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• Why are my hard drives failing?

  - by WishCow

  I have a small Ubuntu server running at home, with 2 HDDs. There are two software raids (raid1) on the disks, managed by mdadm, which I believe is irrelevant, but mentioning it anyway. Both of the HDDs are Western Digital, and have been used for around 2 years, when one of them started making clicking noises, and died. I figured that maybe it's natural after 2 years, so I bought a new one, and resynced the raid arrays. After about a month, the other drive also died. I didn't get suspicious, since both drives have been bought at the same time, it's not that surprising to see both of them near each other, so I bought another one. So far, 2 old drives failed, and 2 brand new in the system. After one month, one of the new drives died. This is when it started getting suspicious. Since the PC was put together from some really old parts (think AthlonXP), I figured that maybe the motherboard's SATA controller is the culprit. Of course you can't switch parts easily in an old PC like this, so I bought a whole system, new MB, new CPU, new RAM. Took the just failed drive back, since it was under warranty, and got it replaced. So it is up to 2 failed drives from the old ones, and 1 failed drive from the new ones. No problems, for 1 month. After that errors were creeping up again in /var/log/messages, and mdadm was reporting raid array failures. I started tearing my hair out. Everything is new in the system, it's up to the third brand new HDD, it's simply not possible that all of the new drives that I bought were faulty. Let's see what is still common... the cables. Okay, long shot, let's replace the SATA cables. Take HDD back, smile to the guy at the counter and say that I'm really unlucky. He replaces the HDD. I come home, one month passes and one of HDDs fails, again. I'm not joking. Two of the brand new HDDs have failed. Maybe it's a bug in the OS. Let's see what the manufacturer's testing tool says. Download testing tool, burn it to a CD, reboot, leave HDD testing overnight. Test says that the drive is faulty, and I should back up everything, if I still can. I don't know what's happening, but it does not look like a software problem, something is definitely thrashing the HDDs. I should mention now, that the whole system is in a shoebox. Since there are a load of "build your own ikea case" stuff, I thought there shouldn't be any problems throwing the thing in a box, and stuffing it away somewhere. The box is well ventilated, but I thought that just maybe the drives were overheating. There is no other possible answer to this. So I took the HDD back, and got it replaced (for the 3rd time), and bought HDD coolers. And just now, I have heard the sound of doom. click click whizzzzzzzzz. SSH into the box: You have new mail! mail r 1 DegradedArrayEvent on /dev/md0 ... dmesg output: [47128.000051] ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x50) [47128.000097] end_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 58588863 [47128.000134] md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0 [48043.976054] ata3: lost interrupt (Status 0x50) [48043.976086] ata3.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen [48043.976132] ata3.00: cmd c8/00:18:bf:40:52/00:00:00:00:00/e1 tag 0 dma 12288 in [48043.976135] res 40/00:00:00:4f:c2/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x4 (timeout) [48043.976208] ata3.00: status: { DRDY } [48043.976241] ata3: soft resetting link [48044.148446] ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133 [48044.148457] ata3.00: device reported invalid CHS sector 0 [48044.148477] ata3: EH complete Recap: No possibility of overheating 6 drives have failed, 4 of those have been brand new. I'm not sure now that the original two have been faulty, or suffered the same thing that the new ones. There is nothing common in the system, apart from the OS which is Ubuntu Karmic now (started with Jaunty). New MB, new CPU, new RAM, new SATA cables. No, the little holes on the HDD are not covered I'm crying. Really. I don't have the face to return to the store now, it's not possible for 4 drives to fail under 4 months. A few ideas that I have been thinking: Is it possible that I fuck up something when I partition and resync the drives? Can it be so bad that it physicaly wrecks the drive? (since the vendor supplied tool says that the drive is damaged) I do the partitoning with fdisk, and use the same block size for the raid1 partitions (I check the exact block sizes with fdisk -lu) Is it possible that the linux kernel or mdadm, or something is not compatible with this exact brand of HDDs, and thrashes them? Is it possible that it may be the shoebox? Try placing it somewhere else? It's under a shelf now, so humidity is not a problem either. Is it possible that a normal PC case will solve my problem (I'm going to shoot myself then)? I will get a picture tomorrow. Am I just simply cursed? Any help or speculation is greatly appreciated. Edit: The power strip is guarded against overvoltage. Edit2: I have moved inbetween these 4 months, so the possibility of the cause being "dirty" electricity in both places, is very low. Edit3: I have checked the voltages in the BIOS (couldn't borrow a multimeter), and they are all seem correct, the biggest discrepancy is in the 12V, because it's supplying 11.3. Should I be worried about that? Edit4: I put my desktop PC's PSU into the server. The BIOS reported much more accurate voltage readings, and also it has successfully rebuilt the raid1 array, which took some 3-4 hours, so I feel a little positive now. Will get a new PSU tomorrow to test with that. Also, attaching the picture about the box: (disregard the 3rd drive)

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• Why should main() be short?

  - by Stargazer712

  I've been programming for over 9 years, and according to the advice of my first programming teacher, I always keep my main() function extremely short. At first I had no idea why. I just obeyed without understanding, much to the delight of my professors. After gaining experience, I realized that if I designed my code correctly, having a short main() function just sortof happened. Writing modularized code and following the single responsibility principle allowed my code to be designed in "bunches", and main() served as nothing more than a catalyst to get the program running. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, I was looking at Python's souce code, and I found the main() function: /* Minimal main program -- everything is loaded from the library */ ... int main(int argc, char **argv) { ... return Py_Main(argc, argv); } Yay python. Short main() function == Good code. Programming teachers were right. Wanting to look deeper, I took a look at Py_Main. In its entirety, it is defined as follows: /* Main program */ int Py_Main(int argc, char **argv) { int c; int sts; char *command = NULL; char *filename = NULL; char *module = NULL; FILE *fp = stdin; char *p; int unbuffered = 0; int skipfirstline = 0; int stdin_is_interactive = 0; int help = 0; int version = 0; int saw_unbuffered_flag = 0; PyCompilerFlags cf; cf.cf_flags = 0; orig_argc = argc; /* For Py_GetArgcArgv() */ orig_argv = argv; #ifdef RISCOS Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 0; #endif PySys_ResetWarnOptions(); while ((c = _PyOS_GetOpt(argc, argv, PROGRAM_OPTS)) != EOF) { if (c == 'c') { /* -c is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the command to interpret. */ command = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (command == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -c argument"); strcpy(command, _PyOS_optarg); strcat(command, "\n"); break; } if (c == 'm') { /* -m is the last option; following arguments that look like options are left for the module to interpret. */ module = (char *)malloc(strlen(_PyOS_optarg) + 2); if (module == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy -m argument"); strcpy(module, _PyOS_optarg); break; } switch (c) { case 'b': Py_BytesWarningFlag++; break; case 'd': Py_DebugFlag++; break; case '3': Py_Py3kWarningFlag++; if (!Py_DivisionWarningFlag) Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; case 'Q': if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "old") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 0; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warn") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 1; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "warnall") == 0) { Py_DivisionWarningFlag = 2; break; } if (strcmp(_PyOS_optarg, "new") == 0) { /* This only affects __main__ */ cf.cf_flags |= CO_FUTURE_DIVISION; /* And this tells the eval loop to treat BINARY_DIVIDE as BINARY_TRUE_DIVIDE */ _Py_QnewFlag = 1; break; } fprintf(stderr, "-Q option should be `-Qold', " "`-Qwarn', `-Qwarnall', or `-Qnew' only\n"); return usage(2, argv[0]); /* NOTREACHED */ case 'i': Py_InspectFlag++; Py_InteractiveFlag++; break; /* case 'J': reserved for Jython */ case 'O': Py_OptimizeFlag++; break; case 'B': Py_DontWriteBytecodeFlag++; break; case 's': Py_NoUserSiteDirectory++; break; case 'S': Py_NoSiteFlag++; break; case 'E': Py_IgnoreEnvironmentFlag++; break; case 't': Py_TabcheckFlag++; break; case 'u': unbuffered++; saw_unbuffered_flag = 1; break; case 'v': Py_VerboseFlag++; break; #ifdef RISCOS case 'w': Py_RISCOSWimpFlag = 1; break; #endif case 'x': skipfirstline = 1; break; /* case 'X': reserved for implementation-specific arguments */ case 'U': Py_UnicodeFlag++; break; case 'h': case '?': help++; break; case 'V': version++; break; case 'W': PySys_AddWarnOption(_PyOS_optarg); break; /* This space reserved for other options */ default: return usage(2, argv[0]); /*NOTREACHED*/ } } if (help) return usage(0, argv[0]); if (version) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s\n", PY_VERSION); return 0; } if (Py_Py3kWarningFlag && !Py_TabcheckFlag) /* -3 implies -t (but not -tt) */ Py_TabcheckFlag = 1; if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') Py_InspectFlag = 1; if (!saw_unbuffered_flag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONUNBUFFERED")) && *p != '\0') unbuffered = 1; if (!Py_NoUserSiteDirectory && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONNOUSERSITE")) && *p != '\0') Py_NoUserSiteDirectory = 1; if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONWARNINGS")) && *p != '\0') { char *buf, *warning; buf = (char *)malloc(strlen(p) + 1); if (buf == NULL) Py_FatalError( "not enough memory to copy PYTHONWARNINGS"); strcpy(buf, p); for (warning = strtok(buf, ","); warning != NULL; warning = strtok(NULL, ",")) PySys_AddWarnOption(warning); free(buf); } if (command == NULL && module == NULL && _PyOS_optind < argc && strcmp(argv[_PyOS_optind], "-") != 0) { #ifdef __VMS filename = decc$translate_vms(argv[_PyOS_optind]); if (filename == (char *)0 || filename == (char *)-1) filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #else filename = argv[_PyOS_optind]; #endif } stdin_is_interactive = Py_FdIsInteractive(stdin, (char *)0); if (unbuffered) { #if defined(MS_WINDOWS) || defined(__CYGWIN__) _setmode(fileno(stdin), O_BINARY); _setmode(fileno(stdout), O_BINARY); #endif #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ setbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL); setbuf(stderr, (char *)NULL); #endif /* !HAVE_SETVBUF */ } else if (Py_InteractiveFlag) { #ifdef MS_WINDOWS /* Doesn't have to have line-buffered -- use unbuffered */ /* Any set[v]buf(stdin, ...) screws up Tkinter :-( */ setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IONBF, BUFSIZ); #else /* !MS_WINDOWS */ #ifdef HAVE_SETVBUF setvbuf(stdin, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); setvbuf(stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); #endif /* HAVE_SETVBUF */ #endif /* !MS_WINDOWS */ /* Leave stderr alone - it should be unbuffered anyway. */ } #ifdef __VMS else { setvbuf (stdout, (char *)NULL, _IOLBF, BUFSIZ); } #endif /* __VMS */ #ifdef __APPLE__ /* On MacOS X, when the Python interpreter is embedded in an application bundle, it gets executed by a bootstrapping script that does os.execve() with an argv[0] that's different from the actual Python executable. This is needed to keep the Finder happy, or rather, to work around Apple's overly strict requirements of the process name. However, we still need a usable sys.executable, so the actual executable path is passed in an environment variable. See Lib/plat-mac/bundlebuiler.py for details about the bootstrap script. */ if ((p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONEXECUTABLE")) && *p != '\0') Py_SetProgramName(p); else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #else Py_SetProgramName(argv[0]); #endif Py_Initialize(); if (Py_VerboseFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL && stdin_is_interactive)) { fprintf(stderr, "Python %s on %s\n", Py_GetVersion(), Py_GetPlatform()); if (!Py_NoSiteFlag) fprintf(stderr, "%s\n", COPYRIGHT); } if (command != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } if (module != NULL) { /* Backup _PyOS_optind and force sys.argv[0] = '-c' so that PySys_SetArgv correctly sets sys.path[0] to '' rather than looking for a file called "-m". See tracker issue #8202 for details. */ _PyOS_optind--; argv[_PyOS_optind] = "-c"; } PySys_SetArgv(argc-_PyOS_optind, argv+_PyOS_optind); if ((Py_InspectFlag || (command == NULL && filename == NULL && module == NULL)) && isatty(fileno(stdin))) { PyObject *v; v = PyImport_ImportModule("readline"); if (v == NULL) PyErr_Clear(); else Py_DECREF(v); } if (command) { sts = PyRun_SimpleStringFlags(command, &cf) != 0; free(command); } else if (module) { sts = RunModule(module, 1); free(module); } else { if (filename == NULL && stdin_is_interactive) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* do exit on SystemExit */ RunStartupFile(&cf); } /* XXX */ sts = -1; /* keep track of whether we've already run __main__ */ if (filename != NULL) { sts = RunMainFromImporter(filename); } if (sts==-1 && filename!=NULL) { if ((fp = fopen(filename, "r")) == NULL) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: can't open file '%s': [Errno %d] %s\n", argv[0], filename, errno, strerror(errno)); return 2; } else if (skipfirstline) { int ch; /* Push back first newline so line numbers remain the same */ while ((ch = getc(fp)) != EOF) { if (ch == '\n') { (void)ungetc(ch, fp); break; } } } { /* XXX: does this work on Win/Win64? (see posix_fstat) */ struct stat sb; if (fstat(fileno(fp), &sb) == 0 && S_ISDIR(sb.st_mode)) { fprintf(stderr, "%s: '%s' is a directory, cannot continue\n", argv[0], filename); fclose(fp); return 1; } } } if (sts==-1) { /* call pending calls like signal handlers (SIGINT) */ if (Py_MakePendingCalls() == -1) { PyErr_Print(); sts = 1; } else { sts = PyRun_AnyFileExFlags( fp, filename == NULL ? "<stdin>" : filename, filename != NULL, &cf) != 0; } } } /* Check this environment variable at the end, to give programs the * opportunity to set it from Python. */ if (!Py_InspectFlag && (p = Py_GETENV("PYTHONINSPECT")) && *p != '\0') { Py_InspectFlag = 1; } if (Py_InspectFlag && stdin_is_interactive && (filename != NULL || command != NULL || module != NULL)) { Py_InspectFlag = 0; /* XXX */ sts = PyRun_AnyFileFlags(stdin, "<stdin>", &cf) != 0; } Py_Finalize(); #ifdef RISCOS if (Py_RISCOSWimpFlag) fprintf(stderr, "\x0cq\x0c"); /* make frontend quit */ #endif #ifdef __INSURE__ /* Insure++ is a memory analysis tool that aids in discovering * memory leaks and other memory problems. On Python exit, the * interned string dictionary is flagged as being in use at exit * (which it is). Under normal circumstances, this is fine because * the memory will be automatically reclaimed by the system. Under * memory debugging, it's a huge source of useless noise, so we * trade off slower shutdown for less distraction in the memory * reports. -baw */ _Py_ReleaseInternedStrings(); #endif /* __INSURE__ */ return sts; } Good God Almighty...it is big enough to sink the Titanic. It seems as though Python did the "Intro to Programming 101" trick and just moved all of main()'s code to a different function called it something very similar to "main". Here's my question: Is this code terribly written, or are there other reasons to have a short main function? As it stands right now, I see absolutely no difference between doing this and just moving the code in Py_Main() back into main(). Am I wrong in thinking this?

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• PASS: Bylaw Change 2013

  - by Bill Graziano

  PASS launched a Global Growth Initiative in the Summer of 2011 with the appointment of three international Board advisors.  Since then we’ve thought and talked extensively about how we make PASS more relevant to our members outside the US and Canada.  We’ve collected much of that discussion in our Global Growth site.  You can find vision documents, plans, governance proposals, feedback sites, and transcripts of Twitter chats and town hall meetings.  We also address these plans at the Board Q&A during the 2012 Summit. One of the biggest changes coming out of this process is around how we elect Board members.  And that requires a change to the bylaws.  We published the proposed bylaw changes as a red-lined document so you can clearly see the changes.  Our goal in these bylaw changes was to address the changes required by the global growth initiatives, conduct a legal review of the document and address other minor issues in the document.  There are numerous small wording changes throughout the document.  For example, we replaced every reference of “The Corporation” with the word “PASS” so it now reads “PASS is organized…”. Board Composition The biggest change in these bylaw changes is how the Board is composed and elected.  This discussion starts in section VI.2.  This section now says that some elected directors will come from geographic regions.  I think this is the best way to make sure we give all of our members a voice in the leadership of the organization.  The key parts of this section are: The remaining Directors (i.e. the non-Officer Directors and non-Vendor Appointed Directors) shall be elected by the voting membership (“Elected Directors”). Elected Directors shall include representatives of defined PASS regions (“Regions”) as set forth below (“Regional Directors”) and at minimum one (1) additional Director-at-Large whose selection is not limited by region. Regional Directors shall include, but are not limited to, two (2) seats for the Region covering Canada and the United States of America. Additional Regions for the purpose of electing additional Regional Directors and additional Director-at-Large seats for the purpose of expanding the Board shall be defined by a majority vote of the current Board of Directors and must be established prior to the public call for nominations in the general election. Previously defined Regions and seats approved by the Board of Directors shall remain in effect and can only be modified by a 2/3 majority vote by the then current Board of Directors. Currently PASS has six At-Large Directors elected by the members.  These changes allow for a Regional Director position that is elected by the members but must come from a particular region.  It also stipulates that there must always be at least one Director-at-Large who can come from any region. We also understand that PASS is currently a very US-centric organization.  Our Summit is held in America, roughly half our chapters are in the US and Canada and most of the Board members over the last ten years have come from America.  We wanted to reflect that by making sure that our US and Canadian volunteers would continue to play a significant role by ensuring that two Regional seats are reserved specifically for Canada and the US. Other than that, the bylaws don’t create any specific regional seats.  These rules allow us to create Regional Director seats but don’t require it.  We haven’t fully discussed what the criteria will be in order for a region to have a seat designated for it or how many regions there will be.  In our discussions we’ve broadly discussed regions for United States and Canada Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Australia, New Zealand and Asia (also known as Asia Pacific or APAC) Mexico, South America, and Central America (LATAM) As you can see, our thinking is that there will be a few large regions.  I’ve also considered a non-North America region that we can gradually split into the regions above as our membership grows in those areas.  The regions will be defined by a policy document that will be published prior to the elections. I’m hoping that over the next year we can begin to publish more of what we do as Board-approved policy documents. While the bylaws only require a single non-region specific At-large Director, I would expect we would always have two.  That way we can have one in each election.  I think it’s important that we always have one seat open that anyone who is eligible to run for the Board can contest.  The Board is required to have any regions defined prior to the start of the election process. Board Elections – Regional Seats We spent a lot of time discussing how the elections would work for these Regional Director seats.  Ultimately we decided that the simplest solution is that every PASS member should vote for every open seat.  Section VIII.3 reads: Candidates who are eligible (i.e. eligible to serve in such capacity subject to the criteria set forth herein or adopted by the Board of Directors) shall be designated to fill open Board seats in the following order of priority on the basis of total votes received: (i) full term Regional Director seats, (ii) full term Director-at-Large seats, (iii) not full term (vacated) Regional Director seats, (iv) not full term (vacated) Director-at-Large seats. For the purposes of clarity, because of eligibility requirements, it is contemplated that the candidates designated to the open Board seats may not receive more votes than certain other candidates who are not selected to the Board. We debated whether to have multiple ballots or one single ballot.  Multiple ballot elections get complicated quickly.  Let’s say we have a ballot for US/Canada and one for Region 2.  After that we’d need a mechanism to merge those two together and come up with the winner of the at-large seat or have another election for the at-large position.  We think the best way to do this is a single ballot and putting the highest vote getters into the most restrictive seats.  Let’s look at an example: There are seats open for Region 1, Region 2 and at-large.  The election results are as follows: Candidate A (eligible for Region 1) – 550 votes Candidate B (eligible for Region 1) – 525 votes Candidate C (eligible for Region 1) – 475 votes Candidate D (eligible for Region 2) – 125 votes Candidate E (eligible for Region 2) – 75 votes In this case, Candidate A is the winner for Region 1 and is assigned that seat.  Candidate D is the winner for Region 2 and is assigned that seat.  The at-large seat is filled by the high remaining vote getter which is Candidate B. The key point to understand is that we may have a situation where a person with a lower vote total is elected to a regional seat and a person with a higher vote total is excluded.  This will be true whether we had multiple ballots or a single ballot.  Board Elections – Vacant Seats The other change to the election process is for vacant Board seats.  The actual changes are sprinkled throughout the document. Previously we didn’t have a mechanism that allowed for an election of a Board seat that we knew would be vacant in the future.  The most common case is when a Board members moves to an Officer role in the middle of their term.  One of the key changes is to allow the number of votes members have to match the number of open seats.  This allows each voter to express their preference on all open seats.  This only applies when we know about the opening prior to the call for nominations.  This all means that if there’s a seat will be open at the start of the next Board term, and we know about it prior to the call for nominations, we can include that seat in the elections.  Ultimately, the aim is to have PASS members decide who sits on the Board in as many situations as possible. We discussed the option of changing the bylaws to just take next highest vote-getter in all other cases.  I think that’s wrong for the following reasons: All voters aren’t able to express an opinion on all candidates.  If there are five people running for three seats, you can only vote for three.  You have no way to express your preference between #4 and #5. Different candidates may have different information about the number of seats available.  A person may learn that a Board member plans to resign at the end of the year prior to that information being made public. They may understand that the top four vote getters will end up on the Board while the rest of the members believe there are only three openings.  This may affect someone’s decision to run.  I don’t think this creates a transparent, fair election. Board members may use their knowledge of the election results to decide whether to remain on the Board or not.  Admittedly this one is unlikely but I don’t want to create a situation where this accusation can be leveled. I think the majority of vacancies in the future will be handled through elections.  The bylaw section quoted above also indicates that partial term vacancies will be filled after the full term seats are filled. Removing Directors Section VI.7 on removing directors has always had a clause that allowed members to remove an elected director.  We also had a clause that allowed appointed directors to be removed.  We added a clause that allows the Board to remove for cause any director with a 2/3 majority vote.  The updated text reads: Any Director may be removed for cause by a 2/3 majority vote of the Board of Directors whenever in its judgment the best interests of PASS would be served thereby. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the authority of any Director to act as in an official capacity as a Director or Officer of PASS may be suspended by the Board of Directors for cause. Cause for suspension or removal of a Director shall include but not be limited to failure to meet any Board-approved performance expectations or the presence of a reason for suspension or dismissal as listed in Addendum B of these Bylaws. The first paragraph is updated and the second and third are unchanged (except cleaning up language).  If you scroll down and look at Addendum B of these bylaws you find the following: Cause for suspension or dismissal of a member of the Board of Directors may include: Inability to attend Board meetings on a regular basis. Inability or unwillingness to act in a capacity designated by the Board of Directors. Failure to fulfill the responsibilities of the office. Inability to represent the Region elected to represent Failure to act in a manner consistent with PASS's Bylaws and/or policies. Misrepresentation of responsibility and/or authority. Misrepresentation of PASS. Unresolved conflict of interests with Board responsibilities. Breach of confidentiality. The bold line about your inability to represent your region is what we added to the bylaws in this revision.  We also added a clause to section VII.3 allowing the Board to remove an officer.  That clause is much less restrictive.  It doesn’t require cause and only requires a simple majority. The Board of Directors may remove any Officer whenever in their judgment the best interests of PASS shall be served by such removal. Other There are numerous other small changes throughout the document. Proxy voting.  The laws around how members and Board members proxy votes are specific in Illinois law.  PASS is an Illinois corporation and is subject to Illinois laws.  We changed section IV.5 to come into compliance with those laws.  Specifically this says you can only vote through a proxy if you have a written proxy through your authorized attorney.  English language proficiency.  As we increase our global footprint we come across more members that aren’t native English speakers.  The business of PASS is conducted in English and it’s important that our Board members speak English.  If we get big enough to afford translators, we may be able to relax this but right now we need English language skills for effective Board members. Committees.  The language around committees in section IX is old and dated.  Our lawyers advised us to clean it up.  This section specifically applies to any committees that the Board may form outside of portfolios.  We removed the term limits, quorum and vacancies clause.  We don’t currently have any committees that this would apply to.  The Nominating Committee is covered elsewhere in the bylaws. Electronic Votes.  The change allows the Board to vote via email but the results must be unanimous.  This is to conform with Illinois state law. Immediate Past President.  There was no mechanism to fill the IPP role if an outgoing President chose not to participate.  We changed section VII.8 to allow the Board to invite any previous President to fill the role by majority vote. Nominations Committee.  We’ve opened the language to allow for the transparent election of the Nominations Committee as outlined by the 2011 Election Review Committee. Revocation of Charters. The language surrounding the revocation of charters for local groups was flagged by the lawyers. We have allowed for the local user group to make all necessary payment before considering returning of items to PASS if required. Bylaw notification. We’ve spent countless meetings working on these bylaws with the intent to not open them again any time in the near future. Should the bylaws be opened again, we have included a clause ensuring that the PASS membership is involved. I’m proud that the Board has remained committed to transparency and accountability to members. This clause will require that same level of commitment in the future even when all the current Board members have rolled off. I think that covers everything.  I’d encourage you to look through the red-line document and see the changes.  It’s helpful to look at the language that’s being removed and the language that’s being added.  I’m happy to answer any questions here or you can email them to [email protected].

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• mdadm: Win7-install created a boot partition on one of my RAID6 drives. How to rebuild?

  - by EXIT_FAILURE

  My problem happened when I attempted to install Windows 7 on it's own SSD. The Linux OS I used which has knowledge of the software RAID system is on a SSD that I disconnected prior to the install. This was so that windows (or I) wouldn't inadvertently mess it up. However, and in retrospect, foolishly, I left the RAID disks connected, thinking that windows wouldn't be so ridiculous as to mess with a HDD that it sees as just unallocated space. Boy was I wrong! After copying over the installation files to the SSD (as expected and desired), it also created an ntfs partition on one of the RAID disks. Both unexpected and totally undesired! . I changed out the SSDs again, and booted up in linux. mdadm didn't seem to have any problem assembling the array as before, but if I tried to mount the array, I got the error message: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/md0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so dmesg: EXT4-fs (md0): ext4_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 0 not in group (block 1318081259)! EXT4-fs (md0): group descriptors corrupted! I then used qparted to delete the newly created ntfs partition on /dev/sdd so that it matched the other three /dev/sd{b,c,e}, and requested a resync of my array with echo repair > /sys/block/md0/md/sync_action This took around 4 hours, and upon completion, dmesg reports: md: md0: requested-resync done. A bit brief after a 4-hour task, though I'm unsure as to where other log files exist (I also seem to have messed up my sendmail configuration). In any case: No change reported according to mdadm, everything checks out. mdadm -D /dev/md0 still reports: Version : 1.2 Creation Time : Wed May 23 22:18:45 2012 Raid Level : raid6 Array Size : 3907026848 (3726.03 GiB 4000.80 GB) Used Dev Size : 1953513424 (1863.02 GiB 2000.40 GB) Raid Devices : 4 Total Devices : 4 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Mon May 26 12:41:58 2014 State : clean Active Devices : 4 Working Devices : 4 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 4K Name : okamilinkun:0 UUID : 0c97ebf3:098864d8:126f44e3:e4337102 Events : 423 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 16 0 active sync /dev/sdb 1 8 32 1 active sync /dev/sdc 2 8 48 2 active sync /dev/sdd 3 8 64 3 active sync /dev/sde Trying to mount it still reports: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/md0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so and dmesg: EXT4-fs (md0): ext4_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 0 not in group (block 1318081259)! EXT4-fs (md0): group descriptors corrupted! I'm a bit unsure where to proceed from here, and trying stuff "to see if it works" is a bit too risky for me. This is what I suggest I should attempt to do: Tell mdadm that /dev/sdd (the one that windows wrote into) isn't reliable anymore, pretend it is newly re-introduced to the array, and reconstruct its content based on the other three drives. I also could be totally wrong in my assumptions, that the creation of the ntfs partition on /dev/sdd and subsequent deletion has changed something that cannot be fixed this way. My question: Help, what should I do? If I should do what I suggested , how do I do that? From reading documentation, etc, I would think maybe: mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --set-faulty /dev/sdd mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sdd mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --re-add /dev/sdd However, the documentation examples suggest /dev/sdd1, which seems strange to me, as there is no partition there as far as linux is concerned, just unallocated space. Maybe these commands won't work without. Maybe it makes sense to mirror the partition table of one of the other raid devices that weren't touched, before --re-add. Something like: sfdisk -d /dev/sdb | sfdisk /dev/sdd Bonus question: Why would the Windows 7 installation do something so st...potentially dangerous? Update I went ahead and marked /dev/sdd as faulty, and removed it (not physically) from the array: # mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --set-faulty /dev/sdd # mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sdd However, attempting to --re-add was disallowed: # mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --re-add /dev/sdd mdadm: --re-add for /dev/sdd to /dev/md0 is not possible --add, was fine. # mdadm --manage /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdd mdadm -D /dev/md0 now reports the state as clean, degraded, recovering, and /dev/sdd as spare rebuilding. /proc/mdstat shows the recovery progress: md0 : active raid6 sdd[4] sdc[1] sde[3] sdb[0] 3907026848 blocks super 1.2 level 6, 4k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [UU_U] [>....................] recovery = 2.1% (42887780/1953513424) finish=348.7min speed=91297K/sec nmon also shows expected output: ¦sdb 0% 87.3 0.0| > |¦ ¦sdc 71% 109.1 0.0|RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR > |¦ ¦sdd 40% 0.0 87.3|WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW > |¦ ¦sde 0% 87.3 0.0|> || It looks good so far. Crossing my fingers for another five+ hours :) Update 2 The recovery of /dev/sdd finished, with dmesg output: [44972.599552] md: md0: recovery done. [44972.682811] RAID conf printout: [44972.682815] --- level:6 rd:4 wd:4 [44972.682817] disk 0, o:1, dev:sdb [44972.682819] disk 1, o:1, dev:sdc [44972.682820] disk 2, o:1, dev:sdd [44972.682821] disk 3, o:1, dev:sde Attempting mount /dev/md0 reports: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/md0, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so And on dmesg: [44984.159908] EXT4-fs (md0): ext4_check_descriptors: Block bitmap for group 0 not in group (block 1318081259)! [44984.159912] EXT4-fs (md0): group descriptors corrupted! I'm not sure what do do now. Suggestions? Output of dumpe2fs /dev/md0: dumpe2fs 1.42.8 (20-Jun-2013) Filesystem volume name: Atlas Last mounted on: /mnt/atlas Filesystem UUID: e7bfb6a4-c907-4aa0-9b55-9528817bfd70 Filesystem magic number: 0xEF53 Filesystem revision #: 1 (dynamic) Filesystem features: has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype extent flex_bg sparse_super large_file huge_file uninit_bg dir_nlink extra_isize Filesystem flags: signed_directory_hash Default mount options: user_xattr acl Filesystem state: clean Errors behavior: Continue Filesystem OS type: Linux Inode count: 244195328 Block count: 976756712 Reserved block count: 48837835 Free blocks: 92000180 Free inodes: 243414877 First block: 0 Block size: 4096 Fragment size: 4096 Reserved GDT blocks: 791 Blocks per group: 32768 Fragments per group: 32768 Inodes per group: 8192 Inode blocks per group: 512 RAID stripe width: 2 Flex block group size: 16 Filesystem created: Thu May 24 07:22:41 2012 Last mount time: Sun May 25 23:44:38 2014 Last write time: Sun May 25 23:46:42 2014 Mount count: 341 Maximum mount count: -1 Last checked: Thu May 24 07:22:41 2012 Check interval: 0 (<none>) Lifetime writes: 4357 GB Reserved blocks uid: 0 (user root) Reserved blocks gid: 0 (group root) First inode: 11 Inode size: 256 Required extra isize: 28 Desired extra isize: 28 Journal inode: 8 Default directory hash: half_md4 Directory Hash Seed: e177a374-0b90-4eaa-b78f-d734aae13051 Journal backup: inode blocks dumpe2fs: Corrupt extent header while reading journal super block

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• Cisco ASA5505 8.2 Multiple Outside IP to Multiple Inside IP

  - by GriffJ

  Trying to setup ASA5505. Semi working but having issues with accessing services from the outside. ASA5505 Basic License, Version 8.2. (plus upgrade to unlimited inside hosts). Alert: I'm a Cisco Noob. 321.321.39.X is a place holder for privacy. I came up with this config and tested it tonight. ASA Version 8.2(1) ! hostname <removed> domain-name <removed> enable password <removed> encrypted passwd <removed> encrypted names ! interface Vlan1 nameif inside security-level 100 ip address 172.21.36.1 255.255.252.0 ! interface Vlan2 nameif outside security-level 0 ip address 321.321.39.10 255.255.255.248 ! interface Ethernet0/0 switchport access vlan 2 ! interface Ethernet0/1 ! interface Ethernet0/2 ! interface Ethernet0/3 ! interface Ethernet0/4 ! interface Ethernet0/5 ! interface Ethernet0/6 ! interface Ethernet0/7 ! ftp mode passive dns server-group DefaultDNS domain-name <removed> access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.10 eq pptp access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.11 eq https access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.11 eq 993 access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.11 eq smtp access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.11 eq 1001 access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.11 eq 465 access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.11 eq domain access-list outside_inbound extended permit udp any eq domain host 321.321.39.11 eq domain access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.12 eq www access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.12 eq https access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.13 eq www access-list outside_inbound extended permit tcp any host 321.321.39.13 eq https access-list outside_inbound extended permit icmp any any echo-reply access-list outside_inbound extended permit icmp any any source-quench access-list outside_inbound extended permit icmp any any unreachable access-list outside_inbound extended permit icmp any any time-exceeded access-list outside_inbound extended permit icmp any any traceroute access-list outside_inbound extended permit icmp any any echo pager lines 24 logging asdm informational mtu inside 1500 mtu outside 1500 icmp unreachable rate-limit 1 burst-size 1 no asdm history enable arp timeout 14400 global (outside) 2 321.321.39.11-321.321.39.14 netmask 255.255.255.248 global (outside) 1 interface nat (inside) 1 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 static (inside,outside) tcp interface pptp 172.21.37.20 pptp netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) 321.321.39.11 172.21.37.14 netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) 321.321.39.12 172.21.37.24 netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) 321.321.39.13 172.21.37.17 netmask 255.255.255.255 access-group outside_inbound in interface outside route outside 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 321.321.39.9 1 route inside 192.168.15.0 255.255.255.0 172.21.36.52 1 timeout xlate 3:00:00 timeout conn 1:00:00 half-closed 0:10:00 udp 0:02:00 icmp 0:00:02 timeout sunrpc 0:10:00 h323 0:05:00 h225 1:00:00 mgcp 0:05:00 mgcp-pat 0:05:00 timeout sip 0:30:00 sip_media 0:02:00 sip-invite 0:03:00 sip-disconnect 0:02:00 timeout sip-provisional-media 0:02:00 uauth 0:05:00 absolute timeout tcp-proxy-reassembly 0:01:00 dynamic-access-policy-record DfltAccessPolicy http server enable http 172.21.36.0 255.255.252.0 inside no snmp-server location no snmp-server contact snmp-server enable traps snmp authentication linkup linkdown coldstart crypto ipsec security-association lifetime seconds 28800 crypto ipsec security-association lifetime kilobytes 4608000 telnet 172.21.36.0 255.255.252.0 inside telnet timeout 60 ssh timeout 5 console timeout 0 threat-detection basic-threat threat-detection statistics access-list no threat-detection statistics tcp-intercept webvpn ! class-map inspection_default match default-inspection-traffic ! ! policy-map type inspect dns preset_dns_map parameters message-length maximum 512 policy-map global_policy class inspection_default inspect dns preset_dns_map inspect ftp inspect h323 h225 inspect h323 ras inspect rsh inspect rtsp inspect sqlnet inspect skinny inspect sunrpc inspect xdmcp inspect sip inspect netbios inspect tftp inspect pptp inspect ipsec-pass-thru inspect http ! service-policy global_policy global prompt hostname context The servers that had static forwards did not have any outside network access. couldn't ping google.com for instance. mail server couldn't Domain POP the Barracuda spam filter from our ISP etc. So after doing some reading I removed the statics for 172.21.37.11, 12 and 13, and replaced those three with what's below.. static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.11 https 172.21.37.14 https netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.11 993 172.21.37.14 993 netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.11 smtp 172.21.37.14 smtp netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.11 1001 172.21.37.14 1001 netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.11 465 172.21.37.14 465 netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.11 domain 172.21.37.14 domain netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.12 www 172.21.37.24 www netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.12 https 172.21.37.24 https netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.13 www 172.21.37.17 www netmask 255.255.255.255 static (inside,outside) tcp 321.321.39.13 https 172.21.37.17 https netmask 255.255.255.255 Now the servers (for instance 172.21.37.14) could ping the outside world again. Mail started flowing (Domain POP was successful) etc. etc. But I forgot to check if webmail worked from the outside admittedly. But the webservers at 172.21.37.17 and 172.21.37.24 still didn't respond from the outside world. Although I was able to PPTP VPN in on 321.321.39.10 (interface) which is the outside interface IP address. and it is static mapped to 172.21.37.20. So I'm thinking there must be something wrong with NAT somewhere? no response from 321.321.39.11 to 321.321.39.14.. Could anyone look over the config and please let me know what I've done wrong? Is there something I've missed? well obviously but.. please help! Thank you.

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• Windows 7 intermittently drops wired internet/lan connection.

  - by CraigTP

  In a nutshell, my Windows 7 Ultimate PC intermittently drops it's internet connection. Why? Background: My PC is wired to my ADSL modem/router which is directly connected to the phone line. I also have wireless connectivity turned on within the router for a laptop to connect wirelessly. Every few hours or so, when using my PC, I find I cannot access the internet and pages will not load. Eventually, Windows7 will update the network icon in the task-tray to show the exclamation mark symbol on the network icon. Opening up the Network And Sharing Centre will show the red cross between the "Multiple Networks" and "The Internet". Here's a picture of the "Network And Sharing Centre" (grabbed when everything was working!) As you can see, I'm running Sun's VirtualBox on this machine and that creates a Network connection for itself. This doesn't seem to affect the intermittent dropping (i.e. the intermittent drops occur whether the VirtualBox connection is in use or not). When the connection does drop, I cannot access any internet pages, nor can I access the router's web admin page at http://192.168.1.1/, so I'm assuming I've lost all local LAN access too. It's definitely not the router (or the internet connection itself) as my laptop, using the wireless connection (and running Vista Home Premium) continues to be able to access the internet (and the router's web admin pages) just fine. Every time this happens, I can immediately restore all internet and LAN access by opening Network Adapter page, disabling the "Local Area Connection" and then re-enabling it. Give it a few seconds and everything is fine again. I assume this is because, beneath the GUI, it's effectively doing an "ipconfig /release" then "ipconfig /renew". Why does this happen in the first place, though? I've googled for this and seen quite a few other people (even on MSDN/Technet forums) experiencing the same or almost the same problem, but with no clear resolution. Suggestions of turning off IPv6 on the LAN adapter, and ensuring there's no power management "sleeping" the network adapter have been tried but do not cure the problem. There does not seem to be any particular sequence of events that cause it to happen either. I've had it go twice in 20 minutes when just randomly browsing the web with no other traffic, and I've also had it go once then not go again for 2-3 hours with the same sort of usage. Can anyone tell me why this is happening and how to make it stop? EDIT: Additional information based upon the answer provided so far: Firstly, I forgot the mention that this is Windows 7 64 bit if that makes any difference at all. I mentioned that I don't think the VirtualBox network adpater is causing this problem in any way, and I also have VirtualBox installed on two other machines, one running Vista Home Premium and the other running XP. Neither of these machine experience the same network connectivity issues as the Windows 7 machine. The IP assignment for the Windows 7 machine is the same both before and after the "drop". I have a DHCP server on the router issuing IP Addresses, however my Windows 7 machine uses a static address. Here's the output from "ipconfig": Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled Within the system's event logs, the only event that relates to the connection dropping is a "DNS Client Event" and this is generated after the connection has dropped and is an event detailing that DNS information can't be found for whatever website I may be trying to access, just as the connection drops: Log Name: System Source: Microsoft-Windows-DNS-Client Event ID: 1014 Task Category: None Level: Warning Keywords: User: NETWORK SERVICE Description: Name resolution for the name weather.service.msn.com timed out after none of the configured DNS servers responded. The network adapter chipset is Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller and I have confirmed that this is the correct chipset for the motherboard (Asus M4A77TD PRO), and in fact, Windows Update installed an updated driver for this on 12/Jan/2009. The details of the update say that it's a Realtek software update from December 2009. Incidentally, I was still having the same intermittent problems prior to this update. It seems to have made no difference at all. EDIT 2 (1 Feb 2010): In my quest to solve this problem, I have discovered some more interesting information. On another forum, someone suggested that I should try running Windows in "Safe Mode With Networking" and see if the problem continues to occur. This was a fantastic suggestion and I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner myself. So, I proceeded to run in Safe Mode with Networking for a number of hours, and amazingly, the "drops" didn't occur once. It was a positive discovery, however, due to the intermittent nature of the original problem, I wasn't completely convinced that the problem was cured. One thing I did note is that the fan on my GFX card was running alot louder than normal. This is due to the fact that I have an ASUS ENGTS250 graphics card (http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=B6imcoax3MRY42f3) which had a known problem with a noisy fan until a BIOS update fixed the issue. (See the "Manufacturer Response" here: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121334 for details). Well, running in safe mode had the fan running (incorrectly) at full speed (as it did before the BIOS update), but with an (apparently) stable network connection. Obviously some driver was not loaded for the GFX card when in Safe Mode so this got me thinking about the GFX card (since the very noisy fan was quite obvious when running in Safe Mode). I rebooted into normal mode, and found that Nvidia had a very up-to-date new driver for my GFX card (only about 1 week old), so I downloaded the appropriate driver and installed it. After installation and a reboot, I was able to use my PC for an entire day with NO NETWORK DROPS!!! This was on Saturday. However, on the Sunday, I also had my PC for pretty much the entire day and experienced 2 network drops. No other changes have been made to my PC in this time. So, the story seems to be that updating my graphics card drivers seems to have improved (if not completely fixed) the issue, however, I'm still searching for a proper fix for this problem. Hopefully, this information may help anyone who may have additional ideas as to why this problem is occuring in the first place. (And why does new GFX card drivers have anything to do with the network?) I appreciate everyone's feedback so far. However, I'll have to ask once more if anyone has any further ideas of how to fix this particular problem? Thanks in advance.

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• saslauthd + PostFix producing password verification and authentication errors

  - by Aram Papazian

  So I'm trying to setup PostFix while using SASL (Cyrus variety preferred, I was using dovecot earlier but I'm switching from dovecot to courier so I want to use cyrus instead of dovecot) but I seem to be having issues. Here are the errors I'm receiving: ==> mail.log <== Aug 10 05:11:49 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[779]: warning: SASL authentication failure: Password verification failed Aug 10 05:11:49 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[779]: warning: ipname[xx.xx.xx.xx]: SASL PLAIN authentication failed: authentication failure ==> mail.info <== Aug 10 05:11:49 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[779]: warning: SASL authentication failure: Password verification failed Aug 10 05:11:49 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[779]: warning: ipname[xx.xx.xx.xx]: SASL PLAIN authentication failed: authentication failure ==> mail.warn <== Aug 10 05:11:49 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[779]: warning: SASL authentication failure: Password verification failed Aug 10 05:11:49 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[779]: warning: ipname[xx.xx.xx.xx]: SASL PLAIN authentication failed: authentication failure I tried $testsaslauthd -u xxxx -p xxxx 0: OK "Success." So I know that the password/user I'm using is correct. I'm thinking that most likely I have a setting wrong somewhere, but can't seem to find where. Here is my files. Here is my main.cf for postfix: # See /usr/share/postfix/main.cf.dist for a commented, more complete version # Debian specific: Specifying a file name will cause the first # line of that file to be used as the name. The Debian default # is /etc/mailname. myorigin = /etc/mailname # This is already done in /etc/mailname #myhostname = crazyinsanoman.xxxxx.com smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name #biff = no # appending .domain is the MUA's job. #append_dot_mydomain = no readme_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix # TLS parameters smtpd_tls_cert_file = /etc/postfix/smtpd.cert smtpd_tls_key_file = /etc/postfix/smtpd.key smtpd_use_tls = yes smtpd_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtpd_scache smtp_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtp_scache # Relay smtp through another server or leave blank to do it yourself #relayhost = smtp.yourisp.com # Network details; Accept connections from anywhere, and only trust this machine mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 inet_interfaces = all #mynetworks_style = host #As we will be using virtual domains, these need to be empty local_recipient_maps = mydestination = # how long if undelivered before sending "delayed mail" warning update to sender delay_warning_time = 4h # will it be a permanent error or temporary unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 450 # how long to keep message on queue before return as failed. # some have 3 days, I have 16 days as I am backup server for some people # whom go on holiday with their server switched off. maximal_queue_lifetime = 7d # max and min time in seconds between retries if connection failed minimal_backoff_time = 1000s maximal_backoff_time = 8000s # how long to wait when servers connect before receiving rest of data smtp_helo_timeout = 60s # how many address can be used in one message. # effective stopper to mass spammers, accidental copy in whole address list # but may restrict intentional mail shots. smtpd_recipient_limit = 16 # how many error before back off. smtpd_soft_error_limit = 3 # how many max errors before blocking it. smtpd_hard_error_limit = 12 # Requirements for the HELO statement smtpd_helo_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, warn_if_reject reject_non_fqdn_hostname, reject_invalid_hostname, permit # Requirements for the sender details smtpd_sender_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, warn_if_reject reject_non_fqdn_sender, reject_unknown_sender_domain, reject_unauth_pipelining, permit # Requirements for the connecting server smtpd_client_restrictions = reject_rbl_client sbl.spamhaus.org, reject_rbl_client blackholes.easynet.nl, reject_rbl_client dnsbl.njabl.org # Requirement for the recipient address smtpd_recipient_restrictions = reject_unauth_pipelining, permit_mynetworks, reject_non_fqdn_recipient, reject_unknown_recipient_domain, reject_unauth_destination, permit smtpd_data_restrictions = reject_unauth_pipelining # require proper helo at connections smtpd_helo_required = yes # waste spammers time before rejecting them smtpd_delay_reject = yes disable_vrfy_command = yes # not sure of the difference of the next two # but they are needed for local aliasing alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases alias_database = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases # this specifies where the virtual mailbox folders will be located virtual_mailbox_base = /var/spool/mail/vmail # this is for the mailbox location for each user virtual_mailbox_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_mailbox.cf # and this is for aliases virtual_alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_alias.cf # and this is for domain lookups virtual_mailbox_domains = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_domains.cf # this is how to connect to the domains (all virtual, but the option is there) # not used yet # transport_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_transport.cf # Setup the uid/gid of the owner of the mail files - static:5000 allows virtual ones virtual_uid_maps = static:5000 virtual_gid_maps = static:5000 inet_protocols=all # Cyrus SASL Support smtpd_sasl_path = smtpd smtpd_sasl_local_domain = xxxxx.com ####################### ## OLD CONFIGURATION ## ####################### #myorigin = /etc/mailname #mydestination = crazyinsanoman.xxxxx.com, localhost, localhost.localdomain #mailbox_size_limit = 0 #recipient_delimiter = + #html_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix/html message_size_limit = 30720000 #virtual_alias_domains = ##virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual #virtual_mailbox_base = /home/vmail ##luser_relay = webmaster #smtpd_sasl_type = dovecot #smtpd_sasl_path = private/auth smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes #smtpd_sasl_authenticated_header = yes smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unauth_destination #virtual_create_maildirsize = yes #virtual_maildir_extended = yes #proxy_read_maps = $local_recipient_maps $mydestination $virtual_alias_maps $virtual_alias_domains $virtual_mailbox_maps $virtual_mailbox_domains $relay_recipient_maps $relay_domains $canonical_maps $sender_canonical_maps $recipient_canonical_maps $relocated_maps $transport_maps $mynetworks $virtual_mailbox_limit_maps #virtual_transport = dovecot #dovecot_destination_recipient_limit = 1 Here is my master.cf: # # Postfix master process configuration file. For details on the format # of the file, see the master(5) manual page (command: "man 5 master"). # # Do not forget to execute "postfix reload" after editing this file. # # ========================================================================== # service type private unpriv chroot wakeup maxproc command + args # (yes) (yes) (yes) (never) (100) # ========================================================================== smtp inet n - - - - smtpd submission inet n - - - - smtpd -o smtpd_tls_security_level=encrypt -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject # -o milter_macro_daemon_name=ORIGINATING #smtps inet n - - - - smtpd # -o smtpd_tls_wrappermode=yes # -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes # -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject # -o milter_macro_daemon_name=ORIGINATING #628 inet n - - - - qmqpd pickup fifo n - - 60 1 pickup cleanup unix n - - - 0 cleanup qmgr fifo n - n 300 1 qmgr #qmgr fifo n - - 300 1 oqmgr tlsmgr unix - - - 1000? 1 tlsmgr rewrite unix - - - - - trivial-rewrite bounce unix - - - - 0 bounce defer unix - - - - 0 bounce trace unix - - - - 0 bounce verify unix - - - - 1 verify flush unix n - - 1000? 0 flush proxymap unix - - n - - proxymap proxywrite unix - - n - 1 proxymap smtp unix - - - - - smtp # When relaying mail as backup MX, disable fallback_relay to avoid MX loops relay unix - - - - - smtp -o smtp_fallback_relay= # -o smtp_helo_timeout=5 -o smtp_connect_timeout=5 showq unix n - - - - showq error unix - - - - - error retry unix - - - - - error discard unix - - - - - discard local unix - n n - - local virtual unix - n n - - virtual lmtp unix - - - - - lmtp anvil unix - - - - 1 anvil scache unix - - - - 1 scache # # ==================================================================== # Interfaces to non-Postfix software. Be sure to examine the manual # pages of the non-Postfix software to find out what options it wants. # # Many of the following services use the Postfix pipe(8) delivery # agent. See the pipe(8) man page for information about ${recipient} # and other message envelope options. # ==================================================================== # # maildrop. See the Postfix MAILDROP_README file for details. # Also specify in main.cf: maildrop_destination_recipient_limit=1 # maildrop unix - n n - - pipe flags=DRhu user=vmail argv=/usr/bin/maildrop -d ${recipient} # # ==================================================================== # # Recent Cyrus versions can use the existing "lmtp" master.cf entry. # # Specify in cyrus.conf: # lmtp cmd="lmtpd -a" listen="localhost:lmtp" proto=tcp4 # # Specify in main.cf one or more of the following: # mailbox_transport = lmtp:inet:localhost # virtual_transport = lmtp:inet:localhost # # ==================================================================== # # Cyrus 2.1.5 (Amos Gouaux) # Also specify in main.cf: cyrus_destination_recipient_limit=1 # cyrus unix - n n - - pipe user=cyrus argv=/cyrus/bin/deliver -e -r ${sender} -m ${extension} ${user} # # ==================================================================== # Old example of delivery via Cyrus. # #old-cyrus unix - n n - - pipe # flags=R user=cyrus argv=/cyrus/bin/deliver -e -m ${extension} ${user} # # ==================================================================== # # See the Postfix UUCP_README file for configuration details. # uucp unix - n n - - pipe flags=Fqhu user=uucp argv=uux -r -n -z -a$sender - $nexthop!rmail ($recipient) # # Other external delivery methods. # ifmail unix - n n - - pipe flags=F user=ftn argv=/usr/lib/ifmail/ifmail -r $nexthop ($recipient) bsmtp unix - n n - - pipe flags=Fq. user=bsmtp argv=/usr/lib/bsmtp/bsmtp -t$nexthop -f$sender $recipient scalemail-backend unix - n n - 2 pipe flags=R user=scalemail argv=/usr/lib/scalemail/bin/scalemail-store ${nexthop} ${user} ${extension} mailman unix - n n - - pipe flags=FR user=list argv=/usr/lib/mailman/bin/postfix-to-mailman.py ${nexthop} ${user} #dovecot unix - n n - - pipe # flags=DRhu user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -d ${recipient} Here is what I'm using for /etc/postfix/sasl/smtpd.conf log_level: 7 pwcheck_method: saslauthd pwcheck_method: auxprop mech_list: PLAIN LOGIN CRAM-MD5 DIGEST-MD5 allow_plaintext: true auxprop_plugin: mysql sql_hostnames: 127.0.0.1 sql_user: xxxxx sql_passwd: xxxxx sql_database: maildb sql_select: select crypt from users where id = '%u' As you can see I'm trying to use mysql as my authentication method. The password in 'users' is set through the 'ENCRYPT()' function. I also followed the methods found in http://www.jimmy.co.at/weblog/?p=52 in order to redo /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd as that seems to be a lot of people's problems, but that didn't help at all. Also, here is my /etc/default/saslauthd START=yes DESC="SASL Authentication Daemon" NAME="saslauthd" # Which authentication mechanisms should saslauthd use? (default: pam) # # Available options in this Debian package: # getpwent -- use the getpwent() library function # kerberos5 -- use Kerberos 5 # pam -- use PAM # rimap -- use a remote IMAP server # shadow -- use the local shadow password file # sasldb -- use the local sasldb database file # ldap -- use LDAP (configuration is in /etc/saslauthd.conf) # # Only one option may be used at a time. See the saslauthd man page # for more information. # # Example: MECHANISMS="pam" MECHANISMS="pam" MECH_OPTIONS="" THREADS=5 OPTIONS="-c -m /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd -r" I had heard that potentially changing MECHANISM to MECHANISMS="mysql" but obviously that didn't help as is shown by the options listed above and also by trying it out anyway in case the documentation was outdated. So, I'm now at a loss... I have no idea where to go from here or what steps I need to do to get this working =/ Anyone have any ideas? EDIT: Here is the error that is coming from auth.log ... I don't know if this will help at all, but here you go: Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql auxprop plugin using mysql engine Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin Parse the username [email protected] Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin try and connect to a host Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin trying to open db 'maildb' on host '127.0.0.1' Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin Parse the username [email protected] Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin try and connect to a host Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin trying to open db 'maildb' on host '127.0.0.1' Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: begin transaction Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin create statement from userPassword user xxxxxx.com Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin doing query select crypt from users where id = '[email protected]'; Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin create statement from cmusaslsecretPLAIN user xxxxxx.com Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin doing query select crypt from users where id = '[email protected]'; Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: commit transaction Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin Parse the username [email protected] Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin try and connect to a host Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin trying to open db 'maildb' on host '127.0.0.1' Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin Parse the username [email protected] Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin try and connect to a host Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin trying to open db 'maildb' on host '127.0.0.1' Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin Parse the username [email protected] Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin try and connect to a host Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin trying to open db 'maildb' on host '127.0.0.1' Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin Parse the username [email protected] Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin try and connect to a host Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin trying to open db 'maildb' on host '127.0.0.1' Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: begin transaction Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin create statement from userPassword user xxxxxx.com Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin doing query select crypt from users where id = '[email protected]'; Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin create statement from cmusaslsecretPLAIN user xxxxxx.com Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin doing query select crypt from users where id = '[email protected]'; Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: commit transaction Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin Parse the username [email protected] Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin try and connect to a host Aug 11 17:19:56 crazyinsanoman postfix/smtpd[9503]: sql plugin trying to open db 'maildb' on host '127.0.0.1'

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• high load average, high wait, dmesg raid error messages (debian nfs server)

  - by John Stumbles

  Debian 6 on HP proliant (2 CPU) with raid (2*1.5T RAID1 + 2*2T RAID1 joined RAID0 to make 3.5T) running mainly nfs & imapd (plus samba for windows share & local www for previewing web pages); with local ubuntu desktop client mounting $HOME, laptops accessing imap & odd files (e.g. videos) via nfs/smb; boxes connected 100baseT or wifi via home router/switch uname -a Linux prole 2.6.32-5-686 #1 SMP Wed Jan 11 12:29:30 UTC 2012 i686 GNU/Linux Setup has been working for months but prone to intermittently going very slow (user experience on desktop mounting $HOME from server, or laptop playing videos) and now consistently so bad I've had to delve into it to try to find what's wrong(!) Server seems OK at low load e.g. (laptop) client (with $HOME on local disk) connecting to server's imapd and nfs mounting RAID to access 1 file: top shows load ~ 0.1 or less, 0 wait but when (desktop) client mounts $HOME and starts user KDE session (all accessing server) then top shows e.g. top - 13:41:17 up 3:43, 3 users, load average: 9.29, 9.55, 8.27 Tasks: 158 total, 1 running, 157 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.4%us, 0.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 49.0%id, 49.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.5%si, 0.0%st Mem: 903856k total, 851784k used, 52072k free, 171152k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 476896k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 3935 root 20 0 2456 1088 784 R 2 0.1 0:00.02 top 1 root 20 0 2028 680 584 S 0 0.1 0:01.14 init 2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd 3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0 4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.12 ksoftirqd/0 5 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0 6 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/1 7 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.16 ksoftirqd/1 8 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/1 9 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.42 events/0 10 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:02.26 events/1 11 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuset 12 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper 13 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 netns 14 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 async/mgr 15 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 pm 16 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.02 sync_supers 17 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.02 bdi-default 18 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd/0 19 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd/1 20 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.02 kblockd/0 21 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.08 kblockd/1 22 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid 23 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_notify 24 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_hotplug 25 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod 28 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:04.19 kondemand/0 29 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:02.93 kondemand/1 30 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khungtaskd 31 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.18 kswapd0 32 root 25 5 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksmd 33 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0 34 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/1 35 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 crypto/0 36 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 crypto/1 203 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksuspend_usbd 204 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd 205 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/0 206 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/1 207 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.14 ata_aux 208 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 scsi_eh_0 dmesg suggests there's a disk problem: .............. (previous episode) [13276.966004] raid1:md0: read error corrected (8 sectors at 489900360 on sdc7) [13276.966043] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489898312 to another mirror [13279.569186] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [13279.569211] ata4.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [13279.569230] ata4.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [13279.569257] ata4.00: cmd 60/08:00:00:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in [13279.569262] res 41/40:00:05:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [13279.569306] ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [13279.569321] ata4.00: error: { UNC } [13279.575362] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133 [13279.575388] ata4: EH complete [13283.169224] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [13283.169246] ata4.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [13283.169263] ata4.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [13283.169289] ata4.00: cmd 60/08:00:00:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in [13283.169294] res 41/40:00:07:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [13283.169331] ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [13283.169345] ata4.00: error: { UNC } [13283.176071] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133 [13283.176104] ata4: EH complete [13286.224814] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [13286.224837] ata4.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [13286.224853] ata4.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [13286.224879] ata4.00: cmd 60/08:00:00:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in [13286.224884] res 41/40:00:06:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [13286.224922] ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [13286.224935] ata4.00: error: { UNC } [13286.231277] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133 [13286.231303] ata4: EH complete [13288.802623] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [13288.802646] ata4.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [13288.802662] ata4.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [13288.802688] ata4.00: cmd 60/08:00:00:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in [13288.802693] res 41/40:00:05:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [13288.802731] ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [13288.802745] ata4.00: error: { UNC } [13288.808901] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133 [13288.808927] ata4: EH complete [13291.380430] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [13291.380453] ata4.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [13291.380470] ata4.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [13291.380496] ata4.00: cmd 60/08:00:00:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in [13291.380501] res 41/40:00:05:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [13291.380577] ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [13291.380594] ata4.00: error: { UNC } [13291.386517] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133 [13291.386543] ata4: EH complete [13294.347147] ata4.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x1 SErr 0x0 action 0x0 [13294.347169] ata4.00: irq_stat 0x40000008 [13294.347186] ata4.00: failed command: READ FPDMA QUEUED [13294.347211] ata4.00: cmd 60/08:00:00:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 tag 0 ncq 4096 in [13294.347217] res 41/40:00:06:6a:05/00:00:23:00:00/40 Emask 0x409 (media error) <F> [13294.347254] ata4.00: status: { DRDY ERR } [13294.347268] ata4.00: error: { UNC } [13294.353556] ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133 [13294.353583] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled sense code [13294.353590] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [13294.353599] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [descriptor] [13294.353610] Descriptor sense data with sense descriptors (in hex): [13294.353616] 72 03 11 04 00 00 00 0c 00 0a 80 00 00 00 00 00 [13294.353635] 23 05 6a 06 [13294.353644] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed [13294.353657] sd 3:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 23 05 6a 00 00 00 08 00 [13294.353675] end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 587557382 [13294.353726] ata4: EH complete [13294.366953] raid1:md0: read error corrected (8 sectors at 489900544 on sdc7) [13294.366992] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489898496 to another mirror and they're happening quite frequently, which I guess is liable to account for the performance problem(?) # dmesg | grep mirror [12433.561822] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900464 to another mirror [12449.428933] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489900504 to another mirror [12464.807016] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489900512 to another mirror [12480.196222] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489900520 to another mirror [12495.585413] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489900528 to another mirror [12510.974424] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489900536 to another mirror [12526.374933] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489900544 to another mirror [12542.619938] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900608 to another mirror [12559.431328] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900616 to another mirror [12576.553866] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900624 to another mirror [12592.065265] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900632 to another mirror [12607.621121] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900640 to another mirror [12623.165856] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900648 to another mirror [12638.699474] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900656 to another mirror [12655.610881] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900664 to another mirror [12672.255617] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900672 to another mirror [12672.288746] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900680 to another mirror [12672.332376] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900688 to another mirror [12672.362935] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900696 to another mirror [12674.201177] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900704 to another mirror [12698.045050] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900712 to another mirror [12698.089309] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900720 to another mirror [12698.111999] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900728 to another mirror [12698.134006] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900736 to another mirror [12719.034376] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900744 to another mirror [12734.545775] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900752 to another mirror [12734.590014] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900760 to another mirror [12734.624050] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900768 to another mirror [12734.647308] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900776 to another mirror [12734.664657] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900784 to another mirror [12734.710642] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900792 to another mirror [12734.721919] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900800 to another mirror [12734.744732] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900808 to another mirror [12734.779330] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489900816 to another mirror [12782.604564] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 1242934216 to another mirror [12798.264153] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 1242935080 to another mirror [13245.832193] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489898296 to another mirror [13261.376929] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489898304 to another mirror [13276.966043] raid1: sdb7: redirecting sector 489898312 to another mirror [13294.366992] raid1: sdc7: redirecting sector 489898496 to another mirror although the arrays are still running on all disks - they haven't given up on any yet: # cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] [raid0] md10 : active raid0 md0[0] md1[1] 3368770048 blocks super 1.2 512k chunks md1 : active raid1 sde2[2] sdd2[1] 1464087824 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] md0 : active raid1 sdb7[0] sdc7[2] 1904684920 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> So I think I have some idea what the problem is but I am not a linux sysadmin expert by the remotest stretch of the imagination and would really appreciate some clue checking here with my diagnosis and what do I need to do: obviously I need to source another drive for sdc. (I'm guessing I could buy a larger drive if the price is right: I'm thinking that one day I'll need to grow the size of the array and that would be one less drive to replace with a larger one) then use mdadm to fail out the existing sdc, remove it and fit the new drive fdisk the new drive with the same size partition for the array as the old one had use mdadm to add the new drive into the array that sound OK?

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• Set up linux box for secure local hosting a-z

  - by microchasm

  I am in the process of reinstalling the OS on a machine that will be used to host a couple of apps for our business. The apps will be local only; access from external clients will be via vpn only. The prior setup used a hosting control panel (Plesk) for most of the admin, and I was looking at using another similar piece of software for the reinstall - but I figured I should finally learn how it all works. I can do most of the things the software would do for me, but am unclear on the symbiosis of it all. This is all an attempt to further distance myself from the land of Configuration Programmer/Programmer, if at all possible. I can't find a full walkthrough anywhere for what I'm looking for, so I thought I'd put up this question, and if people can help me on the way I will edit this with the answers, and document my progress/pitfalls. Hopefully someday this will help someone down the line. The details: CentOS 5.5 x86_64 httpd: Apache/2.2.3 mysql: 5.0.77 (to be upgraded) php: 5.1 (to be upgraded) The requirements: SECURITY!! Secure file transfer Secure client access (SSL Certs and CA) Secure data storage Virtualhosts/multiple subdomains Local email would be nice, but not critical The Steps: Download latest CentOS DVD-iso (torrent worked great for me). Install CentOS: While going through the install, I checked the Server Components option thinking I was going to be using another Plesk-like admin. In hindsight, considering I've decided to try to go my own way, this probably wasn't the best idea. Basic config: Setup users, networking/ip address etc. Yum update/upgrade. Upgrade PHP/MySQL: To upgrade PHP and MySQL to the latest versions, I had to look to another repo outside CentOS. IUS looks great and I'm happy I found it! Add IUS repository to our package manager cd /tmp wget http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5/x86_64/epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm rpm -Uvh epel-release-1-1.ius.el5.noarch.rpm wget http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/Redhat/5/x86_64/ius-release-1-4.ius.el5.noarch.rpm rpm -Uvh ius-release-1-4.ius.el5.noarch.rpm yum list | grep -w \.ius\. # list all the packages in the IUS repository; use this to find PHP/MySQL version and libraries you want to install Remove old version of PHP and install newer version from IUS rpm -qa | grep php # to list all of the installed php packages we want to remove yum shell # open an interactive yum shell remove php-common php-mysql php-cli #remove installed PHP components install php53 php53-mysql php53-cli php53-common #add packages you want transaction solve #important!! checks for dependencies transaction run #important!! does the actual installation of packages. [control+d] #exit yum shell php -v PHP 5.3.2 (cli) (built: Apr 6 2010 18:13:45) Upgrade MySQL from IUS repository /etc/init.d/mysqld stop rpm -qa | grep mysql # to see installed mysql packages yum shell remove mysql mysql-server #remove installed MySQL components install mysql51 mysql51-server mysql51-devel transaction solve #important!! checks for dependencies transaction run #important!! does the actual installation of packages. [control+d] #exit yum shell service mysqld start mysql -v Server version: 5.1.42-ius Distributed by The IUS Community Project Upgrade instructions courtesy of IUS wiki: http://wiki.iuscommunity.org/Doc/ClientUsageGuide Install rssh (restricted shell) to provide scp and sftp access, without allowing ssh login cd /tmp wget http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rssh/rssh-2.3.2-1.2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm rpm -ivh rssh-2.3.2-1.2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm useradd -m -d /home/dev -s /usr/bin/rssh dev passwd dev Edit /etc/rssh.conf to grant access to SFTP to rssh users. vi /etc/rssh.conf Uncomment or add: allowscp allowsftp This allows me to connect to the machine via SFTP protocol in Transmit (my FTP program of choice; I'm sure it's similar with other FTP apps). rssh instructions appropriated (with appreciation!) from http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-unix-restrict-shell-access-with-rssh.html Set up virtual interfaces ifconfig eth1:1 192.168.1.3 up #start up the virtual interface cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ cp ifcfg-eth1 ifcfg-eth1:1 #copy default script and match name to our virtual interface vi ifcfg-eth1:1 #modify eth1:1 script #ifcfg-eth1:1 | modify so it looks like this: DEVICE=eth1:1 IPADDR=192.168.1.3 NETMASK=255.255.255.0 NETWORK=192.168.1.0 ONBOOT=yes NAME=eth1:1 Add more Virtual interfaces as needed by repeating. Because of the ONBOOT=yes line in the ifcfg-eth1:1 file, this interface will be brought up when the system boots, or the network starts/restarts. service network restart Shutting down interface eth0: [ OK ] Shutting down interface eth1: [ OK ] Shutting down loopback interface: [ OK ] Bringing up loopback interface: [ OK ] Bringing up interface eth0: [ OK ] Bringing up interface eth1: [ OK ] ping 192.168.1.3 64 bytes from 192.168.1.3: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.105 ms Virtualhosts In the rssh section above I added a user to use for SFTP. In this users' home directory, I created a folder called 'https'. This is where the documents for this site will live, so I need to add a virtualhost that will point to it. I will use the above virtual interface for this site (herein called dev.site.local). vi /etc/http/conf/httpd.conf Add the following to the end of httpd.conf: <VirtualHost 192.168.1.3:80> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /home/dev/https ServerName dev.site.local ErrorLog /home/dev/logs/error_log TransferLog /home/dev/logs/access_log </VirtualHost> I put a dummy index.html file in the https directory just to check everything out. I tried browsing to it, and was met with permission denied errors. The logs only gave an obscure reference to what was going on: [Mon May 17 14:57:11 2010] [error] [client 192.168.1.100] (13)Permission denied: access to /index.html denied I tried chmod 777 et. al., but to no avail. Turns out, I needed to chmod+x the https directory and its' parent directories. chmod +x /home chmod +x /home/dev chmod +x /home/dev/https This solved that problem. DNS I'm handling DNS via our local Windows Server 2003 box. However, the CentOS documentation for BIND can be found here: http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/Deployment_Guide-en-US/ch-bind.html SSL To get SSL working, I changed the following in httpd.conf: NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.3:443 #make sure this line is in httpd.conf <VirtualHost 192.168.1.3:443> #change port to 443 ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /home/dev/https ServerName dev.site.local ErrorLog /home/dev/logs/error_log TransferLog /home/dev/logs/access_log </VirtualHost> Unfortunately, I keep getting (Error code: ssl_error_rx_record_too_long) errors when trying to access a page with SSL. As JamesHannah gracefully pointed out below, I had not set up the locations of the certs in httpd.conf, and thusly was getting the page thrown at the broswer as the cert making the browser balk. So first, I needed to set up a CA and make certificate files. I found a great (if old) walkthrough on the process here: http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/284. Here are the relevant steps I took from that article: mkdir /home/CA cd /home/CA/ mkdir newcerts private echo '01' > serial touch index.txt #this and the above command are for the database that will keep track of certs Create an openssl.cnf file in the /home/CA/ dir and edit it per the walkthrough linked above. (For reference, my finished openssl.cnf file looked like this: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=hnZDij4T) openssl req -new -x509 -extensions v3_ca -keyout private/cakey.pem -out cacert.pem -days 3650 -config ./openssl.cnf #this creates the cacert.pem which gets distributed and imported to the browser(s) Modified openssl.cnf again per walkthrough instructions. openssl req -new -nodes -out dev.req.pem -config ./openssl.cnf #generates certificate request, and key.pem which I renamed dev.key.pem. Modified openssl.cnf again per walkthrough instructions. openssl ca -out dev.cert.pem -config ./openssl.cnf -infiles dev.req.pem #create and sign certificate. cp dev.cert.pem /home/dev/certs/cert.pem cp dev.key.pem /home/certs/key.pem I updated httpd.conf to reflect the certs and turn SSLEngine on: NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.3:443 <VirtualHost 192.168.1.3:443> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /home/dev/https SSLEngine on SSLCertificateFile /home/dev/certs/cert.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile /home/dev/certs/key.pem ServerName dev.site.local ErrorLog /home/dev/logs/error_log TransferLog /home/dev/logs/access_log </VirtualHost> Put the CA cert.pem in a web-accessible place, and downloaded/imported it into my browser. Now I can visit https://dev.site.local with no errors or warnings. And this is where I'm at. I will keep editing this as I make progress. Any tips on how to configure SSL email would be appreciated.

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• Slow filesystem access

  - by danneh3826

  I'm trying to diagnose a slow filesystem issue on a server I look after. It's been ongoing for quite some time, and I've run out of ideas as to what I can try. Here's the thick of it. The server itself is a Dell Poweredge T310. It has 4 SAS hard drives in it, configured at RAID5, and is running Citrix XenServer 5.6. The VM is a (relatively) old Debian 5.0.6 installation. It's given 4 cores, and 4Gb's of RAM. It has 3 volumes. A 10Gb volume (ext3) for the system, 980Gb volume (xfs) for data (~94% full), and another 200Gb volume (xfs) for data (~13% full). Now here's the weird thing. Read/write access to the 980Gb volume is really slow. I might get 5Mb/s out of it if I'm lucky. At first I figured it was actually disk access in the system, or at a hypervisor level, but ruled that out entirely as other VMs on the same host are running perfectly fine (a good couple hundred Mb/s disk r/w access). So then I started to target this particular VM. I started thinking it was XFS, but to prove it I wasn't going to attempt to change the filesystem on the 980Gb drive, with years and years of billions of files on there. So I provisioned the 200Gb drive, and did the same read/write test (basically dd), and got a good couple hundred Mb/s r/w access to it. So that ruled out the VM, the hardware, and the filesystem type. There's also a lot of these in /var/log/kern.log; (sorry, this is quite long) Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564689] httpd: page allocation failure. order:5, mode:0x4020 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564693] Pid: 7318, comm: httpd Not tainted 2.6.32-4-686-bigmem #1 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564696] Call Trace: Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564705] [<c1092a4d>] ? __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x476/0x4e0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564711] [<c1092ac3>] ? __get_free_pages+0xc/0x17 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564716] [<c10b632e>] ? __kmalloc+0x30/0x128 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564722] [<c11dd774>] ? pskb_expand_head+0x4f/0x157 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564727] [<c11ddbbf>] ? __pskb_pull_tail+0x41/0x1fb Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564732] [<c11e4882>] ? dev_queue_xmit+0xe4/0x38e Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564738] [<c1205902>] ? ip_finish_output+0x0/0x5c Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564742] [<c12058c7>] ? ip_finish_output2+0x187/0x1c2 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564747] [<c1204dc8>] ? ip_local_out+0x15/0x17 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564751] [<c12055a9>] ? ip_queue_xmit+0x31e/0x379 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564758] [<c1279a90>] ? _spin_lock_bh+0x8/0x1e Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564767] [<eda15a8d>] ? __nf_ct_refresh_acct+0x66/0xa4 [nf_conntrack] Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564773] [<c103bf42>] ? _local_bh_enable_ip+0x16/0x6e Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564779] [<c1214593>] ? tcp_transmit_skb+0x595/0x5cc Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564785] [<c1005c4f>] ? xen_restore_fl_direct_end+0x0/0x1 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564791] [<c12165ea>] ? tcp_write_xmit+0x7a3/0x874 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564796] [<c121203a>] ? tcp_ack+0x1611/0x1802 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564801] [<c10055ec>] ? xen_force_evtchn_callback+0xc/0x10 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564806] [<c121392f>] ? tcp_established_options+0x1d/0x8b Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564811] [<c1213be4>] ? tcp_current_mss+0x38/0x53 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564816] [<c1216701>] ? __tcp_push_pending_frames+0x1e/0x50 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564821] [<c1212246>] ? tcp_data_snd_check+0x1b/0xd2 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564825] [<c1212de3>] ? tcp_rcv_established+0x5d0/0x626 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564831] [<c121902c>] ? tcp_v4_do_rcv+0x15f/0x2cf Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564835] [<c1219561>] ? tcp_v4_rcv+0x3c5/0x5c0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564841] [<c120197e>] ? ip_local_deliver_finish+0x10c/0x18c Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564846] [<c12015a4>] ? ip_rcv_finish+0x2c4/0x2d8 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564852] [<c11e3b71>] ? netif_receive_skb+0x3bb/0x3d6 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564864] [<ed823efc>] ? xennet_poll+0x9b8/0xafc [xen_netfront] Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564869] [<c11e40ee>] ? net_rx_action+0x96/0x194 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564874] [<c103bd4c>] ? __do_softirq+0xaa/0x151 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564878] [<c103be24>] ? do_softirq+0x31/0x3c Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564883] [<c103befa>] ? irq_exit+0x26/0x58 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564890] [<c118ff9f>] ? xen_evtchn_do_upcall+0x12c/0x13e Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564896] [<c1008c3f>] ? xen_do_upcall+0x7/0xc Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564899] Mem-Info: Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564902] DMA per-cpu: Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564905] CPU 0: hi: 0, btch: 1 usd: 0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564908] CPU 1: hi: 0, btch: 1 usd: 0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564911] CPU 2: hi: 0, btch: 1 usd: 0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564914] CPU 3: hi: 0, btch: 1 usd: 0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564916] Normal per-cpu: Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564919] CPU 0: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 175 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564922] CPU 1: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 165 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564925] CPU 2: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 30 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564928] CPU 3: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 140 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564931] HighMem per-cpu: Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564933] CPU 0: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 159 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564936] CPU 1: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 22 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564939] CPU 2: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 24 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564942] CPU 3: hi: 186, btch: 31 usd: 13 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564947] active_anon:485974 inactive_anon:121138 isolated_anon:0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564948] active_file:75215 inactive_file:79510 isolated_file:0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564949] unevictable:0 dirty:516 writeback:15 unstable:0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564950] free:230770 slab_reclaimable:36661 slab_unreclaimable:21249 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564952] mapped:20016 shmem:29450 pagetables:5600 bounce:0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564958] DMA free:2884kB min:72kB low:88kB high:108kB active_anon:0kB inactive_anon:0kB active_file:5692kB inactive_file:724kB unevictable:0kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):0kB present:15872kB mlocked:0kB dirty:8kB writeback:0kB mapped:0kB shmem:0kB slab_reclaimable:5112kB slab_unreclaimable:156kB kernel_stack:56kB pagetables:0kB unstable:0kB bounce:0kB writeback_tmp:0kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564964] lowmem_reserve[]: 0 698 4143 4143 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564977] Normal free:143468kB min:3344kB low:4180kB high:5016kB active_anon:56kB inactive_anon:2068kB active_file:131812kB inactive_file:131728kB unevictable:0kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):0kB present:715256kB mlocked:0kB dirty:156kB writeback:0kB mapped:308kB shmem:4kB slab_reclaimable:141532kB slab_unreclaimable:84840kB kernel_stack:1928kB pagetables:22400kB unstable:0kB bounce:0kB writeback_tmp:0kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564983] lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 27559 27559 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.564995] HighMem free:776728kB min:512kB low:4636kB high:8760kB active_anon:1943840kB inactive_anon:482484kB active_file:163356kB inactive_file:185588kB unevictable:0kB isolated(anon):0kB isolated(file):0kB present:3527556kB mlocked:0kB dirty:1900kB writeback:60kB mapped:79756kB shmem:117796kB slab_reclaimable:0kB slab_unreclaimable:0kB kernel_stack:0kB pagetables:0kB unstable:0kB bounce:0kB writeback_tmp:0kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.565001] lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 0 0 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.565011] DMA: 385*4kB 16*8kB 3*16kB 9*32kB 6*64kB 2*128kB 1*256kB 0*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB 0*4096kB = 2900kB Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.565032] Normal: 21505*4kB 6508*8kB 273*16kB 24*32kB 3*64kB 0*128kB 0*256kB 0*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB 0*4096kB = 143412kB Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.565054] HighMem: 949*4kB 8859*8kB 7063*16kB 6186*32kB 4631*64kB 727*128kB 6*256kB 0*512kB 0*1024kB 0*2048kB 0*4096kB = 776604kB Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.565076] 198980 total pagecache pages Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.565079] 14850 pages in swap cache Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.565082] Swap cache stats: add 2556273, delete 2541423, find 82961339/83153719 Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.565085] Free swap = 250592kB Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.565087] Total swap = 385520kB Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.575454] 1073152 pages RAM Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.575458] 888834 pages HighMem Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.575461] 11344 pages reserved Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.575463] 1090481 pages shared Sep 4 10:16:59 uriel kernel: [32571790.575465] 737188 pages non-shared Now, I've no idea what this means. There's plenty of free memory; total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4247232 3455904 791328 0 5348 736412 -/+ buffers/cache: 2714144 1533088 Swap: 385520 131004 254516 Though now I see the swap is relatively low in size, but would that matter? I've been starting to think about fragmentation, or inode usage on that large partition, but a recent fsck on it showed is as only like 0.5% fragmented. Which leaves me with inode usage, but how much of an effect really would a large inode table or filesystem TOC have? I've love to hear people's opinions on this. It's driving me potty! df -h output; Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/xvda1 9.5G 6.6G 2.4G 74% / tmpfs 2.1G 0 2.1G 0% /lib/init/rw udev 10M 520K 9.5M 6% /dev tmpfs 2.1G 0 2.1G 0% /dev/shm /dev/xvdb 980G 921G 59G 94% /data

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• Unusually high dentry cache usage

  - by Wolfgang Stengel

  Problem A CentOS machine with kernel 2.6.32 and 128 GB physical RAM ran into trouble a few days ago. The responsible system administrator tells me that the PHP-FPM application was not responding to requests in a timely manner anymore due to swapping, and having seen in free that almost no memory was left, he chose to reboot the machine. I know that free memory can be a confusing concept on Linux and a reboot perhaps was the wrong thing to do. However, the mentioned administrator blames the PHP application (which I am responsible for) and refuses to investigate further. What I could find out on my own is this: Before the restart, the free memory (incl. buffers and cache) was only a couple of hundred MB. Before the restart, /proc/meminfo reported a Slab memory usage of around 90 GB (yes, GB). After the restart, the free memory was 119 GB, going down to around 100 GB within an hour, as the PHP-FPM workers (about 600 of them) were coming back to life, each of them showing between 30 and 40 MB in the RES column in top (which has been this way for months and is perfectly reasonable given the nature of the PHP application). There is nothing else in the process list that consumes an unusual or noteworthy amount of RAM. After the restart, Slab memory was around 300 MB If have been monitoring the system ever since, and most notably the Slab memory is increasing in a straight line with a rate of about 5 GB per day. Free memory as reported by free and /proc/meminfo decreases at the same rate. Slab is currently at 46 GB. According to slabtop most of it is used for dentry entries: Free memory: free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 129048 76435 52612 0 144 7675 -/+ buffers/cache: 68615 60432 Swap: 8191 0 8191 Meminfo: cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 132145324 kB MemFree: 53620068 kB Buffers: 147760 kB Cached: 8239072 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 20300940 kB Inactive: 6512716 kB Active(anon): 18408460 kB Inactive(anon): 24736 kB Active(file): 1892480 kB Inactive(file): 6487980 kB Unevictable: 8608 kB Mlocked: 8608 kB SwapTotal: 8388600 kB SwapFree: 8388600 kB Dirty: 11416 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 18436224 kB Mapped: 94536 kB Shmem: 6364 kB Slab: 46240380 kB SReclaimable: 44561644 kB SUnreclaim: 1678736 kB KernelStack: 9336 kB PageTables: 457516 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 72364108 kB Committed_AS: 22305444 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 480164 kB VmallocChunk: 34290830848 kB HardwareCorrupted: 0 kB AnonHugePages: 12216320 kB HugePages_Total: 2048 HugePages_Free: 2048 HugePages_Rsvd: 0 HugePages_Surp: 0 Hugepagesize: 2048 kB DirectMap4k: 5604 kB DirectMap2M: 2078720 kB DirectMap1G: 132120576 kB Slabtop: slabtop --once Active / Total Objects (% used) : 225920064 / 226193412 (99.9%) Active / Total Slabs (% used) : 11556364 / 11556415 (100.0%) Active / Total Caches (% used) : 110 / 194 (56.7%) Active / Total Size (% used) : 43278793.73K / 43315465.42K (99.9%) Minimum / Average / Maximum Object : 0.02K / 0.19K / 4096.00K OBJS ACTIVE USE OBJ SIZE SLABS OBJ/SLAB CACHE SIZE NAME 221416340 221416039 3% 0.19K 11070817 20 44283268K dentry 1123443 1122739 99% 0.41K 124827 9 499308K fuse_request 1122320 1122180 99% 0.75K 224464 5 897856K fuse_inode 761539 754272 99% 0.20K 40081 19 160324K vm_area_struct 437858 223259 50% 0.10K 11834 37 47336K buffer_head 353353 347519 98% 0.05K 4589 77 18356K anon_vma_chain 325090 324190 99% 0.06K 5510 59 22040K size-64 146272 145422 99% 0.03K 1306 112 5224K size-32 137625 137614 99% 1.02K 45875 3 183500K nfs_inode_cache 128800 118407 91% 0.04K 1400 92 5600K anon_vma 59101 46853 79% 0.55K 8443 7 33772K radix_tree_node 52620 52009 98% 0.12K 1754 30 7016K size-128 19359 19253 99% 0.14K 717 27 2868K sysfs_dir_cache 10240 7746 75% 0.19K 512 20 2048K filp VFS cache pressure: cat /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure 125 Swappiness: cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness 0 I know that unused memory is wasted memory, so this should not necessarily be a bad thing (especially given that 44 GB are shown as SReclaimable). However, apparently the machine experienced problems nonetheless, and I'm afraid the same will happen again in a few days when Slab surpasses 90 GB. Questions I have these questions: Am I correct in thinking that the Slab memory is always physical RAM, and the number is already subtracted from the MemFree value? Is such a high number of dentry entries normal? The PHP application has access to around 1.5 M files, however most of them are archives and not being accessed at all for regular web traffic. What could be an explanation for the fact that the number of cached inodes is much lower than the number of cached dentries, should they not be related somehow? If the system runs into memory trouble, should the kernel not free some of the dentries automatically? What could be a reason that this does not happen? Is there any way to "look into" the dentry cache to see what all this memory is (i.e. what are the paths that are being cached)? Perhaps this points to some kind of memory leak, symlink loop, or indeed to something the PHP application is doing wrong. The PHP application code as well as all asset files are mounted via GlusterFS network file system, could that have something to do with it? Please keep in mind that I can not investigate as root, only as a regular user, and that the administrator refuses to help. He won't even run the typical echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches test to see if the Slab memory is indeed reclaimable. Any insights into what could be going on and how I can investigate any further would be greatly appreciated. Updates Some further diagnostic information: Mounts: cat /proc/self/mounts rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0 proc /proc proc rw,relatime 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs rw,relatime 0 0 devtmpfs /dev devtmpfs rw,relatime,size=66063000k,nr_inodes=16515750,mode=755 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,relatime 0 0 /dev/mapper/sysvg-lv_root / ext4 rw,relatime,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 /proc/bus/usb /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw,relatime 0 0 /dev/sda1 /boot ext4 rw,relatime,barrier=1,data=ordered 0 0 tmpfs /phptmp tmpfs rw,noatime,size=1048576k,nr_inodes=15728640,mode=777 0 0 tmpfs /wsdltmp tmpfs rw,noatime,size=1048576k,nr_inodes=15728640,mode=777 0 0 none /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc binfmt_misc rw,relatime 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/cpuset cgroup rw,relatime,cpuset 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/cpu cgroup rw,relatime,cpu 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/cpuacct cgroup rw,relatime,cpuacct 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/memory cgroup rw,relatime,memory 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/devices cgroup rw,relatime,devices 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/freezer cgroup rw,relatime,freezer 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/net_cls cgroup rw,relatime,net_cls 0 0 cgroup /cgroup/blkio cgroup rw,relatime,blkio 0 0 /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-www.vol /var/www fuse.glusterfs rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072 0 0 /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-upload.vol /var/upload fuse.glusterfs rw,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072 0 0 sunrpc /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rpc_pipefs rw,relatime 0 0 172.17.39.78:/www /data/www nfs rw,relatime,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,port=38467,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=172.17.39.78,mountvers=3,mountport=38465,mountproto=tcp,local_lock=none,addr=172.17.39.78 0 0 Mount info: cat /proc/self/mountinfo 16 21 0:3 / /proc rw,relatime - proc proc rw 17 21 0:0 / /sys rw,relatime - sysfs sysfs rw 18 21 0:5 / /dev rw,relatime - devtmpfs devtmpfs rw,size=66063000k,nr_inodes=16515750,mode=755 19 18 0:11 / /dev/pts rw,relatime - devpts devpts rw,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 20 18 0:16 / /dev/shm rw,relatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw 21 1 253:1 / / rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/mapper/sysvg-lv_root rw,barrier=1,data=ordered 22 16 0:15 / /proc/bus/usb rw,relatime - usbfs /proc/bus/usb rw 23 21 8:1 / /boot rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/sda1 rw,barrier=1,data=ordered 24 21 0:17 / /phptmp rw,noatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=1048576k,nr_inodes=15728640,mode=777 25 21 0:18 / /wsdltmp rw,noatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=1048576k,nr_inodes=15728640,mode=777 26 16 0:19 / /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc rw,relatime - binfmt_misc none rw 27 21 0:20 / /cgroup/cpuset rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuset 28 21 0:21 / /cgroup/cpu rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpu 29 21 0:22 / /cgroup/cpuacct rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuacct 30 21 0:23 / /cgroup/memory rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,memory 31 21 0:24 / /cgroup/devices rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,devices 32 21 0:25 / /cgroup/freezer rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,freezer 33 21 0:26 / /cgroup/net_cls rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,net_cls 34 21 0:27 / /cgroup/blkio rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,blkio 35 21 0:28 / /var/www rw,relatime - fuse.glusterfs /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-www.vol rw,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072 36 21 0:29 / /var/upload rw,relatime - fuse.glusterfs /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-upload.vol rw,user_id=0,group_id=0,default_permissions,allow_other,max_read=131072 37 21 0:30 / /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs rw,relatime - rpc_pipefs sunrpc rw 39 21 0:31 / /data/www rw,relatime - nfs 172.17.39.78:/www rw,vers=3,rsize=65536,wsize=65536,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,port=38467,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=sys,mountaddr=172.17.39.78,mountvers=3,mountport=38465,mountproto=tcp,local_lock=none,addr=172.17.39.78 GlusterFS config: cat /etc/glusterfs/glusterfs-www.vol volume remote1 type protocol/client option transport-type tcp option remote-host 172.17.39.71 option ping-timeout 10 option transport.socket.nodelay on # undocumented option for speed # http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2009-September/003158.html option remote-subvolume /data/www end-volume volume remote2 type protocol/client option transport-type tcp option remote-host 172.17.39.72 option ping-timeout 10 option transport.socket.nodelay on # undocumented option for speed # http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2009-September/003158.html option remote-subvolume /data/www end-volume volume remote3 type protocol/client option transport-type tcp option remote-host 172.17.39.73 option ping-timeout 10 option transport.socket.nodelay on # undocumented option for speed # http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2009-September/003158.html option remote-subvolume /data/www end-volume volume remote4 type protocol/client option transport-type tcp option remote-host 172.17.39.74 option ping-timeout 10 option transport.socket.nodelay on # undocumented option for speed # http://gluster.org/pipermail/gluster-users/2009-September/003158.html option remote-subvolume /data/www end-volume volume replicate1 type cluster/replicate option lookup-unhashed off # off will reduce cpu usage, and network option local-volume-name 'hostname' subvolumes remote1 remote2 end-volume volume replicate2 type cluster/replicate option lookup-unhashed off # off will reduce cpu usage, and network option local-volume-name 'hostname' subvolumes remote3 remote4 end-volume volume distribute type cluster/distribute subvolumes replicate1 replicate2 end-volume volume iocache type performance/io-cache option cache-size 8192MB # default is 32MB subvolumes distribute end-volume volume writeback type performance/write-behind option cache-size 1024MB option window-size 1MB subvolumes iocache end-volume ### Add io-threads for parallel requisitions volume iothreads type performance/io-threads option thread-count 64 # default is 16 subvolumes writeback end-volume volume ra type performance/read-ahead option page-size 2MB option page-count 16 option force-atime-update no subvolumes iothreads end-volume

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• 26 Days: Countdown to Oracle OpenWorld 2012

  - by Michael Snow

  Welcome to our countdown to Oracle OpenWorld! Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just around the corner. In less than 26 days, San Francisco will be invaded by an expected 50,000 people from all over the world. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, we’ve all been working to help make the experience a great one for all our WebCenter customers. For a sneak peak  – we’ll be spending this week giving you a teaser of what to look forward to if you are joining us in San Francisco from September 30th through October 4th. We have Oracle WebCenter sessions covering all topics imaginable. Take a look and use the tools we provide to build out your schedule in advance and reserve your seats in your favorite sessions.  That gives you plenty of time to plan for your week with us in San Francisco. If unfortunately, your boss denied your request to attend - there are still some ways that you can join in the experience virtually On-Demand. This year - we are expanding even more up North of Market Street and will be taking over Union Square as well. Check out this map of San Francisco to get a sense of how much of a footprint Oracle OpenWorld has grown to this year. With so much to see and so many sessions to learn from - its no wonder that people get excited. Add to that a good mix of fun and all of the possible WebCenter sessions you could attend - you won't want to sleep at all to take full advantage of such an opportunity. We'll also have our annual WebCenter Customer Appreciation reception - stay tuned this week for some more info on registration to make sure you'll be able to join us. If you've been following the America's Cup at all and believe in EXTREME PERFORMANCE you'll definitely want to take a look at this video from last year's OpenWorld Keynote. 12.00 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Important OpenWorld Links:  Attendee / Presenters Toolkit Oracle Schedule Builder WebCenter Sessions (listed in the catalog under Fusion Middleware as "Portals, Sites, Content, and Collaboration" ) Oracle Music Festival - AMAZING Line up!!  Oracle Customer Appreciation Night -LOOK HERE!! Oracle OpenWorld LIVE On-Demand Here are all the WebCenter sessions broken down by day for your viewing pleasure. Monday, October 1st CON8885 - Simplify CRM Engagement with Contextual Collaboration Are your sales teams disconnected and disengaged? Do you want a tool for easily connecting expertise across your organization and providing visibility into the complete sales process? Do you want a way to enhance and retain organization knowledge? Oracle Social Network is the answer. Attend this session to learn how to make CRM easy, effective, and efficient for use across virtual sales teams. Also learn how Oracle Social Network can drive sales force collaboration with natural conversations throughout the sales cycle, promote sales team productivity through purposeful social networking without the noise, and build cross-team knowledge by integrating conversations with CRM and other business applications. CON8268 - Oracle WebCenter Strategy: Engaging Your Customers. Empowering Your Business Oracle WebCenter is a user engagement platform for social business, connecting people and information. Attend this session to learn about the Oracle WebCenter strategy, and understand where Oracle is taking the platform to help companies engage customers, empower employees, and enable partners. Business success starts with ensuring that everyone is engaged with the right people and the right information and can access what they need through the channel of their choice—Web, mobile, or social. Are you giving customers, employees, and partners the best-possible experience? Come learn how you can! ¶ HOL10208 - Add Social Capabilities to Your Enterprise Applications Oracle Social Network enables you to add real-time collaboration capabilities into your enterprise applications, so that conversations can happen directly within your business systems. In this hands-on lab, you will try out the Oracle Social Network product to collaborate with other attendees, using real-time conversations with document sharing capabilities. Next you will embed social capabilities into a sample Web-based enterprise application, using embedded UI components. Experts will also write simple REST-based integrations, using the Oracle Social Network API to programmatically create social interactions. ¶ CON8893 - Improve Employee Productivity with Intuitive and Social Work Environments Social technologies have already transformed the ways customers, employees, partners, and suppliers communicate and stay informed. Forward-thinking organizations today need technologies and infrastructures to help them advance to the next level and integrate social activities with business applications to deliver a user experience that simplifies business processes and enterprise application engagement. Attend this session to hear from an innovative Oracle Social Network customer and learn how you can improve productivity with intuitive and social work environments and empower your employees with innovative social tools to enable contextual access to content and dynamic personalization of solutions. ¶ CON8270 - Oracle WebCenter Content Strategy and Vision Oracle WebCenter provides a strategic content infrastructure for managing documents, images, e-mails, and rich media files. With a single repository, organizations can address any content use case, such as accounts payable, HR onboarding, document management, compliance, records management, digital asset management, or Website management. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter will address new use cases as well as new integrations with Oracle Fusion Middleware and Oracle Applications, leveraging your investments by making your users more productive and error-free. ¶ CON8269 - Oracle WebCenter Sites Strategy and Vision Oracle’s Web experience management solution, Oracle WebCenter Sites, enables organizations to use the online channel to drive customer acquisition and brand loyalty. It helps marketers and business users easily create and manage contextually relevant, social, interactive online experiences across multiple channels on a global scale. In this session, learn about future plans for how Oracle WebCenter Sites will provide you with the tools, capabilities, and integrations you need in order to continue to address your customers’ evolving requirements for engaging online experiences and keep moving your business forward. ¶ CON8896 - Living with SharePoint SharePoint is a popular platform, but it’s not always the best fit for Oracle customers. In this session, you’ll discover the technical and nontechnical limitations and pitfalls of SharePoint and learn about Oracle alternatives for collaboration, portals, enterprise and Web content management, social computing, and application integration. The presentation shows you how to integrate with SharePoint when business or IT requirements dictate and covers cloud-based (Office 365) and on-premises versions of SharePoint. Presented by a former Microsoft director of SharePoint product management and backed by independent customer research, this session will prepare you to answer the question “Why don’t we just use SharePoint for that?’ the next time it comes up in your organization. ¶ CON7843 - Content-Enabling Enterprise Processes with Oracle WebCenter Organizations today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. Many business processes are content-intensive and unstructured, requiring ad hoc collaboration, and distributed in nature, requiring many approvals and generating huge volumes of paper. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer content-enable its enterprise with Oracle WebCenter Content and Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate them with Oracle Applications. ¶ CON6114 - Tape Robotics’ Newest Superhero: Now Fueled by Oracle Software For small, midsize, and rapidly growing businesses that want the most energy-efficient, scalable storage infrastructure to meet their rapidly growing data demands, Oracle’s most recent addition to its award-winning tape portfolio leverages several pieces of Oracle software. With Oracle Linux, Oracle WebLogic, and Oracle Fusion Middleware tools, the library achieves a higher level of usability than previous products while offering customers a familiar interface for management, plus ease of use. This session examines the competitive advantages of the tape library and how Oracle software raises customer satisfaction. Learn how the combination of Oracle engineered systems, Oracle Secure Backup, and Oracle’s StorageTek tape libraries provide end-to-end coverage of your data. ¶ CON9437 - Mobile Access Management With more than five billion mobile devices on the planet and an increasing number of users using their own devices to access corporate data and applications, securely extending identity management to mobile devices has become a hot topic. This session focuses on how to extend your existing identity management infrastructure and policies to securely and seamlessly enable mobile user access. CON7815 - Customer Experience Online in Cloud: Oracle WebCenter Sites, Oracle ATG Apps, Oracle Exalogic Oracle WebCenter Sites and Oracle’s ATG product line together can provide a compelling marketing and e-commerce experience. When you couple them with the extreme performance of Oracle Exalogic, you’ll see unmatched scalability that provides you with a true cloud-based solution. In this session, you’ll learn how running Oracle WebCenter Sites and ATG applications on Oracle Exalogic delivers both a private and a public cloud experience. Find out what it takes to get these systems working together and delivering engaging Web experiences. Even if you aren’t considering Oracle Exalogic today, the rich Web experience of Oracle WebCenter, paired with the depth of the ATG product line, can provide your business full support, from merchandising through sale completion. ¶ CON8271 - Oracle WebCenter Portal Strategy and Vision To innovate and keep a competitive edge, organizations need to leverage the power of agile and responsive Web applications. Oracle WebCenter Portal enables you to do just that, by delivering intuitive user experiences for enterprise applications to drive innovation with composite applications and mashups. Attend this session to learn firsthand from customers how Oracle WebCenter Portal extends the value of existing enterprise applications, business processes, and content; delivers a superior business user experience; and maximizes limited IT resources. ¶ CON8880 - The Connected Customer Experience Begins with the Online Channel There’s a lot of talk these days about how to connect the customer journey across various touchpoints—from Websites and e-commerce to call centers and in-store—to provide experiences that are more relevant and engaging and ultimately gain competitive edge. Doing it all at once isn’t a realistic objective, so where do you start? Come to this session, and hear about three steps you can take that can help you begin your journey toward delivering the connected customer experience. You’ll hear how Oracle now has an integrated digital marketing platform for your corporate Website, your e-commerce site, your self-service portal, and your marketing and loyalty campaigns, and you’ll learn what you can do today to begin executing on your customer experience initiatives. ¶ GEN11451 - General Session: Building Mobile Applications with Oracle Cloud With the prevalence of smart mobile devices, companies are facing an increased demand to provide access to data and applications from new channels. However, developing applications for mobile devices poses some unique challenges. Come to this session to learn how Oracle addresses these challenges, offering a simpler way to develop and deploy cross-device mobile applications. See how Oracle Cloud enables you to access applications, data, and services from mobile channels in an easier way.  CON8272 - Oracle Social Network Strategy and Vision One key way of increasing employee productivity is by bringing people, processes, and information together—providing new social capabilities to enable business users to quickly correspond and collaborate on business activities. Oracle WebCenter provides a user engagement platform with social and collaborative technologies to empower business users to focus on their key business processes, applications, and content in the context of their role and process. Attend this session to hear how the latest social capabilities in Oracle Social Network are enabling organizations to transform themselves into social businesses.  --- Tuesday, October 2nd HOL10194 - Enterprise Content Management Simplified: Oracle WebCenter Content’s Next-Generation UI Regardless of the nature of your business, unstructured content underpins many of its daily functions. Whether you are working with traditional presentations, spreadsheets, or text documents—or even with digital assets such as images and multimedia files—your content needs to be accessible and manageable in convenient and intuitive ways to make working with the content easier. Additionally, you need the ability to easily share documents with coworkers to facilitate a collaborative working environment. Come to this session to see how Oracle WebCenter Content’s next-generation user interface helps modern knowledge workers easily manage personal and enterprise documents in a collaborative environment.¶ CON8877 - Develop a Mobile Strategy with Oracle WebCenter: Engage Customers, Employees, and Partners Mobile technology has gone from nice-to-have to a cornerstone of user engagement. Mobile access enables users to have information available at their fingertips, enabling them to take action the moment they make a decision, interact in the moment of convenience, and take advantage of new service offerings in their preferred channels. All your employees have your mobile applications in their pocket; now what are you going to do? It is a critical step for companies to think through what their employees, customers, and partners really need on their devices. Attend this session to see how Oracle WebCenter enables you to better engage your customers, employees, and partners by providing a unified experience across multiple channels. ¶ CON9447 - Enabling Access for Hundreds of Millions of Users How do you grow your business by identifying, authenticating, authorizing, and federating users on the Web, leveraging social identity and the open source OAuth protocol? How do you scale your access management solution to support hundreds of millions of users? With social identity support out of the box, Oracle’s access management solution is also benchmarked for 250-million-user deployment according to real-world customer scenarios. In this session, you will learn about the social identity capability and the 250-million-user benchmark testing of Oracle Access Manager and Oracle Adaptive Access Manager running on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON2906 - Get Proactive: Best Practices for Maintaining Oracle Fusion Middleware You chose Oracle Fusion Middleware products to help your organization deliver superior business results. Now learn how to take full advantage of your software with all the great tools, resources, and product updates you’re entitled to through Oracle Support. In this session, Oracle product experts provide proven best practices to help you work more efficiently, plan and prepare for upgrades and patching more effectively, and manage risk. Topics include configuration management tools, remote diagnostics, My Oracle Support Community, and My Oracle Support Lifecycle Advisors. New users and Oracle Fusion Middleware experts alike are guaranteed to leave with fresh ideas and practical, easy-to-implement next steps. ¶ CON8878 - Oracle WebCenter’s Cloud Strategy: From Social and Platform Services to Mashups Cloud computing represents a paradigm shift in how we build applications, automate processes, collaborate, and share and in how we secure our enterprise. Additionally, as you adopt cloud-based services in your organization, it’s likely that you will still have many critical on-premises applications running. With these mixed environments, multiple user interfaces, different security, and multiple datasources and content sources, how do you start evolving your strategy to account for these challenges? Oracle WebCenter offers a complete array of technologies enabling you to solve these challenges and prepare you for the cloud. Attend this session to learn how you can use Oracle WebCenter in the cloud as well as create on-premises and cloud application mash-ups. ¶ CON8901 - Optimize Enterprise Business Processes with Oracle WebCenter and Oracle BPM Do you have business processes that span multiple applications? Are you grappling with how to have visibility across these business processes; how to manage content that is associated with these processes; and, most importantly, how to model and optimize these business processes? Attend this session to hear how Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Process Management provide a unique set of integrated solutions to provide a composite application dashboard across these business processes and offer a solution for content-centric business processes. ¶ CON8883 - Deliver Engaging Interfaces to Oracle Applications with Oracle WebCenter Critical business processes live within enterprise applications, and application users need to manage and execute these processes as effectively as possible. Oracle provides a comprehensive user engagement platform to increase user productivity and optimize overall processes within Oracle Applications—Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle’s Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards product families—and third-party applications. Attend this session to learn how you can integrate these applications with Oracle WebCenter to deliver composite application dashboards to your end users—whether they are your customers, partners, or employees—for enhanced usability and Web 2.0–enabled enterprise portals.¶ Wednesday, October 3rd CON8895 - Future-Ready Intranets: How Aramark Re-engineered the Application Landscape There are essential techniques and technologies you can use to deliver employee portals that garner higher productivity, improve business efficiency, and increase user engagement. Attend this session to learn how you can leverage Oracle WebCenter Portal as a user engagement platform for bringing together business process management, enterprise content management, and business intelligence into a highly relevant and integrated experience. Hear how Aramark has leveraged Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to deliver a unified workspace providing simpler navigation and processing, consolidation of tools, easy access to information, integrated search, and single sign-on. ¶ CON8886 - Content Consolidation: Save Money, Increase Efficiency, and Eliminate Silos Organizations are looking for ways to save money and be more efficient. With content in many different places, it’s difficult to know where to look for a document and whether the document is the most current version. With Oracle WebCenter, content can be consolidated into one best-of-breed repository that is secure, scalable, and integrated with your business processes and applications. Users can find the content they need, where they need it, and ensure that it is the right content. This session covers content challenges that affect your business; content consolidation that can lead to savings in storage and administration costs and can lower risks; and how companies are realizing savings. ¶ CON8911 - Improve Online Experiences for Customers and Partners with Self-Service Portals Are you able to provide your customers and partners an easy-to-use online self-service experience? Are you processing high-volume transactions and struggling with call center bottlenecks or back-end systems that won’t integrate, causing order delays and customer frustration? Are you looking to target content such as product and service offerings to your end users? This session shares approaches to providing targeted delivery as well as strategies and best practices for transforming your business by providing an intuitive user experience for your customers and partners. ¶ CON6156 - Top 10 Ways to Integrate Oracle WebCenter Content This session covers 10 common ways to integrate Oracle WebCenter Content with other enterprise applications and middleware. It discusses out-of-the-box modules that provide expanded features in Oracle WebCenter Content—such as enterprise search, SOA, and BPEL—as well as developer tools you can use to create custom integrations. The presentation also gives guidance on which integration option may work best in your environment. ¶ HOL10207 - Build an Intranet Portal with Oracle WebCenter In this hands-on lab, you’ll work with Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle WebCenter Content to build out an enterprise portal that maximizes the productivity of teams and individual contributors. Using browser-based tools, you’ll manage site resources such as page styles, templates, and navigation. You’ll edit content stored in Oracle WebCenter Content directly from your portal. You’ll also experience the latest features that promote collaboration, social networking, and personal productivity. ¶ CON7817 - Migration to Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g Customers today continually strive to automate business processes, reduce costs, and improve efficiency. The accounts payable process—which is often distributed in nature, requires many approvals, and generates huge volumes of paper invoices—is automated by many customers. In this session, learn how Oracle and SYSTIME have partnered to help a customer migrate its existing Oracle Imaging and Process Management Release 7.6 to the latest Oracle WebCenter Imaging 11g and integrate it with Oracle’s JD Edwards family of products. ¶ CON8910 - How to Engage Customers Across Web, Mobile, and Social Channels Whether on desktops at the office, on tablets at home, or on mobile phones when on the go, today’s customers are always connected. To engage today’s customers, you need to make the online customer experience connected and consistent across a host of devices and multiple channels, including Web, mobile, and social networks. Managing this multichannel environment can result in lots of headaches without the right tools. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Sites solves the challenge of multichannel customer engagement. ¶ HOL10206 - Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g: Transforming the Content Contributor Experience Oracle WebCenter Sites 11g makes it easy for marketers and business users to contribute to and manage Websites with the new visual, contextual, and intuitive Web authoring interface. In this hands-on lab, you will create and manage content for a sports-themed Website, using many of the new and enhanced features of the 11g release. ¶ CON8900 - Building Next-Generation Portals: An Interactive Customer Panel Discussion Social and collaborative technologies have changed how people interact, learn, and collaborate, and providing a modern, social Web presence is imperative to remain competitive in today’s market. Can your business benefit from a more collaborative and interactive portal environment for employees, customers, and partners? Attend this session to hear from Oracle WebCenter Portal customers as they share their strategies and best practices for providing users with a modern experience that adapts to their needs and includes personalized access to content in context. The panel also addresses how customers have benefited from creating next-generation portals by migrating from older portal technologies to Oracle WebCenter Portal. ¶ CON9625 - Taking Control of Oracle WebCenter Security Organizations are increasingly looking to extend their Oracle WebCenter portal for social business, to serve external users and provide seamless access to the right information. In particular, many organizations are extending Oracle WebCenter in a business-to-business scenario requiring secure identification and authorization of business partners and their users. This session focuses on how customers are leveraging, securing, and providing access control to Oracle WebCenter portal and mobile solutions. You will learn best practices and hear real-world examples of how to provide flexible and granular access control for Oracle WebCenter deployments, using Oracle Platform Security Services and Oracle Access Management Suite product offerings. ¶ CON8891 - Extending Social into Enterprise Applications and Business Processes Oracle Social Network is an extensible social platform that enables contextual collaboration within enterprise applications and business processes, providing relevant data from across various enterprise systems in one place. Attend this session to see how an Oracle Social Network customer is integrating multiple applications—such as CRM, HCM, and business processes—into Oracle Social Network and Oracle WebCenter to enable individuals and teams to solve complex cross-organizational business problems more effectively by utilizing the social enterprise. ¶ Thursday, October 4th CON8899 - Becoming a Social Business: Stories from the Front Lines of Change What does it really mean to be a social business? How can you change our organization to embrace social approaches? What pitfalls do you need to avoid? In this lively panel discussion, customer and industry thought leaders in social business explore these topics and more as they share their stories of the good, the bad, and the ugly that can happen when embracing social methods and technologies to improve business success. Using moderated questions and open Q&A from the audience, the panel discusses vital topics such as the critical factors for success, the major issues to avoid, how to gain senior executive support for social efforts, how to handle undesired behavior, and how to measure business impact. It takes a thought-provoking look at becoming a social business from the inside. ¶ CON6851 - Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to Create Vendor Portals Large manufacturers of grocery items routinely find themselves depending on the inventory management expertise of their wholesalers and distributors. Inventory costs can be managed more efficiently by the manufacturers if they have better insight into the inventory levels of items carried by their distributors. This creates a unique opportunity for distributors and wholesalers to leverage this knowledge into a revenue-generating subscription service. Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle WebCenter Portal play a key part in enabling creation of business-managed business intelligence portals for vendors. This session discusses one customer that implemented this by leveraging Oracle WebCenter and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. ¶ CON8879 - Provide a Personalized and Consistent Customer Experience in Your Websites and Portals Your customers engage with your company online in different ways throughout their journey—from prospecting by acquiring information on your corporate Website to transacting through self-service applications on your customer portal—and then the cycle begins again when they look for new products and services. Ensuring that the customer experience is consistent and personalized across online properties—from branding and content to interactions and transactions—can be a daunting task. Oracle WebCenter enables you to speak and interact with your customers with one voice across your Websites and portals by providing an integrated platform for delivery of self-service and engagement that unifies and personalizes the online experience. Learn more in this session. ¶ CON8898 - Land Mines, Potholes, and Dirt Roads: Navigating the Way to ECM Nirvana Ten years ago, people were predicting that by this time in history, we’d be some kind of utopian paperless society. As we all know, we’re not there yet, but are we getting closer? What is keeping companies from driving down the road to enterprise content management bliss? Most people understand that using ECM as a central platform enables organizations to expedite document-centric processes, but most business processes in organizations are still heavily paper-based. Many of these processes could be automated and improved with an ECM platform infrastructure. In this panel discussion, you’ll hear from Oracle WebCenter customers that have already solved some of these challenges as they share their strategies for success and roads to avoid along your journey. ¶ CON8908 - Oracle WebCenter Portal: Creating and Using Content Presenter Templates Oracle WebCenter Portal applications use task flows to display and integrate content stored in the Oracle WebCenter Content server. Among the most flexible task flows is Content Presenter, which renders various types of content on an Oracle WebCenter Portal page. Although Oracle WebCenter Portal comes with a set of predefined Content Presenter templates, developers can create their own templates for specific rendering needs. This session shows the lifecycle of developing Content Presenter task flows, including how to create, package, import, modify at runtime, and use such templates. In addition to simple examples with Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) UI elements to render the content, it shows how to use other UI technologies, CSS files, and JavaScript libraries. ¶ CON8897 - Using Web Experience Management to Drive Online Marketing Success Every year, the online channel becomes more imperative for driving organizational top-line revenue, but for many companies, mastering how to best market their products and services in a fast-evolving online world with high customer expectations for personalized experiences can be a complex proposition. Come to this panel discussion, and hear directly from online marketers how they are succeeding today by using Web experience management to drive marketing success, using capabilities such as targeting and optimization, user-generated content, mobile site publishing, and site visitor personalization to deliver engaging online experiences. ¶ CON8892 - Oracle’s Journey to Social Business Social business is a revolution, one that is causing rapidly accelerating change in how companies and customers engage with one another and how employees work together. Oracle’s goal in becoming a social business is to create a socially connected organization in which working collaboratively across geographical locations, lines of business, and management chains is second nature, enabling innovative solutions to business challenges. We can achieve this by connecting the right people, finding the right content, communicating with the right people, collaborating at the right time, and building the right communities in the right context—all ready in the CLOUD. Attend this session to see how Oracle is transforming itself into a social business. ¶  ------------ If you've read all the way to the end here - we are REALLY looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco.

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• SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• SQLAuthority News – TechEd India – April 12-14, 2010 Bangalore – An Unforgettable Experience – An Op

  - by pinaldave

  TechEd India was one of the largest Technology events in India led by Microsoft. This event was attended by more than 3,000 technology enthusiasts, making it one of the most well-organized events of the year. Though I attempted to attend almost all the technology events here, I have not seen any bigger or better event in Indian subcontinents other than this. There are 21 Technical Tracks at Tech·Ed India 2010 that span more than 745 learning opportunities. I was fortunate enough to be a part of this whole event as a speaker and a delegate, as well. TechEd India Speaker Badge and A Token of Lifetime Hotel Selection I presented three different sessions at TechEd India and was also a part of panel discussion. (The details of the sessions are given at the end of this blog post.) Due to extensive traveling, I stay away from my family occasionally. For this reason, I took my wife – Nupur and daughter Shaivi (8 months old) to the event along with me. We stayed at the same hotel where the event was organized so as to maximize my time bonding with my family and to have more time in networking with technology community, at the same time. The hotel Lalit Ashok is the largest and most luxurious venue one can find in Bangalore, located in the middle of the city. The cost of the hotel was a bit pricey, but looking at all the advantages, I had decided to ask for a booking there. Hotel Lalit Ashok Nupur Dave and Shaivi Dave Arrival Day – DAY 0 – April 11, 2010 I reached the event a day earlier, and that was one wise decision for I was able to relax a bit and go over my presentation for the next day’s course. I am a kind of person who likes to get everything ready ahead of time. I was also able to enjoy a pleasant evening with several Microsoft employees and my family friends. I even checked out the location where I would be doing presentations the next day. I was fortunate enough to meet Bijoy Singhal from Microsoft who helped me out with a few of the logistics issues that occured the day before. I was not aware of the fact that the very next day he was going to be “The Man” of the TechEd 2010 event. Vinod Kumar from Microsoft was really very kind as he talked to me regarding my subsequent session. He gave me some suggestions which were really helpful that I was able to incorporate them during my presentation. Finally, I was able to meet Abhishek Kant from Microsoft; his valuable suggestions and unlimited passion have inspired many people like me to work with the Community. Pradipta from Microsoft was also around, being extremely busy with logistics; however, in those busy times, he did find some good spare time to have a chat with me and the other Community leaders. I also met Harish Ranganathan and Sachin Rathi, both from Microsoft. It was so interesting to listen to both of them talking about SharePoint. I just have no words to express my overwhelmed spirit because of all these passionate young guys - Pradipta,Vinod, Bijoy, Harish, Sachin and Ahishek (of course!). Map of TechEd India 2010 Event Day 1 – April 12, 2010 From morning until night time, today was truly a very busy day for me. I had two presentations and one panel discussion for the day. Needless to say, I had a few meetings to attend as well. The day started with a keynote from S. Somaseger where he announced the launch of Visual Studio 2010. The keynote area was really eye-catching because of the very large, bigger-than- life uniform screen. This was truly one to show. The title music of the keynote was very interesting and it featured Bijoy Singhal as the model. It was interesting to talk to him afterwards, when we laughed at jokes together about his modeling assignment. TechEd India Keynote Opening Featuring Bijoy TechEd India 2010 Keynote – S. Somasegar Time: 11:15pm – 11:45pm Session 1: True Lies of SQL Server – SQL Myth Buster Following the excellent keynote, I had my very first session on the subject of SQL Server Myth Buster. At first, I was a bit nervous as right after the keynote, for this was my very first session and during my presentation I saw lots of Microsoft Product Team members. Well, it really went well and I had a really good discussion with attendees of the session. I felt that a well begin was half-done and my confidence was regained. Right after the session, I met a few of my Community friends and had meaningful discussions with them on many subjects. The abstract of the session is as follows: In this 30-minute demo session, I am going to briefly demonstrate few SQL Server Myths and their resolutions as I back them up with some demo. This demo presentation is a must-attend for all developers and administrators who would come to the event. This is going to be a very quick yet fun session. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Time: 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM Lunch with Somasegar After the session I went to see my daughter, and then I headed right away to the lunch with S. Somasegar – the keynote speaker and senior vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. I really thank to Abhishek who made it possible for us. Because of his efforts, all the MVPs had the opportunity to meet such a legendary person and had to talk with them on Microsoft Technology. Though Somasegar is currently holding such a high position in Microsoft, he is very polite and a real gentleman, and how I wish that everybody in industry is like him. Believe me, if you spread love and kindness, then that is what you will receive back. As soon as lunch time was over, I ran to the session hall as my second presentation was about to start. Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm Session 2: Master Data Services in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Business Intelligence is a subject which was widely talked about at TechEd. Everybody was interested in this subject, and I did not excuse myself from this great concept as well. I consider myself fortunate as I was presenting on the subject of Master Data Services at TechEd. When I had initially learned this subject, I had a bit of confusion about the usage of this tool. Later on, I decided that I would tackle about how we all developers and DBAs are not able to understand something so simple such as this, and even worst, creating confusion about the technology. During system designing, it is very important to have a reference material or master lookup tables. Well, I talked about the same subject and presented the session keeping that as my center talk. The session went very well and I received lots of interesting questions. I got many compliments for talking about this subject on the real-life scenario. I really thank Rushabh Mehta (CEO, Solid Quality Mentors India) for his supportive suggestions that helped me prepare the slide deck, as well as the subject. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: SQL Server Master Data Services will ship with SQL Server 2008 R2 and will improve Microsoft’s platform appeal. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of MDS features and highlights important usage scenarios. Master Data Services enables consistent decision-making process by allowing you to create, manage and propagate changes from a single master view of your business entities. Also, MDS – Master Data-hub which is a vital component, helps ensure the consistency of reporting across systems and deliver faster and more accurate results across the enterprise. We will talk about establishing the basis for a centralized approach to defining, deploying, and managing master data in the enterprise. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The day was still not over for me. I had ran into several friends but we were not able keep our enthusiasm under control about all the rumors saying that SQL Server 2008 R2 was about to be launched tomorrow in the keynote. I then ran to my third and final technical event for the day- a panel discussion with the top technologies of India. Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm Panel Discussion: Harness the power of Web – SEO and Technical Blogging As I have delivered two technical sessions by this time, I was a bit tired but  not less enthusiastic when I had to talk about Blog and Technology. We discussed many different topics there. I told them that the most important aspect for any blog is its content. We discussed in depth the issues with plagiarism and how to avoid it. Another topic of discussion was how we technology bloggers can create awareness in the Community about what the right kind of blogging is and what morally and technically wrong acts are. A couple of questions were raised about what type of liberty a person can have in terms of writing blogs. Well, it was generically agreed that a blog is mainly a representation of our ideas and thoughts; it should not be governed by external entities. As long as one is writing what they really want to say, but not providing incorrect information or not practicing plagiarism, a blogger should be allowed to express himself. This panel discussion was supposed to be over in an hour, but the interest of the participants was remarkable and so it was extended for 30 minutes more. Finally, we decided to bring to a close the discussion and agreed that we will continue the topic next year. TechEd India Panel Discussion on Web, Technology and SEO Surprisingly, the day was just beginning after doing all of these. By this time, I have almost met all the MVP who arrived at the event, as well as many Microsoft employees. There were lots of Community folks present, too. I decided that I would go to meet several friends from the Community and continue to communicate with me on SQLAuthority.com. I also met Abhishek Baxi and had a good talk with him regarding Win Mobile and Twitter. He also took a very quick video of me wherein I spoke in my mother’s tongue, Gujarati. It was funny that I talked in Gujarati almost all the day, but when I was talking in the interview I could not find the right Gujarati words to speak. I think we all think in English when we think about Technology, so as to address universality. After meeting them, I headed towards the Speakers’ Dinner. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Speakers Dinner The Speakers’ dinner was indeed a wonderful opportunity for all the speakers to get together and relax. We talked so many different things, from XBOX to Hindi Movies, and from SQL to Samosas. I just could not express how much fun I had. After a long evening, when I returned tmy room and met Shaivi, I just felt instantly relaxed. Kids are really gifts from God. Today was a really long but exciting day. So many things happened in just one day: Visual Studio Lanch, lunch with Somasegar, 2 technical sessions, 1 panel discussion, community leaders meeting, speakers dinner and, last but not leas,t playing with my child! A perfect day! Day 2 – April 13, 2010 Today started with a bang with the excellent keynote by Kamal Hathi who launched SQL Server 2008 R2 in India and demonstrated the power of PowerPivot to all of us. 101 Million Rows in Excel brought lots of applause from the audience. Kamal Hathi Presenting Keynote at TechEd India 2010 The day was a bit easier one for me. I had no sessions today and no events planned. I had a few meetings planned for the second day of the event. I sat in the speaker’s lounge for half a day and met many people there. I attended nearly 9 different meetings today. The subjects of the meetings were very different. Here is a list of the topics of the Community-related meetings: SQL PASS and its involvement in India and subcontinents How to start community blogging Forums and developing aptitude towards technology Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar User Groups and their developments SharePoint and SQL Business Meeting – a client meeting Business Meeting – a potential performance tuning project Business Meeting – Solid Quality Mentors (SolidQ) And family friends Pinal Dave at TechEd India The day passed by so quickly during this meeting. In the evening, I headed to Partners Expo with friends and checked out few of the booths. I really wanted to talk about some of the products, but due to the freebies there was so much crowd that I finally decided to just take the contact details of the partner. I will now start sending them with my queries and, hopefully, I will have my questions answered. Nupur and Shaivi had also one meeting to attend; it was with our family friend Vijay Raj. Vijay is also a person who loves Technology and loves it more than anybody. I see him growing and learning every day, but still remaining as a ‘human’. I believe that if someone acquires as much knowledge as him, that person will become either a computer or cyborg. Here, Vijay is still a kind gentleman and is able to stay as our close family friend. Shaivi was really happy to play with Uncle Vijay. Pinal Dave and Vijay Raj Renuka Prasad, a Microsoft MVP, impressed me with his passion and knowledge of SQL. Every time he gives me credit for his success, I believe that he is very humble. He has way more certifications than me and has worked many more years with SQL compared to me. He is an excellent photographer as well. Most of the photos in this blog post have been taken by him. I told him if ever he wants to do a part time job, he can do the photography very well. Pinal Dave and Renuka Prasad I also met L Srividya from Microsoft, whom I was looking forward to meet. She is a bundle of knowledge that everyone would surely learn a lot from her. I was able to get a few minutes from her and well, I felt confident. She enlightened me with SQL Server BI concepts, domain management and SQL Server security and few other interesting details. I also had a wonderful time talking about SharePoint with fellow Solid Quality Mentor Joy Rathnayake. He is very passionate about SharePoint but when you talk .NET and SQL with him, he is still overwhelmingly knowledgeable. In fact, while talking to him, I figured out that the recent training he delivered was on SQL Server 2008 R2. I told him a joke that it hurts my ego as he is more popular now in SQL training and consulting than me. I am sure all of you agree that working with good people is a gift from God. I am fortunate enough to work with the best of the best Industry experts. It was a great pleasure to hang out with my Community friends – Ahswin Kini, HimaBindu Vejella, Vasudev G, Suprotim Agrawal, Dhananjay, Vikram Pendse, Mahesh Dhola, Mahesh Mitkari,  Manu Zacharia, Shobhan, Hardik Shah, Ashish Mohta, Manan, Subodh Sohani and Sanjay Shetty (of course!) .  (Please let me know if I have met you at the event and forgot your name to list here). Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Community Leaders Dinner After lots of meetings, I headed towards the Community Leaders dinner meeting and met almost all the folks I met in morning. The discussion was almost the same but the real good thing was that we were enjoying it. The food was really good. Nupur was invited in the event, but Shaivi could not come. When Nupur tried to enter the event, she was stopped as Shaivi did not have the pass to enter the dinner. Nupur expressed that Shaivi is only 8 months old and does not eat outside food as well and could not stay by herself at this age, but the door keeper did not agree and asked that without the entry details Shaivi could not go in, but Nupur could. Nupur called me on phone and asked me to help her out. By the time, I was outside; the organizer of the event reached to the door and happily approved Shaivi to join the party. Once in the party, Shaivi had lots of fun meeting so many people. Shaivi Dave and Abhishek Kant Dean Guida (Infragistics President and CEO) and Pinal Dave (SQLAuthority.com) Day 3 – April 14, 2010 Though, it was last day, I was very much excited today as I was about to present my very favorite session. Query Optimization and Performance Tuning is my domain expertise and I make my leaving by consulting and training the same. Today’s session was on the same subject and as an additional twist, another subject about Spatial Database was presented. I was always intrigued with Spatial Database and I have enjoyed learning about it; however, I have never thought about Spatial Indexing before it was decided that I will do this session. I really thank Solid Quality Mentor Dr. Greg Low for his assistance in helping me prepare the slide deck and also review the content. Furthermore, today was really what I call my ‘learning day’ . So far I had not attended any session in TechEd and I felt a bit down for that. Everybody spends their valuable time & money to learn something new and exciting in TechEd and I had not attended a single session at the moment thinking that it was already last day of the event. I did have a plan for the day and I attended two technical sessions before my session of spatial database. I attended 2 sessions of Vinod Kumar. Vinod is a natural storyteller and there was no doubt that his sessions would be jam-packed. People attended his sessions simply because Vinod is syhe speaker. He did not have a single time disappointed audience; he is truly a good speaker. He knows his stuff very well. I personally do not think that in India he can be compared to anyone for SQL. Time: 12:30pm-1:30pm SQL Server Query Optimization, Execution and Debugging Query Performance I really had a fun time attending this session. Vinod made this session very interactive. The entire audience really got into the presentation and started participating in the event. Vinod was presenting a small problem with Query Tuning, which any developer would have encountered and solved with their help in such a fashion that a developer feels he or she have already resolved it. In one question, I was the only one who was ready to answer and Vinod told me in a light tone that I am now allowed to answer it! The audience really found it very amusing. There was a huge crowd around Vinod after the session. Vinod – A master storyteller! Time: 3:45pm-4:45pm Data Recovery / consistency with CheckDB This session was much heavier than the earlier one, and I must say this is my most favorite session I EVER attended in India. In this TechEd I have only attended two sessions, but in my career, I have attended numerous technical sessions not only in India, but all over the world. This session had taken my breath away. One by one, Vinod took the different databases, and started to corrupt them in different ways. Each database has some unique ways to get corrupted. Once that was done, Vinod started to show the DBCC CEHCKDB and demonstrated how it can solve your problem. He finally fixed all the databases with this single tool. I do have a good knowledge of this subject, but let me honestly admit that I have learned a lot from this session. I enjoyed and cheered during this session along with other attendees. I had total satisfaction that, just like everyone, I took advantage of the event and learned something. I am now TECHnically EDucated. Pinal Dave and Vinod Kumar After two very interactive and informative SQL Sessions from Vinod Kumar, the next turn me presenting on Spatial Database and Indexing. I got once again nervous but Vinod told me to stay natural and do my presentation. Well, once I got a huge stage with a total of four projectors and a large crowd, I felt better. Time: 5:00pm-6:00pm Session 3: Developing with SQL Server Spatial and Deep Dive into Spatial Indexing Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 I kicked off this session with Michael J Swart‘s beautiful spatial image. This session was the last one for the day but, to my surprise, I had more than 200+ attendees. Slowly, the rain was starting outside and I was worried that the hall would not be full; despite this, there was not a single seat available in the first five minutes of the session. Thanks to all of you for attending my presentation. I had demonstrated the map of world (and India) and quickly explained what  Geographic and Geometry data types in Spatial Database are. This session had interesting story of Indexing and Comparison, as well as how different traditional indexes are from spatial indexing. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Due to the heavy rain during this event, the power went off for about 22 minutes (just an accident – nobodies fault). During these minutes, there were no audio, no video and no light. I continued to address the mass of 200+ people without any audio device and PowerPoint. I must thank the audience because not a single person left from the session. They all stayed in their place, some moved closure to listen to me properly. I noticed that the curiosity and eagerness to learn new things was at the peak even though it was the very last session of the TechEd. Everybody wanted get the maximum knowledge out of this whole event. I was touched by the support from audience. They listened and participated in my session even without any kinds of technology (no ppt, no mike, no AC, nothing). During these 22 minutes, I had completed my theory verbally. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 After a while, we got the projector back online and we continued with some exciting demos. Many thanks to Microsoft people who worked energetically in background to get the backup power for project up. I had a very interesting demo wherein I overlaid Bangalore and Hyderabad on the India Map and find their aerial distance between them. After finding the aerial distance, we browsed online and found that SQL Server estimates the exact aerial distance between these two cities, as compared to the factual distance. There was a huge applause from the crowd on the subject that SQL Server takes into the count of the curvature of the earth and finds the precise distances based on details. During the process of finding the distance, I demonstrated a few examples of the indexes where I expressed how one can use those indexes to find these distances and how they can improve the performance of similar query. I also demonstrated few examples wherein we were able to see in which data type the Index is most useful. We finished the demos with a few more internal stuff. Pinal Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 Despite all issues, I was mostly satisfied with my presentation. I think it was the best session I have ever presented at any conference. There was no help from Technology for a while, but I still got lots of appreciation at the end. When we ended the session, the applause from the audience was so loud that for a moment, the rain was not audible. I was truly moved by the dedication of the Technology enthusiasts. Pinal Dave After Presenting session at TechEd India 2010 The abstract of the session is as follows: The Microsoft SQL Server 2008 delivers new spatial data types that enable you to consume, use, and extend location-based data through spatial-enabled applications. Attend this session to learn how to use spatial functionality in next version of SQL Server to build and optimize spatial queries. This session outlines the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it, use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it, take advantage of new spatial indexes for high performance queries, use the new spatial results tab to quickly and easily view spatial query results directly from within Management Studio, extend spatial data capabilities by building or integrating location-enabled applications through support for spatial standards and specifications and much more. Time: 8:00 PM – onwards Dinner by Sponsors After the lively session during the day, there was another dinner party courtesy of one of the sponsors of TechEd. All the MVPs and several Community leaders were present at the dinner. I would like to express my gratitude to Abhishek Kant for organizing this wonderful event for us. It was a blast and really relaxing in all angles. We all stayed there for a long time and talked about our sweet and unforgettable memories of the event. Pinal Dave and Bijoy Singhal It was really one wonderful event. After writing this much, I say that I have no words to express about how much I enjoyed TechEd. However, it is true that I shared with you only 1% of the total activities I have done at the event. There were so many people I have met, yet were not mentioned here although I wanted to write their names here, too . Anyway, I have learned so many things and up until now, I am not able to get over all the fun I had in this event. Pinal Dave at TechEd India 2010 The Next Days – April 15, 2010 – till today I am still not able to get my mind out of the whole experience I had at TechEd India 2010. It was like a whole Microsoft Family working together to celebrate a happy occasion. TechEd India – Truly An Unforgettable Experience! Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: About Me, MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority Author Visit, SQLAuthority News, SQLServer, T SQL, Technology Tagged: TechEd, TechEdIn

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• ControlTemplate Exception: "XamlParseException: Cannot find a Resource with the Name/Key"

  - by akaphenom

  If I move the application resources to a UserControl resources everythgin runs groovy. I still don't understand why. I noticed that my application object MyApp did more than inherit from Application it loaded an XAML for the main template and connected all the plumbing. So I decided to create a user control to remove the template from the applciation (thinking there may be an even order issue not allowing my resource to be found). namespace Module1 type Template() as this = //inherit UriUserControl("/FSSilverlightApp;component/template.xaml", "") inherit UriUserControl("/FSSilverlightApp;component/templateSimple.xaml", "") do Application.LoadComponent(this, base.uri) let siteTemplate : Grid = (this.Content :?> FrameworkElement) ? siteTemplate let nav : Frame = siteTemplate ? contentFrame let pages : UriUserControl array = [| new Module1.Page1() :> UriUserControl ; new Module1.Page2() :> UriUserControl ; new Module1.Page3() :> UriUserControl ; new Module1.Page4() :> UriUserControl ; new Module1.Page5() :> UriUserControl ; |] do nav.Navigate((pages.[0] :> INamedUriProvider).Uri) |> ignore type MyApp() as this = inherit Application() do Application.LoadComponent(this, new System.Uri("/FSSilverlightApp;component/App.xaml", System.UriKind.Relative)) do System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.Plugin.Focus() this.RootVisual <- new Template() ; // test code to check for the existance of the ControlTemplate - it exists let a = Application.Current.Resources.MergedDictionaries let b = a.[0] let c = b.Count let d : ControlTemplate = downcast c.["TransitioningFrame"] () "/FSSilverlightApp;component/templateSimple.xaml" <UserControl x:Class="Module1.Template" xmlns:navigation="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Navigation" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" > <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Center" Background="White" Name="siteTemplate"> <StackPanel Grid.Row="3" Grid.Column="2" Name="mainPanel"> <!--Template="{StaticResource TransitioningFrame}"--> <navigation:Frame Name="contentFrame" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Template="{StaticResource TransitioningFrame}"/> </StackPanel> </Grid> </UserControl> "/FSSilverlightApp;component/App.xaml" <Application xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" x:Class="Module1.MyApp"> <Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <ResourceDictionary Source="/FSSilverlightApp;component/TransitioningFrame.xaml" /> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application> "/FSSilverlightApp;component/TransitioningFrame.xaml" <ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:navigation="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Navigation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <ControlTemplate x:Key="TransitioningFrame" TargetType="navigation:Frame"> <Border Background="Olive" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" BorderThickness="5" HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}"> <ContentPresenter Cursor="{TemplateBinding Cursor}" HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" Margin="{TemplateBinding Padding}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" Content="{TemplateBinding Content}"/> </Border> </ControlTemplate> </ResourceDictionary> Unfortunately that did not work. If I remove the template attribute from the navigationFrame element, the app loads and directs the content area to the first page in the pages array. Referencing that resource continues to throw a resource no found error. Original Post I have the following app.xaml (using Silverlight 3) <Application xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" x:Class="Module1.MyApp"> <Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <ResourceDictionary Source="/FSSilverlightApp;component/TransitioningFrame.xaml" /> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application> and content template: <ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:navigation="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Navigation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <ControlTemplate x:Key="TransitioningFrame" TargetType="navigation:Frame"> <Border Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" BorderThickness="{TemplateBinding BorderThickness}" HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}"> <ContentPresenter Cursor="{TemplateBinding Cursor}" HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" Margin="{TemplateBinding Padding}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" Content="{TemplateBinding Content}"/> </Border> </ControlTemplate> </ResourceDictionary> The debugger says it the contentTemplate is loaded correctly by adding some minimal code: type MyApp() as this = inherit Application() do Application.LoadComponent(this, new System.Uri("/FSSilverlightApp;component/App.xaml", System.UriKind.Relative)) let cc = new ContentControl() let mainGrid : Grid = loadXaml("MainWindow.xaml") do this.Startup.Add(this.startup) let t = Application.Current.Resources.MergedDictionaries let t1 = t.[0] let t2 = t1.Count let t3: ControlTemplate = t1.["TransitioningFrame"] With this line in my main.xaml <navigation:Frame Name="contentFrame" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" Template="{StaticResource TransitioningFrame}"/> Yields this exception Webpage error details User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E) Timestamp: Mon, 24 May 2010 23:10:15 UTC Message: Unhandled Error in Silverlight Application Code: 4004 Category: ManagedRuntimeError Message: System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException: Cannot find a Resource with the Name/Key TransitioningFrame [Line: 86 Position: 115] at MS.Internal.XcpImports.CreateFromXaml(String xamlString, Boolean createNamescope, Boolean requireDefaultNamespace, Boolean allowEventHandlers, Boolean expandTemplatesDuringParse) at MS.Internal.XcpImports.CreateFromXaml(String xamlString, Boolean createNamescope, Boolean requireDefaultNamespace, Boolean allowEventHandlers) at System.Windows.Markup.XamlReader.Load(String xaml) at Globals.loadXaml[T](String xamlPath) at Module1.MyApp..ctor() Line: 54 Char: 13 Code: 0 URI: file:///C:/fsharp/FSSilverlightDemo/FSSilverlightApp/bin/Debug/SilverlightApplication2TestPage.html

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• Red Gate Coder interviews: Alex Davies

  - by Michael Williamson

  Alex Davies has been a software engineer at Red Gate since graduating from university, and is currently busy working on .NET Demon. We talked about tackling parallel programming with his actors framework, a scientific approach to debugging, and how JavaScript is going to affect the programming languages we use in years to come. So, if we start at the start, how did you get started in programming? When I was seven or eight, I was given a BBC Micro for Christmas. I had asked for a Game Boy, but my dad thought it would be better to give me a proper computer. For a year or so, I only played games on it, but then I found the user guide for writing programs in it. I gradually started doing more stuff on it and found it fun. I liked creating. As I went into senior school I continued to write stuff on there, trying to write games that weren’t very good. I got a real computer when I was fourteen and found ways to write BASIC on it. Visual Basic to start with, and then something more interesting than that. How did you learn to program? Was there someone helping you out? Absolutely not! I learnt out of a book, or by experimenting. I remember the first time I found a loop, I was like “Oh my God! I don’t have to write out the same line over and over and over again any more. It’s amazing!” When did you think this might be something that you actually wanted to do as a career? For a long time, I thought it wasn’t something that you would do as a career, because it was too much fun to be a career. I thought I’d do chemistry at university and some kind of career based on chemical engineering. And then I went to a careers fair at school when I was seventeen or eighteen, and it just didn’t interest me whatsoever. I thought “I could be a programmer, and there’s loads of money there, and I’m good at it, and it’s fun”, but also that I shouldn’t spoil my hobby. Now I don’t really program in my spare time any more, which is a bit of a shame, but I program all the rest of the time, so I can live with it. Do you think you learnt much about programming at university? Yes, definitely! I went into university knowing how to make computers do anything I wanted them to do. However, I didn’t have the language to talk about algorithms, so the algorithms course in my first year was massively important. Learning other language paradigms like functional programming was really good for breadth of understanding. Functional programming influences normal programming through design rather than actually using it all the time. I draw inspiration from it to write imperative programs which I think is actually becoming really fashionable now, but I’ve been doing it for ages. I did it first! There were also some courses on really odd programming languages, a bit of Prolog, a little bit of C. Having a little bit of each of those is something that I would have never done on my own, so it was important. And then there are knowledge-based courses which are about not programming itself but things that have been programmed like TCP. Those are really important for examples for how to approach things. Did you do any internships while you were at university? Yeah, I spent both of my summers at the same company. I thought I could code well before I went there. Looking back at the crap that I produced, it was only surpassed in its crappiness by all of the other code already in that company. I’m so much better at writing nice code now than I used to be back then. Was there just not a culture of looking after your code? There was, they just didn’t hire people for their abilities in that area. They hired people for raw IQ. The first indicator of it going wrong was that they didn’t have any computer scientists, which is a bit odd in a programming company. But even beyond that they didn’t have people who learnt architecture from anyone else. Most of them had started straight out of university, so never really had experience or mentors to learn from. There wasn’t the experience to draw from to teach each other. In the second half of my second internship, I was being given tasks like looking at new technologies and teaching people stuff. Interns shouldn’t be teaching people how to do their jobs! All interns are going to have little nuggets of things that you don’t know about, but they shouldn’t consistently be the ones who know the most. It’s not a good environment to learn. I was going to ask how you found working with people who were more experienced than you… When I reached Red Gate, I found some people who were more experienced programmers than me, and that was difficult. I’ve been coding since I was tiny. At university there were people who were cleverer than me, but there weren’t very many who were more experienced programmers than me. During my internship, I didn’t find anyone who I classed as being a noticeably more experienced programmer than me. So, it was a shock to the system to have valid criticisms rather than just formatting criticisms. However, Red Gate’s not so big on the actual code review, at least it wasn’t when I started. We did an entire product release and then somebody looked over all of the UI of that product which I’d written and say what they didn’t like. By that point, it was way too late and I’d disagree with them. Do you think the lack of code reviews was a bad thing? I think if there’s going to be any oversight of new people, then it should be continuous rather than chunky. For me I don’t mind too much, I could go out and get oversight if I wanted it, and in those situations I felt comfortable without it. If I was managing the new person, then maybe I’d be keener on oversight and then the right way to do it is continuously and in very, very small chunks. Have you had any significant projects you’ve worked on outside of a job? When I was a teenager I wrote all sorts of stuff. I used to write games, I derived how to do isomorphic projections myself once. I didn’t know what the word was so I couldn’t Google for it, so I worked it out myself. It was horrifically complicated. But it sort of tailed off when I started at university, and is now basically zero. If I do side-projects now, they tend to be work-related side projects like my actors framework, NAct, which I started in a down tools week. Could you explain a little more about NAct? It is a little C# framework for writing parallel code more easily. Parallel programming is difficult when you need to write to shared data. Sometimes parallel programming is easy because you don’t need to write to shared data. When you do need to access shared data, you could just have your threads pile in and do their work, but then you would screw up the data because the threads would trample on each other’s toes. You could lock, but locks are really dangerous if you’re using more than one of them. You get interactions like deadlocks, and that’s just nasty. Actors instead allows you to say this piece of data belongs to this thread of execution, and nobody else can read it. If you want to read it, then ask that thread of execution for a piece of it by sending a message, and it will send the data back by a message. And that avoids deadlocks as long as you follow some obvious rules about not making your actors sit around waiting for other actors to do something. There are lots of ways to write actors, NAct allows you to do it as if it was method calls on other objects, which means you get all the strong type-safety that C# programmers like. Do you think that this is suitable for the majority of parallel programming, or do you think it’s only suitable for specific cases? It’s suitable for most difficult parallel programming. If you’ve just got a hundred web requests which are all independent of each other, then I wouldn’t bother because it’s easier to just spin them up in separate threads and they can proceed independently of each other. But where you’ve got difficult parallel programming, where you’ve got multiple threads accessing multiple bits of data in multiple ways at different times, then actors is at least as good as all other ways, and is, I reckon, easier to think about. When you’re using actors, you presumably still have to write your code in a different way from you would otherwise using single-threaded code. You can’t use actors with any methods that have return types, because you’re not allowed to call into another actor and wait for it. If you want to get a piece of data out of another actor, then you’ve got to use tasks so that you can use “async” and “await” to await asynchronously for it. But other than that, you can still stick things in classes so it’s not too different really. Rather than having thousands of objects with mutable state, you can use component-orientated design, where there are only a few mutable classes which each have a small number of instances. Then there can be thousands of immutable objects. If you tend to do that anyway, then actors isn’t much of a jump. If I’ve already built my system without any parallelism, how hard is it to add actors to exploit all eight cores on my desktop? Usually pretty easy. If you can identify even one boundary where things look like messages and you have components where some objects live on one side and these other objects live on the other side, then you can have a granddaddy object on one side be an actor and it will parallelise as it goes across that boundary. Not too difficult. If we do get 1000-core desktop PCs, do you think actors will scale up? It’s hard. There are always in the order of twenty to fifty actors in my whole program because I tend to write each component as actors, and I tend to have one instance of each component. So this won’t scale to a thousand cores. What you can do is write data structures out of actors. I use dictionaries all over the place, and if you need a dictionary that is going to be accessed concurrently, then you could build one of those out of actors in no time. You can use queuing to marshal requests between different slices of the dictionary which are living on different threads. So it’s like a distributed hash table but all of the chunks of it are on the same machine. That means that each of these thousand processors has cached one small piece of the dictionary. I reckon it wouldn’t be too big a leap to start doing proper parallelism. Do you think it helps if actors get baked into the language, similarly to Erlang? Erlang is excellent in that it has thread-local garbage collection. C# doesn’t, so there’s a limit to how well C# actors can possibly scale because there’s a single garbage collected heap shared between all of them. When you do a global garbage collection, you’ve got to stop all of the actors, which is seriously expensive, whereas in Erlang garbage collections happen per-actor, so they’re insanely cheap. However, Erlang deviated from all the sensible language design that people have used recently and has just come up with crazy stuff. You can definitely retrofit thread-local garbage collection to .NET, and then it’s quite well-suited to support actors, even if it’s not baked into the language. Speaking of language design, do you have a favourite programming language? I’ll choose a language which I’ve never written before. I like the idea of Scala. It sounds like C#, only with some of the niggles gone. I enjoy writing static types. It means you don’t have to writing tests so much. When you say it doesn’t have some of the niggles? C# doesn’t allow the use of a property as a method group. It doesn’t have Scala case classes, or sum types, where you can do a switch statement and the compiler checks that you’ve checked all the cases, which is really useful in functional-style programming. Pattern-matching, in other words. That’s actually the major niggle. C# is pretty good, and I’m quite happy with C#. And what about going even further with the type system to remove the need for tests to something like Haskell? Or is that a step too far? I’m quite a pragmatist, I don’t think I could deal with trying to write big systems in languages with too few other users, especially when learning how to structure things. I just don’t know anyone who can teach me, and the Internet won’t teach me. That’s the main reason I wouldn’t use it. If I turned up at a company that writes big systems in Haskell, I would have no objection to that, but I wouldn’t instigate it. What about things in C#? For instance, there’s contracts in C#, so you can try to statically verify a bit more about your code. Do you think that’s useful, or just not worthwhile? I’ve not really tried it. My hunch is that it needs to be built into the language and be quite mathematical for it to work in real life, and that doesn’t seem to have ended up true for C# contracts. I don’t think anyone who’s tried them thinks they’re any good. I might be wrong. On a slightly different note, how do you like to debug code? I think I’m quite an odd debugger. I use guesswork extremely rarely, especially if something seems quite difficult to debug. I’ve been bitten spending hours and hours on guesswork and not being scientific about debugging in the past, so now I’m scientific to a fault. What I want is to see the bug happening in the debugger, to step through the bug happening. To watch the program going from a valid state to an invalid state. When there’s a bug and I can’t work out why it’s happening, I try to find some piece of evidence which places the bug in one section of the code. From that experiment, I binary chop on the possible causes of the bug. I suppose that means binary chopping on places in the code, or binary chopping on a stage through a processing cycle. Basically, I’m very stupid about how I debug. I won’t make any guesses, I won’t use any intuition, I will only identify the experiment that’s going to binary chop most effectively and repeat rather than trying to guess anything. I suppose it’s quite top-down. Is most of the time then spent in the debugger? Absolutely, if at all possible I will never debug using print statements or logs. I don’t really hold much stock in outputting logs. If there’s any bug which can be reproduced locally, I’d rather do it in the debugger than outputting logs. And with SmartAssembly error reporting, there’s not a lot that can’t be either observed in an error report and just fixed, or reproduced locally. And in those other situations, maybe I’ll use logs. But I hate using logs. You stare at the log, trying to guess what’s going on, and that’s exactly what I don’t like doing. You have to just look at it and see does this look right or wrong. We’ve covered how you get to grip with bugs. How do you get to grips with an entire codebase? I watch it in the debugger. I find little bugs and then try to fix them, and mostly do it by watching them in the debugger and gradually getting an understanding of how the code works using my process of binary chopping. I have to do a lot of reading and watching code to choose where my slicing-in-half experiment is going to be. The last time I did it was SmartAssembly. The old code was a complete mess, but at least it did things top to bottom. There wasn’t too much of some of the big abstractions where flow of control goes all over the place, into a base class and back again. Code’s really hard to understand when that happens. So I like to choose a little bug and try to fix it, and choose a bigger bug and try to fix it. Definitely learn by doing. I want to always have an aim so that I get a little achievement after every few hours of debugging. Once I’ve learnt the codebase I might be able to fix all the bugs in an hour, but I’d rather be using them as an aim while I’m learning the codebase. If I was a maintainer of a codebase, what should I do to make it as easy as possible for you to understand? Keep distinct concepts in different places. And name your stuff so that it’s obvious which concepts live there. You shouldn’t have some variable that gets set miles up the top of somewhere, and then is read miles down to choose some later behaviour. I’m talking from a very much SmartAssembly point of view because the old SmartAssembly codebase had tons and tons of these things, where it would read some property of the code and then deal with it later. Just thousands of variables in scope. Loads of things to think about. If you can keep concepts separate, then it aids me in my process of fixing bugs one at a time, because each bug is going to more or less be understandable in the one place where it is. And what about tests? Do you think they help at all? I’ve never had the opportunity to learn a codebase which has had tests, I don’t know what it’s like! What about when you’re actually developing? How useful do you find tests in finding bugs or regressions? Finding regressions, absolutely. Running bits of code that would be quite hard to run otherwise, definitely. It doesn’t happen very often that a test finds a bug in the first place. I don’t really buy nebulous promises like tests being a good way to think about the spec of the code. My thinking goes something like “This code works at the moment, great, ship it! Ah, there’s a way that this code doesn’t work. Okay, write a test, demonstrate that it doesn’t work, fix it, use the test to demonstrate that it’s now fixed, and keep the test for future regressions.” The most valuable tests are for bugs that have actually happened at some point, because bugs that have actually happened at some point, despite the fact that you think you’ve fixed them, are way more likely to appear again than new bugs are. Does that mean that when you write your code the first time, there are no tests? Often. The chance of there being a bug in a new feature is relatively unaffected by whether I’ve written a test for that new feature because I’m not good enough at writing tests to think of bugs that I would have written into the code. So not writing regression tests for all of your code hasn’t affected you too badly? There are different kinds of features. Some of them just always work, and are just not flaky, they just continue working whatever you throw at them. Maybe because the type-checker is particularly effective around them. Writing tests for those features which just tend to always work is a waste of time. And because it’s a waste of time I’ll tend to wait until a feature has demonstrated its flakiness by having bugs in it before I start trying to test it. You can get a feel for whether it’s going to be flaky code as you’re writing it. I try to write it to make it not flaky, but there are some things that are just inherently flaky. And very occasionally, I’ll think “this is going to be flaky” as I’m writing, and then maybe do a test, but not most of the time. How do you think your programming style has changed over time? I’ve got clearer about what the right way of doing things is. I used to flip-flop a lot between different ideas. Five years ago I came up with some really good ideas and some really terrible ideas. All of them seemed great when I thought of them, but they were quite diverse ideas, whereas now I have a smaller set of reliable ideas that are actually good for structuring code. So my code is probably more similar to itself than it used to be back in the day, when I was trying stuff out. I’ve got more disciplined about encapsulation, I think. There are operational things like I use actors more now than I used to, and that forces me to use immutability more than I used to. The first code that I wrote in Red Gate was the memory profiler UI, and that was an actor, I just didn’t know the name of it at the time. I don’t really use object-orientation. By object-orientation, I mean having n objects of the same type which are mutable. I want a constant number of objects that are mutable, and they should be different types. I stick stuff in dictionaries and then have one thing that owns the dictionary and puts stuff in and out of it. That’s definitely a pattern that I’ve seen recently. I think maybe I’m doing functional programming. Possibly. It’s plausible. If you had to summarise the essence of programming in a pithy sentence, how would you do it? Programming is the form of art that, without losing any of the beauty of architecture or fine art, allows you to produce things that people love and you make money from. So you think it’s an art rather than a science? It’s a little bit of engineering, a smidgeon of maths, but it’s not science. Like architecture, programming is on that boundary between art and engineering. If you want to do it really nicely, it’s mostly art. You can get away with doing architecture and programming entirely by having a good engineering mind, but you’re not going to produce anything nice. You’re not going to have joy doing it if you’re an engineering mind. Architects who are just engineering minds are not going to enjoy their job. I suppose engineering is the foundation on which you build the art. Exactly. How do you think programming is going to change over the next ten years? There will be an unfortunate shift towards dynamically-typed languages, because of JavaScript. JavaScript has an unfair advantage. JavaScript’s unfair advantage will cause more people to be exposed to dynamically-typed languages, which means other dynamically-typed languages crop up and the best features go into dynamically-typed languages. Then people conflate the good features with the fact that it’s dynamically-typed, and more investment goes into dynamically-typed languages. They end up better, so people use them. What about the idea of compiling other languages, possibly statically-typed, to JavaScript? It’s a reasonable idea. I would like to do it, but I don’t think enough people in the world are going to do it to make it pick up. The hordes of beginners are the lifeblood of a language community. They are what makes there be good tools and what makes there be vibrant community websites. And any particular thing which is the same as JavaScript only with extra stuff added to it, although it might be technically great, is not going to have the hordes of beginners. JavaScript is always to be quickest and easiest way for a beginner to start programming in the browser. And dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners. Compilers are pretty scary and beginners don’t write big code. And having your errors come up in the same place, whether they’re statically checkable errors or not, is quite nice for a beginner. If someone asked me to teach them some programming, I’d teach them JavaScript. If dynamically-typed languages are great for beginners, when do you think the benefits of static typing start to kick in? The value of having a statically typed program is in the tools that rely on the static types to produce a smooth IDE experience rather than actually telling me my compile errors. And only once you’re experienced enough a programmer that having a really smooth IDE experience makes a blind bit of difference, does static typing make a blind bit of difference. So it’s not really about size of codebase. If I go and write up a tiny program, I’m still going to get value out of writing it in C# using ReSharper because I’m experienced with C# and ReSharper enough to be able to write code five times faster if I have that help. Any other visions of the future? Nobody’s going to use actors. Because everyone’s going to be running on single-core VMs connected over network-ready protocols like JSON over HTTP. So, parallelism within one operating system is going to die. But until then, you should use actors. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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• Benchmark Linq2SQL, Subsonic2, Subsonic3 - Any other ideas to make them faster ?

  - by Aristos

  I am working with Subsonic 2 more than 3 years now... After Linq appears and then Subsonic 3, I start thinking about moving to the new Linq futures that are connected to sql. I must say that I start move and port my subsonic 2 with SubSonic 3, and very soon I discover that the speed was so slow thats I didn't believe it - and starts all that tests. Then I test Linq2Sql and see also a delay - compare it with Subsonic 2. My question here is, especial for the linq2sql, and the up-coming dotnet version 4, what else can I do to speed it up ? What else on linq2sql settings, or classes, not on this code that I have used for my messures I place here the project that I make the tests, also the screen shots of the results. How I make the tests - and the accurate of my measures. I use only for my question Google chrome, because its difficult for me to show here a lot of other measures that I have done with more complex programs. This is the most simple one, I just measure the Data Read. How can I prove that. I make a simple Thread.Sleep(10 seconds) and see if I see that 10 seconds on Google Chrome Measure, and yes I see it. here are more test with this Sleep thead to see whats actually Chrome gives. 10 seconds delay 100 ms delay Zero delay There is only a small 15ms thats get on messure, is so small compare it with the rest of my tests that I do not care about. So what I measure I measure just the data read via each method - did not count the data or database delay, or any disk read or anything like that. Later on the image with the result I show that no disk activity exist on the measures See this image to see what really I measure and if this is correct Why I chose this kind of test Its simple, it's real, and it's near my real problem that I found the delay of subsonic 3 in real program with real data. Now lets tests the dals Start by see this image I have 4-5 calls on every method, the one after the other. The results are. For a loop of 100 times, ask for 5 Rows, one not exist, approximatively.. Simple adonet:81ms SubSonic 2 :210ms linq2sql :1.70sec linq2sql using CompiledQuery.Compile :239ms Subsonic 3 :15.00sec (wow - extreme slow) The project http://www.planethost.gr/DalSpeedTests.rar Can any one confirm this benchmark, or make any optimizations to help me out ? Other tests Some one publish here this link http://ormbattle.net/ (and then remove it - don not know why) In this page you can find a really useful advanced tests for all, except subsonic 2 and subsonic 3 that I have here ! Optimizing What I really ask here is if some one can now any trick how to optimize the DALs, not by changing the test code, but by changing the code and the settings on each dal. For example... Optimizing Linq2SQL I start search how to optimize Linq2sql and found this article, and maybe more exist. Finally I make the tricks from that page to run, and optimize the code using them all. The speed was near 1.50sec from 1.70.... big improvement, but still slow. Then I found a different way - same idea article, and wow ! the speed is blow up. Using this trick with CompiledQuery.Compile, the time from 1.5sec is now 239ms. Here is the code for the precompiled... Func<DataClassesDataContext, int, IQueryable<Product>> compiledQuery = CompiledQuery.Compile((DataClassesDataContext meta, int IdToFind) => (from myData in meta.Products where myData.ProductID.Equals(IdToFind) select myData)); StringBuilder Test = new StringBuilder(); int[] MiaSeira = { 5, 6, 10, 100, 7 }; using (DataClassesDataContext context = new DataClassesDataContext()) { context.ObjectTrackingEnabled = false; for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) { foreach (int EnaID in MiaSeira) { var oFindThat2P = compiledQuery(context, EnaID); foreach (Product One in oFindThat2P) { Test.Append("<br />"); Test.Append(One.ProductName); } } } } Optimizing SubSonic 3 and problems I make many performance profiling, and start change the one after the other and the speed is better but still too slow. I post them on subsonic group but they ignore the problem, they say that everything is fast... Here is some capture of my profiling and delay points inside subsonic source code I have end up that subsonic3 make more call on the structure of the database rather than on data itself. Needs to reconsider the hole way of asking for data, and follow the subsonic2 idea if this is possible. Try to make precompile to subsonic 3 like I did in linq2Sql but fail for the moment... Optimizing SubSonic 2 After I discover that subsonic 3 is extreme slow, I start my checks on subsonic 2 - that I have never done before believing that is fast. (and it is) So its come up with some points that can be faster. For example there are many loops like this ones that actually is slow because of string manipulation and compares inside the loop. I must say to you that this code called million of times ! on a period of few minutes ! of data asking from the program. On small amount of tables and small fields maybe this is not a big think for some people, but on large amount of tables, the delay is even more. So I decide and optimize the subsonic 2 by my self, by replacing the string compares, with number compares! Simple. I do that almost on every point that profiler say that is slow. I change also all small points that can be even a little faster, and disable some not so used thinks. The results, 5% faster on NorthWind database, near 20% faster on my database with 250 tables. That is count with 500ms less in 10 seconds process on northwind, 100ms faster on my database on 500ms process time. I do not have captures to show you for that because I have made them with different code, different time, and track them down on paper. Anyway this is my story and my question on all that, what else do you know to make them even faster... For this measures I have use Subsonic 2.2 optimized by me, Subsonic 3.0.0.3 a little optimized by me, and Dot.Net 3.5

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• Hosted bug tracking system with mercurial repositories (Summary of options & request for opinions)

  - by Mark Booth

  The Question What hosted mercurial repository/bug tracking system or systems have you used? Would you recommend it to others? Are there serious flaws, either in the repository hosting or the bug tracking features that would make it difficult to recommend it? Do you have any other experiences with it or opinions of it that you would like to share? If you have used other non mercurial hosted repository/bug tracking systems, how does it compare? (If I understand correctly, the best format for this type of community-wiki style question is one answer per option, if you have experienced if several) Background I have been looking into options for setting up a bug/issue tracking database and found some valuable advice in this thread and this. But then I got to thinking that a hosted solution might not only solve the problem of tracking bugs, but might also solve the problem we have accessing our mercurial source code repositories while at customer sites around the world. Since we currently have no way to serve mercurial repositories over ssl, when I am at a customer site I have to connect my laptop via VPN to my work network and access the mercurial repositories over a samba share (even if it is just to synce twice a day). This is excruciatingly slow on high latency networks and can be impossible with some customers' firewalls. Even if we could run a TRAC or Redmine server here (thanks turnkey), I'm not sure it would be much quicker as our internet connection is over-stretched as it is. What I would like is for developers to be able to be able to push/pull to/from a remote repository, servicing engineers to be able to pull from a remote repository and for customers (both internal and external) to be able to submit bug/issue reports. Initial options The two options I found were Assembla and Jira. Looking at Assembla I thought the 'group' price looked reasonable, but after enquiring, found that each workspace could only contain a single repository. Since each of our products might have up to a dozen repositories (mostly for libraries) which need to be managed seperately for each product, I could see it getting expensive really quickly. On the plus side, it appears that 'users' are just workspace members, so you can have as many client users (people who can only submit support tickets and track their own tickets) without using up your user allocation. Jira only charges based on the number of users, unfortunately client users also count towards this, if you want them to be able to track their tickets. If you only want clients to be able to submit untracked issues, you can let them submit anonymously, but that doesn't feel very professional to me. More options Looking through MercurialHosting page that @Paidhi suggested, I've added the options which appear to offer private repositories, along with another that I found with a web search. Prices are as per their website today (29th March 2010). Corrections welcome in the future. Anyway, here is my summary, according to the information given on their websites: Assembla, http://www.assembla.com/, looks to be a reasonable price, but suffers only one repository per workspace, so three projects with 6 repos each would use up most of the spaces associated with a $99/month professional account (20 spaces). Bug tracking is based on Trac. Mercurial+Trac support was announced in a blog entry in 2007, but they only list SVN and Git on their Features web page. Cost: $24, $49, $99 & $249/month for 40, 40, unlimited, unlimited users and 1, 10, 20, 100 workspaces. SSL based push/pull? Website https login. BitBucket, http://bitbucket.org/plans/, is primarily a mercurial hosting site for open source projects, with SSL support, but they have an integrated bug tracker and they are cheap for private repositories. It has it’s own issues tracker, but also integrates with Lighthouse & FogBugz. Cost: $0, $5, $12, $50 & $100/month for 1, 5, 15, 25 & 150 private repositories. SSL based push/pull. No https on website login, but supports OpenID, so you can chose an OpenID provider with https login. Codebase HQ, http://www.codebasehq.com/, supports Hg and is almost as cheap as BitBucket. Cost: £5, £13, £21 & £40/month for 3, 15, 30 & 60 active projects, unlimited repositories, unlimited users (except 10 users at £5/month) and 0.5, 2, 4 & 10GB. SSL based push/pull? Website https login? Firefly, http://www.activestate.com/firefly/, by ActiveState looks interesting, but the website is a little light on details, such as whether you can only have one repository per project or not. Cost: $9, $19, & £39/month for 1, 5 & 30 private projects, with a 0.5, 1.5 & 3 GB storage limit. SSL based push/pull? Website https login. Jira, http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/, isn’t limited by the number of repositories you can have, but by ‘user’. It could work out quite expensive if we want client users to be able to track their issues, since they would need a full user account to be created for them. Also, while there is a Mercurial extension to support jira, there is no ‘Advanced integration’ for Mercurial from Atlassian Fisheye. Cost: $150, $300, $400, $500, $700/month for 10, 25, 50, 100, 100+ users. SSL based push/pull? Website https login. Kiln & FogBugz On Demand, http://fogcreek.com/Kiln/IntrotoOnDemand.html, integrates Kilns mercurial DVCS features with FogBugz, where the combined package is much cheaper than the component parts. Also, the Fogbugz integration is supposedly excellent. *8’) Cost: £30/developer/month ($5/d/m more than either on their own). SSL based push/pull? SourceRepo, http://sourcerepo.com/, also supports HG and is even cheaper than BitBucket & Codebase. Cost: $4, $7 & $13/month for 1, unlimited & unlimited repositories/trac/redmine instances and 500MB, 1GB & 3GB storage. SSL based push/pull. Website https login. Edit: 29th March 2010 & Bounty I split this question into sections, made the questions themselves more explicit, added other options from the research I have done since my first posting and made this community wiki, since I now understand what CW is for. *8') Also, I've added a bounty to encourage people to offer their opinions. At the end of the bounty period, I will award the bounty to whoever writes the best review (good or bad), irrespective of the number of up/down votes it gets. Given that it's probably more important to avoid bad providers than find the absolute best one, 'bad reviews' could be considered more important than good ones.

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• Spring security - Reach users ID without passing it through every controller

  - by nilsi

  I have a design issue that I don't know how to solve. I'm using Spring 3.2.4 and Spring security 3.1.4. I have a Account table in my database that looks like this: create table Account (id identity, username varchar unique, password varchar not null, firstName varchar not null, lastName varchar not null, university varchar not null, primary key (id)); Until recently my username was just only a username but I changed it to be the email address instead since many users want to login with that instead. I have a header that I include on all my pages which got a link to the users profile like this: <a href="/project/users/<%= request.getUserPrincipal().getName()%>" class="navbar-link"><strong><%= request.getUserPrincipal().getName()%></strong></a> The problem is that <%= request.getUserPrincipal().getName()%> returns the email now, I don't want to link the user's with thier emails. Instead I want to use the id every user have to link to the profile. How do I reach the users id's from every page? I have been thinking of two solutions but I'm not sure: Change the principal to contain the id as well, don't know how to do this and having problem finding good information on the topic. Add a model attribute to all my controllers that contain the whole user but this would be really ugly, like this. Account account = entityManager.find(Account.class, email); model.addAttribute("account", account); There are more way's as well and I have no clue which one is to prefer. I hope it's clear enough and thank you for any help on this. ====== Edit according to answer ======= I edited Account to implement UserDetails, it now looks like this (will fix the auto generated stuff later): @Entity @Table(name="Account") public class Account implements UserDetails { @Id private int id; private String username; private String password; private String firstName; private String lastName; @ManyToOne private University university; public Account() { } public Account(String username, String password, String firstName, String lastName, University university) { this.username = username; this.password = password; this.firstName = firstName; this.lastName = lastName; this.university = university; } public String getUsername() { return username; } public String getPassword() { return password; } public String getFirstName() { return firstName; } public String getLastName() { return lastName; } public void setUsername(String username) { this.username = username; } public void setPassword(String password) { this.password = password; } public void setFirstName(String firstName) { this.firstName = firstName; } public void setLastName(String lastName) { this.lastName = lastName; } public University getUniversity() { return university; } public void setUniversity(University university) { this.university = university; } public int getId() { return id; } public void setId(int id) { this.id = id; } @Override public Collection<? extends GrantedAuthority> getAuthorities() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return null; } @Override public boolean isAccountNonExpired() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return false; } @Override public boolean isAccountNonLocked() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return false; } @Override public boolean isCredentialsNonExpired() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return false; } @Override public boolean isEnabled() { // TODO Auto-generated method stub return true; } } I also added <%@ taglib prefix="sec" uri="http://www.springframework.org/security/tags" %> To my jsp files and trying to reach the id by <sec:authentication property="principal.id" /> This gives me the following org.springframework.beans.NotReadablePropertyException: Invalid property 'principal.id' of bean class [org.springframework.security.authentication.UsernamePasswordAuthenticationToken]: Bean property 'principal.id' is not readable or has an invalid getter method: Does the return type of the getter match the parameter type of the setter? ====== Edit 2 according to answer ======= I based my application on spring social samples and I never had to change anything until now. This are the files I think are relevant, please tell me if theres something you need to see besides this. AccountRepository.java public interface AccountRepository { void createAccount(Account account) throws UsernameAlreadyInUseException; Account findAccountByUsername(String username); } JdbcAccountRepository.java @Repository public class JdbcAccountRepository implements AccountRepository { private final JdbcTemplate jdbcTemplate; private final PasswordEncoder passwordEncoder; @Inject public JdbcAccountRepository(JdbcTemplate jdbcTemplate, PasswordEncoder passwordEncoder) { this.jdbcTemplate = jdbcTemplate; this.passwordEncoder = passwordEncoder; } @Transactional public void createAccount(Account user) throws UsernameAlreadyInUseException { try { jdbcTemplate.update( "insert into Account (firstName, lastName, username, university, password) values (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)", user.getFirstName(), user.getLastName(), user.getUsername(), user.getUniversity(), passwordEncoder.encode(user.getPassword())); } catch (DuplicateKeyException e) { throw new UsernameAlreadyInUseException(user.getUsername()); } } public Account findAccountByUsername(String username) { return jdbcTemplate.queryForObject("select username, firstName, lastName, university from Account where username = ?", new RowMapper<Account>() { public Account mapRow(ResultSet rs, int rowNum) throws SQLException { return new Account(rs.getString("username"), null, rs.getString("firstName"), rs.getString("lastName"), new University("test")); } }, username); } } security.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans:beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/security" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:beans="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/security http://www.springframework.org/schema/security/spring-security-3.1.xsd http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.1.xsd"> <http pattern="/resources/**" security="none" /> <http pattern="/project/" security="none" /> <http use-expressions="true"> <!-- Authentication policy --> <form-login login-page="/signin" login-processing-url="/signin/authenticate" authentication-failure-url="/signin?error=bad_credentials" /> <logout logout-url="/signout" delete-cookies="JSESSIONID" /> <intercept-url pattern="/addcourse" access="isAuthenticated()" /> <intercept-url pattern="/courses/**/**/edit" access="isAuthenticated()" /> <intercept-url pattern="/users/**/edit" access="isAuthenticated()" /> </http> <authentication-manager alias="authenticationManager"> <authentication-provider> <password-encoder ref="passwordEncoder" /> <jdbc-user-service data-source-ref="dataSource" users-by-username-query="select username, password, true from Account where username = ?" authorities-by-username-query="select username, 'ROLE_USER' from Account where username = ?"/> </authentication-provider> <authentication-provider> <user-service> <user name="admin" password="admin" authorities="ROLE_USER, ROLE_ADMIN" /> </user-service> </authentication-provider> </authentication-manager> </beans:beans> And this is my try of implementing a UserDetailsService public class RepositoryUserDetailsService implements UserDetailsService { private final AccountRepository accountRepository; @Autowired public RepositoryUserDetailsService(AccountRepository repository) { this.accountRepository = repository; } @Override public UserDetails loadUserByUsername(String username) throws UsernameNotFoundException { Account user = accountRepository.findAccountByUsername(username); if (user == null) { throw new UsernameNotFoundException("No user found with username: " + username); } return user; } } Still gives me the same error, do I need to add the UserDetailsService somewhere? This is starting to be something else compared to my initial question, I should maybe start another question. Sorry for my lack of experience in this. I have to read up.

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• Project Euler #15

  - by Aistina

  Hey everyone, Last night I was trying to solve challenge #15 from Project Euler: Starting in the top left corner of a 2×2 grid, there are 6 routes (without backtracking) to the bottom right corner. How many routes are there through a 20×20 grid? I figured this shouldn't be so hard, so I wrote a basic recursive function: const int gridSize = 20; // call with progress(0, 0) static int progress(int x, int y) { int i = 0; if (x < gridSize) i += progress(x + 1, y); if (y < gridSize) i += progress(x, y + 1); if (x == gridSize && y == gridSize) return 1; return i; } I verified that it worked for a smaller grids such as 2×2 or 3×3, and then set it to run for a 20×20 grid. Imagine my surprise when, 5 hours later, the program was still happily crunching the numbers, and only about 80% done (based on examining its current position/route in the grid). Clearly I'm going about this the wrong way. How would you solve this problem? I'm thinking it should be solved using an equation rather than a method like mine, but that's unfortunately not a strong side of mine. Update: I now have a working version. Basically it caches results obtained before when a n×m block still remains to be traversed. Here is the code along with some comments: // the size of our grid static int gridSize = 20; // the amount of paths available for a "NxM" block, e.g. "2x2" => 4 static Dictionary<string, long> pathsByBlock = new Dictionary<string, long>(); // calculate the surface of the block to the finish line static long calcsurface(long x, long y) { return (gridSize - x) * (gridSize - y); } // call using progress (0, 0) static long progress(long x, long y) { // first calculate the surface of the block remaining long surface = calcsurface(x, y); long i = 0; // zero surface means only 1 path remains // (we either go only right, or only down) if (surface == 0) return 1; // create a textual representation of the remaining // block, for use in the dictionary string block = (gridSize - x) + "x" + (gridSize - y); // if a same block has not been processed before if (!pathsByBlock.ContainsKey(block)) { // calculate it in the right direction if (x < gridSize) i += progress(x + 1, y); // and in the down direction if (y < gridSize) i += progress(x, y + 1); // and cache the result! pathsByBlock[block] = i; } // self-explanatory :) return pathsByBlock[block]; } Calling it 20 times, for grids with size 1×1 through 20×20 produces the following output: There are 2 paths in a 1 sized grid 0,0110006 seconds There are 6 paths in a 2 sized grid 0,0030002 seconds There are 20 paths in a 3 sized grid 0 seconds There are 70 paths in a 4 sized grid 0 seconds There are 252 paths in a 5 sized grid 0 seconds There are 924 paths in a 6 sized grid 0 seconds There are 3432 paths in a 7 sized grid 0 seconds There are 12870 paths in a 8 sized grid 0,001 seconds There are 48620 paths in a 9 sized grid 0,0010001 seconds There are 184756 paths in a 10 sized grid 0,001 seconds There are 705432 paths in a 11 sized grid 0 seconds There are 2704156 paths in a 12 sized grid 0 seconds There are 10400600 paths in a 13 sized grid 0,001 seconds There are 40116600 paths in a 14 sized grid 0 seconds There are 155117520 paths in a 15 sized grid 0 seconds There are 601080390 paths in a 16 sized grid 0,0010001 seconds There are 2333606220 paths in a 17 sized grid 0,001 seconds There are 9075135300 paths in a 18 sized grid 0,001 seconds There are 35345263800 paths in a 19 sized grid 0,001 seconds There are 137846528820 paths in a 20 sized grid 0,0010001 seconds 0,0390022 seconds in total I'm accepting danben's answer, because his helped me find this solution the most. But upvotes also to Tim Goodman and Agos :) Bonus update: After reading Eric Lippert's answer, I took another look and rewrote it somewhat. The basic idea is still the same but the caching part has been taken out and put in a separate function, like in Eric's example. The result is some much more elegant looking code. // the size of our grid const int gridSize = 20; // magic. static Func<A1, A2, R> Memoize<A1, A2, R>(this Func<A1, A2, R> f) { // Return a function which is f with caching. var dictionary = new Dictionary<string, R>(); return (A1 a1, A2 a2) => { R r; string key = a1 + "x" + a2; if (!dictionary.TryGetValue(key, out r)) { // not in cache yet r = f(a1, a2); dictionary.Add(key, r); } return r; }; } // calculate the surface of the block to the finish line static long calcsurface(long x, long y) { return (gridSize - x) * (gridSize - y); } // call using progress (0, 0) static Func<long, long, long> progress = ((Func<long, long, long>)((long x, long y) => { // first calculate the surface of the block remaining long surface = calcsurface(x, y); long i = 0; // zero surface means only 1 path remains // (we either go only right, or only down) if (surface == 0) return 1; // calculate it in the right direction if (x < gridSize) i += progress(x + 1, y); // and in the down direction if (y < gridSize) i += progress(x, y + 1); // self-explanatory :) return i; })).Memoize(); By the way, I couldn't think of a better way to use the two arguments as a key for the dictionary. I googled around a bit, and it seems this is a common solution. Oh well.

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• Silverlight 2.0 - Can't get the text wrapping behaviour that I want

  - by Anthony

  I am having trouble getting Silverlight 2.0 to lay out text exactly how I want. I want text with line breaks and embedded links, with wrapping, like HTML text in a web page. Here's the closest that I have come: <UserControl x:Class="FlowPanelTest.Page" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Controls="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Windows.Controls" Width="250" Height="300"> <Border BorderBrush="Black" BorderThickness="2" > <Controls:WrapPanel> <TextBlock x:Name="tb1" TextWrapping="Wrap">Short text. </TextBlock> <TextBlock x:Name="tb2" TextWrapping="Wrap">A bit of text. </TextBlock> <TextBlock x:Name="tb3" TextWrapping="Wrap">About half of a line of text.</TextBlock> <TextBlock x:Name="tb4" TextWrapping="Wrap">More than half a line of longer text.</TextBlock> <TextBlock x:Name="tb5" TextWrapping="Wrap">More than one line of text, so it will wrap onto the following line.</TextBlock> </Controls:WrapPanel> </Border> </UserControl> But the issue is that although the text blocks tb1 and tb2 will go onto the same line because there is room enough for them completely, tb3 onwards will not start on the same line as the previous block, even though it will wrap onto following lines. I want each text block to start where the previous one ends, on the same line. I want to put click event handlers on some of the text. I also want paragraph breaks. Essentially I'm trying to work around the lack of FlowDocument and Hyperlink controls in Silverlight 2.0's subset of XAML. To answer the questions posed in the answers: Why not use runs for the non-clickable text? If I just use individual TextBlocks only on the clickable text, then those bits of text will still suffer from the wrapping problem illustrated above. And the TextBlock just before the link, and the TextBlock just after. Essentially all of it. It doesn't look like I have many opportunities for putting multiple runs in the same TextBlock. Dividing the links from the other text with RegExs and loops is not the issue at all, the issue is display layout. Why not put each word in an individual TextBlock in a WrapPanel Aside from being an ugly hack, this does not play at all well with linebreaks - the layout is incorrect. It would also make the underline style of linked text into a broken line. Here's an example with each word in its own TextBlock. Try running it, note that the linebreak isn't shown in the right place at all. <UserControl x:Class="SilverlightApplication2.Page" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Controls="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Windows.Controls" Width="300" Height="300"> <Controls:WrapPanel> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">Short1 </TextBlock> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">Longer1 </TextBlock> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">Longerest1 </TextBlock> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap"> <Run>Break</Run> <LineBreak></LineBreak> </TextBlock> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">Short2</TextBlock> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">Longer2</TextBlock> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">Longerest2</TextBlock> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">Short3</TextBlock> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">Longer3</TextBlock> <TextBlock TextWrapping="Wrap">Longerest3</TextBlock> </Controls:WrapPanel> </UserControl> What about The LinkLabelControl as here and here. It has the same problems as the approach above, since it's much the same. Try running the sample, and make the link text longer and longer until it wraps. Note that the link starts on a new line, which it shouldn't. Make the link text even longer, so that the link text is longer than a line. Note that it doesn't wrap at all, it cuts off. This control doesn't handle line breaks and paragraph breaks either. Why not put the text all in runs, detect clicks on the containing TextBlock and work out which run was clicked Runs do not have mouse events, but the containing TextBlock does. I can't find a way to check if the run is under the mouse (IsMouseOver is not present in SilverLight) or to find the bounding geometry of the run (no clip property). There is VisualTreeHelper.FindElementsInHostCoordinates() The code below uses VisualTreeHelper.FindElementsInHostCoordinates to get the controls under the click. The output lists the TextBlock but not the Run, since a Run is not a UiElement. private void theText_MouseLeftButtonDown(object sender, System.Windows.Input.MouseButtonEventArgs e) { // get the elements under the click UIElement uiElementSender = sender as UIElement; Point clickPos = e.GetPosition(uiElementSender); var UiElementsUnderClick = VisualTreeHelper.FindElementsInHostCoordinates(clickPos, uiElementSender); // show the controls string outputText = ""; foreach (var uiElement in UiElementsUnderClick) { outputText += uiElement.GetType().ToString() + "\n"; } this.outText.Text = outputText; } Use an empty text block with a margin to space following content onto a following line I'm still thinking about this one. How do you calculate the right width for a line-breaking block to force following content onto the following line? Too short and the following content will still be on the same line, at the right. Too long and the "linebreak" will be on the following line, with content after it. You would have to resize the breaks when the control is resized. Some of the code for this is: TextBlock lineBreak = new TextBlock(); lineBreak.TextWrapping = TextWrapping.Wrap; lineBreak.Text = " "; // need adaptive width lineBreak.Margin = new Thickness(0, 0, 200, 0);

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• value types in the vm

  - by john.rose

  value types in the vm p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 14.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} p.p3 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} p.p4 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 15.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} p.p5 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Courier} p.p6 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Courier; min-height: 17.0px} p.p7 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times; min-height: 18.0px} p.p8 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; text-indent: -36.0px; font: 14.0px Times; min-height: 18.0px} p.p9 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times; min-height: 18.0px} p.p10 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 12.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times; color: #000000} li.li1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times} li.li7 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Times; min-height: 18.0px} span.s1 {font: 14.0px Courier} span.s2 {color: #000000} span.s3 {font: 14.0px Courier; color: #000000} ol.ol1 {list-style-type: decimal} Or, enduring values for a changing world. Introduction A value type is a data type which, generally speaking, is designed for being passed by value in and out of methods, and stored by value in data structures. The only value types which the Java language directly supports are the eight primitive types. Java indirectly and approximately supports value types, if they are implemented in terms of classes. For example, both Integer and String may be viewed as value types, especially if their usage is restricted to avoid operations appropriate to Object. In this note, we propose a definition of value types in terms of a design pattern for Java classes, accompanied by a set of usage restrictions. We also sketch the relation of such value types to tuple types (which are a JVM-level notion), and point out JVM optimizations that can apply to value types. This note is a thought experiment to extend the JVM’s performance model in support of value types. The demonstration has two phases.  Initially the extension can simply use design patterns, within the current bytecode architecture, and in today’s Java language. But if the performance model is to be realized in practice, it will probably require new JVM bytecode features, changes to the Java language, or both.  We will look at a few possibilities for these new features. An Axiom of Value In the context of the JVM, a value type is a data type equipped with construction, assignment, and equality operations, and a set of typed components, such that, whenever two variables of the value type produce equal corresponding values for their components, the values of the two variables cannot be distinguished by any JVM operation. Here are some corollaries: A value type is immutable, since otherwise a copy could be constructed and the original could be modified in one of its components, allowing the copies to be distinguished. Changing the component of a value type requires construction of a new value. The equals and hashCode operations are strictly component-wise. If a value type is represented by a JVM reference, that reference cannot be successfully synchronized on, and cannot be usefully compared for reference equality. A value type can be viewed in terms of what it doesn’t do. We can say that a value type omits all value-unsafe operations, which could violate the constraints on value types.  These operations, which are ordinarily allowed for Java object types, are pointer equality comparison (the acmp instruction), synchronization (the monitor instructions), all the wait and notify methods of class Object, and non-trivial finalize methods. The clone method is also value-unsafe, although for value types it could be treated as the identity function. Finally, and most importantly, any side effect on an object (however visible) also counts as an value-unsafe operation. A value type may have methods, but such methods must not change the components of the value. It is reasonable and useful to define methods like toString, equals, and hashCode on value types, and also methods which are specifically valuable to users of the value type. Representations of Value Value types have two natural representations in the JVM, unboxed and boxed. An unboxed value consists of the components, as simple variables. For example, the complex number x=(1+2i), in rectangular coordinate form, may be represented in unboxed form by the following pair of variables: /*Complex x = Complex.valueOf(1.0, 2.0):*/ double x_re = 1.0, x_im = 2.0; These variables might be locals, parameters, or fields. Their association as components of a single value is not defined to the JVM. Here is a sample computation which computes the norm of the difference between two complex numbers: double distance(/*Complex x:*/ double x_re, double x_im,         /*Complex y:*/ double y_re, double y_im) {     /*Complex z = x.minus(y):*/     double z_re = x_re - y_re, z_im = x_im - y_im;     /*return z.abs():*/     return Math.sqrt(z_re*z_re + z_im*z_im); } A boxed representation groups component values under a single object reference. The reference is to a ‘wrapper class’ that carries the component values in its fields. (A primitive type can naturally be equated with a trivial value type with just one component of that type. In that view, the wrapper class Integer can serve as a boxed representation of value type int.) The unboxed representation of complex numbers is practical for many uses, but it fails to cover several major use cases: return values, array elements, and generic APIs. The two components of a complex number cannot be directly returned from a Java function, since Java does not support multiple return values. The same story applies to array elements: Java has no ’array of structs’ feature. (Double-length arrays are a possible workaround for complex numbers, but not for value types with heterogeneous components.) By generic APIs I mean both those which use generic types, like Arrays.asList and those which have special case support for primitive types, like String.valueOf and PrintStream.println. Those APIs do not support unboxed values, and offer some problems to boxed values. Any ’real’ JVM type should have a story for returns, arrays, and API interoperability. The basic problem here is that value types fall between primitive types and object types. Value types are clearly more complex than primitive types, and object types are slightly too complicated. Objects are a little bit dangerous to use as value carriers, since object references can be compared for pointer equality, and can be synchronized on. Also, as many Java programmers have observed, there is often a performance cost to using wrapper objects, even on modern JVMs. Even so, wrapper classes are a good starting point for talking about value types. If there were a set of structural rules and restrictions which would prevent value-unsafe operations on value types, wrapper classes would provide a good notation for defining value types. This note attempts to define such rules and restrictions. Let’s Start Coding Now it is time to look at some real code. Here is a definition, written in Java, of a complex number value type. @ValueSafe public final class Complex implements java.io.Serializable {     // immutable component structure:     public final double re, im;     private Complex(double re, double im) {         this.re = re; this.im = im;     }     // interoperability methods:     public String toString() { return "Complex("+re+","+im+")"; }     public List<Double> asList() { return Arrays.asList(re, im); }     public boolean equals(Complex c) {         return re == c.re && im == c.im;     }     public boolean equals(@ValueSafe Object x) {         return x instanceof Complex && equals((Complex) x);     }     public int hashCode() {         return 31*Double.valueOf(re).hashCode()                 + Double.valueOf(im).hashCode();     }     // factory methods:     public static Complex valueOf(double re, double im) {         return new Complex(re, im);     }     public Complex changeRe(double re2) { return valueOf(re2, im); }     public Complex changeIm(double im2) { return valueOf(re, im2); }     public static Complex cast(@ValueSafe Object x) {         return x == null ? ZERO : (Complex) x;     }     // utility methods and constants:     public Complex plus(Complex c)  { return new Complex(re+c.re, im+c.im); }     public Complex minus(Complex c) { return new Complex(re-c.re, im-c.im); }     public double abs() { return Math.sqrt(re*re + im*im); }     public static final Complex PI = valueOf(Math.PI, 0.0);     public static final Complex ZERO = valueOf(0.0, 0.0); } This is not a minimal definition, because it includes some utility methods and other optional parts.  The essential elements are as follows: The class is marked as a value type with an annotation. The class is final, because it does not make sense to create subclasses of value types. The fields of the class are all non-private and final.  (I.e., the type is immutable and structurally transparent.) From the supertype Object, all public non-final methods are overridden. The constructor is private. Beyond these bare essentials, we can observe the following features in this example, which are likely to be typical of all value types: One or more factory methods are responsible for value creation, including a component-wise valueOf method. There are utility methods for complex arithmetic and instance creation, such as plus and changeIm. There are static utility constants, such as PI. The type is serializable, using the default mechanisms. There are methods for converting to and from dynamically typed references, such as asList and cast. The Rules In order to use value types properly, the programmer must avoid value-unsafe operations.  A helpful Java compiler should issue errors (or at least warnings) for code which provably applies value-unsafe operations, and should issue warnings for code which might be correct but does not provably avoid value-unsafe operations.  No such compilers exist today, but to simplify our account here, we will pretend that they do exist. A value-safe type is any class, interface, or type parameter marked with the @ValueSafe annotation, or any subtype of a value-safe type.  If a value-safe class is marked final, it is in fact a value type.  All other value-safe classes must be abstract.  The non-static fields of a value class must be non-public and final, and all its constructors must be private. Under the above rules, a standard interface could be helpful to define value types like Complex.  Here is an example: @ValueSafe public interface ValueType extends java.io.Serializable {     // All methods listed here must get redefined.     // Definitions must be value-safe, which means     // they may depend on component values only.     List<? extends Object> asList();     int hashCode();     boolean equals(@ValueSafe Object c);     String toString(); } //@ValueSafe inherited from supertype: public final class Complex implements ValueType { … The main advantage of such a conventional interface is that (unlike an annotation) it is reified in the runtime type system.  It could appear as an element type or parameter bound, for facilities which are designed to work on value types only.  More broadly, it might assist the JVM to perform dynamic enforcement of the rules for value types. Besides types, the annotation @ValueSafe can mark fields, parameters, local variables, and methods.  (This is redundant when the type is also value-safe, but may be useful when the type is Object or another supertype of a value type.)  Working forward from these annotations, an expression E is defined as value-safe if it satisfies one or more of the following: The type of E is a value-safe type. E names a field, parameter, or local variable whose declaration is marked @ValueSafe. E is a call to a method whose declaration is marked @ValueSafe. E is an assignment to a value-safe variable, field reference, or array reference. E is a cast to a value-safe type from a value-safe expression. E is a conditional expression E0 ? E1 : E2, and both E1 and E2 are value-safe. Assignments to value-safe expressions and initializations of value-safe names must take their values from value-safe expressions. A value-safe expression may not be the subject of a value-unsafe operation.  In particular, it cannot be synchronized on, nor can it be compared with the “==” operator, not even with a null or with another value-safe type. In a program where all of these rules are followed, no value-type value will be subject to a value-unsafe operation.  Thus, the prime axiom of value types will be satisfied, that no two value type will be distinguishable as long as their component values are equal. More Code To illustrate these rules, here are some usage examples for Complex: Complex pi = Complex.valueOf(Math.PI, 0); Complex zero = pi.changeRe(0);  //zero = pi; zero.re = 0; ValueType vtype = pi; @SuppressWarnings("value-unsafe")   Object obj = pi; @ValueSafe Object obj2 = pi; obj2 = new Object();  // ok List<Complex> clist = new ArrayList<Complex>(); clist.add(pi);  // (ok assuming List.add param is @ValueSafe) List<ValueType> vlist = new ArrayList<ValueType>(); vlist.add(pi);  // (ok) List<Object> olist = new ArrayList<Object>(); olist.add(pi);  // warning: "value-unsafe" boolean z = pi.equals(zero); boolean z1 = (pi == zero);  // error: reference comparison on value type boolean z2 = (pi == null);  // error: reference comparison on value type boolean z3 = (pi == obj2);  // error: reference comparison on value type synchronized (pi) { }  // error: synch of value, unpredictable result synchronized (obj2) { }  // unpredictable result Complex qq = pi; qq = null;  // possible NPE; warning: “null-unsafe" qq = (Complex) obj;  // warning: “null-unsafe" qq = Complex.cast(obj);  // OK @SuppressWarnings("null-unsafe")   Complex empty = null;  // possible NPE qq = empty;  // possible NPE (null pollution) The Payoffs It follows from this that either the JVM or the java compiler can replace boxed value-type values with unboxed ones, without affecting normal computations.  Fields and variables of value types can be split into their unboxed components.  Non-static methods on value types can be transformed into static methods which take the components as value parameters. Some common questions arise around this point in any discussion of value types. Why burden the programmer with all these extra rules?  Why not detect programs automagically and perform unboxing transparently?  The answer is that it is easy to break the rules accidently unless they are agreed to by the programmer and enforced.  Automatic unboxing optimizations are tantalizing but (so far) unreachable ideal.  In the current state of the art, it is possible exhibit benchmarks in which automatic unboxing provides the desired effects, but it is not possible to provide a JVM with a performance model that assures the programmer when unboxing will occur.  This is why I’m writing this note, to enlist help from, and provide assurances to, the programmer.  Basically, I’m shooting for a good set of user-supplied “pragmas” to frame the desired optimization. Again, the important thing is that the unboxing must be done reliably, or else programmers will have no reason to work with the extra complexity of the value-safety rules.  There must be a reasonably stable performance model, wherein using a value type has approximately the same performance characteristics as writing the unboxed components as separate Java variables. There are some rough corners to the present scheme.  Since Java fields and array elements are initialized to null, value-type computations which incorporate uninitialized variables can produce null pointer exceptions.  One workaround for this is to require such variables to be null-tested, and the result replaced with a suitable all-zero value of the value type.  That is what the “cast” method does above. Generically typed APIs like List<T> will continue to manipulate boxed values always, at least until we figure out how to do reification of generic type instances.  Use of such APIs will elicit warnings until their type parameters (and/or relevant members) are annotated or typed as value-safe.  Retrofitting List<T> is likely to expose flaws in the present scheme, which we will need to engineer around.  Here are a couple of first approaches: public interface java.util.List<@ValueSafe T> extends Collection<T> { … public interface java.util.List<T extends Object|ValueType> extends Collection<T> { … (The second approach would require disjunctive types, in which value-safety is “contagious” from the constituent types.) With more transformations, the return value types of methods can also be unboxed.  This may require significant bytecode-level transformations, and would work best in the presence of a bytecode representation for multiple value groups, which I have proposed elsewhere under the title “Tuples in the VM”. But for starters, the JVM can apply this transformation under the covers, to internally compiled methods.  This would give a way to express multiple return values and structured return values, which is a significant pain-point for Java programmers, especially those who work with low-level structure types favored by modern vector and graphics processors.  The lack of multiple return values has a strong distorting effect on many Java APIs. Even if the JVM fails to unbox a value, there is still potential benefit to the value type.  Clustered computing systems something have copy operations (serialization or something similar) which apply implicitly to command operands.  When copying JVM objects, it is extremely helpful to know when an object’s identity is important or not.  If an object reference is a copied operand, the system may have to create a proxy handle which points back to the original object, so that side effects are visible.  Proxies must be managed carefully, and this can be expensive.  On the other hand, value types are exactly those types which a JVM can “copy and forget” with no downside. Array types are crucial to bulk data interfaces.  (As data sizes and rates increase, bulk data becomes more important than scalar data, so arrays are definitely accompanying us into the future of computing.)  Value types are very helpful for adding structure to bulk data, so a successful value type mechanism will make it easier for us to express richer forms of bulk data. Unboxing arrays (i.e., arrays containing unboxed values) will provide better cache and memory density, and more direct data movement within clustered or heterogeneous computing systems.  They require the deepest transformations, relative to today’s JVM.  There is an impedance mismatch between value-type arrays and Java’s covariant array typing, so compromises will need to be struck with existing Java semantics.  It is probably worth the effort, since arrays of unboxed value types are inherently more memory-efficient than standard Java arrays, which rely on dependent pointer chains. It may be sufficient to extend the “value-safe” concept to array declarations, and allow low-level transformations to change value-safe array declarations from the standard boxed form into an unboxed tuple-based form.  Such value-safe arrays would not be convertible to Object[] arrays.  Certain connection points, such as Arrays.copyOf and System.arraycopy might need additional input/output combinations, to allow smooth conversion between arrays with boxed and unboxed elements. Alternatively, the correct solution may have to wait until we have enough reification of generic types, and enough operator overloading, to enable an overhaul of Java arrays. Implicit Method Definitions The example of class Complex above may be unattractively complex.  I believe most or all of the elements of the example class are required by the logic of value types. If this is true, a programmer who writes a value type will have to write lots of error-prone boilerplate code.  On the other hand, I think nearly all of the code (except for the domain-specific parts like plus and minus) can be implicitly generated. Java has a rule for implicitly defining a class’s constructor, if no it defines no constructors explicitly.  Likewise, there are rules for providing default access modifiers for interface members.  Because of the highly regular structure of value types, it might be reasonable to perform similar implicit transformations on value types.  Here’s an example of a “highly implicit” definition of a complex number type: public class Complex implements ValueType {  // implicitly final     public double re, im;  // implicitly public final     //implicit methods are defined elementwise from te fields:     //  toString, asList, equals(2), hashCode, valueOf, cast     //optionally, explicit methods (plus, abs, etc.) would go here } In other words, with the right defaults, a simple value type definition can be a one-liner.  The observant reader will have noticed the similarities (and suitable differences) between the explicit methods above and the corresponding methods for List<T>. Another way to abbreviate such a class would be to make an annotation the primary trigger of the functionality, and to add the interface(s) implicitly: public @ValueType class Complex { … // implicitly final, implements ValueType (But to me it seems better to communicate the “magic” via an interface, even if it is rooted in an annotation.) Implicitly Defined Value Types So far we have been working with nominal value types, which is to say that the sequence of typed components is associated with a name and additional methods that convey the intention of the programmer.  A simple ordered pair of floating point numbers can be variously interpreted as (to name a few possibilities) a rectangular or polar complex number or Cartesian point.  The name and the methods convey the intended meaning. But what if we need a truly simple ordered pair of floating point numbers, without any further conceptual baggage?  Perhaps we are writing a method (like “divideAndRemainder”) which naturally returns a pair of numbers instead of a single number.  Wrapping the pair of numbers in a nominal type (like “QuotientAndRemainder”) makes as little sense as wrapping a single return value in a nominal type (like “Quotient”).  What we need here are structural value types commonly known as tuples. For the present discussion, let us assign a conventional, JVM-friendly name to tuples, roughly as follows: public class java.lang.tuple.$DD extends java.lang.tuple.Tuple {      double $1, $2; } Here the component names are fixed and all the required methods are defined implicitly.  The supertype is an abstract class which has suitable shared declarations.  The name itself mentions a JVM-style method parameter descriptor, which may be “cracked” to determine the number and types of the component fields. The odd thing about such a tuple type (and structural types in general) is it must be instantiated lazily, in response to linkage requests from one or more classes that need it.  The JVM and/or its class loaders must be prepared to spin a tuple type on demand, given a simple name reference, $xyz, where the xyz is cracked into a series of component types.  (Specifics of naming and name mangling need some tasteful engineering.) Tuples also seem to demand, even more than nominal types, some support from the language.  (This is probably because notations for non-nominal types work best as combinations of punctuation and type names, rather than named constructors like Function3 or Tuple2.)  At a minimum, languages with tuples usually (I think) have some sort of simple bracket notation for creating tuples, and a corresponding pattern-matching syntax (or “destructuring bind”) for taking tuples apart, at least when they are parameter lists.  Designing such a syntax is no simple thing, because it ought to play well with nominal value types, and also with pre-existing Java features, such as method parameter lists, implicit conversions, generic types, and reflection.  That is a task for another day. Other Use Cases Besides complex numbers and simple tuples there are many use cases for value types.  Many tuple-like types have natural value-type representations. These include rational numbers, point locations and pixel colors, and various kinds of dates and addresses. Other types have a variable-length ‘tail’ of internal values. The most common example of this is String, which is (mathematically) a sequence of UTF-16 character values. Similarly, bit vectors, multiple-precision numbers, and polynomials are composed of sequences of values. Such types include, in their representation, a reference to a variable-sized data structure (often an array) which (somehow) represents the sequence of values. The value type may also include ’header’ information. Variable-sized values often have a length distribution which favors short lengths. In that case, the design of the value type can make the first few values in the sequence be direct ’header’ fields of the value type. In the common case where the header is enough to represent the whole value, the tail can be a shared null value, or even just a null reference. Note that the tail need not be an immutable object, as long as the header type encapsulates it well enough. This is the case with String, where the tail is a mutable (but never mutated) character array. Field types and their order must be a globally visible part of the API.  The structure of the value type must be transparent enough to have a globally consistent unboxed representation, so that all callers and callees agree about the type and order of components  that appear as parameters, return types, and array elements.  This is a trade-off between efficiency and encapsulation, which is forced on us when we remove an indirection enjoyed by boxed representations.  A JVM-only transformation would not care about such visibility, but a bytecode transformation would need to take care that (say) the components of complex numbers would not get swapped after a redefinition of Complex and a partial recompile.  Perhaps constant pool references to value types need to declare the field order as assumed by each API user. This brings up the delicate status of private fields in a value type.  It must always be possible to load, store, and copy value types as coordinated groups, and the JVM performs those movements by moving individual scalar values between locals and stack.  If a component field is not public, what is to prevent hostile code from plucking it out of the tuple using a rogue aload or astore instruction?  Nothing but the verifier, so we may need to give it more smarts, so that it treats value types as inseparable groups of stack slots or locals (something like long or double). My initial thought was to make the fields always public, which would make the security problem moot.  But public is not always the right answer; consider the case of String, where the underlying mutable character array must be encapsulated to prevent security holes.  I believe we can win back both sides of the tradeoff, by training the verifier never to split up the components in an unboxed value.  Just as the verifier encapsulates the two halves of a 64-bit primitive, it can encapsulate the the header and body of an unboxed String, so that no code other than that of class String itself can take apart the values. Similar to String, we could build an efficient multi-precision decimal type along these lines: public final class DecimalValue extends ValueType {     protected final long header;     protected private final BigInteger digits;     public DecimalValue valueOf(int value, int scale) {         assert(scale >= 0);         return new DecimalValue(((long)value << 32) + scale, null);     }     public DecimalValue valueOf(long value, int scale) {         if (value == (int) value)             return valueOf((int)value, scale);         return new DecimalValue(-scale, new BigInteger(value));     } } Values of this type would be passed between methods as two machine words. Small values (those with a significand which fits into 32 bits) would be represented without any heap data at all, unless the DecimalValue itself were boxed. (Note the tension between encapsulation and unboxing in this case.  It would be better if the header and digits fields were private, but depending on where the unboxing information must “leak”, it is probably safer to make a public revelation of the internal structure.) Note that, although an array of Complex can be faked with a double-length array of double, there is no easy way to fake an array of unboxed DecimalValues.  (Either an array of boxed values or a transposed pair of homogeneous arrays would be reasonable fallbacks, in a current JVM.)  Getting the full benefit of unboxing and arrays will require some new JVM magic. Although the JVM emphasizes portability, system dependent code will benefit from using machine-level types larger than 64 bits.  For example, the back end of a linear algebra package might benefit from value types like Float4 which map to stock vector types.  This is probably only worthwhile if the unboxing arrays can be packed with such values. More Daydreams A more finely-divided design for dynamic enforcement of value safety could feature separate marker interfaces for each invariant.  An empty marker interface Unsynchronizable could cause suitable exceptions for monitor instructions on objects in marked classes.  More radically, a Interchangeable marker interface could cause JVM primitives that are sensitive to object identity to raise exceptions; the strangest result would be that the acmp instruction would have to be specified as raising an exception. @ValueSafe public interface ValueType extends java.io.Serializable,         Unsynchronizable, Interchangeable { … public class Complex implements ValueType {     // inherits Serializable, Unsynchronizable, Interchangeable, @ValueSafe     … It seems possible that Integer and the other wrapper types could be retro-fitted as value-safe types.  This is a major change, since wrapper objects would be unsynchronizable and their references interchangeable.  It is likely that code which violates value-safety for wrapper types exists but is uncommon.  It is less plausible to retro-fit String, since the prominent operation String.intern is often used with value-unsafe code. We should also reconsider the distinction between boxed and unboxed values in code.  The design presented above obscures that distinction.  As another thought experiment, we could imagine making a first class distinction in the type system between boxed and unboxed representations.  Since only primitive types are named with a lower-case initial letter, we could define that the capitalized version of a value type name always refers to the boxed representation, while the initial lower-case variant always refers to boxed.  For example: complex pi = complex.valueOf(Math.PI, 0); Complex boxPi = pi;  // convert to boxed myList.add(boxPi); complex z = myList.get(0);  // unbox Such a convention could perhaps absorb the current difference between int and Integer, double and Double. It might also allow the programmer to express a helpful distinction among array types. As said above, array types are crucial to bulk data interfaces, but are limited in the JVM.  Extending arrays beyond the present limitations is worth thinking about; for example, the Maxine JVM implementation has a hybrid object/array type.  Something like this which can also accommodate value type components seems worthwhile.  On the other hand, does it make sense for value types to contain short arrays?  And why should random-access arrays be the end of our design process, when bulk data is often sequentially accessed, and it might make sense to have heterogeneous streams of data as the natural “jumbo” data structure.  These considerations must wait for another day and another note. More Work It seems to me that a good sequence for introducing such value types would be as follows: Add the value-safety restrictions to an experimental version of javac. Code some sample applications with value types, including Complex and DecimalValue. Create an experimental JVM which internally unboxes value types but does not require new bytecodes to do so.  Ensure the feasibility of the performance model for the sample applications. Add tuple-like bytecodes (with or without generic type reification) to a major revision of the JVM, and teach the Java compiler to switch in the new bytecodes without code changes. A staggered roll-out like this would decouple language changes from bytecode changes, which is always a convenient thing. A similar investigation should be applied (concurrently) to array types.  In this case, it seems to me that the starting point is in the JVM: Add an experimental unboxing array data structure to a production JVM, perhaps along the lines of Maxine hybrids.  No bytecode or language support is required at first; everything can be done with encapsulated unsafe operations and/or method handles. Create an experimental JVM which internally unboxes value types but does not require new bytecodes to do so.  Ensure the feasibility of the performance model for the sample applications. Add tuple-like bytecodes (with or without generic type reification) to a major revision of the JVM, and teach the Java compiler to switch in the new bytecodes without code changes. That’s enough musing me for now.  Back to work!

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• Solving embarassingly parallel problems using Python multiprocessing

  - by gotgenes

  How does one use multiprocessing to tackle embarrassingly parallel problems? Embarassingly parallel problems typically consist of three basic parts: Read input data (from a file, database, tcp connection, etc.). Run calculations on the input data, where each calculation is independent of any other calculation. Write results of calculations (to a file, database, tcp connection, etc.). We can parallelize the program in two dimensions: Part 2 can run on multiple cores, since each calculation is independent; order of processing doesn't matter. Each part can run independently. Part 1 can place data on an input queue, part 2 can pull data off the input queue and put results onto an output queue, and part 3 can pull results off the output queue and write them out. This seems a most basic pattern in concurrent programming, but I am still lost in trying to solve it, so let's write a canonical example to illustrate how this is done using multiprocessing. Here is the example problem: Given a CSV file with rows of integers as input, compute their sums. Separate the problem into three parts, which can all run in parallel: Process the input file into raw data (lists/iterables of integers) Calculate the sums of the data, in parallel Output the sums Below is traditional, single-process bound Python program which solves these three tasks: #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- # basicsums.py """A program that reads integer values from a CSV file and writes out their sums to another CSV file. """ import csv import optparse import sys def make_cli_parser(): """Make the command line interface parser.""" usage = "\n\n".join(["python %prog INPUT_CSV OUTPUT_CSV", __doc__, """ ARGUMENTS: INPUT_CSV: an input CSV file with rows of numbers OUTPUT_CSV: an output file that will contain the sums\ """]) cli_parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage) return cli_parser def parse_input_csv(csvfile): """Parses the input CSV and yields tuples with the index of the row as the first element, and the integers of the row as the second element. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `csvfile`: a `csv.reader` instance """ for i, row in enumerate(csvfile): row = [int(entry) for entry in row] yield i, row def sum_rows(rows): """Yields a tuple with the index of each input list of integers as the first element, and the sum of the list of integers as the second element. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `rows`: an iterable of tuples, with the index of the original row as the first element, and a list of integers as the second element """ for i, row in rows: yield i, sum(row) def write_results(csvfile, results): """Writes a series of results to an outfile, where the first column is the index of the original row of data, and the second column is the result of the calculation. The index is zero-index based. :Parameters: - `csvfile`: a `csv.writer` instance to which to write results - `results`: an iterable of tuples, with the index (zero-based) of the original row as the first element, and the calculated result from that row as the second element """ for result_row in results: csvfile.writerow(result_row) def main(argv): cli_parser = make_cli_parser() opts, args = cli_parser.parse_args(argv) if len(args) != 2: cli_parser.error("Please provide an input file and output file.") infile = open(args[0]) in_csvfile = csv.reader(infile) outfile = open(args[1], 'w') out_csvfile = csv.writer(outfile) # gets an iterable of rows that's not yet evaluated input_rows = parse_input_csv(in_csvfile) # sends the rows iterable to sum_rows() for results iterable, but # still not evaluated result_rows = sum_rows(input_rows) # finally evaluation takes place as a chain in write_results() write_results(out_csvfile, result_rows) infile.close() outfile.close() if __name__ == '__main__': main(sys.argv[1:]) Let's take this program and rewrite it to use multiprocessing to parallelize the three parts outlined above. Below is a skeleton of this new, parallelized program, that needs to be fleshed out to address the parts in the comments: #!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: UTF-8 -*- # multiproc_sums.py """A program that reads integer values from a CSV file and writes out their sums to another CSV file, using multiple processes if desired. """ import csv import multiprocessing import optparse import sys NUM_PROCS = multiprocessing.cpu_count() def make_cli_parser(): """Make the command line interface parser.""" usage = "\n\n".join(["python %prog INPUT_CSV OUTPUT_CSV", __doc__, """ ARGUMENTS: INPUT_CSV: an input CSV file with rows of numbers OUTPUT_CSV: an output file that will contain the sums\ """]) cli_parser = optparse.OptionParser(usage) cli_parser.add_option('-n', '--numprocs', type='int', default=NUM_PROCS, help="Number of processes to launch [DEFAULT: %default]") return cli_parser def main(argv): cli_parser = make_cli_parser() opts, args = cli_parser.parse_args(argv) if len(args) != 2: cli_parser.error("Please provide an input file and output file.") infile = open(args[0]) in_csvfile = csv.reader(infile) outfile = open(args[1], 'w') out_csvfile = csv.writer(outfile) # Parse the input file and add the parsed data to a queue for # processing, possibly chunking to decrease communication between # processes. # Process the parsed data as soon as any (chunks) appear on the # queue, using as many processes as allotted by the user # (opts.numprocs); place results on a queue for output. # # Terminate processes when the parser stops putting data in the # input queue. # Write the results to disk as soon as they appear on the output # queue. # Ensure all child processes have terminated. # Clean up files. infile.close() outfile.close() if __name__ == '__main__': main(sys.argv[1:]) These pieces of code, as well as another piece of code that can generate example CSV files for testing purposes, can be found on github. I would appreciate any insight here as to how you concurrency gurus would approach this problem. Here are some questions I had when thinking about this problem. Bonus points for addressing any/all: Should I have child processes for reading in the data and placing it into the queue, or can the main process do this without blocking until all input is read? Likewise, should I have a child process for writing the results out from the processed queue, or can the main process do this without having to wait for all the results? Should I use a processes pool for the sum operations? If yes, what method do I call on the pool to get it to start processing the results coming into the input queue, without blocking the input and output processes, too? apply_async()? map_async()? imap()? imap_unordered()? Suppose we didn't need to siphon off the input and output queues as data entered them, but could wait until all input was parsed and all results were calculated (e.g., because we know all the input and output will fit in system memory). Should we change the algorithm in any way (e.g., not run any processes concurrently with I/O)?

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• Python regex to parse text file, get the items in list and count the list

  - by Nemo

  I have a text file which contains some data. I m particularly interested in finding the count of the number of items in v_dims v_dims pattern in my text file looks like this : v_dims={ "Sales", "Product Family", "Sales Organization", "Region", "Sales Area", "Sales office", "Sales Division", "Sales Person", "Sales Channel", "Sales Order Type", "Sales Number", "Sales Person", "Sales Quantity", "Sales Amount" } So I m thinking of getting all the elements in v_dims and dumping them out in a Python list. Then compute the len(mylist) to get the count of the items. The challenge is in getting all the elements of v_dims from my text file and putting them in an empty list. I m particularly interested in items in v_dims in my text file. The text file has data in the form of v_dims pattern i showed in my original post. Some data has nested patterns of v_dims. Thanks. Here's what I have tried and failed. Any help is appreciated. TIA. import re fname = "C:\Users\XXXX\Test.mrk" with open(fname, "r") as fo: content_as_string = fo.read() match = re.findall(r'v_dims={\"(.+?)\"}',content_as_string) Though I have a big text file, Here's a snippet of what's the structure of my text file version "1"; // Computer generated object language file object 'MRKR' "Main" { Data_Type=2, HeaderBlock={ Version_String="6.3 (25)" }, Printer_Info={ Orientation=0, Page_Width=8.50000000, Page_Height=11.00000000, Page_Header="", Page_Footer="", Margin_type=0, Top_Margin=0.50000000, Left_Margin=0.50000000, Bottom_Margin=0.50000000, Right_Margin=0.50000000 }, Marker_Options={ Close_All="TRUE", Hide_Console="FALSE", Console_Left="FALSE", Console_Width=217, Main_Style="Maximized", MDI_Rect={ 0, 0, 892, 1063 } }, Dives={ { Dive="A", Windows={ { View_Index=0, Window_Info={ Window_Rect={ 0, -288, 400, 1008 }, Window_Style="Maximized Front", Window_Name="Theater [Previous Qtr Diveplan-Dive A]" }, Dependent_bool="FALSE", Colset={ Dive_Type="Normal", Dimension_Name="Theater", Action_List={ Actions={ { Action_Type="Select", select_type=5 }, { Action_Type="Select", select_type=0, Key_Names={ "Theater" }, Key_Indexes={ { "AMERICAS" } } }, { Action_Type="Focus", Focus_Rows="True" }, { Action_Type="Dimensions", v_dims={ "Theater", "Product Family", "Division", "Region", "Install at Country Name", "Connect Home Type", "Connect In Type", "SymmConnect Enabled", "Connect Home Refusal Reason", "Sales Order Channel Type", "Maintained By Group", "PS Flag", "Avalanche Flag", "Product Item Family" }, Xtab_Bool="False", Xtab_Flip="False" }, { Action_Type="Select", select_type=5 }, { Action_Type="Select", select_type=0, Key_Names={ "Theater", "Product Family", "Division", "Region", "Install at Country Name", "Connect Home Type", "Connect In Type", "SymmConnect Enabled", "Connect Home Refusal Reason", "Sales Order Channel Type", "Maintained By Group", "PS Flag", "Avalanche Flag" }, Key_Indexes={ { "AMERICAS", "ATMOS", "Latin America CS Division", "37000 CS Region", "Mexico", "", "", "", "", "DIRECT", "EMC", "N", "0" } } } } }, Num_Palette_cols=0, Num_Palette_rows=0 }, Format={ Window_Type="Tabular", Tabular={ Num_row_labels=8 } } } } } }, Widget_Set={ Widget_Layout="Vertical", Go_Button=1, Picklist_Width=0, Sort_Subset_Dimensions="TRUE", Order={ } }, Views={ { Data_Type=1, dbname="Previous Qtr Diveplan", diveline_dbname="Current Qtr Diveplan", logical_name="Current Qtr Diveplan", cols={ { name="Total TSS installs", column_type="Calc[Total TSS installs]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="TSS Valid Connectivity Records", column_type="Calc[TSS Valid Connectivity Records]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="% TSS Connectivity Record", column_type="Calc[% TSS Connectivity Record]", output_type="Number" }, { name="TSS Not Applicable", column_type="Calc[TSS Not Applicable]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="TSS Customer Refusals", column_type="Calc[TSS Customer Refusals]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="% TSS Refusals", column_type="Calc[% TSS Refusals]", output_type="Number" }, { name="TSS Eligible for Physical Connectivity", column_type="Calc[TSS Eligible for Physical Connectivity]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="TSS Boxes with Physical Connectivty", column_type="Calc[TSS Boxes with Physical Connectivty]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="% TSS Physical Connectivity", column_type="Calc[% TSS Physical Connectivity]", output_type="Number" } }, dim_cols={ { name="Model", column_type="Dimension[Model]", output_type="None" }, { name="Model", column_type="Dimension[Model]", output_type="None" }, { name="Connect In Type", column_type="Dimension[Connect In Type]", output_type="None" }, { name="Connect Home Type", column_type="Dimension[Connect Home Type]", output_type="None" }, { name="SymmConnect Enabled", column_type="Dimension[SymmConnect Enabled]", output_type="None" }, { name="Theater", column_type="Dimension[Theater]", output_type="None" }, { name="Division", column_type="Dimension[Division]", output_type="None" }, { name="Region", column_type="Dimension[Region]", output_type="None" }, { name="Sales Order Number", column_type="Dimension[Sales Order Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Product Item Family", column_type="Dimension[Product Item Family]", output_type="None" }, { name="Item Serial Number", column_type="Dimension[Item Serial Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Sales Order Deal Number", column_type="Dimension[Sales Order Deal Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Item Install Date", column_type="Dimension[Item Install Date]", output_type="None" }, { name="SYR Last Dial Home Date", column_type="Dimension[SYR Last Dial Home Date]", output_type="None" }, { name="Maintained By Group", column_type="Dimension[Maintained By Group]", output_type="None" }, { name="PS Flag", column_type="Dimension[PS Flag]", output_type="None" }, { name="Connect Home Refusal Reason", column_type="Dimension[Connect Home Refusal Reason]", output_type="None", col_width=177 }, { name="Cust Name", column_type="Dimension[Cust Name]", output_type="None" }, { name="Sales Order Channel Type", column_type="Dimension[Sales Order Channel Type]", output_type="None" }, { name="Sales Order Type", column_type="Dimension[Sales Order Type]", output_type="None" }, { name="Part Model Key", column_type="Dimension[Part Model Key]", output_type="None" }, { name="Ship Date", column_type="Dimension[Ship Date]", output_type="None" }, { name="Model Number", column_type="Dimension[Model Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Item Description", column_type="Dimension[Item Description]", output_type="None" }, { name="Customer Classification", column_type="Dimension[Customer Classification]", output_type="None" }, { name="CS Customer Name", column_type="Dimension[CS Customer Name]", output_type="None" }, { name="Install At Customer Number", column_type="Dimension[Install At Customer Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Install at Country Name", column_type="Dimension[Install at Country Name]", output_type="None" }, { name="TLA Serial Number", column_type="Dimension[TLA Serial Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="Product Version", column_type="Dimension[Product Version]", output_type="None" }, { name="Avalanche Flag", column_type="Dimension[Avalanche Flag]", output_type="None" }, { name="Product Family", column_type="Dimension[Product Family]", output_type="None" }, { name="Project Number", column_type="Dimension[Project Number]", output_type="None" }, { name="PROJECT_STATUS", column_type="Dimension[PROJECT_STATUS]", output_type="None" } }, Available_Columns={ "Total TSS installs", "TSS Valid Connectivity Records", "% TSS Connectivity Record", "TSS Not Applicable", "TSS Customer Refusals", "% TSS Refusals", "TSS Eligible for Physical Connectivity", "TSS Boxes with Physical Connectivty", "% TSS Physical Connectivity", "Total Installs", "All Boxes with Valid Connectivty Record", "% All Connectivity Record", "Overall Refusals", "Overall Refusals %", "All Eligible for Physical Connectivty", "Boxes with Physical Connectivity", "% All with Physical Conectivity" }, Remaining_columns={ { name="Total Installs", column_type="Calc[Total Installs]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="All Boxes with Valid Connectivty Record", column_type="Calc[All Boxes with Valid Connectivty Record]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="% All Connectivity Record", column_type="Calc[% All Connectivity Record]", output_type="Number" }, { name="Overall Refusals", column_type="Calc[Overall Refusals]", output_type="Number", format_string="." }, { name="Overall Refusals %", column_type="Calc[Overall Refusals %]", output_type="Number" }, { name="All Eligible for Physical Connectivty", column_type="Calc[All Eligible for Physical Connectivty]", output_type="Number" }, { name="Boxes with Physical Connectivity", column_type="Calc[Boxes with Physical Connectivity]", output_type="Number" }, { name="% All with Physical Conectivity", column_type="Calc[% All with Physical Conectivity]", output_type="Number" } }, calcs={ { name="Total TSS installs", definition="Total[Total TSS installs]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Valid Connectivity Records", definition="Total[PS Boxes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% TSS Connectivity Record", definition="Total[PS Boxes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)] /Total[Total TSS installs]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Not Applicable", definition="Total[Bozes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]-Total[Boxes Eligible (1=yes)]-Total[TSS Refusals]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Customer Refusals", definition="Total[TSS Refusals]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% TSS Refusals", definition="Total[TSS Refusals]/Total[PS Boxes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Eligible for Physical Connectivity", definition="Total[TSS Eligible]-Total[Exception]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="TSS Boxes with Physical Connectivty", definition="Total[PS Physical Connectivity] - Total[PS Physical Connectivity, SymmConnect Enabled=\"Capable not enabled\"]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% TSS Physical Connectivity", definition="Total[Boxes w/ phys conn]/Total[Boxes Eligible (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="Total Installs", definition="Total[Total Installs]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="All Boxes with Valid Connectivty Record", definition="Total[Bozes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% All Connectivity Record", definition="Total[Bozes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]/Total[Total Installs]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="Overall Refusals", definition="Total[Overall Refusals]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="Overall Refusals %", definition="Total[Overall Refusals]/Total[Bozes w/ valid connectivity record (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="All Eligible for Physical Connectivty", definition="Total[Boxes Eligible (1=yes)]-Total[Exception]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="Boxes with Physical Connectivity", definition="Total[Boxes w/ phys conn]-Total[Boxes w/ phys conn,SymmConnect Enabled=\"Capable not enabled\"]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" }, { name="% All with Physical Conectivity", definition="Total[Boxes w/ phys conn]/Total[Boxes Eligible (1=yes)]", ts_flag="Not TS Calc" } }, merge_type="consolidate", merge_dbs={ { dbname="connectivityallproducts.mdl", diveline_dbname="/DI_PSREPORTING/connectivityallproducts.mdl" } }, skip_constant_columns="FALSE", categories={ { name="Geography", dimensions={ "Theater", "Division", "Region", "Install at Country Name" } }, { name="Mappings and Flags", dimensions={ "Connect Home Type", "Connect In Type", "SymmConnect Enabled", "Connect Home Refusal Reason", "Sales Order Channel Type", "Maintained By Group", "Customer Installable", "PS Flag", "Top Level Flag", "Avalanche Flag" } }, { name="Product Information", dimensions={ "Product Family", "Product Item Family", "Product Version", "Item Description" } }, { name="Sales Order Info", dimensions={ "Sales Order Deal Number", "Sales Order Number", "Sales Order Type" } }, { name="Dates", dimensions={ "Item Install Date", "Ship Date", "SYR Last Dial Home Date" } }, { name="Details", dimensions={ "Item Serial Number", "TLA Serial Number", "Part Model Key", "Model Number" } }, { name="Customer Infor", dimensions={ "CS Customer Name", "Install At Customer Number", "Customer Classification", "Cust Name" } }, { name="Other Dimensions", dimensions={ "Model" } } }, Maintain_Category_Order="FALSE", popup_info="false" } } };

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• SocketChannel in Java sends data, but it doesn't get to destination application

  - by Peterson

  Hi Everybody, I'm suffering a lot to create a simple ChatServer in Java, using the NIO libraries. Wonder if someone could help me. I am doing that by using SocketChannel and Selector to handle multiple clients in a single thread. The problem is: I am able to accept new connections and get it's data, but when I try to send data back, the SocketChannel simply doesn't work. In the method write(), it returns a integer that is the same size of the data i'm passing to it, but the client never receives that data. Strangely, when I close the server application, the client receives the data. It's like the socketchannel maintains a buffer, and it only get flushed when I close the application. Here are some more details, to give you more information to help. I'm handling the events in this piece of code: private void run() throws IOException { ServerSocketChannel ssc = ServerSocketChannel.open(); // Set it to non-blocking, so we can use select ssc.configureBlocking( false ); // Get the Socket connected to this channel, and bind it // to the listening port this.serverSocket = ssc.socket(); InetSocketAddress isa = new InetSocketAddress( this.port ); serverSocket.bind( isa ); // Create a new Selector for selecting this.masterSelector = Selector.open(); // Register the ServerSocketChannel, so we can // listen for incoming connections ssc.register( masterSelector, SelectionKey.OP_ACCEPT ); while (true) { // See if we've had any activity -- either // an incoming connection, or incoming data on an // existing connection int num = masterSelector.select(); // If we don't have any activity, loop around and wait // again if (num == 0) { continue; } // Get the keys corresponding to the activity // that has been detected, and process them // one by one Set keys = masterSelector.selectedKeys(); Iterator it = keys.iterator(); while (it.hasNext()) { // Get a key representing one of bits of I/O // activity SelectionKey key = (SelectionKey)it.next(); // What kind of activity is it? if ((key.readyOps() & SelectionKey.OP_ACCEPT) == SelectionKey.OP_ACCEPT) { // Aceita a conexão Socket s = serverSocket.accept(); System.out.println( "LOG: Conexao TCP aceita de " + s.getInetAddress() + ":" + s.getPort() ); // Make sure to make it non-blocking, so we can // use a selector on it. SocketChannel sc = s.getChannel(); sc.configureBlocking( false ); // Registra a conexao no seletor, apenas para leitura sc.register( masterSelector, SelectionKey.OP_READ ); } else if ( key.isReadable() ) { SocketChannel sc = null; // It's incoming data on a connection, so // process it sc = (SocketChannel)key.channel(); // Verifica se a conexão corresponde a um cliente já existente if((clientsMap.getClient(key)) != null){ boolean closedConnection = !processIncomingClientData(key); if(closedConnection){ int id = clientsMap.getClient(key); closeClient(id); } } else { boolean clientAccepted = processIncomingDataFromNewClient(key); if(!clientAccepted){ // Se o cliente não foi aceito, sua conexão é simplesmente fechada sc.socket().close(); sc.close(); key.cancel(); } } } } // We remove the selected keys, because we've dealt // with them. keys.clear(); } } This piece of code is simply handles new clients that wants to connect to the chat. So, a client makes a TCP connection to the server, and once it gets accepted, it sends data to the server following a simply text protocol, informing his id and asking to get registrated to the server. I handle this in the method processIncomingDataFromNewClient(key). I'm also keeping a map of clients and its connections in a data structure similar to a hashtable. I? doing that because I need to recover a client Id from a connection and a connection from a client Id. This is can be shown in: clientsMap.getClient(key). But the problem itself resides in the method processIncomingDataFromNewClient(key). There, I simply read the data that the client sent to me, validate it, and if it's ok, I send a message back to the client to tell that it is connected to the chat server. Here is a similar piece of code: private boolean processIncomingDataFromNewClient(SelectionKey key){ SocketChannel sc = (SocketChannel) key.channel(); String connectionOrigin = sc.socket().getInetAddress() + ":" + sc.socket().getPort(); int id = 0; //id of the client buf.clear(); int bytesRead = 0; try { bytesRead = sc.read(buf); if(bytesRead<=0){ System.out.println("Conexão fechada pelo: " + connectionOrigin); return false; } System.out.println("LOG: " + bytesRead + " bytes lidos de " + connectionOrigin); String msg = new String(buf.array(),0,bytesRead); // Do validations with the client sent me here // gets the client id }catch (Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); System.out.println("LOG: Oops. Cliente não conhece o protocolo. Fechando a conexão: " + connectionOrigin); System.out.println("LOG: Primeiros 10 caracteres enviados pelo cliente: " + msg); return false; } } } catch (IOException e) { System.out.println("LOG: Erro ao ler dados da conexao: " + connectionOrigin); System.out.println("LOG: "+ e.getLocalizedMessage()); System.out.println("LOG: Fechando a conexão..."); return false; } // If it gets to here, the protocol is ok and we can add the client boolean inserted = clientsMap.addClient(key, id); if(!inserted){ System.out.println("LOG: Não foi possível adicionar o cliente. Ou ele já está conectado ou já têm clientes demais. Id: " + id); System.out.println("LOG: Fechando a conexão: " + connectionOrigin); return false; } System.out.println("LOG: Novo cliente conectado! Enviando mesnsagem de confirmação. Id: " + id + " Conexao: " + connectionOrigin); /* Here is the error */ sendMessage(id, "Servidor pet: connection accepted"); System.out.println("LOG: Novo cliente conectado! Id: " + id + " Conexao: " + connectionOrigin); return true; } And finally, the method sendMessage(SelectionKey key) looks like this: private void sendMessage(int destId, String msg) { Charset charset = Charset.forName("ISO-8859-1"); CharBuffer charBuffer = CharBuffer.wrap(msg, 0, msg.length()); ByteBuffer bf = charset.encode(charBuffer); //bf.flip(); int bytesSent = 0; SelectionKey key = clientsMap.getClient(destId); SocketChannel sc = (SocketChannel) key.channel(); try { / int total_bytes_sent = 0; while(total_bytes_sent < msg.length()){ bytesSent = sc.write(bf); total_bytes_sent += bytesSent; } System.out.println("LOG: Bytes enviados para o cliente " + destId + ": "+ total_bytes_sent + " Tamanho da mensagem: " + msg.length()); } catch (IOException e) { System.out.println("LOG: Erro ao mandar mensagem para: " + destId); System.out.println("LOG: " + e.getLocalizedMessage()); } } So, what is happening is that the server, when send a message, prints something like this: LOG: Bytes sent to the client: 28 Size of the message: 28 So, it tells that it sent the data, but the chat client keeps blocking, waiting in the recv() method. So, the data never gets to it. When I close the server application, though, all the data appears in the client. I wonder why. It is important to say that the client is in C and the server JAVA, and I'm running both in the same machine, an Ubuntu Guest in virtualbox under windows. I also run both under windows host and under linuxes hosts, and keep getting the same strange problem. I'm sorry for the great lenght of this question, but I already searched a lot of places for an answer, found a lot of tutorials and questions, including here at StackOverflow, but coundn't find a reasonable explanation. I am really not liking this Java NIO, and i saw a lot of people complaining about it too. I am thinking that if I had done that in C it would have been a lot easier :-D So, if someone could help me and even discuss this behavor, it would be great! :-) Thanks everybody in advance, Péterson

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