storage engines - Page 283

Getting a handle on mobile data

- by Eric Jensen

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} written by Ashok Joshi The proliferation of mobile devices in the corporate world is both a blessing as well as a challenge. Mobile devices improve productivity and the velocity of business for the end users; on the other hand, IT departments need to manage the corporate data and applications that run on these devices. Oracle Database Mobile Server (DMS for short) provides a simple and effective way to deal with the management challenge. DMS supports data synchronization between a central Oracle database server and data on mobile devices. It also provides authentication, encryption and application and device management. Finally, DMS is a highly scalable solution that can be used to manage hundreds of thousands of devices. Here’s a simplified outline of how such a solution might work. Each device runs local sync and mgmt agents that handle bidirectional data flow with an Oracle enterprise backend, run remote commands, and provide status to the management console. For example, mobile admins could monitor multiple networks of mobile devices, upgrade their software remotely, and even destroy the local database on a compromised device. DMS supports either Oracle Berkeley DB or SQLite for device-local storage, and runs on a wide variety of mobile platforms. The schema for the device-local database is pretty simple – it contains the name of the application that’s installed on the device as well as details such as product name, version number, time of last access etc. Each mobile user has an account on the monitoring system. DMS supports authentication via the Oracle database authentication mechanisms or alternately, via an external authentication server such as Oracle Identity Management. DMS also provides the option of encrypting the data on disk as well as while it is being synchronized. Whenever a device connects with DMS, it sends the list of all local application changes to the server; the server updates the central repository with this information. Synchronization can be triggered on-demand, whenever there’s a change on the device (e.g. new application installed or an existing application removed) or via a rule-based schedule (e.g. every Saturday). Synchronization is very fast and efficient, since only the changes are propagated. This includes resume capability; should synchronization be interrupted for any reason, the next synchronization will resume where the previous synchronization was interrupted. If the device should be lost or stolen, DMS has the capability to remove the applications and/or data from the device. This ability to control access to sensitive data and applications is critical in the corporate environment. The central repository also allows the IT manager to track the kinds of applications that mobile users use and recommend patches and upgrades, while still allowing the mobile user full control over what applications s/he downloads and uses on the device. This is useful since most devices are used for corporate as well as personal information. In certain restricted use scenarios, the IT manager can also control whether a certain application can be installed on a mobile device. Should an unapproved application be installed, it can easily be removed the next time the device connects with the central server. Oracle Database mobile server provides a simple, effective and highly secure and scalable solution for managing the data and applications for the mobile workforce.

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Design review for application facing memory issues

- by Mr Moose

I apologise in advance for the length of this post, but I want to paint an accurate picture of the problems my app is facing and then pose some questions below; I am trying to address some self inflicted design pain that is now leading to my application crashing due to out of memory errors. An abridged description of the problem domain is as follows; The application takes in a “dataset” that consists of numerous text files containing related data An individual text file within the dataset usually contains approx 20 “headers” that contain metadata about the data it contains. It also contains a large tab delimited section containing data that is related to data in one of the other text files contained within the dataset. The number of columns per file is very variable from 2 to 256+ columns. The original application was written to allow users to load a dataset, map certain columns of each of the files which basically indicating key information on the files to show how they are related as well as identify a few expected column names. Once this is done, a validation process takes place to enforce various rules and ensure that all the relationships between the files are valid. Once that is done, the data is imported into a SQL Server database. The database design is an EAV (Entity-Attribute-Value) model used to cater for the variable columns per file. I know EAV has its detractors, but in this case, I feel it was a reasonable choice given the disparate data and variable number of columns submitted in each dataset. The memory problem Given the fact the combined size of all text files was at most about 5 megs, and in an effort to reduce the database transaction time, it was decided to read ALL the data from files into memory and then perform the following; perform all the validation whilst the data was in memory relate it using an object model Start DB transaction and write the key columns row by row, noting the Id of the written row (all tables in the database utilise identity columns), then the Id of the newly written row is applied to all related data Once all related data had been updated with the key information to which it relates, these records are written using SqlBulkCopy. Due to our EAV model, we essentially have; x columns by y rows to write, where x can by 256+ and rows are often into the tens of thousands. Once all the data is written without error (can take several minutes for large datasets), Commit the transaction. The problem now comes from the fact we are now receiving individual files containing over 30 megs of data. In a dataset, we can receive any number of files. We’ve started seen datasets of around 100 megs coming in and I expect it is only going to get bigger from here on in. With files of this size, data can’t even be read into memory without the app falling over, let alone be validated and imported. I anticipate having to modify large chunks of the code to allow validation to occur by parsing files line by line and am not exactly decided on how to handle the import and transactions. Potential improvements I’ve wondered about using GUIDs to relate the data rather than relying on identity fields. This would allow data to be related prior to writing to the database. This would certainly increase the storage required though. Especially in an EAV design. Would you think this is a reasonable thing to try, or do I simply persist with identity fields (natural keys can’t be trusted to be unique across all submitters). Use of staging tables to get data into the database and only performing the transaction to copy data from staging area to actual destination tables. Questions For systems like this that import large quantities of data, how to you go about keeping transactions small. I’ve kept them as small as possible in the current design, but they are still active for several minutes and write hundreds of thousands of records in one transaction. Is there a better solution? The tab delimited data section is read into a DataTable to be viewed in a grid. I don’t need the full functionality of a DataTable, so I suspect it is overkill. Is there anyway to turn off various features of DataTables to make them more lightweight? Are there any other obvious things you would do in this situation to minimise the memory footprint of the application described above? Thanks for your kind attention.

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Imaging: Paper Paper Everywhere, but None Should be in Sight

- by Kellsey Ruppel

Author: Vikrant Korde, Technical Architect, Aurionpro's Oracle Implementation Services team My wedding photos are stored in several empty shoeboxes. Yes...I got married before digital photography was mainstream...which means I'm old. But my parents are really old. They have shoeboxes filled with vacation photos on slides (I doubt many of you have even seen a home slide projector...and I hope you never do!). Neither me nor my parents should have shoeboxes filled with any form of photographs whatsoever. They should obviously live in the digital world...with no physical versions in sight (other than a few framed on our walls). Businesses grapple with similar challenges. But instead of shoeboxes, they have file cabinets and warehouses jam packed with paper invoices, legal documents, human resource files, material safety data sheets, incident reports, and the list goes on and on. In fact, regulatory and compliance rules govern many industries, requiring that this paperwork is available for any number of years. It's a real challenge...especially trying to find archived documents quickly and many times with no backup. Which brings us to a set of technologies called Image Process Management (or simply Imaging or Image Processing) that are transforming these antiquated, paper-based processes. Oracle's WebCenter Content Imaging solution is a combination of their WebCenter suite, which offers a robust set of content and document management features, and their Business Process Management (BPM) suite, which helps to automate business processes through the definition of workflows and business rules. Overall, the solution provides an enterprise-class platform for end-to-end management of document images within transactional business processes. It's a solution that provides all of the capabilities needed - from document capture and recognition, to imaging and workflow - to effectively transform your ‘shoeboxes’ of files into digitally managed assets that comply with strict industry regulations. The terminology can be quite overwhelming if you're new to the space, so we've provided a summary of the primary components of the solution below, along with a short description of the two paths that can be executed to load images of scanned documents into Oracle's WebCenter suite. WebCenter Imaging (WCI): the electronic document repository that provides security, annotations, and search capabilities, and is the primary user interface for managing work items in the imaging solution SOA & BPM Suites (workflow): provide business process management capabilities, including human tasks, workflow management, service integration, and all other standard SOA features. It's interesting to note that there a number of 'jumpstart' processes available to help accelerate the integration of business applications, such as the accounts payable invoice processing solution for E-Business Suite that facilitates the processing of large volumes of invoices WebCenter Enterprise Capture (WEC): expedites the capture process of paper documents to digital images, offering high volume scanning and importing from email, and allows for flexible indexing options WebCenter Forms Recognition (WFR): automatically recognizes, categorizes, and extracts information from paper documents with greatly reduced human intervention WebCenter Content: the backend content server that provides versioning, security, and content storage There are two paths that can be executed to send data from WebCenter Capture to WebCenter Imaging, both of which are described below: 1. Direct Flow - This is the simplest and quickest way to push an image scanned from WebCenter Enterprise Capture (WEC) to WebCenter Imaging (WCI), using the bare minimum metadata. The WEC activities are defined below: The paper document is scanned (or imported from email). The scanned image is indexed using a predefined indexing profile. The image is committed directly into the process flow 2. WFR (WebCenter Forms Recognition) Flow - This is the more complex process, during which data is extracted from the image using a series of operations including Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Classification, Extraction, and Export. This process creates three files (Tiff, XML, and TXT), which are fed to the WCI Input Agent (the high speed import/filing module). The WCI Input Agent directory is a standard ingestion method for adding content to WebCenter Imaging, the process for doing so is described below: WEC commits the batch using the respective commit profile. A TIFF file is created, passing data through the file name by including values separated by "_" (underscores). WFR completes OCR, classification, extraction, export, and pulls the data from the image. In addition to the TIFF file, which contains the document image, an XML file containing the extracted data, and a TXT file containing the metadata that will be filled in WCI, are also created. All three files are exported to WCI's Input agent directory. Based on previously defined "input masks", the WCI Input Agent will pick up the seeding file (often the TXT file). Finally, the TIFF file is pushed in UCM and a unique web-viewable URL is created. Based on the mapping data read from the TXT file, a new record is created in the WCI application. Although these processes may seem complex, each Oracle component works seamlessly together to achieve a high performing and scalable platform. The solution has been field tested at some of the largest enterprises in the world and has transformed millions and millions of paper-based documents to more easily manageable digital assets. For more information on how an Imaging solution can help your business, please contact [email protected] (for U.S. West inquiries) or [email protected] (for U.S. East inquiries). About the Author: Vikrant is a Technical Architect in Aurionpro's Oracle Implementation Services team, where he delivers WebCenter-based Content and Imaging solutions to Fortune 1000 clients. With more than twelve years of experience designing, developing, and implementing Java-based software solutions, Vikrant was one of the founding members of Aurionpro's WebCenter-based offshore delivery team. He can be reached at [email protected].

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Evaluating Solutions to Manage Product Compliance? Don't Wait Much Longer

- by Kerrie Foy

Depending on severity, product compliance issues can cause all sorts of problems from run-away budgets to business closures. But effective policies and safeguards can create a strong foundation for innovation, productivity, market penetration and competitive advantage. If you’ve been putting off a systematic approach to product compliance, it is time to reconsider that decision, or indecision. Why now? No matter what industry, companies face a litany of worldwide and regional regulations that require proof of product compliance and environmental friendliness for market access. For example, Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) is a regulation that restricts the use of six dangerous materials used in the manufacture of electronic and electrical equipment. ROHS was originally adopted by the European Union in 2003 for implementation in 2006, and it has evolved over time through various regional versions for North America, China, Japan, Korea, Norway and Turkey. In addition, the RoHS directive allowed for material exemptions used in Medical Devices, but that exemption ends in 2014. Additional regulations worth watching are the Battery Directive, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives. Additional evolving regulations are coming from governing bodies like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Corporate sustainability initiatives are also gaining urgency and influencing product design. In a survey of 405 corporations in the Global 500 by Carbon Disclosure Project, co-written by PwC (CDP Global 500 Climate Change Report 2012 entitled Business Resilience in an Uncertain, Resource-Constrained World), 48% of the respondents indicated they saw potential to create new products and business services as a response to climate change. Just 21% reported a dedicated budget for the research. However, the report goes on to explain that those few companies are winning over new customers and driving additional profits by exploiting their abilities to adapt to environmental needs. The article cites Dell as an example – Dell has invested in research to develop new products designed to reduce its customers’ emissions by more than 10 million metric tons of CO2e per year. This reduction in emissions should save Dell’s customers over $1billion per year as a result! Over time we expect to see many additional companies prove that eco-design provides marketplace benefits through differentiation and direct customer value. How do you meet compliance requirements and also successfully invest in eco-friendly designs? No doubt companies struggle to answer this question. After all, the journey to get there may involve transforming business models, go-to-market strategies, supply networks, quality assurance policies and compliance processes per the rapidly evolving global and regional directives. There may be limited executive focus on the initiative, inability to quantify noncompliance, or not enough resources to justify investment. To make things even more difficult to address, compliance responsibility can be a passionate topic within an organization, making the prospect of change on an enterprise scale problematic and time-consuming. Without a single source of truth for product data and without proper processes in place, ensuring product compliance burgeons into a crushing task that is cost-prohibitive and overwhelming to an organization. With all the overhead, certain markets or demographics become simply inaccessible. Therefore, the risk to consumer goodwill and satisfaction, revenue, business continuity, and market potential is too great not to solve the compliance challenge. Companies are beginning to adapt and even thrive in today’s highly regulated and transparent environment by implementing systematic approaches to product compliance that are more than functional bandages but revenue-generating engines. Consider partnering with Oracle to help you address your compliance needs. Many of the world’s most innovative leaders and pioneers are leveraging Oracle’s Agile Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio of enterprise applications to manage the product value chain, centralize product data, automate processes, and launch more eco-friendly products to market faster. Particularly, the Agile Product Governance & Compliance (PG&C) solution provides out-of-the-box functionality to integrate actionable regulatory information into the enterprise product record from the ideation to the disposal/recycling phase. Agile PG&C makes it possible to efficiently manage compliance per corporate green initiatives as well as regional and global directives. Options are critical, but so is ease-of-use. Anyone who’s grappled with compliance policy knows legal interpretation plays a major role in determining how an organization responds to regulation. Agile PG&C gives you the freedom to configure product compliance per your needs, while maintaining rigorous control over the product record in an easy-to-use interface that facilitates adoption efforts. It allows you to assign regulations as specifications for a part or BOM roll-up. Each specification has a threshold value that alerts you to a non-compliance issue if the threshold value is exceeded. Set however many regulations as specifications you need to make sure a product can be sold in your target countries. Another option is to implement like one of our leading consumer electronics customers and define your own “catch-all” specification to ensure compliance in all markets. You can give your suppliers secure access to enter their component data or integrate a third party’s data. With Agile PG&C you are able to design compliance earlier into your products to reduce cost and improve quality downstream when stakes are higher. Agile PG&C is a comprehensive solution that makes product compliance more reliable and efficient. Throughout product lifecycles, use the solution to support full material disclosures, efficiently manage declarations with your suppliers, feed compliance data into a corrective action if a product must be changed, and swiftly satisfy audits by showing all due diligence tracked in one solution. Given the compounding regulation and consumer focus on urgent environmental issues, now is the time to act. Implementing an enterprise, systematic approach to product compliance is a competitive investment. From the start, Agile Product Governance & Compliance enables companies to confidently design for compliance and sustainability, reduce the cost of compliance, minimize the risk of business interruption, deliver responsible products, and inspire new innovation. Don’t wait any longer! To find out more about Agile Product Governance & Compliance download the data sheet, contact your sales representative, or call Oracle at 1-800-633-0738. Many thanks to Shane Goodwin, Senior Manager, Oracle Agile PLM Product Management, for contributions to this article.

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Database-as-a-Service on Exadata Cloud

- by Gagan Chawla

Note – Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c DBaaS is platform agnostic and is designed to work on Exadata/non-Exadata, physical/virtual, Oracle/non Oracle platforms and it’s not a mandatory requirement to use Exadata as the base platform. Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) is an important trend these days and the top business drivers motivating customers towards private database cloud model include constant pressure to reduce IT Costs and Complexity, and also to be able to improve Agility and Quality of Service. The first step many enterprises take in their journey towards cloud computing is to move to a consolidated and standardized environment and Exadata being already a proven best-in-class popular consolidation platform, we are seeing now more and more customers starting to evolve from Exadata based platform into an agile self service driven private database cloud using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. Together Exadata Database Machine and Enterprise Manager 12c provides industry’s most comprehensive and integrated solution to transform from a typical silo’ed environment into enterprise class database cloud with self service, rapid elasticity and pay-per-use capabilities. In today’s post, I’ll list down the important steps to enable DBaaS on Exadata using Enterprise Manager 12c. These steps are chalked down based on a recent DBaaS implementation from a real customer engagement - Project Planning - First step involves defining the scope of implementation, mapping functional requirements and objectives to use cases, defining high availability, network, security requirements, and delivering the project plan. In a Cloud project you plan around technology, business and processes all together so ensure you engage your actual end users and stakeholders early on in the project right from the scoping and planning stage. Setup your EM 12c Cloud Control Site – Once the project plan approval and sign off from stakeholders is achieved, refer to EM 12c Install guide and these are some important tips to follow during the site setup phase - Review the new EM 12c Sizing paper before you get started with install Cloud, Chargeback and Trending, Exadata plug ins should be selected to deploy during install Refer to EM 12c Administrator’s guide for High Availability, Security, Network/Firewall best practices and options Your management and managed infrastructure should not be combined i.e. EM 12c repository should not be hosted on same Exadata where target Database Cloud is to be setup Setup Roles and Users – Cloud Administrator (EM_CLOUD_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service Administrator (EM_SSA_ADMINISTRATOR), Self Service User (EM_SSA_USER) are the important roles required for cloud lifecycle management. Roles and users are managed by Super Administrator via Setup menu –> Security option. For Self Service/SSA users custom role(s) based on EM_SSA_USER should be created and EM_USER, PUBLIC roles should be revoked during SSA user account creation. Configure Software Library – Cloud Administrator logs in and in this step configures software library via Enterprise menu –> provisioning and patching option and the storage location is OMS shared filesystem. Software Library is the centralized repository that stores all software entities and is often termed as ‘local store’. Setup Self Update – Self Update is one of the most innovative and cool new features in EM 12c framework. Self update can be accessed via Setup -> Extensibility option by Super Administrator and is the unified delivery mechanism to get all new and updated entities (Agent software, plug ins, connectors, gold images, provisioning bundles etc) in EM 12c. Deploy Agents on all Compute nodes, and discover Exadata targets – Refer to Exadata discovery cookbook for detailed walkthrough to ensure successful discovery of Exadata targets. Configure Privilege Delegation Settings – This step involves deployment of privilege setting template on all the nodes by Super Administrator via Setup menu -> Security option with the option to define whether to use sudo or powerbroker for all provisioning and patching operations. Provision Grid Infrastructure with RAC Database on Compute Nodes – Software is provisioned in this step via a provisioning profile using EM 12c database provisioning. In case of Exadata, Grid Infrastructure and RAC Database software is already deployed on compute nodes via OneCommand from Oracle, so SSA Administrator just needs to discover Oracle Homes and Listener as EM targets. Databases will be created as and when users request for databases from cloud. Customize Create Database Deployment Procedure – the actual database creation steps are "templatized" in this step by Self Service Administrator and the newly saved deployment procedure will be used during service template creation in next step. This is an important step and make sure you have locked all the required variables marked as locked as ‘Y’ in this table. Setup Self Service Portal – This step involves setting up of zones, user quotas, service templates, chargeback plan. The SSA portal is setup by Self Service Administrator via Setup menu -> Cloud -> Database option and following guided workflow. Refer to DBaaS cookbook for details. You also have an option to customize SSA login page via steps documented in EM 12c Cloud Administrator’s guide Final Checks – Define and document process guidelines for SSA users and administrators. Get your SSA users trained on Self Service Portal features and overall DBaaS model and SSA administrators should be familiar with Self Service Portal setup pieces, EM 12c database lifecycle management capabilities and overall EM 12c monitoring framework. GO LIVE – Announce rollout of Database-as-a-Service to your SSA users. Users can login to the Self Service Portal and request/monitor/view their databases in Exadata based database cloud. Congratulations! You just delivered a successful database cloud implementation project! In future posts, we will cover these additional useful topics around database cloud – DBaaS Implementation tips and tricks – right from setup to self service to managing the cloud lifecycle ‘How to’ enable real production databases copies in DBaaS with rapid provisioning in database cloud Case study of a customer who recently achieved success with their transformational journey from traditional silo’ed environment on to Exadata based database cloud using Enterprise Manager 12c. More Information – Podcast on Database as a Service using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Installation and Administration guide, Cloud Administration guide DBaaS Cookbook Exadata Discovery Cookbook Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Set Up the Cloud Self-Service Portal Screenwatch: Private Database Cloud: Use the Cloud Self-Service Portal Stay Connected: Twitter | Face book | You Tube | Linked in | Newsletter

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The Virtues and Challenges of Implementing Basel III: What Every CFO and CRO Needs To Know

- by Jenna Danko

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) is a group tasked with providing thought-leadership to the global banking industry. Over the years, the BCBS has released volumes of guidance in an effort to promote stability within the financial sector. By effectively communicating best-practices, the Basel Committee has influenced financial regulations worldwide. Basel regulations are intended to help banks: More easily absorb shocks due to various forms of financial-economic stress Improve risk management and governance Enhance regulatory reporting and transparency In June 2011, the BCBS released Basel III: A global regulatory framework for more resilient banks and banking systems. This new set of regulations included many enhancements to previous rules and will have both short and long term impacts on the banking industry. Some of the key features of Basel III include: A stronger capital base More stringent capital standards and higher capital requirements Introduction of capital buffers Additional risk coverage Enhanced quantification of counterparty credit risk Credit valuation adjustments Wrong way risk Asset Value Correlation Multiplier for large financial institutions Liquidity management and monitoring Introduction of leverage ratio Even more rigorous data requirements To implement these features banks need to embark on a journey replete with challenges. These can be categorized into three key areas: Data, Models and Compliance. Data Challenges Data quality - All standard dimensions of Data Quality (DQ) have to be demonstrated. Manual approaches are now considered too cumbersome and automation has become the norm. Data lineage - Data lineage has to be documented and demonstrated. The PPT / Excel approach to documentation is being replaced by metadata tools. Data lineage has become dynamic due to a variety of factors, making static documentation out-dated quickly. Data dictionaries - A strong and clean business glossary is needed with proper identification of business owners for the data. Data integrity - A strong, scalable architecture with work flow tools helps demonstrate data integrity. Manual touch points have to be minimized. Data relevance/coverage - Data must be relevant to all portfolios and storage devices must allow for sufficient data retention. Coverage of both on and off balance sheet exposures is critical. Model Challenges Model development - Requires highly trained resources with both quantitative and subject matter expertise. Model validation - All Basel models need to be validated. This requires additional resources with skills that may not be readily available in the marketplace. Model documentation - All models need to be adequately documented. Creation of document templates and model development processes/procedures is key. Risk and finance integration - This integration is necessary for Basel as the Allowance for Loan and Lease Losses (ALLL) is calculated by Finance, yet Expected Loss (EL) is calculated by Risk Management – and they need to somehow be equal. This is tricky at best from an implementation perspective. Compliance Challenges Rules interpretation - Some Basel III requirements leave room for interpretation. A misinterpretation of regulations can lead to delays in Basel compliance and undesired reprimands from supervisory authorities. Gap identification and remediation - Internal identification and remediation of gaps ensures smoother Basel compliance and audit processes. However business lines are challenged by the competing priorities which arise from regulatory compliance and business as usual work. Qualification readiness - Providing internal and external auditors with robust evidence of a thorough examination of the readiness to proceed to parallel run and Basel qualification In light of new regulations like Basel III and local variations such as the Dodd Frank Act (DFA) and Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review (CCAR) in the US, banks are now forced to ask themselves many difficult questions. For example, executives must consider: How will Basel III play into their Risk Appetite? How will they create project plans for Basel III when they haven’t yet finished implementing Basel II? How will new regulations impact capital structure including profitability and capital distributions to shareholders? After all, new regulations often lead to diminished profitability as well as an assortment of implementation problems as we discussed earlier in this note. However, by requiring banks to focus on premium growth, regulators increase the potential for long-term profitability and sustainability. And a more stable banking system: Increases consumer confidence which in turn supports banking activity Ensures that adequate funding is available for individuals and companies Puts regulators at ease, allowing bankers to focus on banking Stability is intended to bring long-term profitability to banks. Therefore, it is important that every banking institution takes the steps necessary to properly manage, monitor and disclose its risks. This can be done with the assistance and oversight of an independent regulatory authority. A spectrum of banks exist today wherein some continue to debate and negotiate with regulators over the implementation of new requirements, while others are simply choosing to embrace them for the benefits I highlighted above. Do share with me how your institution is coping with and embracing these new regulations within your bank. Dr. Varun Agarwal is a Principal in the Banking Practice for Capgemini Financial Services. He has over 19 years experience in areas that span from enterprise risk management, credit, market, and to country risk management; financial modeling and valuation; and international financial markets research and analyses.

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Professional Development – Difference Between Bio, CV and Resume

- by Pinal Dave

Applying for work can be very stressful – you want to put your best foot forward, and it can be very hard to sell yourself to a potential employer while highlighting your best characteristics and answering questions. On top of that, some jobs require different application materials – a biography (or bio), a curriculum vitae (or CV), or a resume. These things seem so interchangeable, so what is the difference? Let’s start with the one most of us have heard of – the resume. A resume is a summary of your job and education history. If you have ever applied for a job, you will have used a resume. The ability to write a good resume that highlights your best characteristics and emphasizes your qualifications for a specific job is a skill that will take you a long way in the world. For such an essential skill, unfortunately it is one that many people struggle with. RESUME So let’s discuss what makes a great resume. First, make sure that your name and contact information are at the top, in large print (slightly larger font than the rest of the text, size 14 or 16 if the rest is size 12, for example). You need to make sure that if you catch the recruiter’s attention and they know how to get a hold of you. As for qualifications, be quick and to the point. Make your job title and the company the headline, and include your skills, accomplishments, and qualifications as bullet points. Use good action verbs, like “finished,” “arranged,” “solved,” and “completed.” Include hard numbers – don’t just say you “changed the filing system,” say that you “revolutionized the storage of over 250 files in less than five days.” Doesn’t that sentence sound much more powerful? Curriculum Vitae (CV) Now let’s talk about curriculum vitae, or “CVs”. A CV is more like an expanded resume. The same rules are still true: put your name front and center, keep your contact info up to date, and summarize your skills with bullet points. However, CVs are often required in more technical fields – like science, engineering, and computer science. This means that you need to really highlight your education and technical skills. Difference between Resume and CV Resumes are expected to be one or two pages long – CVs can be as many pages as necessary. If you are one of those people lucky enough to feel limited by the size constraint of resumes, a CV is for you! On a CV you can expand on your projects, highlight really exciting accomplishments, and include more educational experience – including GPA and test scores from the GRE or MCAT (as applicable). You can also include awards, associations, teaching and research experience, and certifications. A CV is a place to really expand on all your experience and how great you will be in this particular position. Biography (Bio) Chances are, you already know what a bio is, and you have even read a few of them. Think about the one or two paragraphs that every author includes in the back flap of a book. Think about the sentences under a blogger’s photo on every “About Me” page. That is a bio. It is a way to quickly highlight your life experiences. It is essentially the way you would introduce yourself at a party. Where a bio is required for a job, chances are they won’t want to know about where you were born and how many pets you have, though. This is a way to summarize your entire job history in quick-to-read format – and sometimes during a job hunt, being able to get to the point and grab the recruiter’s interest is the best way to get your foot in the door. Think of a bio as your entire resume put into words. Most bios have a standard format. In paragraph one, talk about your most recent position and accomplishments there, specifically how they relate to the job you are applying for. If you have teaching or research experience, training experience, certifications, or management experience, talk about them in paragraph two. Paragraph three and four are for highlighting publications, education, certifications, associations, etc. To wrap up your bio, provide your contact info and availability (dates and times). Where to use What? For most positions, you will know exactly what kind of application to use, because the job announcement will state what materials are needed – resume, CV, bio, cover letter, skill set, etc. If there is any confusion, choose whatever the industry standard is (CV for technical fields, resume for everything else) or choose which of your documents is the strongest. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: About Me, PostADay, Professional Development, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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Design Pattern for Complex Data Modeling

- by Aaron Hayman

I'm developing a program that has a SQL database as a backing store. As a very broad description, the program itself allows a user to generate records in any number of user-defined tables and make connections between them. As for specs: Any record generated must be able to be connected to any other record in any other user table (excluding itself...the record, not the table). These "connections" are directional, and the list of connections a record has is user ordered. Moreover, a record must "know" of connections made from it to others as well as connections made to it from others. The connections are kind of the point of this program, so there is a strong possibility that the number of connections made is very high, especially if the user is using the software as intended. A record's field can also include aggregate information from it's connections (like obtaining average, sum, etc) that must be updated on change from another record it's connected to. To conserve memory, only relevant information must be loaded at any one time (can't load the entire database in memory at load and go from there). I cannot assume the backing store is local. Right now it is, but eventually this program will include syncing to a remote db. Neither the user tables, connections or records are known at design time as they are user generated. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to design the backing store and the object model to best fit these specs. In my first design attempt on this, I had one object managing all a table's records and connections. I attempted this first because it kept the memory footprint smaller (records and connections were simple dicts), but maintaining aggregate and link information between tables became....onerous (ie...a huge spaghettified mess). Tracing dependencies using this method almost became impossible. Instead, I've settled on a distributed graph model where each record and connection is 'aware' of what's around it by managing it own data and connections to other records. Doing this increases my memory footprint but also let me create a faulting system so connections/records aren't loaded into memory until they're needed. It's also much easier to code: trace dependencies, eliminate cycling recursive updates, etc. My biggest problem is storing/loading the connections. I'm not happy with any of my current solutions/ideas so I wanted to ask and see if anybody else has any ideas of how this should be structured. Connections are fairly simple. They contain: fromRecordID, fromTableID, fromRecordOrder, toRecordID, toTableID, toRecordOrder. Here's what I've come up with so far: Store all the connections in one big table. If I do this, either I load all connections at once (one big db call) or make a call every time a user table is loaded. The big issue here: the size of the connections table has the potential to be huge, and I'm afraid it would slow things down. Store in separate tables all the outgoing connections for each user table. This is probably the worst idea I've had. Now my connections are 'spread out' over multiple tables (one for each user table), which means I have to make a separate DB called to each table (or make a huge join) just to find all the incoming connections for a particular user table. I've avoided making "one big ass table", but I'm not sure the cost is worth it. Store in separate tables all outgoing AND incoming connections for each user table (using a flag to distinguish between incoming vs outgoing). This is the idea I'm leaning towards, but it will essentially double the total DB storage for all the connections (as each connection will be stored in two tables). It also means I have to make sure connection information is kept in sync in both places. This is obviously not ideal but it does mean that when I load a user table, I only need to load one 'connection' table and have all the information I need. This also presents a separate problem, that of connection object creation. Since each user table has a list of all connections, there are two opportunities for a connection object to be made. However, connections objects (designed to facilitate communication between records) should only be created once. This means I'll have to devise a common caching/factory object to make sure only one connection object is made per connection. Does anybody have any ideas of a better way to do this? Once I've committed to a particular design pattern I'm pretty much stuck with it, so I want to make sure I've come up with the best one possible.

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Choosing a VS project type (C++)

- by typoknig

Hi all, I do not use C++ much (I try to stick to the easier stuff like Java and VB.NET), but the lately I have not had a choice. When I am picking a project type in VS for some C++ source I download, what project type should I pick? I had just been sticking with Win32 Console Applications, but I just downloaded some code (below) that will not work right even when it compiles with out errors. I have tried to use a CLR Console Application and an empty project too, and have changed many variables along the way, but I cannot get this code to work. I noticed that this code does not have "int main()" at its beginning, does that have something to do with it? Anyways, here is the code, got it from here: /* Demo of modified Lucas-Kanade optical flow algorithm. See the printf below */ #ifdef _CH_ #pragma package <opencv> #endif #ifndef _EiC #include "cv.h" #include "highgui.h" #include <stdio.h> #include <ctype.h> #endif #include <windows.h> #define FULL_IMAGE_AS_OUTPUT_FILE #define cvMirror cvFlip //IplImage *image = 0, *grey = 0, *prev_grey = 0, *pyramid = 0, *prev_pyramid = 0, *swap_temp; IplImage **buf = 0; IplImage *image1 = 0; IplImage *imageCopy=0; IplImage *image = 0; int win_size = 10; const int MAX_COUNT = 500; CvPoint2D32f* points[2] = {0,0}, *swap_points; char* status = 0; //int count = 0; //int need_to_init = 0; //int night_mode = 0; int flags = 0; //int add_remove_pt = 0; bool bLButtonDown = false; //bool bstopLoop = false; CvPoint pt, pt1,pt2; //IplImage* img1; FILE* FileDest; char* strImageDir = "E:\\Projects\\TSCreator\\Images"; char* strItemName = "b"; int imageCount=0; int bFirstFace = 1; // flag for first face int mode = 1; // Mode 1 - Haar Traing Sample Creation, 2 - HMM sample creation, Mode = 3 - Both Harr and HMM. //int startImgeNo = 1; bool isEqualRation = false; //Weidth to height ratio is equal //Selected Image data IplImage *selectedImage = 0; int selectedX = 0, selectedY = 0, currentImageNo = 0, selectedWidth = 0, selectedHeight= 0; CvRect selectedROI; void saveFroHarrTraining(IplImage *src, int x, int y, int width, int height, int imageCount); void saveForHMMTraining(IplImage *src, CvRect roi,int imageCount); // Code for draw ROI Cropping Image void on_mouse( int event, int x, int y, int flags, void* param ) { char f[200]; CvRect reg; if( !image ) return; if( event == CV_EVENT_LBUTTONDOWN ) { bLButtonDown = true; pt1.x = x; pt1.y = y; } else if ( event == CV_EVENT_MOUSEMOVE ) //Draw the selected area rectangle { pt2.x = x; pt2.y = y; if(bLButtonDown) { if( !image1 ) { /* allocate all the buffers */ image1 = cvCreateImage( cvGetSize(image), 8, 3 ); image1->origin = image->origin; points[0] = (CvPoint2D32f*)cvAlloc(MAX_COUNT*sizeof(points[0][0])); points[1] = (CvPoint2D32f*)cvAlloc(MAX_COUNT*sizeof(points[0][0])); status = (char*)cvAlloc(MAX_COUNT); flags = 0; } cvCopy( image, image1, 0 ); //Equal Weight-Height Ratio if(isEqualRation) { pt2.y = pt1.y + (pt2.x-pt1.x); } //Max Height and Width is the image width and height if(pt2.x>image->width) { pt2.x = image->width; } if(pt2.y>image->height) { pt2.y = image->height; } CvPoint InnerPt1 = pt1; CvPoint InnerPt2 = pt2; if ( InnerPt1.x > InnerPt2.x) { int tempX = InnerPt1.x; InnerPt1.x = InnerPt2.x; InnerPt2.x = tempX; } if ( pt2.y < InnerPt1.y ) { int tempY = InnerPt1.y; InnerPt1.y = InnerPt2.y; InnerPt2.y = tempY; } InnerPt1.y = image->height - InnerPt1.y; InnerPt2.y = image->height - InnerPt2.y; CvFont font; double hScale=1.0; double vScale=1.0; int lineWidth=1; cvInitFont(&font,CV_FONT_HERSHEY_SIMPLEX|CV_FONT_ITALIC, hScale,vScale,0,lineWidth); char size [200]; reg.x = pt1.x; reg.y = image->height - pt2.y; reg.height = abs (pt2.y - pt1.y); reg.width = InnerPt2.x -InnerPt1.x; //print width and heght of the selected reagion sprintf(size, "(%dx%d)",reg.width, reg.height); cvPutText (image1,size,cvPoint(10,10), &font, cvScalar(255,255,0)); cvRectangle(image1, InnerPt1, InnerPt2, CV_RGB(255,0,0), 1); //Mark Selected Reagion selectedImage = image; selectedX = pt1.x; selectedY = pt1.y; selectedWidth = reg.width; selectedHeight = reg.height; selectedROI = reg; //Show the modified image cvShowImage("HMM-Harr Positive Image Creator",image1); } } else if ( event == CV_EVENT_LBUTTONUP ) { bLButtonDown = false; // pt2.x = x; // pt2.y = y; // // if ( pt1.x > pt2.x) // { // int tempX = pt1.x; // pt1.x = pt2.x; // pt2.x = tempX; // } // // if ( pt2.y < pt1.y ) // { // int tempY = pt1.y; // pt1.y = pt2.y; // pt2.y = tempY; // // } // //reg.x = pt1.x; //reg.y = image->height - pt2.y; // //reg.height = abs (pt2.y - pt1.y); ////reg.width = reg.height/3; //reg.width = pt2.x -pt1.x; ////reg.height = (2 * reg.width)/3; #ifdef FULL_IMAGE_AS_OUTPUT_FILE CvRect FullImageRect; FullImageRect.x = 0; FullImageRect.y = 0; FullImageRect.width = image->width; FullImageRect.height = image->height; IplImage *regionFullImage =0; regionFullImage = cvCreateImage(cvSize (FullImageRect.width, FullImageRect.height), image->depth, image->nChannels); image->roi = NULL; //cvSetImageROI (image, FullImageRect); //cvCopy (image, regionFullImage, 0); #else IplImage *region =0; region = cvCreateImage(cvSize (reg.width, reg.height), image1->depth, image1->nChannels); image->roi = NULL; cvSetImageROI (image1, reg); cvCopy (image1, region, 0); #endif //cvNamedWindow("Result", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE); //selectedImage = image; //selectedX = pt1.x; //selectedY = pt1.y; //selectedWidth = reg.width; //selectedHeight = reg.height; ////currentImageNo = startImgeNo; //selectedROI = reg; /*if(mode == 1) { saveFroHarrTraining(image,pt1.x,pt1.y,reg.width,reg.height,startImgeNo); } else if(mode == 2) { saveForHMMTraining(image,reg,startImgeNo); } else if(mode ==3) { saveFroHarrTraining(image,pt1.x,pt1.y,reg.width,reg.height,startImgeNo); saveForHMMTraining(image,reg,startImgeNo); } else { printf("Invalid mode."); } startImgeNo++;*/ } } /* Save popsitive samples for Harr Training. Also add an entry to the PositiveSample.txt with the location of the item of interest. */ void saveFroHarrTraining(IplImage *src, int x, int y, int width, int height, int imageCount) { char f[255] ; sprintf(f,"%s\\%s\\harr_%s%d%d.jpg",strImageDir,strItemName,strItemName,imageCount/10, imageCount%10); cvNamedWindow("Harr", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE); cvShowImage("Harr", src); cvSaveImage(f, src); printf("output%d%d \t ", imageCount/10, imageCount%10); printf("width %d \t", width); printf("height %d \t", height); printf("x1 %d \t", x); printf("y1 %d \t\n", y); char f1[255]; sprintf(f1,"%s\\PositiveSample.txt",strImageDir); FileDest = fopen(f1, "a"); fprintf(FileDest, "%s\\harr_%s%d.jpg 1 %d %d %d %d \n",strItemName,strItemName, imageCount, x, y, width, height); fclose(FileDest); } /* Create Sample Images for HMM recognition algorythm trai ning. */ void saveForHMMTraining(IplImage *src, CvRect roi,int imageCount) { char f[255] ; printf("x=%d, y=%d, w= %d, h= %d\n",roi.x,roi.y,roi.width,roi.height); //Create the file name sprintf(f,"%s\\%s\\hmm_%s%d.pgm",strImageDir,strItemName,strItemName, imageCount); //Create storage for grayscale image IplImage* gray = cvCreateImage(cvSize(roi.width,roi.height), 8, 1); //Create storage for croped reagon IplImage* regionFullImage = cvCreateImage(cvSize(roi.width,roi.height),8,3); //Croped marked region cvSetImageROI(src,roi); cvCopy(src,regionFullImage); cvResetImageROI(src); //Flip croped image - otherwise it will saved upside down cvConvertImage(regionFullImage, regionFullImage, CV_CVTIMG_FLIP); //Convert croped image to gray scale cvCvtColor(regionFullImage,gray, CV_BGR2GRAY); //Show final grayscale image cvNamedWindow("HMM", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE); cvShowImage("HMM", gray); //Save final grayscale image cvSaveImage(f, gray); } int maina( int argc, char** argv ) { CvCapture* capture = 0; //if( argc == 1 || (argc == 2 && strlen(argv[1]) == 1 && isdigit(argv[1][0]))) // capture = cvCaptureFromCAM( argc == 2 ? argv[1][0] - '0' : 0 ); //else if( argc == 2 ) // capture = cvCaptureFromAVI( argv[1] ); char* video; if(argc ==7) { mode = atoi(argv[1]); strImageDir = argv[2]; strItemName = argv[3]; video = argv[4]; currentImageNo = atoi(argv[5]); int a = atoi(argv[6]); if(a==1) { isEqualRation = true; } else { isEqualRation = false; } } else { printf("\nUsage: TSCreator.exe <Mode> <Sample Image Save Path> <Sample Image Save Directory> <Video File Location> <Start Image No> <Is Equal Ratio>\n"); printf("Mode = 1 - Haar Traing Sample Creation. \nMode = 2 - HMM sample creation.\nMode = 3 - Both Harr and HMM\n"); printf("Is Equal Ratio = 0 or 1. 1 - Equal weidth and height, 0 - custom."); printf("Note: You have to create the image save directory in correct path first.\n"); printf("Eg: TSCreator.exe 1 E:\Projects\TSCreator\Images A 11.avi 1 1\n\n"); return 0; } capture = cvCaptureFromAVI(video); if( !capture ) { fprintf(stderr,"Could not initialize capturing...\n"); return -1; } cvNamedWindow("HMM-Harr Positive Image Creator", CV_WINDOW_AUTOSIZE); cvSetMouseCallback("HMM-Harr Positive Image Creator", on_mouse, 0); //cvShowImage("Test", image1); for(;;) { IplImage* frame = 0; int i, k, c; frame = cvQueryFrame( capture ); if( !frame ) break; if( !image ) { /* allocate all the buffers */ image = cvCreateImage( cvGetSize(frame), 8, 3 ); image->origin = frame->origin; //grey = cvCreateImage( cvGetSize(frame), 8, 1 ); //prev_grey = cvCreateImage( cvGetSize(frame), 8, 1 ); //pyramid = cvCreateImage( cvGetSize(frame), 8, 1 ); // prev_pyramid = cvCreateImage( cvGetSize(frame), 8, 1 ); points[0] = (CvPoint2D32f*)cvAlloc(MAX_COUNT*sizeof(points[0][0])); points[1] = (CvPoint2D32f*)cvAlloc(MAX_COUNT*sizeof(points[0][0])); status = (char*)cvAlloc(MAX_COUNT); flags = 0; } cvCopy( frame, image, 0 ); // cvCvtColor( image, grey, CV_BGR2GRAY ); cvShowImage("HMM-Harr Positive Image Creator", image); cvSetMouseCallback("HMM-Harr Positive Image Creator", on_mouse, 0); c = cvWaitKey(0); if((char)c == 's') { //Save selected reagion as training data if(selectedImage) { printf("Selected Reagion Saved\n"); if(mode == 1) { saveFroHarrTraining(selectedImage,selectedX,selectedY,selectedWidth,selectedHeight,currentImageNo); } else if(mode == 2) { saveForHMMTraining(selectedImage,selectedROI,currentImageNo); } else if(mode ==3) { saveFroHarrTraining(selectedImage,selectedX,selectedY,selectedWidth,selectedHeight,currentImageNo); saveForHMMTraining(selectedImage,selectedROI,currentImageNo); } else { printf("Invalid mode."); } currentImageNo++; } } } cvReleaseCapture( &capture ); //cvDestroyWindow("HMM-Harr Positive Image Creator"); cvDestroyAllWindows(); return 0; } #ifdef _EiC main(1,"lkdemo.c"); #endif If I put... #include "stdafx.h" int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { return 0; } ... before the previous code (and link it to the correct OpenCV .lib files) it compiles without errors, but does nothing at the command line. How do I make it work?

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JSP Precompilation for ADF Applications

- by Duncan Mills

A question that comes up from time to time, particularly in relation to build automation, is how to best pre-compile the .jspx and .jsff files in an ADF application. Thus ensuring that the app is ready to run as soon as it's installed into WebLogic. In the normal run of things, the first poor soul to hit a page pays the price and has to wait a little whilst the JSP is compiled into a servlet. Everyone else subsequently gets a free lunch. So it's a reasonable thing to want to do... Let Me List the Ways So forth to Google (other search engines are available)... which lead me to a fairly old article on WLDJ - Removing Performance Bottlenecks Through JSP Precompilation. Technololgy wise, it's somewhat out of date, but the one good point that it made is that it's really not very useful to try and use the precompile option in the weblogic.xml file. That's a really good observation - particularly if you're trying to integrate a pre-compile step into a Hudson Continuous Integration process. That same article mentioned an alternative approach for programmatic pre-compilation using weblogic.jspc. This seemed like a much more useful approach for a CI environment. However, weblogic.jspc is now obsoleted by weblogic.appc so we'll use that instead. Thanks to Steve for the pointer there. And So To APPC APPC has documentation - always a great place to start, and supports usage both from Ant via the wlappc task and from the command line using the weblogic.appc command. In my testing I took the latter approach. Usage, as the documentation will show you, is superficially pretty simple. The nice thing here, is that you can pass an existing EAR file (generated of course using OJDeploy) and that EAR will be updated in place with the freshly compiled servlet classes created from the JSPs. Appc takes care of all the unpacking, compiling and re-packing of the EAR for you. Neat. So we're done right...? Not quite. The Devil is in the Detail OK so I'm being overly dramatic but it's not all plain sailing, so here's a short guide to using weblogic.appc to compile a simple ADF application without pain. Information You'll Need The following is based on the assumption that you have a stand-alone WLS install with the Application Development Runtime installed and a suitable ADF enabled domain created. This could of course all be run off of a JDeveloper install as well 1. Your Weblogic home directory. Everything you need is relative to this so make a note. In my case it's c:\builds\wls_ps4. 2. Next deploy your EAR as normal and have a peek inside it using your favourite zip management tool. First of all look at the weblogic-application.xml inside the EAR /META-INF directory. Have a look for any library references. Something like this: <library-ref> <library-name>adf.oracle.domain</library-name> </library-ref> Make a note of the library ref (adf.oracle.domain in this case) , you'll need that in a second. 3. Next open the nested WAR file within the EAR and then have a peek inside the weblogic.xml file in the /WEB-INF directory. Again make a note of the library references. 4. Now start the WebLogic as per normal and run the WebLogic console app (e.g. http://localhost:7001/console). In the Domain Structure navigator, select Deployments. 5. For each of the libraries you noted down drill into the library definition and make a note of the .war, .ear or .jar that defines the library. For example, in my case adf.oracle.domain maps to "C:\ builds\ WLS_PS4\ oracle_common\ modules\ oracle. adf. model_11. 1. 1\ adf. oracle. domain. ear". Note the extra spaces that are salted throughout this string as it is displayed in the console - just to make it annoying, you'll have to strip these out. 6. Finally you'll need the location of the adfsharebean.jar. We need to pass this on the classpath for APPC so that the ADFConfigLifeCycleCallBack listener can be found. In a more complex app of your own you may need additional classpath entries as well. Now we're ready to go, and it's a simple matter of applying the information we have gathered into the relevant command line arguments for the utility A Simple CMD File to Run APPC Here's the stub .cmd file I'm using on Windows to run this. @echo offREM Stub weblogic.appc Runner setlocal set WLS_HOME=C:\builds\WLS_PS4 set ADF_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\oracle_common\modulesset COMMON_LIB_ROOT=%WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\common\deployable-libraries set ADF_WEBAPP=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.view_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.webapp.war set ADF_DOMAIN=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.model_11.1.1\adf.oracle.domain.ear set JSTL=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jstl-1.2.war set JSF=%COMMON_LIB_ROOT%\jsf-1.2.war set ADF_SHARE=%ADF_LIB_ROOT%\oracle.adf.share_11.1.1\adfsharembean.jar REM Set up the WebLogic Environment so appc can be found call %WLS_HOME%\wlserver_10.3\server\bin\setWLSEnv.cmd CLS REM Now compile away!java weblogic.appc -verbose -library %ADF_WEBAPP%,%ADF_DOMAIN%,%JSTL%,%JSF% -classpath %ADF_SHARE% %1 endlocal Running the above on a target ADF .ear file will zip through and create all of the relevant compiled classes inside your nested .war file in the \WEB-INF\classes\jsp_servlet\ directory (but don't take my word for it, run it and take a look!) And So... In the immortal words of the Pet Shop Boys, Was It Worth It? Well, here's where you'll have to do your own testing. In my case here, with a simple ADF application, pre-compilation shaved an non-scientific "3 Elephants" off of the initial page load time for the first access of each page. That's a pretty significant payback for such a simple step to add into your CI process, so why not give it a go.

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Working with packed dates in SSIS

- by Jim Giercyk

One of the challenges recently thrown my way was to read an EBCDIC flat file, decode packed dates, and insert the dates into a SQL table. For those unfamiliar with packed data, it is a way to store data at the nibble level (half a byte), and was often used by mainframe programmers to conserve storage space. In the case of my input file, the dates were 2 bytes long and represented the number of days that have past since 01/01/1950. My first thought was, in the words of Scooby, Hmmmmph? But, I love a good challenge, so I dove in. Reading in the flat file was rather simple. The only difference between reading an EBCDIC and an ASCII file is the Code Page option in the connection manager. In my case, I needed to use Code Page 1140 for EBCDIC (I could have also used Code Page 37). Once the code page is set correctly, SSIS can understand what it is reading and it will convert the output to the default code page, 1252. However, packed data is either unreadable or produces non-alphabetic characters, as we can see in the preview window. Column 1 is actually the packed date, columns 0 and 2 are the values in the rest of the file. We are only interested in Column 1, which is a 2 byte field representing a packed date. We know that 2 bytes of packed data can be stored in 1 byte of character data, so we are working with 4 packed digits in 2 character bytes. If you are confused, stay tuned….this will make sense in a minute. Right-click on your Flat File Source shape and select “Show Advanced Editor”. Here is where the magic begins. By changing the properties of the output columns, we can access the packed digits from each byte. By default, the Output Column data type is DT_STR. Since we want to look at the bytes individually and not the entire string, change the data type to DT_BYTES. Next, and most important, set UseBinaryFormat to TRUE. This will write the HEX VALUES of the output string instead of writing the character values. Now we are getting somewhere! Next, you will need to use a Data Conversion shape in your Data Flow to transform the 2 position byte stream to a 4 position Unicode string containing the packed data. You need the string to be 4 bytes long because it will contain the 4 packed digits. Here is what that should look like in the Data Conversion shape: Direct the output of your data flow to a test table or file to see the results. In my case, I created a test table. The results looked like this: Hold on a second! That doesn't look like a date at all. No, of course not. It is a hex number which represents the days which have passed between 01/01/1950 and the date. We have to convert the Hex value to a decimal value, and use the DATEADD function to get a date value. Luckily, I have created a function to convert Hex to Decimal: -- ============================================= -- Author: Jim Giercyk -- Create date: March, 2012 -- Description: Converts a Hex string to a decimal value -- ============================================= CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[ftn_HexToDec] ( @hexValue NVARCHAR(6) ) RETURNS DECIMAL AS BEGIN -- Declare the return variable here DECLARE @decValue DECIMAL IF @hexValue LIKE '0x%' SET @hexValue = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,3,4) DECLARE @decTab TABLE ( decPos1 VARCHAR(2), decPos2 VARCHAR(2), decPos3 VARCHAR(2), decPos4 VARCHAR(2) ) DECLARE @pos1 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,1,1) DECLARE @pos2 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,2,1) DECLARE @pos3 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,3,1) DECLARE @pos4 VARCHAR(1) = SUBSTRING(@hexValue,4,1) INSERT @decTab VALUES (CASE WHEN @pos1 = 'A' THEN '10' WHEN @pos1 = 'B' THEN '11' WHEN @pos1 = 'C' THEN '12' WHEN @pos1 = 'D' THEN '13' WHEN @pos1 = 'E' THEN '14' WHEN @pos1 = 'F' THEN '15' ELSE @pos1 END, CASE WHEN @pos2 = 'A' THEN '10' WHEN @pos2 = 'B' THEN '11' WHEN @pos2 = 'C' THEN '12' WHEN @pos2 = 'D' THEN '13' WHEN @pos2 = 'E' THEN '14' WHEN @pos2 = 'F' THEN '15' ELSE @pos2 END, CASE WHEN @pos3 = 'A' THEN '10' WHEN @pos3 = 'B' THEN '11' WHEN @pos3 = 'C' THEN '12' WHEN @pos3 = 'D' THEN '13' WHEN @pos3 = 'E' THEN '14' WHEN @pos3 = 'F' THEN '15' ELSE @pos3 END, CASE WHEN @pos4 = 'A' THEN '10' WHEN @pos4 = 'B' THEN '11' WHEN @pos4 = 'C' THEN '12' WHEN @pos4 = 'D' THEN '13' WHEN @pos4 = 'E' THEN '14' WHEN @pos4 = 'F' THEN '15' ELSE @pos4 END) SET @decValue = (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos4 FROM @decTab))) + (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos3 FROM @decTab))*16) + (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos2 FROM @decTab))*(16*16)) + (CONVERT(INT,(SELECT decPos1 FROM @decTab))*(16*16*16)) RETURN @decValue END GO Making use of the function, I found the decimal conversion, added that number of days to 01/01/1950 and FINALLY arrived at my “unpacked relative date”. Here is the query I used to retrieve the formatted date, and the result set which was returned: SELECT [packedDate] AS 'Hex Value', dbo.ftn_HexToDec([packedDate]) AS 'Decimal Value', CONVERT(DATE,DATEADD(day,dbo.ftn_HexToDec([packedDate]),'01/01/1950'),101) AS 'Relative String Date' FROM [dbo].[Output Table] This technique can be used any time you need to retrieve the hex value of a character string in SSIS. The date example may be a bit difficult to understand at first, but with SSIS becoming the preferred tool for enterprise level integration for many companies, there is no doubt that developers will encounter these types of requirements with regularity in the future. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

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The Joy Of Hex

- by Jim Giercyk

While working on a mainframe integration project, it occurred to me that some basic computer concepts are slipping into obscurity. For example, just about anyone can tell you that a 64-bit processor is faster than a 32-bit processer. A grade school child could tell you that a computer “speaks” in ‘1’s and ‘0’s. Some people can even tell you that there are 8 bits in a byte. However, I have found that even the most seasoned developers often can’t explain the theory behind those statements. That is not a knock on programmers; in the age of IntelliSense, what reason do we have to work with data at the bit level? Many computer theory classes treat bit-level programming as a thing of the past, no longer necessary now that storage space is plentiful. The trouble with that mindset is that the world is full of legacy systems that run programs written in the 1970’s. Today our jobs require us to extract data from those systems, regardless of the format, and that often involves low-level programming. Because it seems knowledge of the low-level concepts is waning in recent times, I thought a review would be in order. CHARACTER: See Spot Run HEX: 53 65 65 20 53 70 6F 74 20 52 75 6E DECIMAL: 83 101 101 32 83 112 111 116 32 82 117 110 BINARY: 01010011 01100101 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110000 01101111 01110100 00100000 01010010 01110101 01101110 In this example, I have broken down the words “See Spot Run” to a level computers can understand – machine language. CHARACTER: The character level is what is rendered by the computer. A “Character Set” or “Code Page” contains 256 characters, both printable and unprintable. Each character represents 1 BYTE of data. For example, the character string “See Spot Run” is 12 Bytes long, exclusive of the quotation marks. Remember, a SPACE is an unprintable character, but it still requires a byte. In the example I have used the default Windows character set, ASCII, which you can see here: http://www.asciitable.com/ HEX: Hex is short for hexadecimal, or Base 16. Humans are comfortable thinking in base ten, perhaps because they have 10 fingers and 10 toes; fingers and toes are called digits, so it’s not much of a stretch. Computers think in Base 16, with numeric values ranging from zero to fifteen, or 0 – F. Each decimal place has a possible 16 values as opposed to a possible 10 values in base 10. Therefore, the number 10 in Hex is equal to the number 16 in Decimal. DECIMAL: The Decimal conversion is strictly for us humans to use for calculations and conversions. It is much easier for us humans to calculate that [30 – 10 = 20] in decimal than it is for us to calculate [1E – A = 14] in Hex. In the old days, an error in a program could be found by determining the displacement from the entry point of a module. Since those values were dumped from the computers head, they were in hex. A programmer needed to convert them to decimal, do the equation and convert back to hex. This gets into relative and absolute addressing, a topic for another day. BINARY: Binary, or machine code, is where any value can be expressed in 1s and 0s. It is really Base 2, because each decimal place can have a possibility of only 2 characters, a 1 or a 0. In Binary, the number 10 is equal to the number 2 in decimal. Why only 1s and 0s? Very simply, computers are made up of lots and lots of transistors which at any given moment can be ON ( 1 ) or OFF ( 0 ). Each transistor is a bit, and the order that the transistors fire (or not fire) is what distinguishes one value from another in the computers head (or CPU). Consider 32 bit vs 64 bit processing…..a 64 bit processor has the capability to read 64 transistors at a time. A 32 bit processor can only read half as many at a time, so in theory the 64 bit processor should be much faster. There are many more factors involved in CPU performance, but that is the fundamental difference. DECIMAL HEX BINARY 0 0 0000 1 1 0001 2 2 0010 3 3 0011 4 4 0100 5 5 0101 6 6 0110 7 7 0111 8 8 1000 9 9 1001 10 A 1010 11 B 1011 12 C 1100 13 D 1101 14 E 1110 15 F 1111 Remember that each character is a BYTE, there are 2 HEX characters in a byte (called nibbles) and 8 BITS in a byte. I hope you enjoyed reading about the theory of data processing. This is just a high-level explanation, and there is much more to be learned. It is safe to say that, no matter how advanced our programming languages and visual studios become, they are nothing more than a way to interpret bits and bytes. There is nothing like the joy of hex to get the mind racing.

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Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 1)

- by Simon Cooper

SQL Compare is one of Red Gate's most successful SQL Server tools; it allows developers and DBAs to compare and synchronize the contents of their databases. Although similar tools exist for Oracle, they are quite noticeably lacking in the usability and stability that SQL Compare is known for in the SQL Server world. We could see a real need for a usable schema comparison tools for Oracle, and so the Schema Compare for Oracle project was born. Over the next few weeks, as we come up to release of v1, I'll be doing a series of posts on the development of Schema Compare for Oracle. For the first post, I thought I would start with the main pitfalls that we stumbled across when developing the product, especially from a SQL Server background. 1. Schemas and Databases The most obvious difference is that the concept of a 'database' is quite different between Oracle and SQL Server. On SQL Server, one server instance has multiple databases, each with separate schemas. There is typically little communication between separate databases, and most databases are no more than about 1000-2000 objects. This means SQL Compare can register an entire database in a reasonable amount of time, and cross-database dependencies probably won't be an issue. It is a quite different scene under Oracle, however. The terms 'database' and 'instance' are used interchangeably, (although technically 'database' refers to the datafiles on disk, and 'instance' the running Oracle process that reads & writes to the database), and a database is a single conceptual entity. This immediately presents problems, as it is infeasible to register an entire database as we do in SQL Compare; in my Oracle install, using the standard recommended options, there are 63975 system objects. If we tried to register all those, not only would it take hours, but the client would probably run out of memory before we finished. As a result, we had to allow people to specify what schemas they wanted to register. This decision had quite a few knock-on effects for the design, which I will cover in a future post. 2. Connecting to Oracle The next obvious difference is in actually connecting to Oracle – in SQL Server, you can specify a server and database, and off you go. On Oracle things are slightly more complicated. SIDs, Service Names, and TNS A database (the files on disk) must have a unique identifier for the databases on the system, called the SID. It also has a global database name, which consists of a name (which doesn't have to match the SID) and a domain. Alternatively, you can identify a database using a service name, which normally has a 1-to-1 relationship with instances, but may not if, for example, using RAC (Real Application Clusters) for redundancy and failover. You specify the computer and instance you want to connect to using TNS (Transparent Network Substrate). The user-visible parts are a config file (tnsnames.ora) on the client machine that specifies how to connect to an instance. For example, the entry for one of my test instances is: SC_11GDB1 = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = simonctest)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = 11gR1db1) ) ) This gives the hostname, port, and SID of the instance I want to connect to, and associates it with a name (SC_11GDB1). The tnsnames syntax also allows you to specify failover, multiple descriptions and address lists, and client load balancing. You can then specify this TNS identifier as the data source in a connection string. Although using ODP.NET (the .NET dlls provided by Oracle) was fine for internal prototype builds, once we released the EAP we discovered that this simply wasn't an acceptable solution for installs on other people's machines. Due to .NET assembly strong naming, users had to have installed on their machines the exact same version of the ODP.NET dlls as we had on our build server. We couldn't ship the ODP.NET dlls with our installer as the Oracle license agreement prohibited this, and we didn't want to force users to install another Oracle client just so they can run our program. To be able to list the TNS entries in the connection dialog, we also had to locate and parse the tnsnames.ora file, which was complicated by users with several Oracle client installs and intricate TNS entries. After much swearing at our computers, we eventually decided to use a third party Oracle connection library from Devart that we could ship with our program; this could use whatever client version was installed, parse the TNS entries for us, and also had the nice feature of being able to connect to an Oracle server without having any client installed at all. Unfortunately, their current license agreement prevents us from shipping an Oracle SDK, but that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it. 3. Running synchronization scripts The most important difference is that in Oracle, DDL is non-transactional; you cannot rollback DDL statements like you can on SQL Server. Although we considered various solutions to this, including using the flashback archive or recycle bin, or generating an undo script, no reliable method of completely undoing a half-executed sync script has yet been found; so in this case we simply have to trust that the DBA or developer will check and verify the script before running it. However, before we got to that stage, we had to get the scripts to run in the first place... To run a synchronization script from SQL Compare we essentially pass the script over to the SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery method. However, when we tried to do the same for an OracleConnection we got a very strange error – 'ORA-00911: invalid character', even when running the most basic CREATE TABLE command. After much hair-pulling and Googling, we discovered that Oracle has got some very strange behaviour with semicolons at the end of statements. To understand what's going on, we need to take a quick foray into SQL and PL/SQL. PL/SQL is not T-SQL In SQL Server, T-SQL is the language used to interface with the database. It has DDL, DML, control flow, and many other nice features (like Turing-completeness) that you can mix and match in the same script. In Oracle, DDL SQL and PL/SQL are two completely separate languages, with different syntax, different datatypes and different execution engines within the instance. Oracle SQL is much more like 'pure' ANSI SQL, with no state, no control flow, and only the basic DML commands. PL/SQL is the Turing-complete language, but can only do DML and DCL (i.e. BEGIN TRANSATION commands). Any DDL or SQL commands that aren't recognised by the PL/SQL engine have to be passed back to the SQL engine via an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command. In PL/SQL, a semicolons is a valid token used to delimit the end of a statement. In SQL, a semicolon is not a valid token (even though the Oracle documentation gives them at the end of the syntax diagrams) . When you execute the command CREATE TABLE table1 (COL1 NUMBER); in SQL*Plus the semicolon on the end is a command to SQL*Plus to execute the preceding statement on the server; it strips off the semicolon before passing it on. SQL Developer does a similar thing. When executing a PL/SQL block, however, the syntax is like so: BEGIN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (1); INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (2); END; / In this case, the semicolon is accepted by the PL/SQL engine as a statement delimiter, and instead the / is the command to SQL*Plus to execute the current block. This explains the ORA-00911 error we got when trying to run the CREATE TABLE command – the server is complaining about the semicolon on the end. This also means that there is no SQL syntax to execute more than one DDL command in the same OracleCommand. Therefore, we would have to do a round-trip to the server for every command we want to execute. Obviously, this would cause lots of network traffic and be very slow on slow or congested networks. Our first attempt at a solution was to wrap every SQL statement (without semicolon) inside an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command in a PL/SQL block and pass that to the server to execute. One downside of this solution is that we get no feedback as to how the script execution is going; we're currently evaluating better solutions to this thorny issue. Next up: Dependencies; how we solved the problem of being unable to register the entire database, and the knock-on effects to the whole product.

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Unlocking Productivity

- by Michael Snow

Unlocking Productivity in Life Sciences with Consolidated Content Management by Joe Golemba, Vice President, Product Management, Oracle WebCenter As life sciences organizations look to become more operationally efficient, the ability to effectively leverage information is a competitive advantage. Whether data mining at the drug discovery phase or prepping the sales team before a product launch, content management can play a key role in developing, organizing, and disseminating vital information. The goal of content management is relatively straightforward: put the information that people need where they can find it. A number of issues can complicate this; information sits in many different systems, each of those systems has its own security, and the information in those systems exists in many different formats. Identifying and extracting pertinent information from mountains of farflung data is no simple job, but the alternative—wasted effort or even regulatory compliance issues—is worse. An integrated information architecture can enable health sciences organizations to make better decisions, accelerate clinical operations, and be more competitive. Unstructured data matters Often when we think of drug development data, we think of structured data that fits neatly into one or more research databases. But structured data is often directly supported by unstructured data such as experimental protocols, reaction conditions, lot numbers, run times, analyses, and research notes. As life sciences companies seek integrated views of data, they are typically finding diverse islands of data that seemingly have no relationship to other data in the organization. Information like sales reports or call center reports can be locked into siloed systems, and unavailable to the discovery process. Additionally, in the increasingly networked clinical environment, Web pages, instant messages, videos, scientific imaging, sales and marketing data, collaborative workspaces, and predictive modeling data are likely to be present within an organization, and each source potentially possesses information that can help to better inform specific efforts. Historically, content management solutions that had 21CFR Part 11 capabilities—electronic records and signatures—were focused mainly on content-enabling manufacturing-related processes. Today, life sciences companies have many standalone repositories, requiring different skills, service level agreements, and vendor support costs to manage them. With the amount of content doubling every three to six months, companies have recognized the need to manage unstructured content from the beginning, in order to increase employee productivity and operational efficiency. Using scalable and secure enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, organizations can better manage their unstructured content. These solutions can also be integrated with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or research systems, making content available immediately, in the context of the application and within the flow of the employee’s typical business activity. Administrative safeguards—such as content de-duplication—can also be applied within ECM systems, so documents are never recreated, eliminating redundant efforts, ensuring one source of truth, and maintaining content standards in the organization. Putting it in context Consolidating structured and unstructured information in a single system can greatly simplify access to relevant information when it is needed through contextual search. Using contextual filters, results can include therapeutic area, position in the value chain, semantic commonalities, technology-specific factors, specific researchers involved, or potential business impact. The use of taxonomies is essential to organizing information and enabling contextual searches. Taxonomy solutions are composed of a hierarchical tree that defines the relationship between different life science terms. When overlaid with additional indexing related to research and/or business processes, it becomes possible to effectively narrow down the amount of data that is returned during searches, as well as prioritize results based on specific criteria and/or prior search history. Thus, search results are more accurate and relevant to an employee’s day-to-day work. For example, a search for the word "tissue" by a lab researcher would return significantly different results than a search for the same word performed by someone in procurement. Of course, diverse data repositories, combined with the immense amounts of data present in an organization, necessitate that the data elements be regularly indexed and cached beforehand to enable reasonable search response times. In its simplest form, indexing of a single, consolidated data warehouse can be expected to be a relatively straightforward effort. However, organizations require the ability to index multiple data repositories, enabling a single search to reference multiple data sources and provide an integrated results listing. Security and compliance Beyond yielding efficiencies and supporting new insight, an enterprise search environment can support important security considerations as well as compliance initiatives. For example, the systems enable organizations to retain the relevance and the security of the indexed systems, so users can only see the results to which they are granted access. This is especially important as life sciences companies are working in an increasingly networked environment and need to provide secure, role-based access to information across multiple partners. Although not officially required by the 21 CFR Part 11 regulation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administraiton has begun to extend the type of content considered when performing relevant audits and discoveries. Having an ECM infrastructure that provides centralized management of all content enterprise-wide—with the ability to consistently apply records and retention policies along with the appropriate controls, validations, audit trails, and electronic signatures—is becoming increasingly critical for life sciences companies. Making the move Creating an enterprise-wide ECM environment requires moving large amounts of content into a single enterprise repository, a daunting and risk-laden initiative. The first key is to focus on data taxonomy, allowing content to be mapped across systems. The second is to take advantage new tools which can dramatically speed and reduce the cost of the data migration process through automation. Additional content need not be frozen while it is migrated, enabling productivity throughout the process. The ability to effectively leverage information into success has been gaining importance in the life sciences industry for years. The rapid adoption of enterprise content management, both in operational processes as well as in scientific management, are clear indicators that the companies are looking to use all available data to be better informed, improve decision making, minimize risk, and increase time to market, to maintain profitability and be more competitive. As more and more varieties and sources of information are brought under the strategic management umbrella, the ability to divine knowledge from the vast pool of information is increasingly difficult. Simple search engines and basic content management are increasingly unable to effectively extract the right information from the mountains of data available. By bringing these tools into context and integrating them with business processes and applications, we can effectively focus on the right decisions that make our organizations more profitable. More Information Oracle will be exhibiting at DIA 2012 in Philadelphia on June 25-27. Stop by our booth Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} (#2825) to learn more about the advantages of a centralized ECM strategy and see the Oracle WebCenter Content solution, our 21 CFR Part 11 compliant content management platform.

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Computer Networks UNISA - Chap 15 – Network Management

- by MarkPearl

After reading this section you should be able to Understand network management and the importance of documentation, baseline measurements, policies, and regulations to assess and maintain a network’s health. Manage a network’s performance using SNMP-based network management software, system and event logs, and traffic-shaping techniques Identify the reasons for and elements of an asset managements system Plan and follow regular hardware and software maintenance routines Fundamentals of Network Management Network management refers to the assessment, monitoring, and maintenance of all aspects of a network including checking for hardware faults, ensuring high QoS, maintaining records of network assets, etc. Scope of network management differs depending on the size and requirements of the network. All sub topics of network management share the goals of enhancing the efficiency and performance while preventing costly downtime or loss. Documentation The way documentation is stored may vary, but to adequately manage a network one should at least record the following… Physical topology (types of LAN and WAN topologies – ring, star, hybrid) Access method (does it use Ethernet 802.3, token ring, etc.) Protocols Devices (Switches, routers, etc) Operating Systems Applications Configurations (What version of operating system and config files for serve / client software) Baseline Measurements A baseline is a report of the network’s current state of operation. Baseline measurements might include the utilization rate for your network backbone, number of users logged on per day, etc. Baseline measurements allow you to compare future performance increases or decreases caused by network changes or events with past network performance. Obtaining baseline measurements is the only way to know for certain whether a pattern of usage has changed, or whether a network upgrade has made a difference. There are various tools available for measuring baseline performance on a network. Policies, Procedures, and Regulations Following rules helps limit chaos, confusion, and possibly downtime. The following policies and procedures and regulations make for sound network management. Media installations and management (includes designing physical layout of cable, etc.) Network addressing policies (includes choosing and applying a an addressing scheme) Resource sharing and naming conventions (includes rules for logon ID’s) Security related policies Troubleshooting procedures Backup and disaster recovery procedures In addition to internal policies, a network manager must consider external regulatory rules. Fault and Performance Management After documenting every aspect of your network and following policies and best practices, you are ready to asses you networks status on an on going basis. This process includes both performance management and fault management. Network Management Software To accomplish both fault and performance management, organizations often use enterprise-wide network management software. There various software packages that do this, each collect data from multiple networked devices at regular intervals, in a process called polling. Each managed device runs a network management agent. So as not to affect the performance of a device while collecting information, agents do not demand significant processing resources. The definition of a managed devices and their data are collected in a MIB (Management Information Base). Agents communicate information about managed devices via any of several application layer protocols. On modern networks most agents use SNMP which is part of the TCP/IP suite and typically runs over UDP on port 161. Because of the flexibility and sophisticated network management applications are a challenge to configure and fine-tune. One needs to be careful to only collect relevant information and not cause performance issues (i.e. pinging a device every 5 seconds can be a problem with thousands of devices). MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a simple command line utility that uses SNMP to poll devices and collects data in a log file. MRTG can be used with Windows, UNIX and Linux. System and Event Logs Virtually every condition recognized by an operating system can be recorded. This is typically done using event logs. In Windows there is a GUI event log viewer. Similar information is recorded in UNIX and Linux in a system log. Much of the information collected in event logs and syslog files does not point to a problem, even if it is marked with a warning so it is important to filter your logs appropriately to reduce the noise. Traffic Shaping When a network must handle high volumes of network traffic, users benefit from performance management technique called traffic shaping. Traffic shaping involves manipulating certain characteristics of packets, data streams, or connections to manage the type and amount of traffic traversing a network or interface at any moment. Its goals are to assure timely delivery of the most important traffic while offering the best possible performance for all users. Several types of traffic prioritization exist including prioritizing traffic according to any of the following characteristics… Protocol IP address User group DiffServr VLAN tag in a Data Link layer frame Service or application Caching In addition to traffic shaping, a network or host might use caching to improve performance. Caching is the local storage of frequently needed files that would otherwise be obtained from an external source. By keeping files close to the requester, caching allows the user to access those files quickly. The most common type of caching is Web caching, in which Web pages are stored locally. To an ISP, caching is much more than just convenience. It prevents a significant volume of WAN traffic, thus improving performance and saving money. Asset Management Another key component in managing networks is identifying and tracking its hardware. This is called asset management. The first step to asset management is to take an inventory of each node on the network. You will also want to keep records of every piece of software purchased by your organization. Asset management simplifies maintaining and upgrading the network chiefly because you know what the system includes. In addition, asset management provides network administrators with information about the costs and benefits of certain types of hardware or software. Change Management Networks are always in a stage of flux with various aspects including… Software changes and patches Client Upgrades Shared Application Upgrades NOS Upgrades Hardware and Physical Plant Changes Cabling Upgrades Backbone Upgrades For a detailed explanation on each of these read the textbook (Page 750 – 761)

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Big Data – Buzz Words: What is HDFS – Day 8 of 21

- by Pinal Dave

In yesterday’s blog post we learned what is MapReduce. In this article we will take a quick look at one of the four most important buzz words which goes around Big Data – HDFS. What is HDFS ? HDFS stands for Hadoop Distributed File System and it is a primary storage system used by Hadoop. It provides high performance access to data across Hadoop clusters. It is usually deployed on low-cost commodity hardware. In commodity hardware deployment server failures are very common. Due to the same reason HDFS is built to have high fault tolerance. The data transfer rate between compute nodes in HDFS is very high, which leads to reduced risk of failure. HDFS creates smaller pieces of the big data and distributes it on different nodes. It also copies each smaller piece to multiple times on different nodes. Hence when any node with the data crashes the system is automatically able to use the data from a different node and continue the process. This is the key feature of the HDFS system. Architecture of HDFS The architecture of the HDFS is master/slave architecture. An HDFS cluster always consists of single NameNode. This single NameNode is a master server and it manages the file system as well regulates access to various files. In additional to NameNode there are multiple DataNodes. There is always one DataNode for each data server. In HDFS a big file is split into one or more blocks and those blocks are stored in a set of DataNodes. The primary task of the NameNode is to open, close or rename files and directory and regulate access to the file system, whereas the primary task of the DataNode is read and write to the file systems. DataNode is also responsible for the creation, deletion or replication of the data based on the instruction from NameNode. In reality, NameNode and DataNode are software designed to run on commodity machine build in Java language. Visual Representation of HDFS Architecture Let us understand how HDFS works with the help of the diagram. Client APP or HDFS Client connects to NameSpace as well as DataNode. Client App access to the DataNode is regulated by NameSpace Node. NameSpace Node allows Client App to connect to the DataNode based by allowing the connection to the DataNode directly. A big data file is divided into multiple data blocks (let us assume that those data chunks are A,B,C and D. Client App will later on write data blocks directly to the DataNode. Client App does not have to directly write to all the node. It just has to write to any one of the node and NameNode will decide on which other DataNode it will have to replicate the data. In our example Client App directly writes to DataNode 1 and detained 3. However, data chunks are automatically replicated to other nodes. All the information like in which DataNode which data block is placed is written back to NameNode. High Availability During Disaster Now as multiple DataNode have same data blocks in the case of any DataNode which faces the disaster, the entire process will continue as other DataNode will assume the role to serve the specific data block which was on the failed node. This system provides very high tolerance to disaster and provides high availability. If you notice there is only single NameNode in our architecture. If that node fails our entire Hadoop Application will stop performing as it is a single node where we store all the metadata. As this node is very critical, it is usually replicated on another clustered as well as on another data rack. Though, that replicated node is not operational in architecture, it has all the necessary data to perform the task of the NameNode in the case of the NameNode fails. The entire Hadoop architecture is built to function smoothly even there are node failures or hardware malfunction. It is built on the simple concept that data is so big it is impossible to have come up with a single piece of the hardware which can manage it properly. We need lots of commodity (cheap) hardware to manage our big data and hardware failure is part of the commodity servers. To reduce the impact of hardware failure Hadoop architecture is built to overcome the limitation of the non-functioning hardware. Tomorrow In tomorrow’s blog post we will discuss the importance of the relational database in Big Data. 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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Disaster Recovery Discovery

- by Rodney Landrum

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

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Can not print after upgrading from 12.x to 14.04

- by user318889

After upgrading from V12.04 to V14.04 I am not able to print. I am using an HP LaserJet 400 M451dn. The printer troubleshooter told me that there is no solution to the problem. This is the output of the advanced diagnositc output. (Due to limited space I cut the output!) Can anybody tell me what is going wrong. I am using the printer via USB ? Page 1 (Scheduler not running?): {'cups_connection_failure': False} Page 2 (Is local server publishing?): {'local_server_exporting_printers': False} Page 3 (Choose printer): {'cups_dest': , 'cups_instance': None, 'cups_queue': u'HP-LaserJet-400-color-M451dn', 'cups_queue_listed': True} Page 4 (Check printer sanity): {'cups_device_uri_scheme': u'hp', 'cups_printer_dict': {'device-uri': u'hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670', 'printer-info': u'Hewlett-Packard HP LaserJet 400 color M451dn', 'printer-is-shared': True, 'printer-location': u'Pinatubo', 'printer-make-and-model': u'HP LJ 300-400 color M351-M451 Postscript (recommended)', 'printer-state': 4, 'printer-state-message': u'', 'printer-state-reasons': [u'none'], 'printer-type': 8556636, 'printer-uri-supported': u'ipp://localhost:631/printers/HP-LaserJet-400-color-M451dn'}, 'cups_printer_remote': False, 'hplip_output': (['', '\x1b[01mHP Linux Imaging and Printing System (ver. 3.14.6)\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01mDevice Information Utility ver. 5.2\x1b[0m', '', 'Copyright (c) 2001-13 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP', 'This software comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.', 'This is free software, and you are welcome to distribute it', 'under certain conditions. See COPYING file for more details.', '', '', '\x1b[01mhp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670\x1b[0m', '', '\x1b[01mDevice Parameters (dynamic data):\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01m Parameter Value(s) \x1b[0m', ' ---------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------', ' back-end hp ', " cups-printers ['HP-LaserJet-400-color-M451dn'] ", ' cups-uri hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670 ', ' dev-file ', ' device-state -1 ', ' device-uri hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670 ', ' deviceid ', ' error-state 101 ', ' host ', ' is-hp True ', ' panel 0 ', ' panel-line1 ', ' panel-line2 ', ' port 1 ', ' serial CNFF308670 ', ' status-code 5002 ', ' status-desc ', '\x1b[01m', 'Model Parameters (static data):\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01m Parameter Value(s) \x1b[0m', ' ---------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------', ' align-type 0 ', ' clean-type 0 ', ' color-cal-type 0 ', ' copy-type 0 ', ' embedded-server-type 0 ', ' fax-type 0 ', ' fw-download False ', ' icon hp_color_laserjet_cp2025.png ', ' io-mfp-mode 1 ', ' io-mode 1 ', ' io-support 6 ', ' job-storage 0 ', ' linefeed-cal-type 0 ', ' model HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn ', ' model-ui HP LaserJet 400 Color m451dn ', ' model1 HP LaserJet 400 Color M451dn ', ' monitor-type 0 ', ' panel-check-type 0 ', ' pcard-type 0 ', ' plugin 0 ', ' plugin-reason 0 ', ' power-settings 0 ', ' ppd-name lj_300_400_color_m351_m451 ', ' pq-diag-type 0 ', ' r-type 0 ', ' r0-agent1-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent1-sku CE410A/CE410X ', ' r0-agent1-type 1 ', ' r0-agent2-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent2-sku CE411A ', ' r0-agent2-type 4 ', ' r0-agent3-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent3-sku CE413A ', ' r0-agent3-type 5 ', ' r0-agent4-kind 4 ', ' r0-agent4-sku CE412A ', ' r0-agent4-type 6 ', ' scan-src 0 ', ' scan-type 0 ', ' status-battery-check 0 ', ' status-dynamic-counters 0 ', ' status-type 3 ', ' support-released True ', ' support-subtype 2202411 ', ' support-type 2 ', ' support-ver 3.12.2 ', " tech-class ['Postscript'] ", " tech-subclass ['Normal'] ", ' tech-type 4 ', ' usb-pid 3882 ', ' usb-vid 1008 ', ' wifi-config 0 ', '\x1b[01m', 'Status History (most recent first):\x1b[0m', '\x1b[01m Date/Time Code Status Description User Job ID \x1b[0m', ' -------------------- ----- ---------------------------------------- -------- --------', ' 08/21/14 00:07:25 5012 Device communication error richard 0 ', ' 08/20/14 13:42:44 500 Started a print job richard 4214 ', '', '', 'Done.', ''], ['\x1b[35;01mwarning: No display found.\x1b[0m', '\x1b[31;01merror: hp-info -u/--gui requires Qt4 GUI support. Entering interactive mode.\x1b[0m', '\x1b[31;01merror: Unable to communicate with device (code=12): hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670\x1b[0m', '\x1b[31;01merror: Error opening device (Device not found).\x1b[0m', ''], 0), 'is_cups_class': False, 'local_cups_queue_attributes': {'charset-configured': u'utf-8', 'charset-supported': [u'us-ascii', u'utf-8'], 'color-supported': True, 'compression-supported': [u'none', u'gzip'], 'copies-default': 1, 'copies-supported': (1, 9999), 'cups-version': u'1.7.2', 'device-uri': u'hp:/usb/HP_LaserJet_400_color_M451dn?serial=CNFF308670', 'document-format-default': u'application/octet-stream', 'document-format-supported': [u'application/octet-stream', u'application/pdf', u'application/postscript', u'application/vnd.adobe-reader-postscript', u'application/vnd.cups-command', u'application/vnd.cups-pdf', u'application/vnd.cups-pdf-banner', u'application/vnd.cups-postscript', u'application/vnd.cups-raw', u'application/vnd.samsung-ps', u'application/x-cshell', u'application/x-csource', u'application/x-perl', u'application/x-shell', u'image/gif', u'image/jpeg', u'image/png', u'image/tiff', u'image/urf', u'image/x-bitmap', u'image/x-photocd', u'image/x-portable-anymap', u'image/x-portable-bitmap', u'image/x-portable-graymap', u'image/x-portable-pixmap', u'image/x-sgi-rgb', u'image/x-sun-raster', u'image/x-xbitmap', u'image/x-xpixmap', u'image/x-xwindowdump', u'text/css', u'text/html', u'text/plain'], 'finishings-default': 3, 'finishings-supported': [3], 'generated-natural-language-supported': [u'en-us'], 'ipp-versions-supported': [u'1.0', u'1.1', u'2.0', u'2.1'], 'ippget-event-life': 15, 'job-creation-attributes-supported': [u'copies', u'finishings', u'ipp-attribute-fidelity', u'job-hold-until', u'job-name', u'job-priority', u'job-sheets', u'media', u'media-col', u'multiple-document-handling', u'number-up', u'output-bin', u'orientation-requested', u'page-ranges', u'print-color-mode', u'print-quality', u'printer-resolution', u'sides'], 'job-hold-until-default': u'no-hold', 'job-hold-until-supported': [u'no-hold', u'indefinite', u'day-time', u'evening', u'night', u'second-shift', u'third-shift', u'weekend'], 'job-ids-supported': True, 'job-k-limit': 0, 'job-k-octets-supported': (0, 470914416), 'job-page-limit': 0, 'job-priority-default': 50, 'job-priority-supported': [100], 'job-quota-period': 0, 'job-settable-attributes-supported': [u'copies', u'finishings', u'job-hold-until', u'job-name', u'job-priority', u'media', u'media-col', u'multiple-document-handling', u'number-up', u'output-bin', u'orientation-requested', u'page-ranges', u'print-color-mode', u'print-quality', u'printer-resolution', u'sides'], 'job-sheets-default': (u'none', u'none'), 'job-sheets-supported': [u'none', u'classified', u'confidential', u'form', u'secret', u'standard', u'topsecret', u'unclassified'], 'jpeg-k-octets-supported': (0, 470914416), 'jpeg-x-dimension-supported': (0, 65535), 'jpeg-y-dimension-supported': (1, 65535), 'marker-change-time': 0, 'media-bottom-margin-supported': [423], 'media-col-default': u'(unknown IPP value tag 0x34)', 'media-col-supported': [u'media-bottom-margin', u'media-left-margin', u'media-right-margin', u'media-size', u'media-source', u'media-top-margin', u'media-type'], 'media-default': u'iso_a4_210x297mm', 'media-left-margin-supported': [423], 'media-right-margin-supported': [423],

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Session Report - Java on the Raspberry Pi

- by Janice J. Heiss

On mid-day Wednesday, the always colorful Oracle Evangelist Simon Ritter demonstrated Java on the Raspberry Pi at his session, “Do You Like Coffee with Your Dessert?”. The Raspberry Pi consists of a credit card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in schools. “I don't think there is a single feature that makes the Raspberry Pi significant,” observed Ritter, “but a combination of things really makes it stand out. First, it's $35 for what is effectively a completely usable computer. You do have to add a power supply, SD card for storage and maybe a screen, keyboard and mouse, but this is still way cheaper than a typical PC. The choice of an ARM (Advanced RISC Machine and Acorn RISC Machine) processor is noteworthy, because it avoids problems like cooling (no heat sink or fan) and can use a USB power brick. When you add in the enormous community support, it offers a great platform for teaching everyone about computing.”Some 200 enthusiastic attendees were present at the session which had the feel of Simon Ritter sharing a fun toy with friends. The main point of the session was to show what Oracle was doing to support Java on the Raspberry Pi in a way that is entertaining and fun. Ritter pointed out that, in addition to being great for teaching, it’s an excellent introduction to the ARM architecture, and runs well with Java and will get better once it has official hard float support. The possibilities are vast.Ritter explained that the Raspberry Pi Project started in 2006 with the goal of devising a computer to inspire children; it drew inspiration from the BBC Micro literacy project of 1981 that produced a series of microcomputers created by the Acorn Computer company. It was officially launched on February 29, 2012, with a first production of 10,000 boards. There were 100,000 pre-orders in one day; currently about 4,000 boards are produced a day. Ritter described the specification as follows:* CPU: ARM 11 core running at 700MHz Broadcom SoC package Can now be overclocked to 1GHz (without breaking the warranty!) * Memory: 256Mb* I/O: HDMI and composite video 2 x USB ports (Model B only) Ethernet (Model B only) Header pins for GPIO, UART, SPI and I2C He took attendees through a brief history of ARM Architecture:* Acorn BBC Micro (6502 based) Not powerful enough for Acorn’s plans for a business computer * Berkeley RISC Project UNIX kernel only used 30% of instruction set of Motorola 68000 More registers, less instructions (Register windows) One chip architecture to come from this was… SPARC * Acorn RISC Machine (ARM) 32-bit data, 26-bit address space, 27 registers First machine was Acorn Archimedes * Spin off from Acorn, Advanced RISC MachinesNext he presented its features:* 32-bit RISC Architecture– ARM accounts for 75% of embedded 32-bit CPUs today– 6.1 Billion chips sold last year (zero manufactured by ARM)* Abstract architecture and microprocessor core designs– Raspberry Pi is ARM11 using ARMv6 instruction set* Low power consumption– Good for mobile devices– Raspberry Pi can be powered from 700mA 5V only PSU– Raspberry Pi does not require heatsink or fanHe described the current ARM Technology:* ARMv6– ARM 11, ARM Cortex-M* ARMv7– ARM Cortex-A, ARM Cortex-M, ARM Cortex-R* ARMv8 (Announced)– Will support 64-bit data and addressingHe next gave the Java Specifics for ARM: Floating point operations* Despite being an ARMv6 processor it does include an FPU– FPU only became standard as of ARMv7* FPU (Hard Float, or HF) is much faster than a software library* Linux distros and Oracle JVM for ARM assume no HF on ARMv6– Need special build of both– Raspbian distro build now available– Oracle JVM is in the works, release date TBDNot So RISCPerformance Improvements* DSP Enhancements* Jazelle* Thumb / Thumb2 / ThumbEE* Floating Point (VFP)* NEON* Security Enhancements (TrustZone)He spent a few minutes going over the challenges of using Java on the Raspberry Pi and covered:* Sound* Vision * Serial (TTL UART)* USB* GPIOTo implement sound with Java he pointed out:* Sound drivers are now included in new distros* Java Sound API– Remember to add audio to user’s groups– Some bits work, others not so much* Playing (the right format) WAV file works* Using MIDI hangs trying to open a synthesizer* FreeTTS text-to-speech– Should work once sound works properlyHe turned to JavaFX on the Raspberry Pi:* Currently internal builds only– Will be released as technology preview soon* Work involves optimal implementation of Prism graphics engine– X11?* Once the JavaFX implementation is completed there will be little of concern to developers-- It’s just Java (WORA). He explained the basis of the Serial Port:* UART provides TTL level signals (3.3V)* RS-232 uses 12V signals* Use MAX3232 chip to convert* Use this for access to serial consoleHe summarized his key points. The Raspberry Pi is a very cool (and cheap) computer that is great for teaching, a great introduction to ARM that works very well with Java and will work better in the future. The opportunities are limitless. For further info, check out, Raspberry Pi User Guide by Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree. From there, Ritter tried out several fun demos, some of which worked better than others, but all of which were greeted with considerable enthusiasm and support and good humor (even when he ran into some glitches). All in all, this was a fun and lively session.

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Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Modifying the Default Shipped Template

- by The Old Toxophilist

Having installed your Exalogic Virtual environment by default you have a single template which can be used to create your vServers. Although this template is suitable for creating simple test or development vServers it is recommended that you look at creating your own custom vServers that match the environment you wish to build and deploy. Therefore this Tea Time Snippet will take you through the simple process of modifying the standard template. Before You Start To edit the template you will need the Oracle ModifyJeos Utility which can be downloaded from the eDelivery Site. Once the ModifyJeos Utility has been downloaded we can install the rpms onto either an existing vServer or one of the Control vServers. rpm -ivh ovm-modify-jeos-1.0.1-10.el5.noarch.rpm rpm -ivh ovm-template-config-1.0.1-5.el5.noarch.rpm Alternatively you can install the modify jeos packages on a none Exalogic OEL installation or a VirtualBox image. If you are doing this, assuming OEL 5u8, you will need the following rpms. rpm -ivh ovm-modify-jeos-1.0.1-10.el5.noarch.rpm rpm -ivh ovm-el5u2-xvm-jeos-1.0.1-5.el5.i386.rpm rpm -ivh ovm-template-config-1.0.1-5.el5.noarch.rpm Base Template If you have installed the modify onto a vServer running on the Exalogic then simply mount the /export/common/images from the ZFS storage and you will be able to find the el_x2-2_base_linux_guest_vm_template_2.0.1.1.0_64.tgz (or similar depending which version you have) template file. Alternatively the latest can be downloaded from the eDelivery Site. Now we have the Template tgz we will need the extract it as follows: tar -zxvf el_x2-2_base_linux_guest_vm_template_2.0.1.1.0_64.tgz This will create a directory called BASE which will contain the System.img (VServer image) and vm.cfg (VServer Config information). This directory should be renamed to something more meaning full that indicates what we have done to the template and then the Simple name / name in the vm.cfg editted for the same reason. Modifying the Template Resizing Root File System By default the shipped template has a root size of 4 GB which will leave a vServer created from it running at 90% full on the root disk. We can simply resize the template by executing the following: modifyjeos -f System.img -T <New Size MB>) For example to imcrease the default 4 GB to 40 GB we would execute: modifyjeos -f System.img -T 40960) Resizing Swap We can modify the size of the swap space within a template by executing the following: modifyjeos -f System.img -S <New Size MB>) For example to increase the swap from the default 512 MB to 4 GB we would execute: modifyjeos -f System.img -S 4096) Changing RPMs Adding RPMs To add RPMs using modifyjeos, complete the following steps: Add the names of the new RPMs in a list file, such as addrpms.lst. In this file, you should list each new RPM in a separate line. Ensure that all of the new RPMs are in a single directory, such as rpms. Run the following command to add the new RPMs: modifyjeos -f System.img -a <path_to_addrpms.lst> -m <path_to_rpms> -nogpg Where <path_to_addrpms.lst> is the path to the location of the addrpms.lst file, and <path_to_rpms> is the path to the directory that contains the RPMs. The -nogpg option eliminates signature check on the RPMs. Removing RPMs To remove RPM s using modifyjeos, complete the following steps: Add the names of the RPMs (the ones you want to remove) in a list file, such as removerpms.lst. In this file, you should list each RPM in a separate line. The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud Administrator's Guide provides a list of all RPMs that must not be removed from the vServer. Run the following command to remove the RPMs: modifyjeos -f System.img -e <path_to_removerpms.lst> Where <path_to_removerpms.lst> is the path to the location of the removerpms.lst file. Mounting the System.img For all other modifications that are not supported by the modifyjeos command (adding you custom yum repositories, pre configuring NTP, modify default NFSv4 Nobody functionality, etc) we can mount the System.img and access it directly. To facititate quick and easy mounting/unmounting of the System.img I have put together the simple scripts below. MountSystemImg.sh #!/bin/sh # The script assumes it's being run from the directory containing the System.img # Export for later i.e. during unmount export LOOP=`losetup -f` export SYSTEMIMG=/mnt/elsystem # Make Temp Mount Directory mkdir -p $SYSTEMIMG # Create Loop for the System Image losetup $LOOP System.img kpartx -a $LOOP mount /dev/mapper/`basename $LOOP`p2 $SYSTEMIMG #Change Dir into mounted Image cd $SYSTEMIMG UnmountSystemImg.sh #!/bin/sh # The script assumes it's being run from the directory containing the System.img # Assume the $LOOP & $SYSTEMIMG exist from a previous run on the MountSystemImg.sh umount $SYSTEMIMG kpartx -d $LOOP losetup -d $LOOP Packaging the Template Once you have finished modifying the template it can be simply repackaged and then imported into EMOC as described in "Exalogic 2.0.1 Tea Break Snippets - Importing Public Server Template". To do this we will simply cd to the directory above that containing the modified files and execute the following: tar -zcvf <New Template Directory> <New Template Name>.tgz The resulting.tgz file can be copied to the images directory on the ZFS and uploadd using the IB network. This entry was originally posted on the The Old Toxophilist Site.

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Windows for IoT, continued

- by Valter Minute

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/WindowsEmbeddedCookbook/archive/2014/08/05/windows-for-iot-continued.aspxI received many interesting feedbacks on my previous blog post and I tried to find some time to do some additional tests. Bert Kleinschmidt pointed out that pins 2,3 and 10 of the Galileo are connected directly to the SOC, while pin 13, the one used for the sample sketch is controlled via an I2C I/O expander. I changed my code to use pin 2 instead of 13 (just changing the variable assignment at the beginning of the code) and latency was greatly reduced. Now each pulse lasts for 1.44ms, 44% more than the expected time, but ways better that the result we got using pin 13. I also used SetThreadPriority to increase the priority of the thread that was running the sketch to THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST but that didn't change the results. When I was using the I2C-controlled pin I tried the same and the timings got ways worse (increasing more than 10 times) and so I did not commented on that part, wanting to investigate the issua a bit more in detail. It seems that increasing the priority of the application thread impacts negatively the I2C communication. I tried to use also the Linux-based implementation (using a different Galileo board since the one provided by MS seems to use a different firmware) and the results of running the sample blink sketch modified to use pin 2 and blink the led for 1ms are similar to those we got on the same board running Windows. Here the difference between expected time and measured time is worse, getting around 3.2ms instead of 1 (320% compared to 150% using Windows but far from the 100.1% we got with the 8-bit Arduino). Both systems were not under load during the test, maybe loading some applications that use part of the CPU time would make those timings even less reliable, but I think that those numbers are enough to draw some conclusions. It may not be worth running a full OS if what you need is Arduino compatibility. The Arduino UNO is probably the best Arduino you can find to perform this kind of development. The Galileo running the Linux-based stack or running Windows for IoT is targeted to be a platform for "Internet of Things" devices, whatever that means. At the moment I don't see the "I" part of IoT. We have low level interfaces (SPI, I2C, the GPIO pins) that can be used to connect sensors but the support for connectivity is limited and the amount of work required to deliver some data to the cloud (using a secure HTTP request or a message queuing system like APMQS or MQTT) is still big and the rich OS underneath seems to not provide any help doing that.Why should I use sockets and can't access all the high level connectivity features we have on "full" Windows?I know that it's possible to use some third party libraries, try to build them using the Windows For IoT SDK etc. but this means re-inventing the wheel every time and can also lead to some IP concerns if used for products meant to be closed-source. I hope that MS and Intel (and others) will focus less on the "coolness" of running (some) Arduino sketches and more on providing a better platform to people that really want to design devices that leverage internet connectivity and the cloud processing power to deliver better products and services. Providing a reliable set of connectivity services would be a great start. Providing support for .NET would be even better, leaving native code available for hardware access etc. I know that those components may require additional storage and memory etc. So making the OS componentizable (or, at least, provide a way to install additional components) would be a great way to let developers pick the parts of the system they need to develop their solution, knowing that they will integrate well together. I can understand that the Arduino and Raspberry Pi* success may have attracted the attention of marketing departments worldwide and almost any new development board those days is promoted as "XXX response to Arduino" or "YYYY alternative to Raspberry Pi", but this is misleading and prevents companies from focusing on how to deliver good products and how to integrate "IoT" features with their existing offer to provide, at the end, a better product or service to their customers. Marketing is important, but can't decide the key features of a product (the OS) that is going to be used to develop full products for end customers integrating it with hardware and application software. I really like the "hackable" nature of open-source devices and like to see that companies are getting more and more open in releasing information, providing "hackable" devices and supporting developers with documentation, good samples etc. On the other side being able to run a sketch designed for an 8 bit microcontroller on a full-featured application processor may sound cool and an easy upgrade path for people that just experimented with sensors etc. on Arduino but it's not, in my humble opinion, the main path to follow for people who want to deliver real products. *Shameless self-promotion: if you are looking for a good book in Italian about the Raspberry Pi , try mine: http://www.amazon.it/Raspberry-Pi-alluso-Digital-LifeStyle-ebook/dp/B00GYY3OKO

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Ransomware: Why This New Malware is So Dangerous and How to Protect Yourself

- by Chris Hoffman

Ransomware is a type of malware that tries to extort money from you. One of the nastiest examples, CryptoLocker, takes your files hostage and holds them for ransom, forcing you to pay hundreds of dollars to regain access. Most malware is no longer created by bored teenagers looking to cause some chaos. Much of the current malware is now produced by organized crime for profit and is becoming increasingly sophisticated. How Ransomware Works Not all ransomware is identical. The key thing that makes a piece of malware “ransomware” is that it attempts to extort a direct payment from you. Some ransomware may be disguised. It may function as “scareware,” displaying a pop-up that says something like “Your computer is infected, purchase this product to fix the infection” or “Your computer has been used to download illegal files, pay a fine to continue using your computer.” In other situations, ransomware may be more up-front. It may hook deep into your system, displaying a message saying that it will only go away when you pay money to the ransomware’s creators. This type of malware could be bypassed via malware removal tools or just by reinstalling Windows. Unfortunately, Ransomware is becoming more and more sophisticated. One of the latest examples, CryptoLocker, starts encrypting your personal files as soon as it gains access to your system, preventing access to the files without knowing the encryption key. CryptoLocker then displays a message informing you that your files have been locked with encryption and that you have just a few days to pay up. If you pay them $300, they’ll hand you the encryption key and you can recover your files. CryptoLocker helpfully walks you through choosing a payment method and, after paying, the criminals seem to actually give you a key that you can use to restore your files. You can never be sure that the criminals will keep their end of the deal, of course. It’s not a good idea to pay up when you’re extorted by criminals. On the other hand, businesses that lose their only copy of business-critical data may be tempted to take the risk — and it’s hard to blame them. Protecting Your Files From Ransomware This type of malware is another good example of why backups are essential. You should regularly back up files to an external hard drive or a remote file storage server. If all your copies of your files are on your computer, malware that infects your computer could encrypt them all and restrict access — or even delete them entirely. When backing up files, be sure to back up your personal files to a location where they can’t be written to or erased. For example, place them on a removable hard drive or upload them to a remote backup service like CrashPlan that would allow you to revert to previous versions of files. Don’t just store your backups on an internal hard drive or network share you have write access to. The ransomware could encrypt the files on your connected backup drive or on your network share if you have full write access. Frequent backups are also important. You wouldn’t want to lose a week’s worth of work because you only back up your files every week. This is part of the reason why automated back-up solutions are so convenient. If your files do become locked by ransomware and you don’t have the appropriate backups, you can try recovering them with ShadowExplorer. This tool accesses “Shadow Copies,” which Windows uses for System Restore — they will often contain some personal files. How to Avoid Ransomware Aside from using a proper backup strategy, you can avoid ransomware in the same way you avoid other forms of malware. CryptoLocker has been verified to arrive through email attachments, via the Java plug-in, and installed on computers that are part of the Zeus botnet. Use a good antivirus product that will attempt to stop ransomware in its tracks. Antivirus programs are never perfect and you could be infected even if you run one, but it’s an important layer of defense. Avoid running suspicious files. Ransomware can arrive in .exe files attached to emails, from illicit websites containing pirated software, or anywhere else that malware comes from. Be alert and exercise caution over the files you download and run. Keep your software updated. Using an old version of your web browser, operating system, or a browser plugin can allow malware in through open security holes. If you have Java installed, you should probably uninstall it. For more tips, read our list of important security practices you should be following. Ransomware — CryptoLocker in particular — is brutally efficient and smart. It just wants to get down to business and take your money. Holding your files hostage is an effective way to prevent removal by antivirus programs after it’s taken root, but CryptoLocker is much less scary if you have good backups. This sort of malware demonstrates the importance of backups as well as proper security practices. Unfortunately, CryptoLocker is probably a sign of things to come — it’s the kind of malware we’ll likely be seeing more of in the future.

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My error with upgrading 4.0 to 4.2- What NOT to do...

- by Steve Tunstall

Last week, I was helping a client upgrade from the 2011.1.4.0 code to the newest 2011.1.4.2 code. We downloaded the 4.2 update from MOS, upload and unpacked it on both controllers, and upgraded one of the controllers in the cluster with no issues at all. As this was a brand-new system with no networking or pools made on it yet, there were not any resources to fail back and forth between the controllers. Each controller had it's own, private, management interface (igb0 and igb1) and that's it. So we took controller 1 as the passive controller and upgraded it first. The first controller came back up with no issues and was now on the 4.2 code. Great. We then did a takeover on controller 1, making it the active head (although there were no resources for it to take), and then proceeded to upgrade controller 2. Upon upgrading the second controller, we ran the health check with no issues. We then ran the update and it ran and rebooted normally. However, something strange then happened. It took longer than normal to come back up, and when it did, we got the "cluster controllers on different code" error message that one gets when the two controllers of a cluster are running different code. But we just upgraded the second controller to 4.2, so they should have been the same, right??? Going into the Maintenance-->System screen of controller 2, we saw something very strange. The "current version" was still on 4.0, and the 4.2 code was there but was in the "previous" state with the rollback icon, as if it was the OLDER code and not the newer code. I have never seen this happen before. I would have thought it was a bad 4.2 code file, but it worked just fine with controller 1, so I don't think that was it. Other than the fact the code did not update, there was nothing else going on with this system. It had no yellow lights, no errors in the Problems section, and no errors in any of the logs. It was just out of the box a few hours ago, and didn't even have a storage pool yet. So.... We deleted the 4.2 code, uploaded it from scratch, ran the health check, and ran the upgrade again. once again, it seemed to go great, rebooted, and came back up to the same issue, where it came to 4.0 instead of 4.2. See the picture below.... HERE IS WHERE I MADE A BIG MISTAKE.... I SHOULD have instantly called support and opened a Sev 2 ticket. They could have done a shared shell and gotten the correct Fishwork engineer to look at the files and the code and determine what file was messed up and fixed it. The system was up and working just fine, it was just on an older code version, not really a huge problem at all. Instead, I went ahead and clicked the "Rollback" icon, thinking that the system would rollback to the 4.2 code. Ouch... What happened was that the system said, "Fine, I will delete the 4.0 code and boot to your 4.2 code"... Which was stupid on my part because something was wrong with the 4.2 code file here and the 4.0 was just fine. So now the system could not boot at all, and the 4.0 code was completely missing from the system, and even a high-level Fishworks engineer could not help us. I had messed it up good. We could only get to the ILOM, and I had to re-image the system from scratch using a hard-to-get-and-use FishStick USB drive. These are tightly controlled and difficult to get, almost always handcuffed to an engineer who will drive out to re-image a system. This took another day of my client's time. So.... If you see a "previous version" of your system code which is actually a version higher than the current version... DO NOT ROLL IT BACK.... It did not upgrade for a very good reason. In my case, after the system was re-imaged to a code level just 3 back, we once again tried the same 4.2 code update and it worked perfectly the first time and is now great and stable. Lesson learned. By the way, our buddy Ryan Matthews wanted to point out the best practice and supported way of performing an upgrade of an active/active ZFSSA, where both controllers are doing some of the work. These steps would not have helpped me for the above issue, but it's important to follow the correct proceedure when doing an upgrade. 1) Upload software to both controllers and wait for it to unpack 2) On controller "A" navigate to configuration/cluster and click "takeover" 3) Wait for controller "B" to finish restarting, then login to it, navigate to maintenance/system, and roll forward to the new software. 4) Wait for controller "B" to apply the update and finish rebooting 5) Login to controller "B", navigate to configuration/cluster and click "takeover" 6) Wait for controller "A" to finish restarting, then login to it, navigate to maintenance/system, and roll forward to the new software. 7) Wait for controller "A" to apply the update and finish rebooting 8) Login to controller "B", navigate to configuration/cluster and click "failback"

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7 Steps To Cut Recruiting Costs & Drive Exceptional Business Results

- by Oracle Accelerate for Midsize Companies

By Steve Viarengo, Vice President Product Management, Oracle Taleo Cloud Services Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 In good times, trimming operational costs is an ongoing goal. In tough times, it’s a necessity. In both good times and bad, however, recruiting occurs. Growth increases headcount in good times, and opportunistic or replacement hiring occurs in slow business cycles. By employing creative recruiting strategies in tandem with the latest technology developments, you can reduce recruiting costs while driving exceptional business results. Here are some critical areas to focus on. 1. Target Direct Cost Savings Total recruiting process expenses are the sum of external costs plus internal labor costs. Most organizations can reduce recruiting expenses with direct cost savings. While additional savings on indirect costs can be realized from process improvement and efficiency gains, there are direct cost savings and benefits readily available in three broad areas: sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting. 2. Sourcing: Reduce Agency Costs Agency search firm fees can amount to 35 percent of a new employee’s annual base salary. Typically taken from the hiring department budget, these fees may not be visible to HR. By relying on internal mobility programs, referrals, candidate pipelines, and corporate career Websites, organizations can reduce or eliminate this agency spend. And when you do have to pay third-party agency fees, you can optimize the value you receive by collaborating with agencies to identify referred candidates, ensure access to candidate data and history, and receive automatic notifications and correspondence. 3. Sourcing: Reduce Advertising Costs You can realize significant cost reductions by placing all job positions on your corporate career Website. This will allow you to reap a substantial number of candidates at minimal cost compared to job boards and other sourcing options. 4. Sourcing: Internal Talent Pool Internal talent pools provide a way to reduce sourcing and advertising costs while delivering improved productivity and retention. Internal redeployment reduces costs and ramp-up time while increasing retention and employee satisfaction. 5. Sourcing: External Talent Pool Strategic recruiting requires identifying and matching people with a given set of skills to a particular job while efficiently allocating sourcing expenditures. By using an e-recruiting system (which drives external talent pool management) with a candidate relationship database, you can automate prescreening and candidate matching while communicating with targeted candidates. Candidate relationship management can lower sourcing costs by marketing new job opportunities to candidates sourced in the past. By mining the talent pool in this fashion, you eliminate the need to source a new pool of candidates for each new requisition. Managing and mining the corporate candidate database can reduce the sourcing cost per candidate by as much as 50 percent. 6. Assessments: Reduce Turnover Costs By taking advantage of assessments during the recruitment process, you can achieve a range of benefits, including better productivity, superior candidate performance, and lower turnover (providing considerable savings). Assessments also save recruiter and hiring manager time by focusing on a short list of qualified candidates. Hired for fit, such candidates tend to stay with the organization and produce quality work—ultimately driving revenue. 7. Green Recruiting: Reduce Paper and Processing Costs You can reduce recruiting costs by automating the process—and making it green. A paperless process informs candidates that you’re dedicated to green recruiting. It also leads to direct cost savings. E-recruiting reduces energy use and pollution associated with manufacturing, transporting, and recycling paper products. And process automation saves energy in mailing, storage, handling, filing, and reporting tasks. Direct cost savings come from reduced paperwork related to résumés, advertising, and onboarding. Improving the recruiting process through sourcing, assessments, and green recruiting not only saves costs. It also positions the company to improve the talent base during the recession while retaining the ability to grow appropriately in recovery. /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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Atheros AR2413 wireless not working after shutdown

- by Chandrasekhar

I am using a Ubuntu 11.04 on an Acer aspire 3680 laptop and my wifi is not working. I followed the below commands to install the madwifi driver: sudo su apt-get install subversion cd /usr/src svn checkout http://madwifi-project.org/svn/madwifi/trunk madwifi tar cfvz madwifi.tgz cd madwifi make && make install echo "blacklist ath5k" /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf echo "ath_pci" /etc/modules modprobe ath_pci sudo reboot After installation I am facing the same problem. My wifi wont work after I shutdown. Infact it didn't work after suspend but I rectified that problem by the following commands: Command 1: sudo rmmod -f ath_pci sudo rfkill unblock all sudo modprobe ath_pci along with the command SUSPEND_MODULES=ath_pci added to the /etc/pm/config.d/madwifi directory. So if I suspend and then on my laptop the wifi loads well and doesn't create a problem. But if I shutdown my laptop the wifi never loads again and eachtime I have to run a Ubuntu 9.04 live CD to load it. I did try adding the Command 1 to the /etc/rc.local directory but still it doesn't work. So my question is: What should I do in order to make my wireless work without having to run a live CD of ubuntu 9.04 everytime after shutdown? Thanks. Here are the outputs which one might need: Output 1 chandru@chandru-acer:~$ lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS, 943/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03) 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) 00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/GME, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03) 00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02) 00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02) 00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02) 00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02) 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02) 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02) 00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2) 00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02) 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) SATA IDE Controller (rev 02) 00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family SMBus Controller (rev 02) 02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8038 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 14) 0a:03.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR2413 802.11bg NIC (rev 01) 0a:09.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller 0a:09.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD) Output 2: lsmod Module Size Used by wlan_tkip 17074 2 binfmt_misc 13213 1 parport_pc 32111 0 ppdev 12849 0 snd_hda_codec_si3054 12924 1 snd_hda_codec_realtek 255882 1 joydev 17322 0 snd_atiixp_modem 18624 0 snd_via82xx_modem 18305 0 snd_intel8x0m 18493 0 snd_ac97_codec 105614 3 snd_atiixp_modem,snd_via82xx_modem,snd_intel8x0m snd_hda_intel 24113 2 ac97_bus 12642 1 snd_ac97_codec snd_hda_codec 90901 3 snd_hda_codec_si3054,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel i915 451053 3 snd_hwdep 13274 1 snd_hda_codec snd_pcm 80042 7 snd_hda_codec_si3054,snd_atiixp_modem,snd_via82xx_modem,snd_intel8x0m,snd_ac97_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec snd_seq_midi 13132 0 snd_rawmidi 25269 1 snd_seq_midi drm_kms_helper 40971 1 i915 snd_seq_midi_event 14475 1 snd_seq_midi snd_seq 51291 2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event pcmcia 39671 0 snd_timer 28659 2 snd_pcm,snd_seq snd_seq_device 14110 3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq drm 184164 4 i915,drm_kms_helper yenta_socket 27230 0 tifm_7xx1 12898 0 wlan_scan_sta 21945 1 ath_rate_sample 17279 1 pcmcia_rsrc 18292 1 yenta_socket psmouse 73312 0 tifm_core 15040 1 tifm_7xx1 snd 55295 18 snd_hda_codec_si3054,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_atiixp_modem,snd_via82xx_modem,snd_intel8x0m,snd_ac97_codec,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device serio_raw 12990 0 i2c_algo_bit 13184 1 i915 soundcore 12600 1 snd pcmcia_core 21505 3 pcmcia,yenta_socket,pcmcia_rsrc video 19112 1 i915 ath_pci 183044 0 snd_page_alloc 14073 5 snd_atiixp_modem,snd_via82xx_modem,snd_intel8x0m,snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm wlan 224640 5 wlan_tkip,wlan_scan_sta,ath_rate_sample,ath_pci ath_hal 398701 3 ath_rate_sample,ath_pci lp 13349 0 parport 36746 3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp usbhid 41704 0 hid 77084 1 usbhid sky2 49172 0 Output 3 root@chandru-acer:~# lshw -C network PCI (sysfs) *-network description: Ethernet interface product: 88E8038 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller vendor: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 14 serial: 00:16:36:fb:aa:64 capacity: 100Mbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm vpd msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=sky2 driverversion=1.28 firmware=N/A latency=0 link=no multicast=yes port=twisted pair resources: irq:43 memory:44000000-44003fff ioport:2000(size=256) *-network description: Wireless interface product: AR2413 802.11bg NIC vendor: Atheros Communications Inc. physical id: 3 bus info: pci@0000:0a:03.0 logical name: wifi0 version: 01 serial: 00:19:7d:d3:0c:fd width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list logical ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath_pci ip=192.168.1.6 latency=96 maxlatency=28 mingnt=10 multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11g resources: irq:18 memory:d0000000-d000ffff Output 4 root@chandru-acer:~# lsmod | grep ath_pci ath_pci 183044 0 wlan 224640 5 wlan_tkip,wlan_scan_sta,ath_rate_sample,ath_pci ath_hal 398701 3 ath_rate_sample,ath_pci

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