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• Oracle Partner Store (OPS) New Enhancements

  - by Kristin Rose

  Effective June 29th, Oracle Partner Store (OPS) will release the enhancements listed below to improve your overall ordering experience. v Online Transactional Oracle Master Agreement (Online TOMA) The Online TOMA enables end users to execute a transactional end user license agreement with Oracle. The new Online TOMA in OPS will replace the need for you to obtain a signed hard copy of the TOMA from the end user. You will now initiate the Online TOMA via OPS. Navigation: OPS Home > Order Tools > Online TOMA Query > Request Online TOMA> End User Contact, click “Select for TOMA” > Select Language > Submit (an automated email is sent immediately to the requestor and the end user) Ø The Online TOMA can also be initiated from the ‘My OPS’ tab. Under the Online TOMA Query section partners can track Online TOMA request details submitted to end users. The status of the Online TOMA request and the OMA Key generated (once Ts&Cs of the Online TOMA are accepted by an end user) are also displayed in this table. There is also the ability to resend pending Online TOMA requests by clicking ‘Resend’. Navigation: OPS Home > Order Tools > Online TOMA Query For more details on the Transactional OMA, please click here. v Convert Deals to Carts The partner deal registration system within OPS will now allow you to convert approved deals into carts with a simple click of a button. VADs can use Deal to Cart on all of their partners' registrations, regardless of whether they submitted on their partner's behalf, or the partner submitted themselves. Navigation: Login > Deal Registrations > Deal Registration List > Open the approved deal > Click Deal Reg ID number link to open > Click on 'Create Cart' link You can locate your newly created cart in the Saved Carts section of OPS. Links are also available from within an open deal or from the Deal Registration List. Click on the cart number to proceed. v Partner Opportunity Management: Deal Registration on OPS now allows you to see updated information on your opportunities from Oracle’s Fusion CRM opportunity management system.  Key fields such as close date, sales stage, products and status can be viewed by clicking the opportunity ID associated with the deal registration.  This new feature allows you to see regular updates to your opportunities after registrations are approved.  Through ongoing communication with Oracle Channel Managers and Sales Reps, you can ensure that Oracle has the latest information on your active registered deals. v Product Recommendations: When adding products to the Deal Registrations tab, OPS will now show additional products that you can try to include to maximize your sale and rebate. v Advanced Customer Support(ACS) Services Note: This will be available from July 9th. Initiate the purchase of the complete stack (HW/SW/Services) online with one single OPS order. More ACS services now supported online with exception of Start-Up Pack: · New SW installation services for Standard Configurations & stand alone System Software. · New Pre-production & Go-live services for Standard & Engineered Systems · New SW configuration & Platinum Pre-Production & Go-Live services for Engineered Systems · New Travel & Expenses Estimate included · New Partner & VAD volume discount supported v Software as a Service (SaaS) for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs): Oracle SaaS ISVs can now use OPS to submit their monthly usage reports to Oracle within 20 days after the end of every month. Navigation: OPS Home > Cart > Transaction Type: Partner SaaS for ISV’s > Add Eligible Products > Check out v Existing Approvals: In an effort to reduce the processing time of discount approvals, we have added a new section in the Request Approval page for you to communicate pre-existing approvals without having to attach the DAT. Just enter the Approval ID and submit your request. In case of existing software approvals, you will be required to submit the DAT with the Contact Information section filled out. v Additional data for Shipping Box Labels and Packing Slips OPS now has additional fields in the Shipping Notes section for you to add PO details. This will help you easily identify shipments as they arrive. Partners will have an End User PO field, whereas VADs will have VAR and End User PO fields. v Shipping Notes on OPS Hardware delivery Shipping Notes will now have multiple options to better suit your requirements. v Reminders for Royalty Reporting Partners: If you have not submitted your royalty report online, OPS will now send an automated alert to remind you. v Order Tracker Changes: · Order Tracker will now have a deal reg flag (Yes/No). You can now clearly distinguish between orders that have registered opportunities. · All lines of the order will be visible in the order details list. v Changes in Terminology · You will notice textual changes on some of our labels and messages relating to approval requests. “Discount Requests” has been replaced with “Approval Requests” to cater to some of our other offerings. · First Line Support (FLS) transaction type has been renamed to Support Provider Partner (SPP). OPS Support For more details on these enhancements, please request a training here. For assistance on the Oracle Partner Store, please contact the OPS support team in your region. NAMER: [email protected] LAD: [email protected] EMEA : [email protected] APAC: [email protected] Japan: [email protected] You can even call us on our Hotline! Find your local number here.     Thank you, Oracle Partner Store Support Team      

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• Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

  - by Kyle Burns

  One of the earliest lessons I was taught in Enterprise development was "always program against an interface".  This was back in the VB6 days and I quickly learned that no code would be allowed to move to the QA server unless my business objects and data access objects each are defined as an interface and have a matching implementation class.  Why?  "It's more reusable" was one answer.  "It doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" a slightly more knowing answer.  And let's not forget the discussion ending "it's a standard".  The problem with these responses was that senior people didn't really understand the reason we were doing the things we were doing and because of that, we were entirely unable to realize the intent behind the practice - we simply used interfaces and had a bunch of extra code to maintain to show for it. It wasn't until a few years later that I finally heard the term "Inversion of Control".  Simply put, "Inversion of Control" takes the creation of objects that used to be within the control (and therefore a responsibility of) of your component and moves it to some outside force.  For example, consider the following code which follows the old "always program against an interface" rule in the manner of many corporate development shops: 1: ICatalog catalog = new Catalog(); 2: Category[] categories = catalog.GetCategories(); In this example, I met the requirement of the rule by declaring the variable as ICatalog, but I didn't hit "it doesn't tie you to a specific implementation" because I explicitly created an instance of the concrete Catalog object.  If I want to test the functionality of the code I just wrote I have to have an environment in which Catalog can be created along with any of the resources upon which it depends (e.g. configuration files, database connections, etc) in order to test my functionality.  That's a lot of setup work and one of the things that I think ultimately discourages real buy-in of unit testing in many development shops. So how do I test my code without needing Catalog to work?  A very primitive approach I've seen is to change the line the instantiates catalog to read: 1: ICatalog catalog = new FakeCatalog();   once the test is run and passes, the code is switched back to the real thing.  This obviously poses a huge risk for introducing test code into production and in my opinion is worse than just keeping the dependency and its associated setup work.  Another popular approach is to make use of Factory methods which use an object whose "job" is to know how to obtain a valid instance of the object.  Using this approach, the code may look something like this: 1: ICatalog catalog = CatalogFactory.GetCatalog();   The code inside the factory is responsible for deciding "what kind" of catalog is needed.  This is a far better approach than the previous one, but it does make projects grow considerably because now in addition to the interface, the real implementation, and the fake implementation(s) for testing you have added a minimum of one factory (or at least a factory method) for each of your interfaces.  Once again, developers say "that's too complicated and has me writing a bunch of useless code" and quietly slip back into just creating a new Catalog and chalking any test failures up to "it will probably work on the server". This is where software intended specifically to facilitate Inversion of Control comes into play.  There are many libraries that take on the Inversion of Control responsibilities in .Net and most of them have many pros and cons.  From this point forward I'll discuss concepts from the standpoint of the Unity framework produced by Microsoft's Patterns and Practices team.  I'm primarily focusing on this library because it questions about it inspired this posting. At Unity's core and that of most any IoC framework is a catalog or registry of components.  This registry can be configured either through code or using the application's configuration file and in the most simple terms says "interface X maps to concrete implementation Y".  It can get much more complicated, but I want to keep things at the "what does it do" level instead of "how does it do it".  The object that exposes most of the Unity functionality is the UnityContainer.  This object exposes methods to configure the catalog as well as the Resolve<T> method which is used to obtain an instance of the type represented by T.  When using the Resolve<T> method, Unity does not necessarily have to just "new up" the requested object, but also can track dependencies of that object and ensure that the entire dependency chain is satisfied. There are three basic ways that I have seen Unity used within projects.  Those are through classes directly using the Unity container, classes requiring injection of dependencies, and classes making use of the Service Locator pattern. The first usage of Unity is when classes are aware of the Unity container and directly call its Resolve method whenever they need the services advertised by an interface.  The up side of this approach is that IoC is utilized, but the down side is that every class has to be aware that Unity is being used and tied directly to that implementation. Many developers don't like the idea of as close a tie to specific IoC implementation as is represented by using Unity within all of your classes and for the most part I agree that this isn't a good idea.  As an alternative, classes can be designed for Dependency Injection.  Dependency Injection is where a force outside the class itself manipulates the object to provide implementations of the interfaces that the class needs to interact with the outside world.  This is typically done either through constructor injection where the object has a constructor that accepts an instance of each interface it requires or through property setters accepting the service providers.  When using dependency, I lean toward the use of constructor injection because I view the constructor as being a much better way to "discover" what is required for the instance to be ready for use.  During resolution, Unity looks for an injection constructor and will attempt to resolve instances of each interface required by the constructor, throwing an exception of unable to meet the advertised needs of the class.  The up side of this approach is that the needs of the class are very clearly advertised and the class is unaware of which IoC container (if any) is being used.  The down side of this approach is that you're required to maintain the objects passed to the constructor as instance variables throughout the life of your object and that objects which coordinate with many external services require a lot of additional constructor arguments (this gets ugly and may indicate a need for refactoring). The final way that I've seen and used Unity is to make use of the ServiceLocator pattern, of which the Patterns and Practices team has also provided a Unity-compatible implementation.  When using the ServiceLocator, your class calls ServiceLocator.Retrieve in places where it would have called Resolve on the Unity container.  Like using Unity directly, it does tie you directly to the ServiceLocator implementation and makes your code aware that dependency injection is taking place, but it does have the up side of giving you the freedom to swap out the underlying IoC container if necessary.  I'm not hugely concerned with hiding IoC entirely from the class (I view this as a "nice to have"), so the single biggest problem that I see with the ServiceLocator approach is that it provides no way to proactively advertise needs in the way that constructor injection does, allowing more opportunity for difficult to track runtime errors. This blog entry has not been intended in any way to be a definitive work on IoC, but rather as something to spur thought about why we program to interfaces and some ways to reach the intended value of the practice instead of having it just complicate your code.  I hope that it helps somebody begin or continue a journey away from being a "Cargo Cult Programmer".

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• Disaster, or Migration?

  - by Rob Farley

  This post is in two parts – technical and personal. And I should point out that it’s prompted in part by this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Allen Kinsel. First, the technical: I’ve had a few conversations with people recently about migration – moving a SQL Server database from one box to another (sometimes, but not primarily, involving an upgrade). One question that tends to come up is that of downtime. Obviously there will be some period of time between the old server being available and the new one. The way that most people seem to think of migration is this: Build a new server. Stop people from using the old server. Take a backup of the old server Restore it on the new server. Reconfigure the client applications (or alternatively, configure the new server to use the same address as the old) Make the new server online. There are other things involved, such as testing, of course. But this is essentially the process that people tell me they’re planning to follow. The bit that I want to look at today (as you’ve probably guessed from my title) is the “backup and restore” section. If a SQL database is using the Simple Recovery Model, then the only restore option is the last database backup. This backup could be full or differential. The transaction log never gets backed up in the Simple Recovery Model. Instead, it truncates regularly to stay small. One that’s using the Full Recovery Model (or Bulk-Logged) won’t truncate its log – the log must be backed up regularly. This provides the benefit of having a lot more option available for restores. It’s a requirement for most systems of High Availability, because if you’re making sure that a spare box is up-and-running, ready to take over, then you have to be interested in the logs that are happening on the current box, rather than truncating them all the time. A High Availability system such as Mirroring, Replication or Log Shipping will initialise the spare machine by restoring a full database backup (and maybe a differential backup if available), and then any subsequent log backups. Once the secondary copy is close, transactions can be applied to keep the two in sync. The main aspect of any High Availability system is to have a redundant system that is ready to take over. So the similarity for migration should be obvious. If you need to move a database from one box to another, then introducing a High Availability mechanism can help. By turning on the Full Recovery Model and then taking a backup (so that the now-interesting logs have some context), logs start being kept, and are therefore available for getting the new box ready (even if it’s an upgraded version). When the migration is ready to occur, a failover can be done, letting the new server take over the responsibility of the old, just as if a disaster had happened. Except that this is a planned failover, not a disaster at all. There’s a fine line between a disaster and a migration. Failovers can be useful in patching, upgrading, maintenance, and more. Hopefully, even an unexpected disaster can be seen as just another failover, and there can be an opportunity there – perhaps to get some work done on the principal server to increase robustness. And if I’ve just set up a High Availability system for even the simplest of databases, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. :) So now the personal: It’s been an interesting time recently... June has been somewhat odd. A court case with which I was involved got resolved (through mediation). I can’t go into details, but my lawyers tell me that I’m allowed to say how I feel about it. The answer is ‘lousy’. I don’t regret pursuing it as long as I did – but in the end I had to make a decision regarding the commerciality of letting it continue, and I’m going to look forward to the days when the kind of money I spent on my lawyers is small change. Mind you, if I had a similar situation with an employer, I’d do the same again, but that doesn’t really stop me feeling frustrated about it. The following day I had to fly to country Victoria to see my grandmother, who wasn’t expected to last the weekend. She’s still around a week later as I write this, but her 92-year-old body has basically given up on her. She’s been a Christian all her life, and is looking forward to eternity. We’ll all miss her though, and it’s hard to see my family grieving. Then on Tuesday, I was driving back to the airport with my family to come home, when something really bizarre happened. We were travelling down the freeway, just pulled out to go past a truck (farm-truck sized, not a semi-trailer), when a car-sized mass of metal fell off it. It was something like an industrial air-conditioner, but from where I was sitting, it was just a mass of spinning metal, like something out of a movie (one friend described it as “holidays by Michael Bay”). Somehow, and I’m really don’t know how, the part of it nearest us bounced high enough to clear the car, and there wasn’t even a scratch. We pulled over the check, and I was just thanking God that we’d changed lanes when we had, and that we remained unharmed. I had all kinds of thoughts about what could’ve happened if we’d had something that size land on the windscreen... All this has drilled home that while I feel that I haven’t provided as well for the family as I could’ve done (like by pursuing an expensive legal case), I shouldn’t even consider that I have proper control over things. I get to live life, and make decisions based on what I feel is right at the time. But I’m not going to get everything right, and there will be things that feel like disasters, some which could’ve been in my control and some which are very much beyond my control. The case feels like something I could’ve pursued differently, a disaster that could’ve been avoided in some way. Gran dying is lousy of course. An accident on the freeway would have been awful. I need to recognise that the worst disasters are ones that I can’t affect, and that I need to look at things in context – perhaps seeing everything that happens as a migration instead. Life is never the same from one day to the next. Every event has a before and an after – sometimes it’s clearly positive, sometimes it’s not. I remember good events in my life (such as my wedding), and bad (such as the loss of my father when I was ten, or the back injury I had eight years ago). I’m not suggesting that I know how to view everything from the “God works all things for good” perspective, but I am trying to look at last week as a migration of sorts. Those things are behind me now, and the future is in God’s hands. Hopefully I’ve learned things, and will be able to live accordingly. I’ve come through this time now, and even though I’ll miss Gran, I’ll see her again one day, and the future is bright.

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• Partner Blog Series: PwC Perspectives Part 2 - Jumpstarting your IAM program with R2

  - by Tanu Sood

  Identity and access management (IAM) isn’t a new concept. Over the past decade, companies have begun to address identity management through a variety of solutions that have primarily focused on provisioning. . The new age workforce is converging at a rapid pace with ever increasing demand to use diverse portfolio of applications and systems to interact and interface with their peers in the industry and customers alike. Oracle has taken a significant leap with their release of Identity and Access Management 11gR2 towards enabling this global workforce to conduct their business in a secure, efficient and effective manner. As companies deal with IAM business drivers, it becomes immediately apparent that holistic, rather than piecemeal, approaches better address their needs. When planning an enterprise-wide IAM solution, the first step is to create a common framework that serves as the foundation on which to build the cost, compliance and business process efficiencies. As a leading industry practice, IAM should be established on a foundation of accurate data for identity management, making this data available in a uniform manner to downstream applications and processes. Mature organizations are looking beyond IAM’s basic benefits to harness more advanced capabilities in user lifecycle management. For any organization looking to embark on an IAM initiative, consider the following use cases in managing and administering user access. Expanding the Enterprise Provisioning Footprint Almost all organizations have some helpdesk resources tied up in handling access requests from users, a distraction from their core job of handling problem tickets. This dependency has mushroomed from the traditional acceptance of provisioning solutions integrating and addressing only a portion of applications in the heterogeneous landscape Oracle Identity Manager (OIM) 11gR2 solves this problem by offering integration with third party ticketing systems as “disconnected applications”. It allows for the existing business processes to be seamlessly integrated into the system and tracked throughout its lifecycle. With minimal effort and analysis, an organization can begin integrating OIM with groups or applications that are involved with manually intensive access provisioning and de-provisioning activities. This aspect of OIM allows organizations to on-board applications and associated business processes quickly using out of box templates and frameworks. This is especially important for organizations looking to fold in users and resources from mergers and acquisitions. Simplifying Access Requests Organizations looking to implement access request solutions often find it challenging to get their users to accept and adopt the new processes.. So, how do we improve the user experience, make it intuitive and personalized and yet simplify the user access process? With R2, OIM helps organizations alleviate the challenge by placing the most used functionality front and centre in the new user request interface. Roles, application accounts, and entitlements can all be found in the same interface as catalog items, giving business users a single location to go to whenever they need to initiate, approve or track a request. Furthermore, if a particular item is not relevant to a user’s job function or area inside the organization, it can be hidden so as to not overwhelm or confuse the user with superfluous options. The ability to customize the user interface to suit your needs helps in exercising the business rules effectively and avoiding access proliferation within the organization. Saving Time with Templates A typical use case that is most beneficial to business users is flexibility to place, edit, and withdraw requests based on changing circumstances and business needs. With OIM R2, multiple catalog items can now be added and removed from the shopping cart, an ecommerce paradigm that many users are already familiar with. This feature can be especially useful when setting up a large number of new employees or granting existing department or group access to a newly integrated application. Additionally, users can create their own shopping cart templates in order to complete subsequent requests more quickly. This feature saves the user from having to search for and select items all over again if a request is similar to a previous one. Advanced Delegated Administration A key feature of any provisioning solution should be to empower each business unit in managing their own access requests. By bringing administration closer to the user, you improve user productivity, enable efficiency and alleviate the administration overhead. To do so requires a federated services model so that the business units capable of shouldering the onus of user life cycle management of their business users can be enabled to do so. OIM 11gR2 offers advanced administrative options for creating, managing and controlling business logic and workflows through easy to use administrative interface and tools that can be exposed to delegated business administrators. For example, these business administrators can establish or modify how certain requests and operations should be handled within their business unit based on a number of attributes ranging from the type of request or the risk level of the individual items requested. Closed-Loop Remediation Security continues to be a major concern for most organizations. Identity management solutions bolster security by ensuring only the right users have the right access to the right resources. To prevent unauthorized access and where it already exists, the ability to detect and remediate it, are key requirements of an enterprise-grade proven solution. But the challenge with most solutions today is that some of this information still exists in silos. And when changes are made to systems directly, not all information is captured. With R2, oracle is offering a comprehensive Identity Governance solution that our customer organizations are leveraging for closed loop remediation that allows for an automated way for administrators to revoke unauthorized access. The change is automatically captured and the action noted for continued management. Conclusion While implementing provisioning solutions, it is important to keep the near term and the long term goals in mind. The provisioning solution should always be a part of a larger security and identity management program but with the ability to seamlessly integrate not only with the company’s infrastructure but also have the ability to leverage the information, business models compiled and used by the other identity management solutions. This allows organizations to reduce the cost of ownership, close security gaps and leverage the existing infrastructure. And having done so a multiple clients’ sites, this is the approach we recommend. In our next post, we will take a journey through our experiences of advising clients looking to upgrade to R2 from a previous version or migrating from a different solution. Meet the Writers:   Praveen Krishna is a Manager in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  Over the last decade Praveen has helped clients plan, architect and implement Oracle identity solutions across diverse industries.  His experience includes delivering security across diverse topics like network, infrastructure, application and data where he brings a holistic point of view to problem solving. Dharma Padala is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has been implementing medium to large scale Identity Management solutions across multiple industries including utility, health care, entertainment, retail and financial sectors.   Dharma has 14 years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which he has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past 8 years. Scott MacDonald is a Director in the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has consulted for several clients across multiple industries including financial services, health care, automotive and retail.   Scott has 10 years of experience in delivering Identity Management solutions. John Misczak is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  He has experience implementing multiple Identity and Access Management solutions, specializing in Oracle Identity Manager and Business Process Engineering Language (BPEL). Jenny (Xiao) Zhang is a member of the Advisory Security practice within PwC.  She has consulted across multiple industries including financial services, entertainment and retail. Jenny has three years of experience in delivering IT solutions out of which she has been implementing Identity Management solutions for the past one and a half years.

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• I Know What I Did This Summer: Put Down Trex Decking

  - by thatjeffsmith

  If you’re wondering why I would bore everyone with my pictures and frequent status updates/tweets from the past week – it’s so I could document the process of refurbishing my deck, or what some would call a porch. When we go to take a vacation, buy a car, do anything – we also read personal blogs to get the real story. So, if you’re curious about what it takes to tackle this sort of project, read on. Skills/Equipment/Manpower We Possessed I took the old decking out by myself. I’m about 230 lbs, more than 6′ tall, and I’m pretty healthy. This took about 8 hours over two afternoons. Three of us put the deck back together. My wife has two engineering degrees. Her father also has two engineering degrees. Lots of brainpower available here. Also, her dad ran the public works department for a country for more than 20 years – so lots and lots of practical experience on hand. We had a compound mitre saw, a skilsaw, 2-3 crowbars, a framing hammer, 3 cordless drills, a corded drill, lots of sawhorses, a power sander, an angle grinder, a 10×10 Coleman canopy tent, a Ford F-150 pickup truck, outdoor speakers and lots of iTunes playlists, plenty of water and cold beer. Why We Did This Our deck was relatively young – it was built in 2005. However, the pressure treated boards must not have been adequately maintained before we bought the house. I had powerwashed the deck every other year and had it stained a few times. The boards just rotted. We’re going to be in the house for a long time, and we wanted something that would look nice and require little maintenance. More bad deck boards The deck boards were in bad shape Things We Learned The two most important things: The hidden fasteners have to be put in JUST right. Wedge them into the grooved board, then bend down the bit that is screwed down. We didn’t do this on the first board and couldn’t get the second board to fit nearly close enough. Watching the official TREX YouTube video helped immensely, and we should have watched that first. When pre-drilling holes for the boards that need screwed down – DO NOT pre-drill through the underlying framing wood. ONLY pre-drill through the TREX itself. The screw won’t seat in the board properly. Instead of sitting down flush with the board, it will stop at the top of the board and just spin. I had to call the the place that sold me the screws to find this out. So about a third of our screws look like crap. If it doesn’t look or feel right – stop everything and pick up your computer or your phone. It’s not right, and it will be much easier to stop and find out why. We didn’t do this, and now I’m going to see every screw that’s not flush with the boards and get upset. Oh well. The Process How much time did it take? Well I spent about 8 hours taking the deck apart. And then the 3 of use spent 8 hours the first day, 10 hours the second day, 8 hours the third, and another 6 hours on the fourth day. That’s like 104 man-hours. We supposedly saved four or five thousand dollars in labor, but don’t do the math here or you might get a bit upset. The main thing is that we got what we wanted, and there won’t be any surprises later. Now for some pictures… This 6”+ pry bar made the destruction of the old deck much easier Most of the joists, once exposed, were OK. This joist wasn’t sitting on ANYTHING before. We think a lazy gas person cut the board to sneak a gas line in. Awesome… These monster lag bolts had to be accounted for when putting in the additional framing The border pattern Sheri wanted to put in required a lot more framing. These were the first boards to go down – we screwed them in as there was no way to attach clips I sat, kicked in the boards, and then drilled these clips in – but my wife was able to go MUCH faster by using her hands to lock the boards in and drill on her knees. I liked locking the board in with my feet when they needed to be ‘encouraged’ to go straight. The first board took FOREVER to go in, but then when we got rolling, we were able to put in a 20′ board in less than 10 minutes. This was end of construction day #2 – we got much further than we thought we would. Ah, the dreaded last 10% – what to do here? Remember those ‘floating’ stringers? Yeah, we fixed that up a bit, too. My wife used a website (and her brain) to calculate exactly how to cut the stringers to give us the rise/run we needed with the proper clearance and all that jazz. The stairs with stringers and toe kicks – this was worth the effort It started raining on us as I screwed down the steps – this we managed to get our shade tent up on the deck to protect us from the rain too The stairs, finished Finished, mostly Good corner shot The top of the stairs Stairs, looking down Celebratory beer In Summary There are a few things we’re not happy with. I think we can fix them up – but later. I have a few things left to finish, rewire the lighting, get the gas grille put back in, and rehang some screen doors. I was expecting this to be a lot worse than it was. If I didn’t have the help, I would have never done it myself. But I’m glad that I did have that help and did do that project. It’s not often you get to spend that kind of qualify time with family and building cool stuff.

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• D2K to OA Framework Transition

  - by PRajkumar

  What is the difference between D2K form and OA Framework? It is a very innocent but important question for someone that desires to make transition from D2K to OA Framework. I hope you have already read and implemented OA Framework Getting Started. I will re-visit my own experience of implementing HelloWorld program in "OA Framework". When I implemented HelloWorld a year ago, I had no clue as to what I was doing & why I was doing those steps. I merely copied the steps from Oracle Tutorial without understanding them. Hence in this blog, I will try to explain in simple manner the meaning of OA Framework HelloWorld Program and compare the steps to D2K form [where possible]. To keep things simple, only basics will be discussed. Following key Steps were needed for HelloWorld Step 1 Create a new Workspace and a new Project as dictated by Oracle's tutorial. When defining project, you will specify a default package, which in this case was oracle.apps.ak.hello This means the following: - ak is the short name of the Application in Oracle           [means fnd_applications.short_name] hello is the name of your project Step 2 Next, you will create a OA Page within hello project Think OA Page as the fmx file itself in D2K. I am saying so because this page gets attached to the form function. This page will be created within hello project, hence the package name oracle.apps.ak.hello.webui Note the webui, it is a convention to have page in webui, means this page represents the Web User Interface You will assign the default AM [OAApplicationModule]. Think of AM "Connection Manager" and "Transaction State Manager" for your page          I can't co-relate this to anything in D2k, as there is no concept of Connection Pooling and that D2k is not stateless. Reason being that as soon as you kick off a D2K Form, it connects to a single session of Oracle and sticks to that single Oracle database session. So is not the case in OAF, hence AM is needed. Step 3 You create Region within the Page. ·         Region is what will store your fields. Text input fields will be of type messageTextInput. Think of Canvas in D2K. You can have nested regions. Stacked Canvas in D2K comes the closest to this component of OA Framework Step 4 Add a button to one of the nested regions The itemStyle should be submitButton, in case you want the page to be submitted when this button is clicked There is no WHEN-BUTTON-PRESSED trigger in OAF. In Framework, you will add a controller java code to handle events like Form Submit button clicks. JDeveloper generates the default code for you. Primarily two functions [should I call methods] will be created processRequest [for UI Rendering Handling] and processFormRequest          Think of processRequest as WHEN-NEW-FORM-INSTANCE, though processRequest is very restrictive. Note What is the difference between processRequest and processFormRequest? These two methods are available in the Default Controller class that gets created. processFormRequest This method is commonly used to react/respond to the event that has taken place, for example click of a button. Some examples are if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Cancel") != null) (Do your processing for Cancellation/ Rollback) if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Submit") != null) (Do your validations and commit here) if(oapagecontext.getParameter("Update") != null) (Do your validations and commit here) In the above three examples, you could be calling oapagecontext.forwardImmediately to re-direct the page navigation to some other page if needed. processRequest In this method, usually page rendering related code is written. Effectively, each GUI component is a bean that gets initialised during processRequest. Those who are familiar with D2K forms, something like pre-query may be written in this method. Step 5 In the controller to access the value in field "HelloName" the command is String userContent = pageContext.getParameter("HelloName"); In D2k, we used :block.field. In OAFramework, at submission of page, all the field values get passed into to OAPageContext object. Use getParameter to access the field value To set the value of the field, use OAMessageTextInputBean field HelloName = (OAMessageTextInputBean)webBean.findChildRecursive("HelloName"); fieldHelloName.setText(pageContext,"Setting the default value" ); Note when setting field value in controller: Note 1. Do not set the value in processFormRequest Note 2. If the field comes from View Object, then do not use setText in controller Note 3. For control fields [that are not based on View Objects], you can use setText to assign values in processRequest method Lets take some notes to expand beyond the HelloWorld Project Note 1 In D2K-forms we sort of created a Window, attached to Canvas, and then fields within that Canvas. However in OA Framework, think of Page being fmx/Window, think of Region being a Canvas, and fields being within Regions. This is not a formal/accurate understanding of analogy between D2k and Framework, but is close to being logical. Note 2 In D2k, your Forms fmb file was compiled to fmx. It was fmx file that was deployed on mid-tier. In case of OAF, your OA Page is nothing but a XML file. We call this MDS [meta data]. Whatever name you give to "Page" in OAF, an XML file of the same name gets created. This xml file must then be loaded into database by using XML Importer command. Note 3 Apart from MDS XML file, almost everything else is merely deployed to your mid-tier. Usually this is underneath $JAVA_TOP/oracle/apps/../.. All java files will go underneath java top/oracle/apps/../.. etc. Note 4 When building tutorial, ignore the steps for setting "Attribute Sets". These are not mandatory. Oracle might just have developed their tutorials without including these. Think of these like Visual Attributes of D2K forms Note 5 Controller is where you will write any java code in OA Framework. You can create a Controller per Page or have a different Controller for each of the Regions with the same Page. Note 6 In the method processFormRequest of the Controller, you can access the values of the page by using notation pageContext.getParameter("<fieldname here>"). This method processFormRequest is executed when the OAF Screen/Page is submitted by click of a button. Note 7 Inside the controller, all the Database Related interactions for example interaction with View Objects happen via Application Module. But why so? Because Application Module Manages the transaction state of the Application. OAApplicationModuleImpl oaapplicationmoduleimpl = OAApplicationModuleImpl)oapagecontext.getApplicationModule(oawebbean); OADBTransaction oadbtransaction = OADBTransaction)oaapplicationmoduleimpl.getDBTransaction(); Note 8 In D2K, we have control block or a block based on database view. Similarly, in OA Framework, if the field does not have view Object attached, then it is like a control field. Hence in HelloWorld example, field HelloName is a control field [in D2K terminology]. A view Object can either be based on a view/table, synonym or on a SQL statement. Note 9 I wish to access the fields in multi record block that is based on view Object. Can I do this in Controller? Sure you can. To traverse through those records, do the below ·         Get the reference to the View Object using (OAViewObject)oapagecontext.getApplicationModule(oawebbean).findViewObject("VO Name Here") ·         Loop through the records in View Objects using count returned from oaviewobject.getFetchedRowCount() ·         For each record, fetch the value of the fields within the loop as oracle.jbo.Row row = oaviewobject.getRowAtRangeIndex(loop index here); (String)row.getAttribute("Column name of VO here ");

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• Hosting and consuming WCF services without configuration files

  - by martinsj

  In this post, I'll demonstrate how to configure both the host and the client in code without the need for configuring services i the <system.serviceModel> section of the config-file. In fact, you don't need a  <system.serviceModel> section at all. What you'll do need (and want) sometimes, is the Uri of the service in the configuration file. Configuring the Uri of the the service is actually only needed for the client or when self-hosting, not when hosting in IIS. So, exactly What do we need to configure? The binding type and the binding constraints The metadata behavior Debug behavior You can of course configure even more, and even more if you want to, WCF is after all the king of configuration… As an example I'll be hosting and consuming a service that removes most of the default constraints for WCF-services, using a BasicHttpBinding. Of course, in regards to security, it is probably better to have some constraints on the server, but this is only a demonstration. The ServerConfig class in the code beneath is a static helper class that will be used in the examples. In this post, I’ll be using this helper-class for all configuration, for both the server and the client. In WCF, the  client and the server have both their own WCF-configuration. With this piece of code, they will be sharing the same configuration. 1: public static class ServiceConfig 2: { 3: public static Binding DefaultBinding 4: { 5: get 6: { 7: var binding = new BasicHttpBinding(); 8: Configure(binding); 9: return binding; 10: } 11: } 12:  13: public static void Configure(HttpBindingBase binding) 14: { 15: if (binding == null) 16: { 17: throw new ArgumentException("Argument 'binding' cannot be null. Cannot configure binding."); 18: } 19:  20: binding.SendTimeout = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 30, 0); // 30 minute timeout 21: binding.MaxBufferSize = Int32.MaxValue; 22: binding.MaxBufferPoolSize = 2147483647; 23: binding.MaxReceivedMessageSize = Int32.MaxValue; 24: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxArrayLength = Int32.MaxValue; 25: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxBytesPerRead = Int32.MaxValue; 26: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxDepth = Int32.MaxValue; 27: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxNameTableCharCount = Int32.MaxValue; 28: binding.ReaderQuotas.MaxStringContentLength = Int32.MaxValue; 29: } 30:  31: public static ServiceMetadataBehavior ServiceMetadataBehavior 32: { 33: get 34: { 35: return new ServiceMetadataBehavior 36: { 37: HttpGetEnabled = true, 38: MetadataExporter = {PolicyVersion = PolicyVersion.Policy15} 39: }; 40: } 41: } 42:  43: public static ServiceDebugBehavior ServiceDebugBehavior 44: { 45: get 46: { 47: var smb = new ServiceDebugBehavior(); 48: Configure(smb); 49: return smb; 50: } 51: } 52:  53:  54: public static void Configure(ServiceDebugBehavior behavior) 55: { 56: if (behavior == null) 57: { 58: throw new ArgumentException("Argument 'behavior' cannot be null. Cannot configure debug behavior."); 59: } 60: 61: behavior.IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true; 62: } 63: } Configuring the server There are basically two ways to host a WCF service, in IIS and self-hosting. When hosting a WCF service in a production environment using SOA architecture, you'll be most likely hosting it in IIS. When testing the service in integration tests, it's very handy to be able to self-host services in the unit-tests. In fact, you can share the the WCF configuration for self-hosted services and services hosted in IIS. And that is exactly what you want to do, testing the same configurations for test and production environments.   Configuring when Self-hosting When self-hosting, in order to start the service, you'll have to instantiate the ServiceHost class, configure the  service and open it. 1: // Create the service-host. 2: var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(MyService), endpoint); 3:  4: // Configure the binding 5: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IMyService), ServiceConfig.DefaultBinding, endpoint); 6:  7: // Configure metadata behavior 8: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(ServiceConfig.ServiceMetadataBehavior); 9:  10: // Configure debgug behavior 11: ServiceConfig.Configure((ServiceDebugBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors[typeof(ServiceDebugBehavior)]); 12: 13: // Start listening to the service 14: host.Open(); 15:  Configuring when hosting in IIS When you create a WCF service application with the wizard in Visual Studio, you'll end up with bits and pieces of code in order to get the service running: Svc-file with codebehind. A interface to the service Web.config In order to get rid of the configuration in the <system.serviceModel> section, which the wizard has generated for us, we must tell the service that we have a factory that will create the service for us. We do this by changing the markup for the svc-file: 1: <%@ ServiceHost Language="C#" Debug="true" Service="Namespace.MyService" Factory="Namespace.ServiceHostFactory" %> The markup tells IIS that we have a factory called ServiceHostFactory for this service. The service factory has a method we can override which will be called when someone asks IIS for the service. There are overloads we can override: 1: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHostBase CreateServiceHost(string constructorString, Uri[] baseAddresses) 2: System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) 3:  In this example, we'll be using the last one, so our implementation looks like this: 1: public class ServiceHostFactory : System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceHostFactory 2: { 3:  4: protected override System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) 5: { 6: var host = base.CreateServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddresses); 7: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(ServiceConfig.ServiceMetadataBehavior); 8: ServiceConfig.Configure((ServiceDebugBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors[typeof(ServiceDebugBehavior)]); 9: return host; 10: } 11: } 12:  1: public class ServiceHostFactory : System.ServiceModel.Activation.ServiceHostFactory 2: { 3: 4: protected override System.ServiceModel.ServiceHost CreateServiceHost(Type serviceType, Uri[] baseAddresses) 5: { 6: var host = base.CreateServiceHost(serviceType, baseAddresses); 7: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(ServiceConfig.ServiceMetadataBehavior); 8: ServiceConfig.Configure((ServiceDebugBehavior)host.Description.Behaviors[typeof(ServiceDebugBehavior)]); 9: return host; 10: } 11: } 12: As you can see, we are using the same configuration helper we used when self-hosting. Now, when you have a factory, the <system.serviceModel> section of the configuration can be removed, because the section will be ignored when the service has a custom factory. If you want to configure something else in the config-file, one could configure in some other section.   Configuring the client Microsoft has helpfully created a ChannelFactory class in order to create a proxy client. When using this approach, you don't have generate those awfull proxy classes for the client. If you share the contracts with the server in it's own assembly like in the layer diagram under, you can share the same piece of code. The contracts in WCF are the interface to the service and if any, the datacontracts (custom types) the service depends on. Using the ChannelFactory with our configuration helper-class is very simple: 1: var identity = EndpointIdentity.CreateDnsIdentity("localhost"); 2: var endpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(endPoint, identity); 3: var factory = new ChannelFactory<IMyService>(DeployServiceConfig.DefaultBinding, endpointAddress); 4: using (var myService = new factory.CreateChannel()) 5: { 6: myService.Hello(); 7: } 8: factory.Close();   Happy configuration!

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• A Bite With No Teeth&ndash;Demystifying Non-Compete Clauses

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  *DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and this post in no way should be considered legal advice. I’m also in Canada, so references made are to Canadian court cases. I received a signed letter the other day, a reminder from my previous employer about some clauses associated with my employment and entry into an employee stock purchase program. So since this is in effect for the next 12 months, I guess I’m not starting that new job tomorrow. I’m kidding of course. How outrageous, how presumptuous, pompous, and arrogant that a company – any company – would actually place these conditions upon an employee. And yet, this is not uncommon. Especially in the IT industry, we see time and again similar wording in our employment agreements. But…are these legal? Is there any teeth behind the threat of the bite? Luckily, the answer seems to be ‘No’. I want to highlight two cases that support this. The first is Lyons v. Multari. In a nutshell, Dentist hires younger Dentist to be an associate. In their short, handwritten agreement, a non-compete clause was written stating “Protective Covenant. 3 yrs. – 5mi” (meaning you can’t set up shop within 5 miles for 3 years). Well, the young dentist left and did start an oral surgery office within 5 miles and within 3 years. Off to court they go! The initial judge sided with the older dentist, but on appeal it was overturned. Feel free to read the transcript of the decision here, but let me highlight one portion from section [19]: The general rule in most common law jurisdictions is that non-competition clauses in employment contracts are void. The sections following [19] explain further, and discuss Elsley v. J.G. Collins Insurance Agency Ltd. and its impact on Canadian law in this regard. The second case is Winnipeg Livestock Sales Ltd. v. Plewman. Desmond Plewman is an auctioneer, and worked at Winnipeg Livestock Sales. Part of his employment agreement was that he could not work for a competitor for 18 months if he left the company. Well, he left, and took up an important role in a competing company. The case went to court and as with Lyons v. Multari, the initial judge found in favour of the plaintiffs. Also as in the first case, that was overturned on appeal. Again, read through the transcript of the decision, but consider section [28]: In other words, even though Plewman has a great deal of skill as an auctioneer, Winnipeg Livestock has no proprietary interest in his professional skill and experience, even if they were acquired during his time working for Winnipeg Livestock.  Thus, Winnipeg Livestock has the burden of establishing that it has a legitimate proprietary interest requiring protection.  On this key question there is little evidence before the Court.  The record discloses that part of Plewman’s job was to “mingle with the … crowd” and to telephone customers and prospective customers about future prospects for the sale of livestock.  It may seem reasonable to assume that Winnipeg Livestock has a legitimate proprietary interest in its customer connections; but there is no evidence to indicate that there is any significant degree of “customer loyalty” in the business, as opposed to customers making choices based on other considerations such as cost, availability and the like. So are there any incidents where a non-compete can actually be valid? Yes, and these are considered “exceptional” cases, meaning that the situation meets certain circumstances. Michael Carabash has a great blog series discussing the above mentioned cases as well as the difference between a non-compete and non-solicit agreement. He talks about the exceptional criteria: In summary, the authorities reveal that the following circumstances will generally be relevant in determining whether a case is an “exceptional” one so that a general non-competition clause will be found to be reasonable: - The length of service with the employer. - The amount of personal service to clients. - Whether the employee dealt with clients exclusively, or on a sustained or     recurring basis. - Whether the knowledge about the client which the employee gained was of a   confidential nature, or involved an intimate knowledge of the client’s   particular needs, preferences or idiosyncrasies. - Whether the nature of the employee’s work meant that the employee had   influence over clients in the sense that the clients relied upon the employee’s   advice, or trusted the employee. - If competition by the employee has already occurred, whether there is   evidence that clients have switched their custom to him, especially without   direct solicitation. - The nature of the business with respect to whether personal knowledge of   the clients’ confidential matters is required. - The nature of the business with respect to the strength of customer loyalty,   how clients are “won” and kept, and whether the clientele is a recurring one. - The community involved and whether there were clientele yet to be exploited   by anyone. I close this blog post with a final quote, one from Zvulony & Co’s blog post on this subject. Again, all of this is not official legal advice, but I think we can see what all these sources are pointing towards. To answer my earlier question, there’s no teeth behind the threat of the bite. In light of this list, and the decisions in Lyons and Orlan, it is reasonably certain that in most employment situations a non-competition clause will be ineffective in protecting an employer from a departing employee who wishes to compete in the same business. The Courts have been relatively consistent in their position that if a non-solicitation clause can protect an employer’s interests, then a non-competition clause is probably unreasonable. Employers (or their solicitors) should avoid the inclination to draft restrictive covenants in broad, catch-all language. Or in other words, when drafting a restrictive covenant – take only what you need! D

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• Using IIS Logs for Performance Testing with Visual Studio

  - by Tarun Arora

  In this blog post I’ll show you how you can play back the IIS Logs in Visual Studio to automatically generate the web performance tests. You can also download the sample solution I am demo-ing in the blog post. Introduction Performance testing is as important for new websites as it is for evolving websites. If you already have your website running in production you could mine the information available in IIS logs to analyse the dense zones (most used pages) and performance test those pages rather than wasting time testing & tuning the least used pages in your application. What are IIS Logs To help with server use and analysis, IIS is integrated with several types of log files. These log file formats provide information on a range of websites and specific statistics, including Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, user information and site visits as well as dates, times and queries. If you are using IIS 7 and above you will find the log files in the following directory C:\Interpub\Logs\ Walkthrough 1. Download and Install Log Parser from the Microsoft download Centre. You should see the LogParser.dll in the install folder, the default install location is C:\Program Files (x86)\Log Parser 2.2. LogParser.dll gives us a library to query the iis log files programmatically. By the way if you haven’t used Log Parser in the past, it is a is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory. More details… 2. Create a new test project in Visual Studio. Let’s call it IISLogsToWebPerfTestDemo.   3.  Delete the UnitTest1.cs class that gets created by default. Right click the solution and add a project of type class library, name it, IISLogsToWebPerfTestEngine. Delete the default class Program.cs that gets created with the project. 4. Under the IISLogsToWebPerfTestEngine project add a reference to Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.WebTestFramework – c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\PublicAssemblies\Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.WebTestFramework.dll LogParser also called MSUtil - c:\users\tarora\documents\visual studio 2010\Projects\IisLogsToWebPerfTest\IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine\obj\Debug\Interop.MSUtil.dll 5. Right click IISLogsToWebPerfTestEngine project and add a new classes – IISLogReader.cs The IISLogReader class queries the iis logs using the log parser. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using MSUtil; using LogQuery = MSUtil.LogQueryClassClass; using IISLogInputFormat = MSUtil.COMIISW3CInputContextClassClass; using LogRecordSet = MSUtil.ILogRecordset; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting; using System.Diagnostics; namespace IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine { // By making use of log parser it is possible to query the iis log using select queries public class IISLogReader { private string _iisLogPath; public IISLogReader(string iisLogPath) { _iisLogPath = iisLogPath; } public IEnumerable<WebTestRequest> GetRequests() { LogQuery logQuery = new LogQuery(); IISLogInputFormat iisInputFormat = new IISLogInputFormat(); // currently these columns give us suffient information to construct the web test requests string query = @"SELECT s-ip, s-port, cs-method, cs-uri-stem, cs-uri-query FROM " + _iisLogPath; LogRecordSet recordSet = logQuery.Execute(query, iisInputFormat); // Apply a bit of transformation while (!recordSet.atEnd()) { ILogRecord record = recordSet.getRecord(); if (record.getValueEx("cs-method").ToString() == "GET") { string server = record.getValueEx("s-ip").ToString(); string path = record.getValueEx("cs-uri-stem").ToString(); string querystring = record.getValueEx("cs-uri-query").ToString(); StringBuilder urlBuilder = new StringBuilder(); urlBuilder.Append("http://"); urlBuilder.Append(server); urlBuilder.Append(path); if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(querystring)) { urlBuilder.Append("?"); urlBuilder.Append(querystring); } // You could make substitutions by introducing parameterized web tests. WebTestRequest request = new WebTestRequest(urlBuilder.ToString()); Debug.WriteLine(request.UrlWithQueryString); yield return request; } recordSet.moveNext(); } Console.WriteLine(" That's it! Closing the reader"); recordSet.close(); } } }   6. Connect the dots by adding the project reference ‘IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine’ to ‘IisLogsToWebPerfTest’. Right click the ‘IisLogsToWebPerfTest’ project and add a new class ‘WebTest1Coded.cs’ The WebTest1Coded.cs inherits from the WebTest class. By overriding the GetRequestMethod we can inject the log files to the IISLogReader class which uses Log parser to query the log file and extract the web requests to generate the web test request which is yielded back for play back when the test is run. namespace IisLogsToWebPerfTest { using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.WebTesting.Rules; using IisLogsToWebPerfTestEngine; // This class is a coded web performance test implementation, that simply passes // the path of the iis logs to the IisLogReader class which does the heavy // lifting of reading the contents of the log file and converting them to tests. // You could have multiple such classes that inherit from WebTest and implement // GetRequestEnumerator Method and pass differnt log files for different tests. public class WebTest1Coded : WebTest { public WebTest1Coded() { this.PreAuthenticate = true; } public override IEnumerator<WebTestRequest> GetRequestEnumerator() { // substitute the highlighted path with the path of the iis log file IISLogReader reader = new IISLogReader(@"C:\Demo\iisLog1.log"); foreach (WebTestRequest request in reader.GetRequests()) { yield return request; } } } }   7. Its time to fire the test off and see the iis log playback as a web performance test. From the Test menu choose Test View Window you should be able to see the WebTest1Coded test show up. Highlight the test and press Run selection (you can also debug the test in case you face any failures during test execution). 8. Optionally you can create a Load Test by keeping ‘WebTest1Coded’ as the base test. Conclusion You have just helped your testing team, you now have become the coolest developer in your organization! Jokes apart, log parser and web performance test together allow you to save a lot of time by not having to worry about what to test or even worrying about how to record the test. If you haven’t already, download the solution from here. You can take this to the next level by using LogParser to extract the log files as part of an end of day batch to a database. See the usage trends by user this solution over a longer term and have your tests consume the web requests now stored in the database to generate the web performance tests. If you like the post, don’t forget to share … Keep RocKiNg!

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• “It’s only test code…”

  - by Chris George

  “Let me hack this in, it’s only test code”, “Don’t worry about getting it reviewed, it’s only test code”, “It doesn’t have to be elegant or efficient, it’s only test code”… do these phrases sound familiar? Chances are if you’ve working with test automation, at one point or other you will have heard these phrases, you have probably even used them yourself! What is certain is that code written under this “it’s only test code” mantra will come back and bite you in the arse! I’ve recently encountered a case where a test was giving a false positive, therefore hiding a real product bug because that test code was very badly written. Firstly it was very difficult to understand what the test was actually trying to achieve let alone how it was doing it, and this complexity masked a simple logic error. These issues are real and they do happen. Let’s take a step back from this and look at what we are trying to do. We are writing test code that tests product code, and we do this to create a suite of tests that will help protect our software against regressions. This test code is making sure that the product behaves as it should by employing some sort of expected result verification. The simple cases of these are generally not a problem. However, automation allows us to explore more complex scenarios in many more permutations. As this complexity increases then so does the complexity of the test code. It is at this point that code which has not been architected properly will cause problems.   Keep your friends close… So, how do we make sure we are doing it right? The development teams I have worked on have always had Test Engineers working very closely with their Software Engineers. This is something that I have always tried to take full advantage of. They are coding experts! So run your ideas past them, ask for advice on how to structure your code, help you design your data structures. This may require a shift in your teams viewpoint, as contrary to this section title and folklore, Software Engineers are not actually the mortal enemy of Test Engineers. As time progresses, and test automation becomes more and more ingrained in what we do, the two roles are converging more than ever. Over the 16 years I have spent as a Test Engineer, I have seen the grey area between the two roles grow significantly larger. This serves to strengthen the relationship and common bond between the two roles which helps to make test code activities so much easier!   Pair for the win Possibly the best thing you could do to write good test code is to pair program on the task. This will serve a few purposes. you will get the benefit of the Software Engineers knowledge and experience the Software Engineer will gain knowledge on the testing process. Sharing the love is a wonderful thing! two pairs of eyes are always better than one… And so are two brains. Between the two of you, I will guarantee you will derive more useful test cases than if it was just one of you.   Code reviews Another policy which certainly pays dividends is the practice of code reviews. By having one of your peers review your code before you commit it serves two purposes. Firstly, it forces you to explain your code. Just the act of doing this will often pick up errors in your code. Secondly, it gets yet another pair of eyes on your code! I cannot stress enough how important code reviews are. The benefits they offer apply as much to product code as test code. In short, Software and Test Engineers should all be doing them! It can be extended even further by getting test code reviewed by a Software Engineer and a Test Engineer, and likewise product code. This serves to keep both functions in the loop with changes going on within your code base.   Learn from your devs I briefly touched on this earlier but I’d like to go into more detail here. Pairing with your Software Engineers when writing your test code is such an amazing opportunity to improve your coding skills. As I sit here writing this article waiting to be called into court for jury service, it reminds me that it takes a lot of patience to be a Test Engineer, almost as much as it takes to be a juror! However tempting it is to go rushing in and start writing your automated tests, resist that urge. Discuss what you want to achieve then talk through the approach you’re going to take. Then code it up together. I find it really enlightening to ask questions like ‘is there a better way to do this?’ Or ‘is this how you would code it?’ The latter question, especially, is where I learn the most. I’ve found that most Software Engineers will be reluctant to show you the ‘right way’ to code something when writing tests because they perceive the ‘right way’ to be too complicated for the Test Engineer (e.g. not mentioning LINQ and instead doing something verbose). So by asking how THEY would code it, it unleashes their true dev-ness and advanced code usually ensues! I would like to point out, however, that you don’t have to accept their method as the final answer. On numerous occasions I have opted for the more simple/verbose solution because I found the code written by the Software Engineer too advanced and therefore I would find it unreadable when I return to the code in a months’ time! Always keep the target audience in mind when writing clever code, and in my case that is mostly Test Engineers.  

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• Simplifying Human Capital Management with Mobile Applications

  - by HCM-Oracle

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

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• Benefits of Behavior Driven Development

  - by Aligned

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2013/07/26/benefits-of-behavior-driven-development.aspxContinuing my previous article on BDD, I wanted to point out some benefits of BDD and since BDD is an extension of Test Driven Development (TDD), you get those as well. I’ll add another article on some possible downsides of this approach. There are many articles about the benefits of TDD and they apply to BDD. I’ve pointed out some here and copied some of the main points for each article, but there are many more including the book The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove. http://geekswithblogs.net/leesblog/archive/2008/04/30/the-benefits-of-test-driven-development.aspx (Lee Brandt) Stability Accountability Design Ability Separated Concerns Progress Indicator http://tddftw.com/benefits-of-tdd/ Help maintainers understand the intention behind the code Bring validation and proper data handling concerns to the forefront. Writing the tests first is fun. Better APIs come from writing testable code. TDD will make you a better developer. http://www.slideshare.net/dhelper/benefit-from-unit-testing-in-the-real-world (from Typemock). Take a look at the slides, especially the extra time required for TDD (slide 10) and the next one of the bugs avoided using TDD (slide 11). Less bugs (slide 11) about testing and development (13) Increase confidence in code (14) Fearlessly change your code (14) Document Requirements (14) also see http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2013/06/01/roc-rocks.aspx Discover usability issues early (14) All these points and articles are great and there are many more. The following are my additions to the benefits of BDD from using it in real projects for my company. July 2013 on MSDN - Behavior-Driven Design with SpecFlow Scott Allen did a very informative TDD and MVC module, but to me he is doing BDDCompile and Execute Requirements in Microsoft .NET ~ Video from TechEd 2012 Communication I was working through a complicated task that the decision tree kept growing. After writing out the Given, When, Then of the scenario, I was able tell QA what I had worked through for their initial test cases. They were able to add from there. It is also useful to use this language with other developers, managers, or clients to help make informed decisions on if it meets the requirements or if it can simplified to save time (money). Thinking through solutions, before starting to code This was the biggest benefit to me. I like to jump into coding to figure out the problem. Many times I don't understand my path well enough and have to do some parts over. A past supervisor told me several times during reviews that I need to get better at seeing "the forest for the trees". When I sit down and write out the behavior that I need to implement, I force myself to think things out further and catch scenarios before they get to QA. A co-worker that is new to BDD and we’ve been using it in our new project for the last 6 months, said “It really clarifies things”. It took him awhile to understand it all, but now he’s seeing the value of this approach (yes there are some downsides, but that is a different issue). Developers’ Confidence This is huge for me. With tests in place, my confidence grows that I won’t break code that I’m not directly changing. In the past, I’ve worked on projects with out tests and we would frequently find regression bugs (or worse the users would find them). That isn’t fun. We don’t catch all problems with the tests, but when QA catches one, I can write a test to make sure it doesn’t happen again. It’s also good for Releasing code, telling your manager that it’s good to go. As time goes on and the code gets older, how confident are you that checking in code won’t break something somewhere else? Merging code - pre release confidence If you’re merging code a lot, it’s nice to have the tests to help ensure you didn’t merge incorrectly. Interrupted work I had a task that I started and planned out, then was interrupted for a month because of different priorities. When I started it up again, and un-shelved my changes, I had the BDD specs and it helped me remember what I had figured out and what was left to do. It would have much more difficult without the specs and tests. Testing and verifying complicated scenarios Sometimes in the UI there are scenarios that get tricky, because there are a lot of steps involved (click here to open the dialog, enter the information, make sure it’s valid, when I click cancel it should do {x}, when I click ok it should close and do {y}, then do this, etc….). With BDD I can avoid some of the mouse clicking define the scenarios and have them re-run quickly, without using a mouse. UI testing is still needed, but this helps a bunch. The same can be true for tricky server logic. Documentation of Assumptions and Specifications The BDD spec tests (Jasmine or SpecFlow or other tool) also work as documentation and show what the original developer was trying to accomplish. It’s not a different Word document, so developers will keep this up to date, instead of letting it become obsolete. What happens if you leave the project (consulting, new job, etc) with no specs or at the least good comments in the code? Sometimes I think of a new scenario, so I add a failing spec and continue in the same stream of thought (don’t forget it because it was on a piece of paper or in a notepad). Then later I can come back and handle it and have it documented. Jasmine tests and JavaScript –> help deal with the non-typed system I like JavaScript, but I also dislike working with JavaScript. I miss C# telling me if a property doesn’t actually exist at build time. I like the idea of TypeScript and hope to use it more in the future. I also use KnockoutJs, which has observables that need to be called with ending (), since the observable is a function. It’s hard to remember when to use () or not and the Jasmine specs/tests help ensure the correct usage.   This should give you an idea of the benefits that I see in using the BDD approach. I’m sure there are more. It talks a lot of practice, investment and experimentation to figure out how to approach this and to get comfortable with it. I agree with Scott Allen in the video I linked above “Remember that TDD can take some practice. So if you're not doing test-driven design right now? You can start and practice and get better. And you'll reach a point where you'll never want to get back.”

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• Azure Task Scheduling Options

  - by charlie.mott

  Currently, the Azure PaaS does not offer a distributed\resilient task scheduling service.  If you do want to host a task scheduling product\solution off-premise (and ideally use Azure), what are your options? PaaS Option 1: Worker Roles Use a worker role to schedule and execute actions at specific time periods.  There are a few frameworks available to assist with this: http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com https://github.com/Lokad/lokad-cloud/wiki/TaskScheduler http://blog.smarx.com/posts/building-a-task-scheduler-in-windows-azure - This addresses a slightly different set of requirements. It’s a more dynamic approach for queuing up tasks, but not repeatable tasks (e.g. daily). I found the Azure Toolkit option the most simple to implement.  Step 1 : Create a domain entity implementing IJob for each job to schedule.  In this sample, I asynchronously call a WCF service method. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole.Jobs 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit; 4: using ScheduledTasksService; 5: 6: public class UploadEmployeesJob : IJob 7: { 8: public void Run() 9: { 10: // Call Tasks Service 11: var client = new ScheduledTasksServiceClient("BasicHttpBinding_IScheduledTasksService"); 12: client.UploadEmployees(); 13: client.Close(); 14: } 15: } 16: } Step 2 : In the worker role run method, add the jobs to the toolkit engine. 1: namespace Acme.WorkerRole 2: { 3: using AzureToolkit.Engine; 4: using Jobs; 5:   6: public class WorkerRole : WorkerRoleEntryPoint 7: { 8: public override void Run() 9: { 10: var engine = new CloudEngine(); 11:   12: // Add Scheduled Jobs (using CronJob syntax - see http://www.adminschoice.com/crontab-quick-reference). 13:   14: // 1. Upload Employee job - 8.00 PM every weekday (Mon-Fri) 15: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<UploadEmployeesJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 20 * * 1-5"; }); 16: // 2. Purge Data job - 10 AM every Saturday 17: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<PurgeDataJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "0 10 * * 6"; }); 18: // 3. Process Exceptions job - Every 5 minutes 19: engine.WithJobScheduler().ScheduleJob<ProcessExceptionsJob>(c => { c.CronSchedule = "*/5 * * * *"; }); 20:   21: engine.Run(); 22: base.Run(); 23: } 24: } 25: } Pros Cons Azure Toolkit option is simple to implement. For the AzureToolkit option, you are limited to a single worker role.  Otherwise, the jobs will be executed multiple times, once for each worker role instance.   Paying for a continuously running worker role, even if it just processes a single job once a week.  If you only have a few scheduled tasks to run calling asynchronous services hosted in different web roles, an extra small worker role likely to be sufficient.  However, for an extra small worker role this still costs $14.40/month (03/09/2012). Option 2: Use Scheduled Task on Azure Web Role calling a console app Setup a Windows Scheduled Task on the Azure Web Role. This calls a console application that calls the WCF service methods that run the task actions. This design is described here: http://www.ronaldwidha.net/2011/02/23/cron-job-on-azure-using-scheduled-task-on-a-web-role-to-replace-azure-worker-role-for-background-job/ http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/index.php/2011/07/windows-azure-task-scheduler/ http://devlicio.us/blogs/vinull/archive/2011/10/23/moving-to-azure-worker-roles-for-nothing-and-tasks-for-free.aspx Pros Cons Fairly easy to implement. Supportability - I RDC’ed onto the Azure server and stopped the scheduled task. I then rebooted the machine and the task was re-started. I also tried deleting the task and rebooting, the same thing occurred. The only way to permanently guarantee that a task is disabled is to do a fresh deployment. I think this is a major supportability concern.   Saleability - multiple instances would trigger multiple tasks. You can only have one instance for the scheduled task web role. The guidance implements setup of the scheduled task as part of a web role instance. But if you have more than one instance in a web role, the task will be triggered multiple times for each scheduled action (once per machine). Workaround: If we wanted to use scheduled tasks for another client with a saleable WCF service, then we could include the console & tasks scripts in a separate web role (e.g. a empty WCF service with no real purpose to it). SaaS Option 3: Azure Marketplace I thought that someone might be offering this type of service via the Azure marketplace. At the point of writing this blog post, I did not find anyone doing so. https://datamarket.azure.com/ Pros Cons   Nobody currently offers this on the Azure Marketplace. Option 4: Online Job Scheduling Service Provider There are plenty of online providers that offer this type of service on a pay-as-you-go approach.  Some of these are free for small usage.   Many of these providers are listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webcron Pros Cons No bespoke development for scheduler. Reliance on third party. IaaS Option 5: Setup Scheduling Software on Azure IaaS VM’s One of job scheduling software offerings could be installed and configured on Azure VM’s.  A list of software options is listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_job_scheduler_software Pros Cons Enterprise distributed\resilient task scheduling service VM Setup and maintenance   Software Licence Costs Option 6: VM Gallery A the time of writing this blog post, I did not spot a VM in the gallery that included pre-installation of any of the above software options. Pros Cons   No current VM template. Summary For my current project that had a small handful of tasks to schedule with a limited project budget I chose option 1 (a worker role using the Azure Toolkit to schedule tasks).  If I was building an enterprise scale solution for the future, options 4 and 5 are currently worthy of consideration. Hopefully, Microsoft will include tasks scheduling in the future as part of their PaaS offerings.

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• Sudo apt-get update -f does not work?

  - by BrianO09

  I am a bit of a noob with Linux. Several months ago I updated to Ubuntu 12.04, then stopped using Ubuntu for a while for a variety of reasons. Now I would like to go back to it, but I have a couple of problems. For one thing, the Software Center will simply not load. I click on the icon, the program comes up, but it never loads, and when I close it I get a "window not responding" message. While reading some threads to fix this issue, the common theme was that the main solution was to update by running: sudo apt-get install --reinstall software-center However, when I run that, I get the following (long): bcoleary@ubuntu:~$ sudo apt-get install --reinstall software-center [sudo] password for bcoleary: Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these: The following packages have unmet dependencies: kdelibs-bin : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkjsapi4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed kdelibs5-plugins : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkjsapi4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkntlm4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed kdoctools : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkcmutils4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkde3support4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkpty4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkdeclarative5 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkdewebkit5 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkdnssd4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkemoticons4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkfile4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkhtml5 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkjsapi4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkidletime4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkio5 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkjsembed4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkjsapi4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkmediaplayer4 : Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libknewstuff3-4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libknotifyconfig4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkparts4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libkrosscore4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libktexteditor4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libnepomuk4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libnepomukquery4a : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libnepomukutils4 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed libplasma3 : Depends: libkdecore5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libkdeui5 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed Depends: libthreadweaver4 (= 4:4.8.3-0ubuntu0.1) but 4:4.8.5-0ubuntu0.1 is to be installed E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution). So the next thing I tried was: sudo apt-get -f install The following has been cut down, but you get the idea: Errors were encountered while processing: libkdeclarative5 libkcmutils4 libnepomuk4 libkio5 libnepomukquery4a libnepomukutils4 libkparts4 libkdewebkit5 libkdnssd4 libknewstuff3-4 libplasma3 libnepomuksync4 libkemoticons4 libkfile4 libktexteditor4 libkhtml5 libkidletime4 libkmediaplayer4 libknotifyconfig4 libnepomukdatamanagement4 libkde3support4 libkjsembed4 libkrosscore4 kdoctools kdelibs-bin libkatepartinterfaces4 katepart kdelibs5-plugins plasma-scriptengine-javascript kde-runtime amarok libkdcraw20 libkgeomap1 libkipi8 libkvkontakte1 kipi-plugins digikam libkonq-common libkonq5abi1 dolphin kde-baseapps-bin kdebase-runtime libkcddb4 kdemultimedia-kio-plugins kdepimlibs-kio-plugins libkonqsidebarplugin4a konqueror konqueror-nsplugins libakonadi-kde4 libakonadi-calendar4 libkabc4 Processing was halted because there were too many errors. E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) Basically it said a ton of stuff was missing. Maybe this happened when I upgraded, I am not sure. Is there a way to fix this? And if not what is the best way to un-install and re-install Ubuntu? It is currently dual-booted with Windows 7. If you need anymore info, please let me know. Thank you for helping a beginner! :)

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• Notes on implementing Visual Studio 2010 Navigate To

  - by cyberycon

  One of the many neat functions added to Visual Studio in VS 2010 was the Navigate To feature. You can find it by clicking Edit, Navigate To, or by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl, (yes, that's control plus the comma key). This pops up the Navigate To dialog that looks like this: As you type, Navigate To starts searching through a number of different search providers for your term. The entries in the list change as you type, with most providers doing some kind of fuzzy or at least substring matching. If you have C#, C++ or Visual Basic projects in your solution, all symbols defined in those projects are searched. There's also a file search provider, which displays all matching filenames from projects in the current solution as well. And, if you have a Visual Studio package of your own, you can implement a provider too. Micro Focus (where I work) provide the Visual COBOL language inside Visual Studio (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/ef9bc810-c133-4581-9429-b01420a9ea40 ), and we wanted to provide this functionality too. This post provides some notes on the things I discovered mainly through trial and error, but also with some kind help from devs inside Microsoft. The expectation of Navigate To is that it searches across the whole solution, not just the current project. So in our case, we wanted to search for all COBOL symbols inside all of our Visual COBOL projects inside the solution. So first of all, here's the Microsoft documentation on Navigate To: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee844862.aspx . It's the reference information on the Microsoft.VisualStudio.Language.NavigateTo.Interfaces Namespace, and it lists all the interfaces you will need to implement to create your own Navigate To provider. Navigate To uses Visual Studio's latest mechanism for integrating external functionality and services, Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). MEF components don't require any registration with COM or any other registry entries to be found by Visual Studio. Visual Studio looks in several well-known locations for manifest files (extension.vsixmanifest). It then uses reflection to scan for MEF attributes on classes in the assembly to determine which functionality the assembly provides. MEF itself is actually part of the .NET framework, and you can learn more about it here: http://mef.codeplex.com/. To get started with Visual Studio and MEF you could do worse than look at some of the editor examples on the VSX page http://archive.msdn.microsoft.com/vsx . I've also written a small application to help with switching between development and production MEF assemblies, which you can find on Codeproject: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/miscctrl/MEF_Switch.aspx. The Navigate To interfaces Back to Navigate To, and summarizing the MSDN reference documentation, you need to implement the following interfaces: INavigateToItemProviderFactoryThis is Visual Studio's entry point to your Navigate To implementation, and you must decorate your implementation with the following MEF export attribute: [Export(typeof(INavigateToItemProviderFactory))]  INavigateToItemProvider Your INavigateToItemProviderFactory needs to return your implementation of INavigateToItemProvider. This class implements StartSearch() and StopSearch(). StartSearch() is the guts of your provider, and we'll come back to it in a minute. This object also needs to implement IDisposeable(). INavigateToItemDisplayFactory Your INavigateToItemProvider hands back NavigateToItems to the NavigateTo framework. But to give you good control over what appears in the NavigateTo dialog box, these items will be handed back to your INavigateToItemDisplayFactory, which must create objects implementing INavigateToItemDisplay  INavigateToItemDisplay Each of these objects represents one result in the Navigate To dialog box. As well as providing the description and name of the item, this object also has a NavigateTo() method that should be capable of displaying the item in an editor when invoked. Carrying out the search The lifecycle of your INavigateToItemProvider is the same as that of the Navigate To dialog. This dialog is modal, which makes your implementation a little easier because you know that the user can't be changing things in editors and the IDE while this dialog is up. But the Navigate To dialog DOES NOT run on the main UI thread of the IDE – so you need to be aware of that if you want to interact with editors or other parts of the IDE UI. When the user invokes the Navigate To dialog, your INavigateToItemProvider gets sent a TryCreateNavigateToItemProvider() message. Instantiate your INavigateToItemProvider and hand this back. The sequence diagram below shows what happens next. Your INavigateToItemProvider will get called with StartSearch(), and passed an INavigateToCallback. StartSearch() is an asynchronous request – you must return from this method as soon as possible, and conduct your search on a separate thread. For each match to the search term, instantiate a NavigateToItem object and send it to INavigateToCallback.AddItem(). But as the user types in the Search Terms field, NavigateTo will invoke your StartSearch() method repeatedly with the changing search term. When you receive the next StartSearch() message, you have to abandon your current search, and start a new one. You can't rely on receiving a StopSearch() message every time. Finally, when the Navigate To dialog box is closed by the user, you will get a Dispose() message – that's your cue to abandon any uncompleted searches, and dispose any resources you might be using as part of your search. While you conduct your search invoke INavigateToCallback.ReportProgress() occasionally to provide feedback about how close you are to completing the search. There does not appear to be any particular requirement to how often you invoke ReportProgress(), and you report your progress as the ratio of two integers. In my implementation I report progress in terms of the number of symbols I've searched over the total number of symbols in my dictionary, and send a progress report every 16 symbols. Displaying the Results The Navigate to framework invokes INavigateToItemDisplayProvider.CreateItemDisplay() once for each result you passed to the INavigateToCallback. CreateItemDisplay() is passed the NavigateToItem you handed to the callback, and must return an INavigateToItemDisplay object. NavigateToItem is a sealed class which has a few properties, including the name of the symbol. It also has a Tag property, of type object. This enables you to stash away all the information you will need to create your INavigateToItemDisplay, which must implement an INavigateTo() method to display a symbol in an editor IDE when the user double-clicks an entry in the Navigate To dialog box. Since the tag is of type object, it is up to you, the implementor, to decide what kind of object you store in here, and how it enables the retrieval of other information which is not included in the NavigateToItem properties. Some of the INavigateToItemDisplay properties are self-explanatory, but a couple of them are less obvious: Additional informationThe string you return here is displayed inside brackets on the same line as the Name property. In English locales, Visual Studio includes the preposition "of". If you look at the first line in the Navigate To screenshot at the top of this article, Book_WebRole.Default is the additional information for textBookAuthor, and is the namespace qualified type name the symbol appears in. For procedural COBOL code we display the Program Id as the additional information DescriptionItemsYou can use this property to return any textual description you want about the item currently selected. You return a collection of DescriptionItem objects, each of which has a category and description collection of DescriptionRun objects. A DescriptionRun enables you to specify some text, and optional formatting, so you have some control over the appearance of the displayed text. The DescriptionItems property is displayed at the bottom of the Navigate To dialog box, with the Categories on the left and the Descriptions on the right. The Visual COBOL implementation uses it to display more information about the location of an item, making it easier for the user to know disambiguate duplicate names (something there can be a lot of in large COBOL applications). Summary I hope this article is useful for anyone implementing Navigate To. It is a fantastic navigation feature that Microsoft have added to Visual Studio, but at the moment there still don't seem to be any examples on how to implement it, and the reference information on MSDN is a little brief for anyone attempting an implementation.

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• SharePoint logging to a list

  - by Norgean

  I recently worked in an environment with several servers. Locating the correct SharePoint log file for error messages, or development trace calls, is cumbersome. And once the solution hit the cloud, it got even worse, as we had no access to the log files at all. Obviously we are not the only ones with this problem, and the current trend seems to be to log to a list. This had become an off-hour project, so rather than do the sensible thing and find a ready-made solution, I decided to do it the hard way. So! Fire up Visual Studio, create yet another empty SharePoint solution, and start to think of some requirements. Easy on/offI want to be able to turn list-logging on and off.Easy loggingFor me, this means being able to use string.Format.Easy filteringLet's have the possibility to add some filtering columns; category and severity, where severity can be "verbose", "warning" or "error". Easy on/off Well, that's easy. Create a new web feature. Add an event receiver, and create the list on activation of the feature. Tear the list down on de-activation. I chose not to create a new content type; I did not feel that it would give me anything extra. I based the list on the generic list - I think a better choice would have been the announcement type. Approximately: public void CreateLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListName);             if (list == null)             {                 var listGuid = web.Lists.Add(LogListName, "Logging for the masses", SPListTemplateType.GenericList);                 list = web.Lists[listGuid];                 list.Title = LogListTitle;                 list.Update();                 list.Fields.Add(Category, SPFieldType.Text, false);                 var stringColl = new StringCollection();                 stringColl.AddRange(new[]{Error, Information, Verbose});                 list.Fields.Add(Severity, SPFieldType.Choice, true, false, stringColl);                 ModifyDefaultView(list);             }         }Should be self explanatory, but: only create the list if it does not already exist (d'oh). Best practice: create it with a Url-friendly name, and, if necessary, give it a better title. ...because otherwise you'll have to look for a list with a name like "Simple_x0020_Log". I've added a couple of fields; a field for category, and a 'severity'. Both to make it easier to find relevant log messages. Notice that I don't have to call list.Update() after adding the fields - this would cause a nasty error (something along the lines of "List locked by another user"). The function for deleting the log is exactly as onerous as you'd expect:         public void DeleteLog(SPWeb web)         {             var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);             if (list != null)             {                 list.Delete();             }         } So! "All" that remains is to log. Also known as adding items to a list. Lots of different methods with different signatures end up calling the same function. For example, LogVerbose(web, message) calls LogVerbose(web, null, message) which again calls another method which calls: private static void Log(SPWeb web, string category, string severity, string textformat, params object[] texts)         {             if (web != null)             {                 var list = web.Lists.TryGetList(LogListTitle);                 if (list != null)                 {                     var item = list.AddItem(); // NOTE! NOT list.Items.Add… just don't, mkay?                     var text = string.Format(textformat, texts);                     if (text.Length > 255) // because the title field only holds so many chars. Sigh.                         text = text.Substring(0, 254);                     item[SPBuiltInFieldId.Title] = text;                     item[Degree] = severity;                     item[Category] = category;                     item.Update();                 }             } // omitted: Also log to SharePoint log.         } By adding a params parameter I can call it as if I was doing a Console.WriteLine: LogVerbose(web, "demo", "{0} {1}{2}", "hello", "world", '!'); Ok, that was a silly example, a better one might be: LogError(web, LogCategory, "Exception caught when updating {0}. exception: {1}", listItem.Title, ex); For performance reasons I use list.AddItem rather than list.Items.Add. For completeness' sake, let us include the "ModifyDefaultView" function that I deliberately skipped earlier.         private void ModifyDefaultView(SPList list)         {             // Add fields to default view             var defaultView = list.DefaultView;             var exists = defaultView.ViewFields.Cast<string>().Any(field => String.CompareOrdinal(field, Severity) == 0);               if (!exists)             {                 var field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Severity);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 field = list.Fields.GetFieldByInternalName(Category);                 if (field != null)                     defaultView.ViewFields.Add(field);                 defaultView.Update();                   var sortDoc = new XmlDocument();                 sortDoc.LoadXml(string.Format("<Query>{0}</Query>", defaultView.Query));                 var orderBy = (XmlElement) sortDoc.SelectSingleNode("//OrderBy");                 if (orderBy != null && sortDoc.DocumentElement != null)                     sortDoc.DocumentElement.RemoveChild(orderBy);                 orderBy = sortDoc.CreateElement("OrderBy");                 sortDoc.DocumentElement.AppendChild(orderBy);                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.Modified];                 var fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                   fieldRef = sortDoc.CreateElement("FieldRef");                 field = list.Fields[SPBuiltInFieldId.ID];                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Name", field.InternalName);                 fieldRef.SetAttribute("Ascending", "FALSE");                 orderBy.AppendChild(fieldRef);                 defaultView.Query = sortDoc.DocumentElement.InnerXml;                 //defaultView.Query = "<OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Modified' Ascending='FALSE' /><FieldRef Name='ID' Ascending='FALSE' /></OrderBy>";                 defaultView.Update();             }         } First two lines are easy - see if the default view includes the "Severity" column. If it does - quit; our job here is done.Adding "severity" and "Category" to the view is not exactly rocket science. But then? Then we build the sort order query. Through XML. The lines are numerous, but boring. All to achieve the CAML query which is commented out. The major benefit of using the dom to build XML, is that you may get compile time errors for spelling mistakes. I say 'may', because although the compiler will not let you forget to close a tag, it will cheerfully let you spell "Name" as "Naem". Whichever you prefer, at the end of the day the view will sort by modified date and ID, both descending. I added the ID as there may be several items with the same time stamp. So! Simple logging to a list, with sensible a view, and with normal functionality for creating your own filterings. I should probably have added some more views in code, ready filtered for "only errors", "errors and warnings" etc. And it would be nice to block verbose logging completely, but I'm not happy with the alternatives. (yetanotherfeature or an admin page seem like overkill - perhaps just removing it as one of the choices, and not log if it isn't there?) Before you comment - yes, try-catches have been removed for clarity. There is nothing worse than having a logging function that breaks your site!

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• User Input That Involves A ' ' Causes A Substring Out Of Range Error

  - by Greenhouse Gases

  Hi Stackoverflow people. You have already helped me quite a bit but near the end of writing this program I have somewhat of a bug. You see in order to read in city names with a space in from a text file I use a '/' that is then replaced by the program for a ' ' (and when the serializer runs the opposite happens for next time the program is run). The problem is when a user inputs a name too add, search for, or delete that contains a space, for instance 'New York' I get a Debug Assertion Error with a substring out of range expression. I have a feeling it's to do with my correctCase function, or setElementsNull that looks at the string until it experiences a null element in the array, however ' ' is not null so I'm not sure how to fix this and I'm going a bit insane. Any help would be much appreciated. Here is my code: // U08221.cpp : main project file. #include "stdafx.h" #include <_iostream> #include <_string> #include <_fstream> #include <_cmath> using namespace std; class locationNode { public: string nodeCityName; double nodeLati; double nodeLongi; locationNode* Next; locationNode(string nameOf, double lat, double lon) { this->nodeCityName = nameOf; this->nodeLati = lat; this->nodeLongi = lon; this->Next = NULL; } locationNode() // NULL constructor { } void swapProps(locationNode *node2) { locationNode place; place.nodeCityName = this->nodeCityName; place.nodeLati = this->nodeLati; place.nodeLongi = this->nodeLongi; this->nodeCityName = node2->nodeCityName; this->nodeLati = node2->nodeLati; this->nodeLongi = node2->nodeLongi; node2->nodeCityName = place.nodeCityName; node2->nodeLati = place.nodeLati; node2->nodeLongi = place.nodeLongi; } void modify(string name) { this->nodeCityName = name; } void modify(double latlon, int mod) { switch(mod) { case 2: this->nodeLati = latlon; break; case 3: this->nodeLongi = latlon; break; } } void correctCase() // Correct upper and lower case letters of input { int MAX_SIZE = 35; int firstLetVal = this->nodeCityName[0], letVal; int n = 1; // variable for name index from second letter onwards if((this->nodeCityName[0] >90) && (this->nodeCityName[0] < 123)) // First letter is lower case { firstLetVal = firstLetVal - 32; // Capitalise first letter this->nodeCityName[0] = firstLetVal; } while(this->nodeCityName[n] != NULL) { if((this->nodeCityName[n] >= 65) && (this->nodeCityName[n] <= 90)) { if(this->nodeCityName[n - 1] != 32) { letVal = this->nodeCityName[n] + 32; this->nodeCityName[n] = letVal; } } n++; } } }; Here is the main part of the program: // U08221.cpp : main project file. #include "stdafx.h" #include "Locations2.h" #include <_iostream> #include <_string> #include <_fstream> #include <_cmath> using namespace std; #define pi 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288 #define radius 6371 #define gig 1073741824 //size of a gigabyte in bytes int n = 0,x, locationCount = 0, MAX_SIZE = 35 , g = 0, i = 0, modKey = 0, xx; string cityNameInput, alter; char targetCity[35], skipKey = ' '; double lat1, lon1, lat2, lon2, dist, dummy, modVal, result; bool acceptedInput = false, match = false, nodeExists = false;// note: addLocation(), set to true to enable user input as opposed to txt file locationNode *temp, *temp2, *example, *seek, *bridge, *start_ptr = NULL; class Menu { int junction; public: /* Convert decimal degrees to radians */ public: void setElementsNull(char cityParam[]) { int y=0; while(cityParam[y] != NULL) { y++; } while(y < MAX_SIZE) { cityParam[y] = NULL; y++; } } void correctCase(string name) // Correct upper and lower case letters of input { int MAX_SIZE = 35; int firstLetVal = name[0], letVal; int n = 1; // variable for name index from second letter onwards if((name[0] >90) && (name[0] < 123)) // First letter is lower case { firstLetVal = firstLetVal - 32; // Capitalise first letter name[0] = firstLetVal; } while(name[n] != NULL) { if((name[n] >= 65) && (name[n] <= 90)) { letVal = name[n] + 32; name[n] = letVal; } n++; } for(n = 0; targetCity[n] != NULL; n++) { targetCity[n] = name[n]; } } bool nodeExistTest(char targetCity[]) // see if entry is present in the database { match = false; seek = start_ptr; int letters = 0, letters2 = 0, x = 0, y = 0; while(targetCity[y] != NULL) { letters2++; y++; } while(x <= locationCount) // locationCount is number of entries currently in list { y=0, letters = 0; while(seek->nodeCityName[y] != NULL) // count letters in the current name { letters++; y++; } if(letters == letters2) // same amount of letters in the name { y = 0; while(y <= letters) // compare each letter against one another { if(targetCity[y] == seek->nodeCityName[y]) { match = true; y++; } else { match = false; y = letters + 1; // no match, terminate comparison } } } if(match) { x = locationCount + 1; //found match so terminate loop } else{ if(seek->Next != NULL) { bridge = seek; seek = seek->Next; x++; } else { x = locationCount + 1; // end of list so terminate loop } } } return match; } double deg2rad(double deg) { return (deg * pi / 180); } /* Convert radians to decimal degrees */ double rad2deg(double rad) { return (rad * 180 / pi); } /* Do the calculation */ double distance(double lat1, double lon1, double lat2, double lon2, double dist) { dist = sin(deg2rad(lat1)) * sin(deg2rad(lat2)) + cos(deg2rad(lat1)) * cos(deg2rad(lat2)) * cos(deg2rad(lon1 - lon2)); dist = acos(dist); dist = rad2deg(dist); dist = (radius * pi * dist) / 180; return dist; } void serialise() { // Serialize to format that can be written to text file fstream outfile; outfile.open("locations.txt",ios::out); temp = start_ptr; do { for(xx = 0; temp->nodeCityName[xx] != NULL; xx++) { if(temp->nodeCityName[xx] == 32) { temp->nodeCityName[xx] = 47; } } outfile << endl << temp->nodeCityName<< " "; outfile<<temp->nodeLati<< " "; outfile<<temp->nodeLongi; temp = temp->Next; }while(temp != NULL); outfile.close(); } void sortList() // do this { int changes = 1; locationNode *node1, *node2; while(changes > 0) // while changes are still being made to the list execute { node1 = start_ptr; node2 = node1->Next; changes = 0; do { xx = 1; if(node1->nodeCityName[0] > node2->nodeCityName[0]) //compare first letter of name with next in list { node1->swapProps(node2); // should come after the next in the list changes++; } else if(node1->nodeCityName[0] == node2->nodeCityName[0]) // if same first letter { while(node1->nodeCityName[xx] == node2->nodeCityName[xx]) // check next letter of name { if((node1->nodeCityName[xx + 1] != NULL) && (node2->nodeCityName[xx + 1] != NULL)) // check next letter until not the same { xx++; } else break; } if(node1->nodeCityName[xx] > node2->nodeCityName[xx]) { node1->swapProps(node2); // should come after the next in the list changes++; } } node1 = node2; node2 = node2->Next; // move to next pair in list } while(node2 != NULL); } } void initialise() { cout << "Populating List..."; ifstream inputFile; inputFile.open ("locations.txt", ios::in); char inputName[35] = " "; double inputLati = 0, inputLongi = 0; //temp = new locationNode(inputName, inputLati, inputLongi); do { inputFile.get(inputName, 35, ' '); inputFile >> inputLati; inputFile >> inputLongi; if(inputName[0] == 10 || 13) //remove linefeed from input { for(int i = 0; inputName[i] != NULL; i++) { inputName[i] = inputName[i + 1]; } } for(xx = 0; inputName[xx] != NULL; xx++) { if(inputName[xx] == 47) // if it is a '/' { inputName[xx] = 32; // replace it for a space } } temp = new locationNode(inputName, inputLati, inputLongi); if(start_ptr == NULL){ // if list is currently empty, start_ptr will point to this node start_ptr = temp; } else { temp2 = start_ptr; // We know this is not NULL - list not empty! while (temp2->Next != NULL) { temp2 = temp2->Next; // Move to next link in chain until reach end of list } temp2->Next = temp; } ++locationCount; // increment counter for number of records in list } while(!inputFile.eof()); cout << "Successful!" << endl << "List contains: " << locationCount << " entries" << endl; inputFile.close(); cout << endl << "*******************************************************************" << endl << "DISTANCE CALCULATOR v2.0\tAuthors: Darius Hodaei, Joe Clifton" << endl; } void menuInput() { char menuChoice = ' '; while(menuChoice != 'Q') { // Menu if(skipKey != 'X') // This is set by case 'S' below if a searched term does not exist but wants to be added { cout << endl << "*******************************************************************" << endl; cout << "Please enter a choice for the menu..." << endl << endl; cout << "(P) To print out the list" << endl << "(O) To order the list alphabetically" << endl << "(A) To add a location" << endl << "(D) To delete a record" << endl << "(C) To calculate distance between two points" << endl << "(S) To search for a location in the list" << endl << "(M) To check memory usage" << endl << "(U) To update a record" << endl << "(Q) To quit" << endl; cout << endl << "*******************************************************************" << endl; cin >> menuChoice; if(menuChoice >= 97) { menuChoice = menuChoice - 32; // Turn the lower case letter into an upper case letter } } skipKey = ' '; //Reset skipKey so that it does not skip the menu switch(menuChoice) { case 'P': temp = start_ptr; // set temp to the start of the list do { if (temp == NULL) { cout << "You have reached the end of the database" << endl; } else { // Display details for what temp points to at that stage cout << "Location : " << temp->nodeCityName << endl; cout << "Latitude : " << temp->nodeLati << endl; cout << "Longitude : " << temp->nodeLongi << endl; cout << endl; // Move on to next locationNode if one exists temp = temp->Next; } } while (temp != NULL); break; case 'O': { sortList(); // pass by reference??? cout << "List reordered alphabetically" << endl; } break; case 'A': char cityName[35]; double lati, longi; cout << endl << "Enter the name of the location: "; cin >> cityName; for(xx = 0; cityName[xx] != NULL; xx++) { if(cityName[xx] == 47) // if it is a '/' { cityName[xx] = 32; // replace it for a space } } if(!nodeExistTest(cityName)) { cout << endl << "Please enter the latitude value for this location: "; cin >> lati; cout << endl << "Please enter the longitude value for this location: "; cin >> longi; cout << endl; temp = new locationNode(cityName, lati, longi); temp->correctCase(); //start_ptr allignment if(start_ptr == NULL){ // if list is currently empty, start_ptr will point to this node start_ptr = temp; } else { temp2 = start_ptr; // We know this is not NULL - list not empty! while (temp2->Next != NULL) { temp2 = temp2->Next; // Move to next link in chain until reach end of list } temp2->Next = temp; } ++locationCount; // increment counter for number of records in list cout << "Location sucessfully added to the database! There are " << locationCount << " location(s) stored" << endl; } else { cout << "Node is already present in the list and so cannot be added again" << endl; } break; case 'D': { junction = 0; locationNode *place; cout << "Enter the name of the city you wish to remove" << endl; cin >> targetCity; setElementsNull(targetCity); correctCase(targetCity); for(xx = 0; targetCity[xx] != NULL; xx++) { if(targetCity[xx] == 47) { targetCity[xx] = 32; } } if(nodeExistTest(targetCity)) //if this node does exist { if(seek == start_ptr) // if it is the first in the list { junction = 1; } if(seek->Next == NULL) // if it is last in the list { junction = 2; } switch(junction) // will alter list accordingly dependant on where the searched for link is { case 1: start_ptr = start_ptr->Next; delete seek; --locationCount; break; case 2: place = seek; seek = bridge; seek->Next = NULL; delete place; --locationCount; break; default: bridge->Next = seek->Next; delete seek; --locationCount; break; } cout << endl << "Link deleted. There are now " << locationCount << " locations." << endl; } else { cout << "That entry does not currently exist" << endl << endl << endl; } } break; case 'C': { char city1[35], city2[35]; cout << "Enter the first city name" << endl; cin >> city1; setElementsNull(city1); correctCase(targetCity); if(nodeExistTest(city1)) { lat1 = seek->nodeLati; lon1 = seek->nodeLongi; cout << "Lati = " << seek->nodeLati << endl << "Longi = " << seek->nodeLongi << endl << endl; } cout << "Enter the second city name" << endl; cin >> city2; setElementsNull(city2); correctCase(targetCity); if(nodeExistTest(city2)) { lat2 = seek->nodeLati; lon2 = seek->nodeLongi; cout << "Lati = " << seek->nodeLati << endl << "Longi = " << seek->nodeLongi << endl << endl; } result = distance (lat1, lon1, lat2, lon2, dist); cout << "The distance between these two locations is " << result << " kilometres." << endl; } break; case 'S': { char choice; cout << "Enter search term..." << endl; cin >> targetCity; setElementsNull(targetCity); correctCase(targetCity); if(nodeExistTest(targetCity)) { cout << "Latitude: " << seek->nodeLati << endl << "Longitude: " << seek->nodeLongi << endl; } else { cout << "Sorry, that city is not currently present in the list." << endl << "Would you like to add this city now Y/N?" << endl; cin >> choice; /*while(choice != ('Y' || 'N')) { cout << "Please enter a valid choice..." << endl; cin >> choice; }*/ switch(choice) { case 'Y': skipKey = 'X'; menuChoice = 'A'; break; case 'N': break; default : cout << "Invalid choice" << endl; break; } } break; } case 'M': { cout << "Locations currently stored: " << locationCount << endl << "Memory used for this: " << (sizeof(start_ptr) * locationCount) << " bytes" << endl << endl << "You can store " << ((gig - (sizeof(start_ptr) * locationCount)) / sizeof(start_ptr)) << " more locations" << endl ; break; } case 'U': { cout << "Enter the name of the Location you would like to update: "; cin >> targetCity; setElementsNull(targetCity); correctCase(targetCity); if(nodeExistTest(targetCity)) { cout << "Select (1) to alter City Name, (2) to alter Longitude, (3) to alter Latitude" << endl; cin >> modKey; switch(modKey) { case 1: cout << "Enter the new name: "; cin >> alter; cout << endl; seek->modify(alter); break; case 2: cout << "Enter the new latitude: "; cin >> modVal; cout << endl; seek->modify(modVal, modKey); break; case 3: cout << "Enter the new longitude: "; cin >> modVal; cout << endl; seek->modify(modVal, modKey); break; default: break; } } else cout << "Location not found" << endl; break; } } } } }; int main(array<System::String ^> ^args) { Menu mm; //mm.initialise(); mm.menuInput(); mm.serialise(); }

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• Can't Remove Logical Drive/Array from HP P400

  - by Myles

  This is my first post here. Thank you in advance for any assistance with this matter. I'm trying to remove a logical drive (logical drive 2) and an array (array "B") from my Smart Array P400. The host is a DL580 G5 running 64-bit Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.7 (Tikanga). I am unable to remove the array using either hpacucli or cpqacuxe. I believe it is because of "OS Status: LOCKED". The file system that lives on this array has been unmounted. I do not want to reboot the host. Is there some way to "release" this logical drive so I can remove the array? Note that I do not need to preserve the data on logical drive 2. I intend to physically remove the drives from the machine and replace them with larger drives. I'm using the cciss kernel module that ships with Red Hat 5.7. Here is some information pertaining to the host and the P400 configuration: [root@gort ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.7 (Tikanga) [root@gort ~]# uname -a Linux gort 2.6.18-274.el5 #1 SMP Fri Jul 8 17:36:59 EDT 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux [root@gort ~]# rpm -qa | egrep '^(hp|cpq)' cpqacuxe-9.30-15.0 hp-health-9.25-1551.7.rhel5 hpsmh-7.1.2-3 hpdiags-9.3.0-466 hponcfg-3.1.0-0 hp-snmp-agents-9.25-2384.8.rhel5 hpacucli-9.30-15.0 [root@gort ~]# hpacucli HP Array Configuration Utility CLI 9.30.15.0 Detecting Controllers...Done. Type "help" for a list of supported commands. Type "exit" to close the console. => ctrl all show config detail Smart Array P400 in Slot 0 (Embedded) Bus Interface: PCI Slot: 0 Cache Serial Number: PA82C0J9SVW34U RAID 6 (ADG) Status: Enabled Controller Status: OK Hardware Revision: D Firmware Version: 7.22 Rebuild Priority: Medium Expand Priority: Medium Surface Scan Delay: 15 secs Surface Scan Mode: Idle Wait for Cache Room: Disabled Surface Analysis Inconsistency Notification: Disabled Post Prompt Timeout: 0 secs Cache Board Present: True Cache Status: OK Cache Ratio: 25% Read / 75% Write Drive Write Cache: Disabled Total Cache Size: 256 MB Total Cache Memory Available: 208 MB No-Battery Write Cache: Disabled Cache Backup Power Source: Batteries Battery/Capacitor Count: 1 Battery/Capacitor Status: OK SATA NCQ Supported: True Logical Drive: 1 Size: 136.7 GB Fault Tolerance: RAID 1 Heads: 255 Sectors Per Track: 32 Cylinders: 35132 Strip Size: 128 KB Full Stripe Size: 128 KB Status: OK Caching: Enabled Unique Identifier: 600508B100184A395356573334550002 Disk Name: /dev/cciss/c0d0 Mount Points: /boot 101 MB, /tmp 7.8 GB, /usr 3.9 GB, /usr/local 2.0 GB, /var 3.9 GB, / 2.0 GB, /local 113.2 GB OS Status: LOCKED Logical Drive Label: A0027AA78DEE Mirror Group 0: physicaldrive 1I:1:2 (port 1I:box 1:bay 2, SAS, 146 GB, OK) Mirror Group 1: physicaldrive 1I:1:1 (port 1I:box 1:bay 1, SAS, 146 GB, OK) Drive Type: Data Array: A Interface Type: SAS Unused Space: 0 MB Status: OK Array Type: Data physicaldrive 1I:1:1 Port: 1I Box: 1 Bay: 1 Status: OK Drive Type: Data Drive Interface Type: SAS Size: 146 GB Rotational Speed: 10000 Firmware Revision: HPDE Serial Number: 3NM57RF40000983878FX Model: HP DG146BB976 Current Temperature (C): 29 Maximum Temperature (C): 35 PHY Count: 2 PHY Transfer Rate: Unknown, Unknown physicaldrive 1I:1:2 Port: 1I Box: 1 Bay: 2 Status: OK Drive Type: Data Drive Interface Type: SAS Size: 146 GB Rotational Speed: 10000 Firmware Revision: HPDE Serial Number: 3NM55VQC000098388524 Model: HP DG146BB976 Current Temperature (C): 29 Maximum Temperature (C): 36 PHY Count: 2 PHY Transfer Rate: Unknown, Unknown Logical Drive: 2 Size: 546.8 GB Fault Tolerance: RAID 5 Heads: 255 Sectors Per Track: 32 Cylinders: 65535 Strip Size: 64 KB Full Stripe Size: 256 KB Status: OK Caching: Enabled Parity Initialization Status: Initialization Completed Unique Identifier: 600508B100184A395356573334550003 Disk Name: /dev/cciss/c0d1 Mount Points: None OS Status: LOCKED Logical Drive Label: A5C9C6F81504 Drive Type: Data Array: B Interface Type: SAS Unused Space: 0 MB Status: OK Array Type: Data physicaldrive 1I:1:3 Port: 1I Box: 1 Bay: 3 Status: OK Drive Type: Data Drive Interface Type: SAS Size: 146 GB Rotational Speed: 10000 Firmware Revision: HPDE Serial Number: 3NM2H5PE00009802NK19 Model: HP DG146ABAB4 Current Temperature (C): 30 Maximum Temperature (C): 37 PHY Count: 1 PHY Transfer Rate: Unknown physicaldrive 1I:1:4 Port: 1I Box: 1 Bay: 4 Status: OK Drive Type: Data Drive Interface Type: SAS Size: 146 GB Rotational Speed: 10000 Firmware Revision: HPDE Serial Number: 3NM28YY400009750MKPJ Model: HP DG146ABAB4 Current Temperature (C): 31 Maximum Temperature (C): 36 PHY Count: 1 PHY Transfer Rate: 3.0Gbps physicaldrive 2I:1:5 Port: 2I Box: 1 Bay: 5 Status: OK Drive Type: Data Drive Interface Type: SAS Size: 146 GB Rotational Speed: 10000 Firmware Revision: HPDE Serial Number: 3NM2FGYV00009802N3GN Model: HP DG146ABAB4 Current Temperature (C): 30 Maximum Temperature (C): 38 PHY Count: 1 PHY Transfer Rate: Unknown physicaldrive 2I:1:6 Port: 2I Box: 1 Bay: 6 Status: OK Drive Type: Data Drive Interface Type: SAS Size: 146 GB Rotational Speed: 10000 Firmware Revision: HPDE Serial Number: 3NM8AFAK00009920MMV1 Model: HP DG146BB976 Current Temperature (C): 31 Maximum Temperature (C): 41 PHY Count: 2 PHY Transfer Rate: Unknown, Unknown physicaldrive 2I:1:7 Port: 2I Box: 1 Bay: 7 Status: OK Drive Type: Data Drive Interface Type: SAS Size: 146 GB Rotational Speed: 10000 Firmware Revision: HPDE Serial Number: 3NM2FJQD00009801MSHQ Model: HP DG146ABAB4 Current Temperature (C): 29 Maximum Temperature (C): 39 PHY Count: 1 PHY Transfer Rate: Unknown

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• How to convert html textfield/area data to server-side txt file? [closed]

  - by olijake

  How can I make a script that will convert the text/data in a html textfield/textarea and send it to the server, which then saves it as a .txt file for storage? NOTE: I am hosting a website(for testing purposes) using Apache 2.2 on a Windows 7 machine. I downloaded PHP version 5.4.7, but have not yet installed on my server yet (not sure if I will need it, but also not sure how to install it). 1st problem: Saving text to server Html page/section with title textfield, text textarea, and submit button. You would enter a title, the text/notes you need in the textfield, then press the submit button to have it store the text in the textarea, as a .txt file on the server called .txt. 2nd problem: Opening text from server Html with list of all txt files OR textfield for entering in title, then submit button to send the title of the requested .txt file to the server, which would then load it up on the page. Here is what I have so far: (let me know if there is something that I should change or if something just isn't correct in the index.html code I have right now.) <!DOCTYPE HTML> <html> <head> <title>Insert Title</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="Text/HTML; charset=UTF-8"/> </head> <body> <form method="post" action="save.INSERT_FILETYPE" name="textfile" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <input type="text" name="title"><br/> <textarea rows="20" cols="100" id="text" name="text"></textarea><br/> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit Text to Server"> </form><br/> <hr style="width: 100%; height: 4px;"><br/> <form method="post" action="open.INSERT_FILETYPE" name="textfile" enctype="multipart/form-data"> <input type="text" name="title"><br/> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit Txt File Request"> </form><br/> <div>Opened text file displays here or goes on another page</div> </body> </html> I plan on using a server side language/script, but ANYTHING that gets the job done is fine. I already tried looking into using some ASP/jScript/PHP, but have had some trouble implementing it into my server. (ie: getting the modules loaded and telling the server what file types to parse.) I know this may be an extremely easy fix, but then in that case, hopefully you wouldn't mind helping me out a little :). If it turns out that this is MUCH more complicated than I expect, then feel free to let me know that, so I don't waste me time running in circles. I appreciate any help/assistance that you can provide, Thanks, Jake EDIT: Wrong Apache version. In response to the comments/closing of this thread: My question: "How exactly do I install the PHP module on the apache server? and is this even possible? and is this even recommended?" ^ In case I wasn't clear enough already To Clarify: I understand the basics of PHP, I just have trouble with INSTALLING PHP on the apache server. (I have used PHP before, but never successfully on apache (so far...)) For my script I wrote something similar to this already (using fopen() and a few other commands): <?php fopen("notes.txt", "r"); file_put_contents("notes.txt",teststring1); ?> I have used javascript for this task before also (although I prefer using PHP and server-side languages): <script language="javascript"> function WriteToFile(){ var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject"); var s = fso.CreateTextFile("C:\\NewFile.txt", true); var text=document.getElementById("TextArea1").innerText; s.WriteLine(text); s.WriteLine('***********************'); s.Close(); } </script>

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• Strategy for using snapshots to back up Ubuntu Linux server?

  - by MountainX

  I need some backup advice for my home file server. Here are the mount points, volume groups, logical volumes and used/total space of all the volumes on my Ubuntu 8.10 home file server. / vgA/lvRoot [7.5G/50G] /tmp vgB/lvTmp [195M/30G] /var vgB/lvVar [780M/30G] swap vgB/lvSwap [16.00 GB] /media1 vgC/lvMedia1 [400G/975G] /media2 vgC/lvMedia2 [75G/295G] /boot partition (no volume group) [95M/200M] /video partition (no volume group) [450G/950G] /backups vgD/lvBackupTarget [800G/925G] /home vgE/lvHome [85G/200G] I have just added a 2.0 TB external USB drive that I would like to use to backup everything. (It will be a close fit to get it all on one 2.0 TB drive. I actually have a 2nd external USB drive if needed.) I'd like to backup "/", var, /media1, media2 and /home. I'll deal with /boot and /video separately since they are not logical volumes. For all the logical volumes I'm anticipating taking snapshots and then copying those snapshots to the 2.0 TB external USB drive. I have never done a task like that before. If I do that, I could use the tutorial I found here: http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_lvm_snapshots My questions are: What is the best overall strategy? Is it LVM snapshots, as I'm assuming? How should I prepare, subdivide and mount the 2.0 TB external USB drive? 2.a. Should I create one or more regular partitions or should I create a physical volume with one or more logical volumes? 2.b. Would it be advisable to extactly mirror the source pv/lv layout on the external drive, and if so, is this a good strategy? What's the best way to get the snapshots onto the external drive? dd? Even though this is a strategy question, feedback with actual commands is appreciated. I need step-by-step cookbook-style help because I don't do much server admin work. (Background: This is a home file server that I have rarely had to touch in about 2 years. It has done its job without much intervention. The really old PC that I used to back everything up recently failed, so I'm replacing that with the external USB drive(s) and I'd like to upgrade my backup strategy at the same time. Previously, I just copied stuff from /backups over to the other computer and that would not have made things very easy in a real restore situation. The /backups mount point contains backup copies of "most" of the important data on a file by file basis, but it does not contain copies of /boot, etc. BTW, the actual internal HDD that holds /backups is separate from the other storage devices.) EDIT: I'll propose a strategy... The idea came from a comment here: LVM mirroring VS RAID1 "LVM mirrors are for replication of a logical volume to a different physical volume. It's essentially meant to "move the data to a different disk". The mirror is then broken..." That would fit my requirements well. Here is an ideal situation: establish the LV mirror on the external drive break the link with the mirror create a (persistent) snapshot on the mirror after a week, resync the mirror with the original source and update the mirror break the link and create another snapshot on the mirror. Obviously, the mirror will be like a weekly full backup. And the snapshots on the mirror will represent earlier points in time. If this would work and if it would be time efficient, it would give a nice full & differential type backup on the external drive based on LVM. I have not heard of a strategy like this before. Will it work? Could it be scripted? Thoughts? EDIT 2: Creating Portable DiskSafes With LoopbackFS And LVM Snapshots This article seems intriguing: http://www.howtoforge.com/creating-portable-disksafes-with-loopbackfs-and-lvm-snapshots Unfortunately, I don't understand exactly how to map those ideas to the strategy I'm proposing above. I'm going to ask this last bit as a separate question. I will leave my original question in place because I still desire feedback on the overall best strategy. At this moment I'm assuming it is LVM mirroring in the style of "Creating Portable DiskSafes with LVM Snapshots" but that might be wrong.

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• Getting HAPROXY to redirect http to https in users browser session

  - by Jon

  We are currently using a Internet cloud provider to host our SaaS platform. The platform consists of a Firewall - Cloud Provider SLB - - Apache Web Server - HAPROXY SLB - Liferay Platform We have had to use HAPROXY because of an issue with the cloud providers SLB that meant we were unable to use it for load balancing the Liferay platform applications. I have implemented HAPROXY in our secure tier and that seems to do the trick of load balancing the requests quite adequately. However during testing we encountered a functional issue whereby selecting a sub-menu from the web portal resulted in the application hanging, using an http analyser we saw that the request being passed back to the users browser was in http, from discussing this with the software vendor it transpires that the Liferay application has some hard-coded http links, and that other customers have worked around this by using physical NLB's such as F5 and redirecting the http traffic to https. The entry in the HAPROXY logs reads: haproxy[2717]: haproxy[2717]: <Apache Web Agent>:37957 [11/Apr/2013:08:07:00.128] http-uapi uapi/<ServerName> 0/0/0/9/10 200 4912 - - ---- 4/2/1/2/0 0/0 "GET /servicedesk/controller?docommand=renderradform&!key=esd_sfb001_frm_feedback_forms_list&isportalintegratedmode=true&USR=joe.bloggs%40gmail.com&_dc=1365667773097&redirecturl=controller%3Fdocommand%3Drenderbody%26%21key%3DESD_SFB001_FRM_FEEDBACK_FORMS_LIST%26isportalintegratedmode%3Dtrue&sso_token=ALiYv2UqzLsAhSw1ZchRDlCHlq44Bhj9&ONERROR=%2Fweb%2Fjsp%2Fapps%2Fportal-integration-error.jsp&itype=login&slicetoken=NW51O%242aRo%2C_Zz%2476P_9DTtnFmz6%28bhk&AUTOFORWARDURL=controller%3Fdocommand%3Drenderbody%26%21key%3DESD_SFB001_FRM_FEEDBACK_FORMS_LIST%26isportalintegratedmode%3Dtrue&LOGINPAGE=https%3A%2F%2F<FQDN of Web Portal>%2Fweb%2F4732cf01-82c3-4bc5-b6c9-552253e672cf%2Fworkflow-tools&appid=1&!uid=1&!redownloadToken=7.0.3.1.1363611301.0&userlocale=en_US&!datechanged=2012-05-18%2015:05:31.38 HTTP/1.1" :37957 [11/Apr/2013:08:07:00.128] http-uapi uapi/<ServerName> 0/0/0/9/10 200 4912 - - ---- 4/2/1/2/0 0/0 "GET /servicedesk/controller?docommand=renderradform&!key=esd_sfb001_frm_feedback_forms_list&isportalintegratedmode=true&USR=joe.bloggs%40gmail.com&_dc=1365667773097&redirecturl=controller%3Fdocommand%3Drenderbody%26%21key%3DESD_SFB001_FRM_FEEDBACK_FORMS_LIST%26isportalintegratedmode%3Dtrue&sso_token=ALiYv2UqzLsAhSw1ZchRDlCHlq44Bhj9&ONERROR=%2Fweb%2Fjsp%2Fapps%2Fportal-integration-error.jsp&itype=login&slicetoken=NW51O%242aRo%2C_Zz%2476P_9DTtnFmz6%28bhk&AUTOFORWARDURL=controller%3Fdocommand%3Drenderbody%26%21key%3DESD_SFB001_FRM_FEEDBACK_FORMS_LIST%26isportalintegratedmode%3Dtrue&LOGINPAGE=https%3A%2F%2F<FQDN of Web Portal>%2Fweb%2F4732cf01-82c3-4bc5-b6c9-552253e672cf%2Fworkflow-tools&appid=1&!uid=1&!redownloadToken=7.0.3.1.1363611301.0&userlocale=en_US&!datechanged=2012-05-18%2015:05:31.38 HTTP/1.1" The corresponding HTTP browser entry shows: http://<FQDN of ServiceDesk>/servicedesk/controller?docommand=renderradform&!key=esd_org019_frm_contact_list&isportalintegratedmode=true&USR=joe.bloggs%40gmail.com&_dc=1365665987887&redirecturl=controller%3Fdocommand%3Drenderbody%26%21key%3DESD_ORG019_FRM_CONTACT_LIST%26isportalintegratedmode%3Dtrue&sso_token=3NxsXYORMPp32SwL8ftVUCMH2QdWLH82&ONERROR=%2Fweb%2Fjsp%2Fapps%2Fportal-integration-error.jsp&itype=login&slicetoken=NW51O%242aRo%2C_Zz%2476P_9DTtnFmz6%28bhk&AUTOFORWARDURL=controller%3Fdocommand%3Drenderbody%26%21key%3DESD_ORG019_FRM_CONTACT_LIST%26isportalintegratedmode%3Dtrue&LOGINPAGE=https%3A%2F%2F<FQDN of Web Portal>>%2Fweb%2F4732cf01-82c3-4bc5-b6c9-552253e672cf%2Fapplication-setup&appid=1&!uid=1&!redownloadToken=7.0.3.1.1363611301.0&userlocale=en_US&!datechanged=2012-10-26%2019:00:25.08 From reading through the forums and other sites it looks like we should be use to use HAPROXY to redirect the traffic to https, but try as I might I cant get it to work. This is our HAPROXY configuration: global log 127.0.0.1 local2 chroot /var/lib/haproxy pidfile /var/run/haproxy.pid maxconn 4000 user haproxy group haproxy daemon stats socket /var/lib/haproxy/stats defaults mode http log global option httplog option dontlognull option http-server-close option forwardfor except 127.0.0.0/8 option redispatch retries 3 timeout http-request 10s timeout queue 1m timeout connect 10s timeout client 1m timeout server 1m timeout http-keep-alive 10s timeout check 10s maxconn 3000 frontend http-openfire bind *:7070 default_backend openfire backend openfire balance roundrobin server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:7070 check server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:7070 check frontend http-uapi bind *:7080 default_backend uapi backend uapi balance roundrobin server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:7080 check server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:7080 check frontend http-sec bind *:8080 default_backend sec backend sec balance roundrobin server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:8080 check server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:8080 check frontend http-wall bind *:9080 default_backend wall backend wall balance roundrobin server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:9080 check server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:9080 check frontend http-xmpp bind *:9090 default_backend xmpp backend xmpp balance roundrobin server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:9090 check server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:9090 check frontend http-aim bind *:10080 default_backend aim backend aim balance roundrobin server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:10080 check server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:10080 check frontend http-servicedesk bind *:8081 default_backend servicedesk backend servicedesk balance roundrobin server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:8081 check server <serverName> <IPv4 Address>:8081 check listen stats :1936 mode http stats enable stats hide-version stats realm Haproxy\ Statistics stats uri / stats auth haproxy:<Password> I have tried following the articles listed posted on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13227544/haproxy-redirecting-http-to-https-ssl and http://parsnips.net/haproxy-http-to-https-redirect/ but that hasn't made any difference. Am I on the right track with this or are we trying to achieve the impossible?, I'm hoping I'm just being an idiot and one of you good people can point me in the right direction.

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• nginx+php-fpm help optimize configs

  - by Dmitro

  I have 3 servers. First server (CPU - model name: 06/17, 2.66GHz, 4 cores, 8GB RAM) have nginx as load balancer with next config upstream lb_mydomain { server mydomain.ru:81 weight=2; server 66.0.0.18 weight=6; } server { listen 80; server_name ~(?!mydomain.ru)(.*); client_max_body_size 20m; location / { proxy_pass http://lb_mydomain; proxy_redirect off; proxy_set_header Connection close; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_pass_header Set-Cookie; proxy_pass_header P3P; proxy_pass_header Content-Type; proxy_pass_header Content-Disposition; proxy_pass_header Content-Length; } } And configs from nginx.conf: user www-data; worker_processes 5; # worker_priority -1; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 5024; # multi_accept on; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log; sendfile on; default_type application/octet-stream; #tcp_nopush on; keepalive_timeout 65; tcp_nodelay on; gzip on; gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)"; # PHP-FPM (backend) upstream php-fpm { server 127.0.0.1:9000; } include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; } And config php-fpm: listen = 127.0.0.1:9000 ;listen.backlog = -1 ;listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1 ;listen.owner = www-data ;listen.group = www-data ;listen.mode = 0666 user = www-data group = www-data pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 80 ;pm.start_servers = 20 pm.min_spare_servers = 5 pm.max_spare_servers = 35 ;pm.max_requests = 500 pm.status_path = /status ping.path = /ping ;ping.response = pong request_terminate_timeout = 30s request_slowlog_timeout = 10s slowlog = /var/log/php-fpm.log.slow ;rlimit_files = 1024 ;rlimit_core = 0 ;chroot = chdir = /var/www ;catch_workers_output = yes ;env[HOSTNAME] = $HOSTNAME ;env[PATH] = /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin ;env[TMP] = /tmp ;env[TMPDIR] = /tmp ;env[TEMP] = /tmp ;php_admin_value[sendmail_path] = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f [email protected] ;php_flag[display_errors] = off ;php_admin_value[error_log] = /var/log/fpm-php.www.log ;php_admin_flag[log_errors] = on ;php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 32M In top I see 20 php-fpm processes which use from 1% - 15% CPU. So it's have high load averadge: top - 15:36:22 up 34 days, 20:54, 1 user, load average: 5.98, 7.75, 8.78 Tasks: 218 total, 1 running, 217 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 34.1%us, 3.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 37.0%id, 24.8%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.9%si, 0.0%st Mem: 8183228k total, 7538584k used, 644644k free, 351136k buffers Swap: 9936892k total, 14636k used, 9922256k free, 990540k cached Second server(CPU - model name: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5504 @ 2.00GHz, 8 cores, 8GB RAM). Nginx configs from nginx.conf: user www-data; worker_processes 5; # worker_priority -1; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 5024; # multi_accept on; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log; sendfile on; default_type application/octet-stream; #tcp_nopush on; keepalive_timeout 65; tcp_nodelay on; gzip on; gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)"; # PHP-FPM (backend) upstream php-fpm { server 127.0.0.1:9000; } include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; } And config of php-fpm: listen = 127.0.0.1:9000 ;listen.backlog = -1 ;listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1 ;listen.owner = www-data ;listen.group = www-data ;listen.mode = 0666 user = www-data group = www-data pm = dynamic pm.max_children = 50 ;pm.start_servers = 20 pm.min_spare_servers = 5 pm.max_spare_servers = 35 ;pm.max_requests = 500 ;pm.status_path = /status ;ping.path = /ping ;ping.response = pong ;request_terminate_timeout = 0 ;request_slowlog_timeout = 0 ;slowlog = /var/log/php-fpm.log.slow ;rlimit_files = 1024 ;rlimit_core = 0 ;chroot = chdir = /var/www ;catch_workers_output = yes ;env[HOSTNAME] = $HOSTNAME ;env[PATH] = /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin ;env[TMP] = /tmp ;env[TMPDIR] = /tmp ;env[TEMP] = /tmp ;php_admin_value[sendmail_path] = /usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i -f [email protected] ;php_flag[display_errors] = off ;php_admin_value[error_log] = /var/log/fpm-php.www.log ;php_admin_flag[log_errors] = on ;php_admin_value[memory_limit] = 32M In top I see 50 php-fpm processes which use from 10% - 25% CPU. So it's have high load averadge: top - 15:53:05 up 33 days, 1:15, 1 user, load average: 41.35, 40.28, 39.61 Tasks: 239 total, 40 running, 199 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 96.5%us, 3.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.4%si, 0.0%st Mem: 8185560k total, 7804224k used, 381336k free, 161648k buffers Swap: 19802108k total, 16k used, 19802092k free, 5068112k cached Third server is server with database postgresql. Also i try ab -n 50 -c 5 http://www.mydomain.ru/ And I get next info: Complete requests: 50 Failed requests: 48 (Connect: 0, Receive: 0, Length: 48, Exceptions: 0) Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 9271367 bytes HTML transferred: 9247767 bytes Requests per second: 1.02 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 4882.427 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 976.486 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 185.44 [Kbytes/sec] received Please advise how can I make lower level of load average?

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• Error attempting to log into Redmine through IIS 7.5 Reverse Proxy

  - by dneaster3

  I am trying to set up Redmine as a subdirectory of our department's intranet site, and also to rebrand it as "Workflow" using IIS's URL Rewrite extension. I have it "working" in that it will serve the page with all the correct rewrites in both the URL and the HTML code. However, when I try to submit a form (including logging in to redmine), IIS gives me one of the the following errors: Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. or The specified CGI application encountered an error and the server terminated the process. Here's the setup: Redmine installed on a local Windows XP machine using the Bitnami all-in-one installer, which includes: Apache 2 Ruby-on-Rails MySQL Redmine Thin Redmine runs locally at http:/localhost/redmine Redmine runs over the intranet http:/146.18.236.xxx/redmine Windows Server + IIS 7.5 serving up an ASP.NET intranet web application mydept.mycompany.com IIS Extensions Url Rewrite and AAR installed Reverse proxy settings for IIS (shown below) to serve Redmine at mydept.mycompany.com/workflow <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="Route requests for workflow to redmine server" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="^workflow/?(.*)" /> <conditions> <add input="{CACHE_URL}" pattern="^(https?)://" /> </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="{C:1}://146.18.236.xxx/redmine/{R:1}" logRewrittenUrl="true" /> <serverVariables> <set name="HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING" value="" /> <set name="ORIGINAL_HOST" value="{HTTP_HOST}" /> </serverVariables> </rule> </rules> <outboundRules rewriteBeforeCache="true"> <clear /> <preConditions> <preCondition name="isHTML" logicalGrouping="MatchAny"> <add input="{RESPONSE_CONTENT_TYPE}" pattern="^text/html" /> <add input="{RESPONSE_CONTENT_TYPE}" pattern="^text/plain" /> <add input="{RESPONSE_CONTENT_TYPE}" pattern="^application/.*xml" /> </preCondition> <preCondition name="isRedirection"> <add input="{RESPONSE_STATUS}" pattern="3\d\d" /> </preCondition> </preConditions> <rule name="Rewrite outbound relative URLs in tags" preCondition="isHTML"> <match filterByTags="A, Area, Base, Form, Frame, Head, IFrame, Img, Input, Link, Script" pattern="^/redmine/(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="/workflow/{R:1}" /> </rule> <rule name="Rewrite outbound absolute URLs in tags" preCondition="isHTML"> <match filterByTags="A, Area, Base, Form, Frame, Head, IFrame, Img, Input, Link, Script" pattern="^(https?)://146.18.236.xxx/redmine/(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}://mydept.mycompany.com/workflow/{R:2}" /> </rule> <rule name="Rewrite tags with hypenated properties missed by IIS bug" preCondition="isHTML"> <!-- http://forums.iis.net/t/1200916.aspx --> <match filterByTags="None" customTags="" pattern="(\baction=&quot;|\bsrc=&quot;|\bhref=&quot;)/redmine/(.*?)(&quot;)" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="true" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}/workflow/{R:2}{R:3}" /> </rule> <rule name="Rewrite Location Header" preCondition="isRedirection"> <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_LOCATION" pattern="^http://[^/]+/(.*)" /> <conditions> <add input="{ORIGINAL_URL}" pattern=".+" /> <add input="{URL}" pattern="^/(workflow|redmine)/.*" /> </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" value="http://{ORIGINAL_URL}/{C:1}/{R:1}" /> </rule> </outboundRules> </rewrite> <urlCompression dynamicCompressionBeforeCache="false" /> Any help that you can provide would be appreciated. I get the impression that I'm close adn that it is just one little setting here or there, but I can't seem to make it work.

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• Cluster failover and strange gratuitous arp behavior

  - by lazerpld

  I am experiencing a strange Windows 2008R2 cluster related issue that is bothering me. I feel that I have come close as to what the issue is, but still don't fully understand what is happening. I have a two node exchange 2007 cluster running on two 2008R2 servers. The exchange cluster application works fine when running on the "primary" cluster node. The problem occurs when failing over the cluster ressource to the secondary node. When failing over the cluster to the "secondary" node, which for instance is on the same subnet as the "primary", the failover initially works ok and the cluster ressource continues to work for a couple of minutes on the new node. Which means that the recieving node does send out a gratuitous arp reply packet that updated the arp tables on the network. But after x amount of time (typically within 5 minutes time) something updates the arp-tables again because all of a sudden the cluster service does not answer to pings. So basically I start a ping to the exchange cluster address when its running on the "primary node". It works just great. I failover the cluster ressource group to the "secondary node" and I only have loss of one ping which is acceptable. The cluster ressource still answers for some time after being failed over and all of a sudden the ping starts timing out. This is telling me that the arp table initially is updated by the secondary node, but then something (which I haven't found out yet) wrongfully updates it again, probably with the primary node's MAC. Why does this happen - has anyone experienced the same problem? The cluster is NOT running NLB and the problem stops immidiately after failing over back to the primary node where there are no problems. Each node is using NIC teaming (intel) with ALB. Each node is on the same subnet and has gateway and so on entered correctly as far as I am concerned. Edit: I was wondering if it could be related to network binding order maybe? Because I have noticed that the only difference I can see from node to node is when showing the local arp table. On the "primary" node the arp table is generated on the cluster address as the source. While on the "secondary" its generated from the nodes own network card. Any input on this? Edit: Ok here is the connection layout. Cluster address: A.B.6.208/25 Exchange application address: A.B.6.212/25 Node A: 3 physical nics. Two teamed using intels teaming with the address A.B.6.210/25 called public The last one used for cluster traffic called private with 10.0.0.138/24 Node B: 3 physical nics. Two teamed using intels teaming with the address A.B.6.211/25 called public The last one used for cluster traffic called private with 10.0.0.139/24 Each node sits in a seperate datacenter connected together. End switches being cisco in DC1 and NEXUS 5000/2000 in DC2. Edit: I have been testing a little more. I have now created an empty application on the same cluster, and given it another ip address on the same subnet as the exchange application. After failing this empty application over, I see the exact same problem occuring. After one or two minutes clients on other subnets cannot ping the virtual ip of the application. But while clients on other subnets cannot, another server from another cluster on the same subnet has no trouble pinging. But if i then make another failover to the original state, then the situation is the opposite. So now clients on same subnet cannot, and on other they can. We have another cluster set up the same way and on the same subnet, with the same intel network cards, the same drivers and same teaming settings. Here we are not seeing this. So its somewhat confusing. Edit: OK done some more research. Removed the NIC teaming of the secondary node, since it didnt work anyway. After some standard problems following that, I finally managed to get it up and running again with the old NIC teaming settings on one single physical network card. Now I am not able to reproduce the problem described above. So it is somehow related to the teaming - maybe some kind of bug? Edit: Did some more failing over without being able to make it fail. So removing the NIC team looks like it was a workaround. Now I tried to reestablish the intel NIC teaming with ALB (as it was before) and i still cannot make it fail. This is annoying due to the fact that now i actually cannot pinpoint the root of the problem. Now it just seems to be some kind of MS/intel hick-up - which is hard to accept because what if the problem reoccurs in 14 days? There is a strange thing that happened though. After recreating the NIC team I was not able to rename the team to "PUBLIC" which the old team was called. So something has not been cleaned up in windows - although the server HAS been restarted! Edit: OK after restablishing the ALB teaming the error came back. So I am now going to do some thorough testing and i will get back with my observations. One thing is for sure. It is related to Intel 82575EB NICS, ALB and Gratuitous Arp.

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• Remote Desktop Services Gateway Issue

  - by AVandelay05

  Alright fellow techies here's the rundown. I have installed Server 2008 r2 Remote Dekstop Services on a VM in my network. I installed the following RD role services: RD Session Host, Licensing, Connection Broker, Gateway, Web Access. When I set things up originally, the gateway server and RDWeb worked as it should locally. After getting things running locally (remoteserver.domainname.local) I wanted to test things externally. From the outside, I couldn't get things running (meaning I could connect to rdweb access externally, but when I tried to run an app I would get the message "can't connect/find computer"). Here's my setup for external access The VM has every RD Services role services installed on it, meaning it acts as gateway, rd web access, session host, licensing, the whole bit. I made a self-signed certificate on the gateway server (gateway.domainname.net is the cert name). Internally, I have a secondary forward-lookup zone called domainname.net with an A record gateway pointing to the local IP of the gateway server. On our public DNS (domainname.net) I have an A record gateway. This is to access the RDWeb externally. In IIS I have the following authentication settings RDWeb: All disabled except for anonymous authentication Rpc: All disabled except for basic and windows RpcWithCert: All disbled except for windows authentication I have the necessary web access config in our sonicwall tz210 (https and rdp, external ip pointing to local ip of rds server) RAP and CAP have the correct user and computer groups, authentication, and allowed devices After all of this, here's what happens accessing externally. I can login correctly to RDWeb Access (I've tried a bogus login, I can't login to it so that's working properly). I see the Apps for use. I click on an app, click connect, the credential window opens, I put in the correct user creds, it tries to connect to the gateway server, but then the cred window comes back in view. I tried to reach a limit of failed logins, but never reached one, haha. So from the same external client machine I try to connect to the gateway through a Remote Desktop connection. I put in the correct gateway settings in the RD window, try to connect and get the same results as I did in RDWeb access. I checked the event logs on the RD Services machine and saw the following event IDs around the time I tried to login externally: ID 6037 with the message "The program svchost.exe, with the assigned process ID 2168, could not authenticate locally by using the target name host/gateway.domainname.net. The target name used is not valid. A target name should refer to one of the local computer names, for example, the DNS host name. Try a different target name." ID 10 RADWebAccess "RD Web Access was unable to access gateway.domainname.net, which is the server that is specified as running the RemoteApp and Desktop Connection Management service. Ensure that the computer account of the RD Web Access server is a member of the TS Web Access Computers security group on gateway.domainname.net" ID 4625 "An account failed to log on. Subject: Security ID: NULL SID Account Name: - Account Domain: - Logon ID: 0x0 Logon Type: 3 Account For Which Logon Failed: Security ID: NULL SID Account Name: Administrator Account Domain: gateway.domainname.net Failure Information: Failure Reason: Unknown user name or bad password. Status: 0xc000006d Sub Status: 0xc000006a Process Information: Caller Process ID: 0x0 Caller Process Name: - Network Information: Workstation Name: USER-LAPTOP Source Network Address: External IP Source Port: 63125 Detailed Authentication Information: Logon Process: NtLmSsp Authentication Package: NTLM Transited Services: - Package Name (NTLM only): - Key Length: 0 This event is generated when a logon request fails. It is generated on the computer where access was attempted. The Subject fields indicate the account on the local system which requested the logon. This is most commonly a service such as the Server service, or a local process such as Winlogon.exe or Services.exe. The Logon Type field indicates the kind of logon that was requested. The most common types are 2 (interactive) and 3 (network). The Process Information fields indicate which account and process on the system requested the logon. The Network Information fields indicate where a remote logon request originated. Workstation name is not always available and may be left blank in some cases. The authentication information fields provide detailed information about this specific logon request. - Transited services indicate which intermediate services have participated in this logon request. - Package name indicates which sub-protocol was used among the NTLM protocols." I don't think the VM has a null SID. The SID of the VM and it's physical host have different SIDS. I can access the blank page for rpc externally using the external gateway name. It seems like authentication is a problem. Also, is it a problem that the external name of the gateway server doesn't match the local name? The external name (which the cert is based on) is gateway.domainname.net and the internal name is remoteserver.domainname.local. That's the only thing I can think of that would be the problem, but the external name has to be different from the local right? Internally, I ping gateway.domainname.net and it gives me the correct local IP of the server. Now, there isn't an actual computer name in AD, but I don't know how I would achieve that? I hope I've been clear....any help would be appreciated. I think I'm close to achieving this. :)

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