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  • Project Management Helps AmeriCares Deliver International Aid

    - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP
    Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Alison Weiss Handle with Care Sound project management helps AmeriCares bring international aid to those in need. The stakes are always high for AmeriCares. On a mission to restore health and save lives during times of disaster, the nonprofit international relief and humanitarian aid organization delivers donated medicines, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to people in the U.S. and around the globe. Founded in 1982 with the express mission of responding as quickly and efficiently as possible to help people in need, the Stamford, Connecticut-based AmeriCares has delivered more than US$10.5 billion in aid to 147 countries over the past three decades. Launch the Slideshow “It’s critically important to us that we steward all the donations and that the medical supplies and medicines get to people as quickly as possible with no loss,” says Kate Sears, senior vice president for finance and technology at AmeriCares. “Whether we’re shipping IV solutions to victims of cholera in Haiti or antibiotics to Somali famine victims, we need to get the medicines there sooner because it means more people will be helped and lives improved or even saved.” Ten years ago, the tracking systems used by AmeriCares associates were paper-based. In recent years, staff started using spreadsheets, but the tracking processes were not standardized between teams. “Every team was tracking completely different information,” says Megan McDermott, senior associate, Sub-Saharan Africa partnerships, at AmeriCares. “It was just a few key things. For example, we tracked the date a shipment was supposed to arrive and the date we got reports from our partner that a hospital received aid on their end.” While the data was accurate, much detail was being lost in the process. AmeriCares management knew it could do a better job of tracking this enterprise data and in 2011 took a significant step by implementing Oracle’s Primavera P6 Professional Project Management. “It’s a comprehensive solution that has helped us improve the monitoring and controlling processes. It has allowed us to do our distribution better,” says Sears. In addition, the implementation effort has been a change agent, helping AmeriCares leadership rethink project management across the entire organization. Initially, much of the focus was on standardizing processes, but staff members also learned the importance of thinking proactively to prevent possible problems and evaluating results to determine if goals and objectives are truly being met. Such data about process efficiency and overall results is critical not only to AmeriCares staff but also to the donors supporting the organization’s life-saving missions. Efficiency Saves Lives One of AmeriCares’ core operations is to gather product donations from the private sector, establish where the most-urgent needs are, and solicit monetary support to send the aid via ocean cargo or airlift to welfare- and health-oriented nongovernmental organizations, hospitals, health networks, and government ministries based in areas in need. In 2011 alone, AmeriCares sent more than 3,500 shipments to 95 countries in response to both ongoing humanitarian needs and more than two dozen emergencies, including deadly tornadoes and storms in the U.S. and the devastating tsunami in Japan. When it comes to nonprofits in general, donors want to know that the charitable organizations they support are using funds wisely. Typically, nonprofits are evaluated by donors in terms of efficiency, an area where AmeriCares has an excellent reputation: 98 percent of expenses go directly to supporting programs and less than 2 percent represent administrative and fundraising costs. Donors, however, should look at more than simple efficiency, says Peter York, senior partner and chief research and learning officer at TCC Group, a nonprofit consultancy headquartered in New York, New York. They should also look at whether organizations have the systems in place to sustain their missions and continue to thrive. An expert on nonprofit organizational management, York has spent years studying sustainable charitable organizations. He defines them as nonprofits that are able to achieve the ongoing financial support to stay relevant and continue doing core mission work. In his analysis of well over 2,500 larger nonprofits, York has found that many are not sustaining, and are actually scaling back in size. “One of the biggest challenges of nonprofit sustainability is the general public’s perception that every dollar donated has to go only to the delivery of service,” says York. “What our data shows is that there are some fundamental capacities that have to be there in order for organizations to sustain and grow.” York’s research highlights the importance of data-driven leadership at successful nonprofits. “You’ve got to have the tools, the systems, and the technologies to get objective information on what you do, the people you serve, and the results you’re achieving,” says York. “If leaders don’t have the knowledge and the data, they can’t make the strategic decisions about programs to take organizations to the next level.” Historically, AmeriCares associates have used time-tested and cost-effective strategies to ship and then track supplies from donation to delivery to their destinations in designated time frames. When disaster strikes, AmeriCares ships by air and generally pulls out all the stops to deliver the most urgently needed aid within the first few days and weeks. Then, as situations stabilize, AmeriCares turns to delivering sea containers for the postemergency and ongoing aid so often needed over the long term. According to McDermott, getting a shipment out the door is fairly complicated, requiring as many as five different AmeriCares teams collaborating together. The entire process can take months—from when products are received in the warehouse and deciding which recipients to allocate supplies to, to getting customs and governmental approvals in place, actually shipping products, and finally ensuring that the products are received in-country. Delivering that aid is no small affair. “Our volume exceeds half a billion dollars a year worth of donated medicines and medical supplies, so it’s a sizable logistical operation to bring these products in and get them out to the right place quickly to have the most impact,” says Sears. “We really pride ourselves on our controls and efficiencies.” Adding to that complexity is the fact that the longer it takes to deliver aid, the more dire the human need can be. Any time AmeriCares associates can shave off the complicated aid delivery process can translate into lives saved. “It’s really being able to track information consistently that will help us to see where are the bottlenecks and where can we work on improving our processes,” says McDermott. Setting a Standard Productivity and information management improvements were key objectives for AmeriCares when staff began the process of implementing Oracle’s Primavera solution. But before configuring the software, the staff needed to take the time to analyze the systems already in place. According to Greg Loop, manager of database systems at AmeriCares, the organization received guidance from several consultants, including Rich D’Addario, consulting project manager in the Primavera Global Business Unit at Oracle, who was instrumental in shepherding the critical requirements-gathering phase. D’Addario encouraged staff to begin documenting shipping processes by considering the order in which activities occur and which ones are dependent on others to get accomplished. This exercise helped everyone realize that to be more efficient, they needed to keep track of shipments in a more standard way. “The staff didn’t recognize formal project management methodology,” says D’Addario. “But they did understand what the most important things are and that if they go wrong, an entire project can go off course.” Before, if a boatload of supplies was being sent to Haiti and there was a problem somewhere, a lot of time was taken up finding out where the problem was—because staff was not tracking things in a standard way. As a result, even more time was needed to find possible solutions to the problem and alert recipients that the aid might be delayed. “For everyone to put on the project manager hat and standardize the way every single thing is done means that now the whole organization is on the same page as to what needs to occur from the time a hurricane hits Haiti and when a boat pulls in to unload supplies,” says D’Addario. With so much care taken to put a process foundation firmly in place, configuring the Primavera solution was actually quite simple. Specific templates were set up for different types of shipments, and dashboards were implemented to provide executives with clear overviews of every project in the system. AmeriCares’ Loop reports that system planning, refining, and testing, followed by writing up documentation and training, took approximately four months. The system went live in spring 2011 at AmeriCares’ Connecticut headquarters. While the nonprofit has an international presence, with warehouses in Europe and offices in Haiti, India, Japan, and Sri Lanka, most donated medicines come from U.S. entities and are shipped from the U.S. out to the rest of the world. In addition, all shipments are tracked from the U.S. office. AmeriCares doesn’t expect the Primavera system to take months off the shipping time, especially for sea containers. However, any time saved is still important because it will allow aid to be delivered to people more quickly at a lower overall cost. “If we can trim a day or two here or there, that can translate into lives that we’re saving, especially in emergency situations,” says Sears. A Cultural Change Beyond the measurable benefits that come with IT-driven process improvement, AmeriCares management is seeing a change in culture as a result of the Primavera project. One change has been treating every shipment of aid as a project, and everyone involved with facilitating shipments as a project manager. “This is a revolutionary concept for us,” says McDermott. “Before, we were used to thinking we were doing logistics—getting a container from point A to point B without looking at it as one project and really understanding what it meant to manage it.” AmeriCares staff is also happy to report that collaboration within the organization is much more efficient. When someone creates a shipment in the Primavera system, the same shared template is used, which means anyone can log in to the system to see the status of a shipment. Knowledgeable staff can access a shipment project to help troubleshoot a problem. Management can easily check the status of projects across the organization. “Dashboards are really useful,” says McDermott. “Instead of going into the details of each project, you can just see the high-level real-time information at a glance.” The new system is helping team members focus on proactively managing shipments rather than simply reacting when problems occur. For example, when a container is shipped, documents must be included for customs clearance. Now, the shipping template has built-in reminders to prompt team members to ask for copies of these documents from freight forwarders and to follow up with partners to discover if a shipment is on time. In the past, staff may not have worked on securing these documents until they’d been notified a shipment had arrived in-country. Another benefit of capturing and adopting best practices within the Primavera system is that staff training is easier. “Capturing the processes in documented steps and milestones allows us to teach new staff members how to do their jobs faster,” says Sears. “It provides them with the knowledge of their predecessors so they don’t have to keep reinventing the wheel.” With the Primavera system already generating positive results, management is eager to take advantage of advanced capabilities. Loop is working on integrating the company’s proprietary inventory management system with the Primavera system so that when logistics or warehousing operators input data, the information will automatically go into the Primavera system. In the past, this information had to be manually keyed into spreadsheets, often leading to errors. Mining Historical Data Another feature on the horizon for AmeriCares is utilizing Primavera P6 Professional Project Management reporting capabilities. As the system begins to include more historical data, management soon will be able to draw on this information to conduct analysis that has not been possible before and create customized reports. For example, at the beginning of the shipment process, staff will be able to use historical data to more accurately estimate how long the approval process should take for a particular country. This could help ensure that food and medicine with limited shelf lives do not get stuck in customs or used beyond their expiration dates. The historical data in the Primavera system will also help AmeriCares with better planning year to year. The nonprofit’s staff has always put together a plan at the beginning of the year, but this has been very challenging simply because it is impossible to predict disasters. Now, management will be able to look at historical data and see trends and statistics as they set current objectives and prepare for future need. In addition, this historical data will provide AmeriCares management with the ability to review year-end data and compare actual project results with goals set at the beginning of the year—to see if desired outcomes were achieved and if there are areas that need improvement. It’s this type of information that is so valuable to donors. And, according to York, project management software can play a critical role in generating the data to help nonprofits sustain and grow. “It is important to invest in systems to help replicate, expand, and deliver services,” says York. “Project management software can help because it encourages nonprofits to examine program or service changes and how to manage moving forward.” Sears believes that AmeriCares donors will support the return on investment the organization will achieve with the Primavera solution. “It won’t be financial returns, but rather how many more people we can help for a given dollar or how much more quickly we can respond to a need,” says Sears. “I think donors are receptive to such arguments.” And for AmeriCares, it is all about the future and increasing results. The project management environment currently may be quite simple, but IT staff plans to expand the complexity and functionality as the organization grows in its knowledge of project management and the goals it wants to achieve. “As we use the system over time, we’ll continue to refine our best practices and accumulate more data,” says Sears. “It will advance our ability to make better data-driven decisions.”

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  • Uncorrectable Machine Check Exception on HP DL360 G7

    - by ReDSerpenT
    i have about every hour in IML (hplog) from HP DL360 G7 record: CRITICAL: CPU - Uncorrectable Machine Check Exception (Board 0, Processor 1, APIC ID 0x00000003, Bank 0x00000005, Status 0xBE000000'00800400, Address 0x00003FFF'811239E0, Misc 0x00000000'00007FFF) hpasmcli show server System : ProLiant DL360 G7 ROM version : P68 09/30/2010 iLo present : Yes Can someone tell me what part is being referenced by the IML status codes above? Thank in advance!

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  • Win7 Task Scheduler Crashes with Error Description "RpcServerUseProtseq:ncacn_ip_tcp"

    - by BlaM
    I just installed my fresh Windows 7 and so far are not very happy with it. Much more problems than with Windows Vista. The latest in a series: My Task Scheduler crashes right at the moment when I boot my system. When I check the Event Viewer it tells me that the scheduler crashes with a critical error: EventID: 404 ErrorDescription: RpcServerUseProtseq:ncacn_ip_tcp ResultCode: 1721 I found this entry in TechNet, but there is no "Internet" Key in my registry: "Task Scheduler service has encountered RPC initialization error..."

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  • Pros/Cons of switching from Exchange to GMail

    - by Brent
    We are a medium-large non-profit company, with around 1000 staff and volunteers, and have been using MS Exchange (currently 2003) for our mail system for years. I recently attended a Google conference where they were positing that "Cloud computing is the way of the future", and encouraging us to switch from doing our own email with Exchange, to using GMail and Google Apps for everything. Additionally, one of our departments has been pushing from inside to do this transition within their own department, if not throughout the entire organization. I can definitely see some benefits - such as: Archive space - we never seem to have the space our users want, and of course, the more we get, the more we have to back up OS Agnostic - Exchange is definitely built for windows, and with mac and linux users on the rise, these users increasingly demand better tools / support. Google offers this. Better archiving - potential of e-discovery, that doesn't exist in a practical way with our current setup. Switching would relieve us of a fair bit of server administration, give more options to our end users, and free up the server resources we are now using for Exchange. Our IT department wants to be perceived as providing up-to-date solutions to technical problems, and this change would definitely provide such an image. Google's infrastructure is obviously much more robust than ours, and they employ some of the world's best security and network experts. However, there are also some serious drawbacks: We would be essentially outsourcing one of our mission-critical systems to a 3rd party The switch would inevitably involve Google Apps and perhaps more as well. That means we would have a-lot more at the mercy of a single (potentially weak) password. (is there a way to make this more secure using a password plus physical key of some sort??) Our data would not remain under our roof - or even in our country (Canada). This obviously has plusses on the Disaster Recovery side, but I think there are potential negatives on the legal side. I can't imagine that somebody as large as Google would be as responsive as we would want with regard to non-critical issues such as tracing missing emails, etc. (not sure how much access we would have to basic mail logs - for instance) Can anyone help me evaluate this decision? What issues am I overlooking? What experiences have you had with this transition (or the opposite - gmail to Exchange) Can you add to the points I have already outlined?

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  • Centreon setup (web part) config not writeable

    - by Evgeniy
    I have a problem with Centreon installation. At end of install process, I stopped at 10th step: Writable Centreon Configuration File (centreon.conf.php) Critical: Not Writeable /etc/centreon/ asterisk:asterisk (755) Should be : (755) Generate Centreon configuration file OK /etc/centreon/centreon.conf.php asterisk:asterisk (755) Should be : (755) Generate Centstorage configuration file OK /etc/centreon//conf.pm asterisk:asterisk (755) Should be : (755) But permissions and owner are OK. And I tried chmod -R 777 /etc/centreon Please help to understand what's wrong. UPD: Screenshot: http://gyazo.com/82701d119a5e0d98947ad35406a5b8f3

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  • How can I keep track of SQL Server updates?

    - by Adrian Grigore
    Hi, If I am not mistaken, SQL server cannot be automatically updated via the regular windows backup routine. Instead, there are cummulative updates that need to be installed by hand. I assume this is done for security and stability reasons. Is this correct? If so, how can I keep track of new updates without regularly reading SQL server related blogs? Is there any low-volume newsletter I can subscribe (ideally only announcing critical updates)?

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  • How can I force a MySQL table to become corrupted?

    - by Rory McCann
    I have written a simple Nagios plugin that calls mysqlcheck (which checks for corrupted tables) and will give a warning if any are corrupt. However none of my tables are corrupt now. So I'm not 100% sure that my plugin is working fine. I have a dev server that's not misson critical. How can I force one (or any) of the tables there to be corrupt so that I can test my nagios alert? For the record the server is Ubuntu Dapper and the mysql is version 5.0

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  • Update to recent stable php in Ubuntu 12.04

    - by Jurian Sluiman
    We run an Ubuntu 12.04 server where php 5.3.10 is installed by default. I thought Ubuntu did only apply bugfixes in their updates, so micros like 5.3.x should pass through. Apparently, our version isn't updated, but we are stuck with a critical bug in php which is solved in 5.3.15. Should I wait longer for this release to bubble up? Or are there safe repositories to use for Ubuntu to continuously update php and php related packages?

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  • Nagios3: Conditional operators for service checks?

    - by Dave
    I'm trying to setup Nagios to monitor my various using hostgroups to define 'machine roles', against which I run services to check the machines by role. However, I'd like to use conditional operators that would enable me to run the service check against an intersection of two host groups, rather than their unions... i.e. using &&, ||, or () operators. For example, imagine I have the following servers: www-eu: Linux WWW (Apache) server, in the EU www-us: Windows WWW (IIS) server, in the US (West coast) ftp-eu: Linux FTP server, in the EU ftp-us: Windows FTP server, in the US I would want to create the following host groups: US-Servers: www-us, ftp-us EU-Servers: www-eu, ftp-eu WWW-Servers: www-us, www-eu FTP-Servers: ftp-us, ftp-eu Now say I'm interested in checking the HTTP response time for my web servers. Then let's say this particular Nagios service is running from the US (West Coast), and that I have a command called *check_http_response_time*. This command will check the responsiveness of the HTTP server, which I can provide an argument which defines the max response time before raising critical. My command might look like: check_http_response_time $HOSTNAME$ 50 Now traditionally, I can run my checks by specifying a list of host or hostgroups. define service{ use local-service hostgroup_name WWW-Servers # Servers = www-us, www-eu servicegroups WWW Checks service_description Check HTTP Response Time check_command check_http_response_time!50 } However, with the above service definition, given my Nagios service is in US West, I could reasonably expect that my EU server will return critical. Really, I want different thresholds for each region (50 for US West, 200 for EU.) I would have to permutate my service for each host and set their custom threshold, or alternatively permutate out my service groups by role & region (i.e. WWW-Servers-EU), and run my specific thresholds against those. Though the latter is better, both are much messier than I'd like... What I would love, and what this post is asking for, is a way to use hostgroups to perform an intersection using conditional logic, rather than a simple union. It might look like: define service{ use local-service hostgroup_name WWW-Servers && US-Servers servicegroups WWW Checks service_description Check HTTP Response Time check_command check_http_response_time!50 } It then would run the check only against servers that are in both WWW-Servers and US-Servers, in my example, just www-us. The benefits of such a feature would be significant for Nagios services configured for large-scale. Is this feature available? If it isn't, will it be available in the future? Is there an alternative way to accomplish this given the most recent Nagios version? Any tips/suggestions are most appreciated! Dave

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  • Any rerefence of CPU world statistics?

    - by Áxel Costas Pena
    I am looking for any referencee about computer power statistics across the world. My main interest is about real computing capabilities, so I'd prefer information about real processor power, and even best if it includes also other critical hardware statistics, like RAM memory, but if it isn't possible, maybe statistics about brand/model distribution will be also useful. I've Googled for some minutes and I've found nothing related.

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  • munin-limits error, Missing configuration options for contact admin; skipping

    - by jjames
    I am getting an error when trying to configure email alerts with Munin. I've tried with both version 1.4.7 and 2.0.6. My config file: contacts admin contact.admin.command mail -s "Munin notification ${var:host}" [email protected] contact.admin.always_send warning critical [Production;server1] use_node_name yes address server1addr contacts enielson The error, 2012/08/31 16:47:24 [WARNING] Missing configuration options for contact admin; skipping How can I fix this?

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  • Is the difference between superuser and serverfault basically when you can do a power cycle?

    - by wag2639
    Generally speaking, aren't there a lot of problems that can be fixed with just a simple power cycle? Especially with Windows, a reboot will solve the problems (at least temporarily)? So, would this be the difference between serverfault and superuser? Generally, where as a superuser might just be annoyed by a restart/power cycle, a sysadmin cannot because its a critical system or otherwise production box?

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  • Smss.exe - setting any core affinity breaks rdp on Windows 7 / Windows Server 2012

    - by Hetman
    I have tried to set core affinity of smss.exe to not run on one critical core on Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008r2. It turns out that simply setting the core affinity to anything (even the full mask that smss.exe already has) seems to work but prevents users from rdp'ing into the machine until it is restarted. The users already logged in may continue to use their sessions. This behaviour does not occur on Windows 8/Windows Server 2012. Does anyone know why it is happening?

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  • ApplicationXtender?

    - by jpmartins
    Where can I find free technical documentation on EMC Application EXtender? This is a distributed system for "Storage, Organization, and Management of Business-Critical Information". The IT team where I'm in has on his machines an installation of a server of this product, but I'm having troubles finding knowledge about it. There are Microsoft Windows or Web-based clients. The administration is "easy", but i have no manual or documentation that can help me understand, monitor or fix...

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  • Monitor ssh on non-default port with Nagios

    - by obvio171
    I just deployed Nagios on a Gentoo server and everything is fine except ssh, which it marks as "CRITICAL" because it's refusing connections. But that's because it's running on a port different from the default 22. How do I change it so that it monitors the right port?

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  • How can I keep track of SQL Server cummulative updates?

    - by Adrian Grigore
    Hi, If I am not mistaken, SQL server cannot be automatically updated via the regular windows backup routine. Instead, there are cummulative updates that need to be installed by hand. I assume this is done for security and stability reasons. Is this correct? If so, how can I keep track of new updates without regularly reading SQL server related blogs? Is there any low-volume newsletter I can subscribe (ideally only announcing critical updates)?

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  • Shut down windows service based on load

    - by JP
    Hello, I was wondering if there are any free / open source solutions that will start and stop a windows service based on load? I have some pubsub subscriber services that do background work which is not critical. Ideally i would like tot be able to automate things so that these services could start if memory/cpu/disk i/o was under a certain threshold and stop gracefully if that threshold was met. Do you know of any solutions? Thanks JP

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  • Run a batch file before user logs into Windows 2003 R2?

    - by Sid
    I have an Amazon EC2 machine (Windows Server 2003 R2) where I want to run a script (.bat file) when the Windows Server 2003 R2 machine boots up. This need to run BEFORE any user logs in. Ideally I'd like to extend the same work-around on my Windows Server 2008 R2 instances too - but Windows Server 2003 R2 is critical for me as of now. Purely as FYI, the .bat file updates the DDNS records so the EC2 machine doesn't need to consume static IPs.

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  • How to get Remote Processes on Windows 2003 with cpu percentage

    - by Brettski
    I have a production server with it's cpu's running excessively high. Except in critical circumstances nobody is allowed to logon to servers during non maintenance times. I am looking for an application I can use to look at the processes on the remote server which include CPU % usage. An application like top. Windows native tasklist.exe doesn't show percentage, nor does sysinternals pslist.exe. Suggestions?

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  • Lost P/W Tape Backup

    - by Jeff Rawlins
    We need to perform complete restore to critical server using tape backup (Veritas). Found out that former IT director put p/w on tape and we cannot locate or figure it out. Options for recovery?

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  • Backup server 2008 system state without using wbadmin?

    - by Beuy
    Is it possible to backup the System State of a 2008 server without using wbamdin? The setup in question does support the requirements that wbadmin forces (all volumes are marked as critical). Third party tools are an option but I would like to keep away from the big money sinks (BE etc)

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