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• Feedback on meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius

  Once upon a time in a country far far away... Okay, actually it's not that bad but it has been a while since the last meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM). There have been plans in the past but it never really happened. Finally, Selven took the opportunity and organised a new meetup with low administrative overhead, proper scheduling on alternative dates and a small attendee's survey on the preferred option. All the pre-work was nicely executed. First, I wasn't sure whether it would be possible to attend. Luckily I got some additional information, like children should come, too, and I was sold to this community gathering. According to other long-term members of the LUGM it was the first time 'ever' that a gathering was organised outside of Quatre Bornes, and I have to admit it was great! LUGM - user group meeting on the 15.06.2013 in L'Escalier Quick overview of Linux & the LUGM With a little bit of delay the LUGM meeting officially started with a quick overview and introduction to Linux presented by Avinash. During the session he told the audience that there had been quite some activity over the island some years ago but unfortunately it had been quiet during recent times. Of course, we also spoke about the acknowledged world dominance of Linux - thanks to Android - and the interesting possibilities for countries like Mauritius. It is known that a couple of public institutions have there back-end infrastructure running on Red Hat Linux systems but the presence on the desktop is still very low. Users are simply hanging on to Windows XP and older versions of Microsoft Office. Following the introduction of the LUGM Ajay joined into the session and it quickly changed into a panel discussion with lots of interesting questions and answers, sharing of first-hand experience either on the job or in private use of Linux, and a couple of ideas about how the LUGM could promote Linux a bit more in Mauritius. It was great to get an insight into other attendee's opinion and activities. Especially taking into consideration that I'm already using Linux since around 1996/97. Frankly speaking, I bought a SuSE 4.x distribution back in those days because I couldn't achieve certain tasks on Windows NT 4.0 without spending a fortune. OpenELEC Mediacenter Next, Selven gave us decent introduction on OpenELEC: Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center (OpenELEC) is a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into an XBMC media center. OpenELEC is designed to make your system boot fast, and the install is so easy that anyone can turn a blank PC into a media machine in less than 15 minutes. I didn't know about it until this presentation. In the past, I was mainly attached to Video Disk Recorder (VDR) as it allows the use of satellite receiver cards very easily. Hm, somehow I'm still missing my precious HTPC that I had to leave back in Germany years ago. It was great piece of hardware and software; self-built PC in a standard HiFi-sized (43cm) black desktop casing with 2 full-featured Hauppauge DVB-s cards, an old-fashioned Voodoo graphics card, WiFi card, Pioneer slot-in DVD drive, and fully remote controlled via infra-red thanks to Debian, VDR and LIRC. With EP Guide, scheduled recordings and general multimedia centre it offered all the necessary comfort in the living room, besides a Nintendo game console; actually a GameCube at that time... But I have to admit that putting OpenELEC on a Raspberry Pi would be a cool DIY project in the near future. LUGM - our next generation of linux users (15.06.2013) Project Evil Genius (PEG) Don't be scared of the paragraph header. Ish gave us a cool explanation why he named it PEG - Project Evil Genius; it's because of the time of the day when he was scripting down his ideas to be able to build, package and provide software applications to various Linux distributions. The main influence came from openSuSE but the platform didn't cater for his needs and ideas, so he started to work out something on his own. During his passionate session he also talked about the amazing experience he had due to other Linux users from all over the world. During the next couple of days Ish promised to put his script to GitHub... Looking forward to that. Check out Ish's personal blog over at hacklog.in. Highly recommended to read. Why India? Simply because the registration fees per year for an Indian domain are approximately 20 times less than for a Mauritian domain (.mu). Exploring the beach of L'Escalier af the meeting 'After-party' at the beach of L'Escalier Puh, after such interesting sessions, ideas around Linux and good conversation during the breaks and over lunch it was time for a little break-out. Selven suggested that we all should head down to the beach of L'Escalier and get some impressions of nature down here in the south of the island. Talking about 'beach' ;-) - absolutely not comparable to the white-sanded ones here in Flic en Flac... There are no lagoons down at the south coast of Mauriitus, and watching the breaking waves is a different experience and joy after all. Unfortunately, I was a little bit worried about the thoughtless littering at such a remote location. You have to drive on natural paths through the sugar cane fields and I was really shocked by the amount of rubbish lying around almost everywhere. Sad, really sad and it concurs with Yasir's recent article on the same topic. Resumé & outlook It was a great event. I met with new people, had some good conversations, and even my children enjoyed themselves the whole day. The location was well-chosen, enough space for each and everyone, parking spaces and even a playground for the children. Also, a big "Thank You" to Selven and his helpers for the organisation and preparation of lunch. I'm kind of sure that this was an exceptional meeting of LUGM and I'm really looking forward to the next gathering of Linux geeks. Hopefully, soon. All images are courtesy of Avinash Meetoo. More pictures are available on Flickr.

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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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• 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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• Blogging locally and globally–my experience

  - by DigiMortal

  In Baltic MVP Summit 2011 there was discussion about having two blogs - one for local and another for global audience – and how to publish once written information in these blogs. There are many ways how to optimize your blogging activities if you have more than one audience and here you can find my experiences, best practices and advices about this topic. My two blogs I have to working blogs: this one here technology and programming blog for local market My local blog is almost five years old and it makes it one of the oldest company blogs in Estonia. It is still active and I write there as much as I have time for it. This blog here is active since September 2007, so it is about 3.5 years old right now. Both of these blogs are  my major hits in my MVP carrier and they have very good web statistics too. My local blog My local blog is about programming, web and technology. It has way wider target audience then this blog here has. By example, in my local blog I blog also about local events, cool new concept phones, different webs providing some interesting services etc. But local guys can find there also my postings about how to solve one or another programming problem and postings about Microsoft technologies I am playing with. This far my local blog has a lot of readers for such a small country that Estonia is. This blog has made me a lot of cool contacts and I have had there a lot of interesting discussions about different technical topics. Why I started this blog? Living in small country is different than living in big country. In small country you have less people and therefore smaller audience so you have to target more than one technical topic to find enough readers. In a same time you are still interested in your main topics and you want to reach to more people who are sharing same interests with you. Practically one day y will grow out from local market and you go global. This is how this blog was born. Was it worth to create, promote and mess with it? Every second I have put on my time to this blog has been worth of it. Thanks to this blog I have found new good friends and without them I think it is more boring to work on different problems and solutions. Defining target audiences One thing you should always do when having more than one blog is defining target audiences. If you are just technomaniac interested in sharing your stuff and make some new friends and have something to write to your MVP nomination form then you don’t have to go through complex targeting process. You can do it simple way and same effectively. Here is how I defined target audiences to my blogs: local blog – reader of my local blog is IT professional, software developer, technology innovator or just some guy who is interested in technology,   this blog – reader of this blog is experienced professional software developer who works on Microsoft technologies or software developer who is open minded and open to new technologies and interesting solutions to development problems. You can see how local blog – due to small market with less people – has wider definition for audience while this blog is heavily targeted to Microsoft technologies and specially to software development. On practical side these decisions are also made well I think because it is very hard to build up popular common IT blog. On global level it is better to target some specific niche and find readers who are professionals on your favorite topics. Thanks to this blog I have found new friends who are professional developers and I am very happy about all the discussions I have had with them. Publishing content to different blogs My local blog and this blog have some overlapping topics like .NET, databases and SEO. Due to this overlapping there is question: when I write posting to my local blog then should I have to publish same thing in my global blog? And if I write something to my global blog then should I publish same thing also in my local blog? Well, it really depends on the definition of your target audiences. If they match then of course it is good idea to translate you post and publish it also to another blog. But if you have different audiences then you may need to modify your posting before publishing it. The questions you have to answer are: is target audience interested in this topic? is target audience expecting more specific and deeper handling of this topic or are they expecting more general handling of topic? is the problem you are discussing actual for target audience or not? You have to answer these questions and after that make your decision. If you need to modify your original posting then take some time and do it. Provide quality to all your readers because they will respect you if you respect them. Cross-posting and referencing It is tempting to save time that preparing some blog post takes and if you have are done with posting in one blog it may seem like good idea to make short posting to another blog and add reference to first one where topic is discussed longer. Well, don’t do it – all your readers expect good quality content from you and jumping from one blog post to another is disturbing for them. Of course, there is problem with differences between target audiences. You may have wider target audience and some people may be interested in more specific handling of topic. In this case feel free to refer your blog you are writing in english. This is not working very well in opposite direction because almost all my global blog readers understand english but not estonian. By example, estonian language is complex one and online translating tools make very poor translations from estonian language. This is why I don’t even plan to publish postings here that refer to my local blog for more information. I am keeping these two blogs as two different worlds and if there is posting that fits well to both blogs I will write my posting to one blog and then answer previous three questions before posting same thing to another blog. Conclusion Growing out of your local market is not anything mysterious if you are living in small country. As it is harder to find people there who are interested in same topics with you then sooner or later you will start finding these new contacts from global audience. Global audience is bigger and to be visible there you must provide high quality content to your audience. It is something you will learn over time and you will learn every day something new when you are posting to your global blog. You may ask: if global blog is much more complex thing to do then is it worth to do at all? My answer is: yes, do it for sure. It is not easy thing to do when you start but if you work on your global blog and improve it over time you will get over all obstacles pretty soon. Just don’t forget one thing – content is king and your readers expect high quality from you.

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• How to implement smooth flocking

  - by Craig

  I'm working on a simple survival game, avoid the big guy and chase the the small guys to stay alive for as long as possible. I have taken the chase and evade example from MSDN create and drawn 20 mice on the screen. I want the small guys to flock when they arent evading. They are doing this, but it isnt as smooth as I would like it to be. How do i make the movement smoother? Its very jittery.# Below is what I have going at the moment, flocking code is within the IF statement, when it isnt set to evading. Any help would be greatly appreciated! :) namespace ChaseAndEvade { class MouseSprite { public enum MouseAiState { // evading the cat Evading, // the mouse can't see the "cat", and it's wandering around. Wander } // how fast can the mouse move? public float MaxMouseSpeed = 4.5f; // and how fast can it turn? public float MouseTurnSpeed = 0.20f; // MouseEvadeDistance controls the distance at which the mouse will flee from // cat. If the mouse is further than "MouseEvadeDistance" pixels away, he will // consider himself safe. public float MouseEvadeDistance = 100.0f; // this constant is similar to TankHysteresis. The value is larger than the // tank's hysteresis value because the mouse is faster than the tank: with a // higher velocity, small fluctuations are much more visible. public float MouseHysteresis = 60.0f; public Texture2D mouseTexture; public Vector2 mouseTextureCenter; public Vector2 mousePosition; public MouseAiState mouseState = MouseAiState.Wander; public float mouseOrientation; public Vector2 mouseWanderDirection; int separationImpact = 4; int cohesionImpact = 6; int alignmentImpact = 2; int sensorDistance = 50; public void UpdateMouse(Vector2 position, MouseSprite [] mice, int numberMice, int index) { Vector2 catPosition = position; int enemies = numberMice; // first, calculate how far away the mouse is from the cat, and use that // information to decide how to behave. If they are too close, the mouse // will switch to "active" mode - fleeing. if they are far apart, the mouse // will switch to "idle" mode, where it roams around the screen. // we use a hysteresis constant in the decision making process, as described // in the accompanying doc file. float distanceFromCat = Vector2.Distance(mousePosition, catPosition); // the cat is a safe distance away, so the mouse should idle: if (distanceFromCat > MouseEvadeDistance + MouseHysteresis) { mouseState = MouseAiState.Wander; } // the cat is too close; the mouse should run: else if (distanceFromCat < MouseEvadeDistance - MouseHysteresis) { mouseState = MouseAiState.Evading; } // if neither of those if blocks hit, we are in the "hysteresis" range, // and the mouse will continue doing whatever it is doing now. // the mouse will move at a different speed depending on what state it // is in. when idle it won't move at full speed, but when actively evading // it will move as fast as it can. this variable is used to track which // speed the mouse should be moving. float currentMouseSpeed; // the second step of the Update is to change the mouse's orientation based // on its current state. if (mouseState == MouseAiState.Evading) { // If the mouse is "active," it is trying to evade the cat. The evasion // behavior is accomplished by using the TurnToFace function to turn // towards a point on a straight line facing away from the cat. In other // words, if the cat is point A, and the mouse is point B, the "seek // point" is C. // C // B // A Vector2 seekPosition = 2 * mousePosition - catPosition; // Use the TurnToFace function, which we introduced in the AI Series 1: // Aiming sample, to turn the mouse towards the seekPosition. Now when // the mouse moves forward, it'll be trying to move in a straight line // away from the cat. mouseOrientation = ChaseAndEvadeGame.TurnToFace(mousePosition, seekPosition, mouseOrientation, MouseTurnSpeed); // set currentMouseSpeed to MaxMouseSpeed - the mouse should run as fast // as it can. currentMouseSpeed = MaxMouseSpeed; } else { // if the mouse isn't trying to evade the cat, it should just meander // around the screen. we'll use the Wander function, which the mouse and // tank share, to accomplish this. mouseWanderDirection and // mouseOrientation are passed by ref so that the wander function can // modify them. for more information on ref parameters, see // http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/14akc2c7(VS.80).aspx ChaseAndEvadeGame.Wander(mousePosition, ref mouseWanderDirection, ref mouseOrientation, MouseTurnSpeed); // if the mouse is wandering, it should only move at 25% of its maximum // speed. currentMouseSpeed = .25f * MaxMouseSpeed; Vector2 separate = Vector2.Zero; Vector2 moveCloser = Vector2.Zero; Vector2 moveAligned = Vector2.Zero; // What the AI does when it sees other AIs for (int j = 0; j < enemies; j++) { if (index != j) { // Calculate a vector towards another AI Vector2 separation = mice[index].mousePosition - mice[j].mousePosition; // Only react if other AI is within a certain distance if ((separation.Length() < this.sensorDistance) & (separation.Length()> 0) ) { moveAligned += mice[j].mouseWanderDirection; float distance = Math.Abs(separation.Length()); if (distance == 0) distance = 1; moveCloser += mice[j].mousePosition; separation.Normalize(); separate += separation / distance; } } } if (moveAligned.LengthSquared() != 0) { moveAligned.Normalize(); } if (moveCloser.LengthSquared() != 0) { moveCloser.Normalize(); } moveCloser /= enemies; mice[index].mousePosition += (separate * separationImpact) + (moveCloser * cohesionImpact) + (moveAligned * alignmentImpact); } // The final step is to move the mouse forward based on its current // orientation. First, we construct a "heading" vector from the orientation // angle. To do this, we'll use Cosine and Sine to tell us the x and y // components of the heading vector. See the accompanying doc for more // information. Vector2 heading = new Vector2( (float)Math.Cos(mouseOrientation), (float)Math.Sin(mouseOrientation)); // by multiplying the heading and speed, we can get a velocity vector. the // velocity vector is then added to the mouse's current position, moving him // forward. mousePosition += heading * currentMouseSpeed; } } }

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• Bouncing off a circular Boundary with multiple balls?

  - by Anarkie

  I am making a game like this : Yellow Smiley has to escape from red smileys, when yellow smiley hits the boundary game is over, when red smileys hit the boundary they should bounce back with the same angle they came, like shown below: Every 10 seconds a new red smiley comes in the big circle, when red smiley hits yellow, game is over, speed and starting angle of red smileys should be random. I control the yellow smiley with arrow keys. The biggest problem I have reflecting the red smileys from the boundary with the angle they came. I don't know how I can give a starting angle to a red smiley and bouncing it with the angle it came. I would be glad for any tips! My js source code : var canvas = document.getElementById("mycanvas"); var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d"); // Object containing some global Smiley properties. var SmileyApp = { radius: 15, xspeed: 0, yspeed: 0, xpos:200, // x-position of smiley ypos: 200 // y-position of smiley }; var SmileyRed = { radius: 15, xspeed: 0, yspeed: 0, xpos:350, // x-position of smiley ypos: 65 // y-position of smiley }; var SmileyReds = new Array(); for (var i=0; i<5; i++){ SmileyReds[i] = { radius: 15, xspeed: 0, yspeed: 0, xpos:350, // x-position of smiley ypos: 67 // y-position of smiley }; SmileyReds[i].xspeed = Math.floor((Math.random()*50)+1); SmileyReds[i].yspeed = Math.floor((Math.random()*50)+1); } function drawBigCircle() { var centerX = canvas.width / 2; var centerY = canvas.height / 2; var radiusBig = 300; ctx.beginPath(); ctx.arc(centerX, centerY, radiusBig, 0, 2 * Math.PI, false); // context.fillStyle = 'green'; // context.fill(); ctx.lineWidth = 5; // context.strokeStyle = '#003300'; // green ctx.stroke(); } function lineDistance( positionx, positiony ) { var xs = 0; var ys = 0; xs = positionx - 350; xs = xs * xs; ys = positiony - 350; ys = ys * ys; return Math.sqrt( xs + ys ); } function drawSmiley(x,y,r) { // outer border ctx.lineWidth = 3; ctx.beginPath(); ctx.arc(x,y,r, 0, 2*Math.PI); //red ctx.fillStyle="rgba(255,0,0, 0.5)"; ctx.fillStyle="rgba(255,255,0, 0.5)"; ctx.fill(); ctx.stroke(); // mouth ctx.beginPath(); ctx.moveTo(x+0.7*r, y); ctx.arc(x,y,0.7*r, 0, Math.PI, false); // eyes var reye = r/10; var f = 0.4; ctx.moveTo(x+f*r, y-f*r); ctx.arc(x+f*r-reye, y-f*r, reye, 0, 2*Math.PI); ctx.moveTo(x-f*r, y-f*r); ctx.arc(x-f*r+reye, y-f*r, reye, -Math.PI, Math.PI); // nose ctx.moveTo(x,y); ctx.lineTo(x, y-r/2); ctx.lineWidth = 1; ctx.stroke(); } function drawSmileyRed(x,y,r) { // outer border ctx.lineWidth = 3; ctx.beginPath(); ctx.arc(x,y,r, 0, 2*Math.PI); //red ctx.fillStyle="rgba(255,0,0, 0.5)"; //yellow ctx.fillStyle="rgba(255,255,0, 0.5)"; ctx.fill(); ctx.stroke(); // mouth ctx.beginPath(); ctx.moveTo(x+0.4*r, y+10); ctx.arc(x,y+10,0.4*r, 0, Math.PI, true); // eyes var reye = r/10; var f = 0.4; ctx.moveTo(x+f*r, y-f*r); ctx.arc(x+f*r-reye, y-f*r, reye, 0, 2*Math.PI); ctx.moveTo(x-f*r, y-f*r); ctx.arc(x-f*r+reye, y-f*r, reye, -Math.PI, Math.PI); // nose ctx.moveTo(x,y); ctx.lineTo(x, y-r/2); ctx.lineWidth = 1; ctx.stroke(); } // --- Animation of smiley moving with constant speed and bounce back at edges of canvas --- var tprev = 0; // this is used to calculate the time step between two successive calls of run function run(t) { requestAnimationFrame(run); if (t === undefined) { t=0; } var h = t - tprev; // time step tprev = t; SmileyApp.xpos += SmileyApp.xspeed * h/1000; // update position according to constant speed SmileyApp.ypos += SmileyApp.yspeed * h/1000; // update position according to constant speed for (var i=0; i<SmileyReds.length; i++){ SmileyReds[i].xpos += SmileyReds[i].xspeed * h/1000; // update position according to constant speed SmileyReds[i].ypos += SmileyReds[i].yspeed * h/1000; // update position according to constant speed } // change speed direction if smiley hits canvas edges if (lineDistance(SmileyApp.xpos, SmileyApp.ypos) + SmileyApp.radius > 300) { alert("Game Over"); } // redraw smiley at new position ctx.clearRect(0,0,canvas.height, canvas.width); drawBigCircle(); drawSmiley(SmileyApp.xpos, SmileyApp.ypos, SmileyApp.radius); for (var i=0; i<SmileyReds.length; i++){ drawSmileyRed(SmileyReds[i].xpos, SmileyReds[i].ypos, SmileyReds[i].radius); } } // uncomment these two lines to get every going // SmileyApp.speed = 100; run(); // --- Control smiley motion with left/right arrow keys function arrowkeyCB(event) { event.preventDefault(); if (event.keyCode === 37) { // left arrow SmileyApp.xspeed = -100; SmileyApp.yspeed = 0; } else if (event.keyCode === 39) { // right arrow SmileyApp.xspeed = 100; SmileyApp.yspeed = 0; } else if (event.keyCode === 38) { // up arrow SmileyApp.yspeed = -100; SmileyApp.xspeed = 0; } else if (event.keyCode === 40) { // right arrow SmileyApp.yspeed = 100; SmileyApp.xspeed = 0; } } document.addEventListener('keydown', arrowkeyCB, true); JSFiddle : http://jsfiddle.net/gj4Q7/

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• HTG Explains: Should You Buy Extended Warranties?

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Buy something at an electronics store and you’ll be confronted by a pushy salesperson who insists you need an extended warranty. You’ll also see extended warranties pushed hard when shopping online. But are they worth it? There’s a reason stores push extended warranties so hard. They’re almost always pure profit for the store involved. An electronics store may live on razor-thin product margins and make big profits on extended warranties and overpriced HDMI cables. You’re Already Getting Multiple Warranties First, back up. The product you’re buying already includes a warranty. In fact, you’re probably getting several different types of warranties. Store Return and Exchange: Most electronics stores allow you to return a malfunctioning product within the first 15 or 30 days and they’ll provide you with a new one. The exact period of time will vary from store to store. If you walk out of the store with a defective product and have to swap it for a new one within the first few weeks, this should be easy. Manufacturer Warranty: A device’s manufacturer — whether the device is a laptop, a television, or a graphics card — offers their own warranty period. The manufacturer warranty covers you after the store refuses to take the product back and exchange it. The length of this warranty depends on the type of product. For example, a cheap laptop may only offer a one-year manufacturer warranty, while a more expensive laptop may offer a two-year warranty. Credit Card Warranty Extension: Many credit cards offer free extended warranties on products you buy with that credit card. Credit card companies will often give you an additional year of warranty. For example, if you buy a laptop with a two year warranty and it fails in the third year, you could then contact your credit card company and they’d cover the cost of fixing or replacing it. Check your credit card’s benefits and fine print for more information. Why Extended Warranties Are Bad You’re already getting a fairly long warranty period, especially if you have a credit card that offers you a free extended warranty — these are fairly common. If the product you get is a “lemon” and has a manufacturing error, it will likely fail pretty soon — well within your warranty period. The extended warranty matters after all your other warranties are exhausted. In the case of a laptop with a two-year warranty that you purchase with a credit card giving you a one-year warranty extension, your extended warranty will kick in three years after you purchase the laptop. In that many years, your current laptop will likely feel pretty old and laptops that are as good — or better — will likely be pretty cheap. If it’s a television, better television displays will be available at a lower price point. You’ll either want to upgrade to a newer model or you’ll be able to buy a new, just-as-good product for very cheap. You’ll only have to pay out-of-pocket if your device fails after the normal warranty period — in over two or three years for typical laptops purchased with a decent credit card. Save the money you would have spent on the warranty and put it towards a future upgrade. How Much Do Extended Warranties Cost? Let’s look at an example from a typical pushy retail outlet, Best Buy. We went to Best Buy’s website and found a pretty standard $600 Samsung laptop. This laptop comes with a one-year warranty period. If purchased with a fairly common credit card, you can easily get a two-year warranty period on this laptop without spending an additional penny. (Yes, such credit cards are available with no yearly fees.) During the check-out process, Best Buy tries to sell you a Geek Squad “Accidental Protection Plan.” To get an additional year of Best Buy’s extended warranty, you’d have to pay $324.98 for a “3-Year Accidental Protection Plan”. You’d basically be paying more than half the price of your laptop for an additional year of warranty — remember, the standard warranties would cover you anyway for the first two years. If this laptop did break sometime between two and three years from now, we wouldn’t be surprised if you could purchase a comparable laptop for about $325 anyway. And, if you don’t need to replace it, you’ve saved that money. Best Buy would object that this isn’t a standard extended warranty. It’s a supercharged warranty plan that will also provide coverage if you spill something on your laptop or drop it and break it. You just have to ask yourself a question. What are the odds that you’ll drop your laptop or spill something on it? They’re probably pretty low if you’re a typical human being. Is it worth spending more than half the price of the laptop just in case you’ll make an uncommon mistake? Probably not. There may be occasional exceptions to this — some Apple users swear by Apple’s AppleCare, for example — but you should generally avoid buying these things. There’s a reason stores are so pushy about extended warranties, and it’s not because they want to help protect you. It’s because they’re making lots of profit from these plans, and they’re making so much profit because they’re not a good deal for customers. Image Credit: Philip Taylor on Flickr     

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• PASS Summit 2010 BI Workshop Feedbacks

  - by Davide Mauri

  As many other speakers already did, I’d like to share with the SQL Community the feedback of my PASS Summit 2010 Workshop. For those who were not there, my workshop was the “BI From A-Z” and the main objective of that workshop was to introduce people in the BI world not only from a technical point of view but insist a lot on the methodological and “engineered” approach. The will to put more engineering in the IT (and specially in the BI field) is something that has been growing stronger and stronger in me every day for of this last 5 years since is simply envy the fact that Airbus, Fincatieri, BMW (just to name a few) can create very complex machine “just” using putting people together and giving them some rules to follow (Of course this is an oversimplification but I think you get what I mean). The key point of engineering is that, after having defined the project blueprint, you have the possibility to give to a huge number of people, the rules to follow, the correct tools in order to implement the rules easily and semi-automatically and a way to measure the quality of the results. Could this be done in IT? Very big question, so my scope is now limited to BI. So that’s the main point of my workshop: and entry-level approach to BI (level was 200) in order to allow attendees to know the basics, to understand what tools they should use for which purpose and, above all, a set of rules and tools in order to make a BI solution scalable in terms of people working on it, while still maintaining a very good quality. All done not focusing only on the practice but explaining the theory behind to see how it can help *a lot* to build a correct solution despite the technology used to implement it. The idea is to reach a point where more then 70% of the work done to create a BI solution can be reused even if technologies changes. This is a very demanding challenge nowadays with the coming of Denali and its column-aligned storage and the shiny-new DAX language. As you may understand I was looking forward to get the feedback since you may have noticed that there’s a lot of “architectural” stuff in IT but really nothing on “engineering”. So how the session could be perceived by the attendees was really unknown to me. The feedback could also give a good indication if the need of more “engineering” is something I feel only by myself or if is something more broad. I’m very happy to be able to say that the overall score of 4.75 put my workshop in the TOP 20 session (on near 200 sessions)! Here’s the detailed evaluations: How would you rate the usefulness of the information presented in your day-to-day environment? 4.75 Answer:    # of Responses 3    1         4    12        5    42               How would you rate the Speaker's presentation skills? 4.80 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 1         4 : 9         5 : 45               How would you rate the Speaker's knowledge of the subject? 4.95 Answer:    # of Responses 4 :  3         5 : 52               How would you rate the accuracy of the session title, description and experience level to the actual session? 4.75 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 2         4 : 10         5 : 43               How would you rate the amount of time allocated to cover the topic/session? 4.44 Answer:    # of Responses 3 : 7         4 : 17        5 : 31               How would you rate the quality of the presentation materials? 4.62 Answer:    # of Responses 4 : 21        5 : 34 The comments where all very positive. Many of them asked for more time on the subject (or to shorten the very last topics). I’ll make treasure of these comments and will review the content accordingly. We’ll organize a two-day classes on this topic, where also more examples will be shown and some arguments will be explained more deeply. I’d just like to answer a comment that asks how much of what I shown is “universally applicable”. I can tell you that all of our BI project follow these rules and they’ve been applied to different markets (Insurance, Fashion, GDO) with different people and different teams and they allowed us to be “Adaptive” against the customer. The more the rules are well defined and the more there are tools that supports their implementations, the easier is to add new people to the project and to add or change solution features. Think of a car. How come that almost any mechanic can help you to fix a problem? Because they know what to expect. Because there a rules that allow them to identify the problem without having to discover each time how the car has been implemented build. And this is of course also true for car upgrades/improvements. Last but not least: thanks a lot to everyone for coming!

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• Restoring databases to a set drive and directory

  - by okeofs

   Restoring databases to a set drive and directory Introduction Often people say that necessity is the mother of invention. In this case I was faced with the dilemma of having to restore several databases, with multiple ‘ndf’ files, and having to restore them with different physical file names, drives and directories on servers other than the servers from which they originated. As most of us would do, I went to Google to see if I could find some code to achieve this task and found some interesting snippets on Pinal Dave’s website. Naturally, I had to take it further than the code snippet, HOWEVER it was a great place to start. Creating a temp table to hold database file details First off, I created a temp table which would hold the details of the individual data files within the database. Although there are a plethora of fields (within the temp table below), I utilize LogicalName only within this example. The temporary table structure may be seen below:   create table #tmp ( LogicalName nvarchar(128)  ,PhysicalName nvarchar(260)  ,Type char(1)  ,FileGroupName nvarchar(128)  ,Size numeric(20,0)  ,MaxSize numeric(20,0), Fileid tinyint, CreateLSN numeric(25,0), DropLSN numeric(25, 0), UniqueID uniqueidentifier, ReadOnlyLSN numeric(25,0), ReadWriteLSN numeric(25,0), BackupSizeInBytes bigint, SourceBlocSize int, FileGroupId int, LogGroupGUID uniqueidentifier, DifferentialBaseLSN numeric(25,0), DifferentialBaseGUID uniqueidentifier, IsReadOnly bit, IsPresent bit,  TDEThumbPrint varchar(50) )    We now declare and populate a variable(@path), setting the variable to the path to our SOURCE database backup. declare @path varchar(50) set @path = 'P:\DATA\MYDATABASE.bak'   From this point, we insert the file details of our database into the temp table. Note that we do so by utilizing a restore statement HOWEVER doing so in ‘filelistonly’ mode.   insert #tmp EXEC ('restore filelistonly from disk = ''' + @path + '''')   At this point, I depart from what I gleaned from Pinal Dave.   I now instantiate a few more local variables. The use of each variable will be evident within the cursor (which follows):   Declare @RestoreString as Varchar(max) Declare @NRestoreString as NVarchar(max) Declare @LogicalName  as varchar(75) Declare @counter as int Declare @rows as int set @counter = 1 select @rows = COUNT(*) from #tmp  -- Count the number of records in the temp                                    -- table   Declaring and populating the cursor At this point I do realize that many people are cringing about the use of a cursor. Being an Oracle professional as well, I have learnt that there is a time and place for cursors. I would remind the reader that the data that will be read into the cursor is from a local temp table and as such, any locking of the records (within the temp table) is not really an issue.   DECLARE MY_CURSOR Cursor  FOR  Select LogicalName  From #tmp   Parsing the logical names from within the cursor. A small caveat that works in our favour,  is that the first logical name (of our database) is the logical name of the primary data file (.mdf). Other files, except for the very last logical name, belong to secondary data files. The last logical name is that of our database log file.   I now open my cursor and populate the variable @RestoreString Open My_Cursor  set @RestoreString =  'RESTORE DATABASE [MYDATABASE] FROM DISK = N''P:\DATA\ MYDATABASE.bak''' + ' with  '   We now fetch the first record from the temp table.   Fetch NEXT FROM MY_Cursor INTO @LogicalName   While there are STILL records left within the cursor, we dynamically build our restore string. Note that we are using concatenation to create ‘one big restore executable string’.   Note also that the target physical file name is hardwired, as is the target directory.   While (@@FETCH_STATUS <> -1) BEGIN IF (@@FETCH_STATUS <> -2) -- As long as there are no rows missing select @RestoreString = case  when @counter = 1 then -- This is the mdf file    @RestoreString + 'move  N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.mdf' + '''' + ', '   -- OK, if it passes through here we are dealing with an .ndf file -- Note that Counter must be greater than 1 and less than the number of rows.   when @counter > 1 and @counter < @rows then -- These are the ndf file(s)    @RestoreString + 'move  N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.ndf' + '''' + ', '   -- OK, if it passes through here we are dealing with the log file When @LogicalName like '%log%' then    @RestoreString + 'move  N''' + @LogicalName + '''' + ' TO N’’X:\DATA1\'+ @LogicalName + '.ldf' +'''' end --Increment the counter   set @counter = @counter + 1 FETCH NEXT FROM MY_CURSOR INTO @LogicalName END   At this point we have populated the varchar(max) variable @RestoreString with a concatenation of all the necessary file names. What we now need to do is to run the sp_executesql stored procedure, to effect the restore.   First, we must place our ‘concatenated string’ into an nvarchar based variable. Obviously this will only work as long as the length of @RestoreString is less than varchar(max) / 2.   set @NRestoreString = @RestoreString EXEC sp_executesql @NRestoreString   Upon completion of this step, the database should be restored to the server. I now close and deallocate the cursor, and to be clean, I would also drop my temp table.   CLOSE MY_CURSOR DEALLOCATE MY_CURSOR GO   Conclusion Restoration of databases on different servers with different physical names and on different drives are a fact of life. Through the use of a few variables and a simple cursor, we may achieve an efficient and effective way to achieve this task.

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• At times, you need to hire a professional.

  - by Phil Factor

  After months of increasingly demanding toil, the development team I belonged to was told that the project was to be canned and the whole team would be fired.  I’d been brought into the team as an expert in the data implications of a business re-engineering of a major financial institution. Nowadays, you’d call me a data architect, I suppose.  I’d spent a happy year being paid consultancy fees solving a succession of interesting problems until the point when the company lost is nerve, and closed the entire initiative. The IT industry was in one of its characteristic mood-swings downwards.  After the announcement, we met in the canteen. A few developers had scented the smell of death around the project already hand had been applying unsuccessfully for jobs. There was a sense of doom in the mass of dishevelled and bleary-eyed developers. After giving vent to anger and despair, talk turned to getting new employment. It was then that I perked up. I’m not an obvious choice to give advice on getting, or passing,  IT interviews. I reckon I’ve failed most of the job interviews I’ve ever attended. I once even failed an interview for a job I’d already been doing perfectly well for a year. The jobs I’ve got have mostly been from personal recommendation. Paradoxically though, from years as a manager trying to recruit good staff, I know a lot about what IT managers are looking for.  I gave an impassioned speech outlining the important factors in getting to an interview.  The most important thing, certainly in my time at work is the quality of the résumé or CV. I can’t even guess the huge number of CVs (résumés) I’ve read through, scanning for candidates worth interviewing.  Many IT Developers find it impossible to describe their  career succinctly on two sides of paper.  They leave chunks of their life out (were they in prison?), get immersed in detail, put in irrelevancies, describe what was going on at work rather than what they themselves did, exaggerate their importance, criticize their previous employers, aren’t  aware of the important aspects of a role to a potential employer, suffer from shyness and modesty,  and lack any sort of organized perspective of their work. There are many ways of failing to write a decent CV. Many developers suffer from the delusion that their worth can be recognized purely from the code that they write, and shy away from anything that seems like self-aggrandizement. No.  A resume must make a good impression, which means presenting the facts about yourself in a clear and positive way. You can’t do it yourself. Why not have your resume professionally written? A good professional CV Writer will know the qualities being looked for in a CV and interrogate you to winkle them out. Their job is to make order and sense out of a confused career, to summarize in one page a mass of detail that presents to any recruiter the information that’s wanted. To stand back and describe an accurate summary of your skills, and work-experiences dispassionately, without rancor, pity or modesty. You are no more capable of producing an objective documentation of your career than you are of taking your own appendix out.  My next recommendation was more controversial. This is to have a professional image overhaul, or makeover, followed by a professionally-taken photo portrait. I discovered this by accident. It is normal for IT professionals to face impossible deadlines and long working hours by looking more and more like something that had recently blocked a sink. Whilst working in IT, and in a state of personal dishevelment, I’d been offered the role in a high-powered amateur production of an old ex- Broadway show, purely for my singing voice. I was supposed to be the presentable star. When the production team saw me, the air was thick with tension and despair. I was dragged kicking and protesting through a succession of desperate grooming, scrubbing, dressing, dieting. I emerged feeling like “That jewelled mass of millinery, That oiled and curled Assyrian bull, Smelling of musk and of insolence.” (Tennyson Maud; A Monodrama (1855) Section v1 stanza 6) I was then photographed by a professional stage photographer.  When the photographs were delivered, I was amazed. It wasn’t me, but it looked somehow respectable, confident, trustworthy.   A while later, when the show had ended, I took the photos, and used them for work. They went with the CV to job applications. It did the trick better than I could ever imagine.  My views went down big with the developers. Old rivalries were put immediately to one side. We voted, with a show of hands, to devote our energies for the entire notice period to getting employable. We had a team sourcing the CV Writer,  a team organising the make-overs and photographer, and a third team arranging  mock interviews. A fourth team determined the best websites and agencies for recruitment, with the help of friends in the trade.  Because there were around thirty developers, we were in a good negotiating position.  Of the three CV Writers we found who lived locally, one proved exceptional. She was an ex-journalist with an eye to detail, and years of experience in manipulating language. We tried her skills out on a developer who seemed a hopeless case, and he was called to interview within a week.  I was surprised, too, how many companies were experts at image makeovers. Within the month, we all looked like those weird slick  people in the ‘Office-tagged’ stock photographs who stare keenly and interestedly at PowerPoint slides in sleek chromium-plated high-rise offices. The portraits we used still adorn the entries of many of my ex-colleagues in LinkedIn. After a months’ worth of mock interviews, and technical Q&A, our stutters, hesitations, evasions and periphrastic circumlocutions were all gone.  There is little more to relate. With the résumés or CVs, mugshots, and schooling in how to pass interviews, we’d all got new and better-paid jobs well  before our month’s notice was ended. Whilst normally, an IT team under the axe is a sad and depressed place to belong to, this wonderful group of people had proved the power of organized group action in turning the experience to advantage. It left us feeling slightly guilty that we were somehow cheating, but I guess we were merely leveling the playing-field.

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• Right-Time Retail Part 1

  - by David Dorf

  This is the first in a three-part series. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Revolution Technology enables some amazing feats in retail. I can order flowers for my wife while flying 30,000 feet in the air. I can order my groceries in the subway and have them delivered later that day. I can even see how clothes look on me without setting foot in a store. Who knew that a TV, diamond necklace, or even a car would someday be as easy to purchase as a candy bar? Can technology make a mattress an impulse item? Wake-up and your back is hurting, so you rollover and grab your iPad, then a new mattress is delivered the next day. Behind the scenes the many processes are being choreographed to make the sale happen. This includes moving data between systems with the least amount for friction, which in some cases is near real-time. But real-time isn’t appropriate for all the integrations. Think about what a completely real-time retailer would look like. A consumer grabs toothpaste off the shelf, and all systems are immediately notified so that the backroom clerk comes running out and pushes the consumer aside so he can replace the toothpaste on the shelf. Such a system is not only cost prohibitive, but it’s also very inefficient and ineffectual. Retailers must balance the realities of people, processes, and systems to find the right speed of execution. That’ what “right-time retail” means. Retailers used to sell during the day and count the money and restock at night, but global expansion and the Web have complicated that simplistic viewpoint. Our 24hr society demands not only access but also speed, which constantly pushes the boundaries of our IT systems. In the last twenty years, there have been three major technology advancements that have moved us closer to real-time systems. Networking is the first technology that drove the real-time trend. As systems became connected, it became easier to move data between them. In retail we no longer had to mail the daily business report back to corporate each day as the dial-up modem could transfer the data. That was soon replaced with trickle-polling, when sale transactions were occasionally sent from stores to corporate throughout the day, often through VSAT. Then we got terrestrial networks like DSL and Ethernet that allowed the constant stream of data between stores and corporate. When corporate could see the sales transactions coming from stores, it could better plan for replenishment and promotions. That drove the need for speed into the supply chain and merchandising, but for many years those systems were stymied by the huge volumes of data. Nordstrom has 150 million SKU/Store combinations when planning (RPAS); The Gap generates 110 million price changes during end-of-season (RPM); Argos does 1.78 billion calculations executed each day for replenishment planning (AIP). These areas are now being alleviated by the second technology, storage. The typical laptop disk drive runs at 5,400rpm with PCs stepping up to 7,200rpm and servers hitting 15,000rpm. But the platters can only spin so fast, so to squeeze more performance we’ve had to rely on things like disk striping. Then solid state drives (SSDs) were introduced and prices continue to drop. (Augmenting your harddrive with a SSD is the single best PC upgrade these days.) RAM continues to be expensive, but compressing data in memory has allowed more efficient use. So a few years back, Oracle decided to build a box that incorporated all these advancements to move us closer to real-time. This family of products, often categorized as engineered systems, combines the hardware and software so that they work together to provide better performance. How much better? If Exadata powered a 747, you’d go from New York to Paris in 42 minutes, and it would carry 5,000 passengers. If Exadata powered baseball, games would last only 18 minutes and Boston’s Fenway would hold 370,000 fans. The Exa-family enables processing more data in less time. So with faster networks and storage, that brings us to the third and final ingredient. If we continue to process data in traditional ways, we won’t be able to take advantage of the faster networks and storage. Enter what Harvard calls “The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” – the data scientist. New technologies like the Hadoop-powered Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle Advanced Analytics, and Oracle Endeca Information Discovery change the way in which we organize data. These technologies allow us to extract actionable information from raw data at incredible speeds, often ad-hoc. So the foundation to support the real-time enterprise exists, but how does a retailer begin to take advantage? The most visible way is through real-time marketing, but I’ll save that for part 3 and instead begin with improved integrations for the assets you already have in part 2.

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• I'm a contract developer and I think I'm about to get screwed [closed]

  - by kagaku

  I do contract development on the side. You could say that I'm a contract developer? Considering I've only ever had one client I'd say that's not exactly the truth - more like I took a side job and needed some extra cash. It started out as a "rebuild our website and we'll pay you $10k" type project. Once that was complete (a bit over schedule, but certainly not over budget), the company hired me on as a "long term support" contractor. The contract is to go from March of this year, expiring on December 31st of this year - 10 months. Over which a payment is to be paid on the 30th of each month for a set amount. I've been fulfilling my end of the contract on all points - doing server maintenence, application and database changes, doing huge rush changes and pretty much just going above and beyond. Currently I'm in the middle of development of an iPhone mobile application (PhoneGap based) which is nearing completion (probably 3-4 weeks from submission). It has not been all peaches and flowers though. Each and every month when my paycheck comes due, there always seems to be an issue of sorts. These issues did not occur during the initial project, only during the support contract. The actual contract states that my check should be mailed out on the 30th of the month. I have received my check on time approximately once (on time being about 2-3 days within the 30th). I've received my paycheck as late as the 15th of the next month - over two weeks late. I've put up with it because I need the paycheck. There have been promises and promises of "we'll send it out on time next time! I promise" - only to receive it just as late the next month. When I ask about payment they give me a vibe like "why are you only worried about money?" - unfortunately I don't have the luxury of not worrying about money. The last straw was with my August payment, which should have been mailed on August 30th. I received it on September 12th. The reason for the delay? "USPS is delaying it man! we sent it out on the 1st!" is the reason I got. When I finally got the check in the mail, the postage on the envelope was marked September 10th - the date it was run through the postage machine. I've been outright lied to, at this point. I carry on working, because again - I need a paycheck. I orchestrated the move of our application to a new server, developed a bunch of new changes and continued work on the iPhone app. All told I probably went over my hourly allotment (I'm paid for 40 hours a month, I probably put in at least 50). On Saturday, the 1st, I gave the main contact at the company (a company of 3, by the way - this is not some big corporation) a ring and filled him in on the status of my work for the past two weeks. Unusually I hadn't heard from him since the middle of September. His response was "oh... well, that is nice and uh.. good job. well, we've been talking within the company about things and we've certainly got some decisions ahead of us..." - not verbatim but you get the idea (I hope?). I got out of this conversation that the site is not doing very well (which it's not) and they're considering pulling the plug. Crap, this contract is going to end early - there goes Christmas! Fine, that's alright, no problem. I'll get paid for the last months work and call it a day. Unfortunately I still haven't gotten last months check, and I'm getting dicked around now. "Oh.. we had problems transferring funds, we'll try and mail it out tomorrow" and "I left a VM with the finance guy, but I can't get ahold of him". So I'm getting the feeling I'm not getting paid for all the work I put in for September. This is obviously breach of contract, and I am pissed. Thinking irrationally, I considered changing all their passwords and holding their stuff hostage. Before I think it through (by the way, I am NOT going to do this, realized it would probably get me in trouble), I go and try some passwords for our various accounts. Google Apps? Oh, I'm no longer administrator here. Godaddy? Whoops, invalid password. Disqus? Nope, invalid password here too. Google Adsense / Analytics? Invalid password. Dedicated server account manager? Invalid password. Now, I have the servers root password - I just built the box last week and haven't had a chance to send the guy the root password. Wasn't in a rush, I manage the server and they never touch it. Now all of a sudden all the passwords except this one are changed; the writing is on the wall - I am out. Here's the conundrum. I have the root password, they do not. If I give them this password all the leverage I have is gone, out the door and out of my hands. During this argument of why am I not getting paid the guy sends me an email saying "oh by the way, what's the root username and password to the server?". Considering he knows absolutely nothing, I gave him an "admin" account which really has almost no rights. I still have exclusive access to the server, I just don't know where to go. I can hold their data hostage, but I'm almost positive this is the wrong thing to do. I'd consider it blackmail, regardless of whether or not I have gotten paid yet. I can "break" something on the server and give them the whole "well, if you were paying me I could fix it!" spiel. This works from a "well he's not holding their stuff hostage" point of view, but what stops them from hiring some one else to just fix the issue at hand? For all I know the guys nephew is a "l33t hax0r" and can figure it out for free. I can give in, document as much as I can and take him to small claims court. This is breach of contract, I'm not getting paid. I have a case, right? ???? Does anyone have any experience in this? What can I do? What are my options? I'm broke, I can't afford a lawyer and I can barely afford not getting this paycheck. My wife doesn't work (I work two jobs so she doesn't have to work - we have a 1 year old) and is already looking at getting a part time job to cover the bills. Long term we'll be fine, but this has pissed me off beyond belief! Help me out, I'm about to get screwed.

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• Maintenance plans love story

  - by Maria Zakourdaev

  There are about 200 QA and DEV SQL Servers out there.  There is a maintenance plan on many of them that performs a backup of all databases and removes the backup history files. First of all, I must admit that I’m no big fan of maintenance plans in particular or the SSIS packages in general.  In this specific case, if I ever need to change anything in the way backup is performed, such as the compression feature or perform some other change, I have to open each plan one by one. This is quite a pain. Therefore, I have decided to replace the maintenance plans with a stored procedure that will perform exactly the same thing.  Having such a procedure will allow me to open multiple server connections and just execute an ALTER PROCEDURE whenever I need to change anything in it. There is nothing like good ole T-SQL. The first challenge was to remove the unneeded maintenance plans. Of course, I didn’t want to do it server by server.  I found the procedure msdb.dbo.sp_maintplan_delete_plan, but it only has a parameter for the maintenance plan id and it has no other parameters, like plan name, which would have been much more useful. Now I needed to find the table that holds all maintenance plans on the server. You would think that it would be msdb.dbo.sysdbmaintplans but, unfortunately, regardless of the number of maintenance plans on the instance, it contains just one row.    After a while I found another table: msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_subplans. It contains the plan id that I was looking for, in the plan_id column and well as the agent’s job id which is executing the plan’s package: That was all I needed and the rest turned out to be quite easy.  Here is a script that can be executed against hundreds of servers from a multi-server query window to drop the specific maintenance plans. DECLARE @PlanID uniqueidentifier   SELECT @PlanID = plan_id FROM msdb.dbo.sysmaintplan_subplans Where name like ‘BackupPlan%’   EXECUTE msdb.dbo.sp_maintplan_delete_plan @plan_id=@PlanID   The second step was to create a procedure that will perform  all of the old maintenance plan tasks: create a folder for each database, backup all databases on the server and clean up the old files. The script is below. Enjoy.   ALTER PROCEDURE BackupAllDatabases                                   @PrintMode BIT = 1 AS BEGIN          DECLARE @BackupLocation VARCHAR(500)        DECLARE @PurgeAferDays INT        DECLARE @PurgingDate VARCHAR(30)        DECLARE @SQLCmd  VARCHAR(MAX)        DECLARE @FileName  VARCHAR(100)               SET @PurgeAferDays = -14        SET @BackupLocation = '\\central_storage_servername\BACKUPS\'+@@servername               SET @PurgingDate = CONVERT(VARCHAR(19), DATEADD (dd,@PurgeAferDays,GETDATE()),126)               SET @FileName = '?_full_'+                      + REPLACE(CONVERT(VARCHAR(19), GETDATE(),126),':','-')                      +'.bak';          SET @SQLCmd = '               IF ''?'' <> ''tempdb'' BEGIN                      EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_create_subdir N'''+@BackupLocation+'\?\'' ;                        BACKUP DATABASE ? TO  DISK = N'''+@BackupLocation+'\?\'+@FileName+'''                      WITH NOFORMAT, NOINIT,  SKIP, REWIND, NOUNLOAD, COMPRESSION,  STATS = 10 ;                        EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_delete_file 0,N'''+@BackupLocation+'\?\'',N''bak'',N'''+@PurgingDate+''',1;               END'          IF @PrintMode = 1 BEGIN               PRINT @SQLCmd        END               EXEC sp_MSforeachdb @SQLCmd        END

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• How can I render multiple windows with DirectX 9 in C++?

  - by Friso1990

  I'm trying to render multiple windows, using DirectX 9 and swap chains, but even though I create 2 windows, I only see the first one that I've created. My RendererDX9 header is this: #include <d3d9.h> #include <Windows.h> #include <vector> #include "RAT_Renderer.h" namespace RAT_ENGINE { class RAT_RendererDX9 : public RAT_Renderer { public: RAT_RendererDX9(); ~RAT_RendererDX9(); void Init(RAT_WindowManager* argWMan); void CleanUp(); void ShowWin(); private: LPDIRECT3D9 renderInterface; // Used to create the D3DDevice LPDIRECT3DDEVICE9 renderDevice; // Our rendering device LPDIRECT3DSWAPCHAIN9* swapChain; // Swapchain to make multi-window rendering possible WNDCLASSEX wc; std::vector<HWND> hwindows; void Render(int argI); }; } And my .cpp file is this: #include "RAT_RendererDX9.h" static LRESULT CALLBACK MsgProc( HWND hWnd, UINT msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam ); namespace RAT_ENGINE { RAT_RendererDX9::RAT_RendererDX9() : renderInterface(NULL), renderDevice(NULL) { } RAT_RendererDX9::~RAT_RendererDX9() { } void RAT_RendererDX9::Init(RAT_WindowManager* argWMan) { wMan = argWMan; // Register the window class WNDCLASSEX windowClass = { sizeof( WNDCLASSEX ), CS_CLASSDC, MsgProc, 0, 0, GetModuleHandle( NULL ), NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL, "foo", NULL }; wc = windowClass; RegisterClassEx( &wc ); for (int i = 0; i< wMan->getWindows().size(); ++i) { HWND hWnd = CreateWindow( "foo", argWMan->getWindow(i)->getName().c_str(), WS_OVERLAPPEDWINDOW, argWMan->getWindow(i)->getX(), argWMan->getWindow(i)->getY(), argWMan->getWindow(i)->getWidth(), argWMan->getWindow(i)->getHeight(), NULL, NULL, wc.hInstance, NULL ); hwindows.push_back(hWnd); } // Create the D3D object, which is needed to create the D3DDevice. renderInterface = (LPDIRECT3D9)Direct3DCreate9( D3D_SDK_VERSION ); // Set up the structure used to create the D3DDevice. Most parameters are // zeroed out. We set Windowed to TRUE, since we want to do D3D in a // window, and then set the SwapEffect to "discard", which is the most // efficient method of presenting the back buffer to the display. And // we request a back buffer format that matches the current desktop display // format. D3DPRESENT_PARAMETERS deviceConfig; ZeroMemory( &deviceConfig, sizeof( deviceConfig ) ); deviceConfig.Windowed = TRUE; deviceConfig.SwapEffect = D3DSWAPEFFECT_DISCARD; deviceConfig.BackBufferFormat = D3DFMT_UNKNOWN; deviceConfig.BackBufferHeight = 1024; deviceConfig.BackBufferWidth = 768; deviceConfig.EnableAutoDepthStencil = TRUE; deviceConfig.AutoDepthStencilFormat = D3DFMT_D16; // Create the Direct3D device. Here we are using the default adapter (most // systems only have one, unless they have multiple graphics hardware cards // installed) and requesting the HAL (which is saying we want the hardware // device rather than a software one). Software vertex processing is // specified since we know it will work on all cards. On cards that support // hardware vertex processing, though, we would see a big performance gain // by specifying hardware vertex processing. renderInterface->CreateDevice( D3DADAPTER_DEFAULT, D3DDEVTYPE_HAL, hwindows[0], D3DCREATE_SOFTWARE_VERTEXPROCESSING, &deviceConfig, &renderDevice ); this->swapChain = new LPDIRECT3DSWAPCHAIN9[wMan->getWindows().size()]; this->renderDevice->GetSwapChain(0, &swapChain[0]); for (int i = 0; i < wMan->getWindows().size(); ++i) { renderDevice->CreateAdditionalSwapChain(&deviceConfig, &swapChain[i]); } renderDevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_CULLMODE, D3DCULL_CCW); // Set cullmode to counterclockwise culling to save resources renderDevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_AMBIENT, 0xffffffff); // Turn on ambient lighting renderDevice->SetRenderState(D3DRS_ZENABLE, TRUE); // Turn on the zbuffer } void RAT_RendererDX9::CleanUp() { renderDevice->Release(); renderInterface->Release(); } void RAT_RendererDX9::Render(int argI) { // Clear the backbuffer to a blue color renderDevice->Clear( 0, NULL, D3DCLEAR_TARGET, D3DCOLOR_XRGB( 0, 0, 255 ), 1.0f, 0 ); LPDIRECT3DSURFACE9 backBuffer = NULL; // Set draw target this->swapChain[argI]->GetBackBuffer(0, D3DBACKBUFFER_TYPE_MONO, &backBuffer); this->renderDevice->SetRenderTarget(0, backBuffer); // Begin the scene renderDevice->BeginScene(); // End the scene renderDevice->EndScene(); swapChain[argI]->Present(NULL, NULL, hwindows[argI], NULL, 0); } void RAT_RendererDX9::ShowWin() { for (int i = 0; i < wMan->getWindows().size(); ++i) { ShowWindow( hwindows[i], SW_SHOWDEFAULT ); UpdateWindow( hwindows[i] ); // Enter the message loop MSG msg; while( GetMessage( &msg, NULL, 0, 0 ) ) { if (PeekMessage( &msg, NULL, 0U, 0U, PM_REMOVE ) ) { TranslateMessage( &msg ); DispatchMessage( &msg ); } else { Render(i); } } } } } LRESULT CALLBACK MsgProc( HWND hWnd, UINT msg, WPARAM wParam, LPARAM lParam ) { switch( msg ) { case WM_DESTROY: //CleanUp(); PostQuitMessage( 0 ); return 0; case WM_PAINT: //Render(); ValidateRect( hWnd, NULL ); return 0; } return DefWindowProc( hWnd, msg, wParam, lParam ); } I've made a sample function to make multiple windows: void RunSample1() { //Create the window manager. RAT_ENGINE::RAT_WindowManager* wMan = new RAT_ENGINE::RAT_WindowManager(); //Create the render manager. RAT_ENGINE::RAT_RenderManager* rMan = new RAT_ENGINE::RAT_RenderManager(); //Create a window. //This is currently needed to initialize the render manager and create a renderer. wMan->CreateRATWindow("Sample 1 - 1", 10, 20, 640, 480); wMan->CreateRATWindow("Sample 1 - 2", 150, 100, 480, 640); //Initialize the render manager. rMan->Init(wMan); //Show the window. rMan->getRenderer()->ShowWin(); } How do I get the multiple windows to work?

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• PHP+Apache as forward/reverse proxy: ¿how to process client requests and server responses in PHP?

  - by Lightworker

  Hi! I'm having a lot of troubles with the propper configuration of Apache mod_proxy.so to work as desired... The main idea, is to create a proxy on a local machine in a network wich will have the ability to proces a client request (client connected through this Apache prepared proxy) in PHP. And also, it will have the capacity to process the server responses on PHP too. Those are the 2 funcionalities, and they are independent one from each other. Let me present a little schema of what I need to achive: As you can see here, there're 2 ways: blue one and red one. For the blue one, I basically conected a client (Machine B - cell phone) on my local network (home) and configured it to go thorugh a proxy, wich is the Machine A (personal computer) on the exactly same network. So let's say (not DHCP): Machine A: 192.168.1.40 -- Apache is running on this machine, and configured to listen port 80. Machine B (cell phone): 192.168.1.75 -- configured to go throug a proxy, wich is IP 192.168.1.75 and port 80 (basically, Machine A). After configuring Apache properly, wich is basically to remove the "#" from httpd.conf on the lines for the mod_proxy.so (main worker), mod_proxy_connect.so (SSL, allowCONNECT, ...) and mod_proxy_http.so (needed for handle HTTP request/responses) and having in my case, lines like this: # Implements a proxy/gateway for Apache. Include "conf/extra/httpd-proxy.conf" # Various default settings Include "conf/extra/httpd-default.conf" # Secure (SSL/TLS) connections Include "conf/extra/httpd-ssl.conf" wich gives me the ability to configure the file httpd-proxy.conf to prepare the forward proxy or the reverse proxy. So I'm not sure, if what I need it's a forward proxy or a reverse one. For a forward proxy I've done this: <IfModule proxy_module> <IfModule proxy_http_module> # # FORWARD Proxy # #ProxyRequests Off ProxyRequests On ProxyVia On <Proxy *> Order deny,allow # Allow from all Deny from all Allow from 192.168.1 </Proxy> </IfModule> </IfModule> wich basically passes all the packets normally to the server and back to the client. I can trace it perfectly (and testing that works) looking at the "access.log" from Apache. Any request I make with the cell phone, appears then on the Apache log. So it works. But here come the problem: I need to process those client requests. And I need to do it, in PHP. I have read a lot about this. I've read in detail the oficial site from Apache about mod_proxy. And I've searched a lot on forums, but without luck. So I thought about a first aproximation: 1) Forward proxy in Apache, passes all the packets and it's not possible to process them. This seems to be true, so, what about a reverse proxy? So I envisioned something like: ProxyRequests Off <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyPass http://www.google.com http://www.yahoo.com ProxyPassReverse http://www.google.com http://www.yahoo.com which is just a test, but this should cause on my cell phone that when trying to navigate to Google, I should be going to Yahoo, isn't it? But not. It doesn't work. So you really see, that ALL the examples on Apache reverse proxy, goes like: ProxyPass /foo http://foo.example.com/bar ProxyPassReverse /foo http://foo.example.com/bar wich means, that any kind of request in a local context, will be solved on a remote location. But what I needed is the inverse! It's that when asking for a remote site on my phone, I solve this request on my local server (the Apache one) to process it with a PHP module. So, if it's a forward proxy, I need to pass through PHP first. If it's a reverse proxy, I need to change the "going" direction to my local server one to process first on PHP. Then comes in mind second option: 2) I've seen something like: <Proxy http://example.com/foo/*> SetOutputFilter INCLUDES </Proxy> And I started to search for SetOutputFilter, SetInputFilter, AddOutputFilter and AddInputFilter. But I don't really know how can I use it. Seems to be good, or a solution to me, cause with somethin' like this, I should can add an Input filter to process on PHP the client requests and send back to the client what I programed/want (not the remote server response) wich is the BLUE path on schema, and I should have the ability to add an Output filter wich seems to give me the ability to process the remote server response befor sending it to the client, wich should be the RED path on the schema. Red path, it's just to read server responses and play with em. But nothing more. The Blue path, it's the important one. Cause I will send to the client whatever I want after procesing the requests. I so sorry for this amazingly big post, but I needed to explain it as well as I can. I hope someone will understand my problem, and will help me to solve it! Lot of thanks in advance!! :)

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• Improving SAS multipath to JBOD performance on Linux

  - by user36825

  Hello all I'm trying to optimize a storage setup on some Sun hardware with Linux. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. We have the following hardware: Sun Blade X6270 2* LSISAS1068E SAS controllers 2* Sun J4400 JBODs with 1 TB disks (24 disks per JBOD) Fedora Core 12 2.6.33 release kernel from FC13 (also tried with latest 2.6.31 kernel from FC12, same results) Here's the datasheet for the SAS hardware: http://www.sun.com/storage/storage_networking/hba/sas/PCIe.pdf It's using PCI Express 1.0a, 8x lanes. With a bandwidth of 250 MB/sec per lane, we should be able to do 2000 MB/sec per SAS controller. Each controller can do 3 Gb/sec per port and has two 4 port PHYs. We connect both PHYs from a controller to a JBOD. So between the JBOD and the controller we have 2 PHYs * 4 SAS ports * 3 Gb/sec = 24 Gb/sec of bandwidth, which is more than the PCI Express bandwidth. With write caching enabled and when doing big writes, each disk can sustain about 80 MB/sec (near the start of the disk). With 24 disks, that means we should be able to do 1920 MB/sec per JBOD. multipath { rr_min_io 100 uid 0 path_grouping_policy multibus failback manual path_selector "round-robin 0" rr_weight priorities alias somealias no_path_retry queue mode 0644 gid 0 wwid somewwid } I tried values of 50, 100, 1000 for rr_min_io, but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Along with varying rr_min_io I tried adding some delay between starting the dd's to prevent all of them writing over the same PHY at the same time, but this didn't make any difference, so I think the I/O's are getting properly spread out. According to /proc/interrupts, the SAS controllers are using a "IR-IO-APIC-fasteoi" interrupt scheme. For some reason only core #0 in the machine is handling these interrupts. I can improve performance slightly by assigning a separate core to handle the interrupts for each SAS controller: echo 2 /proc/irq/24/smp_affinity echo 4 /proc/irq/26/smp_affinity Using dd to write to the disk generates "Function call interrupts" (no idea what these are), which are handled by core #4, so I keep other processes off this core too. I run 48 dd's (one for each disk), assigning them to cores not dealing with interrupts like so: taskset -c somecore dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mapper/mpathx oflag=direct bs=128M oflag=direct prevents any kind of buffer cache from getting involved. None of my cores seem maxed out. The cores dealing with interrupts are mostly idle and all the other cores are waiting on I/O as one would expect. Cpu0 : 0.0%us, 1.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 91.2%id, 7.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 0.0%us, 0.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 93.0%id, 0.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 6.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu2 : 0.0%us, 0.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 94.4%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 4.8%si, 0.0%st Cpu3 : 0.0%us, 7.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.3%id, 56.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu4 : 0.0%us, 1.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 85.7%id, 4.9%wa, 0.0%hi, 8.1%si, 0.0%st Cpu5 : 0.1%us, 5.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.2%id, 58.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu6 : 0.0%us, 5.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.3%id, 58.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu7 : 0.0%us, 5.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.3%id, 58.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu8 : 0.1%us, 8.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 27.2%id, 64.4%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu9 : 0.1%us, 7.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.2%id, 55.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu10 : 0.0%us, 7.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.2%id, 56.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu11 : 0.0%us, 7.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.3%id, 56.4%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu12 : 0.0%us, 5.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 33.1%id, 61.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu13 : 0.1%us, 5.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.1%id, 58.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu14 : 0.0%us, 4.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.4%id, 58.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu15 : 0.1%us, 5.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 36.5%id, 58.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Given all this, the throughput reported by running "dstat 10" is in the range of 2200-2300 MB/sec. Given the math above I would expect something in the range of 2*1920 ~= 3600+ MB/sec. Does anybody have any idea where my missing bandwidth went? Thanks!

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• VSFTPD Unable to set write permissions on folder

  - by Frank Astin

  I've just set up my first FTP server with VSFTPD on cent os . I can connect to it fine using a user in the group ftp-users but I get read only access . I've tried several different CHMOD codes on the folder (even 777) all to no avail . This is the tutorial I used to set up the server http://tinyurl.com/73pyuxz hopefully you'll be able to see something I missed. Thanks in advance . Requested Config File : # Example config file /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf # # The default compiled in settings are fairly paranoid. This sample file # loosens things up a bit, to make the ftp daemon more usable. # Please see vsftpd.conf.5 for all compiled in defaults. # # READ THIS: This example file is NOT an exhaustive list of vsftpd options. # Please read the vsftpd.conf.5 manual page to get a full idea of vsftpd's # capabilities. # # Allow anonymous FTP? (Beware - allowed by default if you comment this out). anonymous_enable=NO # # Uncomment this to allow local users to log in. local_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command. write_enable=YES # # Default umask for local users is 077. You may wish to change this to 022, # if your users expect that (022 is used by most other ftpd's) local_umask=022 # # Uncomment this to allow the anonymous FTP user to upload files. This only # has an effect if the above global write enable is activated. Also, you will # obviously need to create a directory writable by the FTP user. #anon_upload_enable=YES # # Uncomment this if you want the anonymous FTP user to be able to create # new directories. #anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES # # Activate directory messages - messages given to remote users when they # go into a certain directory. dirmessage_enable=YES # # The target log file can be vsftpd_log_file or xferlog_file. # This depends on setting xferlog_std_format parameter xferlog_enable=YES # # Make sure PORT transfer connections originate from port 20 (ftp-data). connect_from_port_20=YES # # If you want, you can arrange for uploaded anonymous files to be owned by # a different user. Note! Using "root" for uploaded files is not # recommended! #chown_uploads=YES #chown_username=whoever # # The name of log file when xferlog_enable=YES and xferlog_std_format=YES # WARNING - changing this filename affects /etc/logrotate.d/vsftpd.log #xferlog_file=/var/log/xferlog # # Switches between logging into vsftpd_log_file and xferlog_file files. # NO writes to vsftpd_log_file, YES to xferlog_file xferlog_std_format=YES # # You may change the default value for timing out an idle session. #idle_session_timeout=600 # # You may change the default value for timing out a data connection. #data_connection_timeout=120 # # It is recommended that you define on your system a unique user which the # ftp server can use as a totally isolated and unprivileged user. #nopriv_user=ftpsecure # # Enable this and the server will recognise asynchronous ABOR requests. Not # recommended for security (the code is non-trivial). Not enabling it, # however, may confuse older FTP clients. #async_abor_enable=YES # # By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore # the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII # mangling on files when in ASCII mode. # Beware that on some FTP servers, ASCII support allows a denial of service # attack (DoS) via the command "SIZE /big/file" in ASCII mode. vsftpd # predicted this attack and has always been safe, reporting the size of the # raw file. # ASCII mangling is a horrible feature of the protocol. #ascii_upload_enable=YES #ascii_download_enable=YES # # You may fully customise the login banner string: #ftpd_banner=Welcome to blah FTP service. # # You may specify a file of disallowed anonymous e-mail addresses. Apparently # useful for combatting certain DoS attacks. #deny_email_enable=YES # (default follows) #banned_email_file=/etc/vsftpd/banned_emails # # You may specify an explicit list of local users to chroot() to their home # directory. If chroot_local_user is YES, then this list becomes a list of # users to NOT chroot(). #chroot_list_enable=YES # (default follows) #chroot_list_file=/etc/vsftpd/chroot_list # # You may activate the "-R" option to the builtin ls. This is disabled by # default to avoid remote users being able to cause excessive I/O on large # sites. However, some broken FTP clients such as "ncftp" and "mirror" assume # the presence of the "-R" option, so there is a strong case for enabling it. #ls_recurse_enable=YES # # When "listen" directive is enabled, vsftpd runs in standalone mode and # listens on IPv4 sockets. This directive cannot be used in conjunction # with the listen_ipv6 directive. listen=YES # # This directive enables listening on IPv6 sockets. To listen on IPv4 and IPv6 # sockets, you must run two copies of vsftpd whith two configuration files. # Make sure, that one of the listen options is commented !! #listen_ipv6=YES pam_service_name=vsftpd userlist_enable=YES tcp_wrappers=YES

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• vsftpd not allowing uploads. 550 response

  - by Josh

  I've set vsftpd up on a centos box. I keep trying to upload files but I keep getting "550 Failed to change directory" and "550 Could not get file size." Here's my vsftpd.conf # The default compiled in settings are fairly paranoid. This sample file # loosens things up a bit, to make the ftp daemon more usable. # Please see vsftpd.conf.5 for all compiled in defaults. # # READ THIS: This example file is NOT an exhaustive list of vsftpd options. # Please read the vsftpd.conf.5 manual page to get a full idea of vsftpd's # capabilities. # # Allow anonymous FTP? (Beware - allowed by default if you comment this out). anonymous_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to allow local users to log in. local_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command. write_enable=YES # # Default umask for local users is 077. You may wish to change this to 022, # if your users expect that (022 is used by most other ftpd's) local_umask=022 # # Uncomment this to allow the anonymous FTP user to upload files. This only # has an effect if the above global write enable is activated. Also, you will # obviously need to create a directory writable by the FTP user. anon_upload_enable=YES # # Uncomment this if you want the anonymous FTP user to be able to create # new directories. anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES anon_other_write_enable=YES # # Activate directory messages - messages given to remote users when they # go into a certain directory. dirmessage_enable=YES # # The target log file can be vsftpd_log_file or xferlog_file. # This depends on setting xferlog_std_format parameter xferlog_enable=YES # # Make sure PORT transfer connections originate from port 20 (ftp-data). connect_from_port_20=YES # # If you want, you can arrange for uploaded anonymous files to be owned by # a different user. Note! Using "root" for uploaded files is not # recommended! #chown_uploads=YES #chown_username=whoever # # The name of log file when xferlog_enable=YES and xferlog_std_format=YES # WARNING - changing this filename affects /etc/logrotate.d/vsftpd.log #xferlog_file=/var/log/xferlog # # Switches between logging into vsftpd_log_file and xferlog_file files. # NO writes to vsftpd_log_file, YES to xferlog_file xferlog_std_format=NO # # You may change the default value for timing out an idle session. #idle_session_timeout=600 # # You may change the default value for timing out a data connection. #data_connection_timeout=120 # # It is recommended that you define on your system a unique user which the # ftp server can use as a totally isolated and unprivileged user. #nopriv_user=ftpsecure # # Enable this and the server will recognise asynchronous ABOR requests. Not # recommended for security (the code is non-trivial). Not enabling it, # however, may confuse older FTP clients. #async_abor_enable=YES # # By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore # the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII # mangling on files when in ASCII mode. # Beware that on some FTP servers, ASCII support allows a denial of service # attack (DoS) via the command "SIZE /big/file" in ASCII mode. vsftpd # predicted this attack and has always been safe, reporting the size of the # raw file. # ASCII mangling is a horrible feature of the protocol. #ascii_upload_enable=YES #ascii_download_enable=YES # # You may fully customise the login banner string: #ftpd_banner=Welcome to blah FTP service. # # You may specify a file of disallowed anonymous e-mail addresses. Apparently # useful for combatting certain DoS attacks. #deny_email_enable=YES # (default follows) #banned_email_file=/etc/vsftpd/banned_emails # # You may specify an explicit list of local users to chroot() to their home # directory. If chroot_local_user is YES, then this list becomes a list of # users to NOT chroot(). #chroot_list_enable=YES # (default follows) #chroot_list_file=/etc/vsftpd/chroot_list # # You may activate the "-R" option to the builtin ls. This is disabled by # default to avoid remote users being able to cause excessive I/O on large # sites. However, some broken FTP clients such as "ncftp" and "mirror" assume # the presence of the "-R" option, so there is a strong case for enabling it. #ls_recurse_enable=YES # # When "listen" directive is enabled, vsftpd runs in standalone mode and # listens on IPv4 sockets. This directive cannot be used in conjunction # with the listen_ipv6 directive. listen=YES # This directive enables listening on IPv6 sockets. To listen on IPv4 and IPv6 # sockets, you must run two copies of vsftpd whith two configuration files. # Make sure, that one of the listen options is commented !! #listen_ipv6=YES pam_service_name=vsftpd userlist_enable=YES tcp_wrappers=YES log_ftp_protocol=YES banner_file=/etc/vsftpd/issue local_root=/var/www guest_enable=YES guest_username=ftpusr ftp_username=nobody

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• MySQL 5.1.49 freezing every two days

  - by maximus

  Hi all, our mysql system is "freezing" every two days. By "freezing" i mean the following: it doesn't respond to ping we can't login with SSH we don't get any answer from MySQL there is no entry in the error logs! neither from linux neither from MySQL. we have already changed to a completely new hardware, we have the same problem, so it's definitely not a hardware problem. we do not have any other software installed except a firewall (iptables rule) we can restart the server from another server using rsyslog (www.rsyslog.com)(software reset) Could someone help me, by giving me some pointers what could i do to figure out the problem? I have included every detail about our settings. Thank you in advance for your help. Max. Our system parameters and settings: System-Memory: 12GB Processor: Intel 7-920 Quadcore Operating system: Debian 5 (lenny) 64bit MySQL 5.1.49 Databases: (a) a small phpbb forum (b) a 6GB database 3 tables with about 15 million rows my.cnf # # The MySQL database server configuration file. # # You can copy this to one of: # - "/etc/mysql/my.cnf" to set global options, # - "~/.my.cnf" to set user-specific options. # # One can use all long options that the program supports. # Run program with --help to get a list of available options and with # --print-defaults to see which it would actually understand and use. # # For explanations see # http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/server-system-variables.html # This will be passed to all mysql clients # It has been reported that passwords should be enclosed with ticks/quotes # escpecially if they contain "#" chars... # Remember to edit /etc/mysql/debian.cnf when changing the socket location. [client] port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock # Here is entries for some specific programs # The following values assume you have at least 32M ram # This was formally known as [safe_mysqld]. Both versions are currently parsed. [mysqld_safe] socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock nice = 0 [mysqld] # # * Basic Settings # user = mysql pid-file = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock port = 3306 basedir = /usr datadir = /var/lib/mysql tmpdir = /tmp language = /usr/share/mysql/english skip-external-locking # # Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on # localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure. bind-address = our-ip-address # # * Fine Tuning # key_buffer = 16M max_allowed_packet = 16M thread_stack = 256K thread_cache_size = 32 max_connections = 300 table_cache = 2048 #thread_concurrency = 4 # Used for InnoDB tables recommended to 50%-80% available memory innodb_buffer_pool_size = 6G # 20MB sometimes larger innodb_additional_mem_pool_size = 20M # 8M-16M is good for most situations innodb_log_buffer_size = 8M # Disable XA support because we do not use it innodb-support-xa = 0 # 1 is default wich is 100% secure but 2 offers better performance innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 1 innodb_flush_method = O_DIRECT #innodb_thread_concurency = 8 # Recommended 64M - 512M depending on server size innodb_log_file_size = 512M # One file per table innodb_file_per_table # # * Query Cache Configuration # query_cache_limit = 1M query_cache_size = 16M #query_cache_type = 1 #query_cache_min_res_unit= 2K #join_buffer_size = 1M # # * Logging and Replication # # Both location gets rotated by the cronjob. # Be aware that this log type is a performance killer. # As of 5.1 you can enable the log at runtime! #general_log_file = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log #general_log = 1 # # Error logging goes to syslog. This is a Debian improvement :) # # Here you can see queries with especially long duration log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log long_query_time = 2 log-queries-not-using-indexes # # The following can be used as easy to replay backup logs or for replication. #server-id = 1 log_bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log # WARNING: Using expire_logs_days without bin_log crashes the server! See README.Debian! expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 100M #binlog_do_db = include_database_name #binlog_ignore_db = include_database_name # # InnoDB is enabled by default with a 10MB datafile in /var/lib/mysql/. # Read the manual for more InnoDB related options. There are many! # * InnoDB plugin # As of MySQL 5.1.38, the InnoDB plugin from Oracle is included in the MySQL source code. # It has many improvements and better performances than the built-in InnoDB storage engine. # Please read http://www.innodb.com/products/innodb_plugin/ for more information. # Uncommenting the two following lines to use the InnoDB plugin. ignore_builtin_innodb plugin-load=innodb=ha_innodb_plugin.so # # * Security Features # # Read the manual, too, if you want chroot! # chroot = /var/lib/mysql/ # # For generating SSL certificates I recommend the OpenSSL GUI "tinyca". # # ssl-ca=/etc/mysql/cacert.pem # ssl-cert=/etc/mysql/server-cert.pem # ssl-key=/etc/mysql/server-key.pem [mysqldump] quick quote-names max_allowed_packet = 16M [mysql] #no-auto-rehash # faster start of mysql but no tab completition [isamchk] key_buffer = 16M # # * NDB Cluster # # See /usr/share/doc/mysql-server-*/README.Debian for more information. # # The following configuration is read by the NDB Data Nodes (ndbd processes) # not from the NDB Management Nodes (ndb_mgmd processes). # # [MYSQL_CLUSTER] # ndb-connectstring=127.0.0.1 # # * IMPORTANT: Additional settings that can override those from this file! # !includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/ UPDATE After installing sysstat and configuring it to collect data after every minute i have the following datas. I used sar to generate the following output: The log-file is too big so coudn't enter it here but uploaded to box.net. The link is http://www.box.net/shared/xc6rh7qqob SECOND UPDATE We started a ping command in the background, and that solved the problem. Now the server does work since more then a week. We still don't know what's the problem.

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• Centos 6.3 vsftp unable to upload file to apache webserver

  - by user148648

  I am new to Centos, I did work with Sun Solaris and upload files to Apache web server before. I create an end user account and manage to ftp using command prompt to the server, error message is '226 Transfer Done (but failed to open directory). Content of my vsftpd.conf as below # Example config file /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf # # The default compiled in settings are fairly paranoid. This sample file # loosens things up a bit, to make the ftp daemon more usable. # Please see vsftpd.conf.5 for all compiled in defaults. # # READ THIS: This example file is NOT an exhaustive list of vsftpd options. # Please read the vsftpd.conf.5 manual page to get a full idea of vsftpd's # capabilities. # # Allow anonymous FTP? (Beware - allowed by default if you comment this out). anonymous_enable=YES # ** may need to comment it back # # Uncomment this to allow local users to log in. local_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command. write_enable=YES # # Default umask for local users is 077. You may wish to change this to 022, # if your users expect that (022 is used by most other ftpd's) #local_umask=022 local_umask=077 # # Uncomment this to allow the anonymous FTP user to upload files. This only # has an effect if the above global write enable is activated. Also, you will # obviously need to create a directory writable by the FTP user. anon_upload_enable=YES # *** maybe to comment it back!!! # # Uncomment this if you want the anonymous FTP user to be able to create # new directories. anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES # ** may need to comment it back!!! # # Activate directory messages - messages given to remote users when they # go into a certain directory. dirmessage_enable=YES # # The target log file can be vsftpd_log_file or xferlog_file. # This depends on setting xferlog_std_format parameter xferlog_enable=YES # # Make sure PORT transfer connections originate from port 20 (ftp-data). connect_from_port_20=YES # # If you want, you can arrange for uploaded anonymous files to be owned by # a different user. Note! Using "root" for uploaded files is not # recommended! #chown_uploads=YES #chown_username=whoever # # The name of log file when xferlog_enable=YES and xferlog_std_format=YES # WARNING - changing this filename affects /etc/logrotate.d/vsftpd.log xferlog_file=/var/log/xferlog # # Switches between logging into vsftpd_log_file and xferlog_file files. # NO writes to vsftpd_log_file, YES to xferlog_file xferlog_std_format=YES # # You may change the default value for timing out an idle session. #idle_session_timeout=600 # # You may change the default value for timing out a data connection. #data_connection_timeout=120 # # It is recommended that you define on your system a unique user which the # ftp server can use as a totally isolated and unprivileged user. #nopriv_user=ftpsecure # # Enable this and the server will recognise asynchronous ABOR requests. Not # recommended for security (the code is non-trivial). Not enabling it, # however, may confuse older FTP clients. #async_abor_enable=YES # # By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore # the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII # mangling on files when in ASCII mode. # Beware that on some FTP servers, ASCII support allows a denial of service # attack (DoS) via the command "SIZE /big/file" in ASCII mode. vsftpd # predicted this attack and has always been safe, reporting the size of the # raw file. # ASCII mangling is a horrible feature of the protocol. ascii_upload_enable=YES ascii_download_enable=YES # # You may fully customise the login banner string: ftpd_banner=Warning, only for authorize login. # # You may specify a file of disallowed anonymous e-mail addresses. Apparently # useful for combatting certain DoS attacks. #deny_email_enable=YES # (default follows) #banned_email_file=/etc/vsftpd/banned_emails # # You may specify an explicit list of local users to chroot() to their home # directory. If chroot_local_user is YES, then this list becomes a list of # users to NOT chroot(). chroot_local_user=YES chroot_list_enable=YES # (default follows) #chroot_list_file=/etc/vsftpd/chroot_list local_root=/var/www # # You may activate the "-R" option to the builtin ls. This is disabled by # default to avoid remote users being able to cause excessive I/O on large # sites. However, some broken FTP clients such as "ncftp" and "mirror" assume # the presence of the "-R" option, so there is a strong case for enabling it. ls_recurse_enable=YES # # When "listen" directive is enabled, vsftpd runs in standalone mode and # listens on IPv4 sockets. This directive cannot be used in conjunction # with the listen_ipv6 directive. listen=YES # # This directive enables listening on IPv6 sockets. To listen on IPv4 and IPv6 # sockets, you must run two copies of vsftpd with two configuration files. # Make sure, that one of the listen options is commented !! #listen_ipv6=YES pam_service_name=vsftpd userlist_enable=YES tcp_wrappers=YES

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• Macports irssi & perl5 installation issues

  - by Dmitri DB

  Long time reader, first time poster. Big, appreciative thanks for everyone's collective questioning and answering here and at stackoverflow, it's helped me quite a lot over the time I've been learning answers through these sites! Apologies in advance if I didn't search hard enough on posts already up on this site to find out what I could do about this issue, but I thought I'd just reach out for the sake of trying at least once. I've experienced this issue while starting up my macports-installed version of irssi: 13:25 -!- Irssi: Error in script dispatch: 13:25 Can't locate lib.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.4/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.4 /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.12.4/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.12.4 /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.12.4/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/5.12.4 /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.3/darwin-multi-2level /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.12.3 /opt/local/lib/perl5/site_perl /opt/local/lib/perl5/vendor_perl .) at (eval 18) line 1. 13:25 BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at (eval 18) line 1. 13:25 Huh, strange. I looked into it a bit: [email protected] /opt/local/lib/perl5 ?- find . -name "lib.pm" -ls 14673887 16 -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 6853 25 Jun 23:39 ./5.12.4/darwin-thread-multi- 2level/lib.pm [email protected] /opt/local/lib/perl5 ?- l 5.12.4/darwin-thread-multi-2level total 1864 drwxr-xr-x 55 root admin 1870 28 Jun 19:28 . drwxr-xr-x 158 root admin 5372 28 Jun 19:28 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 177814 25 Jun 23:39 .packlist drwxr-xr-x 6 root admin 204 28 Jun 19:28 B -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 25714 25 Jun 23:39 B.pm drwxr-xr-x 64 root admin 2176 28 Jun 19:28 CORE drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 28 Jun 19:28 Compress -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 3000 25 Jun 23:39 Config.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 228094 25 Jun 23:39 Config.pod -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 409 25 Jun 23:39 Config_git.pl -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 38759 25 Jun 23:39 Config_heavy.pl -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 21174 25 Jun 23:39 Cwd.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 63535 25 Jun 23:39 DB_File.pm drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 28 Jun 19:28 Data drwxr-xr-x 5 root admin 170 28 Jun 19:28 Devel drwxr-xr-x 4 root admin 136 28 Jun 19:28 Digest -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 25185 25 Jun 23:39 DynaLoader.pm drwxr-xr-x 22 root admin 748 28 Jun 19:28 Encode -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 29731 25 Jun 23:39 Encode.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 6736 25 Jun 23:39 Errno.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 5445 25 Jun 23:39 Fcntl.pm drwxr-xr-x 5 root admin 170 28 Jun 19:28 File drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 28 Jun 19:28 Filter -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 1819 25 Jun 23:39 GDBM_File.pm drwxr-xr-x 4 root admin 136 28 Jun 19:28 Hash drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 28 Jun 19:28 I18N drwxr-xr-x 11 root admin 374 28 Jun 19:28 IO -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 1404 25 Jun 23:39 IO.pm drwxr-xr-x 6 root admin 204 28 Jun 19:28 IPC drwxr-xr-x 4 root admin 136 28 Jun 19:28 List drwxr-xr-x 4 root admin 136 28 Jun 19:28 MIME drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 28 Jun 19:28 Math -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 2519 25 Jun 23:39 NDBM_File.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 4208 25 Jun 23:39 O.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 15563 25 Jun 23:39 Opcode.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 21011 25 Jun 23:39 POSIX.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 58962 25 Jun 23:39 POSIX.pod drwxr-xr-x 5 root admin 170 28 Jun 19:28 PerlIO -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 2515 25 Jun 23:39 SDBM_File.pm drwxr-xr-x 4 root admin 136 28 Jun 19:28 Scalar -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 10837 25 Jun 23:39 Socket.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 41003 25 Jun 23:39 Storable.pm drwxr-xr-x 4 root admin 136 28 Jun 19:28 Sys drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 28 Jun 19:28 Text drwxr-xr-x 5 root admin 170 28 Jun 19:28 Time drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 28 Jun 19:28 Unicode -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 14462 25 Jun 23:39 attributes.pm drwxr-xr-x 38 root admin 1292 28 Jun 19:28 auto -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 19892 25 Jun 23:39 encoding.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 6853 25 Jun 23:39 lib.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 11044 25 Jun 23:39 mro.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 997 25 Jun 23:39 ops.pm -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 13945 25 Jun 23:39 re.pm drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 28 Jun 19:28 threads -r--r--r-- 1 root admin 33283 25 Jun 23:39 threads.pm So, it sort of seems to me that the permissions which perl5 got installed with for these modules has gotten mixed up somehow? I'm not really a perl user beyond enjoying it for massive directory-recursive find/replace operations within text files, so I haven't much of an idea what the permissions here are supposed to look like, and I'm not really sure how to go about determining how macports has gone and installed perl this way when it's otherwise worked without failure for years now. Does anyone have any recommendations for the sanest path towards rectifying this issue? Also, is there any interesting reason as to why the macports default for the perl5 port installs 5.12.4, and not 5.16.0, which has to be explicitly installed via the perl5.16 port? Thanks again!

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• Creating Persistent Drive Labels With UDEV Using /dev/disk/by-path

  - by Matt

  I have a new BackBlaze Pod (BackBlaze Pod 2.0). It has 45 3TB drives and they when I first set it up they were labeled /dev/sda through /dev/sdz and /dev/sdaa through /dev/sdas. I used mdadm to setup three really big 15 drive RAID6 arrays. However, since first setup a few weeks ago I had a couple of the hard drives fail on me. I've replaced them but now the arrays are complaining because they can't find the missing drives. When I list the the disks... ls -l /dev/sd* I see that /dev/sda /dev/sdf /dev/sdk /dev/sdp no longer appear and now there are 4 new ones... /dev/sdau /dev/sdav /dev/sdaw /dev/sdax I also just found that I can do this... ls -l /dev/disk/by-path/ total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 -> ../../sdau lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-0:1:0:0 -> ../../sdb lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-0:2:0:0 -> ../../sdc lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-0:3:0:0 -> ../../sdd lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-0:4:0:0 -> ../../sde lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-2:0:0:0 -> ../../sdae lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-2:1:0:0 -> ../../sdg lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-2:2:0:0 -> ../../sdh lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-2:3:0:0 -> ../../sdi lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-2:4:0:0 -> ../../sdj lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-3:0:0:0 -> ../../sdav lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-3:1:0:0 -> ../../sdl lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-3:2:0:0 -> ../../sdm lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-3:3:0:0 -> ../../sdn lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:02:04.0-scsi-3:4:0:0 -> ../../sdo lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-0:0:0:0 -> ../../sdax lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-0:1:0:0 -> ../../sdq lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-0:2:0:0 -> ../../sdr lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-0:3:0:0 -> ../../sds lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-0:4:0:0 -> ../../sdt lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-2:0:0:0 -> ../../sdu lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-2:1:0:0 -> ../../sdv lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-2:2:0:0 -> ../../sdw lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-2:3:0:0 -> ../../sdx lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-2:4:0:0 -> ../../sdy lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Sep 19 18:08 pci-0000:04:04.0-scsi-3:0:0:0 -> ../../sdz I didn't list them all....you can see the problem above. They're sorted by scsi id here but sda is missing...replaced by sdau...etc... So obviously the arrays are complaining. Is it possible to get Linux to reread the drive labels in the correct order or am I screwed? My initial design with 15 drive arrays is not ideal. With 3TB drives the rebuild times were taking 3 or 4 days....maybe more. I'm scrapping the whole design and I think I am going to go with 6 x 7 RAID5 disk arrays and 3 hot spares to make the arrays a bit easier to manage and shorten the rebuild times. But I'd like to clean up the drive labels so they aren't out of order. I haven't figured out how to do this yet. Does anyone know how to get this straightened out? Thanks, Matt

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• squid3 auth thru samba using ntlm to AD doesn't work

  - by derty

  some users here are spending to much time exploring the WWW. So big boss whats to get this under control. We use a squid3 just for some security reason and chace benefits. and now i'm trying to set up a new proxy on a different server (Debian 6) Permissions are defined in AC and the squid3 should get the auth thru samba/winbind by using the ntlm protocol. but i'll get all the time Access, denited. it only works by using LDAP but thats not the way i need it. here some log and confs squid access.log 1326878095.784 1 192.168.15.27 TCP_DENIED/407 4049 GET http://at.msn.com/? -NONE/- text/html 1326878095.791 1 192.168.15.27 TCP_DENIED/407 4294 GET http://at.msn.com/? - NONE/- text/html 1326878095.803 9 192.168.15.27 TCP_DENIED/403 4028 GET http://at.msn.com/? kavan NONE/- text/html 1326878095.848 0 192.168.15.27 TCP_DENIED/403 3881 GET http://www.squid-cache.org/Artwork/SN.png kavan NONE/- text/html 1326878100.279 0 192.168.15.27 TCP_DENIED/403 3735 GET http://www.google.at/ kavan NONE/- text/html 1326878100.296 0 192.168.15.27 TCP_DENIED/403 3870 GET http://www.squid-cache.org/Artwork/SN.png kavan NONE/- text/html 1326878155.700 0 192.168.15.27 TCP_DENIED/407 4072 GET http://ie9cvlist.ie.microsoft.com/IE9CompatViewList.xml - NONE/- text/html 1326878155.705 2 192.168.15.27 TCP_DENIED/407 4317 GET http://ie9cvlist.ie.microsoft.com/IE9CompatViewList.xml - NONE/- text/html 1326878155.709 3 192.168.15.27 TCP_DENIED/403 4026 GET http://ie9cvlist.ie.microsoft.com/IE9CompatViewList.xml kavan NONE/- text/html squid chace 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Creating Swap Directories 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Starting Squid Cache version 3.1.6 for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu... 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Process ID 17236 2012/01/18 10:12:49| With 65535 file descriptors available 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Initializing IP Cache... 2012/01/18 10:12:49| DNS Socket created at [::], FD 7 2012/01/18 10:12:49| DNS Socket created at 0.0.0.0, FD 8 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Adding nameserver 192.168.15.2 from /etc/resolv.conf 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Adding nameserver 192.168.15.19 from /etc/resolv.conf 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Adding nameserver 192.168.15.1 from /etc/resolv.conf 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Adding domain schoenbrunn.local from /etc/resolv.conf 2012/01/18 10:12:49| helperOpenServers: Starting 5/5 'squid_ldap_auth' processes 2012/01/18 10:12:49| helperOpenServers: Starting 10/10 'ntlm_auth' processes 2012/01/18 10:12:49| helperOpenServers: Starting 10/10 'squid_kerb_auth' processes 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| helperOpenServers: Starting 5/5 'squid_ldap_group' processes 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| squid_kerb_auth: INFO: Starting version 1.0.5 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Unlinkd pipe opened on FD 73 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Local cache digest enabled; rebuild/rewrite every 3600/3600 sec 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Store logging disabled 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Swap maxSize 0 + 262144 KB, estimated 20164 objects 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Target number of buckets: 1008 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Using 8192 Store buckets 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Max Mem size: 262144 KB 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Max Swap size: 0 KB 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Using Least Load store dir selection 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Set Current Directory to /var/spool/squid3 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Loaded Icons. 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Accepting HTTP connections at [::]:3128, FD 74. 2012/01/18 10:12:49| HTCP Disabled. 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Squid modules loaded: 0 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Adaptation support is off. 2012/01/18 10:12:49| Ready to serve requests. 2012/01/18 10:12:50| storeLateRelease: released 0 objects smb.conf # Domain Authntication Settings workgroup = <WORKGROUP> security = ads password server = <DOMAINNAME>.LOCAL realm = <DOMAINNAME>.LOCAL ldap ssl = no # logging log level = 5 max log size = 50 # logs split per machine log file = /var/log/samba/%m.log # max 50KB per log file, then rotate ; max log size = 50 # User settings username map = /etc/samba/smbusers idmap uid = 10000-20000000 idmap gid = 10000-20000000 idmap backend = ad ; template primary group = <ad group> template shell = /sbin/nologin # Winbind Settings winbind separator = + winbind enum users = Yes winbind enum groups = Yes winbind netsted groups = Yes winbind nested groups = Yes winbind cache time = 10 winbind use default domain = Yes #Other Globals unix charset = LOCALE server string = <SERVERNAME> load printers = no printing = cups cups options = raw ; printcap name = /etc/printcap #obtain list of printers automatically on SystemV ; printcap name = lpstat ; printing = cups squid.conf auth_param ntlm program /usr/bin/ntlm_auth --require-membership-of=<DOMAINNAME>\\INTERNETZ --helper-protocol=squid-2.5-ntlmssp auth_param ntlm children 10 auth_param basic program /usr/lib/squid3/squid_ldap_auth -R -b "dc=<dcname>,dc=local" -D "cn=administrator,cn=Users,dc=<domainname>,dc=local" -w "******" -f sAMAccountName=%s -h 192.168.15.19:3268 auth_param basic realm "Proxy Authentifizierung. Bitte geben Sie Ihren Benutzername und Ihr Passwort ein!" #means insert you PW in an other language - # external_acl_type InetGroup %LOGIN /usr/lib/squid3/squid_ldap_group -R -b "dc=<domainname>,dc=local" -D "cn=administrator,cn=Users,dc=<domainname>,dc=local" -w "******" -f "(&(objectclass=person)(sAMAccountName=%v) (memberof=cn=%a,cn=internetz,dc=<domainname>,dc=local))" -h 192.168.15.19:3268 auth_param negotiate program /usr/lib/squid3/squid_kerb_auth -d auth_param negotiate children 10 auth_param negotiate keep_alive on acl localnet proxy_auth REQUIRED acl InetAccess external InetGroup Internetz http_access allow InetAccess http_access deny all acl auth proxy_auth REQUIRED http_access allow auth and a very suspicious is that by adding the proxy server to the Domain i see 2 new entries in the PC one with the original computer-name leopoldine and one with leopoldine CNF:f8efa4c4-ff0e-4217-939d-f1523b43464d ?!? I tried a lot, really... but i stuck on this problem... i actually i even reinstalled all dependent programs and reconfigured them from default. Group exists and has me in it. Firefox running on the old proxy and i use IE for testing the new one. But i'll get all the time Access-Denited and to be honest i'm quite a beginner, so please don't be to prude. I'll interested in improving, i'll get the information we need to fix this but i started working 2 month ago and got only 1 1/2 year's training and not a single sec. in linux ;)

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• vsftpd not allowing uploads. 550 response.

  - by Josh

  I've set vsftpd up on a centos box. I keep trying to upload files but I keep getting "550 Failed to change directory" and "550 Could not get file size." Here's my vsftpd.conf # The default compiled in settings are fairly paranoid. This sample file # loosens things up a bit, to make the ftp daemon more usable. # Please see vsftpd.conf.5 for all compiled in defaults. # # READ THIS: This example file is NOT an exhaustive list of vsftpd options. # Please read the vsftpd.conf.5 manual page to get a full idea of vsftpd's # capabilities. # # Allow anonymous FTP? (Beware - allowed by default if you comment this out). anonymous_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to allow local users to log in. local_enable=YES # # Uncomment this to enable any form of FTP write command. write_enable=YES # # Default umask for local users is 077. You may wish to change this to 022, # if your users expect that (022 is used by most other ftpd's) local_umask=022 # # Uncomment this to allow the anonymous FTP user to upload files. This only # has an effect if the above global write enable is activated. Also, you will # obviously need to create a directory writable by the FTP user. anon_upload_enable=YES # # Uncomment this if you want the anonymous FTP user to be able to create # new directories. anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES anon_other_write_enable=YES # # Activate directory messages - messages given to remote users when they # go into a certain directory. dirmessage_enable=YES # # The target log file can be vsftpd_log_file or xferlog_file. # This depends on setting xferlog_std_format parameter xferlog_enable=YES # # Make sure PORT transfer connections originate from port 20 (ftp-data). connect_from_port_20=YES # # If you want, you can arrange for uploaded anonymous files to be owned by # a different user. Note! Using "root" for uploaded files is not # recommended! #chown_uploads=YES #chown_username=whoever # # The name of log file when xferlog_enable=YES and xferlog_std_format=YES # WARNING - changing this filename affects /etc/logrotate.d/vsftpd.log #xferlog_file=/var/log/xferlog # # Switches between logging into vsftpd_log_file and xferlog_file files. # NO writes to vsftpd_log_file, YES to xferlog_file xferlog_std_format=NO # # You may change the default value for timing out an idle session. #idle_session_timeout=600 # # You may change the default value for timing out a data connection. #data_connection_timeout=120 # # It is recommended that you define on your system a unique user which the # ftp server can use as a totally isolated and unprivileged user. #nopriv_user=ftpsecure # # Enable this and the server will recognise asynchronous ABOR requests. Not # recommended for security (the code is non-trivial). Not enabling it, # however, may confuse older FTP clients. #async_abor_enable=YES # # By default the server will pretend to allow ASCII mode but in fact ignore # the request. Turn on the below options to have the server actually do ASCII # mangling on files when in ASCII mode. # Beware that on some FTP servers, ASCII support allows a denial of service # attack (DoS) via the command "SIZE /big/file" in ASCII mode. vsftpd # predicted this attack and has always been safe, reporting the size of the # raw file. # ASCII mangling is a horrible feature of the protocol. #ascii_upload_enable=YES #ascii_download_enable=YES # # You may fully customise the login banner string: #ftpd_banner=Welcome to blah FTP service. # # You may specify a file of disallowed anonymous e-mail addresses. Apparently # useful for combatting certain DoS attacks. #deny_email_enable=YES # (default follows) #banned_email_file=/etc/vsftpd/banned_emails # # You may specify an explicit list of local users to chroot() to their home # directory. If chroot_local_user is YES, then this list becomes a list of # users to NOT chroot(). #chroot_list_enable=YES # (default follows) #chroot_list_file=/etc/vsftpd/chroot_list # # You may activate the "-R" option to the builtin ls. This is disabled by # default to avoid remote users being able to cause excessive I/O on large # sites. However, some broken FTP clients such as "ncftp" and "mirror" assume # the presence of the "-R" option, so there is a strong case for enabling it. #ls_recurse_enable=YES # # When "listen" directive is enabled, vsftpd runs in standalone mode and # listens on IPv4 sockets. This directive cannot be used in conjunction # with the listen_ipv6 directive. listen=YES # This directive enables listening on IPv6 sockets. To listen on IPv4 and IPv6 # sockets, you must run two copies of vsftpd whith two configuration files. # Make sure, that one of the listen options is commented !! #listen_ipv6=YES pam_service_name=vsftpd userlist_enable=YES tcp_wrappers=YES log_ftp_protocol=YES banner_file=/etc/vsftpd/issue local_root=/var/www guest_enable=YES guest_username=ftpusr ftp_username=nobody

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• Weighted round robins via TTL - possible?

  - by Joe Hopfgartner

  I currently use DNS round robin for load balancing, which works great. The records look like this (I have a ttl of 120 seconds) ;; ANSWER SECTION: orion.2x.to. 116 IN A 80.237.201.41 orion.2x.to. 116 IN A 87.230.54.12 orion.2x.to. 116 IN A 87.230.100.10 orion.2x.to. 116 IN A 87.230.51.65 I learned that not every ISP / device treats such a response the same way. For example some DNS servers rotate the addresses randomly or always cycle them through. Some just propagate the first entry, others try to determine which is best (regionally near) by looking at the ip address. However if the userbase is big enough (spreads over multiple ISPs etc) it balances pretty well. The discrepancies from highest to lowest loaded server hardly every exceeds 15%. However now I have the problem that I am introducing more servers into the systems, that not all have the same capacities. I currently only have 1gbps servers, but I want to work with 100mbit and also 10gbps servers too. So what I want is I want to introduce a server with 10 GBps with a weight of 100, a 1 gbps server with a weight of 10 and a 100 mbit server with a weight of 1. I used to add servers twice to bring more traffic to them (which worked nice. the bandwidth doubled almost.) But adding a 10gbit server 100 times to DNS is a bit rediculous. So I thought about using the TTL. If I give server A 240 seconds ttl and server B only 120 seconds (which is about about the minimum to use for round robin, as a lot of dns servers set to 120 if a lower ttl is specified.. so i have heard) I think something like this should occour in an ideal scenario: first 120 seconds 50% of requests get server A -> keep it for 240 seconds. 50% of requests get server B -> keep it for 120 seconds second 120 seconds 50% of requests still have server A cached -> keep it for another 120 seconds. 25% of requests get server A -> keep it for 240 seconds 25% of requests get server B -> keep it for 120 seconds third 120 seconds 25% will get server A (from the 50% of Server A that now expired) -> cache 240 sec 25% will get server B (from the 50% of Server A that now expired) -> cache 120 sec 25% will have server A cached for another 120 seconds 12.5% will get server B (from the 25% of server B that now expired) -> cache 120sec 12.5% will get server A (from the 25% of server B that now expired) -> cache 240 sec fourth 120 seconds 25% will have server A cached -> cache for another 120 secs 12.5% will get server A (from the 25% of b that now expired) -> cache 240 secs 12.5% will get server B (from the 25% of b that now expired) -> cache 120 secs 12.5% will get server A (from the 25% of a that now expired) -> cache 240 secs 12.5% will get server B (from the 25% of a that now expired) -> cache 120 secs 6.25% will get server A (from the 12.5% of b that now expired) -> cache 240 secs 6.25% will get server B (from the 12.5% of b that now expired) -> cache 120 secs 12.5% will have server A cached -> cache another 120 secs ... i think i lost something at this point but i think you get the idea.... As you can see this gets pretty complicated to predict and it will for sure not work out like this in practice. But it should definitely have an effect on the distribution! I know that weighted round robin exists and is just controlled by the root server. It just cycles through dns records when responding and returns dns records with a set propability that corresponds to the weighting. My DNS server does not support this, and my requirements are not that precise. If it doesnt weight perfectly its okay, but it should go into the right direction. I think using the TTL field could be a more elegant and easier solution - and it deosnt require a dns server that controls this dynamically, which saves resources - which is in my opinion the whole point of dns load balancing vs hardware load balancers. My question now is... are there any best prectices / methos / rules of thumb to weight round robin distribution using the TTL attribute of DNS records? Edit: The system is a forward proxy server system. The amount of Bandwidth (not requests) exceeds what one single server with ethernet can handle. So I need a balancing solution that distributes the bandwidth to several servers. Are there any alternative methods than using DNS? Of course I can use a load balancer with fibre channel etc, but the costs are rediciulous and it also increases only the width of the bottleneck and does not eliminate it. The only thing i can think of are anycast (is it anycast or multicast?) ip addresses, but I don't have the means to set up such a system.

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