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  • Part 2&ndash;Load Testing In The Cloud

    - by Tarun Arora
    Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig.  What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute and to enable communication between Test Controller and Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect.  Azure Connect The Test Controller is on premise and the Test Agents are in the cloud (How will they talk?). To enable communication between the two, we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect. With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IPsec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. With this you can now join Windows Azure role instances to your domain, so that you can use your existing methods for domain authentication, name resolution, or other domain-wide maintenance actions. For more details refer to an overview of Windows Azure connect. A very useful video explaining everything you wanted to know about Windows Azure connect.  Azure Compute Windows Azure compute provides developers a platform to host and manage applications in Microsoft’s data centres across the globe. A Windows Azure application is built from one or more components called ‘roles.’ Roles come in three different types: Web role, Worker role, and Virtual Machine (VM) role, we’ll be using the Worker role to set up the Test Agents. A very nice blog post discussing the difference between the 3 role types. Developers are free to use the .NET framework or other software that runs on Windows with the Worker role or Web role. Developers can also create applications using languages such as PHP and Java. More on Windows Azure Compute. Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server... Virtual Machine Size CPU Cores Memory Cost Per Hour Extra Small Shared 768 MB $0.04 Small 1 1.75 GB $0.12 Medium 2 3.50 GB $0.24 Large 4 7.00 GB $0.48 Extra Large 8 14.00 GB $0.96   You might want to review the Windows Azure Pricing FAQ. Let’s Get Started building the Test Rig… Configuration Machine Role Comments VM – 1 Domain Controller for Playpit.com On Premise VM – 2 TFS, Test Controller On Premise VM – 3 Test Agent Cloud   In this blog post I would assume that you have the domain, Team Foundation Server and Test Controller Installed and set up already. If not, please refer to the TFS 2010 Installation Guide and this walkthrough on MSDN to set up your Test Controller. You can also download a preconfigured TFS 2010 VM from Brian Keller's blog, Brian also has some great hands on Labs on TFS 2010 that you may want to explore. I. Lets start building VM – 3: The Test Agent Download the Windows Azure SDK and Tools Open Visual Studio and create a new Windows Azure Project using the Cloud Template                   Choose the Worker Role for reasons explained in the earlier post         The WorkerRole.cs implements the Run() and OnStart() methods, no code changes required. You should be able to compile the project and run it in the compute emulator (The compute emulator should have been installed as part of the Windows Azure Toolkit) on your local machine.                   We will only be making changes to WindowsAzureProject, open ServiceDefinition.csdef. Ensure that the vmsize is small (remember the cost chart above). Import the “Connect” module. I am importing the Connect module because I need to join the Worker role VM to the Playpit domain. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect"/> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg and note that settings with key ‘Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.%%%%’ have been added to the configuration file. This is because you decided to import the connect module. See the config below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>             Let’s go step by step and understand all the highlighted parameters and where you can find the values for them.       osFamily – By default this is set to 1 (Windows Server 2008 SP2). Change this to 2 if you want the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The Advantage of using osFamily = “2” is that you get Powershell 2.0 rather than Powershell 1.0. In Powershell 2.0 you could simply use “powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted ./myscript.ps1” and it will work while in Powershell 1.0 you will have to change the registry key by including the following in your command file “reg add HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell /v ExecutionPolicy /d Unrestricted /f” before you can execute any power shell. The other reason you might want to move to os2 is if you wanted IIS 7.5.       Activation Token – To enable communication between the on premise machine and the Windows Azure Worker role VM both need to have the same token. Log on to Windows Azure Management Portal, click on Connect, click on Get Activation Token, this should give you the activation token, copy the activation token to the clipboard and paste it in the configuration file. Note – Later in the blog I’ll be showing you how to install connect on the on premise machine.                       EnableDomainJoin – Set the value to true, ofcourse we want to join the on windows azure worker role VM to the domain.       DomainFQDN, DomainControllerFQDN, DomainAccountName, DomainPassword, DomainOU, Administrators – This information is specific to your domain. I have extracted this information from the ‘service manager’ and ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’. Also, i created a new Domain-OU namely ‘CloudInstances’ so all my cloud instances joined to my domain show up here, this is optional. You can encrypt the DomainPassword – refer to the instructions here. Or hold fire, I’ll be covering that when i come to certificates and encryption in the coming section.       Now once you have filled all this information up, the configuration file should look something like below, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Next we will be enabling the Remote Desktop module in to the ServiceDefinition.csdef, we could make changes manually or allow a beautiful wizard to help us make changes. I prefer the second option. So right click on the Windows Azure project and choose Publish       Now once you get the publish wizard, if you haven’t already you would be asked to import your Windows Azure subscription, this is simply the Msdn subscription activation key xml. Once you have done click Next to go to the Settings page and check ‘Enable Remote Desktop for all roles’.       As soon as you do that you get another pop up asking you the details for the user that you would be logging in with (make sure you enter a reasonable expiry date, you do not want the user account to expire today). Notice the more information tag at the bottom, click that to get access to the certificate section. See screen shot below.       From the drop down select the option to create a new certificate        In the pop up window enter the friendly name for your certificate. In my case I entered ‘WAC – Test Rig’ and click ok. This will create a new certificate for you. Click on the view button to see the certificate details. Do you see the Thumbprint, this is the value that will go in the config file (very important). Now click on the Copy to File button to copy the certificate, we will need to import the certificate to the windows Azure Management portal later. So, make sure you save it a safe location.                                Click Finish and enter details of the user you would like to create with permissions for remote desktop access, once you have entered the details on the ‘Remote desktop configuration’ screen click on Ok. From the Publish Windows Azure Wizard screen press Cancel. Cancel because we don’t want to publish the role just yet and Yes because we want to save all the changes in the config file.       Now if you go to the ServiceDefinition.csdef file you will see that the RemoteAccess and RemoteForwarder roles have been imported for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Now go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg file and you see a whole bunch for setting “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.%%%” values added for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.Enabled" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountUsername" value="Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountEncryptedPassword" value="MIIBnQYJKoZIhvcNAQcDoIIBjjCCAYoCAQAxggFOMIIBSgIBADAyMB4xHDAaBgNVBAMME1dpbmRvd 3MgQXp1cmUgVG9vbHMCEGa+B46voeO5T305N7TSG9QwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQAEggEABg4ol5Xol66Ip6QKLbAPWdmD4ae ADZ7aKj6fg4D+ATr0DXBllZHG5Umwf+84Sj2nsPeCyrg3ZDQuxrfhSbdnJwuChKV6ukXdGjX0hlowJu/4dfH4jTJC7sBWS AKaEFU7CxvqYEAL1Hf9VPL5fW6HZVmq1z+qmm4ecGKSTOJ20Fptb463wcXgR8CWGa+1w9xqJ7UmmfGeGeCHQ4QGW0IDSBU6ccg vzF2ug8/FY60K1vrWaCYOhKkxD3YBs8U9X/kOB0yQm2Git0d5tFlIPCBT2AC57bgsAYncXfHvPesI0qs7VZyghk8LVa9g5IqaM Cp6cQ7rmY/dLsKBMkDcdBHuCTAzBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwFAYIKoZIhvcNAwcECDRVifSXbA43gBApNrp40L1VTVZ1iGag+3O1" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountExpiration" value="2012-11-27T23:59:59.0000000+00:00" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteForwarder.Enabled" value="true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <Certificates> <Certificate name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.PasswordEncryption" thumbprint="AA23016CF0BDFC344400B5B82706B608B92E4217" thumbprintAlgorithm="sha1" /> </Certificates> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>          Okay let’s look at them one at a time,       Enabled - Yes, we would like to enable Remote Access.       AccountUserName – This is the user name you entered while you were on the publish windows azure role screen, as detailed above.       AccountEncrytedPassword – Try and decode that, the certificate is used to encrypt the password you specified for the user account. Remember earlier i said, either use the instructions or wait and i’ll be showing you encryption, now the user account i am using for rdp has the same password as my domain password, so i can simply copy the value of the AccountEncryptedPassword to the DomainPassword as well.       AccountExpiration – This is the expiration as you specified in the wizard earlier, make sure your account does not expire today.       Remote Forwarder – Check out the documentation, below is how I understand it, -- One role in an application that implements a remote desktop connection must import the RemoteForwarder module. The two modules work together to enable the remote desktop connections to role instances. -- If you have multiple roles defined in the service model, it does not matter which role you add the RemoteForwarder module to, but you must add it to only one of the role definitions.       Certificate – Remember the certificate thumbprint from the wizard, the on premise machine and windows azure role machine that need to speak to each other must have the same thumbprint. More on that when we install Windows Azure connect Endpoints on the on premise machine. As i said earlier, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you the manual process so i won’t be scripting any star up tasks to install the test agent or register the test agent with the TFS Server. I’ll be showing you all this cool stuff in the next blog post, that’s because it’s important to understand the manual side of it, it becomes easier for you to troubleshoot in case something fails. Having said that, the changes we have made are sufficient to spin up the Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent VM, have it connected with the play.pit.com domain and have remote access enabled on it. Before we deploy the Test Agent VM we need to set up Windows Azure Connect on the TFS Server. II. Windows Azure Connect: Setting up Connect on VM – 2 i.e. TFS & Test Controller Glad you made it so far, now to enable communication between the on premise TFS/Test Controller and Azure-ed Test Agent we need to enable communication. We have set up the Azure connect module in the Test Agent configuration, now the connect end points need to be enabled on the on premise machines, let’s have a look at how we can do this. Log on to VM – 2 running the TFS Server and Test Controller Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network Click on Virtual Network, if you already have a subscription you should see the below screen shot, if not, you would be asked to complete the subscription first        Click on Install Local Endpoints from the top left on the panel and you get a url appended with a token id in it, remember the token i showed you earlier, in theory the token you get here should match the token you added to the Test Agent config file.        Copy the url to the clip board and paste it in IE explorer (important, the installation at present only works out of IE and you need to have cookies enabled in order to complete the installation). As stated in the pop up, you can NOT download and run the software later, you need to run it as is, since it contains a token. Once the installation completes you should see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray.                         Right click the Azure Connect icon, choose Diagnostics and refer to this link for diagnostic detail terminology. NOTE – Unfortunately I could not see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray, a bit of binging with Google revealed that the azure connect icon is only shown when the ‘Windows Azure Connect Endpoint’ Service is started. So go to services.msc and make sure that the service is started, if not start it, unfortunately again, the service did not start for me on a manual start and i realised that one of the dependant services was disabled, you can look at the service dependencies and start them and then start windows azure connect. Bottom line, you need to start Windows Azure connect service before you can proceed. Please refer here on MSDN for more on Troubleshooting Windows Azure connect. (Follow the next step as well)   Now go back to the Windows Azure Management Portal and from Groups and Roles create a new group, lets call it ‘Test Rig’. Make sure you add the VM – 2 (the TFS Server VM where you just installed the endpoint).       Now if you go back to the Azure Connect icon in the system tray and click ‘Refresh Policy’ you will notice that the disconnected status of the icon should change to ready for connection. III. Importing Certificate in to Windows Azure Management Portal But before that you need to import the certificate you created in Step I in to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on ‘Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN’ and then ‘Management Certificates’ followed by Add Certificates as shown in the screen shot below        Browse to the location where you saved the certificate earlier, remember… Refer to Step I in case you forgot.        Now you should be able to see the imported certificate here, make sure the thumbprint of the certificate matches the one you inserted in the config files        IV. Publish Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent Having completed I, II and III, you are ready to publish the Test Agent VM – 3 to the cloud. Go to Visual Studio and right click the Windows Azure project and select Publish. Verify the infomration in the wizard, from the advanced settings tab, you can also enabled capture of intellitrace or profiling information.         Click Next and Click Publish! From the view menu bar select the Windows Azure Activity Log window.       Now you should be able to see the deployment progress in real time.             In the Windows Azure Management Portal, you should also be able to see the progress of creation of a new Worker Role.       Once the deployment is complete you should be able to RDP (go to run prompt type mstsc and in the pop up the machine name) in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM from the Playpit network using the domain admin user account. In case you are unable to log in to the Test Agent using the domain admin user account it means the process of joining the Test Agent to the domain has failed! But the good news is, because you imported the connect module, you can connect to the Test Agent machine using Windows Azure Management Portal and troubleshoot the reason for failure, you will be able to log in with the user name and password you specified in the config file for the keys ‘RemoteAccess.AccountUsername, RemoteAccess.EncryptedPassword (just that enter the password unencrypted)’, fix it or manually join the machine to the domain. Once you have managed to Join the Test Agent VM to the Domain move to the next step.      So, log in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM with the Playpit Domain Administrator and verify that you can log in, the machine is connected to the domain and the connect service is successfully running. If yes, give your self a pat on the back, you are 80% mission accomplished!         Go to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network, click on Groups and Roles and click on Test Rig, click Edit Group, the edit the Test Rig group you created earlier. In the Connect to section, click on Add to select the worker role you have just deployed. Also, check the ‘Allow connections between endpoints in the group’ with this you will enable to communication between test controller and test agents and test agents/test agents. Click Save.      Now, you are ready to deploy the Test Agent software on the Worker Role Test Agent VM and configure it to work with the Test Controller. V. Configuring VM – 3: Installing Test Agent and Associating Test Agent to Controller Log in to the Worker Role Test Agent VM that you have just successfully deployed, make sure you log in with the domain administrator account. Download the All Agents software from MSDN, ‘en_visual_studio_agents_2010_x86_x64_dvd_509679.iso’, extract the iso and navigate to where you have extracted the iso. In my case, i have extracted the iso to “C:\Resources\Temp\VsAgentSetup”. Open the Test Agent folder and double click on setup.exe. Once you have installed the Test Agent you should reach the configuration window. If you face any issues installing TFS Test Agent on the VM, refer to the walkthrough on MSDN.       Once you have successfully installed the Test Agent software you will need to configure the test agent. Right click the test agent configuration tool and run as a different user. i.e. an Administrator. This is really to run the configuration wizard with elevated privileges (you might have UAC block something's otherwise).        In the run options, you can select ‘service’ you do not need to run the agent as interactive un less you are running coded UI tests. I have specified the domain administrator to connect to the TFS Test Controller. In real life, i would never do that, i would create a separate test user service account for this purpose. But for the blog post, we are using the most powerful user so that any policies or restrictions don’t block you.        Click the Apply Settings button and you should be all green! If not, the summary usually gives helpful error messages that you can resolve and proceed. As per my experience, you may run in to either a permission or a firewall blocking communication issue.        And now the moment of truth! Go to VM –2 open up Visual Studio and from the Test Menu select Manage Test Controller       Mission Accomplished! You should be able to see the Test Agent that you have just configured here,         VI. Creating and Running Load Tests on your brand new Azure-ed Test Rig I have various blog posts on Performance Testing with Visual Studio Ultimate, you can follow the links and videos below, Blog Posts: - Part 1 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 2 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 3 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Videos: - Test Tools Configuration & Settings in Visual Studio - Why & How to Record Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio Ultimate - Goal Driven Load Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate Now that you have created your load tests, there is one last change you need to make before you can run the tests on your Azure Test Rig, create a new Test settings file, and change the Test Execution method to ‘Remote Execution’ and select the test controller you have configured the Worker Role Test Agent against in our case VM – 2 So, go on, fire off a test run and see the results of the test being executed on the Azur-ed Test Rig. Review and What’s next? A quick recap of the benefits of running the Test Rig in the cloud and what i will be covering in the next blog post AND I would love to hear your feedback! Advantages Utilizing the power of Azure compute to run a heavy virtual user load. Benefiting from the Azure flexibility, destroy Test Agents when not in use, takes < 25 minutes to spin up a new Test Agent. Most important test Network Latency, (network latency and speed of connection are two different things – usually network latency is very hard to test), by placing the Test Agents in Microsoft Data centres around the globe, one can actually test the lag in transferring the bytes not because of a slow connection but because the page has been requested from the other side of the globe. Next Steps The process of spinning up the Test Agents in windows Azure is not 100% automated. I am working on the Worker process and power shell scripts to make the role deployment, unattended install of test agent software and registration of the test agent to the test controller automated. In the next blog post I will show you how to make the complete process unattended and automated. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Hope you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. See you in Part III.   Share this post : CodeProject

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  • Here's what I want... what do I tell my IT guy I need?

    - by Jason
    I work in the graphics department for a real estate brokerage, and we deal with a lot of photos. Agents take the photos, upload them to me, I touch up and standardize the photos, then I add them to an in-house server for future use by the graphics dept. I'd like to make the "sanitized" photo files available to the agents to use when they want, but I don't want the agents poking around the graphics department's files (things get misplaced, renamed and messed up in a hurry). What would be perfect is if we could create a read-only "mirror" (correct term?) of that server that could be accessed by the agents as needed, but which wouldn't feed back into our "sanitized" file system. What do I tell the office IT guy I need (platform-agnostically, because I don't know what he's running)? I never get to see him face-to-face, so I've got to word this as carefully and explicitly as possible. Thoughts? Thanks in advance for your feedback

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  • Building a Redundant / Distrubuted Application

    - by MattW
    This is more of a "point me in the right direction" question. I (and my team of 3) have built a hosted web app that queues and routes customer chat requests to available customer service agents (It does other things as well, but this is enough background to illustrate the issue). The basic dev architecture today is: a single page ajax web UI (ASP.NET MVC) with floating chat windows (think Gmail) a backend Windows service to queue and route the chat requests this service also logs the chats, calculates service levels, etc a Comet server product that routes data between the web frontend and the backend Windows service this also helps us detect which Agents are still connected (online) And our hardware architecture today is: 2 servers to host the web UI portion of the application a load balancer to route requests to the 2 different web app servers a third server to host the SQL Server DB and the backend Windows service responsible for queuing / delivering chats So as it stands today, one of the web app servers could go down and we would be ok. However, if something would happen to the SQL Server / Windows Service server we would be boned. My question - how can I make this backend Windows service logic be able to be spread across multiple machines (distributed)? The Windows service is written to accept requests from the Comet server, check for available Agents, and route the chat to those agents. How can I make this more distributed? How can I make it so that I can distribute the work of the backend Windows service can be spread across multiple machines for redundancy and uptime purposes? Will I need to re-write it with distributed computing in mind? I should also note that I am hosting all of this on Rackspace Cloud instances - so maybe it is something I should be less concerned about? Thanks in advance for any help!

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  • Building a Redundant / Distributed Application

    - by MattW
    This is more of a "point me in the right direction" question. My team of three and I have built a hosted web app that queues and routes customer chat requests to available customer service agents (It does other things as well, but this is enough background to illustrate the issue). The basic dev architecture today is: a single page ajax web UI (ASP.NET MVC) with floating chat windows (think Gmail) a backend Windows service to queue and route the chat requests this service also logs the chats, calculates service levels, etc a Comet server product that routes data between the web frontend and the backend Windows service this also helps us detect which Agents are still connected (online) And our hardware architecture today is: 2 servers to host the web UI portion of the application a load balancer to route requests to the 2 different web app servers a third server to host the SQL Server DB and the backend Windows service responsible for queuing / delivering chats So as it stands today, one of the web app servers could go down and we would be ok. However, if something would happen to the SQL Server / Windows Service server we would be boned. My question - how can I make this backend Windows service logic be able to be spread across multiple machines (distributed)? The Windows service is written to accept requests from the Comet server, check for available Agents, and route the chat to those agents. How can I make this more distributed? How can I make it so that I can distribute the work of the backend Windows service can be spread across multiple machines for redundancy and uptime purposes? Will I need to re-write it with distributed computing in mind? I should also note that I am hosting all of this on Rackspace Cloud instances - so maybe it is something I should be less concerned about? Thanks in advance for any help!

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  • New functionality in TFS Build Manager &ndash; Managing Triggers and Build Resources

    - by Jakob Ehn
    Yesterday we pushed out a new release (August 2012) of the Community TFS Build Extension, including a new version of the Community TFS Build Manager (1.0.4.6) The two big new features in the Build Manager in this release are: Set Triggers It is now possible to select one or more build definitions and update the triggers for them in one simple operation: You’ll note that we have started collapsing the context menu a bit, the list of commands are getting long! When selecting the Trigger command, you’ll see a dialog where the options should be self-explanatory: The only thing missing here is the Scheduled trigger option, you’ll have to do that using Team Explorer for now.   Manage Build Resources The other feature is that it is now possible to view the build controllers and agents in your current collection and also perform some actions against them. The new functionality is available by select the Build Resources item in the drop down menu: Selecting this, you’ll see a (sort of) hierarchical view of the build controllers and their agents: In this view you can quickly see all the resources and their status. You can also view the build directory of each build agent and the tags that are associated with them. On the action menu, you can enable and disable both agents and controllers (several at a time), and you can also select to remove them. By selecting Manage, you’ll be presented with the standard Manage Controller dialog from Visual Studio where you can set the rest of the properties. Hopefully we’ll be able to implement most of the existing functionality so that we can remove that menu option Our plan is to add more functionality to this view, such as adding new agents/controllers, restarting build service hosts, maybe view diagnostic information such as disk space and error logs.   Hope you’ll find the new functionality useful. Remember to log any bugs and feature requests on the CodePlex site. Happy building!

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  • Image Management System with Different Levels of Access

    - by Jason
    I work in the graphics department for a real estate brokerage, and we deal with a lot of photos. Agents take the photos, upload them to me, I touch up and standardize the photos, then I add them to an in-house server for future use by the graphics dept. I'd like to make the "sanitized" photo files available to the agents to use when they want, but I don't want the agents poking around the graphics department's files (things get misplaced, renamed and messed up in a hurry). What would be perfect is if we could create a read-only "mirror" (correct term?) of that server that could be accessed by the agents as needed, but which wouldn't feed back into our "sanitized" file system. Edit: I'm looking for an automatic solution... manually posting the files to two separate locations seems like an inelegant solution when working digitally. Edit: I'm trying to avoid any access barriers to the public (dirty) file system (however it's finally implemented). There are 40-50 real estate agents who need to access these files, half of whom can't reliably download an email attachment.

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  • Running TeamCity from Amazon EC2 - Cloud based scalable build and continuous Integration

    - by RoyOsherove
    I’ve been having fun playing with the amazon EC2 cloud service. I set up a server running TeamCity, and an image of a server that just runs a TeamCity agent. I also setup TeamCity  to automatically instantiate agents on EC2 and shut them down based upon availability of free agents. Here’s how I did it: The first step was setting up the teamcity server. Create an account on amazon EC2 (BTW, amazon’s sites works better in IE than it does in chrome.. who knew!?) Open the EC2 dashboard, and click “Launch Instance” . From the “Quick Start” tab I selected from the list: “Getting Started on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (AMI Id: ami-c5e40dac)” .  it’s good enough to just run teamcity. In the instance details, I used the default (Small instance, 1.7 GB mem). You might want to choose a close availability zone based on where you are. We want to “Launch instances” so click continue. Select the default kernel, RAM disk and all. No need to enable monitoring for now (you can do that later). click continue. If you don’t have a key pair, you will be prompted to create one. Once you do, select it in the list. Now you’ll be prompted to create a security group. I named mine “TC” as in “TeamCity”. each group is a bunch of settings on which ports can be let through into and out of a hosted machine.  keep it as the default settings. We will change them later. Click continue,  review and then click “Launch”. Now you’ll be able to see the new instance in the running instances list on your site. Now, you need to install stuff on that instance (TeamCity!) . To do that, you’ll need to Remote desktop into that instance. To do that, we’ll get the admin password for that instance: Check it on the list, and click “Instance Actions” - “Get Windows Admin Password”. You might have to wait about 10 minutes or so for the password to be generated for you. Once you have the password, you will remote desktop (start-run-‘mstsc’) into the instance. It’s address is a dns address shown below the list under “Public DNS”. it looks something like: ec2-256-226-194-91.compute-1.amazonaws.com Once you’re inside the instance – you’ll need to open IE (it is in hardened mode so you’ll have to relax its security settings to download stuff). I first downloaded chrome and using chrome I downloaded TeamCity. Note that the download speed is FAST. several MBs per second. To be able to see TeamCity from the outside, you will need to open the advanced firewall settings inside the remote machine, and add incoming and outgoing rules for port 80 (HTTP). Once you do that, you should be able to see the machine from the outside. If you still can’t, see the next step. I also enabled ports 9090 since I will use this machine to create an agent image later as well. Now configure the security group (TC) to enable talking to agents: IN the EC2 dashboard click on “Security Groups” and select your group. To add a rule, click on the empty list under the ‘protocol’ header. select TCP. from and ‘to’ ports are 9090. source ip is 0.0.0.0/0 (every ip is allowed). click “Save.  Also make sure you can see “HTTP” tcp 80 in that list. if you can’t see it, add it or you won’t be able to browse to the machine’s teamcity server home page. I also set an elastic IP for the machine: so I always have the same IP for the machine instance. Allocate and set one through the”Elastic IP” link on the EC2 dashboard.   you should now have a working instance of teamcity.   Now let’s create an agent image. Repeat steps 1-9, but this time, make sure you select a machine that fits what an agent might do. I selected Instance type – Hihg-CPU medium machine,  that is much faster. On that machine, I installed what I needed (VS 2010, PostSharp etc..). downloading VS 2010 from MSDN (2 GB took less than 10 min!) Now, instead of installing teamcity, browse using the browser to the teamcity homepage (from within the remote machine). go to the Administration page, and click the upper right link “Install agents”. Install the agent on he local machine – set it to the IP or DNS of the running TeamCity server. That way you’ll be able to check their connectivity live before making this machine your official agent image to reuse. Once the agent is installed, see that the TC server can see it and use it. see steps 13-14 above if they can’t. Once it works, you can take steps to make this image your agent image to be reused. next, here is a copy-paste of several steps to take from http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/TCD5/Setting+Up+TeamCity+for+Amazon+EC2 Configure system so that agent it is started on machine boot (and make sure TeamCity server is accessible on machine boot). Test the setup by rebooting machine and checking that the agent connects normally to the server. Prepare the Image for bundling: Remove any temporary/history information in the system. Stop the agent (under Windows stop the service but leave it in Automatic startup type) Delete content agent logs and temp directories (not necessary) Delete "<Agent Home>/conf/amazon-*" file (not necessary) Change config/buildAgent.properties to remove properties: name, serverAddress, authToken (not necessary)   Now, we need to: Make AMI from the running instance. Configure TeamCity EC2 support on TeamCity server. Making an AMI: Check the instance of the agent in the EC2 dashboard instance list, and select instance actions->Create Image (EBS AMI) you’ll see the image pending in the APIs list in the EC2 dashboard. this could take 30 minutes or more. meanwhile we can configure the could support in the teamcity server. COPY THE AMI ID to the clipboard (looks like ami-a88aa4ce) Configuring TeamCity for Cloud: In TeamCity, click on “Agents” and then on “Cloud” tab. this is where you will control your cloud agents. to configure new cloud agents based on APIs, click on the right link to the “configuration page” Create a new profile and select AMazon EC2 as cloud type. Use your AMI ID that you copied to the clipboard into the “Images” field. Select an availability zone that is the same as the one your instance is running on for best communication perf between them make sure you select the ‘TC’ security group hopefully, that should be it, and teamcity will try to instantiate new instances on demand. Note that it may take around 10 minutes for an agent to become available to teamcity from the time it’s started.

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  • Interpretation of empty User-agent

    - by Amit Agrawal
    How should I interpret a empty User-agent? I have some custom analytics code and that code has to analyze only human traffic. I have got a working list of User-agents denoting human traffic, and bot traffic, but the empty User-agent is proving to be problematic. And I am getting lots of traffic with empty user agent - 10%. Additionally - I have crafted the human traffic versus bot traffic user agent list by analyzing my current logs. As such I might be missing a lot of entries in there. Is there a well maintained list of user agents denoting bot traffic, OR the inverse a list of user agents denoting human traffic?

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  • How to secure robots.txt file?

    - by CompilingCyborg
    I would like for User-agents to index my relative pages only without accessing any directory on my server. As initial thought, i had this version in mind: User-agent: * Disallow: */* Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml My Questions: Is it correct to block all directories like that - Disallow: */*? Would still search engines be able to see and index my sitemap if i disallowed all directories? What are the best practices for securing the robots.txt file? For Reference: Here is a good tutorial for robots.txt #Add this if you want to stop Alexa from indexing your site. User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: / #Add this to stop duggmirror User-agent: duggmirror Disallow: / #Add this to allow specific agents User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: #Add this to allow all agents while blocking specific directories User-agent: * Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /*?*

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  • 14+ Real Estate WordPress Themes

    - by Aditi
    If you are looking for a great WordPress real estate theme. Below is a list of some of the best wordpress real estate themes, so you can find one, which is the best suited for you and be at par with increasing industry demands in real estates business.We have covered only the best themes available. The Themes are flexible & can be used by anybody in real estate business. If you are realtor, agent, appraiser or realty these can be modified as per your use. Estate It is an immensely powerful and simple to manage business theme. It offers advanced SEO control, clean code and styling modification features. It has new “Properties” management facility when installed – proving it’s far more than just a WordPress theme. It offers flexible page templates, an advanced search facility that allows you to drill down into properties based on very specific criteria, Google Maps integration and smart property images management. It is a complete web solution. It also has IDX functionality due to dsIDXpress plugin integration, which allows multi-listing services. Price: $200 View Demo Download ElegantEstate It makes your WordPress blog into a full-feature real estate website. The theme makes browsing your listings easy, and adds special integration features for property info, photos, Google Maps and more. Help increase sales by establishing an elegant and professional online presence today. It has opera compatibility, Netscape compatibility, Safari compatibility, WordPress 3.0 compatibility. It comes with five color schemes, threaded comments, optional blog-style structure, Gravatar ready, firefox compatible, IE8 + IE7 + IE6 compatible, advertisement ready, widget ready sidebars, theme options page, custom thumbnail images, PSD files, valid XHTML + CSS, smooth table less design, ePanel theme options, page templates, complete localization and many more features. Price: $39 (Package includes more than 55 themes) View Demo Download Open House Open House is fully compatible with WordPress 3.0+ and a highly customizable Real Estate WordPress theme. It has Google Maps Integration with Street View. It has a professional look for Agents and Realtors both. It is best suited for all markets and countries with theme localization, translation and internationalization. It provides for English, Spanish and Portuguese language files in the Developer Package. It has custom scripts, which makes it easy to add/delete/modify listings. It also includes photo gallery with a lightbox effect, gorgeous photo fade animations and automatic Google Maps integration. The theme can be used as a single or multi-agent website with individual Agent-Realtor pages with listings and biography information, Agent photo uploader, financing calculator.There is Multi Category search for potential customers to locate the house they want. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Residence Real Estate It is a WordPress 3.0+ compatible stunning real estate theme. It has a dynamic real estate framework management module for easy edit-delete-add more features options, which makes this theme super easy to customize to the market needs. It allows you to add your own labels and values in your own language and switch the theme to your own language with English and Spanish files included with the ability to add your own language. It offers Multi-Category search with breadcrumb filtered results, easy photo gallery management with drag-drop sorting of images. It allows you to build your own multi-category search section menu with custom labels-choices and unlimited dropdown menus. They have been presented in a professional module with search results in breadcrumb navigation. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Smooth Smooth is a WordPress Real Estate theme. It is a complete theme, which comes with Multi Category Search, Google Maps Integration, Agent Photo and Logo uploader that offers a professional and extremely affordable solution for Realtors and Agents to showcase their properties with ease. You can add your listings with the extremely easy and flexible Dynamic Real Estate Framework, edit-add-modify-delete all features, labels and values within the WordPress administration and upload unlimited photos to your galleries with latest WordPress 3.0+ features. It is a complete solution for real estate sites. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Homeowners It is another WordPress Real Estate theme, which is a fast loading optimized theme with Google Maps Integration, fully compatible with WordPress 3.0 features and all Real Estate markets. It has a professional clean look and it is full of features extremely easy to modify. It also provides for 12 new styles provided. English, Spanish and Portuguese language files are provided in the Developer Package. Homeowners WordPress Real Estate features custom scripts that make add/delete/modify listings an easy task with an included photo gallery with a lightbox effect and automatic Google Map integration with street view (New) Agents will have access only to their own listings and add the listing management for their account making this theme an ideal affordable solution for Realtors and Real Estate agencies. The theme can be used as a single or multi-agent website with individual Agent-Realtor pages with listings and biography information, Agent photo uploader, financing calculator. Multi category search has also been provided. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Real Agent Real Estate This theme is a WordPress 3.0+ compatible clean grid based real estate theme. It has a dynamic real estate framework management module for easy edit-delete-add more features options. It is easy to customize according to market. It allows you to add your own labels and values in your own language switch the theme to your own language with English and Spanish files included with the ability to add your own language. Multi-Category search with breadcrumb filtered results, easy photo gallery management with drag-drop sorting of images. You can upload property photos in bulk with the native WordPress uploader and the new image editing and resizing options in WordPress 3.0+. The theme features 5 different color styles, blue, black, red, green and purple with professional layouts, logo and agent photo uploaders. This theme is best suited for individual or multiple agents both. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Agent Press The AgentPress theme is an ideal solution for real estate agents. It offers multiple page templates that can be used to create a complete real estate website. You can create from single property templates to a custom homepage easily with it. It is compatible to WordPress 3.0 and 3.1. It has custom background/header, property template, 6 layout options, fixed width, threaded comments and many more features. Price: $99.95 View Demo Download Real Estate It is one of the best Real Estate themes. It offers single click auto install of the site, Allow user to pay & submit properties on your site, Multi-agent site with profiles, Strategically built real estate site with professional design, User dashboard to edit/renew their submissions, Auto generated Google Maps and Image Slideshows and many more unique features. Once the users search property as per their criteria, the properties are listed with all the necessary parameters that let them select the property of their choice. Users can also add the property to favorite so they can check the property later from their member area dashboard. Admin may display different sidebar on this page and add widgets of their choice. This theme is full of custom, dynamic widgets such as top agents, finance calculator, user login; advertise blocks, testimonials and so on. There is a property details page where users can see the actual property. The agent details is displayed with the full contact details and appropriate links so the visitor can get all info about the property being sold, seller and may contact them by filling out a simple form. The email will be sent directly to the person who listed the property. Price: $89.95 Single | $159.95 Developer View Demo Download Broker Real Estate It is also a WordPress 3.0+ compatible real estate theme. It has a featured property slideshow, dynamic real estate framework management module for easy edit-delete-add more features. You can add your own labels and values in your own language. It offers multi-category search with breadcrumb-filtered results, easy photo gallery management with drag-drop sorting of images. You can also build your own multi-category search section menu with custom labels-choices and unlimited dropdown menus. Price: $39.95 essential | $69.95 standard | $99.95 premium View Demo Download Decasa It has custom search panel that lets your user easily browse your properties by keyword search or category select drop downs. It offers the property exposé, which is a user-friendly overview over the most important details of each real estate object. You can easily add this data through a post settings meta box on the post edit screen. You can easily create a real estate image gallery. Its theme options panel makes it easy to make the basic theme settings. It supports the new WordPress post thumbnail feature. When uploading an image file the theme will automatically create all the necessary image size. You can also create your own custom menu easily and fast with drag and drop without touching any code. Price: 39 € View Demo Download RealtorPress A real estate premium WordPress theme from PremiumPress. Versatile WordPress Theme that can be used by individual agents or real estate companies. The theme allows you to easily add property listings via the custom backend admin area or import CSV spreadsheets. It features customisable search options, Google maps integration, real estate data custom field creator, image management tools and more. Price: $79 | Premium Collection: $259 (all PremiumPress themes) View Demo Download Related posts:21+ WordPress Photo Blog & Portfolio Themes 14+ WordPress Portfolio Themes Professional WordPress Business Themes

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  • SQL - Joining multiple records to one record

    - by ho
    I've got a SQL Server database with the the following tables: Client (ClientID, ClientName) SalesAgent (AgentID, AgentName) Item (ItemID, Description) Purchase (PurchaseID, ClientID, Price) PurchaseSalesAgent (PurchaseID, AgentID) Each purchase is only ever one item to one client but there can have been multiple agents involved. I want to return the following list of columns: ClientName, Description, Price, Agents Where Agents is the names of all the agents involved in the purchase. Either as a comma separated list or as multiple columns with one agent in each. I'm looking for a way that's compatible with SQL Server 2000 but I'd also be interested in if there's a better way of doing it in SQL Server 2008.

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  • java hashmap flaws ?

    - by Tiberiu Hajas
    hi there, if (agents != null) for (Iterator iter = agents.keySet().iterator(); iter .hasNext();) { // some stuffs here } I have the following piece of java code, the agents is a hashmap, wondering if anyone can figure it out why on the line with "for" statement sometimes I got NPE ? is there any flaw with hashmaps ? thanks

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  • Upgrading Agent Controllers

    - by Owen Allen
    There was an update for Oracle Solaris Agents not too long ago. Over on the Oracle Enterprise Manager blog, Steve Stelting has put together a detailed walkthrough for upgrading your environment. It covers downloading the Agent update, seeing what Agents need to be upgraded, and performing the upgrade itself Speaking of which, the Oracle Enterprise Manager blog often has in-depth posts about Ops Center, so it's well worth a look if you don't follow it.

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  • Upgrading to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2: Top Tips One Must Know

    - by AnkurGupta
    Recently Oracle announced incremental release of Enterprise Manager 12c called Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 (EM12c R2) which includes several new exciting features (Press announcement). Right before the official release, we upgraded an internal production site from EM 12c R1 to EM 12c R2 and had an extremely pleasant experience. Let me share few key takeaways as well as few tips from this upgrade exercise. I - Why Should You Upgrade To Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 While an upgrade is usually recommended primarily to take benefit of the latest features (which is valid for this upgrade as well), I found several other compelling reasons purely from deployment perspective. Standardize your EM deployment:  Enterprise Manager comprises of several different components (OMS, agents, plug-ins, etc) and it might be possible that these are at varied patch levels in your environment. For instance, in case of an environment containing Bundle Patch 1 (customer announcement), there is a good chance that you may not have all the components up-to-date. There are two possible reasons. Bundle Patch 1 involved patching different components (OMS, agents, plug-ins) with multiple one-off patches which may not have been applied to all components yet. Bundle Patch 1 for different platforms were not released together. Which means you may not have got the chance to patch all the components on different platforms. Note: BP1 patches are not mandatory to upgrade to EM12c R2 release EM 12c R2 provides an excellent opportunity to standardize your Cloud Control environment (OMS, repository and agents) and plug-ins to latest versions in single shot. All platform releases are made available simultaneously: For the very first time in the history of EM release, all the platforms were released on day one itself, which means you do not need to wait for platform specific binaries for EM OMS or Agent to perform install or upgrades in a heterogeneous environment. Highly refined and automated process – Upgrade process is by far the smoothest and the cleanest as compared to previous releases of Enterprise manager. Following are the ones that stand out. Automatic Plug-in management – Plug-in upgrade along with new plug-in deployment is supported in upgrade installer wizard which means bulk of the updates to OMS and repository can be done in the same workflow. Saves time and minimizes user inputs. Plug-in Upgrade or Migrate Auto Update: While doing the OMS and repository upgrade, you can use Auto Update screen in Oracle Universal Installer to check for any updates/patches. That will help you to avoid the know issues and will make sure that your upgrade is successful. Allows mass upgrade of EM Agents – A new dedicated menu has been added in the EM console for agent upgrade. Agent upgrade workflow is extremely simple that requires agent name as the only input. ADM / JVMD Manager/Agent upgrade – complete process is supported via UI screens. EM12c R2 Upgrade Guide is much simpler to follow as compared to those for earlier releases. This is attributed to the simpler upgrade process. Robust and Performing Platform: EM12c R2 release not only includes several new features, but also provides a more stable platform which incorporates several fixes and enhancements in the Enterprise Manager framework. II - Few Tips To Remember In my last post (blog link) I shared few tips and tricks from my experience applying the Bundle Patch. Recently I upgraded the same site to EM 12c R2 and found few points that you must take note of, while planning this upgrade. The tips below are also applicable to EM 12c R1 environments that do not have Bundle Patch 1 patches applied. Verify the monitored application certification – Specific targets like E-Business Suite have not yet been certified as managed target in EM 12c R2. Therefore make sure to recheck the Enterprise Manager certification Matrix on My Oracle Support before planning the upgrade. Plan downtime – Because EM 12c R2 is an incremental release of EM 12c, for EM 12c R1 to EM 12c R2 upgrade supports only 1-system upgrade approach, which mean there will be downtime. OMS name change after upgrade – In case of multi OMS environments, additional OMS is renamed after upgrade, which has few implications when you upgrade JVMD and ADP agents on OMS. This is well documented in upgrade guide but make sure you read through all the notes. Upgrading BI Publisher– EM12c R2 is certified with BI Publisher 11.1.1.6.0 only. Therefore in case you are using EM 12c R1 which is integrated with BI Publisher 11.1.1.5.0, you must upgrade the BI Publisher to 11.1.1.6.0. Follow the steps from Advanced Installation and Configuration Guide here. Perform Post upgrade Tasks – Make sure to perform post upgrade steps mentioned in documentation here. These include critical changes that must be done right after upgrade to get the right configuration. For instance Database plug-in should be upgraded to Revision 3 (12.1.0.2.0 [u120804]). Delete old OMS Home – EM12c R1 to EM12c R2 is an out of place upgrade, which means it creates a new oracle home for OMS, plug-ins, etc. Therefore please ensure that You have sufficient extra space for new OMS before starting the upgrade process. You clean up the old OMS home after the upgrade process. Steps are available here. DO NOT remove the agent home on OMS host, because agent is upgraded in-place. If you have standby OMS setup then do look into the steps to upgrade the standby OMS from the upgrade guide before going ahead. Read the right documentation – Make sure to follow the Upgrade guide which provides the most comprehensive information on EM12c R2 upgrade process. Additionally you can refer other resources to get familiar with upgrade concepts. Recorded webcast - Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 Installation and Upgrade Overview Presentation - Understanding Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 Upgrade We are very excited about this latest release and will look forward to hear back any feedback from your upgrade experience!

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  • Real Time BI in the Real World

    - by tobin.gilman(at)oracle.com
    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:"Times New Roman","serif";} 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:"Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} One of my favorite BI offerings from Oracle is a solution called Oracle Real Time Decisions.  Whenever I mention this product in customer meetings, eyes light up.  There are some fascinating examples of customers using it to up-sell, cross-sell, increase customer retention, and reduce risk in real time, with off the charts return on investment. I plan to share some of those stories in a future blog.  In this post however, I want to share some far more common real time analytics use case scenarios that are being addressed with widely deployed Oracle BI and data integration technologies Not all real time BI applications require continuous learning, predictive modeling, and data mining.  Many simply require the ability to integrate, aggregate, and access information that is current (typically within in few minutes or a few seconds).  The use cases are infinite.  A few I've seen: ·         Purchasing agents need to match demand against available inventory ·         Manufacturing planners need to monitor current parts and material against scheduled build plans ·         Airline agents need to match ticket demand against flight schedules, ·         Human resources managers need to track the status of global hiring requisitions against current headcount authorizations...you get the idea. One way of doing this is to run reports or federated queries directly against transactional systems.  That approach can be viable if you only need to access simple data sets on rare occasions.  High volume and complex queries can quickly bog down performance of mission critical transactional systems.  There is an architecturally simple way of solving the problem, and it's being applied by real companies around the world to solve real needs in real time.    Cbeyond is an Atlanta, GA based  provider of voice, data and mobile business applications delivers.  They deliver real time information to its call center agents  as they are interacting with their customers. The data they need resides in production CRM and other transactional systems, but  instead or reporting directly off the those systems, data is first moved to an operational data store (ODS).  Rather than running data intensive, time consuming, and performance degrading batch ETL routines to populate the ODS, Cbeyond uses Oracle Golden Gate software to incrementally capture and move only the changed records from log files of the transactional systems every few minutes.  There is no impact on transactional system performance, and the information needed by call center representatives is up to date.  Oracle Business Intelligence software presents the information to services reps in a rich, visual, and highly interactive format. Avea is similar to Cbeyond.  They are a telecommunications company who integrates billing and customer information in an ODS that is accessed by their call center agents in real time using Oracle Golden Gate and Oracle Business Intelligence.  They've taken it a step further by using the ODS to feed a data warehouse.  The operational data store provides the current information needed by call center agents during "in flight" customer interactions.  The data warehouse is used for more sophisticated analysis of historical data.  For maximum performance, both the ODS and data warehouse run on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine. These are practical illustrations of companies addressing real time reporting and analysis needs using established business intelligence/data warehousing methodologies and tools common to many IT departments.  If real time BI could benefit your organization, you may be already be closer than you thought to having the pieces in place to solving the problem.    Give us a shout if you are interested in learning more or if you have an interesting use or approach to real-time BI.

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  • How to build a "traffic AI"?

    - by Lunikon
    A project I am working on right now features a lot of "traffic" in the sense of cars moving along roads, aircraft moving aroun an apron etc. As of now the available paths are precalculated, so nodes are generated automatically for crossings which themselves are interconnected by edges. When a character/agent spawns into the world it starts at some node and finds a path to a target node by means of a simply A* algorithm. The agent follows the path and ultimately reaches its destination. No problem so far. Now I need to enable the agents to avoid collisions and to handle complex traffic situations. Since I'm new to the field of AI I looked up several papers/articles on steering behavior but found them to be too low-level. My problem consists less of the actual collision avoidance (which is rather simple in this case because the agents follow strictly defined paths) but of situations like one agent leaving a dead-end while another one wants to enter exactly the same one. Or two agents meeting at a bottleneck which only allows one agent to pass at a time but both need to pass it (according to the optimal route found before) and they need to find a way to let the other one pass first. So basically the main aspect of the problem would be predicting traffic movement to avoid dead-locks. Difficult to describe, but I guess you get what I mean. Do you have any recommendations for me on where to start looking? Any papers, sample projects or similar things that could get me started? I appreciate your help!

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  • Skip CodedUI Tests, use Selenium for Web Automation

    - by Aligned
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/10/31/skip-codedui-tests-use-selenium-for-web-automation.aspxI recently joined a team that was using Agile Methodologies to create a new product. They have a working beta product after 10 or so 2 week sprints and already had UI’s that had changed several times as they went through iterations of their UI. As a result, the QA team was falling behind with automated tests and I was tasked to help them catch up and expand their tests. The project is a website. I heard many complaints about how hard it is to work with CodedUI (writing our own code, not relying on the recorder as we wanted re-usable and more maintainable code) then it took me 4+ hours to fix one issue. It was hard to traverse the key and debugging the objects with breakpoints… I said out loud “there has to be a better way or a framework the uses jQuery to run through the tests.” Plus it seemed really slow (wait… finding the object … wait… start putting in text…). Plus some tests would randomly fail on the test agents (using the test settings and an automated build, they are run on VMs using Microsoft test agents). Enough complaining. Selenium to the rescue (mostly). The lead QA guy decided to try it out and we haven’t turned back. We are now running tests in Chrome and Firefox and they run a lot faster. We had IE running to, but some of the tests were running fine locally, but hanging on the test agents. I’ll add some hints and lessons learned in a later post.

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  • Must all AI states be able to react to any event?

    - by Prog
    FSMs implemented with the State design pattern are a common way to design AI agents. I am familiar with the State design pattern and know how to implement it. How is this used in games to design AI agents? Consider a simplified class Monster, representing an AI agent: class Monster { State state; // other fields omitted public void update(){ // called every game-loop cycle state.execute(this); } public void setState(State state){ this.state = state; } // irrelevant stuff omitted } There are several State subclasses implementing execute() differently. So far, classic State pattern. AI agents are subject to environmental effects and other objects communicating with them. For example, an AI agent might tell another AI agent to attack (i.e. agent.attack()). Or a fireball might tell an AI agent to fall down. This means that the agent must have methods such as attack() and fallDown(), or commonly some message receiving mechanism to understand such messages. With an FSM, the current State of the agent should be the one taking care of such method calls - i.e. the agent delegates to the current state upon every event. Is this correct? If correct, how is this done? Are all states obligated by their superclass to implement methods such as attack(), fallDown() etc., so the agent can always delegate to them on almost every event? Or is it done in some other way?

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  • How to build a "traffic AI"?

    - by Lunikon
    A project I am working on right now features a lot of "traffic" in the sense of cars moving along roads, aircraft moving aroun an apron etc. As of now the available paths are precalculated, so nodes are generated automatically for crossings which themselves are interconnected by edges. When a character/agent spawns into the world it starts at some node and finds a path to a target node by means of a simply A* algorithm. The agent follows the path and ultimately reaches its destination. No problem so far. Now I need to enable the agents to avoid collisions and to handle complex traffic situations. Since I'm new to the field of AI I looked up several papers/articles on steering behavior but found them to be too low-level. My problem consists less of the actual collision avoidance (which is rather simple in this case because the agents follow strictly defined paths) but of situations like one agent leaving a dead-end while another one wants to enter exactly the same one. Or two agents meeting at a bottleneck which only allows one agent to pass at a time but both need to pass it (according to the optimal route found before) and they need to find a way to let the other one pass first. So basically the main aspect of the problem would be predicting traffic movement to avoid dead-locks. Difficult to describe, but I guess you get what I mean. Do you have any recommendations for me on where to start looking? Any papers, sample projects or similar things that could get me started? I appreciate your help!

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  • Juju stuck in "pending" state when using LXC

    - by Andre
    So I'm trying to get started with Juju, and tried to do this locally using LXC. I followed the instructions here: How do I configure juju for local usage? Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work for me. status shows the following: $ juju status machines: 0: agent-state: running dns-name: localhost instance-id: local instance-state: running services: mysql: charm: cs:precise/mysql-1 relations: db: - wordpress units: mysql/0: agent-state: pending machine: 0 public-address: null wordpress: charm: cs:precise/wordpress-0 exposed: true relations: db: - mysql units: wordpress/0: agent-state: pending machine: 0 open-ports: [] public-address: null 2012-05-10 14:09:38,155 INFO 'status' command finished successfully As you can see the agent-state is 'pending' and there is no public address where I'm able to access the newly created site. Am I missing something here? UPDATE: Tried destroying the environment an doing everything again (multiple times). This is the output for debug-log: ~$ juju debug-log 2012-05-11 08:50:23,790 INFO Enabling distributed debug log. 2012-05-11 08:50:23,806 INFO Tailing logs - Ctrl-C to stop. 2012-05-11 08:50:42,338 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Units changed old:set([]) new:set(['mysql/0']) 2012-05-11 08:50:42,339 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Starting service unit: mysql/0 ... 2012-05-11 08:50:42,459 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Downloading charm cs:precise/mysql-1 to /home/andre/.juju/data/andre-local/charms 2012-05-11 08:50:42,620 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Using <juju.machine.unit.UnitContainerDeployment object at 0x9c54b6c> for mysql/0 in /home/andre/.juju/data/andre-local 2012-05-11 08:50:42,648 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Starting service unit mysql/0... 2012-05-11 08:50:42,649 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Creating master container... 2012-05-11 08:54:33,992 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Created master container andre-local-0-template 2012-05-11 08:54:33,993 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Creating container mysql-0... 2012-05-11 08:56:18,760 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Container created for mysql/0 2012-05-11 08:56:19,466 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Charm extracted into container 2012-05-11 08:56:19,569 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Starting container... 2012-05-11 08:56:22,707 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Started container for mysql/0 2012-05-11 08:56:22,707 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Started service unit mysql/0 2012-05-11 08:56:23,012 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Units changed old:set(['mysql/0']) new:set(['wordpress/0', 'mysql/0']) 2012-05-11 08:56:23,039 Machine:0: juju.agents.machine DEBUG: Starting service unit: wordpress/0 ... 2012-05-11 08:56:23,154 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Downloading charm cs:precise/wordpress-0 to /home/andre/.juju/data/andre-local/charms 2012-05-11 08:56:23,396 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Using <juju.machine.unit.UnitContainerDeployment object at 0x9c519cc> for wordpress/0 in /home/andre/.juju/data/andre-local 2012-05-11 08:56:23,620 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Starting service unit wordpress/0... 2012-05-11 08:56:23,621 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Creating container wordpress-0... 2012-05-11 08:58:24,739 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Container created for wordpress/0 2012-05-11 08:58:25,163 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Charm extracted into container 2012-05-11 08:58:25,397 Machine:0: unit.deploy DEBUG: Starting container... 2012-05-11 08:58:27,982 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Started container for wordpress/0 2012-05-11 08:58:27,983 Machine:0: unit.deploy INFO: Started service unit wordpress/0 This is the result for the status command (with verbose flag): ~$ juju -v status 2012-05-11 08:51:53,464 DEBUG Initializing juju status runtime 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@658: Client environment:zookeeper.version=zookeeper C client 3.3.5 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@662: Client environment:host.name=andre-ufo 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@669: Client environment:os.name=Linux 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@670: Client environment:os.arch=3.2.0-24-generic-pae 2012-05-11 08:51:53,625:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@671: Client environment:os.version=#37-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 25 10:47:59 UTC 2012 2012-05-11 08:51:53,626:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@679: Client environment:user.name=andre 2012-05-11 08:51:53,626:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@687: Client environment:user.home=/home/andre 2012-05-11 08:51:53,626:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@log_env@699: Client environment:user.dir=/home/andre 2012-05-11 08:51:53,626:4030(0xb7345b00):ZOO_INFO@zookeeper_init@727: Initiating client connection, host=192.168.122.1:41779 sessionTimeout=10000 watcher=0xb7780620 sessionId=0 sessionPasswd=<null> context=0x9242ee8 flags=0 2012-05-11 08:51:53,627:4030(0xb6b90b40):ZOO_INFO@check_events@1585: initiated connection to server [192.168.122.1:41779] 2012-05-11 08:51:53,649:4030(0xb6b90b40):ZOO_INFO@check_events@1632: session establishment complete on server [192.168.122.1:41779], sessionId=0x1373ae057d90007, negotiated timeout=10000 2012-05-11 08:51:53,651 DEBUG Environment is initialized. machines: 0: agent-state: running dns-name: localhost instance-id: local instance-state: running services: mysql: charm: cs:precise/mysql-1 relations: db: - wordpress units: mysql/0: agent-state: pending machine: 0 public-address: null wordpress: charm: cs:precise/wordpress-0 relations: db: - mysql units: wordpress/0: agent-state: pending machine: 0 public-address: null

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 28 - November 3, 2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for the week of Oct 28 - Nov 3, 2012. Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments | ZDNet Another interesting post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick about changing roles in IT. ADF Mobile - Login Functionality | Andrejus Baranovskis "The new ADF Mobile approach with native deployment is cool when you want to access phone functionality (camera, email, sms and etc.), also when you want to build mobile applications with advanced UI," reports Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis. Mobile Development Platform Strategy Chart: ADF Mobile, WebCenter Sites, Portal, Content and Social "Unlike desktop web focused efforts, the world of mobile has undergone change at a feverish pace," says social enterprise expert John Brunswick. His extensive post charts various resources that will help you keep up. ADF Essentials - The Bare Necessities | Floyd Teter The experiment is over… And now Oracle ACE Director Floyd Teter shares his impressions after spending some time with Oracle ADF Essentials, the free version of Oracle ADF. A review of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook | RedStack "More so than any other single piece of content that I have seen on the topic, it provides the information that a SOA administrator needs to know in order to successfully configure, manage, monitor, troubleshoot and backup an Oracle SOA environment." So says Oracle Fusion Middleware A-Team solution architect Mark Nelson of Oracle SOA Suite 11g Administrator’s Handbook, by Ahmed Aboulnaga and Arun Pareek. Expanding the Oracle Enterprise Repository with functional documentation Capgemini middleware specialist Marc Kuijpers shares information on how Oracle Enterprise Repository can be configured "to contain functional assets, i.e. functional designs, use cases and a logical data model" to aid in SOA governance efforts. Podcast: Are You Future Proof? - Part 2 In Part 2, practicing architects and Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra (AT&T), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology), and Ronald van Luttikhuizen discuss re-tooling one’s skill set to reflect changes in enterprise IT, including the knowledge to steer stakeholders around the hype to what’s truly valuable. Easy way to access JPA with REST (JSON / XML) | Edwin Biemond Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond shows you "what is possible with JPA-RS, how easy it is and howto setup your own EclipseLink REST service." Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic: when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. 2012 IOUG Virtualization SIG – Online Symposium on Nov 7 and Nov 8 | Kai Yu Oracle ACE Director Kai Yu shares information on this week's IOUG Virtualization SIG online event. Does that make it a virtual virtualization event? Thought for the Day "If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning — and the response would be, 'We’re sorry, here’s a coupon for two more.'" — Mark Minasi Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for November 2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    Every day ArchBeat searches the web for content created by and for community members, and then shares that content via social media. Here's the list of the Top 10 most popular items posted on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for November 2012. One-Stop Shop for Oracle Webcasts Webcasts can be a great way to get information about Oracle products without having to go cross-eyed reading yet another document off your computer screen. Oracle's new Webcast Center offers selectable filtering to make it easy to get to the information you want. Yes, you have to register to gain access, but that process is quick, and with over 200 webcasts to choose from you know you'll find useful content. OAM/OVD JVM Tuning Vinay from the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture Group (otherwise known as the A-Team) shares a process for analyzing and improving performance in Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Access Manager. White Paper: Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud: Advanced I/O Virtualization Architecture for Consolidating High-Performance Workloads This new white paper by Adam Hawley (with contributions from Yoav Eilat) describes in great detail the incorporation into Oracle Exalogic of virtualized InfiniBand I/O interconnects using Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) technology. Architected Systems: "If you don't develop an architecture, you will get one anyway..." "Can you build a system without taking care of architecture?," asks Manuel Ricca. "You certainly can. But inevitably the system will be unbalanced, neglecting the interests of key stakeholders, and problems will soon emerge." Backup and Recovery of an Exalogic vServer via rsync "On Exalogic a vServer will consist of a number of resources from the underlying machine," says the man known only as Donald. "These resources include compute power, networking and storage. In order to recover a vServer from a failure in the underlying rack all of these components have to be thoughts about. This article only discusses the backup and recovery strategies that apply to the storage system of a vServer." This Week on the OTN Architect Community Home Page Make time to check out this week's features on the OTN Solution Architect Homepage, including: SOA Practitioner Guide: Identifying and Discovering Services Technical article by Yuli Vasiliev on Setting Up, Configuring, and Using an Oracle WebLogic Server Cluster Podcast: Are You Future Proof? Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic – when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. OIM 11g : Multi-thread approach for writing custom scheduled job | Saravanan V S Saravanan shares insight and expertise relevant to "designing and developing an OIM schedule job that uses multi threaded approach for updating data in OIM using APIs." How to Create Virtual Directory in Weblogic Server | Zeeshan Baig Oracle ACE Zeeshan Baig shows you how in six easy steps. SOA Galore: New Books for Technical Eyes Only Shake up up your technical skills with this trio of new technical books from community members covering SOA and BPM. Thought for the Day "Humans are the best value in computers -- where else can you get a non-linear computer weighing only about 160lbs, having a billion binary decision elements, that can be mass-produced by unskilled labour?" — Anonymous Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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  • ArchBeat Link-o-Rama Top 10 for October 2012

    - by Bob Rhubart
    The Top 10 most popular items shared on the OTN ArchBeat Facebook Page for October 2012. OAM/OVD JVM Tuning | @FusionSecExpert Vinay from the Oracle Fusion Middleware Architecture Group (known as the A-Team) shares a process for analyzing and improving performance in Oracle Virtual Directory and Oracle Access Manager. SOA Galore: New Books for Technical Eyes Only Shake up up your technical skills with this trio of new technical books from community members covering SOA and BPM. Clustering ODI11g for High-Availability Part 1: Introduction and Architecture | Richard Yeardley "JEE agents can be deployed alongside, or instead of, standalone agents," says Rittman Meade's Richard Yeardley. "But there is one key advantage in using JEE agents and WebLogic – when you deploy JEE agents as part of a WebLogic cluster they can be configured together to form a high availability cluster." Learn more in Yeardley's extensive post. Solving Big Problems in Our 21st Century Information Society | Irving Wladawsky-Berger "I believe that the kind of extensive collaboration between the private sector, academia and government represented by the Internet revolution will be the way we will generally tackle big problems in the 21st century. Just as with the Internet, governments have a major role to play as the catalyst for many of the big projects that the private sector will then take forward and exploit. The need for high bandwidth, robust national broadband infrastructures is but one such example." -- Irving Wladawsky-Berger Eventually, 90% of tech budgets will be outside IT departments | ZDNet Another interesting post from ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick about changing roles in IT. ADF Mobile - Login Functionality | Andrejus Baranovskis "The new ADF Mobile approach with native deployment is cool when you want to access phone functionality (camera, email, sms and etc.), also when you want to build mobile applications with advanced UI," reports Oracle ACE Director Andrejus Baranovskis. Podcast: Are You Future Proof? - Part 2 In Part 2, practicing architects and Oracle ACE Directors Ron Batra (AT&T), Basheer Khan (Innowave Technology), and Ronald van Luttikhuizen (Vennster) discuss re-tooling one’s skill set to reflect changes in enterprise IT, including the knowledge to steer stakeholders around the hype to what's truly valuable. ADF Mobile Custom Javascript — iFrame Injection | John Brunswick The ADF Mobile Framework provides a range of out of the box components to add within your AMX pages, according to John Brunswick. But what happens when "an out of the box component does not directly fulfill your development need? What options are available to extend your application interface?" John has an answer. Oracle Solaris 11.1 update focuses on database integration, cloud | Mark Fontecchio TechTarget editor Mark Fontecchio reports on the recent Oracle Solaris 11.1 release, with comments from IDC's Al Gillen. Architects Matter: Making sense of the people who make sense of enterprise IT Why do architects matter? Oracle Enterprise Architect Eric Stephens suggests that you ask yourself this question the next time you take the elevator to the Oracle offices on the 45th floor of the Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois (or any other skyscraper, for that matter). If you had to take the stairs to get to those offices, who would you blame? "You get the picture," he says. "Architecture is essential for any necessarily complex structure, be it a building or an enterprise." (Read the article) Thought for the Day "I will contend that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design. It is better to have a system omit certain anomalous features and improvements, but to reflect one set of design ideas, than to have one that contains many good but independent and uncoordinated ideas." — Frederick P. Brooks Source: SoftwareQuotes.com

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  • Unicenter Software Delivery 4 not able to connect to MS SQL 2000 Database after W2003 SP2 upgrade

    - by grub
    Hello Everyone Yesterday I installed the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 on a Windows Server 2003 which has Unicenter Software Delivery 4 installed. Prior to the installation I disabled every CA service on the server (Brightstor, SDO , RCO, TNG) and the MS SQL 2000 service. After the installation of the SP2 I enabled the services again but the Unicenter Service is not able to connect to the MS SQL 2000 Database anymore. The database itself is up and running and I can connect to it with the Enterprise Manager. A dbcc checkdb doesnt return any errors on the Unicenter database. The Unicenter service throws the following error messages during startup: IM[1] 27/05 10:38:31,272 Installation Manager in init phase IM[1] 27/05 10:38:31,694 Process IM(L) - [004152] failed to open database SDDATA. dbopen() call failed. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:31,694 sqls error details: IM[1] 27/05 10:38:31,694 (null) IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 ##EXCEPTION## TableError T@:PS_SQLS\isam_db.cxx:744. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 ##EXCEPTION## TableError C@:TaskmgrL\ASMTML.CXX:596. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 ##EXCEPTION## ErrorCode: 4711 in SDDATA:Isam::Isam. Process IM(L) - [004152] failed to open database SDDATA. dbopen() call failed. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 sqls error details: IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 (null) IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 returned 0. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,084 Persistent Storage could not be opened. Error cause is found in the ASM Event Log. Restart Task Manager. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,084 Failed to open database. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,084 Installation Manager ends> If I check the Unicenter configutation with *chkmib_l* the tool throws an exception and creates a small dump file. An Exception Occurred: Time: 27/05 09:49:38,928 Reason: ChkMIB_l.exe caused an UNKNOWN_EXCEPTION in module kernel32.dll at 7C82001B:77E4BEE7 Registers: EAX=0012F908 EBX=00000000 ECX=00000000 EDX=02410004 ESI=0012F998 EDI=0012F998 EBP=0012F958 ESP=0012F904 EIP=77E4BEE7 FLG=00000206 CS =7C82001B DS =B90023 SS =120023 ES =120023 FS =7C82003B GS =3F0000 Call Stack: 7C82001B:77E4BEE7 (0xE06D7363 0x00000001 0x00000003 0x0012F98C) kernel32.dll 7C82001B:77BB3259 (0x0012F9B8 0x2B017C50 0x2B024404 0x00B68C98) MSVCRT.dll 7C82001B:2B010C42 (0x00020003 0x010C00FE 0x003F0190 0x00B69050) PS.dll << SOFTWARE DELIVERY INSTANCE INFO >> TRIGGER 0(1) instances: JCE 0(1) instances: TM 0(1) instances: IM 0(1) instances: DM 0(1) instances: DPU 0(71) instances: NATF 0(1) instances: MIBCONV 0(0) instances: API 0(4) instances: DTSFT 0(0) instances: TNGPOP 0(0) instances: DGATE 0(0) instances: << FLUSHING MEMORY TRACES >> << STOP FLUSHING MEMORY TRACES >> I compared the configuration of the SDO service and the system configuration with another server on which the Windows Server 2003 SP2 is installed and SDO is working. The configuration is the same and the same driver and software versions are used. Do you have any idea what causes the connection issue? Should I deinstall the unicenter service and make a fresh installation on the server or should I remove the Windows Server 2003 SP2? I don't want to remove the SP2 because it's a requirement for WSUS3 SP2 and I really don't want to know how many possible exploits are possible in such an old system ;-) Thank you very much and have a nice day. Below you can find more detailed information about the system and the SDO service. psinfo output (system information) System information for \\CZZAAS1003: Uptime: 0 days 14 hours 38 minutes 50 seconds Kernel version: Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Multiprocessor Free Product type: Standard Edition Product version: 5.2 Service pack: 2 Kernel build number: 3790 Install date: 23.9.2004, 11:16:11s IE version: 6.0000 System root: C:\WINDOWS Processors: 2 Processor speed: 2.3 GHz Processor type: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU Physical memory: 1024 MB Video driver: RAGE XL PCI Family (Microsoft Corporation) sdver output (Unicenter Software delivery version) Unicenter Software Delivery 4.0 SP1 I2 ENU [2901] Copyright 2004 Computer Associates International, Incorporated ms sql 2000 version and odbc driver version MS SQL 2000 Server Standard Edition Product Version: 8.00.760 (SP3) ODBC Driver: SQL Server - Version 2000.86.3959.00 complete Unicenter Software delivery service log file TRIGGER[1] 27/05 10:38:28,366 SD Trigger Agent has started NATF[1] 27/05 10:38:28,928 Initiation phase finished IM[1] 27/05 10:38:31,272 Installation Manager in init phase IM[1] 27/05 10:38:31,694 Process IM(L) - [004152] failed to open database SDDATA. dbopen() call failed. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:31,694 sqls error details: IM[1] 27/05 10:38:31,694 (null) IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 ##EXCEPTION## TableError T@:PS_SQLS\isam_db.cxx:744. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 ##EXCEPTION## TableError C@:TaskmgrL\ASMTML.CXX:596. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 ##EXCEPTION## ErrorCode: 4711 in SDDATA:Isam::Isam. Process IM(L) - [004152] failed to open database SDDATA. dbopen() call failed. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 sqls error details: IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 (null) IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,069 returned 0. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,084 Persistent Storage could not be opened. Error cause is found in the ASM Event Log. Restart Task Manager. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,084 Failed to open database. IM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,084 Installation Manager ends TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,116 Task Manager in init phase TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,334 Process TM(L) - [006132] failed to open database SDDATA. dbopen() call failed. TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,334 sqls error details: TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,334 (null) TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,381 ##EXCEPTION## TableError T@:PS_SQLS\isam_db.cxx:744. TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,381 ##EXCEPTION## TableError C@:TaskmgrL\ASMTML.CXX:596. TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,381 ##EXCEPTION## ErrorCode: 4711 in SDDATA:Isam::Isam. Process TM(L) - [006132] failed to open database SDDATA. dbopen() call failed. TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,381 sqls error details: TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,381 (null) TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,381 returned 0. TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,381 Persistent Storage could not be opened. Error cause is found in the ASM Event Log. Restart Task Manager. TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,381 Failed to open database. TM[1] 27/05 10:38:32,381 Task Manager ends DM[1] 27/05 10:38:33,272 Dialogue Manager is now active API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,397 API Server Process in init phase API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,397 API - SDNLS_Init API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,397 API - connectEM API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,412 API - apiServ.init DM[1] 27/05 10:38:34,678 **AND** 1 Agents triggered API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,709 Process API(L) - [005680] failed to open database SDDATA. dbopen() call failed. API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,709 sqls error details: API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,709 (null) API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,756 ##EXCEPTION## TableError T@:PS_SQLS\isam_db.cxx:744. API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,756 ##EXCEPTION## TableError C@:MainAPIL\APISERVL.CXX:246. API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,756 ##EXCEPTION## ErrorCode: 4711 in SDDATA:Isam::Isam. Process API(L) - [005680] failed to open database SDDATA. dbopen() call failed. API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,756 sqls error details: API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,756 (null) API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,756 returned 0. API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,756 Open of the database failed. API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,756 API - apiServ.init complete API[1] 27/05 10:38:34,756 API - start_APIServer DM[1] 27/05 10:38:34,803 CZZAAR1037 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:35,772 DPU in init phase DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,100 >> GetManagerData DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,287 >> SetCompInfo DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,334 >> GetContainerList DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,350 getJobState 3 from 5b6ad DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,350 getJobState 3 from 5b6ad DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,350 getJobState 3 from 5b6b7 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,350 getJobState 3 from 5b6b7 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,350 getJobState 3 from 5b6c1 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,350 getJobState 3 from 5b6c1 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,366 getJobState 3 from 5b6cb DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,366 getJobState 3 from 5b6cb DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,366 getJobState 3 from 5b6f9 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,366 getJobState 3 from 5b6f9 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,366 getJobState 3 from 5b71a DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,366 getJobState 3 from 5b71a DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,366 getJobState 3 from 5b724 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,381 getJobState 3 from 5b724 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b72e DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b72e DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b738 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b738 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b742 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b742 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b74c DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b74c DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b756 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b756 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b78a DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b78a DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b7af DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,397 getJobState 3 from 5b7af DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,522 >> SetCompAttr DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,569 >> SetDetected DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 disconnect DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b6ad DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b6b7 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b6c1 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b6cb DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b6f9 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b71a DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b724 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b72e DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b738 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b742 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b74c DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b756 DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b78a DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 getJobState 3 from 5b7af DPU[1:CZZAAR1037] 27/05 10:38:36,584 DPU ends DM[1] 27/05 10:38:38,006 **AND** 0 Agents triggered JCE[1] 27/05 10:38:38,053 JCE starts DM[1] 27/05 10:38:38,287 CZZAAS1003 DPU[2:CZZAAS1003] 27/05 10:38:38,412 DPU in init phase DPU[2:CZZAAS1003] 27/05 10:38:38,647 >> GetManagerData DPU[2:CZZAAS1003] 27/05 10:38:38,756 >> SetCompInfo DPU[2:CZZAAS1003] 27/05 10:38:38,787 >> GetContainerList DM[1] 27/05 10:38:38,850 **AND** 1 Agents triggered DM[1] 27/05 10:38:38,928 CZZAAR1124 DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,053 DPU in init phase DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,272 >> GetManagerData DM[1] 27/05 10:38:39,334 **AND** 1 Agents triggered DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,381 >> SetCompInfo DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,412 >> GetContainerList DM[1] 27/05 10:38:39,412 CZZAAR1125 DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,428 getJobState 3 from 5b88e DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,428 getJobState 3 from 5b88e DPU[2:CZZAAS1003] 27/05 10:38:39,491 >> SetCompAttr DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,522 >> SetCompAttr DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:39,522 DPU in init phase DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,584 >> SetDetected DPU[2:CZZAAS1003] 27/05 10:38:39,584 >> SetDetected DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,584 disconnect DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,600 getJobState 3 from 5b88e DPU[3:CZZAAR1124] 27/05 10:38:39,600 DPU ends DPU[2:CZZAAS1003] 27/05 10:38:39,631 disconnect DPU[2:CZZAAS1003] 27/05 10:38:39,631 DPU ends DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:39,756 >> GetManagerData DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:39,850 >> SetCompInfo DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:39,881 >> GetContainerList DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:39,897 getJobState 3 from 5b8a9 DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:39,897 getJobState 3 from 5b8a9 DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:39,991 >> SetCompAttr DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:40,100 >> SetDetected DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:40,116 disconnect DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:40,116 getJobState 3 from 5b8a9 DPU[4:CZZAAR1125] 27/05 10:38:40,116 DPU ends DM[1] 27/05 10:38:40,741 **AND** 0 Agents triggered JCE[1] 27/05 10:38:42,756 JCE ends DM[1] 27/05 10:38:47,475 **AND** 0 Agents triggered DM[1] 27/05 10:38:54,241 **AND** 0 Agents triggered

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