos attackers, How to file complaint?

    - by Ehsan
    Sorry, I don't know where to open this subject. This is not the first time we have faced with a massive DDOS attack from one of servers in RedStation.com and even after we had contacted with their abuse department with it's log there is no cooperation and they don't even like to bother themselves about it. and we don't know how to stop such activity. Do you know how to file complaint against this datacenter? we could not be patient anymore and see they are not care about such things on their network ? it seems like they are heaven for attackers now since they close their eyes to gain more money. I guess some global organization is missing in this matter to investigate such activity and make sure providers are responsible for their services. Here is some of it's log: 2686M 75G DROP all -- * * 31.3-RedStation 0.0.0.0/0 rt: 16167 0.002007 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 36391 Destination port: 16167 0.002011 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 38367 Destination port: 16312 0.002014 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 39585 Destination port: 12081 0.002018 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 39585 Destination port: 12081 0.002021 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 38367 Destination port: 16312 0.002025 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 39585 Destination port: 12081 0.002033 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 36391 Destination port: 16167 0.002037 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 38367 Destination port: 16312 0.002040 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 38367 Destination port: 16312 0.002044 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 38367 Destination port: 16312 0.002047 31.3-RedStation -> my-server-ip UDP Source port: 39585 Destination Any response would be appreciated

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  • Reporting SQL Vulnerability [migrated]

    - by Ciaran87Bel
    My first post here so i'll hopefully keep it simple. I have just finished building a CMS targeted at a certain industry and built a test site to see how everything works. Anyway I wrote a program to check for sql injection vulnerabilities and the program followed a blog link to an external website. The program discovered that the external site had a massive vulnerability that left it open to practically anyone who could then access every bit of data on their MYSQL Server and run queries etc. The thing is this external site is the brand leader in their industry and do millions upon millions of sales per annum. I have tried contacting them to let them know and even went as far as contacting the company that built their platform but I was pretty much brushed off and haven't heard back from them. Their database would contain the details of hundreds of thousands of customers and all their data. I could easily make myself site admin etc in a few seconds but they won't listen to me even though I have offered to share the vulnerability with them and help in anyway I can. Is there anything else I can do because it is one of the biggest security risks I have ever personally come across. Is there any other steps I should take to report this? Thanks

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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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  • 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

    - by Alan Smith
    For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour.  This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue   static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005>     define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2  diffuse 0.7  specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1  lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7  } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } }   viewpoint {     from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60     resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 }       light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20>   object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden }   object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome }   After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue }   In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000   As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72   Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: ·         On-Premise o   Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o   Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o   Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o   Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. ·         Windows Azure o   Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment.   The architecture of each worker role is shown below.   The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" >   <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small">     <Imports>     </Imports>     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString" />     </ConfigurationSettings>     <LocalResources>       <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" />     </LocalResources>   </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition>     The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1.       The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2.       PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3.       DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4.       The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5.       A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6.       The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7.       The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() {     // Set environment variables     string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation);     string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation);       LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder");     string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath;       JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs");     JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs");     CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes");     CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images");     RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource();       Frames = 0;       while (true)     {         // Get the render job from the queue         CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get();           if (jobMsg != null)         {             // Get the file details             string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString;             string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga");             string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg");               string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile);             string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile);             string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile);               // Copy the scene file to local storage             sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath);               // Run the ray tracer.             string polyrayArguments =                 string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath);             Process polyRayProcess = new Process();             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath);             polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments;             polyRayProcess.Start();             polyRayProcess.WaitForExit();               // Convert the image             string dtaArguments =                 string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath));             Process dtaProcess = new Process();             dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName =                 Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath);             dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments;             dtaProcess.Start();             dtaProcess.WaitForExit();               // Upload the image to blob storage             imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath);               // Add a download job.             downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile);               // Delete the render job message             jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg);               Frames++;         }         else         {             Thread.Sleep(1000);         }           // Log the worker role activity.         roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive             ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames);     } }     Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage.   public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity {     public string ServerName { get; set; }     public string Status { get; set; }     public DateTime StartTime { get; set; }     public DateTime EndTime { get; set; }     public long SecondsRunning { get; set; }     public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; }     public int Frames { get; set; }     public string Comment { get; set; }       public RoleLifecycle()     {     }       public RoleLifecycle(string roleName)     {         PartitionKey = roleName;         RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey();         Status = "Started";         StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow;         LastActiveTime = StartTime;         EndTime = StartTime;         SecondsRunning = 0;         Frames = 0;     } }     A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="16" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames.   Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation.   With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes.     At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances.   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*">   <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole">     <Instances count="256" />     <ConfigurationSettings>       <Setting name="DataConnectionString"         value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." />     </ConfigurationSettings>   </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>     Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames.   Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds.   We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes.   The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each.   Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles   The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. ·         Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. ·         The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. ·         Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. ·         No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. ·         Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. ·         Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. ·         Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. ·         Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. ·         If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. ·         Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. ·         Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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  • ls -l freezes terminal locally and remotely

    - by Jakobud
    I've been reading other SF threads regarding ls not returning results or freezing and stalling terminal sessions and it appears they usually the fault of network problems. My problem however, occurs both over remote SSH sessions but also if I am physically at the server itself... I just installed CentOS 5.4 on one of our servers. I'm setting up some rdiff-backup scripts and when I downloaded librsync and untared it, thats when I started seeing some weird behavior with ls -l. wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/librsync/files/librsync/0.9.7/librsync-0.9.7.tar.gz/download /tmp cd /tmp tar -xzf librsync-0.9.7.tar.gz Simple enough. To view the files in this directory I did this: ls results: librsync-0.9.7 librsync-0.9.7.tar.gz Now, if I ls -l, my terminal freezes. I have to re-ssh in to keep going. After reading SF threads, I thought it was network related. So I was extremely surprised to go sit down at the server itself and see the exact same thing happen... So its obviously not a network issues. Even if I ls /tmp/librsync-0.9.7, my terminal freezes just the same... Next I did an strace and got this (warning: wall of text coming....): strace ls -l /tmp execve("/bin/ls", ["ls", "-l", "/tmp"], [/* 21 vars */]) = 0 brk(0) = 0x1c521000 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b8582cc0000 uname({sys="Linux", node="massive.answeron.com", ...}) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=71746, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 71746, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x2b8582cc1000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib64/librt.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0 \"\200\2730\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=53448, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b8582cd3000 mmap(0x30bb800000, 2132936, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x30bb800000 mprotect(0x30bb807000, 2097152, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30bba07000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x7000) = 0x30bba07000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib64/libacl.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\0\31@\2740\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=28008, ...}) = 0 mmap(0x30bc400000, 2120992, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x30bc400000 mprotect(0x30bc406000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30bc605000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x5000) = 0x30bc605000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib64/libselinux.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0`E\300\2730\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=95464, ...}) = 0 mmap(0x30bbc00000, 2192784, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x30bbc00000 mprotect(0x30bbc15000, 2097152, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30bbe15000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x15000) = 0x30bbe15000 mmap(0x30bbe17000, 1424, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x30bbe17000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib64/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\220\332\201\2720\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1717800, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b8582cd4000 mmap(0x30ba800000, 3498328, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x30ba800000 mprotect(0x30ba94d000, 2097152, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30bab4d000, 20480, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x14d000) = 0x30bab4d000 mmap(0x30bab52000, 16728, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x30bab52000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib64/libpthread.so.0", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\220W\0\2730\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=145824, ...}) = 0 mmap(0x30bb000000, 2204528, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x30bb000000 mprotect(0x30bb016000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30bb215000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x15000) = 0x30bb215000 mmap(0x30bb217000, 13168, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x30bb217000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib64/libattr.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\320\17\300\2750\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=17888, ...}) = 0 mmap(0x30bdc00000, 2110728, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x30bdc00000 mprotect(0x30bdc04000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30bde03000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x3000) = 0x30bde03000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib64/libdl.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\20\16\300\2720\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=23360, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b8582cd5000 mmap(0x30bac00000, 2109696, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x30bac00000 mprotect(0x30bac02000, 2097152, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30bae02000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x2000) = 0x30bae02000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib64/libsepol.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\0=\0\2740\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=247496, ...}) = 0 mmap(0x30bc000000, 2383136, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x30bc000000 mprotect(0x30bc03b000, 2097152, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30bc23b000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x3b000) = 0x30bc23b000 mmap(0x30bc23c000, 40224, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x30bc23c000 close(3) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b8582cd6000 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b8582cd7000 arch_prctl(ARCH_SET_FS, 0x2b8582cd6c50) = 0 mprotect(0x30bba07000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x30bab4d000, 16384, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x30bb215000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x30ba61b000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x30bae02000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x2b8582cc1000, 71746) = 0 set_tid_address(0x2b8582cd6ce0) = 24102 set_robust_list(0x2b8582cd6cf0, 0x18) = 0 futex(0x7fff72d02d6c, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1) = 0 rt_sigaction(SIGRTMIN, {0x30bb005370, [], SA_RESTORER|SA_SIGINFO, 0x30bb00e7c0}, NULL, 8) = 0 rt_sigaction(SIGRT_1, {0x30bb0052b0, [], SA_RESTORER|SA_RESTART|SA_SIGINFO, 0x30bb00e7c0}, NULL, 8) = 0 rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [RTMIN RT_1], NULL, 8) = 0 getrlimit(RLIMIT_STACK, {rlim_cur=10240*1024, rlim_max=RLIM_INFINITY}) = 0 access("/etc/selinux/", F_OK) = 0 brk(0) = 0x1c521000 brk(0x1c542000) = 0x1c542000 open("/etc/selinux/config", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=448, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b8582cc1000 read(3, "# This file controls the state o"..., 4096) = 448 read(3, "", 4096) = 0 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x2b8582cc1000, 4096) = 0 open("/proc/mounts", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0444, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b8582cc1000 read(3, "rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0\n/dev/root"..., 4096) = 577 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x2b8582cc1000, 4096) = 0 open("/selinux/mls", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "1", 19) = 1 close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/setrans/.setrans-unix"...}, 110) = 0 sendmsg(3, {msg_name(0)=NULL, msg_iov(5)=[{"\1\0\0\0", 4}, {"\1\0\0\0", 4}, {"\1\0\0\0", 4}, {"\0", 1}, {"\0", 1}], msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=0}, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 14 readv(3, [{"\1\0\0\0", 4}, {"\1\0\0\0", 4}, {"\0\0\0\0", 4}], 3) = 12 readv(3, [{"\0", 1}], 1) = 1 close(3) = 0 open("/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=56413824, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 56413824, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x2b8582cd8000 close(3) = 0 ioctl(1, SNDCTL_TMR_TIMEBASE or TCGETS, {B38400 opost isig icanon echo ...}) = 0 ioctl(1, TIOCGWINSZ, {ws_row=65, ws_col=137, ws_xpixel=0, ws_ypixel=0}) = 0 open("/usr/share/locale/locale.alias", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2528, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(3, "# Locale name alias data base.\n#"..., 4096) = 2528 read(3, "", 4096) = 0 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 open("/usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en.UTF-8/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en.utf8/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en/LC_TIME/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) lstat("/tmp", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|S_ISVTX|0777, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 getxattr("/tmp", "system.posix_acl_access", 0x0, 0) = -1 ENODATA (No data available) getxattr("/tmp", "system.posix_acl_default", 0x0, 0) = -1 ENODATA (No data available) socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"...}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"...}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 open("/etc/nsswitch.conf", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1711, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(3, "#\n# /etc/nsswitch.conf\n#\n# An ex"..., 4096) = 1711 read(3, "", 4096) = 0 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=71746, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 71746, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 close(3) = 0 open("/lib64/libnss_files.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\340\37\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=53880, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 2139432, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x2b85862b7000 mprotect(0x2b85862c1000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x2b85864c0000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x9000) = 0x2b85864c0000 close(3) = 0 mprotect(0x2b85864c0000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 71746) = 0 open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY) = 3 fcntl(3, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1823, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(3, "root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash\n"..., 4096) = 1823 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"...}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 3 fcntl(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"...}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(3) = 0 open("/etc/group", O_RDONLY) = 3 fcntl(3, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=743, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(3, "root:x:0:root\nbin:x:1:root,bin,d"..., 4096) = 743 close(3) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 open("/tmp", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY) = 3 fcntl(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 getdents(3, /* 8 entries */, 32768) = 264 lstat("/tmp/librsync-0.9.7.tar.gz", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=453802, ...}) = 0 getxattr("/tmp/librsync-0.9.7.tar.gz", "system.posix_acl_access", 0x0, 0) = -1 ENODATA (No data available) getxattr("/tmp/librsync-0.9.7.tar.gz", "system.posix_acl_default", 0x0, 0) = -1 ENODATA (No data available) lstat("/tmp/librsync-0.9.7", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0777, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0 getxattr("/tmp/librsync-0.9.7", "system.posix_acl_access", 0x0, 0) = -1 ENODATA (No data available) getxattr("/tmp/librsync-0.9.7", "system.posix_acl_default", 0x0, 0) = -1 ENODATA (No data available) open("/etc/passwd", O_RDONLY) = 4 fcntl(4, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=1823, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(4, "root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash\n"..., 4096) = 1823 read(4, "", 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=71746, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 71746, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 4, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 close(4) = 0 open("/lib64/libnss_ldap.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 4 read(4, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\300r\4\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=3169960, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 5329912, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0) = 0x2b85864c2000 mprotect(0x2b858679e000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x2b858699d000, 176128, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0x2db000) = 0x2b858699d000 mmap(0x2b85869c8000, 62456, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85869c8000 close(4) = 0 open("/lib64/libcom_err.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 4 read(4, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\320\n\300\2770\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=10000, ...}) = 0 mmap(0x30bfc00000, 2103048, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0) = 0x30bfc00000 mprotect(0x30bfc02000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30bfe01000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0x1000) = 0x30bfe01000 close(4) = 0 open("/lib64/libkeyutils.so.1", O_RDONLY) = 4 read(4, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0`\n@\2760\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=9472, ...}) = 0 mmap(0x30be400000, 2102416, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0) = 0x30be400000 mprotect(0x30be402000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30be601000, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0x1000) = 0x30be601000 close(4) = 0 open("/lib64/libresolv.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 4 read(4, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\2402\0\2760\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=92736, ...}) = 0 mmap(0x30be000000, 2181864, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0) = 0x30be000000 mprotect(0x30be011000, 2097152, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x30be211000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0x11000) = 0x30be211000 mmap(0x30be213000, 6888, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x30be213000 close(4) = 0 mprotect(0x30be211000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 71746) = 0 rt_sigaction(SIGPIPE, {0x1, [], SA_RESTORER, 0x30ba8302d0}, {SIG_DFL, [], 0}, 8) = 0 geteuid() = 0 futex(0x2b85869c7708, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 2147483647) = 0 open("/etc/ldap.conf", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=9119, ...}) = 0 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=9119, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(4, "# @(#)$Id: ldap.conf,v 1.38 2006"..., 4096) = 4096 read(4, "Use the OpenLDAP password change"..., 4096) = 4096 read(4, " OpenLDAP 2.0 and earlier is \"no"..., 4096) = 927 read(4, "", 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 uname({sys="Linux", node="massive.answeron.com", ...}) = 0 open("/etc/resolv.conf", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=107, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(4, "; generated by /sbin/dhclient-sc"..., 4096) = 107 read(4, "", 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 4 fcntl(4, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(4, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"...}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(4) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 4 fcntl(4, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(4, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"...}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(4) = 0 open("/etc/host.conf", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=17, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(4, "order hosts,bind\n", 4096) = 17 read(4, "", 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 futex(0x30bab54d44, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 2147483647) = 0 open("/etc/hosts", O_RDONLY) = 4 fcntl(4, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=187, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(4, "# Do not remove the following li"..., 4096) = 187 read(4, "", 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=71746, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 71746, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 4, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 close(4) = 0 open("/lib64/libnss_dns.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 4 read(4, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\340\17\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=23736, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 2113792, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0) = 0x2b85869d8000 mprotect(0x2b85869dc000, 2093056, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x2b8586bdb000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0x3000) = 0x2b8586bdb000 close(4) = 0 mprotect(0x2b8586bdb000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 71746) = 0 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 4 connect(4, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("192.168.10.20")}, 28) = 0 fcntl(4, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl(4, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 gettimeofday({1276265920, 823870}, NULL) = 0 poll([{fd=4, events=POLLOUT}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=4, revents=POLLOUT}]) sendto(4, "C\v\1\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\7massive\10answeron\3co"..., 38, MSG_NOSIGNAL, NULL, 0) = 38 poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}], 1, 5000) = 1 ([{fd=4, revents=POLLIN}]) ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [122]) = 0 recvfrom(4, "C\v\205\200\0\1\0\1\0\2\0\2\7massive\10answeron\3co"..., 1024, 0, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("192.168.10.20")}, [16]) = 122 close(4) = 0 open("/etc/openldap/ldap.conf", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=335, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(4, "#\n# LDAP Defaults\n#\n\n# See ldap."..., 4096) = 335 read(4, "", 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 getuid() = 0 geteuid() = 0 getgid() = 0 getegid() = 0 open("/root/ldaprc", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/root/.ldaprc", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat("/etc/ldap.conf", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=9119, ...}) = 0 geteuid() = 0 brk(0x1c566000) = 0x1c566000 open("/etc/hosts", O_RDONLY) = 4 fcntl(4, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=187, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(4, "# Do not remove the following li"..., 4096) = 187 read(4, "", 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 open("/etc/hosts", O_RDONLY) = 4 fcntl(4, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=187, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x2b85862a5000 read(4, "# Do not remove the following li"..., 4096) = 187 read(4, "", 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0x2b85862a5000, 4096) = 0 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 4 connect(4, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("192.168.10.20")}, 28) = 0 fcntl(4, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl(4, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 gettimeofday({1276265920, 855948}, NULL) = 0 poll([{fd=4, events=POLLOUT}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=4, revents=POLLOUT}]) sendto(4, "\32 \1\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\4ldap\10answeron\3com\0\0"..., 35, MSG_NOSIGNAL, NULL, 0) = 35 poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}], 1, 5000) = 1 ([{fd=4, revents=POLLIN}]) ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [104]) = 0 recvfrom(4, "\32 \205\200\0\1\0\1\0\1\0\0\4ldap\10answeron\3com\0\0"..., 1024, 0, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("192.168.10.20")}, [16]) = 104 close(4) = 0 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 4 connect(4, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("192.168.10.20")}, 28) = 0 fcntl(4, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl(4, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 gettimeofday({1276265920, 858536}, NULL) = 0 poll([{fd=4, events=POLLOUT}], 1, 0) = 1 ([{fd=4, revents=POLLOUT}]) sendto(4, "I\375\1\0\0\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\4ldap\10answeron\3com\0\0"..., 35, MSG_NOSIGNAL, NULL, 0) = 35 poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}], 1, 5000) = 1 ([{fd=4, revents=POLLIN}]) ioctl(4, FIONREAD, [139]) = 0 recvfrom(4, "I\375\205\200\0\1\0\2\0\2\0\2\4ldap\10answeron\3com\0\0"..., 1024, 0, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(53), sin_addr=inet_addr("192.168.10.20")}, [16]) = 139 close(4) = 0 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_IP) = 4 fcntl(4, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 setsockopt(4, SOL_SOCKET, SO_KEEPALIVE, [1], 4) = 0 setsockopt(4, SOL_TCP, TCP_NODELAY, [1], 4) = 0 fcntl(4, F_GETFL) = 0x2 (flags O_RDWR) fcntl(4, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(4, {sa_family=AF_INET, sin_port=htons(389), sin_addr=inet_addr("10.20.0.30")}, 16) = -1 EINPROGRESS (Operation now in progress) poll([{fd=4, events=POLLOUT|POLLERR|POLLHUP}], 1, 120000 And thats where it stops, right there after that last 120000.... Using strace, I can obviously CTRL+C to keep going. But like I said, normally the terminal completely freezes. Anyone have any clues?

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  • Oracle Announces Oracle Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine

    - by jgelhaus
    Fourth Generation Exadata X3 Systems are Ideal for High-End OLTP, Large Data Warehouses, and Database Clouds; Eighth-Rack Configuration Offers New Low-Cost Entry Point ORACLE OPENWORLD, SAN FRANCISCO – October 1, 2012 News Facts During his opening keynote address at Oracle OpenWorld, Oracle CEO, Larry Ellison announced the Oracle Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine - the latest generation of its Oracle Exadata Database Machines. The Oracle Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine is a key component of the Oracle Cloud. Oracle Exadata X3-2 Database In-Memory Machine and Oracle Exadata X3-8 Database In-Memory Machine can store up to hundreds of Terabytes of compressed user data in Flash and RAM memory, virtually eliminating the performance overhead of reads and writes to slow disk drives, making Exadata X3 systems the ideal database platforms for the varied and unpredictable workloads of cloud computing. In order to realize the highest performance at the lowest cost, the Oracle Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine implements a mass memory hierarchy that automatically moves all active data into Flash and RAM memory, while keeping less active data on low-cost disks. With a new Eighth-Rack configuration, the Oracle Exadata X3-2 Database In-Memory Machine delivers a cost-effective entry point for smaller workloads, testing, development and disaster recovery systems, and is a fully redundant system that can be used with mission critical applications. Next-Generation Technologies Deliver Dramatic Performance Improvements Oracle Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machines use a combination of scale-out servers and storage, InfiniBand networking, smart storage, PCI Flash, smart memory caching, and Hybrid Columnar Compression to deliver extreme performance and availability for all Oracle Database Workloads. Oracle Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine systems leverage next-generation technologies to deliver significant performance enhancements, including: Four times the Flash memory capacity of the previous generation; with up to 40 percent faster response times and 100 GB/second data scan rates. Combined with Exadata’s unique Hybrid Columnar Compression capabilities, hundreds of Terabytes of user data can now be managed entirely within Flash; 20 times more capacity for database writes through updated Exadata Smart Flash Cache software. The new Exadata Smart Flash Cache software also runs on previous generation Exadata systems, increasing their capacity for writes tenfold; 33 percent more database CPU cores in the Oracle Exadata X3-2 Database In-Memory Machine, using the latest 8-core Intel® Xeon E5-2600 series of processors; Expanded 10Gb Ethernet connectivity to the data center in the Oracle Exadata X3-2 provides 40 10Gb network ports per rack for connecting users and moving data; Up to 30 percent reduction in power and cooling. Configured for Your Business, Available Today Oracle Exadata X3-2 Database In-Memory Machine systems are available in a Full-Rack, Half-Rack, Quarter-Rack, and the new low-cost Eighth-Rack configuration to satisfy the widest range of applications. Oracle Exadata X3-8 Database In-Memory Machine systems are available in a Full-Rack configuration, and both X3 systems enable multi-rack configurations for virtually unlimited scalability. Oracle Exadata X3-2 and X3-8 Database In-Memory Machines are fully compatible with prior Exadata generations and existing systems can also be upgraded with Oracle Exadata X3-2 servers. Oracle Exadata X3 Database In-Memory Machine systems can be used immediately with any application certified with Oracle Database 11g R2 and Oracle Real Application Clusters, including SAP, Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle’s PeopleSoft, Oracle’s Siebel CRM, the Oracle E-Business Suite, and thousands of other applications. Supporting Quotes “Forward-looking enterprises are moving towards Cloud Computing architectures,” said Andrew Mendelsohn, senior vice president, Oracle Database Server Technologies. “Oracle Exadata’s unique ability to run any database application on a fully scale-out architecture using a combination of massive memory for extreme performance and low-cost disk for high capacity delivers the ideal solution for Cloud-based database deployments today.” Supporting Resources Oracle Press Release Oracle Exadata Database Machine Oracle Exadata X3-2 Database In-Memory Machine Oracle Exadata X3-8 Database In-Memory Machine Oracle Database 11g Follow Oracle Database via Blog, Facebook and Twitter Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Oracle OpenWorld 2012 Keynotes Like Oracle OpenWorld on Facebook Follow Oracle OpenWorld on Twitter Oracle OpenWorld Blog Oracle OpenWorld on LinkedIn Mark Hurd's keynote with Andy Mendelsohn and Juan Loaiza - - watch for the replay to be available soon at http://www.youtube.com/user/Oracle or http://www.oracle.com/openworld/live/on-demand/index.html

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  • Big Data – Buzz Words: What is MapReduce – Day 7 of 21

    - by Pinal Dave
    In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is Hadoop. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – MapReduce. What is MapReduce? MapReduce was designed by Google as a programming model for processing large data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. Though, MapReduce was originally Google proprietary technology, it has been quite a generalized term in the recent time. MapReduce comprises a Map() and Reduce() procedures. Procedure Map() performance filtering and sorting operation on data where as procedure Reduce() performs a summary operation of the data. This model is based on modified concepts of the map and reduce functions commonly available in functional programing. The library where procedure Map() and Reduce() belongs is written in many different languages. The most popular free implementation of MapReduce is Apache Hadoop which we will explore tomorrow. Advantages of MapReduce Procedures The MapReduce Framework usually contains distributed servers and it runs various tasks in parallel to each other. There are various components which manages the communications between various nodes of the data and provides the high availability and fault tolerance. Programs written in MapReduce functional styles are automatically parallelized and executed on commodity machines. The MapReduce Framework takes care of the details of partitioning the data and executing the processes on distributed server on run time. During this process if there is any disaster the framework provides high availability and other available modes take care of the responsibility of the failed node. As you can clearly see more this entire MapReduce Frameworks provides much more than just Map() and Reduce() procedures; it provides scalability and fault tolerance as well. A typical implementation of the MapReduce Framework processes many petabytes of data and thousands of the processing machines. How do MapReduce Framework Works? A typical MapReduce Framework contains petabytes of the data and thousands of the nodes. Here is the basic explanation of the MapReduce Procedures which uses this massive commodity of the servers. Map() Procedure There is always a master node in this infrastructure which takes an input. Right after taking input master node divides it into smaller sub-inputs or sub-problems. These sub-problems are distributed to worker nodes. A worker node later processes them and does necessary analysis. Once the worker node completes the process with this sub-problem it returns it back to master node. Reduce() Procedure All the worker nodes return the answer to the sub-problem assigned to them to master node. The master node collects the answer and once again aggregate that in the form of the answer to the original big problem which was assigned master node. The MapReduce Framework does the above Map () and Reduce () procedure in the parallel and independent to each other. All the Map() procedures can run parallel to each other and once each worker node had completed their task they can send it back to master code to compile it with a single answer. This particular procedure can be very effective when it is implemented on a very large amount of data (Big Data). The MapReduce Framework has five different steps: Preparing Map() Input Executing User Provided Map() Code Shuffle Map Output to Reduce Processor Executing User Provided Reduce Code Producing the Final Output Here is the Dataflow of MapReduce Framework: Input Reader Map Function Partition Function Compare Function Reduce Function Output Writer In a future blog post of this 31 day series we will explore various components of MapReduce in Detail. MapReduce in a Single Statement MapReduce is equivalent to SELECT and GROUP BY of a relational database for a very large database. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss Buzz Word – HDFS. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • Big Data: Size isn’t everything

    - by Simon Elliston Ball
    Big Data has a big problem; it’s the word “Big”. These days, a quick Google search will uncover terabytes of negative opinion about the futility of relying on huge volumes of data to produce magical, meaningful insight. There are also many clichéd but correct assertions about the difficulties of correlation versus causation, in massive data sets. In reading some of these pieces, I begin to understand how climatologists must feel when people complain ironically about “global warming” during snowfall. Big Data has a name problem. There is a lot more to it than size. Shape, Speed, and…err…Veracity are also key elements (now I understand why Gartner and the gang went with V’s instead of S’s). The need to handle data of different shapes (Variety) is not new. Data developers have always had to mold strange-shaped data into our reporting systems, integrating with semi-structured sources, and even straying into full-text searching. However, what we lacked was an easy way to add semi-structured and unstructured data to our arsenal. New “Big Data” tools such as MongoDB, and other NoSQL (Not Only SQL) databases, or a graph database like Neo4J, fill this gap. Still, to many, they simply introduce noise to the clean signal that is their sensibly normalized data structures. What about speed (Velocity)? It’s not just high frequency trading that generates data faster than a single system can handle. Many other applications need to make trade-offs that traditional databases won’t, in order to cope with high data insert speeds, or to extract quickly the required information from data streams. Unfortunately, many people equate Big Data with the Hadoop platform, whose batch driven queries and job processing queues have little to do with “velocity”. StreamInsight, Esper and Tibco BusinessEvents are examples of Big Data tools designed to handle high-velocity data streams. Again, the name doesn’t do the discipline of Big Data any favors. Ultimately, though, does analyzing fast moving data produce insights as useful as the ones we get through a more considered approach, enabled by traditional BI? Finally, we have Veracity and Value. In many ways, these additions to the classic Volume, Velocity and Variety trio acknowledge the criticism that without high-quality data and genuinely valuable outputs then data, big or otherwise, is worthless. As a discipline, Big Data has recognized this, and data quality and cleaning tools are starting to appear to support it. Rather than simply decrying the irrelevance of Volume, we need as a profession to focus how to improve Veracity and Value. Perhaps we should just declare the ‘Big’ silent, embrace these new data tools and help develop better practices for their use, just as we did the good old RDBMS? What does Big Data mean to you? Which V gives your business the most pain, or the most value? Do you see these new tools as a useful addition to the BI toolbox, or are they just enabling a dangerous trend to find ghosts in the noise?

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  • Is there a low carbon future for the retail industry?

    - by user801960
    Recently Oracle published a report in conjunction with The Future Laboratory and a global panel of experts to highlight the issue of energy use in modern industry and the serious need to reduce carbon emissions radically by 2050.  Emissions must be cut by 80-95% below the levels in 1990 – but what can the retail industry do to keep up with this? There are three key aspects to the retail industry where carbon emissions can be cut:  manufacturing, transport and IT.  Manufacturing Naturally, manufacturing is going to be a big area where businesses across all industries will be forced to make considerable savings in carbon emissions as well as other forms of pollution.  Many retailers of all sizes will use third party factories and will have little control over specific environmental impacts from the factory, but retailers can reduce environmental impact at the factories by managing orders more efficiently – better planning for stock requirements means economies of scale both in terms of finance and the environment. The John Lewis Partnership has made detailed commitments to reducing manufacturing and packaging waste on both its own-brand products and products it sources from third party suppliers. It aims to divert 95 percent of its operational waste from landfill by 2013, which is a huge logistics challenge.  The John Lewis Partnership’s website provides a large amount of information on its responsibilities towards the environment. Transport Similarly to manufacturing, tightening up on logistical planning for stock distribution will make savings on carbon emissions from haulage.  More accurate supply and demand analysis will mean less stock re-allocation after initial distribution, and better warehouse management will mean more efficient stock distribution.  UK grocery retailer Morrisons has introduced double-decked trailers to its haulage fleet and adjusted distribution logistics accordingly to reduce the number of kilometers travelled by the fleet.  Morrisons measures route planning efficiency in terms of cases moved per kilometre and has, over the last two years, increased the number of cases per kilometre by 12.7%.  See Morrisons Corporate Responsibility report for more information. IT IT infrastructure is often initially overlooked by businesses when considering environmental efficiency.  Datacentres and web servers often need to run 24/7 to handle both consumer orders and internal logistics, and this both requires a lot of energy and puts out a lot of heat.  Many businesses are lowering environmental impact by reducing IT system fragmentation in their offices, while an increasing number of businesses are outsourcing their datacenters to cloud-based services.  Using centralised datacenters reduces the power usage at smaller offices, while using cloud based services means the datacenters can be based in a more environmentally friendly location.  For example, Facebook is opening a massive datacentre in Sweden – close to the Arctic Circle – to reduce the need for artificial cooling methods.  In addition, moving to a cloud-based solution makes IT services more easily scaleable, reducing redundant IT systems that would still use energy.  In store, the UK’s Carbon Trust reports that on average, lighting accounts for 25% of a retailer’s electricity costs, and for grocery retailers, up to 50% of their electricity bill comes from refrigeration units.  On a smaller scale, retailers can invest in greener technologies in store and in their offices.  The report concludes that widely shared objectives of energy security, reduced emissions and continued economic growth are dependent on the development of a smart grid capable of delivering energy efficiency and demand response, as well as integrating renewable and variable sources of energy. The report is available to download from http://emeapressoffice.oracle.com/imagelibrary/detail.aspx?MediaDetailsID=1766I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on the report.   

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  • Lazy Evaluation &ndash; Why being lazy in F# blows my mind!

    - by MarkPearl
    First of all – shout out to Peter Adams – from the feedback I have gotten from him on the last few posts of F# that I have done – my mind has just been expanded. I did a blog post a few days ago about infinite sequences – I didn’t really understand what was going on with it, and I still don’t really get it – but I am getting closer. In Peter’s last comment he made mention of Lazy Evaluation. I am ashamed to say that up till then I had never heard about lazy evaluation – how can evaluation be lazy? I mean, I know about lazy loading and that makes sense… but surely something is either evaluated or not! Well… a bit of reading today and I have been enlightened to a point – if you do know of any good articles explaining lazy evaluation please send them to me. So what is lazy evaluation and why is it useful? Lazy evaluation is a process whereby the system only computes the values needed and “ignores” the computations not needed. I’m going out on a limb here, but with this explanation in hand, imagine the following C# code… public int CalculatedVal() { int Val1 = 0; int Val2 = 0; for (int Count = 0; Count < 1000000; Count++) { Val1++; } return Val2; }   Normally, even though Val1 is never needed, the system would loop 1000000 times and add 1 to the current value of Val1. Imagine if the system realized this and so just skipped this segment of code and instead did the following…. public int CalculatedVal() { int Val1 = 0; return Val2; }   A massive saving in computation and wasted effort. Now I am pretty sure it isn’t as simple as this but I think this is the basic idea. For a more detailed explanation of lazy evaluation in c#, Pedram Rezei has a wonderful post on lazy evaluation and makes some C# comparisons. I am not going to take any thunder from him by repeating everything he said since I think he did such a good job of explaining it himself. What I am interested in though is how in F# do you tell something to have lazy evalution, and how do you know if something will be eager or lazy by looking at it. I found this post was useful. From reading around F# by default uses eager evaluation unless explicitly told to use lazy evaluation. One exception to this is sequences, which are lazy by default. Now reading about lazy evaluation has helped me understand more about F# coding… From my understanding of F# because of its declarative nature, most of the actual code you are declaring properties and rules – very little code is actually saying do this right now - but when it comes to a “do this” code section, it then evaluates and optimizes code and applies the rules. So props to lazy evaluation and its optimizations…

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  • 24 hours to pass until 24 Hours of PASS

    - by Rob Farley
    There’s a bunch of stuff going on at the moment in the SQL world, so if you’ve missed this particular piece of news, let me tell you a bit about it. Twice a year, the SQL community puts on its biggest virtual event – 24 Hours of PASS. And the next one is tomorrow – March 21st, 2012. Twenty-four sessions, back-to-back, featuring a selection of some of the best presenters in the SQL world, speakers from all over the world, coming together in an online collaboration that so far has well over thirty thousand registrations across the presentations. Some people are signed up for all 24 sessions, some only one. Traditionally, LiveMeeting has been used as the platform for this event, but this year we’re going with a new platform – IBTalk. It promises big, and we’re hoping it won’t let us down. LiveMeeting has been great, and we thank Microsoft for providing it as a platform for the past few years. However, as the event has grown, we’ve found that a new idea is necessary. Last year a search was done for a new platform, and IBTalk ticked the right boxes. The feedback from the presenters and moderators so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’re hoping that this is going to really enhance the user experience. One of my favourite features of the platform is the language side. It provides a pretty good translation service. Users who join a session will see a flag on the left of the screen. If they click it, they can change the language to one of 15 on offer. Picking this changes all the labels on everything. It even translates the text in the Q&A window. What this means is that someone from Brazil can ask their question in Portuguese, and the presenter will see it in English. Then if the answer is typed in English, the questioner will be able to see the answer, also in Portuguese. Or they can switch to English to see it as the answerer typed it. I know there’s always the risk of bad translations going on, but I’ve heard good things about this translation service. But there’s more – IBTalk are providing staff to type up closed captioning live during the event. So if English isn’t your first language, don’t worry! Picking your language will also let you see subtitles in your chosen language. I’m hoping that this event is the start of PASS being able to reach people from all corners of the world. Wouldn’t it be great to find that this event is successful, and that the next 24HOP (later in the year, our Summit Preview event) has just as many non-English speakers tuning in as English speakers? If you haven’t been planning which sessions you’re going to attend, you really should get over to sqlpass.org/24hours and have a look through what’s on offer. There’s some amazing material from some of the industry’s brightest, covering a wide range of topics, from classic SQL areas to the brand new SQL 2012 features. There really should be something for every SQL professional. Check the time zones though – if you’re in the US you might be on Summer time, and an hour closer to GMT than normal. Massive thanks must go to Microsoft, SQL Sentry and Idera for sponsoring this event. Without sponsors we wouldn’t be able to put any of this on. These companies are helping 24HOP continue to grow into an event for the whole world. See you tomorrow! @rob_farley | #24hop | #sqlpass

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  • 24 hours to pass until 24 Hours of PASS

    - by Rob Farley
    There’s a bunch of stuff going on at the moment in the SQL world, so if you’ve missed this particular piece of news, let me tell you a bit about it. Twice a year, the SQL community puts on its biggest virtual event – 24 Hours of PASS. And the next one is tomorrow – March 21st, 2012. Twenty-four sessions, back-to-back, featuring a selection of some of the best presenters in the SQL world, speakers from all over the world, coming together in an online collaboration that so far has well over thirty thousand registrations across the presentations. Some people are signed up for all 24 sessions, some only one. Traditionally, LiveMeeting has been used as the platform for this event, but this year we’re going with a new platform – IBTalk. It promises big, and we’re hoping it won’t let us down. LiveMeeting has been great, and we thank Microsoft for providing it as a platform for the past few years. However, as the event has grown, we’ve found that a new idea is necessary. Last year a search was done for a new platform, and IBTalk ticked the right boxes. The feedback from the presenters and moderators so far has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’re hoping that this is going to really enhance the user experience. One of my favourite features of the platform is the language side. It provides a pretty good translation service. Users who join a session will see a flag on the left of the screen. If they click it, they can change the language to one of 15 on offer. Picking this changes all the labels on everything. It even translates the text in the Q&A window. What this means is that someone from Brazil can ask their question in Portuguese, and the presenter will see it in English. Then if the answer is typed in English, the questioner will be able to see the answer, also in Portuguese. Or they can switch to English to see it as the answerer typed it. I know there’s always the risk of bad translations going on, but I’ve heard good things about this translation service. But there’s more – IBTalk are providing staff to type up closed captioning live during the event. So if English isn’t your first language, don’t worry! Picking your language will also let you see subtitles in your chosen language. I’m hoping that this event is the start of PASS being able to reach people from all corners of the world. Wouldn’t it be great to find that this event is successful, and that the next 24HOP (later in the year, our Summit Preview event) has just as many non-English speakers tuning in as English speakers? If you haven’t been planning which sessions you’re going to attend, you really should get over to sqlpass.org/24hours and have a look through what’s on offer. There’s some amazing material from some of the industry’s brightest, covering a wide range of topics, from classic SQL areas to the brand new SQL 2012 features. There really should be something for every SQL professional. Check the time zones though – if you’re in the US you might be on Summer time, and an hour closer to GMT than normal. Massive thanks must go to Microsoft, SQL Sentry and Idera for sponsoring this event. Without sponsors we wouldn’t be able to put any of this on. These companies are helping 24HOP continue to grow into an event for the whole world. See you tomorrow! @rob_farley | #24hop | #sqlpass

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  • Subscribable World Cup 2010 Calendar

    - by jamiet
    I bang on quite a lot on this blog about ways in which data can get published over the web and one of the most interesting ways, in my opinion, of publishing data in a structured manner that is well understood is to use the iCalendar specification. There isn’t much information in the world that doesn’t have some concept of “when” so iCalendar is a great way of distributing that information. You have probably used iCalendar at some point without even knowing about it. All files with a .ics suffix are iCalendar format files and that is why you can happily import them into Outlook, Hotmail Calendar, Google Calendar etc… where they can be parsed and have the semantic data (when, where and who) extracted from them. Importing of iCalendar format data is really only half the trick though; in my opinion the real value of iCalendar-formatted calendar is the ability to subscribe to them. Subscribing has a simple benefit over importing but that single benefit is of massive importance: a subscriber to an iCalendar calendar can periodically check to see if any updates have been made and, if they have, automatically update the local copy. The real benefit to the user is the productivity gain – a single update to an iCalendar means that all subscribers are automatically made aware of the change and there is zero effort on the part of the subscriber; as my former colleague Howard van Rooijen is fond of saying, “work smarter not harder” – nowhere is this edict more ably demonstrated than subscribing versus importing of calendars. If you want to read some more thoughts about iCalendar then go and read my past blog post Calendar syndication - My big hope for 2009's breakthrough technology or better still go and seek out Jon Udell who speaks very authoritatively on the issue of iCalendar. With this subject of iCalendar on my mind I was interested to discover (via Steve Clayton’s blog post Download the world cup fixtures) that the BBC had made a .ics file available containing all of the matches in the upcoming World Cup. As you can probably guess this was a file that was made available so that it could be imported into your calendar of choice. It had one obvious downside though, right now nobody knows who is going to be playing in the knock-out stages so the calendar looks like this: with no teams being named after 25th June. How much more useful would this calendar have been if the BBC had made it possible to subscribe to the calendar instead, thus the calendar could be updated with the teams for the knock out stages when they are known and every subscriber would have a permanently up-to-date record of all the fixtures in their calendar. Better still, the calendar could be updated with match results as well or perhaps even post a match report from the BBC sport pages; when calendars are made subscribable a sea of opportunity opens up for distribution of information. So with that in mind I have decided to go one better than the BBC. I have imported their .ics into a brand new Hotmail calendar and made it publicly available at the following URLs: HTML http://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/index.html iCalendar webcal://cid-dc1ed121af0476be.calendar.live.com/calendar/World+Cup+2010/calendar.ics The link you’re really interested in is the second one - click on that and it should open up in your calendar software of choice. Or, if you want to view it in an online calendar such as Hotmail Calendar or Google Calendar, copy and paste that URL into the appropriate place. I shall endeavour to keep the calendar updated throughout the World Cup and even if I don’t you’re no worse off than if you had imported the BBC’s .ics file so why not give it a try? If I do keep it up to date then you will have a permanent record of the 2010 World Cup available in your calendar. Forever. If you have your calendar synced to your smartphone then you’ll be carrying match reports around with you without you having to do a single thing. Surely that’s worth a quick click isn’t it?   If you have any thoughts let me have them in the comments below. Thanks for reading. @Jamiet Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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  • How to develop RPG Damage Formulas?

    - by user127817
    I'm developing a classical 2d RPG (in a similar vein to final fantasy) and I was wondering if anyone had some advice on how to do damage formulas/links to resources/examples? I'll explain my current setup. Hopefully I'm not overdoing it with this question, and I apologize if my questions is too large/broad My Characters stats are composed of the following: enum Stat { HP = 0, MP = 1, SP = 2, Strength = 3, Vitality = 4, Magic = 5, Spirit = 6, Skill = 7, Speed = 8, //Speed/Agility are the same thing Agility = 8, Evasion = 9, MgEvasion = 10, Accuracy = 11, Luck = 12, }; Vitality is basically defense to physical attacks and spirit is defense to magic attacks. All stats have fixed maximums (9999 for HP, 999 for MP/SP and 255 for the rest). With abilities, the maximums can be increased (99999 for HP, 9999 for HP/SP, 999 for the rest) with typical values (at level 100) before/after abilities+equipment+etc will be 8000/20,000 for HP, 800/2000 for SP/MP, 180/350 for other stats Late game Enemy HP will typically be in the lower millions (with a super boss having the maximum of ~12 million). I was wondering how do people actually develop proper damage formulas that scale correctly? For instance, based on this data, using the damage formulas for Final Fantasy X as a base looked very promising. A full reference here http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps2/197344-final-fantasy-x/faqs/31381 but as a quick example: Str = 127, 'Attack' command used, enemy Def = 34. 1. Physical Damage Calculation: Step 1 ------------------------------------- [{(Stat^3 ÷ 32) + 32} x DmCon ÷16] Step 2 ---------------------------------------- [{(127^3 ÷ 32) + 32} x 16 ÷ 16] Step 3 -------------------------------------- [{(2048383 ÷ 32) + 32} x 16 ÷ 16] Step 4 --------------------------------------------------- [{(64011) + 32} x 1] Step 5 -------------------------------------------------------- [{(64043 x 1)}] Step 6 ---------------------------------------------------- Base Damage = 64043 Step 7 ----------------------------------------- [{(Def - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 8 ------------------------------------------ [{(34 - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 9 ------------------------------------------------- [(-246)^2) ÷ 110] + 16 Step 10 ---------------------------------------------------- [60516 ÷ 110] + 16 Step 11 ------------------------------------------------------------ [550] + 16 Step 12 ---------------------------------------------------------- DefNum = 566 Step 13 ---------------------------------------------- [BaseDmg * DefNum ÷ 730] Step 14 --------------------------------------------------- [64043 * 566 ÷ 730] Step 15 ------------------------------------------------------ [36248338 ÷ 730] Step 16 ------------------------------------------------- Base Damage 2 = 49655 Step 17 ------------ Base Damage 2 * {730 - (Def * 51 - Def^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 18 ---------------------- 49655 * {730 - (34 * 51 - 34^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 19 ------------------------- 49655 * {730 - (1734 - 1156 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 20 ------------------------------- 49655 * {730 - (1734 - 105) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 21 ------------------------------------- 49655 * {730 - (1629) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 22 --------------------------------------------- 49655 * {730 - 162} ÷ 730 Step 23 ----------------------------------------------------- 49655 * 568 ÷ 730 Step 24 -------------------------------------------------- Final Damage = 38635 I simply modified the dividers to include the attack rating of weapons and the armor rating of armor. Magic Damage is calculated as follows: Mag = 255, Ultima is used, enemy MDef = 1 Step 1 ----------------------------------- [DmCon * ([Stat^2 ÷ 6] + DmCon) ÷ 4] Step 2 ------------------------------------------ [70 * ([255^2 ÷ 6] + 70) ÷ 4] Step 3 ------------------------------------------ [70 * ([65025 ÷ 6] + 70) ÷ 4] Step 4 ------------------------------------------------ [70 * (10837 + 70) ÷ 4] Step 5 ----------------------------------------------------- [70 * (10907) ÷ 4] Step 6 ------------------------------------ Base Damage = 190872 [cut to 99999] Step 7 ---------------------------------------- [{(MDef - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 8 ------------------------------------------- [{(1 - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 9 ---------------------------------------------- [{(-279.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 10 -------------------------------------------------- [(78064) ÷ 110] + 16 Step 11 ------------------------------------------------------------ [709] + 16 Step 12 --------------------------------------------------------- MDefNum = 725 Step 13 --------------------------------------------- [BaseDmg * MDefNum ÷ 730] Step 14 --------------------------------------------------- [99999 * 725 ÷ 730] Step 15 ------------------------------------------------- Base Damage 2 = 99314 Step 16 ---------- Base Damage 2 * {730 - (MDef * 51 - MDef^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 17 ------------------------ 99314 * {730 - (1 * 51 - 1^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 18 ------------------------------ 99314 * {730 - (51 - 1 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 19 --------------------------------------- 99314 * {730 - (49) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 20 ----------------------------------------------------- 99314 * 725 ÷ 730 Step 21 -------------------------------------------------- Final Damage = 98633 The problem is that the formulas completely fall apart once stats start going above 255. In particular Defense values over 300 or so start generating really strange behavior. High Strength + Defense stats lead to massive negative values for instance. While I might be able to modify the formulas to work correctly for my use case, it'd probably be easier just to use a completely new formula. How do people actually develop damage formulas? I was considering opening excel and trying to build the formula that way (mapping Attack Stats vs. Defense Stats for instance) but I was wondering if there's an easier way? While I can't convey the full game mechanics of my game here, might someone be able to suggest a good starting place for building a damage formula? Thanks

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  • Some thoughts on email hosting for one’s own domain

    - by jamiet
    I have used the same email providers for my own domains for a few years now however I am considering moving over to a new provider. In this email I’ll share my current thoughts and hopefully I’ll get some feedback that might help me to decide on what to do next. What I use today I have three email addresses that I use primarily (I have changed the domains in this blog post as I don’t want to give them away to spammers): [email protected] – My personal account that I give out to family and friends and which I use to register on websites [email protected]  - An account that I use to catch email from the numerous mailing lists that I am on [email protected] – I am a self-employed consultant so this is an account that I hand out to my clients, my accountant, and other work-related organisations Those two domains (jtpersonaldomain.com & jtworkdomain.com) are both managed at http://domains.live.com which is a fantastic service provided by Microsoft that for some perplexing reason they never bother telling anyone about. It offers multiple accounts (I have seven at jtpersonaldomain.com though as already stated I only use two of them) which are accessed via Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail.com) along with usage reporting plus a few other odds and sods that I never use. Best of all though, its totally free. In addition, given that I have got both domains hosted using http://domains.live.com I can link my various accounts together and switch between them at Outlook.com without having to login and logout: N.B. You’ll notice that there are two other accounts listed there in addition to the three I already mentioned. One is my mum’s account which helps me provide IT support/spam filtering services to her and the other is the donation account for AdventureWorks on Azure. I find that linking feature to be very handy indeed. Finally, http://domains.live.com is the epitome of “it just works”. I set up jtworkdomain.com at http://domains.live.com over three years ago and I am pretty certain I haven’t been back there even once to administer it. Proposed changes OK, so if I like http://domains.live.com so much why am I considering changing? Well, I earn my corn in the Microsoft ecosystem and if I’m reading the tea-leaves correctly its looking increasingly likely that the services that I’m going to have to be familiar with in the future are all going to be running on top of and alongside Windows Azure Active Directory and Office 365 respectively. Its clear to me that Microsoft’s are pushing their customers toward cloud services and, like it or lump it, data integration developers like me may have to come along for the ride. I don’t think the day is too far off when we can log into Windows Azure SQL Database (aka SQL Azure), Team Foundation Service, Dynamics etc… using the same credentials that are currently used for Office 365 and over time I would expect those things to get integrated together a lot better – that integration will be based upon a Windows Azure Active Directory identity. This should not come as a surprise, in my opinion Microsoft’s whole enterprise play over the past 15 or 20 years can be neatly surmised as “get people onto Windows Server and Active Directory then upsell from there” – in the not-too-distant-future the only difference is that they’re trying to do it in the cloud. I want to get familiar with these services and hence I am considering moving jtworkdomain.com onto Office 365. I’ll lose the convenience of easily being able to switch to that account at Outlook.com and moreover I’ll have to start paying for it (I think it’ll be about fifty quid a year – not a massive amount but its quite a bit more than free) but increasingly this is beginning to look like a move I have to make. So that’s where my head is at right now. Anyone have any relevant thoughts or experiences to share? Please let me know in the comments below. @Jamiet

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  • How to develop RPG Damage Formulas?

    - by user127817
    I'm developing a classical 2d RPG (in a similar vein to final fantasy) and I was wondering if anyone had some advice on how to do damage formulas/links to resources/examples? I'll explain my current setup. Hopefully I'm not overdoing it with this question, and I apologize if my questions is too large/broad My Characters stats are composed of the following: enum Stat { HP = 0, MP = 1, SP = 2, Strength = 3, Vitality = 4, Magic = 5, Spirit = 6, Skill = 7, Speed = 8, //Speed/Agility are the same thing Agility = 8, Evasion = 9, MgEvasion = 10, Accuracy = 11, Luck = 12, }; Vitality is basically defense to physical attacks and spirit is defense to magic attacks. All stats have fixed maximums (9999 for HP, 999 for MP/SP and 255 for the rest). With abilities, the maximums can be increased (99999 for HP, 9999 for HP/SP, 999 for the rest) with typical values (at level 100) before/after abilities+equipment+etc will be 8000/20,000 for HP, 800/2000 for SP/MP, 180/350 for other stats Late game Enemy HP will typically be in the lower millions (with a super boss having the maximum of ~12 million). I was wondering how do people actually develop proper damage formulas that scale correctly? For instance, based on this data, using the damage formulas for Final Fantasy X as a base looked very promising. A full reference here http://www.gamefaqs.com/ps2/197344-final-fantasy-x/faqs/31381 but as a quick example: Str = 127, 'Attack' command used, enemy Def = 34. 1. Physical Damage Calculation: Step 1 ------------------------------------- [{(Stat^3 ÷ 32) + 32} x DmCon ÷16] Step 2 ---------------------------------------- [{(127^3 ÷ 32) + 32} x 16 ÷ 16] Step 3 -------------------------------------- [{(2048383 ÷ 32) + 32} x 16 ÷ 16] Step 4 --------------------------------------------------- [{(64011) + 32} x 1] Step 5 -------------------------------------------------------- [{(64043 x 1)}] Step 6 ---------------------------------------------------- Base Damage = 64043 Step 7 ----------------------------------------- [{(Def - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 8 ------------------------------------------ [{(34 - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 9 ------------------------------------------------- [(-246)^2) ÷ 110] + 16 Step 10 ---------------------------------------------------- [60516 ÷ 110] + 16 Step 11 ------------------------------------------------------------ [550] + 16 Step 12 ---------------------------------------------------------- DefNum = 566 Step 13 ---------------------------------------------- [BaseDmg * DefNum ÷ 730] Step 14 --------------------------------------------------- [64043 * 566 ÷ 730] Step 15 ------------------------------------------------------ [36248338 ÷ 730] Step 16 ------------------------------------------------- Base Damage 2 = 49655 Step 17 ------------ Base Damage 2 * {730 - (Def * 51 - Def^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 18 ---------------------- 49655 * {730 - (34 * 51 - 34^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 19 ------------------------- 49655 * {730 - (1734 - 1156 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 20 ------------------------------- 49655 * {730 - (1734 - 105) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 21 ------------------------------------- 49655 * {730 - (1629) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 22 --------------------------------------------- 49655 * {730 - 162} ÷ 730 Step 23 ----------------------------------------------------- 49655 * 568 ÷ 730 Step 24 -------------------------------------------------- Final Damage = 38635 I simply modified the dividers to include the attack rating of weapons and the armor rating of armor. Magic Damage is calculated as follows: Mag = 255, Ultima is used, enemy MDef = 1 Step 1 ----------------------------------- [DmCon * ([Stat^2 ÷ 6] + DmCon) ÷ 4] Step 2 ------------------------------------------ [70 * ([255^2 ÷ 6] + 70) ÷ 4] Step 3 ------------------------------------------ [70 * ([65025 ÷ 6] + 70) ÷ 4] Step 4 ------------------------------------------------ [70 * (10837 + 70) ÷ 4] Step 5 ----------------------------------------------------- [70 * (10907) ÷ 4] Step 6 ------------------------------------ Base Damage = 190872 [cut to 99999] Step 7 ---------------------------------------- [{(MDef - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 8 ------------------------------------------- [{(1 - 280.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 9 ---------------------------------------------- [{(-279.4)^2} ÷ 110] + 16 Step 10 -------------------------------------------------- [(78064) ÷ 110] + 16 Step 11 ------------------------------------------------------------ [709] + 16 Step 12 --------------------------------------------------------- MDefNum = 725 Step 13 --------------------------------------------- [BaseDmg * MDefNum ÷ 730] Step 14 --------------------------------------------------- [99999 * 725 ÷ 730] Step 15 ------------------------------------------------- Base Damage 2 = 99314 Step 16 ---------- Base Damage 2 * {730 - (MDef * 51 - MDef^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 17 ------------------------ 99314 * {730 - (1 * 51 - 1^2 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 18 ------------------------------ 99314 * {730 - (51 - 1 ÷ 11) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 19 --------------------------------------- 99314 * {730 - (49) ÷ 10} ÷ 730 Step 20 ----------------------------------------------------- 99314 * 725 ÷ 730 Step 21 -------------------------------------------------- Final Damage = 98633 The problem is that the formulas completely fall apart once stats start going above 255. In particular Defense values over 300 or so start generating really strange behavior. High Strength + Defense stats lead to massive negative values for instance. While I might be able to modify the formulas to work correctly for my use case, it'd probably be easier just to use a completely new formula. How do people actually develop damage formulas? I was considering opening excel and trying to build the formula that way (mapping Attack Stats vs. Defense Stats for instance) but I was wondering if there's an easier way? While I can't convey the full game mechanics of my game here, might someone be able to suggest a good starting place for building a damage formula? Thanks

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