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Microsoft Business Intelligence Seminar 2011

- by DavidWimbush

I was lucky enough to attend the maiden presentation of this at Microsoft Reading yesterday. It was pretty gripping stuff not only because of what was said but also because of what could only be hinted at. Here's what I took away from the day. (Disclaimer: I'm not a BI guru, just a reasonably experienced BI developer, so I may have misunderstood or misinterpreted a few things. Particularly when so much of the talk was about the vision and subtle hints of what is coming. Please comment if you think I've got anything wrong. I'm also not going to even try to cover Master Data Services as I struggled to imagine how you would actually use it.) I was a bit worried when I learned that the whole day was going to be presented by one guy but Rafal Lukawiecki is a very engaging speaker. He's going to be presenting this about 20 times around the world over the coming months. If you get a chance to hear him speak, I say go for it. No doubt some of the hints will become clearer as Denali gets closer to RTM. Firstly, things are definitely happening in the SQL Server Reporting and BI world. Traditionally IT would build a data warehouse, then cubes on top of that, and then publish them in a structured and controlled way. But, just as with many IT projects in general, by the time it's finished the business has moved on and the system no longer meets their requirements. This not sustainable and something more agile is needed but there has to be some control. Apparently we're going to be hearing the catchphrase 'Balancing agility with control' a lot. More users want more access to more data. Can they define what they want? Of course not, but they'll recognise it when they see it. It's estimated that only 28% of potential BI users have meaningful access to the data they need, so there is a real pent-up demand. The answer looks like: give them some self-service tools so they can experiment and see what works, and then IT can help to support the results. It's estimated that 32% of Excel users are comfortable with its analysis tools such as pivot tables. It's the power user's preferred tool. Why fight it? That's why PowerPivot is an Excel add-in and that's why they released a Data Mining add-in for it as well. It does appear that the strategy is going to be to use Reporting Services (in SharePoint mode), PowerPivot, and possibly something new (smiles and hints but no details) to create reports and explore data. Everything will be published and managed in SharePoint which gives users the ability to mash-up, share and socialise what they've found out. SharePoint also gives IT tools to understand what people are looking at and where to concentrate effort. If PowerPivot report X becomes widely used, it's time to check that it shows what they think it does and perhaps get it a bit more under central control. There was more SharePoint detail that went slightly over my head regarding where Excel Services and Excel Web Application fit in, the differences between them, and the suggestion that it is likely they will one day become one (but not in the immediate future). That basic pattern is set to be expanded upon by further exploiting Vertipaq (the columnar indexing engine that enables PowerPivot to store and process a lot of data fast and in a small memory footprint) to provide scalability 'from the desktop to the data centre', and some yet to be detailed advances in 'frictionless deployment' (part of which is about making the difference between local and the cloud pretty much irrelevant). Excel looks like becoming Microsoft's primary BI client. It already has: the ability to consume cubes strong visualisation tools slicers (which are part of Excel not PowerPivot) a data mining add-in PowerPivot A major hurdle for self-service BI is presenting the data in a consumable format. You can't just give users PowerPivot and a server with a copy of the OLTP database(s). Building cubes is labour intensive and doesn't always give the user what they need. This is where the BI Semantic Model (BISM) comes in. I gather it's a layer of metadata you define that can combine multiple data sources (and types of data source) into a clear 'interface' that users can work with. It comes with a new query language called DAX. SSAS cubes are unlikely to go away overnight because, with their pre-calculated results, they are still the most efficient way to work with really big data sets. A few other random titbits that came up: Reporting Services is going to get some good new stuff in Denali. Keep an eye on www.projectbotticelli.com for the slides. You can also view last year's seminar sessions which covered a lot of the same ground as far as the overall strategy is concerned. They plan to add more material as Denali's features are publicly exposed. Check out the PASS keynote address for a showing of Yahoo's SQL BI servers. Apparently they wheeled the rack out on stage still plugged in and running! Check out the Excel 2010 Data Mining Add-Ins. 32 bit only at present but 64 bit is on the way. There are lots of data sets, many of them free, at the Windows Azure Marketplace Data Market (where you can also get ESRI shape files). If you haven't already seen it, have a look at the Silverlight Pivot Viewer (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/06/29/silverlight-pivotviewer-now-available.aspx). The Bing Maps Data Connector is worth a look if you're into spatial stuff (http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/maps/archive/2010/07/13/data-connector-sql-server-2008-spatial-amp-bing-maps.aspx).

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Fraud Detection with the SQL Server Suite Part 2

- by Dejan Sarka

This is the second part of the fraud detection whitepaper. You can find the first part in my previous blog post about this topic. My Approach to Data Mining Projects It is impossible to evaluate the time and money needed for a complete fraud detection infrastructure in advance. Personally, I do not know the customer’s data in advance. I don’t know whether there is already an existing infrastructure, like a data warehouse, in place, or whether we would need to build one from scratch. Therefore, I always suggest to start with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. A POC takes something between 5 and 10 working days, and involves personnel from the customer’s site – either employees or outsourced consultants. The team should include a subject matter expert (SME) and at least one information technology (IT) expert. The SME must be familiar with both the domain in question as well as the meaning of data at hand, while the IT expert should be familiar with the structure of data, how to access it, and have some programming (preferably Transact-SQL) knowledge. With more than one IT expert the most time consuming work, namely data preparation and overview, can be completed sooner. I assume that the relevant data is already extracted and available at the very beginning of the POC project. If a customer wants to have their people involved in the project directly and requests the transfer of knowledge, the project begins with training. I strongly advise this approach as it offers the establishment of a common background for all people involved, the understanding of how the algorithms work and the understanding of how the results should be interpreted, a way of becoming familiar with the SQL Server suite, and more. Once the data has been extracted, the customer’s SME (i.e. the analyst), and the IT expert assigned to the project will learn how to prepare the data in an efficient manner. Together with me, knowledge and expertise allow us to focus immediately on the most interesting attributes and identify any additional, calculated, ones soon after. By employing our programming knowledge, we can, for example, prepare tens of derived variables, detect outliers, identify the relationships between pairs of input variables, and more, in only two or three days, depending on the quantity and the quality of input data. I favor the customer’s decision of assigning additional personnel to the project. For example, I actually prefer to work with two teams simultaneously. I demonstrate and explain the subject matter by applying techniques directly on the data managed by each team, and then both teams continue to work on the data overview and data preparation under our supervision. I explain to the teams what kind of results we expect, the reasons why they are needed, and how to achieve them. Afterwards we review and explain the results, and continue with new instructions, until we resolve all known problems. Simultaneously with the data preparation the data overview is performed. The logic behind this task is the same – again I show to the teams involved the expected results, how to achieve them and what they mean. This is also done in multiple cycles as is the case with data preparation, because, quite frankly, both tasks are completely interleaved. A specific objective of the data overview is of principal importance – it is represented by a simple star schema and a simple OLAP cube that will first of all simplify data discovery and interpretation of the results, and will also prove useful in the following tasks. The presence of the customer’s SME is the key to resolving possible issues with the actual meaning of the data. We can always replace the IT part of the team with another database developer; however, we cannot conduct this kind of a project without the customer’s SME. After the data preparation and when the data overview is available, we begin the scientific part of the project. I assist the team in developing a variety of models, and in interpreting the results. The results are presented graphically, in an intuitive way. While it is possible to interpret the results on the fly, a much more appropriate alternative is possible if the initial training was also performed, because it allows the customer’s personnel to interpret the results by themselves, with only some guidance from me. The models are evaluated immediately by using several different techniques. One of the techniques includes evaluation over time, where we use an OLAP cube. After evaluating the models, we select the most appropriate model to be deployed for a production test; this allows the team to understand the deployment process. There are many possibilities of deploying data mining models into production; at the POC stage, we select the one that can be completed quickly. Typically, this means that we add the mining model as an additional dimension to an existing DW or OLAP cube, or to the OLAP cube developed during the data overview phase. Finally, we spend some time presenting the results of the POC project to the stakeholders and managers. Even from a POC, the customer will receive lots of benefits, all at the sole risk of spending money and time for a single 5 to 10 day project: The customer learns the basic patterns of frauds and fraud detection The customer learns how to do the entire cycle with their own people, only relying on me for the most complex problems The customer’s analysts learn how to perform much more in-depth analyses than they ever thought possible The customer’s IT experts learn how to perform data extraction and preparation much more efficiently than they did before All of the attendees of this training learn how to use their own creativity to implement further improvements of the process and procedures, even after the solution has been deployed to production The POC output for a smaller company or for a subsidiary of a larger company can actually be considered a finished, production-ready solution It is possible to utilize the results of the POC project at subsidiary level, as a finished POC project for the entire enterprise Typically, the project results in several important “side effects” Improved data quality Improved employee job satisfaction, as they are able to proactively contribute to the central knowledge about fraud patterns in the organization Because eventually more minds get to be involved in the enterprise, the company should expect more and better fraud detection patterns After the POC project is completed as described above, the actual project would not need months of engagement from my side. This is possible due to our preference to transfer the knowledge onto the customer’s employees: typically, the customer will use the results of the POC project for some time, and only engage me again to complete the project, or to ask for additional expertise if the complexity of the problem increases significantly. I usually expect to perform the following tasks: Establish the final infrastructure to measure the efficiency of the deployed models Deploy the models in additional scenarios Through reports By including Data Mining Extensions (DMX) queries in OLTP applications to support real-time early warnings Include data mining models as dimensions in OLAP cubes, if this was not done already during the POC project Create smart ETL applications that divert suspicious data for immediate or later inspection I would also offer to investigate how the outcome could be transferred automatically to the central system; for instance, if the POC project was performed in a subsidiary whereas a central system is available as well Of course, for the actual project, I would repeat the data and model preparation as needed It is virtually impossible to tell in advance how much time the deployment would take, before we decide together with customer what exactly the deployment process should cover. Without considering the deployment part, and with the POC project conducted as suggested above (including the transfer of knowledge), the actual project should still only take additional 5 to 10 days. The approximate timeline for the POC project is, as follows: 1-2 days of training 2-3 days for data preparation and data overview 2 days for creating and evaluating the models 1 day for initial preparation of the continuous learning infrastructure 1 day for presentation of the results and discussion of further actions Quite frequently I receive the following question: are we going to find the best possible model during the POC project, or during the actual project? My answer is always quite simple: I do not know. Maybe, if we would spend just one hour more for data preparation, or create just one more model, we could get better patterns and predictions. However, we simply must stop somewhere, and the best possible way to do this, according to my experience, is to restrict the time spent on the project in advance, after an agreement with the customer. You must also never forget that, because we build the complete learning infrastructure and transfer the knowledge, the customer will be capable of doing further investigations independently and improve the models and predictions over time without the need for a constant engagement with me.

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People, Process & Engagement: WebCenter Partner Keste

- by Michael Snow

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Within the WebCenter group here at Oracle, discussions about people, process and engagement cross over many vertical industries and products. Amidst our growing partner ecosystem, the community provides us insight into great customer use cases every day. Such is the case with our partner, Keste, who provides us a guest post on our blog today with an overview of their innovative solution for a customer in the transportation industry. Keste is an Oracle software solutions and development company headquartered in Dallas, Texas. As a Platinum member of the Oracle® PartnerNetwork, Keste designs, develops and deploys custom solutions that automate complex business processes. Seamless Customer Self-Service Experience in the Trucking Industry with Oracle WebCenter Portal Keste, Oracle Platinum Partner Customer Overview Omnitracs, Inc., a Qualcomm company provides mobility solutions for trucking fleets to companies in the transportation industry. Omnitracs’ mobility services include basic communications such as text as well as advanced monitoring services such as GPS tracking, temperature tracking of perishable goods, load tracking and weighting distribution, and many others. Customer Business Needs Already the leading provider of mobility solutions for large trucking fleets, they chose to target smaller trucking fleets as new customers. However their existing high-touch customer support method would not be a cost effective or scalable method to manage and service these smaller customers. Omnitracs needed to provide several self-service features to make customer support more scalable while keeping customer satisfaction levels high and the costs manageable. The solution also had to be very intuitive and easy to use. The systems that Omnitracs sells to these trucking customers require professional installation and smaller customers need to track and schedule the installation. Information captured in Oracle eBusiness Suite needed to be readily available for new customers to track these purchases and delivery details. Omnitracs wanted a high impact User Interface to significantly improve customer experience with the ability to integrate with EBS, provisioning systems as well as CRM systems that were already implemented. Omnitracs also wanted to build an architecture platform that could potentially be extended to other Portals. Omnitracs’ stated goal was to deliver an “eBay-like” or “Amazon-like” experience for all of their customers so that they could reach a much broader market beyond their large company customer base. Solution Overview In order to manage the increased complexity, the growing support needs of global customers and improve overall product time-to-market in a cost-effective manner, IT began to deliver a self-service model. This self service model not only transformed numerous business processes but is also allowing the business to keep up with the growing demands of the (internal and external) customers. This solution was a customer service Portal that provided self service capabilities for large and small customers alike for Activation of mobility products, managing add-on applications for the devices (much like the Apple App Store), transferring services when trucks are sold to other companies as well as deactivation all without the involvement of a call service agent or sending multiple emails to different Omnitracs contacts. This is a conceptual view of the Customer Portal showing the details of the components that make up the solution. 12.00 The portal application for transactions was entirely built using ADF 11g R2. Omnitracs’ business had a pressing requirement to have a portal available 24/7 for its customers. Since there were interactions with EBS in the back-end, the downtimes on the EBS would negate this availability. Omnitracs devised a decoupling strategy at the database side for the EBS data. The decoupling of the database was done using Oracle Data Guard and completely insulated the solution from any eBusiness Suite down time. The customer has no knowledge whether eBS is running or not. Here are two sample screenshots of the portal application built in Oracle ADF. Customer Benefits The Customer Portal not only provided the scalability to grow the business but also provided the seamless integration with other disparate applications. Some of the key benefits are: Improved Customer Experience: With a modern look and feel and a Portal that has the aspects of an App Store, the customer experience was significantly improved. Page response times went from several seconds to sub-second for all of the pages. Enabled new product launches: After successfully dominating the large fleet market, Omnitracs now has a scalable solution to sell and manage smaller fleet customers giving them a huge advantage over their nearest competitors. Dozens of new customers have been acquired via this portal through an onboarding process that now takes minutes Seamless Integrations Improves Customer Support: ADF 11gR2 allowed Omnitracs to bring a diverse list of applications into one integrated solution. This provided a seamless experience for customers to route them from Marketing focused application to a customer-oriented portal. Internally, it also allowed Sales Representatives to have an integrated flow for taking a prospect through the various steps to onboard them as a customer. Key integrations included: Unity Core Salesforce.com Merchant e-Solution for credit card Custom Omnitracs Applications like CUPS and AUTO Security utilizing OID and OVD Back end integration with EBS (Data Guard) and iQ Database Business Impact Significant business impacts were realized through the launch of customer portal. It not only allows the business to push through in underserved segments, but also reduces the time it needs to spend on customer support—allowing the business to focus more on sales and identifying the market for new products. Some of the Immediate Benefits are The entire onboarding process is now completely automated and now completes in minutes. This represents an 85% productivity improvement over their previous processes. And it was 160 times faster! With the success of this self-service solution, the business is now targeting about 3X customer growth in the next five years. This represents a tripling of their overall customer base and significant downstream revenue for the ongoing services. 90%+ improvement of customer onboarding and management process by utilizing, single sign on integration using OID/OAM solution, performance improvements and new self-service functionality Unified login for all Customers, Partners and Internal Users enables login to a common portal and seamless access to all other integrated applications targeted at the respective audience Significantly improved customer experience with a better look and feel with a more user experience focused Portal screens. Helped sales of the new product by having an easy way of ordering and activating the product. Data Guard helped increase availability of the Portal to 99%+ and make it independent of EBS downtime. This gave customers the feel of high availability of the portal application. Some of the anticipated longer term Benefits are: Platform that can be leveraged to launch any new product introduction and enable all product teams to reach new customers and new markets Easy integration with content management to allow business owners more control of the product catalog Overall reduced TCO with standardization of the Oracle platform Managed IT support cost savings through optimization of technology skills needed to support and modify this solution ------------------------------------------------------------ 12.00 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-family:"Times New Roman","serif";}

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PASS: Election Changes for 2011

- by Bill Graziano

Last year after the election, the PASS Board created an Election Review Committee. This group was charged with reviewing our election procedures and making suggestions to improve the process. You can read about the formation of the group and review some of the intermediate work on the site – especially in the forums. I was one of the members of the group along with Joe Webb (Chair), Lori Edwards, Brian Kelley, Wendy Pastrick, Andy Warren and Allen White. This group worked from October to April on our election process. Along the way we: Interviewed interested parties including former NomCom members, Board candidates and anyone else that came forward. Held a session at the Summit to allow interested parties to discuss the issues Had numerous conference calls and worked through the various topics I can’t thank these people enough for the work they did. They invested a tremendous number of hours thinking, talking and writing about our elections. I’m proud to say I was a member of this group and thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone (even if I did finally get tired of all the calls.) The ERC delivered their recommendations to the PASS Board prior to our May Board meeting. We reviewed those and made a few modifications. I took their recommendations and rewrote them as procedures while incorporating those changes. Their original recommendations as well as our final document are posted at the ERC documents page. Please take a second and read them BEFORE we start the elections. If you have any questions please post them in the forums on the ERC site. (My final document includes a change log at the end that I decided to leave in. If you want to know which areas to pay special attention to that’s a good start.) Many of those recommendations were already posted in the forums or in the blogs of individual ERC members. Hopefully nothing in the ERC document is too surprising. In this post I’m going to walk through some of the key changes and talk about what I remember from both ERC and Board discussions. I’ll pay a little extra attention to things the Board changed from the ERC. I’d also encourage any of the Board or ERC members to blog their thoughts on this. The Nominating Committee will continue to exist. Personally, I was curious to see what the non-Board ERC members would think about the NomCom. There was broad agreement that a group to vet candidates had value to the organization. The NomCom will be composed of five members. Two will be Board members and three will be from the membership at large. The only requirement for the three community members is that you’ve volunteered in some way (and volunteering is defined very broadly). We expect potential at-large NomCom members to participate in a forum on the PASS site to answer questions from the other PASS members. We’re going to hold an election to determine the three community members. It will be closer to voting for Summit sessions than voting for Board members. That means there won’t be multiple dedicated emails. If you’re at all paying attention it will be easy to participate. Personally I wanted it easy for those that cared to participate but not overwhelm those that didn’t care. I think this strikes a good balance. There’s also a clause that in order to be considered a winner in this NomCom election, you must receive 10 votes. This is something I suggested. I have no idea how popular the NomCom election is going to be. I just wanted a fallback that if no one participated and some random person got in with one or two votes. Any open slots will be filled by the NomCom chair (usually the PASS Immediate Past President). My assumption is that they would probably take the next highest vote getters unless they were throwing flames in the forums or clearly unqualified. As a final check, the Board still approves the final NomCom. The NomCom is going to rank candidates instead of rating them. This has interesting implications. This was championed by another ERC member and I’m hoping they write something about it. This will really force the NomCom to make decisions between candidates. You can’t just rate everyone a 3 and be done with it. It may also make candidates appear further apart than they actually are. I’m looking forward talking with the NomCom after this election and getting their feedback on this. The PASS Board added an option to remove a candidate with a unanimous vote of the NomCom. This was primarily put in place to handle people that lied on their application or had a criminal background or some other unusual situation and we figured it out. We list an explicit goal of three candidate per open slot. We also wanted an easy way to find the NomCom candidate rankings from the ballot. Hopefully this will satisfy those that want a broad candidate pool and those that want the NomCom to identify the most qualified candidates. The primary spokesperson for the NomCom is the committee chair. After the issues around the election last year we didn’t have a good communication plan in place. We should have and that was a failure on the part of the Board. If there is criticism of the election this year I hope that falls squarely on the Board. The community members of the NomCom shouldn’t be fielding complaints over the election process. That said, the NomCom is ranking candidates and we are forcing them to rank some lower than others. I’m sure you’ll each find someone that you think should have been ranked differently. I also want to highlight one other change to the process that we started last year and isn’t included in these documents. I think the candidate forums on the PASS site were tremendously helpful last year in helping people to find out more about candidates. That gives our members a way to ask hard questions of the candidates and publicly see their answers. This year we have two important groups to fill. The first is the NomCom. We need three people from our membership to step up and fill this role. It won’t be easy. You will have to make subjective rankings of your fellow community members. Your actions will be important in deciding who the future leaders of PASS will be. There’s a 50/50 chance that one of the people you interview will be the President of PASS someday. This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. The second is the slate of candidates. If you’ve ever thought about running for the Board this is the year. We’ve never had nine candidates on the ballot before. Your chance of making it through the NomCom are higher than in any previous year. Unfortunately the more of you that run, the more of you that will lose in the election. And hopefully that competition will mean more community involvement and better Board members for PASS. Is this the end of changes to the election process? It isn’t. Every year that I’ve been on the Board the election process has changed. Some years there have been small changes and some years there have been large changes. After this election we’ll look at how the process worked and decide what steps to take – just like we do every year.

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The Faces in the Crowdsourcing

- by Applications User Experience

By Jeff Sauro, Principal Usability Engineer, Oracle Imagine having access to a global workforce of hundreds of thousands of people who can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately. Distributing simple tasks not easily done by computers to the masses is called "crowdsourcing" and until recently was an interesting concept, but due to practical constraints wasn't used often. Enter Amazon.com. For five years, Amazon has hosted a service called Mechanical Turk, which provides an easy interface to the crowds. The service has almost half a million registered, global users performing a quarter of a million human intelligence tasks (HITs). HITs are submitted by individuals and companies in the U.S. and pay from $.01 for simple tasks (such as determining if a picture is offensive) to several dollars (for tasks like transcribing audio). What do we know about the people who toil away in this digital crowd? Can we rely on the work done in this anonymous marketplace? A rendering of the actual Mechanical Turk (from Wikipedia) Knowing who is behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is fitting, considering the history of the actual Mechanical Turk. In the late 1800's, a mechanical chess-playing machine awed crowds as it beat master chess players in what was thought to be a mechanical miracle. It turned out that the creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, had a small person (also a chess master) hiding inside the machine operating the arms to provide the illusion of automation. The field of human computer interaction (HCI) is quite familiar with gathering user input and incorporating it into all stages of the design process. It makes sense then that Mechanical Turk was a popular discussion topic at the recent Computer Human Interaction usability conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery in Atlanta. It is already being used as a source for input on Web sites (for example, Feedbackarmy.com) and behavioral research studies. Two papers shed some light on the faces in this crowd. One paper tells us about the shifting demographics from mostly stay-at-home moms to young men in India. The second paper discusses the reliability and quality of work from the workers. Just who exactly would spend time doing tasks for pennies? In "Who are the crowdworkers?" University of California researchers Ross, Silberman, Zaldivar and Tomlinson conducted a survey of Mechanical Turk worker demographics and compared it to a similar survey done two years before. The initial survey reported workers consisting largely of young, well-educated women living in the U.S. with annual household incomes above $40,000. The more recent survey reveals a shift in demographics largely driven by an influx of workers from India. Indian workers went from 5% to over 30% of the crowd, and this block is largely male (two-thirds) with a higher average education than U.S. workers, and 64% report an annual income of less than $10,000 (keeping in mind $1 has a lot more purchasing power in India). This shifting demographic certainly has implications as language and culture can play critical roles in the outcome of HITs. Of course, the demographic data came from paying Turkers $.10 to fill out a survey, so there is some question about both a self-selection bias (characteristics which cause Turks to take this survey may be unrepresentative of the larger population), not to mention whether we can really trust the data we get from the crowd. Crowds can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately for usability testing. (Photo attributed to victoriapeckham Flikr While having immediate access to a global workforce is nice, one major problem with Mechanical Turk is the incentive structure. Individuals and companies that deploy HITs want quality responses for a low price. Workers, on the other hand, want to complete the task and get paid as quickly as possible, so that they can get on to the next task. Since many HITs on Mechanical Turk are surveys, how valid and reliable are these results? How do we know whether workers are just rushing through the multiple-choice responses haphazardly answering? In "Are your participants gaming the system?" researchers at Carnegie Mellon (Downs, Holbrook, Sheng and Cranor) set up an experiment to find out what percentage of their workers were just in it for the money. The authors set up a 30-minute HIT (one of the more lengthy ones for Mechanical Turk) and offered a very high $4 to those who qualified and $.20 to those who did not. As part of the HIT, workers were asked to read an email and respond to two questions that determined whether workers were likely rushing through the HIT and not answering conscientiously. One question was simple and took little effort, while the second question required a bit more work to find the answer. Workers were led to believe other factors than these two questions were the qualifying aspect of the HIT. Of the 2000 participants, roughly 1200 (or 61%) answered both questions correctly. Eighty-eight percent answered the easy question correctly, and 64% answered the difficult question correctly. In other words, about 12% of the crowd were gaming the system, not paying enough attention to the question or making careless errors. Up to about 40% won't put in more than a modest effort to get paid for a HIT. Young men and those that considered themselves in the financial industry tended to be the most likely to try to game the system. There wasn't a breakdown by country, but given the demographic information from the first article, we could infer that many of these young men come from India, which makes language and other cultural differences a factor. These articles raise questions about the role of crowdsourcing as a means for getting quick user input at low cost. While compensating users for their time is nothing new, the incentive structure and anonymity of Mechanical Turk raises some interesting questions. How complex of a task can we ask of the crowd, and how much should these workers be paid? Can we rely on the information we get from these professional users, and if so, how can we best incorporate it into designing more usable products? Traditional usability testing will still play a central role in enterprise software. Crowdsourcing doesn't replace testing; instead, it makes certain parts of gathering user feedback easier. One can turn to the crowd for simple tasks that don't require specialized skills and get a lot of data fast. As more studies are conducted on Mechanical Turk, I suspect we will see crowdsourcing playing an increasing role in human computer interaction and enterprise computing. References: Downs, J. S., Holbrook, M. B., Sheng, S., and Cranor, L. F. 2010. Are your participants gaming the system?: screening mechanical turk workers. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2399-2402. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753688 Ross, J., Irani, L., Silberman, M. S., Zaldivar, A., and Tomlinson, B. 2010. Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2863-2872. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753873

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How to ensure custom serverListener events fires before action events

- by frank.nimphius

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Using JavaScript in ADF Faces you can queue custom events defined by an af:serverListener tag. If the custom event however is queued from an af:clientListener on a command component, then the command component's action and action listener methods fire before the queued custom event. If you have a use case, for example in combination with client side integration of 3rd party technologies like HTML, Applets or similar, then you want to change the order of execution. The way to change the execution order is to invoke the command item action from the client event method that handles the custom event propagated by the af:serverListener tag. The following four steps ensure your successful doing this 1. Call cancel() on the event object passed to the client JavaScript function invoked by the af:clientListener tag 2. Call the custom event as an immediate action by setting the last argument in the custom event call to true function invokeCustomEvent(evt){ evt.cancel(); var custEvent = new AdfCustomEvent( evt.getSource(), "mycustomevent", {message:"Hello World"}, true); custEvent.queue(); } 3. When handling the custom event on the server, lookup the command item, for example a button, to queue its action event. This way you simulate a user clicking the button. Use the following code ActionEvent event = new ActionEvent(component); event.setPhaseId(PhaseId.INVOKE_APPLICATION); event.queue(); The component reference needs to be changed with the handle to the command item which action method you want to execute. 4. If the command component has behavior tags, like af:fileDownloadActionListener, or af:setPropertyListener, defined, then these are also executed when the action event is queued. However, behavior tags, like the file download action listener, may require a full page refresh to be issued to work, in which case the custom event cannot be issued as a partial refresh. File download action tag: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17904_01/apirefs.1111/e12419/tagdoc/af_fileDownloadActionListener.html " Since file downloads must be processed with an ordinary request - not XMLHttp AJAX requests - this tag forces partialSubmit to be false on the parent component, if it supports that attribute." To issue a custom event as a non-partial submit, the previously shown sample code would need to be changed as shown below function invokeCustomEvent(evt){ evt.cancel(); var custEvent = new AdfCustomEvent( evt.getSource(), "mycustomevent", {message:"Hello World"}, true); custEvent.queue(false); } To learn more about custom events and the af:serverListener, please refer to the tag documentation: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17904_01/apirefs.1111/e12419/tagdoc/af_serverListener.html

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RIF PRD: Presentation syntax issues

- by Charles Young

Over Christmas I got to play a bit with the W3C RIF PRD and came across a few issues which I thought I would record for posterity. Specifically, I was working on a grammar for the presentation syntax using a GLR grammar parser tool (I was using the current CTP of ‘M’ (MGrammer) and Intellipad – I do so hope the MS guys don’t kill off M and Intellipad now they have dropped the other parts of SQL Server Modelling). I realise that the presentation syntax is non-normative and that any issues with it do not therefore compromise the standard. However, presentation syntax is useful in its own right, and it would be great to iron out any issues in a future revision of the standard. The main issues are actually not to do with the grammar at all, but rather with the ‘running example’ in the RIF PRD recommendation. I started with the code provided in Example 9.1. There are several discrepancies when compared with the EBNF rules documented in the standard. Broadly the problems can be categorised as follows: · Parenthesis mismatch – the wrong number of parentheses are used in various places. For example, in GoldRule, the RHS of the rule (the ‘Then’) is nested in the LHS (‘the If’). In NewCustomerAndWidgetRule, the RHS is orphaned from the LHS. Together with additional incorrect parenthesis, this leads to orphanage of UnknownStatusRule from the entire Document. · Invalid use of parenthesis in ‘Forall’ constructs. Parenthesis should not be used to enclose formulae. Removal of the invalid parenthesis gave me a feeling of inconsistency when comparing formulae in Forall to formulae in If. The use of parenthesis is not actually inconsistent in these two context, but in an If construct it ‘feels’ as if you are enclosing formulae in parenthesis in a LISP-like fashion. In reality, the parenthesis is simply being used to group subordinate syntax elements. The fact that an If construct can contain only a single formula as an immediate child adds to this feeling of inconsistency. · Invalid representation of compact URIs (CURIEs) in the context of Frame productions. In several places the URIs are not qualified with a namespace prefix (‘ex1:’). This conflicts with the definition of CURIEs in the RIF Datatypes and Built-Ins 1.0 document. Here are the productions: CURIE ::= PNAME_LN | PNAME_NS PNAME_LN ::= PNAME_NS PN_LOCAL PNAME_NS ::= PN_PREFIX? ':' PN_LOCAL ::= ( PN_CHARS_U | [0-9] ) ((PN_CHARS|'.')* PN_CHARS)? PN_CHARS ::= PN_CHARS_U | '-' | [0-9] | #x00B7 | [#x0300-#x036F] | [#x203F-#x2040] PN_CHARS_U ::= PN_CHARS_BASE | '_' PN_CHARS_BASE ::= [A-Z] | [a-z] | [#x00C0-#x00D6] | [#x00D8-#x00F6] | [#x00F8-#x02FF] | [#x0370-#x037D] | [#x037F-#x1FFF] | [#x200C-#x200D] | [#x2070-#x218F] | [#x2C00-#x2FEF] | [#x3001-#xD7FF] | [#xF900-#xFDCF] | [#xFDF0-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#xEFFFF] PN_PREFIX ::= PN_CHARS_BASE ((PN_CHARS|'.')* PN_CHARS)? The more I look at CURIEs, the more my head hurts! The RIF specification allows prefixes and colons without local names, which surprised me. However, the CURIE Syntax 1.0 working group note specifically states that this form is supported…and then promptly provides a syntactic definition that seems to preclude it! However, on (much) deeper inspection, it appears that ‘ex1:’ (for example) is allowed, but would really represent a ‘fragment’ of the ‘reference’, rather than a prefix! Ouch! This is so completely ambiguous that it surely calls into question the whole CURIE specification. In any case, RIF does not allow local names without a prefix. · Missing ‘External’ specifiers for built-in functions and predicates. The EBNF specification enforces this for terms within frames, but does not appear to enforce (what I believe is) the correct use of External on built-in predicates. In any case, the running example only specifies ‘External’ once on the predicate in UnknownStatusRule. External() is required in several other places. · The List used on the LHS of UnknownStatusRule is comma-delimited. This is not supported by the EBNF definition. Similarly, the argument list of pred:list-contains is illegally comma-delimited. · Unnecessary use of conjunction around a single formula in DiscountRule. This is strictly legal in the EBNF, but redundant. All the above issues concern the presentation syntax used in the running example. There are a few minor issues with the grammar itself. Note that Michael Kiefer stated in his paper “Rule Interchange Format: The Framework” that: “The presentation syntax of RIF … is an abstract syntax and, as such, it omits certain details that might be important for unambiguous parsing.” · The grammar cannot differentiate unambiguously between strategies and priorities on groups. A processor is forced to resolve this by detecting the use of IRIs and integers. This could easily be fixed in the grammar. · The grammar cannot unambiguously parse the ‘->’ operator in frames. Specifically, ‘-’ characters are allowed in PN_LOCAL names and hence a parser cannot determine if ‘status->’ is (‘status’ ‘->’) or (‘status-’ ‘>’). One way to fix this is to amend the PN_LOCAL production as follows: PN_LOCAL ::= ( PN_CHARS_U | [0-9] ) ((PN_CHARS|'.')* ((PN_CHARS)-('-')))? However, unilaterally changing the definition of this production, which is defined in the SPARQL Query Language for RDF specification, makes me uncomfortable. · I assume that the presentation syntax is case-sensitive. I couldn’t find this stated anywhere in the documentation, but function/predicate names do appear to be documented as being case-sensitive. · The EBNF does not specify whitespace handling. A couple of productions (RULE and ACTION_BLOCK) are crafted to enforce the use of whitespace. This is not necessary. It seems inconsistent with the rest of the specification and can cause parsing issues. In addition, the Const production exhibits whitespaces issues. The intention may have been to disallow the use of whitespace around ‘^^’, but any direct implementation of the EBNF will probably allow whitespace between ‘^^’ and the SYMSPACE. Of course, I am being a little nit-picking about all this. On the whole, the EBNF translated very smoothly and directly to ‘M’ (MGrammar) and proved to be fairly complete. I have encountered far worse issues when translating other EBNF specifications into usable grammars. I can’t imagine there would be any difficulty in implementing the same grammar in Antlr, COCO/R, gppg, XText, Bison, etc. A general observation, which repeats a point made above, is that the use of parenthesis in the presentation syntax can feel inconsistent and un-intuitive. It isn’t actually inconsistent, but I think the presentation syntax could be improved by adopting braces, rather than parenthesis, to delimit subordinate syntax elements in a similar way to so many programming languages. The familiarity of braces would communicate the structure of the syntax more clearly to people like me. If braces were adopted, parentheses could be retained around ‘var (frame | ‘new()’) constructs in action blocks. This use of parenthesis feels very LISP-like, and I think that this is my issue. It’s as if the presentation syntax represents the deformed love-child of LISP and C. In some places (specifically, action blocks), parenthesis is used in a LISP-like fashion. In other places it is used like braces in C. I find this quite confusing. Here is a corrected version of the running example (Example 9.1) in compliant presentation syntax: Document( Prefix( ex1 <http://example.com/2009/prd2> ) (* ex1:CheckoutRuleset *) Group rif:forwardChaining ( (* ex1:GoldRule *) Group 10 ( Forall ?customer such that And(?customer # ex1:Customer ?customer[ex1:status->"Silver"]) (Forall ?shoppingCart such that ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?shoppingCart] (If Exists ?value (And(?shoppingCart[ex1:value->?value] External(pred:numeric-greater-than-or-equal(?value 2000)))) Then Do(Modify(?customer[ex1:status->"Gold"]))))) (* ex1:DiscountRule *) Group ( Forall ?customer such that ?customer # ex1:Customer (If Or( ?customer[ex1:status->"Silver"] ?customer[ex1:status->"Gold"]) Then Do ((?s ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart-> ?s]) (?v ?s[ex1:value->?v]) Modify(?s [ex1:value->External(func:numeric-multiply (?v 0.95))])))) (* ex1:NewCustomerAndWidgetRule *) Group ( Forall ?customer such that And(?customer # ex1:Customer ?customer[ex1:status->"New"] ) (If Exists ?shoppingCart ?item (And(?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?shoppingCart] ?shoppingCart[ex1:containsItem->?item] ?item # ex1:Widget ) ) Then Do( (?s ?customer[ex1:shoppingCart->?s]) (?val ?s[ex1:value->?val]) (?voucher ?customer[ex1:voucher->?voucher]) Retract(?customer[ex1:voucher->?voucher]) Retract(?voucher) Modify(?s[ex1:value->External(func:numeric-multiply(?val 0.90))])))) (* ex1:UnknownStatusRule *) Group ( Forall ?customer such that ?customer # ex1:Customer (If Not(Exists ?status (And(?customer[ex1:status->?status] External(pred:list-contains(List("New" "Bronze" "Silver" "Gold") ?status)) ))) Then Do( Execute(act:print(External(func:concat("New customer: " ?customer)))) Assert(?customer[ex1:status->"New"])))) ) ) I hope that helps someone out there :-)

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Pathfinding results in false path costs that are too high

- by user2144536

I'm trying to implement pathfinding in a game I'm programming using this method. I'm implementing it with recursion but some of the values after the immediate circle of tiles around the player are way off. For some reason I cannot find the problem with it. This is a screen cap of the problem: The pathfinding values are displayed in the center of every tile. Clipped blocks are displayed with the value of 'c' because the values were too high and were covering up the next value. The red circle is the first value that is incorrect. The code below is the recursive method. //tileX is the coordinates of the current tile, val is the current pathfinding value, used[][] is a boolean //array to keep track of which tiles' values have already been assigned public void pathFind(int tileX, int tileY, int val, boolean[][] used) { //increment pathfinding value int curVal = val + 1; //set current tile to true if it hasn't been already used[tileX][tileY] = true; //booleans to know which tiles the recursive call needs to be used on boolean topLeftUsed = false, topUsed = false, topRightUsed = false, leftUsed = false, rightUsed = false, botomLeftUsed = false, botomUsed = false, botomRightUsed = false; //set value of top left tile if necessary if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY - 1 >= 0) { //isClipped(int x, int y) returns true if the coordinates givin are in a tile that can't be walked through (IE walls) //occupied[][] is an array that keeps track of which tiles have an enemy in them // //if the tile is not clipped and not occupied set the pathfinding value if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] == false && !(used[tileX - 1][tileY - 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = curVal; topLeftUsed = true; used[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = true; } //if it is occupied set it to an arbitrary high number so enemies find alternate routes if the best is clogged if(occupied[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = 1000000000; //if it is clipped set it to an arbitrary higher number so enemies don't travel through walls if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = 2000000000; } //top middle if(tileY - 1 >= 0 ) { if(isClipped(tileX * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX][tileY - 1] == false && !(used[tileX][tileY - 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY - 1] = curVal; topUsed = true; used[tileX][tileY - 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX][tileY - 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY - 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped(tileX * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY - 1] = 2000000000; } //top right if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY - 1 >= 0) { if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] == false && !(used[tileX + 1][tileY - 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = curVal; topRightUsed = true; used[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = 2000000000; } //left if(tileX - 1 >= 0) { if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX - 1][tileY] == false && !(used[tileX - 1][tileY])) { pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY] = curVal; leftUsed = true; used[tileX - 1][tileY] = true; } if(occupied[tileX - 1][tileY] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY] = 2000000000; } //right if(tileX + 1 <= used.length) { if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX + 1][tileY] == false && !(used[tileX + 1][tileY])) { pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY] = curVal; rightUsed = true; used[tileX + 1][tileY] = true; } if(occupied[tileX + 1][tileY] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY] = 2000000000; } //botom left if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length) { if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] == false && !(used[tileX - 1][tileY + 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = curVal; botomLeftUsed = true; used[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = 2000000000; } //botom middle if(tileY + 1 <= used[0].length) { if(isClipped((tileX) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX][tileY + 1] == false && !(used[tileX][tileY + 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY + 1] = curVal; botomUsed = true; used[tileX][tileY + 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX][tileY + 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY + 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY + 1] = 2000000000; } //botom right if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length) { if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] == false && !(used[tileX + 1][tileY + 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = curVal; botomRightUsed = true; used[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = 2000000000; } //call the method on the tiles that need it if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY - 1 >= 0 && topLeftUsed) pathFind(tileX - 1, tileY - 1, curVal, used); if(tileY - 1 >= 0 && topUsed) pathFind(tileX , tileY - 1, curVal, used); if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY - 1 >= 0 && topRightUsed) pathFind(tileX + 1, tileY - 1, curVal, used); if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && leftUsed) pathFind(tileX - 1, tileY, curVal, used); if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && rightUsed) pathFind(tileX + 1, tileY, curVal, used); if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length && botomLeftUsed) pathFind(tileX - 1, tileY + 1, curVal, used); if(tileY + 1 <= used[0].length && botomUsed) pathFind(tileX, tileY + 1, curVal, used); if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length && botomRightUsed) pathFind(tileX + 1, tileY + 1, curVal, used); }

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Why are my httpd mpm_prefork processes being reaped so quickly?

- by Dan Pritts

We've got a system running RHEL6, x64. We are using a local installation of apache 2.2.22 from source. we serve primarily: mod_perl applications (with a local installation of perl 5.16.0) tomcat applications proxied with mod_jk Here is some context; the main question is below. All of this talks to an Oracle backend. We are having issues with Oracle becoming unresponsive. We think this is because we're hitting the maximum process limit in oracle. We've upped the process limit, but now we are hitting memory pressure on the oracle server. We have tons of oracle sessions sitting idle. I can trace a bunch of them back to the httpd processes. We have mod_perl's Apache::DBI start up a new connection to the database with each httpd child that's spawned. We are concerned that these are not always getting closed out properly when the httpd's exit...and the httpd's are exiting very frequently. I know that it would be good to modify the mod_perl applications to use some better form of db connection pooling; we plan to pursue that but would like to solve our immediate problem sooner. So here's the main question. We are using the prefork MPM. The apache child processes are lasting at most a few minutes. Log analysis shows that each one is serving fewer than 50 clients before exiting; the last request each child serves is OPTIONS * HTTP/1.0 on some sort of internal connection; I'm under the impression that this is a "ping" from the master process. I've adjusted the MPM config as follows. I didn't want to raise MinSpareServers too high, because, after all, i'm trying to minimize the number of sessions to oracle. MinSpareServers 5 MaxSpareServers 30 MaxClients 150 MaxRequestsPerChild 10000 Right now we're serving 250-300 requests per minute. We've got 21 httpd's running, the eldest (other than the master, owned by root) being 3 minutes old. This rate of reaping of the apache children really seems excessive. What could be causing it? Apache was built with: $ ./configure --prefix=/opt/apache --with-ssl=/usr/lib --enable-expires --enable-ext-filter --enable-info --enable-mime-magic --enable-rewrite --enable-so --enable-speling --enable-ssl --enable-usertrack --enable-proxy --enable-headers --enable-log-forensic Apache config info: % /opt/apache/bin/httpd -V Server version: Apache/2.2.22 (Unix) Server built: Jul 23 2012 22:30:13 Server's Module Magic Number: 20051115:30 Server loaded: APR 1.4.5, APR-Util 1.4.1 Compiled using: APR 1.4.5, APR-Util 1.4.1 Architecture: 64-bit Server MPM: Prefork threaded: no forked: yes (variable process count) Server compiled with.... -D APACHE_MPM_DIR="server/mpm/prefork" -D APR_HAS_SENDFILE -D APR_HAS_MMAP -D APR_HAVE_IPV6 (IPv4-mapped addresses enabled) -D APR_USE_SYSVSEM_SERIALIZE -D APR_USE_PTHREAD_SERIALIZE -D SINGLE_LISTEN_UNSERIALIZED_ACCEPT -D APR_HAS_OTHER_CHILD -D AP_HAVE_RELIABLE_PIPED_LOGS -D DYNAMIC_MODULE_LIMIT=128 -D HTTPD_ROOT="/opt/apache" -D SUEXEC_BIN="/opt/apache/bin/suexec" -D DEFAULT_PIDLOG="logs/httpd.pid" -D DEFAULT_SCOREBOARD="logs/apache_runtime_status" -D DEFAULT_LOCKFILE="logs/accept.lock" -D DEFAULT_ERRORLOG="logs/error_log" -D AP_TYPES_CONFIG_FILE="conf/mime.types" -D SERVER_CONFIG_FILE="conf/httpd.conf" modules are compiled into apache rather than shared libs: % /opt/apache/bin/httpd -l Compiled in modules: core.c mod_authn_file.c mod_authn_default.c mod_authz_host.c mod_authz_groupfile.c mod_authz_user.c mod_authz_default.c mod_auth_basic.c mod_ext_filter.c mod_include.c mod_filter.c mod_log_config.c mod_log_forensic.c mod_env.c mod_mime_magic.c mod_expires.c mod_headers.c mod_usertrack.c mod_setenvif.c mod_version.c mod_proxy.c mod_proxy_connect.c mod_proxy_ftp.c mod_proxy_http.c mod_proxy_scgi.c mod_proxy_ajp.c mod_proxy_balancer.c mod_ssl.c prefork.c http_core.c mod_mime.c mod_status.c mod_autoindex.c mod_asis.c mod_info.c mod_cgi.c mod_negotiation.c mod_dir.c mod_actions.c mod_speling.c mod_userdir.c mod_alias.c mod_rewrite.c mod_so.c One final note - the red hat httpd, apr, and perl packages are all installed, but ldd shows that none of those libraries are linked with the running httpd.

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laptop crashed: why?

- by sds

my linux (ubuntu 12.04) laptop crashed, and I am trying to figure out why. # last sds pts/4 :0 Tue Sep 4 10:01 still logged in sds pts/3 :0 Tue Sep 4 10:00 still logged in reboot system boot 3.2.0-29-generic Tue Sep 4 09:43 - 11:23 (01:40) sds pts/8 :0 Mon Sep 3 14:23 - crash (19:19) this seems to indicate a crash at 09:42 (= 14:23+19:19). as per another question, I looked at /var/log: auth.log: Sep 4 09:17:02 t520sds CRON[32744]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root Sep 4 09:43:17 t520sds lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session opened for user lightdm by (uid=0) no messages file syslog: Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819975] CPU0: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. kern.log: Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819969] CPU1: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819971] CPU2: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819974] CPU3: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819975] CPU0: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu I had a computation running until 9:24, but the system crashed 18 minutes later! kern.log has many pages of these: Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] total RAM covered: 8086M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 64K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 128K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 256K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 512K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 1M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 2M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 4M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 8M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 16M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 32M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -16M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 64M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -16M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 128M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 256M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 512M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 1G num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 2G num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -1G does this mean that my RAM is bad?! it also says Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 2.944123] EXT4-fs (sda1): INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 2.944126] EXT4-fs (sda1): write access will be enabled during recovery Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 3.088001] firewire_core: created device fw0: GUID f0def1ff8fbd7dff, S400 Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 8.929243] EXT4-fs (sda1): orphan cleanup on readonly fs Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 8.929249] EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 658984 ... Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343266] EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 525343 Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343270] EXT4-fs (sda1): 56 orphan inodes deleted Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343271] EXT4-fs (sda1): recovery complete Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.645799] EXT4-fs (sda1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) does this mean my HD is bad? As per FaultyHardware, I tried smartctl -l selftest, which uncovered no errors: smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.2.0-30-generic] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Seagate Momentus 7200.4 Device Model: ST9500420AS Serial Number: 5VJE81YK LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0440defe3 Firmware Version: 0003LVM1 User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 4 Local Time is: Mon Sep 10 16:40:04 2012 EDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED See vendor-specific Attribute list for marginal Attributes. General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity was completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 0) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 109) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x103b) SCT Status supported. SCT Error Recovery Control supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 117 099 034 Pre-fail Always - 162843537 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 571 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 069 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 17210154023 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 174362787320258 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 571 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 099 Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 061 043 045 Old_age Always In_the_past 39 (0 11 44 26) 191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 84 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 20 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 2434 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 039 057 000 Old_age Always - 39 (0 15 0 0) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 041 041 000 Old_age Always - 162843537 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x000f 095 095 030 Pre-fail Always - 4540 (61955, 0) 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 254 Free_Fall_Sensor 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 4545 - SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay. Googling for the messages proved inconclusive, I can't even figure out whether the messages are routine or catastrophic. So, what do I do now?

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PASS Summit – looking back on my first time

- by Fatherjack

So I was lucky enough to get my first experience of PASS Summit this year and took some time beforehand to read some blogs and reference material to get an idea on what to do and how to get the best out of my visit. Having been to other conferences – technical and non-technical – I had a reasonable idea on the routine and what to expect in general. Here is a list of a few things that I have learned/remembered as the week has gone by. Wear comfortable shoes. This actually needs to be broadened to Take several pairs of comfortable shoes. You will be spending many many hours, for several days one after another. Having comfortable feet that can literally support you for the duration will make the week in general a whole lot better. Not only at the conference but getting to and from you could well be walking. In the evenings you will be walking around town and standing talking in various bars and clubs. Looking back, on some days I was on my feet for over 20 hours. Make friends. This is a given for the long term benefits it brings but there is also an immediate reward in being at a conference with a friend or two. Some events are bigger and more popular than others and some have the type of session that every single attendee will want to be in. This is great for those that get in but if you are in the bathroom or queuing for coffee and you miss out it sucks. Having a friend that can get in to a room and reserve you a seat is a great advantage to make sure you get the content that you want to see and still have the coffee that you need. Don’t go to every session you want to see This might sound counter intuitive and it relies on the sessions being recorded in some way to guarantee you don’t totally miss out. Both PASS Summit and SQL Bits sessions are recorded (summit is audio, SQLBits is video) and this means that if you get into a good conversation with someone over a coffee you don’t have to break it up to go to a session. Obviously there is a trade-off here and you need to decide on the tipping point for yourself but a conversation at a place like this could make a big difference to the next contract or employer you have or it might simply be great catching up with some friends you don’t see so often. Go to at least one session you don’t want to Again, this will seem to be contrary to normal logic but there is no reason why you shouldn’t learn about a part of SQL Server that isn’t part of your daily routine. Not only will you learn something new but you will also pick up on the feelings and attitudes of the people in the session. So, if you are a DBA, head off to a BI session and so on. You’ll hear BI speakers speaking to a BI audience and get to understand their point of view and reasoning for making the decisions they do. You will also appreciate the way that your decisions and instructions affect the way they have to work. This will help you a lot when you are on a project, working with multiple teams and make you all more productive. Socialise While you are at the conference venue, speak to people. Ask questions, be interested in whoever you are speaking to. You get chances to talk to new friends at breakfast, dinner and every break between sessions. The only people that might not talk to you would be speakers that are about to go and give a session, in most cases speakers like peace and quiet before going on stage. Other than that the people around you are just waiting for someone to talk to them so make the first move. There is a whole lot going on outside of the conference hours and you should make an effort to join in with some of this too. At karaoke evenings or just out for a quiet drink with a few of the people you meet at the conference. Either way, don’t be a recluse and hide in your room or be alone out in the town. Don’t talk to people Once again this sounds wrong but stay with me. I have spoken to a number of speakers since Summit 2013 finished and they have all mentioned the time it has taken them to move about the conference venue due to people stopping them for a chat or to ask a question. 45 minutes to walk from a session room to the speaker room in one case. Wow. While none of the speakers were upset about this sort of delay I think delegates should take the situation into account and possibly defer their question to an email or to a time when the person they want is clearly less in demand. Give them a chance to enjoy the conference in the same way that you are, they may actually want to go to a session or just have a rest after giving their session – talking for 75 minutes is hard work, taking an extra 45 minutes right after is unbelievable. I certainly hope that they get good feedback on their sessions and perhaps if you spoke to a speaker outside a session you can give them a mention in the ‘any other comments’ part of the feedback, just to convey your gratitude for them giving up their time and expertise for free. Say thank you I just mentioned giving the speakers a clear, visible ‘thank you’ in the feedback but there are plenty of people that help make any conference the success it is that would really appreciate hearing that their efforts are valued. People on the registration desk, volunteers giving schedule guidance and directions, people on the community zone are all volunteers giving their time to help you have the best experience possible. Send an email to PASS and convey your thoughts about the work that was done. Maybe you want to be a volunteer next time so you could enquire how you get into that position at the same time. This isn’t an exclusive list and you may agree or disagree with the points I have made, please add anything you think is good advice in the comments. I’d like to finish by saying a huge thank you to all the people involved in planning, facilitating and executing the PASS Summit 2013, it was an excellent event and I know many others think it was a totally worthwhile event to attend.

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CPU Utilization LAMP stack

- by Max

We've got an ec2 m2.4xlarge running Magento (centos 5.6, httpd 2.2, php 5.2.17 with eaccelerator 0.9.5.3, mysql 5.1.52). Right now we're getting a large traffic spike, and our top looks like this: top - 09:41:29 up 31 days, 1:12, 1 user, load average: 120.01, 129.03, 113.23 Tasks: 1190 total, 18 running, 1172 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 97.3%us, 1.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.5%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.4%st Mem: 71687720k total, 36898928k used, 34788792k free, 49692k buffers Swap: 880737784k total, 0k used, 880737784k free, 1586524k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2433 mysql 15 0 23.6g 4.5g 7112 S 564.7 6.6 33607:34 mysqld 24046 apache 16 0 411m 65m 28m S 26.4 0.1 0:09.05 httpd 24360 apache 15 0 410m 60m 25m S 26.4 0.1 0:03.65 httpd 24993 apache 16 0 410m 57m 21m S 26.1 0.1 0:01.41 httpd 24838 apache 16 0 428m 74m 20m S 24.8 0.1 0:02.37 httpd 24359 apache 16 0 411m 62m 26m R 22.3 0.1 0:08.12 httpd 23850 apache 15 0 411m 64m 27m S 16.8 0.1 0:14.54 httpd 25229 apache 16 0 404m 46m 17m R 10.2 0.1 0:00.71 httpd 14594 apache 15 0 404m 63m 34m S 8.4 0.1 1:10.26 httpd 24955 apache 16 0 404m 50m 21m R 8.4 0.1 0:01.66 httpd 24313 apache 16 0 399m 46m 22m R 8.1 0.1 0:02.30 httpd 25119 apache 16 0 411m 59m 23m S 6.8 0.1 0:01.45 httpd Questions: Would giving msyqld more memory help it cache queries and react faster? If so, how? Other than splitting mysql and php to separate servers (which we're about to do) is there anything else we could/should be doing? Thanks! UPDATE: Here's our my.cnf along with the output of mysqltuner. It looks like a cache problem. Thanks again! # cat /etc/my.cnf [client] port = **** socket = /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock [mysqld] datadir=/mnt/persistent/mysql port=**** socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock key_buffer = 512M max_allowed_packet = 64M table_cache = 1024 sort_buffer_size = 8M read_buffer_size = 4M read_rnd_buffer_size = 2M myisam_sort_buffer_size = 64M thread_cache_size = 128M tmp_table_size = 128M join_buffer_size = 1M query_cache_limit = 2M query_cache_size= 64M query_cache_type = 1 max_connections = 1000 thread_stack = 128K thread_concurrency = 48 log-bin=mysql-bin server-id = 1 wait_timeout = 300 innodb_data_home_dir = /mnt/persistent/mysql/ innodb_data_file_path = ibdata1:10M:autoextend innodb_buffer_pool_size = 20G innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M innodb_log_file_size = 64M innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 50 innodb_thread_concurrency = 48 ft_min_word_len=3 [myisamchk] ft_min_word_len=3 key_buffer = 128M sort_buffer_size = 128M read_buffer = 2M write_buffer = 2M # ./mysqltuner.pl >> MySQLTuner 1.2.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.52-log [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: +Archive -BDB +Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 2G (Tables: 26) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 749M (Tables: 250) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 262 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 31d 2h 30m 38s (680M q [253.371 qps], 2M conn, TX: 4825B, RX: 236B) [--] Reads / Writes: 89% / 11% [--] Total buffers: 20.6G global + 15.1M per thread (1000 max threads) [OK] Maximum possible memory usage: 35.4G (51% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (35K/680M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 53% (537/1000) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 512.0M/457.2M [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (9B cached / 264K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 42.3% (260M cached / 615M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 4384652 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (1K temp sorts / 38M sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 100404 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 17% (7M on disk / 45M total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (537 created / 2M connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 0% (1K open / 946K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 9% (453/5K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 99% (758M immediate / 758M locks) [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 749.3M/20.0G -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Variables to adjust: query_cache_size (> 64M) join_buffer_size (> 1.0M, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache (> 1024)

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Effectiveness and Efficiency

- by Daniel Moth

In the professional environment, i.e. at work, I am always seeking personal growth and to be challenged. The result is that my assignments, my work list, my tasks, my goals, my commitments, my [insert whatever word resonates with you] keep growing (in scope and desired impact). Which in turn means I have to keep finding new ways to deliver more value, while not falling into the trap of working more hours. To do that I continuously evaluate both my effectiveness and my efficiency. EFFECTIVENESS The first thing I check is my effectiveness: Am I doing the right things? Am I focusing too much on unimportant things? Am I spending more time doing stuff that is important to my team/org/division/business/company, or am I spending it on stuff that is important to me and that I enjoy doing? Am I valuing activities that maybe I have outgrown and should be delegated to others who are at a stage I have surpassed (in Microsoft speak: is the work I am doing level appropriate or am I still operating at the previous level)? Notice how the answers to those questions change over time and due to certain events, so I have to remind myself to revisit them frequently. Events that force me to re-examine them are: change of role, change of team/org/etc, change of direction of team/org/etc, re-org, new hires on the team that take on some of the work I did, personal promotion, change of manager... and if none of those events has occurred since the last annual review, I ask myself those at each annual review anyway. If you think you are not being effective at work, make a list of the stuff that you do and start tracking where your time goes. In parallel, have a discussion with your manager about where they think your time should go. Ultimately your time is finite and hence it is your most precious investment, don't waste it. If your management doesn't value as highly what you spend your time on, then either convince your management, or stop spending your time on it, or find different management: Lead, Follow, or get out of the way! That's my view on effectiveness. You have to fix that before moving to being efficient, or you may end up being very efficient at stuff that nobody wants you to be doing in the first place. For example, you may be spending your time writing blog posts and becoming better and faster at it all the time. If your manager thinks that is not even part of your job description, you are wasting your time to satisfy your inner desires. Nobody can help you with your effectiveness other than your management chain and your management peers - they are the judges of it. EFFICIENCY The second thing I check is my efficiency: Am I doing things right? For me, doing things right means that I deliver the same quality of work faster [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. The result is that I can achieve more [than what I used to, and than my peers, and than expected of me]. Notice how the efficiency goal is a more portable one. If, by whatever criteria, you think you are the best at [insert your own skill here], this can change at two events: because you have new colleagues (who are potentially better than your older ones), and it can change with a change of manager (who has potentially higher expectations). That's about it. Once you are efficient at something, you carry that with you... All you need to really be doing here is, when taking on new kinds of work that you haven't done before, try a few approaches and devise a system so that you can become efficient at this new activity too... Just keep "collecting" stuff that you are efficient at. If you think you are not being efficient at something, break it down: What are the steps you take to complete that task? How long do you spend on each step? Talk to others about what steps they take, to see if you can optimize some steps away or trade them for better steps, or just learn how to complete a step faster. Have a system for every task you take so that you can have repeatable success. That's my view on efficiency. You have to fix it so that you can free up time to do more. When you plan a route from A to B - all else being equal - you try to get there as fast as possible so why would you not want to do that with your everyday work? For example, imagine you are inefficient at processing email: You spend more time than necessary dealing with email, and you still end up with dropped email threads and with slower response times than others. How can you improve? Talk to someone that you think is good at this, understand their system (e.g. here is my email processing system) and come up with one that works for you. Parting Thoughts Are you considered, by your colleagues and manager, an effective and efficient person at your workplace? If you are, what would you change if you were asked by your management to do the job of two people? Seriously, think about that! Your immediate reaction may be "that is not possible", but it actually is. You just have to re-assess what things that were previously important will now stop being important, by discussing them with your management and reaching agreement on relative priorities. For example, stuff that was previously on your plate may now have to be delegated or dropped. Where you thought you were efficient, maybe now you have to find an even faster path to completion, perhaps keeping in mind that Perfect is the Enemy of “Good Enough”. My personal experience (from both observing others and from my own reflection) is that when folks are struggling to keep up at work it is because of two reasons: They are investing energy in stuff that they enjoy doing which the business regards as having a lower priority than a lot of other things on their plate. They are completing tasks to a level of higher quality than what is required (due to personal pride) missing the big picture which almost always mandates completing three tasks at good enough quality than knocking only one of them out of the park while the other two come in late or not at all. There is a lot of content on the web, so I strongly encourage you to use your favorite search engine to read other views on effectiveness and efficiency (Bing, Google). Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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Simplifying Human Capital Management with Mobile Applications

- by HCM-Oracle

By Aaron Green If you're starting to think 'mobility' is a recurring theme in your reading, you'd be right. For those who haven't started to build organisational capabilities to leverage it, it's fair to say you're late to the party. The good news: better late than never. Research firm eMarketer says the worldwide smartphone audience will total 1.75 billion this year, while communications technology and services provider Ericsson suggests smartphones will triple to 5.6 billion globally by 2019. It should be no surprise, smart phone adoption is reaching the farthest corners of the globe; the subsequent impact of enterprise applications enabled by these devices is driving business performance improvement and will continue to do so. Companies using advanced workforce analytics can add significantly to the bottom line, while impacting customer satisfaction, quality and productivity. It's a statement that makes most business leaders sit forward in their chairs. Achieving these three standards is like sipping The Golden Elixir for the business world. No-one would argue their importance. So what are 'advanced workforce analytics?' Simply, they're unprecedented access to workforce trends and performance markers. Many are made possible by a mobile world and the enterprise applications that come with it on smart devices. Some refer to it as 'the consumerisation of IT'. As this phenomenon has matured and become more widely appreciated it has impacted the spectrum of functional units within an enterprise differently, but powerfully. Whether it's sales, HR, marketing, IT, or operations, all have benefited from a more mobile approach. It has been the catalyst for improvement in, and management of, the employee experience. The net result of which is happier customers. The obvious benefits but the lesser realised impact Most people understand that mobility allows for greater efficiency and productivity, collaboration and flexibility, but how that translates into business outcomes within the various functional groups is lesser known. In actuality mobility has helped galvanise partnerships between cross-functional groups within the enterprise. Where in some quarters it was once feared mobility could fragment a workforce, its rallying cry of support is coming from what you might describe as an unlikely source - HR. As the bedrock of an enterprise, it is conceivable HR might contemplate the possible negative impact of a mobile workforce that no-longer sits in an office, at the same desks every day. After all, who would know what they were doing or saying? How would they collaborate? It's reasonable to see why HR might have a legitimate claim to try and retain as much 'perceived control' as possible. The reality however is mobility has emancipated human capital and its management. Mobility and enterprise applications are expediting decision making. Google calls it Zero Moment of Truth, or ZMOT. It enables smoother operation and can contribute to faster growth. From a collaborative perspective, with the growing use of enterprise social media, which in many cases is being driven by HR, workforce planning and the tangible impact of change is much easier to map. This in turn provides a platform from which individuals and teams can thrive. With more agility and ability to anticipate, staff satisfaction and retention is higher, and real time feedback constant. The management team can save time, energy and costs with more accurate data, which is then intelligently applied across the workforce to truly engage with staff, customers and partners. From a human capital management (HCM) perspective, mobility can help you close the loop on true talent management. It can enhance what managers can offer and what employees can provide in return. It can create nested relationships and powerful partnerships. IT and HR - partners and stewards of mobility One effect of enterprise mobility is an evolution in the nature of the relationship between HR and IT from one of service provision to partnership. The reason for the dynamic shift is largely due to the 'bring your own device' (BYOD) movement, which is transitioning to a 'bring your own application' (BYOA) scenario. As enterprise technology has in some ways reverse-engineered its solutions to help manage this situation, the partnership between IT (the functional owner) and HR (the strategic enabler) is deeply entrenched. And it has to be. The CIO and the HR leader are faced with compliance and regulatory issues and concerns around information security and personal privacy on a daily basis, complicated by global reach and varied domestic legislation. There are tens of thousands of new mobile apps entering the market each month and, unlike many consumer applications which get downloaded but are often never opened again after initial perusal, enterprise applications are being relied upon by functional groups, not least by HR to enhance people management. It requires a systematic approach across all applications in use within the enterprise in order to ensure they're used to best effect. No turning back, and no desire to With real time analytics on performance and the ability for immediate feedback, there is no turning back for managers. In my experience with Oracle, our customers' operational efficiency is at record levels. It's clear as a result of the combination of individual KPIs and organisational goals, CIOs have been able to give HR leaders the ability to build predictive models that feed into an enterprise organisations' evolving strategy. It also helps them ensure regulatory compliance much more easily. Once an arduous task, with mobile enabled automation and quality data, compliance is simpler. Their world has changed for the better. For the CIO, mobility also assists them to optimise performance. While it doesn't come without challenges, mobile-enabled applications and the native experience users have with them means employees don't need high-level technical expertise to train users. It reduces the training and engagement required from the IT team so they can focus on other things that deliver value to the bottom line; all the while lowering the cost of assets and related maintenance work by simplifying processes. Rewards of a mobile enterprise outweigh risks With mobile tools allowing us to increasingly integrate our personal and professional lives, terms like "office hours" are becoming irrelevant, so work/life balance is a cultural must. Enterprises are expected to offer tools that enable workers to access information from anywhere, at any time, from any device. Employees want simplicity and convenience but it doesn't stop at private enterprise. This is a societal shift. Governments, which traditionally have been known to be slower to adopt newer technology, are also offering support for local businesses to go mobile. Several state government websites have advice on how to create mobile apps and more. And as recently as last week the Victorian Minister for Technology Gordon Rich-Phillips unveiled his State government's ICT roadmap for the next two years, which details an increased use of the public cloud, as well as mobile communications, and improved access to online data-sets. Tech giants are investing significantly in solutions designed to simplify mobile deployment and enablement. The mobility trend is creating a wave of change in the industry and driving transformation in the enterprise. If you're not on that wave, the business risk continues to rise as your competitiveness drops. Aaron is the Vice President of HCM Strategy at Oracle Corporation where he is responsible for researching and identifying emerging trends in the practice of Human Resources and works to deliver industry-leading technology solutions. Other responsibilities include, ownership of Oracle's innovative HCM solutions across JAPAC and enabling organisations to transform and modernise their workforce tools. Follow him on Twitter @aaronjgreen

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Box2D blocky map. Body, Fixtures a huge map and performance

- by Solom

Right now I'm still in the planning phase of a my very first game. I'm creating a "Minecraft"-like game in 2D that features blocks that can be destroyed as well as players moving around the map. For creating the map I chose a 2D-Array of Integers that represent the Block ID. For testing purposes I created a huge map (16348 * 256) and in my prototype that didn't use Box2D everything worked like a charm. I only rendered those blocks that where within the bounds of my camera and got 60 fps straight. The problem started when I decided to use an existing physics-solution rather than implementing my own one. What I had was basically simple hitboxes around the blocks and then I had to manually check if the player collided with any of those in his neighborhood. For more advanced physics as well as the collision detection I want to switch over to Box2D. The problem I have right now is ... how to go about the bodies? I mean, the blocks are of a static bodytype. They don't move on their own, they just are there to be collided with. But as far as I can see it, every block needs his own body with a rectangular fixture attached to it, so as to be destroyable. But for a huge map such as mine, this turns out to be a real performance bottle-neck. (In fact even a rather small map [compared to the other] of 1024*256 is unplayable.) I mean I create thousands of thousands of blocks. Even if I just render those that are in my immediate neighborhood there are hundreds of them and (at least with the debugRenderer) I drop to 1 fps really quickly (on my own "monster machine"). I thought about strategies like creating just one body, attaching multiple fixtures and only if a fixture got hit, separate it from the body, create a new one and destroy it, but this didn't turn out quite as successful as hoped. (In fact the core just dumps. Ah hello C! I really missed you :X) Here is the code: public class Box2DGameScreen implements Screen { private World world; private Box2DDebugRenderer debugRenderer; private OrthographicCamera camera; private final float TIMESTEP = 1 / 60f; // 1/60 of a second -> 1 frame per second private final int VELOCITYITERATIONS = 8; private final int POSITIONITERATIONS = 3; private Map map; private BodyDef blockBodyDef; private FixtureDef blockFixtureDef; private BodyDef groundDef; private Body ground; private PolygonShape rectangleShape; @Override public void show() { world = new World(new Vector2(0, -9.81f), true); debugRenderer = new Box2DDebugRenderer(); camera = new OrthographicCamera(); // Pixel:Meter = 16:1 // Body definition BodyDef ballDef = new BodyDef(); ballDef.type = BodyDef.BodyType.DynamicBody; ballDef.position.set(0, 1); // Fixture definition FixtureDef ballFixtureDef = new FixtureDef(); ballFixtureDef.shape = new CircleShape(); ballFixtureDef.shape.setRadius(.5f); // 0,5 meter ballFixtureDef.restitution = 0.75f; // between 0 (not jumping up at all) and 1 (jumping up the same amount as it fell down) ballFixtureDef.density = 2.5f; // kg / m² ballFixtureDef.friction = 0.25f; // between 0 (sliding like ice) and 1 (not sliding) // world.createBody(ballDef).createFixture(ballFixtureDef); groundDef = new BodyDef(); groundDef.type = BodyDef.BodyType.StaticBody; groundDef.position.set(0, 0); ground = world.createBody(groundDef); this.map = new Map(20, 20); rectangleShape = new PolygonShape(); // rectangleShape.setAsBox(1, 1); blockFixtureDef = new FixtureDef(); // blockFixtureDef.shape = rectangleShape; blockFixtureDef.restitution = 0.1f; blockFixtureDef.density = 10f; blockFixtureDef.friction = 0.9f; } @Override public void render(float delta) { Gdx.gl.glClearColor(1, 1, 1, 1); Gdx.gl.glClear(GL20.GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT); debugRenderer.render(world, camera.combined); drawMap(); world.step(TIMESTEP, VELOCITYITERATIONS, POSITIONITERATIONS); } private void drawMap() { for(int a = 0; a < map.getHeight(); a++) { /* if(camera.position.y - (camera.viewportHeight/2) > a) continue; if(camera.position.y - (camera.viewportHeight/2) < a) break; */ for(int b = 0; b < map.getWidth(); b++) { /* if(camera.position.x - (camera.viewportWidth/2) > b) continue; if(camera.position.x - (camera.viewportWidth/2) < b) break; */ /* blockBodyDef = new BodyDef(); blockBodyDef.type = BodyDef.BodyType.StaticBody; blockBodyDef.position.set(b, a); world.createBody(blockBodyDef).createFixture(blockFixtureDef); */ PolygonShape rectangleShape = new PolygonShape(); rectangleShape.setAsBox(1, 1, new Vector2(b, a), 0); blockFixtureDef.shape = rectangleShape; ground.createFixture(blockFixtureDef); rectangleShape.dispose(); } } } @Override public void resize(int width, int height) { camera.viewportWidth = width / 16; camera.viewportHeight = height / 16; camera.update(); } @Override public void hide() { dispose(); } @Override public void pause() { } @Override public void resume() { } @Override public void dispose() { world.dispose(); debugRenderer.dispose(); } } As you can see I'm facing multiple problems here. I'm not quite sure how to check for the bounds but also if the map is bigger than 24*24 like 1024*256 Java just crashes -.-. And with 24*24 I get like 9 fps. So I'm doing something really terrible here, it seems and I assume that there most be a (much more performant) way, even with Box2D's awesome physics. Any other ideas? Thanks in advance!

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Pushing DNSSEC updates with offline keys

- by eggyal

In a non-professional capacity, I look after the DNS of some 18 domains: mostly personal/vanity domains for immediate family. I outsource the whole shebang to an inexpensive managed hosting provider with a web interface through which I manage the zones; since the provider also offers DNSSEC, I have successfully deployed that too. These domains are so unimportant that an attack targetted against them seems much less likely than a general compromise of my provider's systems, at which point the records of all their customers might be changed to misdirect traffic (perhaps with extremely long TTLs). DNSSEC could protect against such an attack, but only if the zone's private keys are not held by the hosting provider. So, I wonder: how can one keep DNSSEC private keys offline yet still transfer signed zones to an outsourced DNS host? The most obvious answer (to me, at least) is to run one's own shadow/hidden master (from which the provider can slave) and then copy offline-signed zonefiles to the master as required. The problem is that the only machine I (want to*) control is my personal laptop, which usually connects from a typical home ADSL (behind NAT over a dynamically-assigned IP address). Having them slave from that (e.g. with a very long Expiry time on the zone for periods when my laptop is offline/unavailable) would not only require a Dynamic DNS record from which they can slave (if indeed they can slave from a named host rather than a static IP address), but would also involve me running a DNS server on my laptop and opening both it and my home network up to the incoming zone transfer requests: not ideal. I would prefer a much more push-oriented design, whereby my laptop initiates transfer of offline-signed zonefiles/updates to the provider's servers. I looked into whether nsupdate could fit the bill: documentation is a little sketchy, but my testing (with BIND 9.7) suggests it can indeed update DNSSEC zones, but only where the server holds the keys to perform the zone signing; I have not found a way to have it take an update including the relevant RRSIG/NSEC/etc. records and have the server accept them. Is this a supported use-case? If not, I suspect the only solutions which could fit the bill will involve non-DNS-based transfer of the zone updates and would welcome recommendations that are supported by (hopefully inexpensive) hosting providers: SFTP/SCP? rsync? RDBMS replication? Proprietary API? Finally, what would be the practical implications of such a setup? Key rotation is jumping out at me as being an obvious difficulty, especially if my laptop is offline for extended periods. But the zones are extremely stable, so perhaps I could get away with long-lived ZSKs**...? * Whilst I could run a shadow/hidden master on e.g. an outsourced VPS, I dislike the overhead of having to secure / manage / monitor / maintain yet another system; not to mention the additional financial costs of so doing. ** Okay, this would enable a concerted attacker to replay outdated records—but the risk and impact of such are both tolerable in the case of these domains.

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MySQL reserves too much RAM

- by Buddy

I have a cheap VPS with 128Mb RAM and 256Mb burst. MySQL starts and reserves about 110Mb, but uses not more than 20Mb of them. My VPS Control Panel shows, that I use 127Mb (I also running nginx and sphinx), I know, that it shows reserved RAM, but when I reach over 128Mb, my VPS reboots automatically every 4 hours. So I want to force MySQL to reserve less RAM. How can i do that? I did some tweaks with my.conf but it helped not so much. top output: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1 root 15 0 2156 668 572 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.03 init 11311 root 15 0 11212 356 228 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 vzctl 11312 root 18 0 3712 1484 1248 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.01 bash 11347 root 18 0 2284 916 732 R 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 top 13978 root 17 -4 2248 552 344 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 udevd 14262 root 15 0 1812 564 472 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.03 syslogd 14293 sphinx 15 0 11816 1172 672 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.07 searchd 14305 root 25 0 7192 1036 636 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.00 sshd 14321 root 25 0 2832 836 668 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.00 xinetd 15389 root 18 0 3708 1300 1132 S 0.0 0.5 0:00.00 mysqld_safe 15441 mysql 15 0 113m 16m 4440 S 0.0 6.4 0:00.15 mysqld 15489 root 21 0 13056 1456 340 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.00 nginx 15490 nginx 18 0 13328 2388 992 S 0.0 0.9 0:00.06 nginx 15507 nginx 25 0 19520 5888 4244 S 0.0 2.2 0:00.00 php-cgi 15508 nginx 18 0 19636 4876 2748 S 0.0 1.9 0:00.12 php-cgi 15509 nginx 15 0 19668 4872 2716 S 0.0 1.9 0:00.11 php-cgi 15518 root 18 0 4492 1116 568 S 0.0 0.4 0:00.01 crond MySQL tuner: >> MySQLTuner 1.0.1 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering Please enter your MySQL administrative login: root Please enter your MySQL administrative password: -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.0.77 [OK] Operating on 32-bit architecture with less than 2GB RAM -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 1M (Tables: 1) [OK] Total fragmented tables: 0 -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 38m 43s (37 q [0.016 qps], 20 conn, TX: 4M, RX: 3K) [--] Reads / Writes: 100% / 0% [--] Total buffers: 28.1M global + 832.0K per thread (100 max threads) [OK] Maximum possible memory usage: 109.4M (42% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (0/37) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 1% (1/100) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 128.0K/64.0K [OK] Query cache efficiency: 42.1% (8 cached / 19 selects) [OK] Query cache prunes per day: 0 [!!] Temporary tables created on disk: 27% (3 on disk / 11 total) [!!] Thread cache is disabled [OK] Table cache hit rate: 57% (8 open / 14 opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 1% (12/1K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (22 immediate / 22 locks) [!!] Connections aborted: 10% [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 1.5M/8.0M -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries When making adjustments, make tmp_table_size/max_heap_table_size equal Reduce your SELECT DISTINCT queries without LIMIT clauses Set thread_cache_size to 4 as a starting value Your applications are not closing MySQL connections properly Variables to adjust: tmp_table_size (> 32M) max_heap_table_size (> 16M) thread_cache_size (start at 4) I think if I do what MySQLtuner says, MySQL will use more RAM.

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Clarification On Write-Caching Policy, Its Underlying Options And How It Applies To Hard Drives And Solid-State Drives

- by Boris_yo

In last week after doing more research on subject matter, I have been wondering about what I have been neglecting all those years to understand write-caching policy, always leaving it on default setting. Write-caching policy improves writing performance and consists of write-back caching and write-cache buffer flushing. This is how I understand all the above, but correct me if I erred somewhere: Write-through cache / Write-through caching itself is not a part of write caching policy per se and it's when data is written to both cache and storage device so if Windows will need that data later again, it is retrieved from cache and not from storage device which means only improved read performance as there is no need for waiting for storage device to read required data again. Since data is still written to storage device, write performance isn't improved and represents no risk of data loss or corruption in case of power failure or system crash while only data in cache gets lost. This option seems to be enabled by default and is recommended for removable devices with no need to use function of "Safely Remove Hardware" on user's part. Write-back caching is similar to above but without writing data to storage device, periodically releasing data from cache and writing to storage device when it is idle. In my opinion this option improves both read and write performance but represents risk if power failure or system crash occurs with the outcome of not only losing data eventually to be written to storage device, but causing file inconsistencies or corrupted file system. Write-back caching cannot be enabled together with write-through caching and it is not recommended to be enabled if no backup power supply is availabe. Write-cache buffer flushing I reckon is similar to write-back caching but enables immediate release and writing of data from cache to storage device right before power outage occurs but I don't know if it applies also to occasional system crash. This option seem to be complementary to write-back cache reducing or potentially eliminating risk of data loss or corruption of file system. I have questions about relevance of last 2 options to today's modern SSDs in order to get best performance and with less wear on SSDs: I know that traditional hard drives come with onboard cache (I wonder what type of cache that is), but do SSDs also come with cache? Assuming they do, is this cache faster than their NAND flash and system RAM and worth taking the risk of utilizing it by enabling write-back cache? I read somewhere that generally storage device's cache is faster than RAM, but I want to be sure. Additionally I read that write-caching should be enabled since current data that is to be written later to NAND flash is kept for a while in cache and provided there is data that gets modified a lot before finally being written, holding of this data and its periodic release reduces its write times to SSD thereby reducing its wearing. Now regarding to write-cache buffer flushing, I heard that SSD controllers are so fast by themselves that enabling this option is not required, because they manage flushing. However, once again, I don't know if SSDs have their own onboard cache and whether or not it is faster than their NAND flash and system RAM because if it is, keeping this option enabled would make sense. Recently I have posted question about issue with my Intel 330 SSD 120GB which was main reason to do deeper research having suspicion of write-caching policy being the culprit of SSD's freezing issue assuming data being released is what causes freezes. Currently I have write-cache enabled and write-cache buffer flushing disabled because I believe SSD controller's management of write-cache flushing and Windows write-cache buffer flushing are conflicting with each other: Since I want to troubleshoot in small steps to finally determine the source of issue, I have decided to start with write-caching policy and the move to drivers, switching to AHCI later on and finally disabling DIPM (device initiated power management) through registry modification thanks to @TomWijsman

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Having trouble with pathfinding

- by user2144536

I'm trying to implement pathfinding in a game I'm programming using this method. I'm implementing it with recursion but some of the values after the immediate circle of tiles around the player are way off. For some reason I cannot find the problem with it. This is a screen cap of the problem: The pathfinding values are displayed in the center of every tile. Clipped blocks are displayed with the value of 'c' because the values were too high and were covering up the next value. The red circle is the first value that is incorrect. The code below is the recursive method. //tileX is the coordinates of the current tile, val is the current pathfinding value, used[][] is a boolean //array to keep track of which tiles' values have already been assigned public void pathFind(int tileX, int tileY, int val, boolean[][] used) { //increment pathfinding value int curVal = val + 1; //set current tile to true if it hasn't been already used[tileX][tileY] = true; //booleans to know which tiles the recursive call needs to be used on boolean topLeftUsed = false, topUsed = false, topRightUsed = false, leftUsed = false, rightUsed = false, botomLeftUsed = false, botomUsed = false, botomRightUsed = false; //set value of top left tile if necessary if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY - 1 >= 0) { //isClipped(int x, int y) returns true if the coordinates givin are in a tile that can't be walked through (IE walls) //occupied[][] is an array that keeps track of which tiles have an enemy in them // //if the tile is not clipped and not occupied set the pathfinding value if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] == false && !(used[tileX - 1][tileY - 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = curVal; topLeftUsed = true; used[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = true; } //if it is occupied set it to an arbitrary high number so enemies find alternate routes if the best is clogged if(occupied[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = 1000000000; //if it is clipped set it to an arbitrary higher number so enemies don't travel through walls if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY - 1] = 2000000000; } //top middle if(tileY - 1 >= 0 ) { if(isClipped(tileX * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX][tileY - 1] == false && !(used[tileX][tileY - 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY - 1] = curVal; topUsed = true; used[tileX][tileY - 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX][tileY - 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY - 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped(tileX * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY - 1] = 2000000000; } //top right if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY - 1 >= 0) { if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] == false && !(used[tileX + 1][tileY - 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = curVal; topRightUsed = true; used[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY - 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY - 1] = 2000000000; } //left if(tileX - 1 >= 0) { if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX - 1][tileY] == false && !(used[tileX - 1][tileY])) { pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY] = curVal; leftUsed = true; used[tileX - 1][tileY] = true; } if(occupied[tileX - 1][tileY] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY] = 2000000000; } //right if(tileX + 1 <= used.length) { if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX + 1][tileY] == false && !(used[tileX + 1][tileY])) { pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY] = curVal; rightUsed = true; used[tileX + 1][tileY] = true; } if(occupied[tileX + 1][tileY] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY] = 2000000000; } //botom left if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length) { if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] == false && !(used[tileX - 1][tileY + 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = curVal; botomLeftUsed = true; used[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX - 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX - 1][tileY + 1] = 2000000000; } //botom middle if(tileY + 1 <= used[0].length) { if(isClipped((tileX) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX][tileY + 1] == false && !(used[tileX][tileY + 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY + 1] = curVal; botomUsed = true; used[tileX][tileY + 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX][tileY + 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY + 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX][tileY + 1] = 2000000000; } //botom right if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length) { if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == false && occupied[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] == false && !(used[tileX + 1][tileY + 1])) { pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = curVal; botomRightUsed = true; used[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = true; } if(occupied[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = 1000000000; if(isClipped((tileX + 1) * 50 + 25, (tileY + 1) * 50 + 25) == true) pathFindingValues[tileX + 1][tileY + 1] = 2000000000; } //call the method on the tiles that need it if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY - 1 >= 0 && topLeftUsed) pathFind(tileX - 1, tileY - 1, curVal, used); if(tileY - 1 >= 0 && topUsed) pathFind(tileX , tileY - 1, curVal, used); if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY - 1 >= 0 && topRightUsed) pathFind(tileX + 1, tileY - 1, curVal, used); if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && leftUsed) pathFind(tileX - 1, tileY, curVal, used); if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && rightUsed) pathFind(tileX + 1, tileY, curVal, used); if(tileX - 1 >= 0 && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length && botomLeftUsed) pathFind(tileX - 1, tileY + 1, curVal, used); if(tileY + 1 <= used[0].length && botomUsed) pathFind(tileX, tileY + 1, curVal, used); if(tileX + 1 <= used.length && tileY + 1 <= used[0].length && botomRightUsed) pathFind(tileX + 1, tileY + 1, curVal, used); }

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mySQL Optimization Suggestions

- by Brian Schroeter

I'm trying to optimize our mySQL configuration for our large Magento website. The reason I believe that mySQL needs to be configured further is because New Relic has shown that our SELECT queries are taking a long time (20,000+ ms) in some categories. I ran MySQLTuner 1.3.0 and got the following results... (Disclaimer: I restarted mySQL earlier after tweaking some settings, and so the results here may not be 100% accurate): >> MySQLTuner 1.3.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.5.37-35.0 [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: +ARCHIVE +BLACKHOLE +CSV -FEDERATED +InnoDB +MRG_MYISAM [--] Data in MyISAM tables: 7G (Tables: 332) [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 213G (Tables: 8714) [--] Data in PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA tables: 0B (Tables: 17) [--] Data in MEMORY tables: 0B (Tables: 353) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 5492 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '@host5.server1.autopartsnetwork.com' has no password set. [!!] User '@localhost' has no password set. [!!] User 'root@%' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 5h 3m 4s (5M q [317.443 qps], 42K conn, TX: 18B, RX: 2B) [--] Reads / Writes: 95% / 5% [--] Total buffers: 35.5G global + 184.5M per thread (1024 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 220.0G (174% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (6K/5M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 5% (61/1024) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 512.0M/3.1G [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (102M cached / 45K reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 66.9% (3M cached / 5M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 3486361 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (0 temp sorts / 812K sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 1328 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 11% (126K on disk / 1M total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 99% (61 created / 42K connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 19% (9K open / 49K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 2% (712/25K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (5M immediate / 5M locks) [!!] InnoDB buffer pool / data size: 32.0G/213.4G [OK] InnoDB log waits: 0 -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Read this before increasing table_cache over 64: http://bit.ly/1mi7c4C Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 512M) [see warning above] join_buffer_size (> 128.0M, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache (> 12288) innodb_buffer_pool_size (>= 213G) My my.cnf configuration is as follows... [client] port = 3306 [mysqld_safe] nice = 0 [mysqld] tmpdir = /var/lib/mysql/tmp user = mysql port = 3306 skip-external-locking character-set-server = utf8 collation-server = utf8_general_ci event_scheduler = 0 key_buffer = 512M max_allowed_packet = 64M thread_stack = 512K thread_cache_size = 512 sort_buffer_size = 24M read_buffer_size = 8M read_rnd_buffer_size = 24M join_buffer_size = 128M # for some nightly processes client sessions set the join buffer to 8 GB auto-increment-increment = 1 auto-increment-offset = 1 myisam-recover = BACKUP max_connections = 1024 # max connect errors artificially high to support behaviors of NetScaler monitors max_connect_errors = 999999 concurrent_insert = 2 connect_timeout = 5 wait_timeout = 180 net_read_timeout = 120 net_write_timeout = 120 back_log = 128 # this table_open_cache might be too low because of MySQL bugs #16244691 and #65384) table_open_cache = 12288 tmp_table_size = 512M max_heap_table_size = 512M bulk_insert_buffer_size = 512M open-files-limit = 8192 open-files = 1024 query_cache_type = 1 # large query limit supports SOAP and REST API integrations query_cache_limit = 4M # larger than 512 MB query cache size is problematic; this is typically ~60% full query_cache_size = 512M # set to true on read slaves read_only = false slow_query_log_file = /var/log/mysql/slow.log slow_query_log = 0 long_query_time = 0.2 expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 1024M binlog_cache_size = 32K sync_binlog = 0 # SSD RAID10 technically has a write capacity of 10000 IOPS innodb_io_capacity = 400 innodb_file_per_table innodb_table_locks = true innodb_lock_wait_timeout = 30 # These servers have 80 CPU threads; match 1:1 innodb_thread_concurrency = 48 innodb_commit_concurrency = 2 innodb_support_xa = true innodb_buffer_pool_size = 32G innodb_file_per_table innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_log_buffer_size = 2G skip-federated [mysqldump] quick quote-names single-transaction max_allowed_packet = 64M I have a monster of a server here to power our site because our catalog is very large (300,000 simple SKUs), and I'm just wondering if I'm missing anything that I can configure further. :-) Thanks!

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need assistance with my.cnf - 1500% CPU usage

- by Alan Long

I'm running into a few issues with our new database server. It is a HP G8 with 2 INTEL XEON E5-2650 processors and 32GB of ram. This server is dedicated as a MySQL server (5.1.69) for our intranet portal. I have been having issues with this server staying alive - I notice high CPU usage during certain times of day (8% ~ 1500%+) and see very low memory usage (7 ~ 15%) based on using the 'top' command. When the CPU usage passes 1000%, that is when the app usually dies. I'm trying to see what I'm doing wrong with the config file, hopefully one of the experts can chime in and let me know what they think. See below for my.cnf file: [mysqld] default-storage-engine=InnoDB datadir=/var/lib/mysql socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock #user=mysql large-pages # Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks symbolic-links=0 max_connections=275 tmp_table_size=1G key_buffer_size=384M key_buffer=384M thread_cache_size=1024 long_query_time=5 low_priority_updates=1 max_heap_table_size=1G myisam_sort_buffer_size=8M concurrent_insert=2 table_cache=1024 sort_buffer_size=8M read_buffer_size=5M read_rnd_buffer_size=6M join_buffer_size=16M table_definition_cache=6k open_files_limit=8k slow_query_log #skip-name-resolve # Innodb Settings innodb_buffer_pool_size=18G innodb_thread_concurrency=0 innodb_log_file_size=1G innodb_log_buffer_size=16M innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=2 innodb_lock_wait_timeout=50 innodb_file_per_table #innodb_buffer_pool_instances=4 #eliminating double buffering innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT flush_time=86400 innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=40M #innodb_io_capacity = 5000 #innodb_read_io_threads = 64 #innodb_write_io_threads = 64 # increase until threads_created doesnt grow anymore thread_cache=1024 query_cache_type=1 query_cache_limit=4M query_cache_size=256M # Try number of CPU's*2 for thread_concurrency thread_concurrency = 0 wait_timeout = 1800 connect_timeout = 10 interactive_timeout = 60 [mysqldump] max_allowed_packet=32M [mysqld_safe] log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid log-slow-queries=/var/log/mysql/slow-queries.log long_query_time = 1 log-queries-not-using-indexes we connect to one database with 75 tables, the largest table has 1,150,000 entries and the second largest has 128,036 entries. I have also verified that our PHP queries are optimized as best as possible. Reference - MySQLtuner: >> MySQLTuner 1.2.0 - Major Hayden <[email protected]> >> Bug reports, feature requests, and downloads at http://mysqltuner.com/ >> Run with '--help' for additional options and output filtering -------- General Statistics -------------------------------------------------- [--] Skipped version check for MySQLTuner script [OK] Currently running supported MySQL version 5.1.69-log [OK] Operating on 64-bit architecture -------- Storage Engine Statistics ------------------------------------------- [--] Status: -Archive -BDB -Federated +InnoDB -ISAM -NDBCluster [--] Data in InnoDB tables: 420M (Tables: 75) [!!] Total fragmented tables: 75 -------- Security Recommendations ------------------------------------------- [!!] User '[email protected]' has no password set. -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 1h 14m 50s (8M q [1K qps], 705 conn, TX: 6B, RX: 892M) [--] Reads / Writes: 68% / 32% [--] Total buffers: 19.7G global + 35.2M per thread (275 max threads) [!!] Maximum possible memory usage: 29.1G (93% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (472/8M) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 66% (183/275) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 384.0M/91.0K [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (173 cached / 0 reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 96.2% (7M cached / 7M selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 553614 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (3 temp sorts / 1K sorts) [!!] Temporary tables created on disk: 49% (3K on disk / 7K total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 74% (183 created / 705 connections) [OK] Table cache hit rate: 97% (231 open / 238 opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 0% (17/8K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (432K immediate / 432K locks) [OK] InnoDB data size / buffer pool: 420.9M/18.0G -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Reduce your overall MySQL memory footprint for system stability Increasing the query_cache size over 128M may reduce performance Temporary table size is already large - reduce result set size Reduce your SELECT DISTINCT queries without LIMIT clauses Variables to adjust: *** MySQL's maximum memory usage is dangerously high *** *** Add RAM before increasing MySQL buffer variables *** query_cache_size (> 256M) [see warning above] Thanks in advanced for your help!

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?11.2RAC??????????????

- by JaneZhang(???)

?????,???????????????,???dbca???????,???????????dbca,?????????11.2???????,???????,??dbca??????????????????,???????????????? ????11.2???????RACDB2???,?????RACDB1? ?????rac1,????rac2? ?11.2?,?????grid?????GI,??oracle????????,????????oracle?????? 1. ??????????????????,?????,???????????:audit_file_dest, background_dump_dest, user_dump_dest ?core_dump_dest????audit_file_dest=/u01/app/oracle/admin/RACDB/adump,?????????,?????????:ORA-09925: Unable to create audit trail fileLinux-x86_64 Error: 2: No such file or directoryAdditional information: 99252. ????????????????????????????:SQL> alter system set instance_number=2 scope=spfile sid='RACDB2';SQL> alter system set thread=2 scope=spfile sid='RACDB2';SQL> alter system set undo_tablespace='UNDOTBS2' scope=spfile sid='RACDB2';SQL> alter system set local_listener='(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS_LIST=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=192.0.2.122)(PORT=1521))))' sid='RACDB2'; <=====192.0.2.122???2?VIP 3. ???????DB?$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/init<sid>.ora ?????DB?$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/init<sid>.ora,??????????????init<sid>.ora ????,????spfile???:=======================SPFILE='+DATA/racdb/spfileracdb.ora'??:[oracle@rac1 ~]$ scp $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/initRACDB1.ora rac2:$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/initRACDB2.ora <===????????24. ??????/etc/oratab,????????????:RACDB2:/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1:N 5. ???????????: DB?$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/ora<sid>.pwd ????DB?$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/ora<sid>.pwd,??????????????:[oracle@rac1 dbs]$ scp $ORACLE_HOME/dbs/orapwRACDB1 rac2:$ORACLE_HOME/dbs/orapwRACDB2 <==?????26. ?????????????,????????UNDO TABLESPACE?(??????dbca?????,???????undo tablespace????,?????????)??:SQL>CREATE UNDO TABLESPACE "UNDOTBS2" DATAFILE '/dev/….' SIZE 4096M ;???????:SQL>CREATE UNDO TABLESPACE "UNDOTBS2" DATAFILE '+DATA' SIZE 4096M ;7. ?????????????,????????redo thread?redo log:??:SQL> alter database add logfile thread 2 group 3 ('/dev/...', '/dev/...') size 1024M, group 4 ('/dev/...','dev/...') size 1024M;???????:SQL> alter database add logfile thread 2 group 3 ('+DATA','+RECO') size 1024M, group 4 ('+DATA','+RECO') size 1024M;SQL> alter database enable thread 2; <==????thread8. ??????????,?????????????:[oracle@rac2 admin]$su - oracle[oracle@rac2 admin]$export ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1[oracle@rac2 admin]$export ORACLE_SID=RACDB2[oracle@rac2 admin]$ sqlplus / as sysdbaSQL> startup <==??????,???????2????????????9. ?????OCR???GI??,?????????????:$srvctl add instance -d <database name> -i <new instance name> -n <new node name>Example of srvctl add instance command:============================[oracle@rac2 ~]$ srvctl add instance -d racdb -i RACDB2 -n rac2 <==????????,????ps -ef|grep smon???[oracle@rac2 dbs]$ ps -ef|grep smonroot 3453 1 1 Jun12 ? 04:03:05 /u01/app/11.2.0/grid/bin/osysmond.bingrid 3727 1 0 Jun12 ? 00:00:19 asm_smon_+ASM2oracle 5343 4543 0 14:06 pts/1 00:00:00 grep smonoracle 28736 1 0 Jun25 ? 00:00:03 ora_smon_RACDB2 <========??????10. ???????:$su - grid[grid@rac2 ~]$ crsctl stat res -t...ora.racdb.db 1 ONLINE ONLINE rac1 Open 2 OFFLINE OFFLINE rac2????,??????offline,????????????sqlplus??????sqlplus??????,???srvctl??:[grid@rac2 ~]$ su - oraclePassword: [oracle@rac2 ~]$ sqlplus / as sysdbaSQL> shutdown immediate;Database closed.Database dismounted.ORACLE instance shut down.SQL> exit[oracle@rac2 ~]$ srvctl start instance -d racdb -i RACDB2[oracle@rac2 ~]$ su - gridPassword: [grid@rac2 ~]$ crsctl stat res -tora.racdb.db 1 ONLINE ONLINE rac1 Open 2 ONLINE ONLINE rac2 Open 11. ?????????:[oracle@rac2 ~]$ crsctl stat res ora.racdb.db -pNAME=ora.racdb.dbTYPE=ora.database.typeACL=owner:oracle:rwx,pgrp:oinstall:rwx,other::r--ACTION_FAILURE_TEMPLATE=ACTION_SCRIPT=ACTIVE_PLACEMENT=1AGENT_FILENAME=%CRS_HOME%/bin/oraagent%CRS_EXE_SUFFIX%AUTO_START=restoreCARDINALITY=2CHECK_INTERVAL=1CHECK_TIMEOUT=30CLUSTER_DATABASE=trueDATABASE_TYPE=RACDB_UNIQUE_NAME=RACDBDEFAULT_TEMPLATE=PROPERTY(RESOURCE_CLASS=database) PROPERTY(DB_UNIQUE_NAME= CONCAT(PARSE(%NAME%, ., 2), %USR_ORA_DOMAIN%, .)) ELEMENT(INSTANCE_NAME= %GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME%) ELEMENT(DATABASE_TYPE= %DATABASE_TYPE%)DEGREE=1DESCRIPTION=Oracle Database resourceENABLED=1FAILOVER_DELAY=0FAILURE_INTERVAL=60FAILURE_THRESHOLD=1GEN_AUDIT_FILE_DEST=/u01/app/oracle/admin/RACDB/adumpGEN_START_OPTIONS=GEN_START_OPTIONS@SERVERNAME(rac1)=openGEN_START_OPTIONS@SERVERNAME(rac2)=openGEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME=GEN_USR_ORA_INST_NAME@SERVERNAME(rac1)=RACDB1HOSTING_MEMBERS=INSTANCE_FAILOVER=0LOAD=1LOGGING_LEVEL=1MANAGEMENT_POLICY=AUTOMATICNLS_LANG=NOT_RESTARTING_TEMPLATE=OFFLINE_CHECK_INTERVAL=0ONLINE_RELOCATION_TIMEOUT=0ORACLE_HOME=/u01/app/oracle/product/11.2.0/dbhome_1ORACLE_HOME_OLD=PLACEMENT=restrictedPROFILE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE=RESTART_ATTEMPTS=2ROLE=PRIMARYSCRIPT_TIMEOUT=60SERVER_POOLS=ora.RACDBSPFILE=+DATA/RACDB/spfileRACDB.oraSTART_DEPENDENCIES=hard(ora.DATA.dg,ora.RECO.dg) weak(type:ora.listener.type,global:type:ora.scan_listener.type,uniform:ora.ons,global:ora.gns) pullup(ora.DATA.dg,ora.RECO.dg)START_TIMEOUT=600STATE_CHANGE_TEMPLATE=STOP_DEPENDENCIES=hard(intermediate:ora.asm,shutdown:ora.DATA.dg,shutdown:ora.RECO.dg)STOP_TIMEOUT=600TYPE_VERSION=3.2UPTIME_THRESHOLD=1hUSR_ORA_DB_NAME=RACDBUSR_ORA_DOMAIN=USR_ORA_ENV=USR_ORA_FLAGS=USR_ORA_INST_NAME=USR_ORA_INST_NAME@SERVERNAME(rac1)=RACDB1USR_ORA_INST_NAME@SERVERNAME(rac2)=RACDB2USR_ORA_OPEN_MODE=openUSR_ORA_OPI=falseUSR_ORA_STOP_MODE=immediateVERSION=11.2.0.3.0???11.2,?OCR???database??,??????,???????????database???????database???????,??????,???????????????ASM???????????? ?:dbca ???????????:????????oracle????dbca:su - oracledbca?? RAC database?? Instance Management?? add an instance???active rac database??????? ??undo?redo??

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Troubleshooting Windows Authentication problems (no challenge) in IIS 7.5?

- by Aaronaught

I know that there are thousands of reports of people having trouble getting Integrated Windows Authentication to work with IIS, but they all seem to lead to web pages that don't apply or solutions that I've already tried. I've deployed dozens of sites like this before, so either there's something bizarre going on with the server/configuration, or I've been looking at this too long and not seeing the obvious. Simply put, everything works perfectly on my local machine, but falls apart on the production server, which as far as I can tell has the exact same configuration. On the local machine: The machine is running Windows 7 Ultimate, Service Pack 1, IIS 7.5. The site has been tested successfully, using both IIS and the VS Web Development Server. The IIS site config has all authentication methods disabled except Windows Authentication. The local machine is not on any domain. The Providers set up are Negotiate and NTLM (not Negotiate:Kerberos). Extended Protection is Off. All browsers tested (IE, Firefox, Chrome) show the challenge prompt and allow me to log in to the localhost domain with my (local) Windows account. All browsers tested also work using an opaque local IP address - so the browsers themselves don't seem to care whether the site appears "local" or "remote". I've added a display line to the web page which shows the currently-logged-in user and it shows exactly what I would expect (whichever local user I logged in with). On the remote machine: The server is running Windows Server 2008 R2, IIS 7.5. Loading the web page results in an immediate 401.2 error: You are not authorized to view this page due to invalid authentication headers. No challenge prompt ever appears. The IIS site config has all authentication methods disabled except Windows Authentication. The remote machine is not on any domain. The Providers set up are Negotiate and NTLM (not Negotiate:Kerberos). Extended Protection is Off. On the remote machine (remote desktop session), the same error appears in Internet Explorer regardless of whether the domain is localhost or the external IP address. If I try to view the remote web site from my local machine, the error is still 401, but a slightly different 401. No subcode, with the text: Access is denied due to invalid credentials. The Windows Authentication IIS role feature is installed. The WindowsAuthentication Module is added (at the Server level). The exact same error occurs if I turn off Windows Authentication and enable Basic Authentication. The site does load if I turn off Windows Authentication and enable Anonymous (obviously). I've already followed all of the troubleshooting steps on Microsoft Support: Troubleshooting HTTP 401 errors in IIS I've already tried the workaround shown on another Microsoft support page (supposedly to force NTLM as the only method). Last but not least, I tried turning on FREB for 401.2 errors and the results don't seem to tell me anything useful, all I see is the following warning: MODULE_SET_RESPONSE_ERROR_STATUS ModuleName IIS Web Core Notification 2 HttpStatus 401 HttpReason Unauthorized HttpSubStatus 2 ErrorCode 2147942405 ConfigExceptionInfo Notification AUTHENTICATE_REQUEST ErrorCode Access is denied. (0x80070005) ...this seems to just be telling me what I already know (that it's simply rejecting the request instead of negotiating the credentials). The trace does indicate that the WindowsAuthentication module is correctly loaded because there is a NOTIFY_MODULE_START line with ModuleName = WindowsAuthentication (and various other ASP.NET follow-up events - [un]fortunately, no interesting errors or warnings here). Can anyone tell me what I might be missing here? Quick Update: I'm a little uncomfortable sending a whole Wireshark dump as it would reveal IPs, URLs and other stuff, but I did a side-by-side comparison of the HTTP responses from localhost and the remote server in Fiddler, and it seems fairly self-evident what the problem is: Localhost: HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized Cache-Control: private Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 WWW-Authenticate: Negotiate WWW-Authenticate: NTLM X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:42:34 GMT Content-Length: 6399 Proxy-Support: Session-Based-Authentication Remote: HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized Content-Type: text/html Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5 X-Powered-By: ASP.NET Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:43:13 GMT Content-Length: 1293 Aside from a few seemingly-inconsequential differences like cache-control, the main difference is that the remote server is not sending the WWW-Authenticate headers back to the client. So, I guess that narrows the question down to: Why is IIS not sending WWW-Authenticate headers when Windows Authentication appears to be installed, loaded, and exclusively enabled?

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Mac OS X Server Open Directory does not push Software Update settings to clients

- by joxl

I have an Xserve G5 running Mac OS X Server 10.5.8 configured as an Open Directory master. I have also enabled and configured Software Update service on the machine. The SUS is configured to serve Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard clients (see http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10297359#10297359) The clients bound to the OD are a variety of Mac's running OS X 10.4, 10.5 or 10.6. In Workgroup Manager, I have created 3 machine groups for each client OS. Each group is configured with a custom SUS URL, and the managed client computers are members accordingly (see http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10493154#10493154) My problem is that the server pushes the SUS settings to some of the client machines, but not all. When I first configured all this stuff on the server (a few weeks ago) I was closely monitoring a few of the client machines to confirm that they received the custom settings. I noticed that some of the clients (10.4/5/6 alike) seemed to get the settings immediately, others didn't show the new settings until after a reboot. As I said, results are mixed across OS's, but some clients will not "sync" at all. My immediate thought was to unbind/rebind the problematic machines. I did this on several client computers with no success. For example, today I was working on one of the Tiger clients. I noticed it was not pointed at my local SUS, so I checked the OD binding; it was fine. Just to be sure I unbound the machine. Next, I checked WM and confirmed the computer record was gone. I noticed the machine group still had a residual (broken?) member from the unbound client; I manually removed this. Finally, I re-bound the client to OD and re-added the machine to it's correct group in WM. Unfortunately, the client still pings apple's SUS for updates. Just to play it safe I rebooted the client, but to no avail, it will not see my local SUS. To confirm that there is nothing wrong with the server, or the client's connection to it, forcefully pointed the machine at my SUS: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL "$LOCAL_SUS_URL" and the machine successfully updated off my local server. Great, successful updates, but problem not solved. I've done exhaustive reading on discussions.apple.com (not saying I read everything, I'm just saying I have read a lot) without a good answer. The discouraging thing is that a lot of OD problems I've read about only result in the sysadmin completely reinstalling the server, or OD, or some other similarly heavy-handed operation. At this point, I am not willing to go that route. I still have hope that I can find the reason for this flaky behavior. If anyone can point me in a helpful direction it would be much appreciated. EDIT: Indeed, some files are being pushed to the client: # from client machine: $ sudo find /Library -type f -name com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Library/Managed Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Library/Managed Preferences/username/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist A few weeks ago, prior to my (previously mentioned) modifications, the SUS was still running "stock". Which meant it could not serve SL (10.6) machines. At that time, the Software Update settings were setup in WM under User Groups. This didn't make any sense because some users work on multiple machines with different OS's. Before creating Machine Groups in WM, I deleted all the SU settings from the User Group Preferences. This just makes the whole thing more confusing, because when I see a file here: /Library/Managed Preferences/username/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist I assume it's still remaining from the "old" settings, because I wouldn't think a Machine Setting belongs there. Despite all the com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist hanging around under the Managed Preferences, why does the client machine still call home to Apple and not my SUS? # on client machine: $ date Tue Jan 25 17:01:46 EST 2011 $ softwareupdate --list Software Update Tool Copyright 2002-2005 Apple No new software available. switch terminals... # on server: $ tail -n1 /var/log/swupd/swupd_access_log 10.x.x.x - - [25/Jan/2011:15:54:29 -0500] XXXX POST "/cgi-bin/SoftwareUpdateServerStats" 200 13 ... Notice the date of the client softwareupdate and the latest access to the SUS server; the server never heard a peep from that client.

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Active Directory Password Policy Problem

- by Will

To Clarify: my question is why isn't my password policy applying to people in the domain. Hey guys, having trouble with our password policy in Active Directory. Sometimes it just helps me to type out what I’m seeing It appears to not be applying properly across the board. I am new to this environment and AD in general but I think I have a general grasp of what should be going on. It’s a pretty simple AD setup without too many Group Policies being applied. It looks something like this DOMAIN Default Domain Policy (link enabled) Password Policy (link enabled and enforce) Personal OU Force Password Change (completely empty nothing in this GPO) IT OU Lockout Policy (link enabled and enforced) CS OU Lockout Policy Accouting OU Lockout Policy The password policy and default domain policy both define the same things under Computer ConfigWindows seetings sec settings Account Policies / Password Policy Enforce password History : 24 passwords remembered Maximum Password age : 180 days Min password age: 14 days Minimum Password Length: 6 characters Password must meet complexity requirements: Enabled Store Passwords using reversible encryption: Disabled Account Policies / Account Lockout Policy Account Lockout Duration 10080 Minutes Account Lockout Threshold: 5 invalid login attempts Reset Account Lockout Counter after : 30 minutes IT lockout This just sets the screen saver settings to lock computers when the user is Idle. After running Group Policy modeling it seems like the password policy and default domain policy is getting applied to everyone. Here is the results of group policy modeling on MO-BLANCKM using the mblanck account, as you can see the policies are both being applied , with nothing important being denied Group Policy Results NCLGS\mblanck on NCLGS\MO-BLANCKM Data collected on: 12/29/2010 11:29:44 AM Summary Computer Configuration Summary General Computer name NCLGS\MO-BLANCKM Domain NCLGS.local Site Default-First-Site-Name Last time Group Policy was processed 12/29/2010 10:17:58 AM Group Policy Objects Applied GPOs Name Link Location Revision Default Domain Policy NCLGS.local AD (15), Sysvol (15) WSUS-52010 NCLGS.local/WSUS/Clients AD (54), Sysvol (54) Password Policy NCLGS.local AD (58), Sysvol (58) Denied GPOs Name Link Location Reason Denied Local Group Policy Local Empty Security Group Membership when Group Policy was applied BUILTIN\Administrators Everyone S-1-5-21-507921405-1326574676-682003330-1003 BUILTIN\Users NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users NCLGS\MO-BLANCKM$ NCLGS\Admin-ComputerAccounts-GP NCLGS\Domain Computers WMI Filters Name Value Reference GPO(s) None Component Status Component Name Status Last Process Time Group Policy Infrastructure Success 12/29/2010 10:17:59 AM EFS recovery Success (no data) 10/28/2010 9:10:34 AM Registry Success 10/28/2010 9:10:32 AM Security Success 10/28/2010 9:10:34 AM User Configuration Summary General User name NCLGS\mblanck Domain NCLGS.local Last time Group Policy was processed 12/29/2010 11:28:56 AM Group Policy Objects Applied GPOs Name Link Location Revision Default Domain Policy NCLGS.local AD (7), Sysvol (7) IT-Lockout NCLGS.local/Personal/CS AD (11), Sysvol (11) Password Policy NCLGS.local AD (5), Sysvol (5) Denied GPOs Name Link Location Reason Denied Local Group Policy Local Empty Force Password Change NCLGS.local/Personal Empty Security Group Membership when Group Policy was applied NCLGS\Domain Users Everyone BUILTIN\Administrators BUILTIN\Users NT AUTHORITY\INTERACTIVE NT AUTHORITY\Authenticated Users LOCAL NCLGS\MissingSkidEmail NCLGS\Customer_Service NCLGS\Email_Archive NCLGS\Job Ticket Users NCLGS\Office Staff NCLGS\CUSTOMER SERVI-1 NCLGS\Prestige_Jobs_Email NCLGS\Telecommuters NCLGS\Everyone - NCL WMI Filters Name Value Reference GPO(s) None Component Status Component Name Status Last Process Time Group Policy Infrastructure Success 12/29/2010 11:28:56 AM Registry Success 12/20/2010 12:05:51 PM Scripts Success 10/13/2010 10:38:40 AM Computer Configuration Windows Settings Security Settings Account Policies/Password Policy Policy Setting Winning GPO Enforce password history 24 passwords remembered Password Policy Maximum password age 180 days Password Policy Minimum password age 14 days Password Policy Minimum password length 6 characters Password Policy Password must meet complexity requirements Enabled Password Policy Store passwords using reversible encryption Disabled Password Policy Account Policies/Account Lockout Policy Policy Setting Winning GPO Account lockout duration 10080 minutes Password Policy Account lockout threshold 5 invalid logon attempts Password Policy Reset account lockout counter after 30 minutes Password Policy Local Policies/Security Options Network Security Policy Setting Winning GPO Network security: Force logoff when logon hours expire Enabled Default Domain Policy Public Key Policies/Autoenrollment Settings Policy Setting Winning GPO Enroll certificates automatically Enabled [Default setting] Renew expired certificates, update pending certificates, and remove revoked certificates Disabled Update certificates that use certificate templates Disabled Public Key Policies/Encrypting File System Properties Winning GPO [Default setting] Policy Setting Allow users to encrypt files using Encrypting File System (EFS) Enabled Certificates Issued To Issued By Expiration Date Intended Purposes Winning GPO SBurns SBurns 12/13/2007 5:24:30 PM File Recovery Default Domain Policy For additional information about individual settings, launch Group Policy Object Editor. Public Key Policies/Trusted Root Certification Authorities Properties Winning GPO [Default setting] Policy Setting Allow users to select new root certification authorities (CAs) to trust Enabled Client computers can trust the following certificate stores Third-Party Root Certification Authorities and Enterprise Root Certification Authorities To perform certificate-based authentication of users and computers, CAs must meet the following criteria Registered in Active Directory only Administrative Templates Windows Components/Windows Update Policy Setting Winning GPO Allow Automatic Updates immediate installation Enabled WSUS-52010 Allow non-administrators to receive update notifications Enabled WSUS-52010 Automatic Updates detection frequency Enabled WSUS-52010 Check for updates at the following interval (hours): 1 Policy Setting Winning GPO Configure Automatic Updates Enabled WSUS-52010 Configure automatic updating: 4 - Auto download and schedule the install The following settings are only required and applicable if 4 is selected. Scheduled install day: 0 - Every day Scheduled install time: 03:00 Policy Setting Winning GPO No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations Disabled WSUS-52010 Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations Enabled WSUS-52010 Wait the following period before prompting again with a scheduled restart (minutes): 30 Policy Setting Winning GPO Reschedule Automatic Updates scheduled installations Enabled WSUS-52010 Wait after system startup (minutes): 1 Policy Setting Winning GPO Specify intranet Microsoft update service location Enabled WSUS-52010 Set the intranet update service for detecting updates: http://lavender Set the intranet statistics server: http://lavender (example: http://IntranetUpd01) User Configuration Administrative Templates Control Panel/Display Policy Setting Winning GPO Hide Screen Saver tab Enabled IT-Lockout Password protect the screen saver Enabled IT-Lockout Screen Saver Enabled IT-Lockout Screen Saver executable name Enabled IT-Lockout Screen Saver executable name sstext3d.scr Policy Setting Winning GPO Screen Saver timeout Enabled IT-Lockout Number of seconds to wait to enable the Screen Saver Seconds: 1800 System/Power Management Policy Setting Winning GPO Prompt for password on resume from hibernate / suspend Enabled IT-Lockout

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