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• IIS SSL Certificate Renewal Pain

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’m in the middle of my annual certificate renewal for the West Wind site and I can honestly say that I hate IIS’s certificate system.  When it works it’s fine, but when it doesn’t man can it be a pain. Because I deal with public certificates on my site merely once a year, and you have to perform the certificate dance just the right way, I seem to run into some sort of trouble every year, thinking that Microsoft surely must have addressed the issues I ran into previously – HA! Not so. Don’t ever use the Renew Certificate Feature in IIS! The first rule that I should have never forgotten is that certificate renewals in IIS (7 is what I’m using but I think it’s no different in 7.5 and 8), simply don’t work if you’re submitting to get a public certificate from a certificate authority. I use DNSimple for my DNS domain management and SSL certificates because they provide ridiculously easy domain management and good prices for SSL certs – especially wildcard certificates, which is what I use on west-wind.com. Certificates in IIS can be found pegged to the machine root. If you go into the IIS Manager, go to the machine root the tree and then click on certificates and you then get various certificate options: Both of these options create a new Certificate request (CSR), which is just a text file. But if you’re silly enough like me to click on the Renew button on your old certificate, you’ll find that you end up generating a very long Certificate Request that looks nothing like the original certificate request and the format that’s used for this is not accepted by most certificate authorities. While I’m not sure exactly what the problem is, it simply looks like IIS is respecting none of your original certificate bit size choices and is generating a huge certificate request that is 3 times the size of a ‘normal’ certificate request. The end result is (and I’ve done this at least twice now) is that the certificate processor is likely to fail processing those renewals. Always create a new Certificate While it’s a little more work and you have to remember how to fill out the certificate request properly, this is the safe way to make sure your certificate generates properly. First comes the Distinguished Name Properties dialog: Ah yes you have to love the nomenclature of this stuff. Distinguished name, Common name – WTF is a common name? It doesn’t look common to me! Make sure this form gets filled out correctly. Common NameThis is the domain name of the Web site. In my case I’m creating a wildcard certificate so I’m using the * prefix. If you’re purchasing a certificate for a specific domain use www.west-wind.com or store.west-wind.com for example. Make sure this matches the EXACT domain you’re trying to use secure access on because that’s all the certificate is going to work on unless you get a wildcard certificate. Organization Is the name of your company or organization. Depending on the kind of certificate you purchase this name will show up on your certificate. Most low end SSL certificates (ie. those that cost under $100 for single domains) don’t list the organization, the higher signature certificates that also require extensive validation by the cert authority do. Regardless you should make sure this matches the right company/organization. Organizational Unit This can be anything. Not really sure what this is for, but traditionally I’ve always set this to Web because – well this is a Web thing after all right? I’ve never seen this used anywhere that I can tell other than to internally reference the cert. State and CountryPretty obvious. Should reflect the location of the business/organization/person or site.   Next you have to configure the bit size used for the certificate: The default on this dialog is 1024, but I’ve found that most providers these days request a minimum bit length of 2048, as did my DNSimple provider. Again check with the provider when you submit to make sure. Bit length mismatches can cause problems if you use a size that isn’t supported by the provider. I had that happen last year when I submitted my CSR and it got rejected quite a bit later, when the certs usually are issued within an hour or less. When you’re done here, the certificate is saved to disk as a .txt file and it should look something like this (this is a 2048 bit length CSR):-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- MIIEVGCCAz0CAQAwdjELMAkGA1UEBhMCVVMxDzANBgNVBAgMBkhhd2FpaTENMAsG A1UEBwwEUGFpYTEfMB0GA1UECgwWV2VzdCBXaW5kIFRlY2hub2xvZ2llczEMMAoG B1UECwwDV2ViMRgwFgYDVQQDDA8qLndlc3Qtd2luZC5jb20wggEiMA0GCSqGSIb3 DQEBAQUAA4IBDwAwggEKAoIBAQDIPWOFMkMVRp2Ftj9w/cCVV4OYYhoZYtl+8lTk oqDwKca0xWHLgioX/9v0rZLS6a82MHqKEBxVXu+cuCmSE4AQtB/1YH9lS4tpc/be OZDvnTotP6l4MCEzzAfROcw4CiIg6X0RMSnl8IATAvv2V5LQM9TDdt9oDdMpX2IY +vVC9RZ7PMHBmR9kwI2i/lrKitzhQKaHgpmKcRlM6iqpALUiX28w5HJaDKK1MDHN 607tyFJLHijuJKx7PdTqZYf50KkC3NupfZ2avVycf18Q13jHWj59tvwEOczoVzRL l4LQivAqbhyiqMpWnrZunIOUZta5aGm+jo7O1knGWJjxuraTAgMBAAGgggGYMBoG CisGAQQBgjcNAgMxDBYKNi4yLjkyMDAuMjA0BgkrBgEEAYI3FRQxJzAlAgEFDAZS QVNYUFMMC1JBU1hQU1xSaWNrDAtJbmV0TWdyLmV4ZTByBgorBgEEAYI3DQICMWQw YgIBAR5aAE0AaQBjAHIAbwBzAG8AZgB0ACAAUgBTAEEAIABTAEMAaABhAG4AbgBl AGwAIABDAHIAeQBwAHQAbwBnAHIAYQBwAGgAaQBjACAAUAByAG8AdgBpAGQAZQBy AwEAMIHPBgkqhkiG9w0BCQ4xgcEwgb4wDgYDVR0PAQH/BAQDAgTwMBMGA1UdJQQM MAoGCCsGAQUFBwMBMHgGCSqGSIb3DQEJDwRrMGkwDgYIKoZIhvcNAwICAgCAMA4G CCqGSIb3DQMEAgIAgDALBglghkgBZQMEASowCwYJYIZIAWUDBAEtMAsGCWCGSAFl AwQBAjALBglghkgBZQMEAQUwBwYFKw4DAgcwCgYIKoZIhvcNAwcwHQYDVR0OBBYE FD/yOsTbXE+GVFCFMmldzQvyloz9MA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBBQUAA4IBAQCK6LlsCuIM 1AU0niB6QZ9v0FTsGFxP1dYvVUnJyY6VEKNiGFiQjZac7UCs0p58yScdXWEFOE8V OsjAYD3xYNc05+ckyD67UHRGEUAVB9RBvbKW23KeR/8kBmEzc8PemD52YOgExxAJ 57xWmAwEHAvbgYzQvhO8AOzH3TGvvHbg5UKM1pYgNmuwZq5DkL/IDoeIJwfk/wrI wghNTuxxIFgbH4YrgLgv4PRvrS/LaTCRBdboaCgzATMczaOb1nd/DVNR+3fCtMhM W0psTAjzRbmXF3nJyAQa7jF/52gkY0RfFX2lG5tJnG+XDsVNvKNvh9Qa5Tlmkm06 ILKCm9ciWCKk -----END NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- You can take that certificate request and submit that to your certificate provider. Since this is base64 encoded you can typically just paste it into a text box on the submission page, or some providers will ask you to upload the CSR as a file. What does a Renewal look like? Note the length of the CSR will vary somewhat with key strength, but compare this to a renewal request that IIS generated from my existing site:-----BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- MIIPpwYFKoZIhvcNAQcCoIIPmDCCD5QCAQExCzAJBgUrDgMCGgUAMIIIqAYJKoZI hvcNAQcBoIIImQSCCJUwggiRMIIH+gIBADBdMSEwHwYDVQQLDBhEb21haW4gQ29u dHJvbCBWYWxpFGF0ZWQxHjAcBgNVBAsMFUVzc2VudGlhbFNTTCBXaWxkY2FyZDEY MBYGA1UEAwwPKi53ZXN0LXdpbmQuY29tMIGfMA0GCSqGSIb3DQEBAQUAA4GNADCB iQKBgQCK4OuIOR18Wb8tNMGRZiD1c9X57b332Lj7DhbckFqLs0ys8kVDHrTXSj+T Ye9nmAvfPpZmBtE5p9qRNN79rUYugAdl+qEtE4IJe1bRfxXzcKa1SXa8+TEs3zQa zYSmcR2dDuC8om1eAdeCtt0NnkvANgm1VLwGOor/UHMASaEhCQIDAQABoIIG8jAa BgorBgEEAYI3DQIDMQwWCjYuMi45MjAwLjIwNAYJKwYBBAGCNxUUMScwJQIBBQwG UkFTWFBTDAtSQVNYUFNcUmljawwLSW5ldE1nci5leGUwZgYKKwYBBAGCNw0CAjFY MFYCAQIeTgBNAGkAYwByAG8AcwBvAGYAdAAgAFMAdAByAG8AbgBnACAAQwByAHkA cAB0AG8AZwByAGEAcABoAGkAYwAgAFAAcgBvAHYAaQBkAGUAcgMBADCCAQAGCSqG SIb3DQEJDjGB8jCB7zAOBgNVHQ8BAf8EBAMCBaAwDAYDVR0TAQH/BAIwADA0BgNV 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+XZ8bhM7vsAS+pZionR4MyuQ0mYIt/lDcsZVZ91KxTsIm8rNMkkYGFoSIXjQ0+0t CbxMF0i2qnpmNRpA6PU8l7lxxvPkplsk9KB8QIPFrR5p/i/SUAd9vECWh5+/ktlc rfFP2PK7XcEwWizsvMrNqLyvQVNXSUPTMYIBrzCCAasCAQEwgYcwcjELMAkGA1UE BhMCR0IxGzAZBgNVBAgTEkdyZWF0ZXIgTWFuY2hlc3RlcjEQMA4GA1UEBxMHU2Fs Zm9yZDEaMBgGA1UEChMRQ09NT0RPIENBIExpbWl0ZWQxGDAWBgNVBAMTD0Vzc2Vu dGlhbFNTTCBDQQIRAO7UTVPkm+2Sbks59IdptaUwCQYFKw4DAhoFADANBgkqhkiG 9w0BAQEFAASCAQB8PNQ6bYnQpWfkHyxnDuvNKw3wrqF2p7JMZm+SuN2qp3R2LpCR mW2LrGtQIm9Iob/QOYH+8houYNVdvsATGPXX2T8gzn+anof4tOG0vCTK1Bp9bwf9 MkRP+1c8RW/vkYmUW4X5/C+y3CZpMH5dDTaXBIpXFzjX/fxNpH/rvLzGiaYYL3Cn OLO+aOADr9qq5yoqwpiYCSfYNNYKTUNNGfYIidQwYtbHXEYhSukB2oR89xD2sZZ4 bOqFjUPgTa5SsERLDDeg3omMKiIXVYGxlqBEq51Kge6IQt4qQV9P9VgInW7cWmKe dTqNHI9ri3ttewdEnT++TKGKKfTjX9SR8Waj -----END NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST----- Clearly there’s something very different between this an my original request! And it didn’t work. IIS creates a custom CSR that is encoded in a format that no certificate authority I’ve ever used uses. If you want the gory details of what’s in there look at this ServerFault question (thanks to Mika in the comments). In the end it doesn’t matter  though – no certificate authority knows what to do with this CSR. So create a new CSR and skip the renewal. Always! Use the same Server Keep in mind that on IIS at least you should always create your certificate on a single server and then when you receive the final certificate from your provider import it on that server. IIS tracks the CSR it created and requires it in order to import the final certificate properly. So if for some reason you try to install the certificate on another server, it won’t work. I’ve also run into trouble trying to install the same certificate twice – this time around I didn’t give my certificate the proper friendly name and IIS failed to allow me to assign the certificate to any of my Web sites. So I removed the certificate and tried to import again, only to find it failed the second time around. There are other ways to fix this, but in my case I had to have the certificate re-issued to work – not what you want to do. Regardless of what you do though, when you import make sure you do it right the first time by crossing all your t’s and dotting your i's– it’ll save you a lot of grief! You don’t actually have to use the server that the certificate gets installed on to generate the CSR and first install it, but it is generally a good idea to do so just so you can get the certificate installed into the right place right away. If you have access to the server where you need to install the certificate you might as well use it. But you can use another machine to generated the and install the certificate, then export the certificate and move it to another machine as needed. So you can use your Dev machine to create a certificate then export it and install it on a live server. More on installation and back up/export later. Installing the Certificate Once you’ve submitted a CSR request your provider will process the request and eventually issue you a new final certificate that contains another text file with the final key to import into your certificate store. IIS does this by combining the content in your certificate request with the original CSR. If all goes well your new certificate shows up in the certificate list and you’re ready to assign the certificate to your sites. Make sure you use a friendly name that matches domain name of your site. So use *.mysite.com or www.mysite.com or store.mysite.com to ensure IIS recognizes the certificate. I made the mistake of not naming my friendly name this way and found that IIS was unable to link my sites to my wildcard certificate. It needed to have the *. as part of the certificate otherwise the Hostname input field was blanked out. Changing the Friendly Name If you by accidentally used an invalid friendly name you can change it later in the Windows certificate store. Bring up a Run Box Type MMC File | Add/Remove Snap In Add Certificates | Computer Account | Local Computer Drill into Certificates | Personal | Certificates Find your Certificate | Right Click | Properties Edit the Friendly Name | Click OK Backing up your Certificate The first thing you should do once your certificate is successfully installed is to back it up! In case your server crashes or you otherwise lose your configuration this will ensure you have an easy way to recover and reinstall your certificate either on the same server or a different one. If you’re running a server farm or using a wildcard certificate you also need to get the certificate onto other machines and a PFX file import is the easiest way to do this. To back up your certificate select your certificate and choose Export from the context or sidebar menu: The Export Certificate option allows you to export a password protected binary file that you can import in a single step. You can copy the resulting binary PFX file to back up or copy to other machines to install on. Importing the certificate on another machine is as easy as pointing at the PFX file and specifying the password. IIS handles the rest. Assigning a new certificate to your Site Once you have the new certificate installed, all that’s left to do is assign it to your site. In IIS select your Web site and bring up the Site Bindings from the right sidebar. Add a new binding for https, bind it to port 443, specify your hostname and pick the certificate from the pick list. If you’re using a root site make sure to set up your certificate for www.yoursite.com and also for yoursite.com so that both work properly with SSL. Note that you need to explicitly configure each hostname for a certificate if you plan to use SSL. Luckily if you update your SSL certificate in the following year, IIS prompts you and asks whether you like to update all other sites that are using the existing cert to the newer cert. And you’re done. So what’s the Pain? So, all of this is old hat and it doesn’t look all that bad right? So what’s the pain here? Well if you follow the instructions and do everything right, then the process is about as straight forward as you would expect it to be. You create a cert request, you import it and assign it to your sites. That’s the basic steps and to be perfectly fair it works well – if nothing goes wrong. However, renewing tends to be the problem. The first unintuitive issue is that you simply shouldn’t renew but create a new CSR and generate your new certificate from that. Over the years I’ve fallen prey to the belief that Microsoft eventually will fix this so that the renewal creates the same type of CSR as the old cert, but apparently that will just never happen. Booo! The other problem I ran into is that I accidentally misnamed my imported certificate which in turn set off a chain of events that caused my originally issued certificate to become uninstallable. When I received my completed certificate I installed it and it installed just fine, but the friendly name was wrong. As a result IIS refused to assign the certificate to any of my host headered sites. That’s strike number one. Why the heck should the friendly name have any effect on the ability to attach the certificate??? Next I uninstalled the certificate because I figured that would be the easiest way to make sure I get it right. But I found that I could not reinstall my certificate. I kept getting these stop errors: "ASN1 bad tag value met" that would prevent the installation from completion. After searching around for this error and reading countless long messages on forums, I found that this error supposedly does not actually mean the install failed, but the list wouldn’t refresh. Commodo has this to say: Note: There is a known issue in IIS 7 giving the following error: "Cannot find the certificate request associated with this certificate file. A certificate request must be completed on the computer where it was created." You may also receive a message stating "ASN1 bad tag value met". If this is the same server that you generated the CSR on then, in most cases, the certificate is actually installed. Simply cancel the dialog and press "F5" to refresh the list of server certificates. If the new certificate is now in the list, you can continue with the next step. If it is not in the list, you will need to reissue your certificate using a new CSR (see our CSR creation instructions for IIS 7). After creating a new CSR, login to your Comodo account and click the 'replace' button for your certificate. Not sure if this issue is fixed in IIS 8 but that’s an insane bug to have crop up. As it turns out, in my case the refresh didn’t work and the certificate didn’t show up in the IIS list after the reinstall. In fact when looking at the certificate store I could see my certificate was installed in the right place, but the private key is missing which is most likely why IIS is not picking it up. It looks like IIS could not match the final cert to the original CSR generated. But again some sort of message to that affect might be helpful instead of ASN1 bad tag value met. Recovering the Private Key So it turns out my original problem was that I received the published key, but when I imported the private key was missing. There’s a relatively easy way to recover from this. If your certificate doesn’t show up in IIS check in the certificate store for the local machine (see steps above on how to bring this up). If you look at the certificate in Certificates/Personal/Certificates make sure you see the key as shown in the image below: if the key is missing it means that the certificate is missing the private key most likely. To fix a certificate you can do the following: Double click the certificate Go to the Details Tab Copy down the Serial number You can copy the serial number from the area blurred out above. The serial number will be in a format like ?00 a7 9b a1 a4 9d 91 63 57 d6 9f 26 b8 ee 79 b5 cb and you’ll need to strip out the spaces in order to use it in the next step. Next open up an Administrative command prompt and issue the following command: certutil -repairstore my 00a79ba1a49d916357d69f26b8ee79b5cb You should get a confirmation message that the repair worked. If you now go back to the certificate store you should now see the key icon show up on the certificate. Your certificate is fixed. Now go back into IIS Manager and refresh the list of certificates and if all goes well you should see all the certificates that showed in the cert store now: Remember – back up the key first then map to your site… Summary I deal with a lot of customers who run their own IIS servers, and I can’t tell you how often I hear about botched SSL installations. When I posted some of my issues on Twitter yesterday I got a hell storm of “me too” responses. I’m clearly not the only one, who’s run into this especially with renewals. I feel pretty comfortable with IIS configuration and I do a lot of it for support purposes, but the SSL configuration is one that never seems to go seamlessly. This blog post is meant as reminder to myself to read next time I do a renewal. So I can dot my i's and dash my t’s before I get caught in the mess I’m dealing with today. Hopefully some of you find this useful as well.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in IIS7  Security   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Improving Partitioned Table Join Performance

  - by Paul White

  The query optimizer does not always choose an optimal strategy when joining partitioned tables. This post looks at an example, showing how a manual rewrite of the query can almost double performance, while reducing the memory grant to almost nothing. Test Data The two tables in this example use a common partitioning partition scheme. The partition function uses 41 equal-size partitions: CREATE PARTITION FUNCTION PFT (integer) AS RANGE RIGHT FOR VALUES ( 125000, 250000, 375000, 500000, 625000, 750000, 875000, 1000000, 1125000, 1250000, 1375000, 1500000, 1625000, 1750000, 1875000, 2000000, 2125000, 2250000, 2375000, 2500000, 2625000, 2750000, 2875000, 3000000, 3125000, 3250000, 3375000, 3500000, 3625000, 3750000, 3875000, 4000000, 4125000, 4250000, 4375000, 4500000, 4625000, 4750000, 4875000, 5000000 ); GO CREATE PARTITION SCHEME PST AS PARTITION PFT ALL TO ([PRIMARY]); There two tables are: CREATE TABLE dbo.T1 ( TID integer NOT NULL IDENTITY(0,1), Column1 integer NOT NULL, Padding binary(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0x,   CONSTRAINT PK_T1 PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (TID) ON PST (TID) );   CREATE TABLE dbo.T2 ( TID integer NOT NULL, Column1 integer NOT NULL, Padding binary(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0x,   CONSTRAINT PK_T2 PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED (TID, Column1) ON PST (TID) ); The next script loads 5 million rows into T1 with a pseudo-random value between 1 and 5 for Column1. The table is partitioned on the IDENTITY column TID: INSERT dbo.T1 WITH (TABLOCKX) (Column1) SELECT (ABS(CHECKSUM(NEWID())) % 5) + 1 FROM dbo.Numbers AS N WHERE n BETWEEN 1 AND 5000000; In case you don’t already have an auxiliary table of numbers lying around, here’s a script to create one with 10 million rows: CREATE TABLE dbo.Numbers (n bigint PRIMARY KEY);   WITH L0 AS(SELECT 1 AS c UNION ALL SELECT 1), L1 AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L0 AS A CROSS JOIN L0 AS B), L2 AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L1 AS A CROSS JOIN L1 AS B), L3 AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L2 AS A CROSS JOIN L2 AS B), L4 AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L3 AS A CROSS JOIN L3 AS B), L5 AS(SELECT 1 AS c FROM L4 AS A CROSS JOIN L4 AS B), Nums AS(SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY (SELECT NULL)) AS n FROM L5) INSERT dbo.Numbers WITH (TABLOCKX) SELECT TOP (10000000) n FROM Nums ORDER BY n OPTION (MAXDOP 1); Table T1 contains data like this: Next we load data into table T2. The relationship between the two tables is that table 2 contains ‘n’ rows for each row in table 1, where ‘n’ is determined by the value in Column1 of table T1. There is nothing particularly special about the data or distribution, by the way. INSERT dbo.T2 WITH (TABLOCKX) (TID, Column1) SELECT T.TID, N.n FROM dbo.T1 AS T JOIN dbo.Numbers AS N ON N.n >= 1 AND N.n <= T.Column1; Table T2 ends up containing about 15 million rows: The primary key for table T2 is a combination of TID and Column1. The data is partitioned according to the value in column TID alone. Partition Distribution The following query shows the number of rows in each partition of table T1: SELECT PartitionID = CA1.P, NumRows = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T CROSS APPLY (VALUES ($PARTITION.PFT(TID))) AS CA1 (P) GROUP BY CA1.P ORDER BY CA1.P; There are 40 partitions containing 125,000 rows (40 * 125k = 5m rows). The rightmost partition remains empty. The next query shows the distribution for table 2: SELECT PartitionID = CA1.P, NumRows = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T2 AS T CROSS APPLY (VALUES ($PARTITION.PFT(TID))) AS CA1 (P) GROUP BY CA1.P ORDER BY CA1.P; There are roughly 375,000 rows in each partition (the rightmost partition is also empty): Ok, that’s the test data done. Test Query and Execution Plan The task is to count the rows resulting from joining tables 1 and 2 on the TID column: SET STATISTICS IO ON; DECLARE @s datetime2 = SYSUTCDATETIME();   SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T1 JOIN dbo.T2 AS T2 ON T2.TID = T1.TID;   SELECT DATEDIFF(Millisecond, @s, SYSUTCDATETIME()); SET STATISTICS IO OFF; The optimizer chooses a plan using parallel hash join, and partial aggregation: The Plan Explorer plan tree view shows accurate cardinality estimates and an even distribution of rows across threads (click to enlarge the image): With a warm data cache, the STATISTICS IO output shows that no physical I/O was needed, and all 41 partitions were touched: Running the query without actual execution plan or STATISTICS IO information for maximum performance, the query returns in around 2600ms. Execution Plan Analysis The first step toward improving on the execution plan produced by the query optimizer is to understand how it works, at least in outline. The two parallel Clustered Index Scans use multiple threads to read rows from tables T1 and T2. Parallel scan uses a demand-based scheme where threads are given page(s) to scan from the table as needed. This arrangement has certain important advantages, but does result in an unpredictable distribution of rows amongst threads. The point is that multiple threads cooperate to scan the whole table, but it is impossible to predict which rows end up on which threads. For correct results from the parallel hash join, the execution plan has to ensure that rows from T1 and T2 that might join are processed on the same thread. For example, if a row from T1 with join key value ‘1234’ is placed in thread 5’s hash table, the execution plan must guarantee that any rows from T2 that also have join key value ‘1234’ probe thread 5’s hash table for matches. The way this guarantee is enforced in this parallel hash join plan is by repartitioning rows to threads after each parallel scan. The two repartitioning exchanges route rows to threads using a hash function over the hash join keys. The two repartitioning exchanges use the same hash function so rows from T1 and T2 with the same join key must end up on the same hash join thread. Expensive Exchanges This business of repartitioning rows between threads can be very expensive, especially if a large number of rows is involved. The execution plan selected by the optimizer moves 5 million rows through one repartitioning exchange and around 15 million across the other. As a first step toward removing these exchanges, consider the execution plan selected by the optimizer if we join just one partition from each table, disallowing parallelism: SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T1 JOIN dbo.T2 AS T2 ON T2.TID = T1.TID WHERE $PARTITION.PFT(T1.TID) = 1 AND $PARTITION.PFT(T2.TID) = 1 OPTION (MAXDOP 1); The optimizer has chosen a (one-to-many) merge join instead of a hash join. The single-partition query completes in around 100ms. If everything scaled linearly, we would expect that extending this strategy to all 40 populated partitions would result in an execution time around 4000ms. Using parallelism could reduce that further, perhaps to be competitive with the parallel hash join chosen by the optimizer. This raises a question. If the most efficient way to join one partition from each of the tables is to use a merge join, why does the optimizer not choose a merge join for the full query? Forcing a Merge Join Let’s force the optimizer to use a merge join on the test query using a hint: SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T1 JOIN dbo.T2 AS T2 ON T2.TID = T1.TID OPTION (MERGE JOIN); This is the execution plan selected by the optimizer: This plan results in the same number of logical reads reported previously, but instead of 2600ms the query takes 5000ms. The natural explanation for this drop in performance is that the merge join plan is only using a single thread, whereas the parallel hash join plan could use multiple threads. Parallel Merge Join We can get a parallel merge join plan using the same query hint as before, and adding trace flag 8649: SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T1 JOIN dbo.T2 AS T2 ON T2.TID = T1.TID OPTION (MERGE JOIN, QUERYTRACEON 8649); The execution plan is: This looks promising. It uses a similar strategy to distribute work across threads as seen for the parallel hash join. In practice though, performance is disappointing. On a typical run, the parallel merge plan runs for around 8400ms; slower than the single-threaded merge join plan (5000ms) and much worse than the 2600ms for the parallel hash join. We seem to be going backwards! The logical reads for the parallel merge are still exactly the same as before, with no physical IOs. The cardinality estimates and thread distribution are also still very good (click to enlarge): A big clue to the reason for the poor performance is shown in the wait statistics (captured by Plan Explorer Pro): CXPACKET waits require careful interpretation, and are most often benign, but in this case excessive waiting occurs at the repartitioning exchanges. Unlike the parallel hash join, the repartitioning exchanges in this plan are order-preserving ‘merging’ exchanges (because merge join requires ordered inputs): Parallelism works best when threads can just grab any available unit of work and get on with processing it. Preserving order introduces inter-thread dependencies that can easily lead to significant waits occurring. In extreme cases, these dependencies can result in an intra-query deadlock, though the details of that will have to wait for another time to explore in detail. The potential for waits and deadlocks leads the query optimizer to cost parallel merge join relatively highly, especially as the degree of parallelism (DOP) increases. This high costing resulted in the optimizer choosing a serial merge join rather than parallel in this case. The test results certainly confirm its reasoning. Collocated Joins In SQL Server 2008 and later, the optimizer has another available strategy when joining tables that share a common partition scheme. This strategy is a collocated join, also known as as a per-partition join. It can be applied in both serial and parallel execution plans, though it is limited to 2-way joins in the current optimizer. Whether the optimizer chooses a collocated join or not depends on cost estimation. The primary benefits of a collocated join are that it eliminates an exchange and requires less memory, as we will see next. Costing and Plan Selection The query optimizer did consider a collocated join for our original query, but it was rejected on cost grounds. The parallel hash join with repartitioning exchanges appeared to be a cheaper option. There is no query hint to force a collocated join, so we have to mess with the costing framework to produce one for our test query. Pretending that IOs cost 50 times more than usual is enough to convince the optimizer to use collocated join with our test query: -- Pretend IOs are 50x cost temporarily DBCC SETIOWEIGHT(50);   -- Co-located hash join SELECT COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T1 JOIN dbo.T2 AS T2 ON T2.TID = T1.TID OPTION (RECOMPILE);   -- Reset IO costing DBCC SETIOWEIGHT(1); Collocated Join Plan The estimated execution plan for the collocated join is: The Constant Scan contains one row for each partition of the shared partitioning scheme, from 1 to 41. The hash repartitioning exchanges seen previously are replaced by a single Distribute Streams exchange using Demand partitioning. Demand partitioning means that the next partition id is given to the next parallel thread that asks for one. My test machine has eight logical processors, and all are available for SQL Server to use. As a result, there are eight threads in the single parallel branch in this plan, each processing one partition from each table at a time. Once a thread finishes processing a partition, it grabs a new partition number from the Distribute Streams exchange…and so on until all partitions have been processed. It is important to understand that the parallel scans in this plan are different from the parallel hash join plan. Although the scans have the same parallelism icon, tables T1 and T2 are not being co-operatively scanned by multiple threads in the same way. Each thread reads a single partition of T1 and performs a hash match join with the same partition from table T2. The properties of the two Clustered Index Scans show a Seek Predicate (unusual for a scan!) limiting the rows to a single partition: The crucial point is that the join between T1 and T2 is on TID, and TID is the partitioning column for both tables. A thread that processes partition ‘n’ is guaranteed to see all rows that can possibly join on TID for that partition. In addition, no other thread will see rows from that partition, so this removes the need for repartitioning exchanges. CPU and Memory Efficiency Improvements The collocated join has removed two expensive repartitioning exchanges and added a single exchange processing 41 rows (one for each partition id). Remember, the parallel hash join plan exchanges had to process 5 million and 15 million rows. The amount of processor time spent on exchanges will be much lower in the collocated join plan. In addition, the collocated join plan has a maximum of 8 threads processing single partitions at any one time. The 41 partitions will all be processed eventually, but a new partition is not started until a thread asks for it. Threads can reuse hash table memory for the new partition. The parallel hash join plan also had 8 hash tables, but with all 5,000,000 build rows loaded at the same time. The collocated plan needs memory for only 8 * 125,000 = 1,000,000 rows at any one time. Collocated Hash Join Performance The collated join plan has disappointing performance in this case. The query runs for around 25,300ms despite the same IO statistics as usual. This is much the worst result so far, so what went wrong? It turns out that cardinality estimation for the single partition scans of table T1 is slightly low. The properties of the Clustered Index Scan of T1 (graphic immediately above) show the estimation was for 121,951 rows. This is a small shortfall compared with the 125,000 rows actually encountered, but it was enough to cause the hash join to spill to physical tempdb: A level 1 spill doesn’t sound too bad, until you realize that the spill to tempdb probably occurs for each of the 41 partitions. As a side note, the cardinality estimation error is a little surprising because the system tables accurately show there are 125,000 rows in every partition of T1. Unfortunately, the optimizer uses regular column and index statistics to derive cardinality estimates here rather than system table information (e.g. sys.partitions). Collocated Merge Join We will never know how well the collocated parallel hash join plan might have worked without the cardinality estimation error (and the resulting 41 spills to tempdb) but we do know: Merge join does not require a memory grant; and Merge join was the optimizer’s preferred join option for a single partition join Putting this all together, what we would really like to see is the same collocated join strategy, but using merge join instead of hash join. Unfortunately, the current query optimizer cannot produce a collocated merge join; it only knows how to do collocated hash join. So where does this leave us? CROSS APPLY sys.partitions We can try to write our own collocated join query. We can use sys.partitions to find the partition numbers, and CROSS APPLY to get a count per partition, with a final step to sum the partial counts. The following query implements this idea: SELECT row_count = SUM(Subtotals.cnt) FROM ( -- Partition numbers SELECT p.partition_number FROM sys.partitions AS p WHERE p.[object_id] = OBJECT_ID(N'T1', N'U') AND p.index_id = 1 ) AS P CROSS APPLY ( -- Count per collocated join SELECT cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T1 JOIN dbo.T2 AS T2 ON T2.TID = T1.TID WHERE $PARTITION.PFT(T1.TID) = p.partition_number AND $PARTITION.PFT(T2.TID) = p.partition_number ) AS SubTotals; The estimated plan is: The cardinality estimates aren’t all that good here, especially the estimate for the scan of the system table underlying the sys.partitions view. Nevertheless, the plan shape is heading toward where we would like to be. Each partition number from the system table results in a per-partition scan of T1 and T2, a one-to-many Merge Join, and a Stream Aggregate to compute the partial counts. The final Stream Aggregate just sums the partial counts. Execution time for this query is around 3,500ms, with the same IO statistics as always. This compares favourably with 5,000ms for the serial plan produced by the optimizer with the OPTION (MERGE JOIN) hint. This is another case of the sum of the parts being less than the whole – summing 41 partial counts from 41 single-partition merge joins is faster than a single merge join and count over all partitions. Even so, this single-threaded collocated merge join is not as quick as the original parallel hash join plan, which executed in 2,600ms. On the positive side, our collocated merge join uses only one logical processor and requires no memory grant. The parallel hash join plan used 16 threads and reserved 569 MB of memory:   Using a Temporary Table Our collocated merge join plan should benefit from parallelism. The reason parallelism is not being used is that the query references a system table. We can work around that by writing the partition numbers to a temporary table (or table variable): SET STATISTICS IO ON; DECLARE @s datetime2 = SYSUTCDATETIME();   CREATE TABLE #P ( partition_number integer PRIMARY KEY);   INSERT #P (partition_number) SELECT p.partition_number FROM sys.partitions AS p WHERE p.[object_id] = OBJECT_ID(N'T1', N'U') AND p.index_id = 1;   SELECT row_count = SUM(Subtotals.cnt) FROM #P AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T1 JOIN dbo.T2 AS T2 ON T2.TID = T1.TID WHERE $PARTITION.PFT(T1.TID) = p.partition_number AND $PARTITION.PFT(T2.TID) = p.partition_number ) AS SubTotals;   DROP TABLE #P;   SELECT DATEDIFF(Millisecond, @s, SYSUTCDATETIME()); SET STATISTICS IO OFF; Using the temporary table adds a few logical reads, but the overall execution time is still around 3500ms, indistinguishable from the same query without the temporary table. The problem is that the query optimizer still doesn’t choose a parallel plan for this query, though the removal of the system table reference means that it could if it chose to: In fact the optimizer did enter the parallel plan phase of query optimization (running search 1 for a second time): Unfortunately, the parallel plan found seemed to be more expensive than the serial plan. This is a crazy result, caused by the optimizer’s cost model not reducing operator CPU costs on the inner side of a nested loops join. Don’t get me started on that, we’ll be here all night. In this plan, everything expensive happens on the inner side of a nested loops join. Without a CPU cost reduction to compensate for the added cost of exchange operators, candidate parallel plans always look more expensive to the optimizer than the equivalent serial plan. Parallel Collocated Merge Join We can produce the desired parallel plan using trace flag 8649 again: SELECT row_count = SUM(Subtotals.cnt) FROM #P AS p CROSS APPLY ( SELECT cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T1 JOIN dbo.T2 AS T2 ON T2.TID = T1.TID WHERE $PARTITION.PFT(T1.TID) = p.partition_number AND $PARTITION.PFT(T2.TID) = p.partition_number ) AS SubTotals OPTION (QUERYTRACEON 8649); The actual execution plan is: One difference between this plan and the collocated hash join plan is that a Repartition Streams exchange operator is used instead of Distribute Streams. The effect is similar, though not quite identical. The Repartition uses round-robin partitioning, meaning the next partition id is pushed to the next thread in sequence. The Distribute Streams exchange seen earlier used Demand partitioning, meaning the next partition id is pulled across the exchange by the next thread that is ready for more work. There are subtle performance implications for each partitioning option, but going into that would again take us too far off the main point of this post. Performance The important thing is the performance of this parallel collocated merge join – just 1350ms on a typical run. The list below shows all the alternatives from this post (all timings include creation, population, and deletion of the temporary table where appropriate) from quickest to slowest: Collocated parallel merge join: 1350ms Parallel hash join: 2600ms Collocated serial merge join: 3500ms Serial merge join: 5000ms Parallel merge join: 8400ms Collated parallel hash join: 25,300ms (hash spill per partition) The parallel collocated merge join requires no memory grant (aside from a paltry 1.2MB used for exchange buffers). This plan uses 16 threads at DOP 8; but 8 of those are (rather pointlessly) allocated to the parallel scan of the temporary table. These are minor concerns, but it turns out there is a way to address them if it bothers you. Parallel Collocated Merge Join with Demand Partitioning This final tweak replaces the temporary table with a hard-coded list of partition ids (dynamic SQL could be used to generate this query from sys.partitions): SELECT row_count = SUM(Subtotals.cnt) FROM ( VALUES (1),(2),(3),(4),(5),(6),(7),(8),(9),(10), (11),(12),(13),(14),(15),(16),(17),(18),(19),(20), (21),(22),(23),(24),(25),(26),(27),(28),(29),(30), (31),(32),(33),(34),(35),(36),(37),(38),(39),(40),(41) ) AS P (partition_number) CROSS APPLY ( SELECT cnt = COUNT_BIG(*) FROM dbo.T1 AS T1 JOIN dbo.T2 AS T2 ON T2.TID = T1.TID WHERE $PARTITION.PFT(T1.TID) = p.partition_number AND $PARTITION.PFT(T2.TID) = p.partition_number ) AS SubTotals OPTION (QUERYTRACEON 8649); The actual execution plan is: The parallel collocated hash join plan is reproduced below for comparison: The manual rewrite has another advantage that has not been mentioned so far: the partial counts (per partition) can be computed earlier than the partial counts (per thread) in the optimizer’s collocated join plan. The earlier aggregation is performed by the extra Stream Aggregate under the nested loops join. The performance of the parallel collocated merge join is unchanged at around 1350ms. Final Words It is a shame that the current query optimizer does not consider a collocated merge join (Connect item closed as Won’t Fix). The example used in this post showed an improvement in execution time from 2600ms to 1350ms using a modestly-sized data set and limited parallelism. In addition, the memory requirement for the query was almost completely eliminated  – down from 569MB to 1.2MB. The problem with the parallel hash join selected by the optimizer is that it attempts to process the full data set all at once (albeit using eight threads). It requires a large memory grant to hold all 5 million rows from table T1 across the eight hash tables, and does not take advantage of the divide-and-conquer opportunity offered by the common partitioning. The great thing about the collocated join strategies is that each parallel thread works on a single partition from both tables, reading rows, performing the join, and computing a per-partition subtotal, before moving on to a new partition. From a thread’s point of view… If you have trouble visualizing what is happening from just looking at the parallel collocated merge join execution plan, let’s look at it again, but from the point of view of just one thread operating between the two Parallelism (exchange) operators. Our thread picks up a single partition id from the Distribute Streams exchange, and starts a merge join using ordered rows from partition 1 of table T1 and partition 1 of table T2. By definition, this is all happening on a single thread. As rows join, they are added to a (per-partition) count in the Stream Aggregate immediately above the Merge Join. Eventually, either T1 (partition 1) or T2 (partition 1) runs out of rows and the merge join stops. The per-partition count from the aggregate passes on through the Nested Loops join to another Stream Aggregate, which is maintaining a per-thread subtotal. Our same thread now picks up a new partition id from the exchange (say it gets id 9 this time). The count in the per-partition aggregate is reset to zero, and the processing of partition 9 of both tables proceeds just as it did for partition 1, and on the same thread. Each thread picks up a single partition id and processes all the data for that partition, completely independently from other threads working on other partitions. One thread might eventually process partitions (1, 9, 17, 25, 33, 41) while another is concurrently processing partitions (2, 10, 18, 26, 34) and so on for the other six threads at DOP 8. The point is that all 8 threads can execute independently and concurrently, continuing to process new partitions until the wider job (of which the thread has no knowledge!) is done. This divide-and-conquer technique can be much more efficient than simply splitting the entire workload across eight threads all at once. Related Reading Understanding and Using Parallelism in SQL Server Parallel Execution Plans Suck © 2013 Paul White – All Rights Reserved Twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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• A Taxonomy of Numerical Methods v1

  - by JoshReuben

  Numerical Analysis – When, What, (but not how) Once you understand the Math & know C++, Numerical Methods are basically blocks of iterative & conditional math code. I found the real trick was seeing the forest for the trees – knowing which method to use for which situation. Its pretty easy to get lost in the details – so I’ve tried to organize these methods in a way that I can quickly look this up. I’ve included links to detailed explanations and to C++ code examples. I’ve tried to classify Numerical methods in the following broad categories: Solving Systems of Linear Equations Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively Interpolation Curve Fitting Optimization Numerical Differentiation & Integration Solving ODEs Boundary Problems Solving EigenValue problems Enjoy – I did ! Solving Systems of Linear Equations Overview Solve sets of algebraic equations with x unknowns The set is commonly in matrix form Gauss-Jordan Elimination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Jordan_elimination C++: http://www.codekeep.net/snippets/623f1923-e03c-4636-8c92-c9dc7aa0d3c0.aspx Produces solution of the equations & the coefficient matrix Efficient, stable 2 steps: · Forward Elimination – matrix decomposition: reduce set to triangular form (0s below the diagonal) or row echelon form. If degenerate, then there is no solution · Backward Elimination –write the original matrix as the product of ints inverse matrix & its reduced row-echelon matrix à reduce set to row canonical form & use back-substitution to find the solution to the set Elementary ops for matrix decomposition: · Row multiplication · Row switching · Add multiples of rows to other rows Use pivoting to ensure rows are ordered for achieving triangular form LU Decomposition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LU_decomposition C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-lu-decomposition-for-solving.html Represent the matrix as a product of lower & upper triangular matrices A modified version of GJ Elimination Advantage – can easily apply forward & backward elimination to solve triangular matrices Techniques: · Doolittle Method – sets the L matrix diagonal to unity · Crout Method - sets the U matrix diagonal to unity Note: both the L & U matrices share the same unity diagonal & can be stored compactly in the same matrix Gauss-Seidel Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gauss%E2%80%93Seidel_method C++: http://www.nr.com/forum/showthread.php?t=722 Transform the linear set of equations into a single equation & then use numerical integration (as integration formulas have Sums, it is implemented iteratively). an optimization of Gauss-Jacobi: 1.5 times faster, requires 0.25 iterations to achieve the same tolerance Solving Non-Linear Equations Iteratively find roots of polynomials – there may be 0, 1 or n solutions for an n order polynomial use iterative techniques Iterative methods · used when there are no known analytical techniques · Requires set functions to be continuous & differentiable · Requires an initial seed value – choice is critical to convergence à conduct multiple runs with different starting points & then select best result · Systematic - iterate until diminishing returns, tolerance or max iteration conditions are met · bracketing techniques will always yield convergent solutions, non-bracketing methods may fail to converge Incremental method if a nonlinear function has opposite signs at 2 ends of a small interval x1 & x2, then there is likely to be a solution in their interval – solutions are detected by evaluating a function over interval steps, for a change in sign, adjusting the step size dynamically. Limitations – can miss closely spaced solutions in large intervals, cannot detect degenerate (coinciding) solutions, limited to functions that cross the x-axis, gives false positives for singularities Fixed point method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_iteration C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=weYj75E_t6MC&pg=PA79&lpg=PA79&dq=fixed+point+method++c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=LQ-5P_taoC&sig=lENUUIYBK53tZtTwNfHLy5PEWDk&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wezDUPW1J5DptQaMsIHQCw&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=fixed%20point%20method%20%20c%2B%2B&f=false Algebraically rearrange a solution to isolate a variable then apply incremental method Bisection method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisection_method C++: http://numericalcomputing.wordpress.com/category/algorithms/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval, keep bisecting it ad midpoint into sub-intervals and then apply incremental method on smaller & smaller intervals – zoom in Adv: unaffected by function gradient à reliable Disadv: slow convergence False Position Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_position_method C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/topic/126100-bisection-and-false-position-methods/ Bracketed - Select an initial interval , & use the relative value of function at interval end points to select next sub-intervals (estimate how far between the end points the solution might be & subdivide based on this) Newton-Raphson method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton's_method C++: http://www-users.cselabs.umn.edu/classes/Summer-2012/csci1113/index.php?page=./newt3 Also known as Newton's method Convenient, efficient Not bracketed – only a single initial guess is required to start iteration – requires an analytical expression for the first derivative of the function as input. Evaluates the function & its derivative at each step. Can be extended to the Newton MutiRoot method for solving multiple roots Can be easily applied to an of n-coupled set of non-linear equations – conduct a Taylor Series expansion of a function, dropping terms of order n, rewrite as a Jacobian matrix of PDs & convert to simultaneous linear equations !!! Secant Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secant_method C++: http://forum.vcoderz.com/showthread.php?p=205230 Unlike N-R, can estimate first derivative from an initial interval (does not require root to be bracketed) instead of inputting it Since derivative is approximated, may converge slower. Is fast in practice as it does not have to evaluate the derivative at each step. Similar implementation to False Positive method Birge-Vieta Method http://mat.iitm.ac.in/home/sryedida/public_html/caimna/transcendental/polynomial%20methods/bv%20method.html C++: http://books.google.co.il/books?id=cL1boM2uyQwC&pg=SA3-PA51&lpg=SA3-PA51&dq=Birge-Vieta+Method+c%2B%2B&source=bl&ots=QZmnDTK3rC&sig=BPNcHHbpR_DKVoZXrLi4nVXD-gg&hl=en&sa=X&ei=R-_DUK2iNIjzsgbE5ID4Dg&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=Birge-Vieta%20Method%20c%2B%2B&f=false combines Horner's method of polynomial evaluation (transforming into lesser degree polynomials that are more computationally efficient to process) with Newton-Raphson to provide a computational speed-up Interpolation Overview Construct new data points for as close as possible fit within range of a discrete set of known points (that were obtained via sampling, experimentation) Use Taylor Series Expansion of a function f(x) around a specific value for x Linear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_interpolation C++: http://www.hamaluik.com/?p=289 Straight line between 2 points à concatenate interpolants between each pair of data points Bilinear Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_interpolation C++: http://supercomputingblog.com/graphics/coding-bilinear-interpolation/2/ Extension of the linear function for interpolating functions of 2 variables – perform linear interpolation first in 1 direction, then in another. Used in image processing – e.g. texture mapping filter. Uses 4 vertices to interpolate a value within a unit cell. Lagrange Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_polynomial C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/approximation/interpolation/lagrange.php For polynomials Requires recomputation for all terms for each distinct x value – can only be applied for small number of nodes Numerically unstable Barycentric Interpolation http://epubs.siam.org/doi/pdf/10.1137/S0036144502417715 C++: http://www.gamedev.net/topic/621445-barycentric-coordinates-c-code-check/ Rearrange the terms in the equation of the Legrange interpolation by defining weight functions that are independent of the interpolated value of x Newton Divided Difference Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_polynomial C++: http://jee-appy.blogspot.co.il/2011/12/newton-divided-difference-interpolation.html Hermite Divided Differences: Interpolation polynomial approximation for a given set of data points in the NR form - divided differences are used to approximately calculate the various differences. For a given set of 3 data points , fit a quadratic interpolant through the data Bracketed functions allow Newton divided differences to be calculated recursively Difference table Cubic Spline Interpolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spline_interpolation C++: https://www.marcusbannerman.co.uk/index.php/home/latestarticles/42-articles/96-cubic-spline-class.html Spline is a piecewise polynomial Provides smoothness – for interpolations with significantly varying data Use weighted coefficients to bend the function to be smooth & its 1st & 2nd derivatives are continuous through the edge points in the interval Curve Fitting A generalization of interpolating whereby given data points may contain noise à the curve does not necessarily pass through all the points Least Squares Fit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_squares C++: http://www.ccas.ru/mmes/educat/lab04k/02/least-squares.c Residual – difference between observed value & expected value Model function is often chosen as a linear combination of the specified functions Determines: A) The model instance in which the sum of squared residuals has the least value B) param values for which model best fits data Straight Line Fit Linear correlation between independent variable and dependent variable Linear Regression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression C++: http://www.oocities.org/david_swaim/cpp/linregc.htm Special case of statistically exact extrapolation Leverage least squares Given a basis function, the sum of the residuals is determined and the corresponding gradient equation is expressed as a set of normal linear equations in matrix form that can be solved (e.g. using LU Decomposition) Can be weighted - Drop the assumption that all errors have the same significance –-> confidence of accuracy is different for each data point. Fit the function closer to points with higher weights Polynomial Fit - use a polynomial basis function Moving Average http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_average C++: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/17860/A-Simple-Moving-Average-Algorithm Used for smoothing (cancel fluctuations to highlight longer-term trends & cycles), time series data analysis, signal processing filters Replace each data point with average of neighbors. Can be simple (SMA), weighted (WMA), exponential (EMA). Lags behind latest data points – extra weight can be given to more recent data points. Weights can decrease arithmetically or exponentially according to distance from point. Parameters: smoothing factor, period, weight basis Optimization Overview Given function with multiple variables, find Min (or max by minimizing –f(x)) Iterative approach Efficient, but not necessarily reliable Conditions: noisy data, constraints, non-linear models Detection via sign of first derivative - Derivative of saddle points will be 0 Local minima Bisection method Similar method for finding a root for a non-linear equation Start with an interval that contains a minimum Golden Search method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_section_search C++: http://www.codecogs.com/code/maths/optimization/golden.php Bisect intervals according to golden ratio 0.618.. Achieves reduction by evaluating a single function instead of 2 Newton-Raphson Method Brent method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brent's_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/cpp_src/brent/brent.cpp Based on quadratic or parabolic interpolation – if the function is smooth & parabolic near to the minimum, then a parabola fitted through any 3 points should approximate the minima – fails when the 3 points are collinear , in which case the denominator is 0 Simplex Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm C++: http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/article.php/c17505/Simplex-Optimization-Algorithm-and-Implemetation-in-C-Programming.htm Find the global minima of any multi-variable function Direct search – no derivatives required At each step it maintains a non-degenerative simplex – a convex hull of n+1 vertices. Obtains the minimum for a function with n variables by evaluating the function at n-1 points, iteratively replacing the point of worst result with the point of best result, shrinking the multidimensional simplex around the best point. Point replacement involves expanding & contracting the simplex near the worst value point to determine a better replacement point Oscillation can be avoided by choosing the 2nd worst result Restart if it gets stuck Parameters: contraction & expansion factors Simulated Annealing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing C++: http://code.google.com/p/cppsimulatedannealing/ Analogy to heating & cooling metal to strengthen its structure Stochastic method – apply random permutation search for global minima - Avoid entrapment in local minima via hill climbing Heating schedule - Annealing schedule params: temperature, iterations at each temp, temperature delta Cooling schedule – can be linear, step-wise or exponential Differential Evolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_evolution C++: http://www.amichel.com/de/doc/html/ More advanced stochastic methods analogous to biological processes: Genetic algorithms, evolution strategies Parallel direct search method against multiple discrete or continuous variables Initial population of variable vectors chosen randomly – if weighted difference vector of 2 vectors yields a lower objective function value then it replaces the comparison vector Many params: #parents, #variables, step size, crossover constant etc Convergence is slow – many more function evaluations than simulated annealing Numerical Differentiation Overview 2 approaches to finite difference methods: · A) approximate function via polynomial interpolation then differentiate · B) Taylor series approximation – additionally provides error estimate Finite Difference methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_difference_method C++: http://www.wpi.edu/Pubs/ETD/Available/etd-051807-164436/unrestricted/EAMPADU.pdf Find differences between high order derivative values - Approximate differential equations by finite differences at evenly spaced data points Based on forward & backward Taylor series expansion of f(x) about x plus or minus multiples of delta h. Forward / backward difference - the sums of the series contains even derivatives and the difference of the series contains odd derivatives – coupled equations that can be solved. Provide an approximation of the derivative within a O(h^2) accuracy There is also central difference & extended central difference which has a O(h^4) accuracy Richardson Extrapolation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richardson_extrapolation C++: http://mathscoding.blogspot.co.il/2012/02/introduction-richardson-extrapolation.html A sequence acceleration method applied to finite differences Fast convergence, high accuracy O(h^4) Derivatives via Interpolation Cannot apply Finite Difference method to discrete data points at uneven intervals – so need to approximate the derivative of f(x) using the derivative of the interpolant via 3 point Lagrange Interpolation Note: the higher the order of the derivative, the lower the approximation precision Numerical Integration Estimate finite & infinite integrals of functions More accurate procedure than numerical differentiation Use when it is not possible to obtain an integral of a function analytically or when the function is not given, only the data points are Newton Cotes Methods http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%E2%80%93Cotes_formulas C++: http://www.siafoo.net/snippet/324 For equally spaced data points Computationally easy – based on local interpolation of n rectangular strip areas that is piecewise fitted to a polynomial to get the sum total area Evaluate the integrand at n+1 evenly spaced points – approximate definite integral by Sum Weights are derived from Lagrange Basis polynomials Leverage Trapezoidal Rule for default 2nd formulas, Simpson 1/3 Rule for substituting 3 point formulas, Simpson 3/8 Rule for 4 point formulas. For 4 point formulas use Bodes Rule. Higher orders obtain more accurate results Trapezoidal Rule uses simple area, Simpsons Rule replaces the integrand f(x) with a quadratic polynomial p(x) that uses the same values as f(x) for its end points, but adds a midpoint Romberg Integration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romberg's_method C++: http://code.google.com/p/romberg-integration/downloads/detail?name=romberg.cpp&can=2&q= Combines trapezoidal rule with Richardson Extrapolation Evaluates the integrand at equally spaced points The integrand must have continuous derivatives Each R(n,m) extrapolation uses a higher order integrand polynomial replacement rule (zeroth starts with trapezoidal) à a lower triangular matrix set of equation coefficients where the bottom right term has the most accurate approximation. The process continues until the difference between 2 successive diagonal terms becomes sufficiently small. Gaussian Quadrature http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_quadrature C++: http://www.alglib.net/integration/gaussianquadratures.php Data points are chosen to yield best possible accuracy – requires fewer evaluations Ability to handle singularities, functions that are difficult to evaluate The integrand can include a weighting function determined by a set of orthogonal polynomials. Points & weights are selected so that the integrand yields the exact integral if f(x) is a polynomial of degree <= 2n+1 Techniques (basically different weighting functions): · Gauss-Legendre Integration w(x)=1 · Gauss-Laguerre Integration w(x)=e^-x · Gauss-Hermite Integration w(x)=e^-x^2 · Gauss-Chebyshev Integration w(x)= 1 / Sqrt(1-x^2) Solving ODEs Use when high order differential equations cannot be solved analytically Evaluated under boundary conditions RK for systems – a high order differential equation can always be transformed into a coupled first order system of equations Euler method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler_method C++: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Euler_method First order Runge–Kutta method. Simple recursive method – given an initial value, calculate derivative deltas. Unstable & not very accurate (O(h) error) – not used in practice A first-order method - the local error (truncation error per step) is proportional to the square of the step size, and the global error (error at a given time) is proportional to the step size In evolving solution between data points xn & xn+1, only evaluates derivatives at beginning of interval xn à asymmetric at boundaries Higher order Runge Kutta http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runge%E2%80%93Kutta_methods C++: http://www.dreamincode.net/code/snippet1441.htm 2nd & 4th order RK - Introduces parameterized midpoints for more symmetric solutions à accuracy at higher computational cost Adaptive RK – RK-Fehlberg – estimate the truncation at each integration step & automatically adjust the step size to keep error within prescribed limits. At each step 2 approximations are compared – if in disagreement to a specific accuracy, the step size is reduced Boundary Value Problems Where solution of differential equations are located at 2 different values of the independent variable x à more difficult, because cannot just start at point of initial value – there may not be enough starting conditions available at the end points to produce a unique solution An n-order equation will require n boundary conditions – need to determine the missing n-1 conditions which cause the given conditions at the other boundary to be satisfied Shooting Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_method C++: http://ganeshtiwaridotcomdotnp.blogspot.co.il/2009/12/c-c-code-shooting-method-for-solving.html Iteratively guess the missing values for one end & integrate, then inspect the discrepancy with the boundary values of the other end to adjust the estimate Given the starting boundary values u1 & u2 which contain the root u, solve u given the false position method (solving the differential equation as an initial value problem via 4th order RK), then use u to solve the differential equations. Finite Difference Method For linear & non-linear systems Higher order derivatives require more computational steps – some combinations for boundary conditions may not work though Improve the accuracy by increasing the number of mesh points Solving EigenValue Problems An eigenvalue can substitute a matrix when doing matrix multiplication à convert matrix multiplication into a polynomial EigenValue For a given set of equations in matrix form, determine what are the solution eigenvalue & eigenvectors Similar Matrices - have same eigenvalues. Use orthogonal similarity transforms to reduce a matrix to diagonal form from which eigenvalue(s) & eigenvectors can be computed iteratively Jacobi method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobi_method C++: http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~jburkardt/classes/acs2_2008/openmp/jacobi/jacobi.html Robust but Computationally intense – use for small matrices < 10x10 Power Iteration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_iteration For any given real symmetric matrix, generate the largest single eigenvalue & its eigenvectors Simplest method – does not compute matrix decomposition à suitable for large, sparse matrices Inverse Iteration Variation of power iteration method – generates the smallest eigenvalue from the inverse matrix Rayleigh Method http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh's_method_of_dimensional_analysis Variation of power iteration method Rayleigh Quotient Method Variation of inverse iteration method Matrix Tri-diagonalization Method Use householder algorithm to reduce an NxN symmetric matrix to a tridiagonal real symmetric matrix vua N-2 orthogonal transforms     Whats Next Outside of Numerical Methods there are lots of different types of algorithms that I’ve learned over the decades: Data Mining – (I covered this briefly in a previous post: http://geekswithblogs.net/JoshReuben/archive/2007/12/31/ssas-dm-algorithms.aspx ) Search & Sort Routing Problem Solving Logical Theorem Proving Planning Probabilistic Reasoning Machine Learning Solvers (eg MIP) Bioinformatics (Sequence Alignment, Protein Folding) Quant Finance (I read Wilmott’s books – interesting) Sooner or later, I’ll cover the above topics as well.

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• Toorcon14

  - by danx

  Toorcon 2012 Information Security Conference San Diego, CA, http://www.toorcon.org/ Dan Anderson, October 2012 It's almost Halloween, and we all know what that means—yes, of course, it's time for another Toorcon Conference! Toorcon is an annual conference for people interested in computer security. This includes the whole range of hackers, computer hobbyists, professionals, security consultants, press, law enforcement, prosecutors, FBI, etc. We're at Toorcon 14—see earlier blogs for some of the previous Toorcon's I've attended (back to 2003). This year's "con" was held at the Westin on Broadway in downtown San Diego, California. The following are not necessarily my views—I'm just the messenger—although I could have misquoted or misparaphrased the speakers. Also, I only reviewed some of the talks, below, which I attended and interested me. MalAndroid—the Crux of Android Infections, Aditya K. Sood Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata, Rebecca "bx" Shapiro Privacy at the Handset: New FCC Rules?, Valkyrie Hacking Measured Boot and UEFI, Dan Griffin You Can't Buy Security: Building the Open Source InfoSec Program, Boris Sverdlik What Journalists Want: The Investigative Reporters' Perspective on Hacking, Dave Maas & Jason Leopold Accessibility and Security, Anna Shubina Stop Patching, for Stronger PCI Compliance, Adam Brand McAfee Secure & Trustmarks — a Hacker's Best Friend, Jay James & Shane MacDougall MalAndroid—the Crux of Android Infections Aditya K. Sood, IOActive, Michigan State PhD candidate Aditya talked about Android smartphone malware. There's a lot of old Android software out there—over 50% Gingerbread (2.3.x)—and most have unpatched vulnerabilities. Of 9 Android vulnerabilities, 8 have known exploits (such as the old Gingerbread Global Object Table exploit). Android protection includes sandboxing, security scanner, app permissions, and screened Android app market. The Android permission checker has fine-grain resource control, policy enforcement. Android static analysis also includes a static analysis app checker (bouncer), and a vulnerablity checker. What security problems does Android have? User-centric security, which depends on the user to grant permission and make smart decisions. But users don't care or think about malware (the're not aware, not paranoid). All they want is functionality, extensibility, mobility Android had no "proper" encryption before Android 3.0 No built-in protection against social engineering and web tricks Alternative Android app markets are unsafe. Simply visiting some markets can infect Android Aditya classified Android Malware types as: Type A—Apps. These interact with the Android app framework. For example, a fake Netflix app. Or Android Gold Dream (game), which uploads user files stealthy manner to a remote location. Type K—Kernel. Exploits underlying Linux libraries or kernel Type H—Hybrid. These use multiple layers (app framework, libraries, kernel). These are most commonly used by Android botnets, which are popular with Chinese botnet authors What are the threats from Android malware? These incude leak info (contacts), banking fraud, corporate network attacks, malware advertising, malware "Hackivism" (the promotion of social causes. For example, promiting specific leaders of the Tunisian or Iranian revolutions. Android malware is frequently "masquerated". That is, repackaged inside a legit app with malware. To avoid detection, the hidden malware is not unwrapped until runtime. The malware payload can be hidden in, for example, PNG files. Less common are Android bootkits—there's not many around. What they do is hijack the Android init framework—alteering system programs and daemons, then deletes itself. For example, the DKF Bootkit (China). Android App Problems: no code signing! all self-signed native code execution permission sandbox — all or none alternate market places no robust Android malware detection at network level delayed patch process Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata Rebecca "bx" Shapiro, Dartmouth College, NH https://github.com/bx/elf-bf-tools @bxsays on twitter Definitions. "ELF" is an executable file format used in linking and loading executables (on UNIX/Linux-class machines). "Weird machine" uses undocumented computation sources (I think of them as unintended virtual machines). Some examples of "weird machines" are those that: return to weird location, does SQL injection, corrupts the heap. Bx then talked about using ELF metadata as (an uintended) "weird machine". Some ELF background: A compiler takes source code and generates a ELF object file (hello.o). A static linker makes an ELF executable from the object file. A runtime linker and loader takes ELF executable and loads and relocates it in memory. The ELF file has symbols to relocate functions and variables. ELF has two relocation tables—one at link time and another one at loading time: .rela.dyn (link time) and .dynsym (dynamic table). GOT: Global Offset Table of addresses for dynamically-linked functions. PLT: Procedure Linkage Tables—works with GOT. The memory layout of a process (not the ELF file) is, in order: program (+ heap), dynamic libraries, libc, ld.so, stack (which includes the dynamic table loaded into memory) For ELF, the "weird machine" is found and exploited in the loader. ELF can be crafted for executing viruses, by tricking runtime into executing interpreted "code" in the ELF symbol table. One can inject parasitic "code" without modifying the actual ELF code portions. Think of the ELF symbol table as an "assembly language" interpreter. It has these elements: instructions: Add, move, jump if not 0 (jnz) Think of symbol table entries as "registers" symbol table value is "contents" immediate values are constants direct values are addresses (e.g., 0xdeadbeef) move instruction: is a relocation table entry add instruction: relocation table "addend" entry jnz instruction: takes multiple relocation table entries The ELF weird machine exploits the loader by relocating relocation table entries. The loader will go on forever until told to stop. It stores state on stack at "end" and uses IFUNC table entries (containing function pointer address). The ELF weird machine, called "Brainfu*k" (BF) has: 8 instructions: pointer inc, dec, inc indirect, dec indirect, jump forward, jump backward, print. Three registers - 3 registers Bx showed example BF source code that implemented a Turing machine printing "hello, world". More interesting was the next demo, where bx modified ping. Ping runs suid as root, but quickly drops privilege. BF modified the loader to disable the library function call dropping privilege, so it remained as root. Then BF modified the ping -t argument to execute the -t filename as root. It's best to show what this modified ping does with an example: $ whoami bx $ ping localhost -t backdoor.sh # executes backdoor $ whoami root $ The modified code increased from 285948 bytes to 290209 bytes. A BF tool compiles "executable" by modifying the symbol table in an existing ELF executable. The tool modifies .dynsym and .rela.dyn table, but not code or data. Privacy at the Handset: New FCC Rules? "Valkyrie" (Christie Dudley, Santa Clara Law JD candidate) Valkyrie talked about mobile handset privacy. Some background: Senator Franken (also a comedian) became alarmed about CarrierIQ, where the carriers track their customers. Franken asked the FCC to find out what obligations carriers think they have to protect privacy. The carriers' response was that they are doing just fine with self-regulation—no worries! Carriers need to collect data, such as missed calls, to maintain network quality. But carriers also sell data for marketing. Verizon sells customer data and enables this with a narrow privacy policy (only 1 month to opt out, with difficulties). The data sold is not individually identifiable and is aggregated. But Verizon recommends, as an aggregation workaround to "recollate" data to other databases to identify customers indirectly. The FCC has regulated telephone privacy since 1934 and mobile network privacy since 2007. Also, the carriers say mobile phone privacy is a FTC responsibility (not FCC). FTC is trying to improve mobile app privacy, but FTC has no authority over carrier / customer relationships. As a side note, Apple iPhones are unique as carriers have extra control over iPhones they don't have with other smartphones. As a result iPhones may be more regulated. Who are the consumer advocates? Everyone knows EFF, but EPIC (Electrnic Privacy Info Center), although more obsecure, is more relevant. What to do? Carriers must be accountable. Opt-in and opt-out at any time. Carriers need incentive to grant users control for those who want it, by holding them liable and responsible for breeches on their clock. Location information should be added current CPNI privacy protection, and require "Pen/trap" judicial order to obtain (and would still be a lower standard than 4th Amendment). Politics are on a pro-privacy swing now, with many senators and the Whitehouse. There will probably be new regulation soon, and enforcement will be a problem, but consumers will still have some benefit. Hacking Measured Boot and UEFI Dan Griffin, JWSecure, Inc., Seattle, @JWSdan Dan talked about hacking measured UEFI boot. First some terms: UEFI is a boot technology that is replacing BIOS (has whitelisting and blacklisting). UEFI protects devices against rootkits. TPM - hardware security device to store hashs and hardware-protected keys "secure boot" can control at firmware level what boot images can boot "measured boot" OS feature that tracks hashes (from BIOS, boot loader, krnel, early drivers). "remote attestation" allows remote validation and control based on policy on a remote attestation server. Microsoft pushing TPM (Windows 8 required), but Google is not. Intel TianoCore is the only open source for UEFI. Dan has Measured Boot Tool at http://mbt.codeplex.com/ with a demo where you can also view TPM data. TPM support already on enterprise-class machines. UEFI Weaknesses. UEFI toolkits are evolving rapidly, but UEFI has weaknesses: assume user is an ally trust TPM implicitly, and attached to computer hibernate file is unprotected (disk encryption protects against this) protection migrating from hardware to firmware delays in patching and whitelist updates will UEFI really be adopted by the mainstream (smartphone hardware support, bank support, apathetic consumer support) You Can't Buy Security: Building the Open Source InfoSec Program Boris Sverdlik, ISDPodcast.com co-host Boris talked about problems typical with current security audits. "IT Security" is an oxymoron—IT exists to enable buiness, uptime, utilization, reporting, but don't care about security—IT has conflict of interest. There's no Magic Bullet ("blinky box"), no one-size-fits-all solution (e.g., Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs)). Regulations don't make you secure. The cloud is not secure (because of shared data and admin access). Defense and pen testing is not sexy. Auditors are not solution (security not a checklist)—what's needed is experience and adaptability—need soft skills. Step 1: First thing is to Google and learn the company end-to-end before you start. Get to know the management team (not IT team), meet as many people as you can. Don't use arbitrary values such as CISSP scores. Quantitive risk assessment is a myth (e.g. AV*EF-SLE). Learn different Business Units, legal/regulatory obligations, learn the business and where the money is made, verify company is protected from script kiddies (easy), learn sensitive information (IP, internal use only), and start with low-hanging fruit (customer service reps and social engineering). Step 2: Policies. Keep policies short and relevant. Generic SANS "security" boilerplate policies don't make sense and are not followed. Focus on acceptable use, data usage, communications, physical security. Step 3: Implementation: keep it simple stupid. Open source, although useful, is not free (implementation cost). Access controls with authentication & authorization for local and remote access. MS Windows has it, otherwise use OpenLDAP, OpenIAM, etc. Application security Everyone tries to reinvent the wheel—use existing static analysis tools. Review high-risk apps and major revisions. Don't run different risk level apps on same system. Assume host/client compromised and use app-level security control. Network security VLAN != segregated because there's too many workarounds. Use explicit firwall rules, active and passive network monitoring (snort is free), disallow end user access to production environment, have a proxy instead of direct Internet access. Also, SSL certificates are not good two-factor auth and SSL does not mean "safe." Operational Controls Have change, patch, asset, & vulnerability management (OSSI is free). For change management, always review code before pushing to production For logging, have centralized security logging for business-critical systems, separate security logging from administrative/IT logging, and lock down log (as it has everything). Monitor with OSSIM (open source). Use intrusion detection, but not just to fulfill a checkbox: build rules from a whitelist perspective (snort). OSSEC has 95% of what you need. Vulnerability management is a QA function when done right: OpenVas and Seccubus are free. Security awareness The reality is users will always click everything. Build real awareness, not compliance driven checkbox, and have it integrated into the culture. Pen test by crowd sourcing—test with logging COSSP http://www.cossp.org/ - Comprehensive Open Source Security Project What Journalists Want: The Investigative Reporters' Perspective on Hacking Dave Maas, San Diego CityBeat Jason Leopold, Truthout.org The difference between hackers and investigative journalists: For hackers, the motivation varies, but method is same, technological specialties. For investigative journalists, it's about one thing—The Story, and they need broad info-gathering skills. J-School in 60 Seconds: Generic formula: Person or issue of pubic interest, new info, or angle. Generic criteria: proximity, prominence, timeliness, human interest, oddity, or consequence. Media awareness of hackers and trends: journalists becoming extremely aware of hackers with congressional debates (privacy, data breaches), demand for data-mining Journalists, use of coding and web development for Journalists, and Journalists busted for hacking (Murdock). Info gathering by investigative journalists include Public records laws. Federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is good, but slow. California Public Records Act is a lot stronger. FOIA takes forever because of foot-dragging—it helps to be specific. Often need to sue (especially FBI). CPRA is faster, and requests can be vague. Dumps and leaks (a la Wikileaks) Journalists want: leads, protecting ourselves, our sources, and adapting tools for news gathering (Google hacking). Anonomity is important to whistleblowers. They want no digital footprint left behind (e.g., email, web log). They don't trust encryption, want to feel safe and secure. Whistleblower laws are very weak—there's no upside for whistleblowers—they have to be very passionate to do it. Accessibility and Security or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Halting Problem Anna Shubina, Dartmouth College Anna talked about how accessibility and security are related. Accessibility of digital content (not real world accessibility). mostly refers to blind users and screenreaders, for our purpose. Accessibility is about parsing documents, as are many security issues. "Rich" executable content causes accessibility to fail, and often causes security to fail. For example MS Word has executable format—it's not a document exchange format—more dangerous than PDF or HTML. Accessibility is often the first and maybe only sanity check with parsing. They have no choice because someone may want to read what you write. Google, for example, is very particular about web browser you use and are bad at supporting other browsers. Uses JavaScript instead of links, often requiring mouseover to display content. PDF is a security nightmare. Executible format, embedded flash, JavaScript, etc. 15 million lines of code. Google Chrome doesn't handle PDF correctly, causing several security bugs. PDF has an accessibility checker and PDF tagging, to help with accessibility. But no PDF checker checks for incorrect tags, untagged content, or validates lists or tables. None check executable content at all. The "Halting Problem" is: can one decide whether a program will ever stop? The answer, in general, is no (Rice's theorem). The same holds true for accessibility checkers. Language-theoretic Security says complicated data formats are hard to parse and cannot be solved due to the Halting Problem. W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines: "Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust" Not much help though, except for "Robust", but here's some gems: * all information should be parsable (paraphrasing) * if not parsable, cannot be converted to alternate formats * maximize compatibility in new document formats Executible webpages are bad for security and accessibility. They say it's for a better web experience. But is it necessary to stuff web pages with JavaScript for a better experience? A good example is The Drudge Report—it has hand-written HTML with no JavaScript, yet drives a lot of web traffic due to good content. A bad example is Google News—hidden scrollbars, guessing user input. Solutions: Accessibility and security problems come from same source Expose "better user experience" myth Keep your corner of Internet parsable Remember "Halting Problem"—recognize false solutions (checking and verifying tools) Stop Patching, for Stronger PCI Compliance Adam Brand, protiviti @adamrbrand, http://www.picfun.com/ Adam talked about PCI compliance for retail sales. Take an example: for PCI compliance, 50% of Brian's time (a IT guy), 960 hours/year was spent patching POSs in 850 restaurants. Often applying some patches make no sense (like fixing a browser vulnerability on a server). "Scanner worship" is overuse of vulnerability scanners—it gives a warm and fuzzy and it's simple (red or green results—fix reds). Scanners give a false sense of security. In reality, breeches from missing patches are uncommon—more common problems are: default passwords, cleartext authentication, misconfiguration (firewall ports open). Patching Myths: Myth 1: install within 30 days of patch release (but PCI §6.1 allows a "risk-based approach" instead). Myth 2: vendor decides what's critical (also PCI §6.1). But §6.2 requires user ranking of vulnerabilities instead. Myth 3: scan and rescan until it passes. But PCI §11.2.1b says this applies only to high-risk vulnerabilities. Adam says good recommendations come from NIST 800-40. Instead use sane patching and focus on what's really important. From NIST 800-40: Proactive: Use a proactive vulnerability management process: use change control, configuration management, monitor file integrity. Monitor: start with NVD and other vulnerability alerts, not scanner results. Evaluate: public-facing system? workstation? internal server? (risk rank) Decide:on action and timeline Test: pre-test patches (stability, functionality, rollback) for change control Install: notify, change control, tickets McAfee Secure & Trustmarks — a Hacker's Best Friend Jay James, Shane MacDougall, Tactical Intelligence Inc., Canada "McAfee Secure Trustmark" is a website seal marketed by McAfee. A website gets this badge if they pass their remote scanning. The problem is a removal of trustmarks act as flags that you're vulnerable. Easy to view status change by viewing McAfee list on website or on Google. "Secure TrustGuard" is similar to McAfee. Jay and Shane wrote Perl scripts to gather sites from McAfee and search engines. If their certification image changes to a 1x1 pixel image, then they are longer certified. Their scripts take deltas of scans to see what changed daily. The bottom line is change in TrustGuard status is a flag for hackers to attack your site. Entire idea of seals is silly—you're raising a flag saying if you're vulnerable.

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• Toorcon 15 (2013)

  - by danx

  The Toorcon gang (senior staff): h1kari (founder), nfiltr8, and Geo Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Making Attacks Go Backwards Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) Toorcon 15 is the 15th annual security conference held in San Diego. I've attended about a third of them and blogged about previous conferences I attended here starting in 2003. As always, I've only summarized the talks I attended and interested me enough to write about them. Be aware that I may have misrepresented the speaker's remarks and that they are not my remarks or opinion, or those of my employer, so don't quote me or them. Those seeking further details may contact the speakers directly or use The Google. For some talks, I have a URL for further information. A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Andrew Furtak and Oleksandr Bazhaniuk Yuri Bulygin, Oleksandr ("Alex") Bazhaniuk, and (not present) Andrew Furtak Yuri and Alex talked about UEFI and Bootkits and bypassing MS Windows 8 Secure Boot, with vendor recommendations. They previously gave this talk at the BlackHat 2013 conference. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Overview UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is interface between hardware and OS. UEFI is processor and architecture independent. Malware can replace bootloader (bootx64.efi, bootmgfw.efi). Once replaced can modify kernel. Trivial to replace bootloader. Today many legacy bootkits—UEFI replaces them most of them. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot verifies everything you load, either through signatures or hashes. UEFI firmware relies on secure update (with signed update). You would think Secure Boot would rely on ROM (such as used for phones0, but you can't do that for PCs—PCs use writable memory with signatures DXE core verifies the UEFI boat loader(s) OS Loader (winload.efi, winresume.efi) verifies the OS kernel A chain of trust is established with a root key (Platform Key, PK), which is a cert belonging to the platform vendor. Key Exchange Keys (KEKs) verify an "authorized" database (db), and "forbidden" database (dbx). X.509 certs with SHA-1/SHA-256 hashes. Keys are stored in non-volatile (NV) flash-based NVRAM. Boot Services (BS) allow adding/deleting keys (can't be accessed once OS starts—which uses Run-Time (RT)). Root cert uses RSA-2048 public keys and PKCS#7 format signatures. SecureBoot — enable disable image signature checks SetupMode — update keys, self-signed keys, and secure boot variables CustomMode — allows updating keys Secure Boot policy settings are: always execute, never execute, allow execute on security violation, defer execute on security violation, deny execute on security violation, query user on security violation Attacking MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Secure Boot does NOT protect from physical access. Can disable from console. Each BIOS vendor implements Secure Boot differently. There are several platform and BIOS vendors. It becomes a "zoo" of implementations—which can be taken advantage of. Secure Boot is secure only when all vendors implement it correctly. Allow only UEFI firmware signed updates protect UEFI firmware from direct modification in flash memory protect FW update components program SPI controller securely protect secure boot policy settings in nvram protect runtime api disable compatibility support module which allows unsigned legacy Can corrupt the Platform Key (PK) EFI root certificate variable in SPI flash. If PK is not found, FW enters setup mode wich secure boot turned off. Can also exploit TPM in a similar manner. One is not supposed to be able to directly modify the PK in SPI flash from the OS though. But they found a bug that they can exploit from User Mode (undisclosed) and demoed the exploit. It loaded and ran their own bootkit. The exploit requires a reboot. Multiple vendors are vulnerable. They will disclose this exploit to vendors in the future. Recommendations: allow only signed updates protect UEFI fw in ROM protect EFI variable store in ROM Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Yoel Gluck and Angelo Prado Angelo Prado and Yoel Gluck, Salesforce.com CRIME is software that performs a "compression oracle attack." This is possible because the SSL protocol doesn't hide length, and because SSL compresses the header. CRIME requests with every possible character and measures the ciphertext length. Look for the plaintext which compresses the most and looks for the cookie one byte-at-a-time. SSL Compression uses LZ77 to reduce redundancy. Huffman coding replaces common byte sequences with shorter codes. US CERT thinks the SSL compression problem is fixed, but it isn't. They convinced CERT that it wasn't fixed and they issued a CVE. BREACH, breachattrack.com BREACH exploits the SSL response body (Accept-Encoding response, Content-Encoding). It takes advantage of the fact that the response is not compressed. BREACH uses gzip and needs fairly "stable" pages that are static for ~30 seconds. It needs attacker-supplied content (say from a web form or added to a URL parameter). BREACH listens to a session's requests and responses, then inserts extra requests and responses. Eventually, BREACH guesses a session's secret key. Can use compression to guess contents one byte at-a-time. For example, "Supersecret SupersecreX" (a wrong guess) compresses 10 bytes, and "Supersecret Supersecret" (a correct guess) compresses 11 bytes, so it can find each character by guessing every character. To start the guess, BREACH needs at least three known initial characters in the response sequence. Compression length then "leaks" information. Some roadblocks include no winners (all guesses wrong) or too many winners (multiple possibilities that compress the same). The solutions include: lookahead (guess 2 or 3 characters at-a-time instead of 1 character). Expensive rollback to last known conflict check compression ratio can brute-force first 3 "bootstrap" characters, if needed (expensive) block ciphers hide exact plain text length. Solution is to align response in advance to block size Mitigations length: use variable padding secrets: dynamic CSRF tokens per request secret: change over time separate secret to input-less servlets Future work eiter understand DEFLATE/GZIP HTTPS extensions Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Ryan Huber Ryan Huber, Risk I/O Ryan first discussed various ways to do a denial of service (DoS) attack against web services. One usual method is to find a slow web page and do several wgets. Or download large files. Apache is not well suited at handling a large number of connections, but one can put something in front of it Can use Apache alternatives, such as nginx How to identify malicious hosts short, sudden web requests user-agent is obvious (curl, python) same url requested repeatedly no web page referer (not normal) hidden links. hide a link and see if a bot gets it restricted access if not your geo IP (unless the website is global) missing common headers in request regular timing first seen IP at beginning of attack count requests per hosts (usually a very large number) Use of captcha can mitigate attacks, but you'll lose a lot of genuine users. Bouncer, goo.gl/c2vyEc and www.github.com/rawdigits/Bouncer Bouncer is software written by Ryan in netflow. Bouncer has a small, unobtrusive footprint and detects DoS attempts. It closes blacklisted sockets immediately (not nice about it, no proper close connection). Aggregator collects requests and controls your web proxies. Need NTP on the front end web servers for clean data for use by bouncer. Bouncer is also useful for a popularity storm ("Slashdotting") and scraper storms. Future features: gzip collection data, documentation, consumer library, multitask, logging destroyed connections. Takeaways: DoS mitigation is easier with a complete picture Bouncer designed to make it easier to detect and defend DoS—not a complete cure Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman, Adobe ASSET, blogs.adobe.com/asset/ Peleus and Karthik talked about response to mass-customized exploits. Attackers behave much like a business. "Mass customization" refers to concept discussed in the book Future Perfect by Stan Davis of Harvard Business School. Mass customization is differentiating a product for an individual customer, but at a mass production price. For example, the same individual with a debit card receives basically the same customized ATM experience around the world. Or designing your own PC from commodity parts. Exploit kits are another example of mass customization. The kits support multiple browsers and plugins, allows new modules. Exploit kits are cheap and customizable. Organized gangs use exploit kits. A group at Berkeley looked at 77,000 malicious websites (Grier et al., "Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service", 2012). They found 10,000 distinct binaries among them, but derived from only a dozen or so exploit kits. Characteristics of Mass Malware: potent, resilient, relatively low cost Technical characteristics: multiple OS, multipe payloads, multiple scenarios, multiple languages, obfuscation Response time for 0-day exploits has gone down from ~40 days 5 years ago to about ~10 days now. So the drive with malware is towards mass customized exploits, to avoid detection There's plenty of evicence that exploit development has Project Manager bureaucracy. They infer from the malware edicts to: support all versions of reader support all versions of windows support all versions of flash support all browsers write large complex, difficult to main code (8750 lines of JavaScript for example Exploits have "loose coupling" of multipe versions of software (adobe), OS, and browser. This allows specific attacks against specific versions of multiple pieces of software. Also allows exploits of more obscure software/OS/browsers and obscure versions. Gave examples of exploits that exploited 2, 3, 6, or 14 separate bugs. However, these complete exploits are more likely to be buggy or fragile in themselves and easier to defeat. Future research includes normalizing malware and Javascript. Conclusion: The coming trend is that mass-malware with mass zero-day attacks will result in mass customization of attacks. x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Richard Wartell Richard Wartell The attack vector we are addressing here is: First some malware causes a buffer overflow. The malware has no program access, but input access and buffer overflow code onto stack Later the stack became non-executable. The workaround malware used was to write a bogus return address to the stack jumping to malware Later came ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to randomize memory layout and make addresses non-deterministic. The workaround malware used was to jump t existing code segments in the program that can be used in bad ways "RoP" is Return-oriented Programming attacks. RoP attacks use your own code and write return address on stack to (existing) expoitable code found in program ("gadgets"). Pinkie Pie was paid $60K last year for a RoP attack. One solution is using anti-RoP compilers that compile source code with NO return instructions. ASLR does not randomize address space, just "gadgets". IPR/ILR ("Instruction Location Randomization") randomizes each instruction with a virtual machine. Richard's goal was to randomize a binary with no source code access. He created "STIR" (Self-Transofrming Instruction Relocation). STIR disassembles binary and operates on "basic blocks" of code. The STIR disassembler is conservative in what to disassemble. Each basic block is moved to a random location in memory. Next, STIR writes new code sections with copies of "basic blocks" of code in randomized locations. The old code is copied and rewritten with jumps to new code. the original code sections in the file is marked non-executible. STIR has better entropy than ASLR in location of code. Makes brute force attacks much harder. STIR runs on MS Windows (PEM) and Linux (ELF). It eliminated 99.96% or more "gadgets" (i.e., moved the address). Overhead usually 5-10% on MS Windows, about 1.5-4% on Linux (but some code actually runs faster!). The unique thing about STIR is it requires no source access and the modified binary fully works! Current work is to rewrite code to enforce security policies. For example, don't create a *.{exe,msi,bat} file. Or don't connect to the network after reading from the disk. Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Collin Greene Collin Greene, Facebook Collin talked about Facebook's bug bounty program. Background at FB: FB has good security frameworks, such as security teams, external audits, and cc'ing on diffs. But there's lots of "deep, dark, forgotten" parts of legacy FB code. Collin gave several examples of bountied bugs. Some bounty submissions were on software purchased from a third-party (but bounty claimers don't know and don't care). We use security questions, as does everyone else, but they are basically insecure (often easily discoverable). Collin didn't expect many bugs from the bounty program, but they ended getting 20+ good bugs in first 24 hours and good submissions continue to come in. Bug bounties bring people in with different perspectives, and are paid only for success. Bug bounty is a better use of a fixed amount of time and money versus just code review or static code analysis. The Bounty program started July 2011 and paid out $1.5 million to date. 14% of the submissions have been high priority problems that needed to be fixed immediately. The best bugs come from a small % of submitters (as with everything else)—the top paid submitters are paid 6 figures a year. Spammers like to backstab competitors. The youngest sumitter was 13. Some submitters have been hired. Bug bounties also allows to see bugs that were missed by tools or reviews, allowing improvement in the process. Bug bounties might not work for traditional software companies where the product has release cycle or is not on Internet. Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Anna Shubina Anna Shubina, Dartmouth Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (I missed the start of her talk because another track went overtime. But I have the DVD of the talk, so I'll expand later) IPsec leaves fingerprints. Using netcat, one can easily visually distinguish various crypto chaining modes just from packet timing on a chart (example, DES-CBC versus AES-CBC) One can tell a lot about VPNs just from ping roundtrips (such as what router is used) Delayed packets are not informative about a network, especially if far away from the network More needed to explore about how TCP works in real life with respect to timing Making Attacks Go Backwards Fuzzynop FuzzyNop, Mandiant This talk is not about threat attribution (finding who), product solutions, politics, or sales pitches. But who are making these malware threats? It's not a single person or group—they have diverse skill levels. There's a lot of fat-fingered fumblers out there. Always look for low-hanging fruit first: "hiding" malware in the temp, recycle, or root directories creation of unnamed scheduled tasks obvious names of files and syscalls ("ClearEventLog") uncleared event logs. Clearing event log in itself, and time of clearing, is a red flag and good first clue to look for on a suspect system Reverse engineering is hard. Disassembler use takes practice and skill. A popular tool is IDA Pro, but it takes multiple interactive iterations to get a clean disassembly. Key loggers are used a lot in targeted attacks. They are typically custom code or built in a backdoor. A big tip-off is that non-printable characters need to be printed out (such as "[Ctrl]" "[RightShift]") or time stamp printf strings. Look for these in files. Presence is not proof they are used. Absence is not proof they are not used. Java exploits. Can parse jar file with idxparser.py and decomile Java file. Java typially used to target tech companies. Backdoors are the main persistence mechanism (provided externally) for malware. Also malware typically needs command and control. Application of Artificial Intelligence in Ad-Hoc Static Code Analysis John Ashaman John Ashaman, Security Innovation Initially John tried to analyze open source files with open source static analysis tools, but these showed thousands of false positives. Also tried using grep, but tis fails to find anything even mildly complex. So next John decided to write his own tool. His approach was to first generate a call graph then analyze the graph. However, the problem is that making a call graph is really hard. For example, one problem is "evil" coding techniques, such as passing function pointer. First the tool generated an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with the nodes created from method declarations and edges created from method use. Then the tool generated a control flow graph with the goal to find a path through the AST (a maze) from source to sink. The algorithm is to look at adjacent nodes to see if any are "scary" (a vulnerability), using heuristics for search order. The tool, called "Scat" (Static Code Analysis Tool), currently looks for C# vulnerabilities and some simple PHP. Later, he plans to add more PHP, then JSP and Java. For more information see his posts in Security Innovation blog and NRefactory on GitHub. Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Sometimes in emailing or posting TCP/IP packets to analyze problems, you may want to mask the IP address. But to do this correctly, you need to mask the checksum too, or you'll leak information about the IP. Problem reports found in stackoverflow.com, sans.org, and pastebin.org are usually not masked, but a few companies do care. If only the IP is masked, the IP may be guessed from checksum (that is, it leaks data). Other parts of packet may leak more data about the IP. TCP and IP checksums both refer to the same data, so can get more bits of information out of using both checksums than just using one checksum. Also, one can usually determine the OS from the TTL field and ports in a packet header. If we get hundreds of possible results (16x each masked nibble that is unknown), one can do other things to narrow the results, such as look at packet contents for domain or geo information. With hundreds of results, can import as CSV format into a spreadsheet. Can corelate with geo data and see where each possibility is located. Eric then demoed a real email report with a masked IP packet attached. Was able to find the exact IP address, given the geo and university of the sender. Point is if you're going to mask a packet, do it right. Eric wouldn't usually bother, but do it correctly if at all, to not create a false impression of security. Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Sergey Bratus Sergey Bratus, Dartmouth College (and Julian Bangert and Rebecca Shapiro, not present) "Reflections on Trusting Trust" refers to Ken Thompson's classic 1984 paper. "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself." There's invisible links in the chain-of-trust, such as "well-installed microcode bugs" or in the compiler, and other planted bugs. Thompson showed how a compiler can introduce and propagate bugs in unmodified source. But suppose if there's no bugs and you trust the author, can you trust the code? Hell No! There's too many factors—it's Babylonian in nature. Why not? Well, Input is not well-defined/recognized (code's assumptions about "checked" input will be violated (bug/vunerabiliy). For example, HTML is recursive, but Regex checking is not recursive. Input well-formed but so complex there's no telling what it does For example, ELF file parsing is complex and has multiple ways of parsing. Input is seen differently by different pieces of program or toolchain Any Input is a program input executes on input handlers (drives state changes & transitions) only a well-defined execution model can be trusted (regex/DFA, PDA, CFG) Input handler either is a "recognizer" for the inputs as a well-defined language (see langsec.org) or it's a "virtual machine" for inputs to drive into pwn-age ELF ABI (UNIX/Linux executible file format) case study. Problems can arise from these steps (without planting bugs): compiler linker loader ld.so/rtld relocator DWARF (debugger info) exceptions The problem is you can't really automatically analyze code (it's the "halting problem" and undecidable). Only solution is to freeze code and sign it. But you can't freeze everything! Can't freeze ASLR or loading—must have tables and metadata. Any sufficiently complex input data is the same as VM byte code Example, ELF relocation entries + dynamic symbols == a Turing Complete Machine (TM). @bxsays created a Turing machine in Linux from relocation data (not code) in an ELF file. For more information, see Rebecca "bx" Shapiro's presentation from last year's Toorcon, "Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata" @bxsays did same thing with Mach-O bytecode Or a DWARF exception handling data .eh_frame + glibc == Turning Machine X86 MMU (IDT, GDT, TSS): used address translation to create a Turning Machine. Page handler reads and writes (on page fault) memory. Uses a page table, which can be used as Turning Machine byte code. Example on Github using this TM that will fly a glider across the screen Next Sergey talked about "Parser Differentials". That having one input format, but two parsers, will create confusion and opportunity for exploitation. For example, CSRs are parsed during creation by cert requestor and again by another parser at the CA. Another example is ELF—several parsers in OS tool chain, which are all different. Can have two different Program Headers (PHDRs) because ld.so parses multiple PHDRs. The second PHDR can completely transform the executable. This is described in paper in the first issue of International Journal of PoC. Conclusions trusting computers not only about bugs! Bugs are part of a problem, but no by far all of it complex data formats means bugs no "chain of trust" in Babylon! (that is, with parser differentials) we need to squeeze complexity out of data until data stops being "code equivalent" Further information See and langsec.org. USENIX WOOT 2013 (Workshop on Offensive Technologies) for "weird machines" papers and videos.

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• Unable to boot Windows 7 after installing Ubuntu

  - by Devendra

  I have Windows 7 on my machine and then installed Ubuntu 12.04 using a live CD. I can see both Windows 7 and Ubuntu in the grub menu, but when I select Windows 7 it shows a black screen for about 2 seconds and the returns to the Grub menu. But if I select Ubuntu it's working fine. This is the contents of the boot-repair log: Boot Info Script 0.61.full + Boot-Repair extra info [Boot-Info November 20th 2012] ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => Grub2 (v2.00) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks in partition 1 for (,msdos6)/boot/grub. sda1: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Grub2 (v1.99-2.00) Boot sector info: Grub2 (v2.00) is installed in the boot sector of sda1 and looks at sector 388911128 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks in partition 1 for (,msdos6)/boot/grub. No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows 7 Boot files: /bootmgr /Boot/BCD /Windows/System32/winload.exe sda2: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sda3: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sda4: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: Extended Partition Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sda5: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: According to the info in the boot sector, sda5 starts at sector 2048. Operating System: Boot files: sda6: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Operating System: Ubuntu 12.10 Boot files: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.img sda7: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: ============================ Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda _____________________________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sda1 * 206,848 146,802,687 146,595,840 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda2 147,007,488 293,623,807 146,616,320 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda3 293,623,808 332,820,613 39,196,806 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda4 332,822,526 1,465,145,343 1,132,322,818 f W95 Extended (LBA) /dev/sda5 461,342,720 1,465,145,343 1,003,802,624 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda6 332,822,528 453,171,199 120,348,672 83 Linux /dev/sda7 453,173,248 461,338,623 8,165,376 82 Linux swap / Solaris "blkid" output: ________________________________________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/sda1 F6AE2C13AE2BCB47 ntfs /dev/sda2 DC2273012272DFC6 ntfs /dev/sda3 1E76E43376E40D79 ntfs New Volume /dev/sda5 5ED60ACDD60AA57D ntfs /dev/sda6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ext4 /dev/sda7 52f3dd94-6be7-4a7b-a3ae-f43eb8810483 swap ================================ Mount points: ================================= Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/sda6 / ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) =========================== sda6/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="0" if [ x"${feature_menuentry_id}" = xy ]; then menuentry_id_option="--id" else menuentry_id_option="" fi export menuentry_id_option if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { if [ x$feature_all_video_module = xy ]; then insmod all_video else insmod efi_gop insmod efi_uga insmod ieee1275_fb insmod vbe insmod vga insmod video_bochs insmod video_cirrus fi } if [ x$feature_default_font_path = xy ] ; then font=unicode else insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi font="/usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2" fi if loadfont $font ; then set gfxmode=auto load_video insmod gfxterm set locale_dir=$prefix/locale set lang=en_IN insmod gettext fi terminal_output gfxterm if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=10 else set timeout=10 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray if background_color 44,0,30; then clear fi ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### function gfxmode { set gfxpayload="${1}" if [ "${1}" = "keep" ]; then set vt_handoff=vt.handoff=7 else set vt_handoff= fi } if [ "${recordfail}" != 1 ]; then if [ -e ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt ]; then if hwmatch ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3; then if [ ${match} = 0 ]; then set linux_gfx_mode=keep else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=keep fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi export linux_gfx_mode if [ "${linux_gfx_mode}" != "text" ]; then load_video; fi menuentry 'Ubuntu' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-simple-9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124' { recordfail gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic root=UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ro quiet splash $vt_handoff initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic } submenu 'Advanced options for Ubuntu' $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-advanced-9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124' { menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.5.0-17-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-3.5.0-17-generic-advanced-9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124' { recordfail gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi echo 'Loading Linux 3.5.0-17-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic root=UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ro quiet splash $vt_handoff echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.5.0-17-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os $menuentry_id_option 'gnulinux-3.5.0-17-generic-recovery-9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124' { recordfail insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi echo 'Loading Linux 3.5.0-17-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic root=UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic } } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='hd0,msdos6' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos6 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos6 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos6 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 fi linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### menuentry 'Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)' --class windows --class os $menuentry_id_option 'osprober-chain-F6AE2C13AE2BCB47' { insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='hd0,msdos1' if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint-bios=hd0,msdos1 --hint-efi=hd0,msdos1 --hint-baremetal=ahci0,msdos1 F6AE2C13AE2BCB47 else search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root F6AE2C13AE2BCB47 fi chainloader +1 } ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_uefi-firmware ### ### END /etc/grub.d/30_uefi-firmware ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f ${config_directory}/custom.cfg ]; then source ${config_directory}/custom.cfg elif [ -z "${config_directory}" -a -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =============================== sda6/etc/fstab: ================================ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> # / was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation UUID=52f3dd94-6be7-4a7b-a3ae-f43eb8810483 none swap sw 0 0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =================== sda6: Location of files loaded by Grub: ==================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) 162.831275940 = 174.838751232 boot/grub/grub.cfg 1 163.036647797 = 175.059267584 boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic 1 206.871749878 = 222.126850048 boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic 1 163.036647797 = 175.059267584 initrd.img 1 163.036647797 = 175.059267584 initrd.img.old 1 206.871749878 = 222.126850048 vmlinuz 1 =============================== StdErr Messages: =============================== cat: write error: Broken pipe cat: write error: Broken pipe ADDITIONAL INFORMATION : =================== log of boot-repair 2012-12-11__00h59 =================== boot-repair version : 3.195~ppa28~quantal boot-sav version : 3.195~ppa28~quantal glade2script version : 3.2.2~ppa45~quantal boot-sav-extra version : 3.195~ppa28~quantal boot-repair is executed in installed-session (Ubuntu 12.10, quantal, Ubuntu, x86_64) CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic root=UUID=9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124 ro quiet splash vt.handoff=7 =================== os-prober: /dev/sda6:The OS now in use - Ubuntu 12.10 CurrentSession:linux /dev/sda1:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain =================== blkid: /dev/sda1: UUID="F6AE2C13AE2BCB47" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda2: UUID="DC2273012272DFC6" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda3: LABEL="New Volume" UUID="1E76E43376E40D79" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda5: UUID="5ED60ACDD60AA57D" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda6: UUID="9e70fd16-b48b-4f88-adcf-e443aef83124" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda7: UUID="52f3dd94-6be7-4a7b-a3ae-f43eb8810483" TYPE="swap" 1 disks with OS, 2 OS : 1 Linux, 0 MacOS, 1 Windows, 0 unknown type OS. Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary. DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently. =================== /etc/default/grub : # If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update # /boot/grub/grub.cfg. # For full documentation of the options in this file, see: # info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration' GRUB_DEFAULT=0 #GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" # Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs # This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains # the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...) #GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef" # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only) #GRUB_TERMINAL=console # The resolution used on graphical terminal # note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE # you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo' #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480 # Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux #GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true # Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries #GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" # Uncomment to get a beep at grub start #GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1" =================== /etc/grub.d/ : drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Oct 17 20:29 grub.d total 72 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7541 Oct 14 23:06 00_header -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5488 Oct 4 15:00 05_debian_theme -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10891 Oct 14 23:06 10_linux -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10258 Oct 14 23:06 20_linux_xen -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1688 Oct 11 19:40 20_memtest86+ -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10976 Oct 14 23:06 30_os-prober -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1426 Oct 14 23:06 30_uefi-firmware -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 214 Oct 14 23:06 40_custom -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 216 Oct 14 23:06 41_custom -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 483 Oct 14 23:06 README =================== UEFI/Legacy mode: This installed-session is not in EFI-mode. EFI in dmesg. Please report this message to [email protected] [ 0.000000] ACPI: UEFI 00000000bafe7000 0003E (v01 DELL QA09 00000002 PTL 00000002) [ 0.000000] ACPI: UEFI 00000000bafe6000 00042 (v01 PTL COMBUF 00000001 PTL 00000001) [ 0.000000] ACPI: UEFI 00000000bafe3000 00256 (v01 DELL QA09 00000002 PTL 00000002) SecureBoot disabled. =================== PARTITIONS & DISKS: sda6 : sda, not-sepboot, grubenv-ok grub2, grub-pc , update-grub, 64, with-boot, is-os, not--efi--part, fstab-without-boot, fstab-without-efi, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, apt-get, grub-install, with--usr, fstab-without-usr, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, . sda1 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, is-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, haswinload, no-recov-nor-hid, bootmgr, is-winboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, not-far, /mnt/boot-sav/sda1. sda2 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, /mnt/boot-sav/sda2. sda3 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, /mnt/boot-sav/sda3. sda5 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, /mnt/boot-sav/sda5. sda : not-GPT, BIOSboot-not-needed, has-no-EFIpart, not-usb, has-os, 2048 sectors * 512 bytes =================== parted -l: Model: ATA WDC WD7500BPKT-7 (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 750GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/4096B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 106MB 75.2GB 75.1GB primary ntfs boot 2 75.3GB 150GB 75.1GB primary ntfs 3 150GB 170GB 20.1GB primary ntfs 4 170GB 750GB 580GB extended lba 6 170GB 232GB 61.6GB logical ext4 7 232GB 236GB 4181MB logical linux-swap(v1) 5 236GB 750GB 514GB logical ntfs =================== parted -lm: BYT; /dev/sda:750GB:scsi:512:4096:msdos:ATA WDC WD7500BPKT-7; 1:106MB:75.2GB:75.1GB:ntfs::boot; 2:75.3GB:150GB:75.1GB:ntfs::; 3:150GB:170GB:20.1GB:ntfs::; 4:170GB:750GB:580GB:::lba; 6:170GB:232GB:61.6GB:ext4::; 7:232GB:236GB:4181MB:linux-swap(v1)::; 5:236GB:750GB:514GB:ntfs::; =================== mount: /dev/sda6 on / type ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) none on /run/user type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=104857600,mode=0755) gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/dev/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=dev) /dev/sda1 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda1 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) /dev/sda2 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda2 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) /dev/sda3 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda3 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) /dev/sda5 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda5 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) =================== ls: /sys/block/sda (filtered): alignment_offset bdi capability dev device discard_alignment events events_async events_poll_msecs ext_range holders inflight power queue range removable ro sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7 size slaves stat subsystem trace uevent /sys/block/sr0 (filtered): alignment_offset bdi capability dev device discard_alignment events events_async events_poll_msecs ext_range holders inflight power queue range removable ro size slaves stat subsystem trace uevent /dev (filtered): alarm ashmem autofs binder block bsg btrfs-control bus cdrom cdrw char console core cpu cpu_dma_latency disk dri dvd dvdrw ecryptfs fb0 fb1 fd full fuse hpet input kmsg kvm log mapper mcelog mei mem net network_latency network_throughput null oldmem port ppp psaux ptmx pts random rfkill rtc rtc0 sda sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7 sg0 sg1 shm snapshot snd sr0 stderr stdin stdout uinput urandom v4l vga_arbiter vhost-net video0 zero ls /dev/mapper: control =================== df -Th: Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sda6 ext4 57G 2.7G 51G 6% / udev devtmpfs 1.9G 12K 1.9G 1% /dev tmpfs tmpfs 770M 892K 769M 1% /run none tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none tmpfs 1.9G 260K 1.9G 1% /run/shm none tmpfs 100M 44K 100M 1% /run/user /dev/sda1 fuseblk 70G 36G 35G 51% /mnt/boot-sav/sda1 /dev/sda2 fuseblk 70G 66G 4.8G 94% /mnt/boot-sav/sda2 /dev/sda3 fuseblk 19G 87M 19G 1% /mnt/boot-sav/sda3 /dev/sda5 fuseblk 479G 436G 44G 92% /mnt/boot-sav/sda5 =================== fdisk -l: Disk /dev/sda: 750.2 GB, 750156374016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 91201 cylinders, total 1465149168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes Disk identifier: 0x1dc69d0b Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 206848 146802687 73297920 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda2 147007488 293623807 73308160 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 293623808 332820613 19598403 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda4 332822526 1465145343 566161409 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) Partition 4 does not start on physical sector boundary. /dev/sda5 461342720 1465145343 501901312 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda6 332822528 453171199 60174336 83 Linux /dev/sda7 453173248 461338623 4082688 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order =================== Recommended repair Recommended-Repair This setting will reinstall the grub2 of sda6 into the MBR of sda. Additional repair will be performed: unhide-bootmenu-10s grub-install (GRUB) 2.00-7ubuntu11,grub-install (GRUB) 2. Reinstall the GRUB of sda6 into the MBR of sda Installation finished. No error reported. grub-install /dev/sda: exit code of grub-install /dev/sda:0 update-grub Generating grub.cfg ... Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.5.0-17-generic Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-3.5.0-17-generic Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda1 Unhide GRUB boot menu in sda6/boot/grub/grub.cfg Boot successfully repaired. You can now reboot your computer. The boot files of [The OS now in use - Ubuntu 12.10] are far from the start of the disk. Your BIOS may not detect them. You may want to retry after creating a /boot partition (EXT4, >200MB, start of the disk). This can be performed via tools such as gParted. Then select this partition via the [Separate /boot partition:] option of [Boot Repair]. (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootPartition)

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• Extending NerdDinner: Adding Geolocated Flair

  - by Jon Galloway

  NerdDinner is a website with the audacious goal of “Organizing the world’s nerds and helping them eat in packs.” Because nerds aren’t likely to socialize with others unless a website tells them to do it. Scott Hanselman showed off a lot of the cool features we’ve added to NerdDinner lately during his popular talk at MIX10, Beyond File | New Company: From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform. Did you miss it? Go ahead and watch it, I’ll wait. One of the features we wanted to add was flair. You know about flair, right? It’s a way to let folks who like your site show it off in their own site. For example, here’s my StackOverflow flair: Great! So how could we add some of this flair stuff to NerdDinner? What do we want to show? If we’re going to encourage our users to give up a bit of their beautiful website to show off a bit of ours, we need to think about what they’ll want to show. For instance, my StackOverflow flair is all about me, not StackOverflow. So how will this apply to NerdDinner? Since NerdDinner is all about organizing local dinners, in order for the flair to be useful it needs to make sense for the person viewing the web page. If someone visits from Egypt visits my blog, they should see information about NerdDinners in Egypt. That’s geolocation – localizing site content based on where the browser’s sitting, and it makes sense for flair as well as entire websites. So we’ll set up a simple little callout that prompts them to host a dinner in their area: Hopefully our flair works and there is a dinner near your viewers, so they’ll see another view which lists upcoming dinners near them: The Geolocation Part Generally website geolocation is done by mapping the requestor’s IP address to a geographic area. It’s not an exact science, but I’ve always found it to be pretty accurate. There are (at least) three ways to handle it: You pay somebody like MaxMind for a database (with regular updates) that sits on your server, and you use their API to do lookups. I used this on a pretty big project a few years ago and it worked well. You use HTML 5 Geolocation API or Google Gears or some other browser based solution. I think those are cool (I use Google Gears a lot), but they’re both in flux right now and I don’t think either has a wide enough of an install base yet to rely on them. You might want to, but I’ve heard you do all kinds of crazy stuff, and sometimes it gets you in trouble. I don’t mean talk out of line, but we all laugh behind your back a bit. But, hey, it’s up to you. It’s your flair or whatever. There are some free webservices out there that will take an IP address and give you location information. Easy, and works for everyone. That’s what we’re doing. I looked at a few different services and settled on IPInfoDB. It’s free, has a great API, and even returns JSON, which is handy for Javascript use. The IP query is pretty simple. We hit a URL like this: http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=74.125.45.100&timezone=false … and we get an XML response back like this… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Response> <Ip>74.125.45.100</Ip> <Status>OK</Status> <CountryCode>US</CountryCode> <CountryName>United States</CountryName> <RegionCode>06</RegionCode> <RegionName>California</RegionName> <City>Mountain View</City> <ZipPostalCode>94043</ZipPostalCode> <Latitude>37.4192</Latitude> <Longitude>-122.057</Longitude> </Response> So we’ll build some data transfer classes to hold the location information, like this: public class LocationInfo { public string Country { get; set; } public string RegionName { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string ZipPostalCode { get; set; } public LatLong Position { get; set; } } public class LatLong { public float Lat { get; set; } public float Long { get; set; } } And now hitting the service is pretty simple: public static LocationInfo HostIpToPlaceName(string ip) { string url = "http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip={0}&timezone=false"; url = String.Format(url, ip); var result = XDocument.Load(url); var location = (from x in result.Descendants("Response") select new LocationInfo { City = (string)x.Element("City"), RegionName = (string)x.Element("RegionName"), Country = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), ZipPostalCode = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), Position = new LatLong { Lat = (float)x.Element("Latitude"), Long = (float)x.Element("Longitude") } }).First(); return location; } Getting The User’s IP Okay, but first we need the end user’s IP, and you’d think it would be as simple as reading the value from HttpContext: HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress But you’d be wrong. Sorry. UserHostAddress just wraps HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"], but that doesn’t get you the IP for users behind a proxy. That’s in another header, “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR". So you can either hit a wrapper and then check a header, or just check two headers. I went for uniformity: string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; We’re almost set to wrap this up, but first let’s talk about our views. Yes, views, because we’ll have two. Selecting the View We wanted to make it easy for people to include the flair in their sites, so we looked around at how other people were doing this. The StackOverflow folks have a pretty good flair system, which allows you to include the flair in your site as either an IFRAME reference or a Javascript include. We’ll do both. We have a ServicesController to handle use of the site information outside of NerdDinner.com, so this fits in pretty well there. We’ll be displaying the same information for both HTML and Javascript flair, so we can use one Flair controller action which will return a different view depending on the requested format. Here’s our general flow for our controller action: Get the user’s IP Translate it to a location Grab the top three upcoming dinners that are near that location Select the view based on the format (defaulted to “html”) Return a FlairViewModel which contains the list of dinners and the location information public ActionResult Flair(string format = "html") { string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty( Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; var location = GeolocationService.HostIpToPlaceName(SourceIP); var dinners = dinnerRepository. FindByLocation(location.Position.Lat, location.Position.Long). OrderByDescending(p => p.EventDate).Take(3); // Select the view we'll return. // Using a switch because we'll add in JSON and other formats later. string view; switch (format.ToLower()) { case "javascript": view = "JavascriptFlair"; break; default: view = "Flair"; break; } return View( view, new FlairViewModel { Dinners = dinners.ToList(), LocationName = string.IsNullOrEmpty(location.City) ? "you" : String.Format("{0}, {1}", location.City, location.RegionName) } ); } Note: I’m not in love with the logic here, but it seems like overkill to extract the switch statement away when we’ll probably just have two or three views. What do you think? The HTML View The HTML version of the view is pretty simple – the only thing of any real interest here is the use of an extension method to truncate strings that are would cause the titles to wrap. public static string Truncate(this string s, int maxLength) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(s) || maxLength <= 0) return string.Empty; else if (s.Length > maxLength) return s.Substring(0, maxLength) + "..."; else return s; }   So here’s how the HTML view ends up looking: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<FlairViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Nerd Dinner</title> <link href="/Content/Flair.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="nd-wrapper"> <h2 id="nd-header">NerdDinner.com</h2> <div id="nd-outer"> <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> <div id="nd-bummer"> Looks like there's no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create">host one</a>?</div> <% } else { %> <h3> Dinners Near You</h3> <ul> <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> <li> <%: Html.ActionLink(String.Format("{0} with {1} on {2}", item.Title.Truncate(20), item.HostedBy, item.EventDate.ToShortDateString()), "Details", "Dinners", new { id = item.DinnerID }, new { target = "_blank" })%></li> <% } %> </ul> <% } %> <div id="nd-footer"> More dinners and fun at <a target="_blank" href="http://nrddnr.com">http://nrddnr.com</a></div> </div> </div> </body> </html> You’d include this in a page using an IFRAME, like this: <IFRAME height=230 marginHeight=0 src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair" frameBorder=0 width=160 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME> The Javascript view The Javascript flair is written so you can include it in a webpage with a simple script include, like this: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair?format=javascript"></script> The goal of this view is very similar to the HTML embed view, with a few exceptions: We’re creating a script element and adding it to the head of the document, which will then document.write out the content. Note that you have to consider if your users will actually have a <head> element in their documents, but for website flair use cases I think that’s a safe bet. Since the content is being added to the existing page rather than shown in an IFRAME, all links need to be absolute. That means we can’t use Html.ActionLink, since it generates relative routes. We need to escape everything since it’s being written out as strings. We need to set the content type to application/x-javascript. The easiest way to do that is to use the <%@ Page ContentType%> directive. <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<NerdDinner.Models.FlairViewModel>" ContentType="application/x-javascript" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> document.write('<script>var link = document.createElement(\"link\");link.href = \"http://nerddinner.com/content/Flair.css\";link.rel = \"stylesheet\";link.type = \"text/css\";var head = document.getElementsByTagName(\"head\")[0];head.appendChild(link);</script>'); document.write('<div id=\"nd-wrapper\"><h2 id=\"nd-header\">NerdDinner.com</h2><div id=\"nd-outer\">'); <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-bummer\">Looks like there\'s no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create\">host one</a>?</div>'); <% } else { %> document.write('<h3> Dinners Near You</h3><ul>'); <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> document.write('<li><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com/<%: item.DinnerID %>\"><%: item.Title.Truncate(20) %> with <%: item.HostedBy %> on <%: item.EventDate.ToShortDateString() %></a></li>'); <% } %> document.write('</ul>'); <% } %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-footer\"> More dinners and fun at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com\">http://nrddnr.com</a></div></div></div>'); Getting IP’s for Testing There are a variety of online services that will translate a location to an IP, which were handy for testing these out. I found http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html to be most useful, but I’m open to suggestions if you know of something better. Next steps I think the next step here is to minimize load – you know, in case people start actually using this flair. There are two places to think about – the NerdDinner.com servers, and the services we’re using for Geolocation. I usually think about caching as a first attack on server load, but that’s less helpful here since every user will have a different IP. Instead, I’d look at taking advantage of Asynchronous Controller Actions, a cool new feature in ASP.NET MVC 2. Async Actions let you call a potentially long-running webservice without tying up a thread on the server while waiting for the response. There’s some good info on that in the MSDN documentation, and Dino Esposito wrote a great article on Asynchronous ASP.NET Pages in the April 2010 issue of MSDN Magazine. But let’s think of the children, shall we? What about ipinfodb.com? Well, they don’t have specific daily limits, but they do throttle you if you put a lot of traffic on them. From their FAQ: We do not have a specific daily limit but queries that are at a rate faster than 2 per second will be put in "queue". If you stay below 2 queries/second everything will be normal. If you go over the limit, you will still get an answer for all queries but they will be slowed down to about 1 per second. This should not affect most users but for high volume websites, you can either use our IP database on your server or we can whitelist your IP for 5$/month (simply use the donate form and leave a comment with your server IP). Good programming practices such as not querying our API for all page views (you can store the data in a cookie or a database) will also help not reaching the limit. So the first step there is to save the geolocalization information in a time-limited cookie, which will allow us to look up the local dinners immediately without having to hit the geolocation service.

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• Red Gate Coder interviews: Robin Hellen

  - by Michael Williamson

  Robin Hellen is a test engineer here at Red Gate, and is also the latest coder I’ve interviewed. We chatted about debugging code, the roles of software engineers and testers, and why Vala is currently his favourite programming language. How did you get started with programming?It started when I was about six. My dad’s a professional programmer, and he gave me and my sister one of his old computers and taught us a bit about programming. It was an old Amiga 500 with a variant of BASIC. I don’t think I ever successfully completed anything! It was just faffing around. I didn’t really get anywhere with it.But then presumably you did get somewhere with it at some point.At some point. The PC emerged as the dominant platform, and I learnt a bit of Visual Basic. I didn’t really do much, just a couple of quick hacky things. A bit of demo animation. Took me a long time to get anywhere with programming, really.When did you feel like you did start to get somewhere?I think it was when I started doing things for someone else, which was my sister’s final year of university project. She called up my dad two days before she was due to submit, saying “We need something to display a graph!”. Dad says, “I’m too busy, go talk to your brother”. So I hacked up this ugly piece of code, sent it off and they won a prize for that project. Apparently, the graph, the bit that I wrote, was the reason they won a prize! That was when I first felt that I’d actually done something that was worthwhile. That was my first real bit of code, and the ugliest code I’ve ever written. It’s basically an array of pre-drawn line elements that I shifted round the screen to draw a very spikey graph.When did you decide that programming might actually be something that you wanted to do as a career?It’s not really a decision I took, I always wanted to do something with computers. And I had to take a gap year for uni, so I was looking for twelve month internships. I applied to Red Gate, and they gave me a job as a tester. And that’s where I really started having to write code well. To a better standard that I had been up to that point.How did you find coming to Red Gate and working with other coders?I thought it was really nice. I learnt so much just from other people around. I think one of the things that’s really great is that people are just willing to help you learn. Instead of “Don’t you know that, you’re so stupid”, it’s “You can just do it this way”.If you could go back to the very start of that internship, is there something that you would tell yourself?Write shorter code. I have a tendency to write massive, many-thousand line files that I break out of right at the end. And then half-way through a project I’m doing something, I think “Where did I write that bit that does that thing?”, and it’s almost impossible to find. I wrote some horrendous code when I started. Just that principle, just keep things short. Even if looks a bit crazy to be jumping around all over the place all of the time, it’s actually a lot more understandable.And how do you hold yourself to that?Generally, if a function’s going off my screen, it’s probably too long. That’s what I tell myself, and within the team here we have code reviews, so the guys I’m with at the moment are pretty good at pulling me up on, “Doesn’t that look like it’s getting a bit long?”. It’s more just the subjective standard of readability than anything.So you’re an advocate of code review?Yes, definitely. Both to spot errors that you might have made, and to improve your knowledge. The person you’re reviewing will say “Oh, you could have done it that way”. That’s how we learn, by talking to others, and also just sharing knowledge of how your project works around the team, or even outside the team. Definitely a very firm advocate of code reviews.Do you think there’s more we could do with them?I don’t know. We’re struggling with how to add them as part of the process without it becoming too cumbersome. We’ve experimented with a few different ways, and we’ve not found anything that just works.To get more into the nitty gritty: how do you like to debug code?The first thing is to do it in my head. I’ll actually think what piece of code is likely to have caused that error, and take a quick look at it, just to see if there’s anything glaringly obvious there. The next thing I’ll probably do is throw in print statements, or throw some exceptions from various points, just to check: is it going through the code path I expect it to? A last resort is to actually debug code using a debugger.Why is the debugger the last resort?Probably because of the environments I learnt programming in. VB and early BASIC didn’t have much of a debugger, the only way to find out what your program was doing was to add print statements. Also, because a lot of the stuff I tend to work with is non-interactive, if it’s something that takes a long time to run, I can throw in the print statements, set a run off, go and do something else, and look at it again later, rather than trying to remember what happened at that point when I was debugging through it. So it also gives me the record of what happens. I hate just sitting there pressing F5, F5, continually. If you’re having to find out what your code is doing at each line, you’ve probably got a very wrong mental model of what your code’s doing, and you can find that out just as easily by inspecting a couple of values through the print statements.If I were on some codebase that you were also working on, what should I do to make it as easy as possible to understand?I’d say short and well-named methods. The one thing I like to do when I’m looking at code is to find out where a value comes from, and the more layers of indirection there are, particularly DI [dependency injection] frameworks, the harder it is to find out where something’s come from. I really hate that. I want to know if the value come from the user here or is a constant here, and if I can’t find that out, that makes code very hard to understand for me.As a tester, where do you think the split should lie between software engineers and testers?I think the split is less on areas of the code you write and more what you’re designing and creating. The developers put a structure on the code, while my major role is to say which tests we should have, whether we should test that, or it’s not worth testing that because it’s a tiny function in code that nobody’s ever actually going to see. So it’s not a split in the code, it’s a split in what you’re thinking about. Saying what code we should write, but alternatively what code we should take out.In your experience, do the software engineers tend to do much testing themselves?They tend to control the lowest layer of tests. And, depending on how the balance of people is in the team, they might write some of the higher levels of test. Or that might go to the testers. I’m the only tester on my team with three other developers, so they’ll be writing quite a lot of the actual test code, with input from me as to whether we should test that functionality, whereas on other teams, where it’s been more equal numbers, the testers have written pretty much all of the high level tests, just because that’s the best use of resource.If you could shuffle resources around however you liked, do you think that the developers should be writing those high-level tests?I think they should be writing them occasionally. It helps when they have an understanding of how testing code works and possibly what assumptions we’ve made in tests, and they can say “actually, it doesn’t work like that under the hood so you’ve missed this whole area”. It’s one of those agile things that everyone on the team should be at least comfortable doing the various jobs. So if the developers can write test code then I think that’s a very good thing.So you think testers should be able to write production code?Yes, although given most testers skills at coding, I wouldn’t advise it too much! I have written a few things, and I did make a few changes that have actually gone into our production code base. They’re not necessarily running every time but they are there. I think having that mix of skill sets is really useful. In some ways we’re using our own product to test itself, so being able to make those changes where it’s not working saves me a round-trip through the developers. It can be really annoying if the developers have no time to make a change, and I can’t touch the code.If the software engineers are consistently writing tests at all levels, what role do you think the role of a tester is?I think on a team like that, those distinctions aren’t quite so useful. There’ll be two cases. There’s either the case where the developers think they’ve written good tests, but you still need someone with a test engineer mind-set to go through the tests and validate that it’s a useful set, or the correct set for that code. Or they won’t actually be pure developers, they’ll have that mix of test ability in there.I think having slightly more distinct roles is useful. When it starts to blur, then you lose that view of the tests as a whole. The tester job is not to create tests, it’s to validate the quality of the product, and you don’t do that just by writing tests. There’s more things you’ve got to keep in your mind. And I think when you blur the roles, you start to lose that end of the tester.So because you’re working on those features, you lose that holistic view of the whole system?Yeah, and anyone who’s worked on the feature shouldn’t be testing it. You always need to have it tested it by someone who didn’t write it. Otherwise you’re a bit too close and you assume “yes, people will only use it that way”, but the tester will come along and go “how do people use this? How would our most idiotic user use this?”. I might not test that because it might be completely irrelevant. But it’s coming in and trying to have a different set of assumptions.Are you a believer that it should all be automated if possible?Not entirely. So an automated test is always better than a manual test for the long-term, but there’s still nothing that beats a human sitting in front of the application and thinking “What could I do at this point?”. The automated test is very good but they follow that strict path, and they never check anything off the path. The human tester will look at things that they weren’t expecting, whereas the automated test can only ever go “Is that value correct?” in many respects, and it won’t notice that on the other side of the screen you’re showing something completely wrong. And that value might have been checked independently, but you always find a few odd interactions when you’re going through something manually, and you always need to go through something manually to start with anyway, otherwise you won’t know where the important bits to write your automation are.When you’re doing that manual testing, do you think it’s important to do that across the entire product, or just the bits that you’ve touched recently?I think it’s important to do it mostly on the bits you’ve touched, but you can’t ignore the rest of the product. Unless you’re dealing with a very, very self-contained bit, you’re almost always encounter other bits of the product along the way. Most testers I know, even if they are looking at just one path, they’ll keep open and move around a bit anyway, just because they want to find something that’s broken. If we find that your path is right, we’ll go out and hunt something else.How do you think this fits into the idea of continuously deploying, so long as the tests pass?With deploying a website it’s a bit different because you can always pull it back. If you’re deploying an application to customers, when you’ve released it, it’s out there, you can’t pull it back. Someone’s going to keep it, no matter how hard you try there will be a few installations that stay around. So I’d always have at least a human element on that path. With websites, you could probably automate straight out, or at least straight out to an internal environment or a single server in a cloud of fifty that will serve some people. But I don’t think you should release to everyone just on automated tests passing.You’ve already mentioned using BASIC and C# — are there any other languages that you’ve used?I’ve used a few. That’s something that has changed more recently, I’ve become familiar with more languages. Before I started at Red Gate I learnt a bit of C. Then last year, I taught myself Python which I actually really enjoyed using. I’ve also come across another language called Vala, which is sort of a C#-like language. It’s basically a pre-processor for C, but it has very nice syntax. I think that’s currently my favourite language.Any particular reason for trying Vala?I have a completely Linux environment at home, and I’ve been looking for a nice language, and C# just doesn’t cut it because I won’t touch Mono. So, I was looking for something like C# but that was useable in an open source environment, and Vala’s what I found. C#’s got a few features that Vala doesn’t, and Vala’s got a few features where I think “It would be awesome if C# had that”.What are some of the features that it’s missing?Extension methods. And I think that’s the only one that really bugs me. I like to use them when I’m writing C# because it makes some things really easy, especially with libraries that you can’t touch the internals of. It doesn’t have method overloading, which is sometimes annoying.Where it does win over C#?Everything is non-nullable by default, you never have to check that something’s unexpectedly null.Also, Vala has code contracts. This is starting to come in C# 4, but the way it works in Vala is that you specify requirements in short phrases as part of your function signature and they stick to the signature, so that when you inherit it, it has exactly the same code contract as the base one, or when you inherit from an interface, you have to match the signature exactly. Just using those makes you think a bit more about how you’re writing your method, it’s not an afterthought when you’ve got contracts from base classes given to you, you can’t change it. Which I think is a lot nicer than the way C# handles it. When are those actually checked?They’re checked both at compile and run-time. The compile-time checking isn’t very strong yet, it’s quite a new feature in the compiler, and because it compiles down to C, you can write C code and interface with your methods, so you can bypass that compile-time check anyway. So there’s an extra runtime check, and if you violate one of the contracts at runtime, it’s game over for your program, there’s no exception to catch, it’s just goodbye!One thing I dislike about C# is the exceptions. You write a bit of code and fifty exceptions could come from any point in your ten lines, and you can’t mentally model how those exceptions are going to come out, and you can’t even predict them based on the functions you’re calling, because if you’ve accidentally got a derived class there instead of a base class, that can throw a completely different set of exceptions. So I’ve got no way of mentally modelling those, whereas in Vala they’re checked like Java, so you know only these exceptions can come out. You know in advance the error conditions.I think Raymond Chen on Old New Thing says “the only thing you know when you throw an exception is that you’re in an invalid state somewhere in your program, so just kill it and be done with it!”You said you’ve also learnt bits of Python. How did you find that compared to Vala and C#?Very different because of the dynamic typing. I’ve been writing a website for my own use. I’m quite into photography, so I take photos off my camera, post-process them, dump them in a file, and I get a webpage with all my thumbnails. So sort of like Picassa, but written by myself because I wanted something to learn Python with. There are some things that are really nice, I just found it really difficult to cope with the fact that I’m not quite sure what this object type that I’m passed is, I might not ever be sure, so it can randomly blow up on me. But once I train myself to ignore that and just say “well, I’m fairly sure it’s going to be something that looks like this, so I’ll use it like this”, then it’s quite nice.Any particular features that you’ve appreciated?I don’t like any particular feature, it’s just very straightforward to work with. It’s very quick to write something in, particularly as you don’t have to worry that you’ve changed something that affects a different part of the program. If you have, then that part blows up, but I can get this part working right now.If you were doing a big project, would you be willing to do it in Python rather than C# or Vala?I think I might be willing to try something bigger or long term with Python. We’re currently doing an ASP.NET MVC project on C#, and I don’t like the amount of reflection. There’s a lot of magic that pulls values out, and it’s all done under the scenes. It’s almost managed to put a dynamic type system on top of C#, which in many ways destroys the language to me, whereas if you’re already in a dynamic language, having things done dynamically is much more natural. In many ways, you get the worst of both worlds. I think for web projects, I would go with Python again, whereas for anything desktop, command-line or GUI-based, I’d probably go for C# or Vala, depending on what environment I’m in.It’s the fact that you can gain from the strong typing in ways that you can’t so much on the web app. Or, in a web app, you have to use dynamic typing at some point, or you have to write a hell of a lot of boilerplate, and I’d rather use the dynamic typing than write the boilerplate.What do you think separates great programmers from everyone else?Probably design choices. Choosing to write it a piece of code one way or another. For any given program you ask me to write, I could probably do it five thousand ways. A programmer who is capable will see four or five of them, and choose one of the better ones. The excellent programmer will see the largest proportion and manage to pick the best one very quickly without having to think too much about it. I think that’s probably what separates, is the speed at which they can see what’s the best path to write the program in. More Red Gater Coder interviews

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• Grandparent – Parent – Child Reports in SQL Developer

  - by thatjeffsmith

  You’ll never see one of these family stickers on my car, but I promise not to judge…much. Parent – Child reports are pretty straightforward in Oracle SQL Developer. You have a ‘parent’ report, and then one or more ‘child’ reports which are based off of a value in a selected row or value from the parent. If you need a quick tutorial to get up to speed on the subject, go ahead and take 5 minutes Shortly before I left for vacation 2 weeks agao, I got an interesting question from one of my Twitter Followers: @thatjeffsmith any luck with the #Oracle awr reports in #SQLDeveloper?This is easy with multi generation parent>child Done in #dbvisualizer — Ronald Rood (@Ik_zelf) August 26, 2012 Now that I’m back from vacation, I can tell Ronald and everyone else that the answer is ‘Yes!’ And here’s how Time to Get Out Your XML Editor Don’t have one? That’s OK, SQL Developer can edit XML files. While the Reporting interface doesn’t surface the ability to create multi-generational reports, the underlying code definitely supports it. We just need to hack away at the XML that powers a report. For this example I’m going to start simple. A query that brings back DEPARTMENTs, then EMPLOYEES, then JOBs. We can build the first two parts of the report using the report editor. A Parent-Child report in Oracle SQL Developer (Departments – Employees) Save the Report to XML Once you’ve generated the XML file, open it with your favorite XML editor. For this example I’ll be using the build-it XML editor in SQL Developer. SQL Developer Reports in their raw XML glory! Right after the PDF element in the XML document, we can start a new ‘child’ report by inserting a DISPLAY element. I just copied and pasted the existing ‘display’ down so I wouldn’t have to worry about screwing anything up. Note I also needed to change the ‘master’ name so it wouldn’t confuse SQL Developer when I try to import/open a report that has the same name. Also I needed to update the binds tags to reflect the names from the child versus the original parent report. This is pretty easy to figure out on your own actually – I mean I’m no real developer and I got it pretty quick. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <displays> <display id="92857fce-0139-1000-8006-7f0000015340" type="" style="Table" enable="true"> <name><![CDATA[Grandparent]]></name> <description><![CDATA[]]></description> <tooltip><![CDATA[]]></tooltip> <drillclass><![CDATA[null]]></drillclass> <CustomValues> <TYPE>horizontal</TYPE> </CustomValues> <query> <sql><![CDATA[select * from hr.departments]]></sql> </query> <pdf version="VERSION_1_7" compression="CONTENT"> <docproperty title="" author="" subject="" keywords="" /> <cell toppadding="2" bottompadding="2" leftpadding="2" rightpadding="2" horizontalalign="LEFT" verticalalign="TOP" wrap="true" /> <column> <heading font="Courier" size="10" style="NORMAL" color="-16777216" rowshading="-1" labeling="FIRST_PAGE" /> <footing font="Courier" size="10" style="NORMAL" color="-16777216" rowshading="-1" labeling="NONE" /> <blob blob="NONE" zip="false" /> </column> <table font="Courier" size="10" style="NORMAL" color="-16777216" userowshading="false" oddrowshading="-1" evenrowshading="-1" showborders="true" spacingbefore="12" spacingafter="12" horizontalalign="LEFT" /> <header enable="false" generatedate="false"> <data> null </data> </header> <footer enable="false" generatedate="false"> <data value="null" /> </footer> <security enable="false" useopenpassword="false" openpassword="" encryption="EXCLUDE_METADATA"> <permission enable="false" permissionpassword="" allowcopying="true" allowprinting="true" allowupdating="false" allowaccessdevices="true" /> </security> <pagesetup papersize="LETTER" orientation="1" measurement="in" margintop="1.0" marginbottom="1.0" marginleft="1.0" marginright="1.0" /> </pdf> <display id="null" type="" style="Table" enable="true"> <name><![CDATA[Parent]]></name> <description><![CDATA[]]></description> <tooltip><![CDATA[]]></tooltip> <drillclass><![CDATA[null]]></drillclass> <CustomValues> <TYPE>horizontal</TYPE> </CustomValues> <query> <sql><![CDATA[select * from hr.employees where department_id = EPARTMENT_ID]]></sql> <binds> <bind id="DEPARTMENT_ID"> <prompt><![CDATA[DEPARTMENT_ID]]></prompt> <tooltip><![CDATA[DEPARTMENT_ID]]></tooltip> <value><![CDATA[NULL_VALUE]]></value> </bind> </binds> </query> <pdf version="VERSION_1_7" compression="CONTENT"> <docproperty title="" author="" subject="" keywords="" /> <cell toppadding="2" bottompadding="2" leftpadding="2" rightpadding="2" horizontalalign="LEFT" verticalalign="TOP" wrap="true" /> <column> <heading font="Courier" size="10" style="NORMAL" color="-16777216" rowshading="-1" labeling="FIRST_PAGE" /> <footing font="Courier" size="10" style="NORMAL" color="-16777216" rowshading="-1" labeling="NONE" /> <blob blob="NONE" zip="false" /> </column> <table font="Courier" size="10" style="NORMAL" color="-16777216" userowshading="false" oddrowshading="-1" evenrowshading="-1" showborders="true" spacingbefore="12" spacingafter="12" horizontalalign="LEFT" /> <header enable="false" generatedate="false"> <data> null </data> </header> <footer enable="false" generatedate="false"> <data value="null" /> </footer> <security enable="false" useopenpassword="false" openpassword="" encryption="EXCLUDE_METADATA"> <permission enable="false" permissionpassword="" allowcopying="true" allowprinting="true" allowupdating="false" allowaccessdevices="true" /> </security> <pagesetup papersize="LETTER" orientation="1" measurement="in" margintop="1.0" marginbottom="1.0" marginleft="1.0" marginright="1.0" /> </pdf> <display id="null" type="" style="Table" enable="true"> <name><![CDATA[Child]]></name> <description><![CDATA[]]></description> <tooltip><![CDATA[]]></tooltip> <drillclass><![CDATA[null]]></drillclass> <CustomValues> <TYPE>horizontal</TYPE> </CustomValues> <query> <sql><![CDATA[select * from hr.jobs where job_id = :JOB_ID]]></sql> <binds> <bind id="JOB_ID"> <prompt><![CDATA[JOB_ID]]></prompt> <tooltip><![CDATA[JOB_ID]]></tooltip> <value><![CDATA[NULL_VALUE]]></value> </bind> </binds> </query> <pdf version="VERSION_1_7" compression="CONTENT"> <docproperty title="" author="" subject="" keywords="" /> <cell toppadding="2" bottompadding="2" leftpadding="2" rightpadding="2" horizontalalign="LEFT" verticalalign="TOP" wrap="true" /> <column> <heading font="Courier" size="10" style="NORMAL" color="-16777216" rowshading="-1" labeling="FIRST_PAGE" /> <footing font="Courier" size="10" style="NORMAL" color="-16777216" rowshading="-1" labeling="NONE" /> <blob blob="NONE" zip="false" /> </column> <table font="Courier" size="10" style="NORMAL" color="-16777216" userowshading="false" oddrowshading="-1" evenrowshading="-1" showborders="true" spacingbefore="12" spacingafter="12" horizontalalign="LEFT" /> <header enable="false" generatedate="false"> <data> null </data> </header> <footer enable="false" generatedate="false"> <data value="null" /> </footer> <security enable="false" useopenpassword="false" openpassword="" encryption="EXCLUDE_METADATA"> <permission enable="false" permissionpassword="" allowcopying="true" allowprinting="true" allowupdating="false" allowaccessdevices="true" /> </security> <pagesetup papersize="LETTER" orientation="1" measurement="in" margintop="1.0" marginbottom="1.0" marginleft="1.0" marginright="1.0" /> </pdf> </display> </display> </display> </displays> Save the file and ‘Open Report…’ You’ll see your new report name in the tree. You just need to double-click it to open it. Here’s what it looks like running A 3 generation family Now Let’s Build an AWR Text Report Ronald wanted to have the ability to query AWR snapshots and generate the AWR reports. That requires a few inputs, including a START and STOP snapshot ID. That basically tells AWR what time period to use for generating the report. And here’s where it gets tricky. We’ll need to use aliases for the SNAP_ID column. Since we’re using the same column name from 2 different queries, we need to use different bind variables. Fortunately for us, SQL Developer’s clever enough to use the column alias as the BIND. Here’s what I mean: Grandparent Query SELECT snap_id start1, begin_interval_time, end_interval_time FROM dba_hist_snapshot ORDER BY 1 asc Parent Query SELECT snap_id stop1, begin_interval_time, end_interval_time, :START1 carry FROM dba_hist_snapshot WHERE snap_id > :START1 ORDER BY 1 asc And here’s where it gets even trickier – you can’t reference a bind from outside the parent query. My grandchild report can’t reference a value from the grandparent report. So I just carry the selected value down to the parent. In my parent query SELECT you see the ‘:START1′ at the end? That’s making that value available to me when I use it in my grandchild query. To complicate things a bit further, I can’t have a column name with a ‘:’ in it, or SQL Developer will get confused when I try to reference the value of the variable with the ‘:’ – and ‘::Name’ doesn’t work. But that’s OK, just alias it. Grandchild Query Select Output From Table(Dbms_Workload_Repository.Awr_Report_Text(1298953802, 1,:CARRY, :STOP1)); Ok, and the last trick – I hard-coded my report to use my database’s DB_ID and INST_ID into the AWR package call. Now a smart person could figure out a way to make that work on any database, but I got lazy and and ran out of time. But this should be far enough for you to take it from here. Here’s what my report looks like now: Caution: don’t run this if you haven’t licensed Enterprise Edition with Diagnostic Pack. The Raw XML for this AWR Report <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <displays> <display id="927ba96c-0139-1000-8001-7f0000015340" type="" style="Table" enable="true"> <name><![CDATA[AWR Start Stop Report Final]]></name> <description><![CDATA[]]></description> <tooltip><![CDATA[]]></tooltip> <drillclass><![CDATA[null]]></drillclass> <CustomValues> <TYPE>horizontal</TYPE> </CustomValues> <query> <sql><![CDATA[SELECT snap_id start1, begin_interval_time, end_interval_time FROM dba_hist_snapshot ORDER BY 1 asc]]></sql> </query> <display id="null" type="" style="Table" enable="true"> <name><![CDATA[Stop SNAP_ID]]></name> <description><![CDATA[]]></description> <tooltip><![CDATA[]]></tooltip> <drillclass><![CDATA[null]]></drillclass> <CustomValues> <TYPE>horizontal</TYPE> </CustomValues> <query> <sql><![CDATA[SELECT snap_id stop1, begin_interval_time, end_interval_time, :START1 carry FROM dba_hist_snapshot WHERE snap_id > :START1 ORDER BY 1 asc]]></sql> </query> <display id="null" type="" style="Table" enable="true"> <name><![CDATA[AWR Report]]></name> <description><![CDATA[]]></description> <tooltip><![CDATA[]]></tooltip> <drillclass><![CDATA[null]]></drillclass> <CustomValues> <TYPE>horizontal</TYPE> </CustomValues> <query> <sql><![CDATA[Select Output From Table(Dbms_Workload_Repository.Awr_Report_Text(1298953802, 1,:CARRY, :STOP1 ))]]></sql> </query> </display> </display> </display> </displays> Should We Build Support for Multiple Levels of Reports into the User Interface? Let us know! A comment here or a suggestion on our SQL Developer Exchange might help your case!

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• Scaling-out Your Services by Message Bus based WCF Transport Extension &ndash; Part 1 &ndash; Background

  - by Shaun

  Cloud computing gives us more flexibility on the computing resource, we can provision and deploy an application or service with multiple instances over multiple machines. With the increment of the service instances, how to balance the incoming message and workload would become a new challenge. Currently there are two approaches we can use to pass the incoming messages to the service instances, I would like call them dispatcher mode and pulling mode.   Dispatcher Mode The dispatcher mode introduces a role which takes the responsible to find the best service instance to process the request. The image below describes the sharp of this mode. There are four clients communicate with the service through the underlying transportation. For example, if we are using HTTP the clients might be connecting to the same service URL. On the server side there’s a dispatcher listening on this URL and try to retrieve all messages. When a message came in, the dispatcher will find a proper service instance to process it. There are three mechanism to find the instance: Round-robin: Dispatcher will always send the message to the next instance. For example, if the dispatcher sent the message to instance 2, then the next message will be sent to instance 3, regardless if instance 3 is busy or not at that moment. Random: Dispatcher will find a service instance randomly, and same as the round-robin mode it regardless if the instance is busy or not. Sticky: Dispatcher will send all related messages to the same service instance. This approach always being used if the service methods are state-ful or session-ful. But as you can see, all of these approaches are not really load balanced. The clients will send messages at any time, and each message might take different process duration on the server side. This means in some cases, some of the service instances are very busy while others are almost idle. For example, if we were using round-robin mode, it could be happened that most of the simple task messages were passed to instance 1 while the complex ones were sent to instance 3, even though instance 1 should be idle. This brings some problem in our architecture. The first one is that, the response to the clients might be longer than it should be. As it’s shown in the figure above, message 6 and 9 can be processed by instance 1 or instance 2, but in reality they were dispatched to the busy instance 3 since the dispatcher and round-robin mode. Secondly, if there are many requests came from the clients in a very short period, service instances might be filled by tons of pending tasks and some instances might be crashed. Third, if we are using some cloud platform to host our service instances, for example the Windows Azure, the computing resource is billed by service deployment period instead of the actual CPU usage. This means if any service instance is idle it is wasting our money! Last one, the dispatcher would be the bottleneck of our system since all incoming messages must be routed by the dispatcher. If we are using HTTP or TCP as the transport, the dispatcher would be a network load balance. If we wants more capacity, we have to scale-up, or buy a hardware load balance which is very expensive, as well as scaling-out the service instances. Pulling Mode Pulling mode doesn’t need a dispatcher to route the messages. All service instances are listening to the same transport and try to retrieve the next proper message to process if they are idle. Since there is no dispatcher in pulling mode, it requires some features on the transportation. The transportation must support multiple client connection and server listening. HTTP and TCP doesn’t allow multiple clients are listening on the same address and port, so it cannot be used in pulling mode directly. All messages in the transportation must be FIFO, which means the old message must be received before the new one. Message selection would be a plus on the transportation. This means both service and client can specify some selection criteria and just receive some specified kinds of messages. This feature is not mandatory but would be very useful when implementing the request reply and duplex WCF channel modes. Otherwise we must have a memory dictionary to store the reply messages. I will explain more about this in the following articles. Message bus, or the message queue would be best candidate as the transportation when using the pulling mode. First, it allows multiple application to listen on the same queue, and it’s FIFO. Some of the message bus also support the message selection, such as TIBCO EMS, RabbitMQ. Some others provide in memory dictionary which can store the reply messages, for example the Redis. The principle of pulling mode is to let the service instances self-managed. This means each instance will try to retrieve the next pending incoming message if they finished the current task. This gives us more benefit and can solve the problems we met with in the dispatcher mode. The incoming message will be received to the best instance to process, which means this will be very balanced. And it will not happen that some instances are busy while other are idle, since the idle one will retrieve more tasks to make them busy. Since all instances are try their best to be busy we can use less instances than dispatcher mode, which more cost effective. Since there’s no dispatcher in the system, there is no bottleneck. When we introduced more service instances, in dispatcher mode we have to change something to let the dispatcher know the new instances. But in pulling mode since all service instance are self-managed, there no extra change at all. If there are many incoming messages, since the message bus can queue them in the transportation, service instances would not be crashed. All above are the benefits using the pulling mode, but it will introduce some problem as well. The process tracking and debugging become more difficult. Since the service instances are self-managed, we cannot know which instance will process the message. So we need more information to support debug and track. Real-time response may not be supported. All service instances will process the next message after the current one has done, if we have some real-time request this may not be a good solution. Compare with the Pros and Cons above, the pulling mode would a better solution for the distributed system architecture. Because what we need more is the scalability, cost-effect and the self-management.   WCF and WCF Transport Extensibility Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a framework for building service-oriented applications. In the .NET world WCF is the best way to implement the service. In this series I’m going to demonstrate how to implement the pulling mode on top of a message bus by extending the WCF. I don’t want to deep into every related field in WCF but will highlight its transport extensibility. When we implemented an RPC foundation there are many aspects we need to deal with, for example the message encoding, encryption, authentication and message sending and receiving. In WCF, each aspect is represented by a channel. A message will be passed through all necessary channels and finally send to the underlying transportation. And on the other side the message will be received from the transport and though the same channels until the business logic. This mode is called “Channel Stack” in WCF, and the last channel in the channel stack must always be a transport channel, which takes the responsible for sending and receiving the messages. As we are going to implement the WCF over message bus and implement the pulling mode scaling-out solution, we need to create our own transport channel so that the client and service can exchange messages over our bus. Before we deep into the transport channel, let’s have a look on the message exchange patterns that WCF defines. Message exchange pattern (MEP) defines how client and service exchange the messages over the transportation. WCF defines 3 basic MEPs which are datagram, Request-Reply and Duplex. Datagram: Also known as one-way, or fire-forgot mode. The message sent from the client to the service, and no need any reply from the service. The client doesn’t care about the message result at all. Request-Reply: Very common used pattern. The client send the request message to the service and wait until the reply message comes from the service. Duplex: The client sent message to the service, when the service processing the message it can callback to the client. When callback the service would be like a client while the client would be like a service. In WCF, each MEP represent some channels associated. MEP Channels Datagram IInputChannel, IOutputChannel Request-Reply IRequestChannel, IReplyChannel Duplex IDuplexChannel And the channels are created by ChannelListener on the server side, and ChannelFactory on the client side. The ChannelListener and ChannelFactory are created by the TransportBindingElement. The TransportBindingElement is created by the Binding, which can be defined as a new binding or from a custom binding. For more information about the transport channel mode, please refer to the MSDN document. The figure below shows the transport channel objects when using the request-reply MEP. And this is the datagram MEP. And this is the duplex MEP. After investigated the WCF transport architecture, channel mode and MEP, we finally identified what we should do to extend our message bus based transport layer. They are: Binding: (Optional) Defines the channel elements in the channel stack and added our transport binding element at the bottom of the stack. But we can use the build-in CustomBinding as well. TransportBindingElement: Defines which MEP is supported in our transport and create the related ChannelListener and ChannelFactory. This also defines the scheme of the endpoint if using this transport. ChannelListener: Create the server side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelListener to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelListener for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. ChannelFactory: Create the client side channel based on the MEP it’s. We can have one ChannelFactory to create channels for all supported MEPs, or we can have ChannelFactory for each MEP. In this series I will use the second approach. Channels: Based on the MEPs we want to support, we need to implement the channels accordingly. For example, if we want our transport support Request-Reply mode we should implement IRequestChannel and IReplyChannel. In this series I will implement all 3 MEPs listed above one by one. Scaffold: In order to make our transport extension works we also need to implement some scaffold stuff. For example we need some classes to send and receive message though out message bus. We also need some codes to read and write the WCF message, etc.. These are not necessary but would be very useful in our example.   Message Bus There is only one thing remained before we can begin to implement our scaling-out support WCF transport, which is the message bus. As I mentioned above, the message bus must have some features to fulfill all the WCF MEPs. In my company we will be using TIBCO EMS, which is an enterprise message bus product. And I have said before we can use any message bus production if it’s satisfied with our requests. Here I would like to introduce an interface to separate the message bus from the WCF. This allows us to implement the bus operations by any kinds bus we are going to use. The interface would be like this. 1: public interface IBus : IDisposable 2: { 3: string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null); 4:  5: void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo); 6:  7: BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo); 8: } There are only three methods for the bus interface. Let me explain one by one. The SendRequest method takes the responsible for sending the request message into the bus. The parameters description are: message: The WCF message content. fromClient: Indicates if this message was came from the client. from: The channel ID that this message was sent from. The channel ID will be generated when any kinds of channel was created, which will be explained in the following articles. to: The channel ID that this message should be received. In Request-Reply and Duplex MEP this is necessary since the reply message must be received by the channel which sent the related request message. The SendReply method takes the responsible for sending the reply message. It’s very similar as the previous one but no “from” parameter. This is because it’s no need to reply a reply message again in any MEPs. The Receive method takes the responsible for waiting for a incoming message, includes the request message and specified reply message. It returned a BusMessage object, which contains some information about the channel information. The code of the BusMessage class is 1: public class BusMessage 2: { 3: public string MessageID { get; private set; } 4: public string From { get; private set; } 5: public string ReplyTo { get; private set; } 6: public string Content { get; private set; } 7:  8: public BusMessage(string messageId, string fromChannelId, string replyToChannelId, string content) 9: { 10: MessageID = messageId; 11: From = fromChannelId; 12: ReplyTo = replyToChannelId; 13: Content = content; 14: } 15: } Now let’s implement a message bus based on the IBus interface. Since I don’t want you to buy and install the TIBCO EMS or any other message bus products, I will implement an in process memory bus. This bus is only for test and sample purpose. It can only be used if the service and client are in the same process. Very straightforward. 1: public class InProcMessageBus : IBus 2: { 3: private readonly ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity> _queue; 4: private readonly object _lock; 5:  6: public InProcMessageBus() 7: { 8: _queue = new ConcurrentDictionary<Guid, InProcMessageEntity>(); 9: _lock = new object(); 10: } 11:  12: public string SendRequest(string message, bool fromClient, string from, string to = null) 13: { 14: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, from, to); 15: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 16: return entity.ID.ToString(); 17: } 18:  19: public void SendReply(string message, bool fromClient, string replyTo) 20: { 21: var entity = new InProcMessageEntity(message, fromClient, null, replyTo); 22: _queue.TryAdd(entity.ID, entity); 23: } 24:  25: public BusMessage Receive(bool fromClient, string replyTo) 26: { 27: InProcMessageEntity e = null; 28: while (true) 29: { 30: lock (_lock) 31: { 32: var entity = _queue 33: .Where(kvp => kvp.Value.FromClient == fromClient && (kvp.Value.To == replyTo || string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(kvp.Value.To))) 34: .FirstOrDefault(); 35: if (entity.Key != Guid.Empty && entity.Value != null) 36: { 37: _queue.TryRemove(entity.Key, out e); 38: } 39: } 40: if (e == null) 41: { 42: Thread.Sleep(100); 43: } 44: else 45: { 46: return new BusMessage(e.ID.ToString(), e.From, e.To, e.Content); 47: } 48: } 49: } 50:  51: public void Dispose() 52: { 53: } 54: } The InProcMessageBus stores the messages in the objects of InProcMessageEntity, which can take some extra information beside the WCF message itself. 1: public class InProcMessageEntity 2: { 3: public Guid ID { get; set; } 4: public string Content { get; set; } 5: public bool FromClient { get; set; } 6: public string From { get; set; } 7: public string To { get; set; } 8:  9: public InProcMessageEntity() 10: : this(string.Empty, false, string.Empty, string.Empty) 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public InProcMessageEntity(string content, bool fromClient, string from, string to) 15: { 16: ID = Guid.NewGuid(); 17: Content = content; 18: FromClient = fromClient; 19: From = from; 20: To = to; 21: } 22: }   Summary OK, now I have all necessary stuff ready. The next step would be implementing our WCF message bus transport extension. In this post I described two scaling-out approaches on the service side especially if we are using the cloud platform: dispatcher mode and pulling mode. And I compared the Pros and Cons of them. Then I introduced the WCF channel stack, channel mode and the transport extension part, and identified what we should do to create our own WCF transport extension, to let our WCF services using pulling mode based on a message bus. And finally I provided some classes that need to be used in the future posts that working against an in process memory message bus, for the demonstration purpose only. In the next post I will begin to implement the transport extension step by step.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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• Virtual host is not working in Ubuntu 14 VPS using XAMPP 1.8.3

  - by viral4ever

  I am using XAMPP as server in ubuntu 14.04 VPS of digitalocean. I tried to setup virtual hosts. But it is not working and I am getting 403 error of access denied. I changed files too. My files with changes are /opt/lampp/etc/httpd.conf # # This is the main Apache HTTP server configuration file. It contains the # configuration directives that give the server its instructions. # See <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/> for detailed information. # In particular, see # <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/directives.html> # for a discussion of each configuration directive. # # Do NOT simply read the instructions in here without understanding # what they do. They're here only as hints or reminders. If you are unsure # consult the online docs. You have been warned. # # Configuration and logfile names: If the filenames you specify for many # of the server's control files begin with "/" (or "drive:/" for Win32), the # server will use that explicit path. If the filenames do *not* begin # with "/", the value of ServerRoot is prepended -- so 'log/access_log' # with ServerRoot set to '/www' will be interpreted by the # server as '/www/log/access_log', where as '/log/access_log' will be # interpreted as '/log/access_log'. # # ServerRoot: The top of the directory tree under which the server's # configuration, error, and log files are kept. # # Do not add a slash at the end of the directory path. If you point # ServerRoot at a non-local disk, be sure to specify a local disk on the # Mutex directive, if file-based mutexes are used. If you wish to share the # same ServerRoot for multiple httpd daemons, you will need to change at # least PidFile. # ServerRoot "/opt/lampp" # # Mutex: Allows you to set the mutex mechanism and mutex file directory # for individual mutexes, or change the global defaults # # Uncomment and change the directory if mutexes are file-based and the default # mutex file directory is not on a local disk or is not appropriate for some # other reason. # # Mutex default:logs # # Listen: Allows you to bind Apache to specific IP addresses and/or # ports, instead of the default. See also the <VirtualHost> # directive. # # Change this to Listen on specific IP addresses as shown below to # prevent Apache from glomming onto all bound IP addresses. # #Listen 12.34.56.78:80 Listen 80 # # Dynamic Shared Object (DSO) Support # # To be able to use the functionality of a module which was built as a DSO you # have to place corresponding `LoadModule' lines at this location so the # directives contained in it are actually available _before_ they are used. # Statically compiled modules (those listed by `httpd -l') do not need # to be loaded here. # # Example: # LoadModule foo_module modules/mod_foo.so # LoadModule authn_file_module modules/mod_authn_file.so LoadModule authn_dbm_module modules/mod_authn_dbm.so LoadModule authn_anon_module modules/mod_authn_anon.so LoadModule authn_dbd_module modules/mod_authn_dbd.so LoadModule authn_socache_module modules/mod_authn_socache.so LoadModule authn_core_module modules/mod_authn_core.so LoadModule authz_host_module modules/mod_authz_host.so LoadModule authz_groupfile_module modules/mod_authz_groupfile.so LoadModule authz_user_module modules/mod_authz_user.so LoadModule authz_dbm_module modules/mod_authz_dbm.so LoadModule authz_owner_module modules/mod_authz_owner.so LoadModule authz_dbd_module modules/mod_authz_dbd.so LoadModule authz_core_module modules/mod_authz_core.so LoadModule authnz_ldap_module modules/mod_authnz_ldap.so LoadModule access_compat_module modules/mod_access_compat.so LoadModule auth_basic_module modules/mod_auth_basic.so LoadModule auth_form_module modules/mod_auth_form.so LoadModule auth_digest_module modules/mod_auth_digest.so LoadModule allowmethods_module modules/mod_allowmethods.so LoadModule file_cache_module modules/mod_file_cache.so LoadModule cache_module modules/mod_cache.so LoadModule cache_disk_module modules/mod_cache_disk.so LoadModule socache_shmcb_module modules/mod_socache_shmcb.so LoadModule socache_dbm_module modules/mod_socache_dbm.so LoadModule socache_memcache_module modules/mod_socache_memcache.so LoadModule dbd_module modules/mod_dbd.so LoadModule bucketeer_module modules/mod_bucketeer.so LoadModule dumpio_module modules/mod_dumpio.so LoadModule echo_module modules/mod_echo.so LoadModule case_filter_module modules/mod_case_filter.so LoadModule case_filter_in_module modules/mod_case_filter_in.so LoadModule buffer_module modules/mod_buffer.so LoadModule ratelimit_module modules/mod_ratelimit.so LoadModule reqtimeout_module modules/mod_reqtimeout.so LoadModule ext_filter_module modules/mod_ext_filter.so LoadModule request_module modules/mod_request.so LoadModule include_module modules/mod_include.so LoadModule filter_module modules/mod_filter.so LoadModule substitute_module modules/mod_substitute.so LoadModule sed_module modules/mod_sed.so LoadModule charset_lite_module modules/mod_charset_lite.so LoadModule deflate_module modules/mod_deflate.so LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so LoadModule ldap_module modules/mod_ldap.so LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so LoadModule log_debug_module modules/mod_log_debug.so LoadModule logio_module modules/mod_logio.so LoadModule env_module modules/mod_env.so LoadModule mime_magic_module modules/mod_mime_magic.so LoadModule cern_meta_module modules/mod_cern_meta.so LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so LoadModule usertrack_module modules/mod_usertrack.so LoadModule unique_id_module modules/mod_unique_id.so LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so LoadModule version_module modules/mod_version.so LoadModule remoteip_module modules/mod_remoteip.so LoadModule proxy_module modules/mod_proxy.so LoadModule proxy_connect_module modules/mod_proxy_connect.so LoadModule proxy_ftp_module modules/mod_proxy_ftp.so LoadModule proxy_http_module modules/mod_proxy_http.so LoadModule proxy_fcgi_module modules/mod_proxy_fcgi.so LoadModule proxy_scgi_module modules/mod_proxy_scgi.so LoadModule proxy_ajp_module modules/mod_proxy_ajp.so LoadModule proxy_balancer_module modules/mod_proxy_balancer.so LoadModule proxy_express_module modules/mod_proxy_express.so LoadModule session_module modules/mod_session.so LoadModule session_cookie_module modules/mod_session_cookie.so LoadModule session_dbd_module modules/mod_session_dbd.so LoadModule slotmem_shm_module modules/mod_slotmem_shm.so LoadModule ssl_module modules/mod_ssl.so LoadModule lbmethod_byrequests_module modules/mod_lbmethod_byrequests.so LoadModule lbmethod_bytraffic_module modules/mod_lbmethod_bytraffic.so LoadModule lbmethod_bybusyness_module modules/mod_lbmethod_bybusyness.so LoadModule lbmethod_heartbeat_module modules/mod_lbmethod_heartbeat.so LoadModule unixd_module modules/mod_unixd.so LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so LoadModule status_module modules/mod_status.so LoadModule autoindex_module modules/mod_autoindex.so LoadModule info_module modules/mod_info.so LoadModule suexec_module modules/mod_suexec.so LoadModule cgi_module modules/mod_cgi.so LoadModule cgid_module modules/mod_cgid.so LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so LoadModule vhost_alias_module modules/mod_vhost_alias.so LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so LoadModule actions_module modules/mod_actions.so LoadModule speling_module modules/mod_speling.so LoadModule userdir_module modules/mod_userdir.so LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so <IfDefine JUSTTOMAKEAPXSHAPPY> LoadModule php4_module modules/libphp4.so LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so </IfDefine> <IfModule unixd_module> # # If you wish httpd to run as a different user or group, you must run # httpd as root initially and it will switch. # # User/Group: The name (or #number) of the user/group to run httpd as. # It is usually good practice to create a dedicated user and group for # running httpd, as with most system services. # User root Group www </IfModule> # 'Main' server configuration # # The directives in this section set up the values used by the 'main' # server, which responds to any requests that aren't handled by a # <VirtualHost> definition. These values also provide defaults for # any <VirtualHost> containers you may define later in the file. # # All of these directives may appear inside <VirtualHost> containers, # in which case these default settings will be overridden for the # virtual host being defined. # # # ServerAdmin: Your address, where problems with the server should be # e-mailed. This address appears on some server-generated pages, such # as error documents. e.g. [email protected] # ServerAdmin [email protected] # # ServerName gives the name and port that the server uses to identify itself. # This can often be determined automatically, but we recommend you specify # it explicitly to prevent problems during startup. # # If your host doesn't have a registered DNS name, enter its IP address here. # #ServerName www.example.com:@@Port@@ # XAMPP ServerName localhost # # Deny access to the entirety of your server's filesystem. You must # explicitly permit access to web content directories in other # <Directory> blocks below. # <Directory /> AllowOverride none Require all denied </Directory> # # Note that from this point forward you must specifically allow # particular features to be enabled - so if something's not working as # you might expect, make sure that you have specifically enabled it # below. # # # DocumentRoot: The directory out of which you will serve your # documents. By default, all requests are taken from this directory, but # symbolic links and aliases may be used to point to other locations. # DocumentRoot "/opt/lampp/htdocs" <Directory "/opt/lampp/htdocs"> # # Possible values for the Options directive are "None", "All", # or any combination of: # Indexes Includes FollowSymLinks SymLinksifOwnerMatch ExecCGI MultiViews # # Note that "MultiViews" must be named *explicitly* --- "Options All" # doesn't give it to you. # # The Options directive is both complicated and important. Please see # http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/core.html#options # for more information. # #Options Indexes FollowSymLinks # XAMPP Options Indexes FollowSymLinks ExecCGI Includes # # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files. # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords: # Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit # #AllowOverride None # since XAMPP 1.4: AllowOverride All # # Controls who can get stuff from this server. # Require all granted </Directory> # # DirectoryIndex: sets the file that Apache will serve if a directory # is requested. # <IfModule dir_module> #DirectoryIndex index.html # XAMPP DirectoryIndex index.html index.html.var index.php index.php3 index.php4 </IfModule> # # The following lines prevent .htaccess and .htpasswd files from being # viewed by Web clients. # <Files ".ht*"> Require all denied </Files> # # ErrorLog: The location of the error log file. # If you do not specify an ErrorLog directive within a <VirtualHost> # container, error messages relating to that virtual host will be # logged here. If you *do* define an error logfile for a <VirtualHost> # container, that host's errors will be logged there and not here. # ErrorLog "logs/error_log" # # LogLevel: Control the number of messages logged to the error_log. # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit, # alert, emerg. # LogLevel warn <IfModule log_config_module> # # The following directives define some format nicknames for use with # a CustomLog directive (see below). # LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\"" combined LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b" common <IfModule logio_module> # You need to enable mod_logio.c to use %I and %O LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" %I %O" combinedio </IfModule> # # The location and format of the access logfile (Common Logfile Format). # If you do not define any access logfiles within a <VirtualHost> # container, they will be logged here. Contrariwise, if you *do* # define per-<VirtualHost> access logfiles, transactions will be # logged therein and *not* in this file. # CustomLog "logs/access_log" common # # If you prefer a logfile with access, agent, and referer information # (Combined Logfile Format) you can use the following directive. # #CustomLog "logs/access_log" combined </IfModule> <IfModule alias_module> # # Redirect: Allows you to tell clients about documents that used to # exist in your server's namespace, but do not anymore. The client # will make a new request for the document at its new location. # Example: # Redirect permanent /foo http://www.example.com/bar # # Alias: Maps web paths into filesystem paths and is used to # access content that does not live under the DocumentRoot. # Example: # Alias /webpath /full/filesystem/path # # If you include a trailing / on /webpath then the server will # require it to be present in the URL. You will also likely # need to provide a <Directory> section to allow access to # the filesystem path. # # ScriptAlias: This controls which directories contain server scripts. # ScriptAliases are essentially the same as Aliases, except that # documents in the target directory are treated as applications and # run by the server when requested rather than as documents sent to the # client. The same rules about trailing "/" apply to ScriptAlias # directives as to Alias. # ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/opt/lampp/cgi-bin/" </IfModule> <IfModule cgid_module> # # ScriptSock: On threaded servers, designate the path to the UNIX # socket used to communicate with the CGI daemon of mod_cgid. # #Scriptsock logs/cgisock </IfModule> # # "/opt/lampp/cgi-bin" should be changed to whatever your ScriptAliased # CGI directory exists, if you have that configured. # <Directory "/opt/lampp/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options None Require all granted </Directory> <IfModule mime_module> # # TypesConfig points to the file containing the list of mappings from # filename extension to MIME-type. # TypesConfig etc/mime.types # # AddType allows you to add to or override the MIME configuration # file specified in TypesConfig for specific file types. # #AddType application/x-gzip .tgz # # AddEncoding allows you to have certain browsers uncompress # information on the fly. Note: Not all browsers support this. # #AddEncoding x-compress .Z #AddEncoding x-gzip .gz .tgz # # If the AddEncoding directives above are commented-out, then you # probably should define those extensions to indicate media types: # AddType application/x-compress .Z AddType application/x-gzip .gz .tgz # # AddHandler allows you to map certain file extensions to "handlers": # actions unrelated to filetype. These can be either built into the server # or added with the Action directive (see below) # # To use CGI scripts outside of ScriptAliased directories: # (You will also need to add "ExecCGI" to the "Options" directive.) # #AddHandler cgi-script .cgi # XAMPP, since LAMPP 0.9.8: AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl # For type maps (negotiated resources): #AddHandler type-map var # # Filters allow you to process content before it is sent to the client. # # To parse .shtml files for server-side includes (SSI): # (You will also need to add "Includes" to the "Options" directive.) # # XAMPP AddType text/html .shtml AddOutputFilter INCLUDES .shtml </IfModule> # # The mod_mime_magic module allows the server to use various hints from the # contents of the file itself to determine its type. The MIMEMagicFile # directive tells the module where the hint definitions are located. # #MIMEMagicFile etc/magic # # Customizable error responses come in three flavors: # 1) plain text 2) local redirects 3) external redirects # # Some examples: #ErrorDocument 500 "The server made a boo boo." #ErrorDocument 404 /missing.html #ErrorDocument 404 "/cgi-bin/missing_handler.pl" #ErrorDocument 402 http://www.example.com/subscription_info.html # # # MaxRanges: Maximum number of Ranges in a request before # returning the entire resource, or one of the special # values 'default', 'none' or 'unlimited'. # Default setting is to accept 200 Ranges. #MaxRanges unlimited # # EnableMMAP and EnableSendfile: On systems that support it, # memory-mapping or the sendfile syscall may be used to deliver # files. This usually improves server performance, but must # be turned off when serving from networked-mounted # filesystems or if support for these functions is otherwise # broken on your system. # Defaults: EnableMMAP On, EnableSendfile Off # EnableMMAP off EnableSendfile off # Supplemental configuration # # The configuration files in the etc/extra/ directory can be # included to add extra features or to modify the default configuration of # the server, or you may simply copy their contents here and change as # necessary. # Server-pool management (MPM specific) #Include etc/extra/httpd-mpm.conf # Multi-language error messages Include etc/extra/httpd-multilang-errordoc.conf # Fancy directory listings Include etc/extra/httpd-autoindex.conf # Language settings #Include etc/extra/httpd-languages.conf # User home directories #Include etc/extra/httpd-userdir.conf # Real-time info on requests and configuration #Include etc/extra/httpd-info.conf # Virtual hosts Include etc/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf # Local access to the Apache HTTP Server Manual #Include etc/extra/httpd-manual.conf # Distributed authoring and versioning (WebDAV) #Include etc/extra/httpd-dav.conf # Various default settings Include etc/extra/httpd-default.conf # Configure mod_proxy_html to understand HTML4/XHTML1 <IfModule proxy_html_module> Include etc/extra/proxy-html.conf </IfModule> # Secure (SSL/TLS) connections <IfModule ssl_module> # XAMPP <IfDefine SSL> Include etc/extra/httpd-ssl.conf </IfDefine> </IfModule> # # Note: The following must must be present to support # starting without SSL on platforms with no /dev/random equivalent # but a statically compiled-in mod_ssl. # <IfModule ssl_module> SSLRandomSeed startup builtin SSLRandomSeed connect builtin </IfModule> # XAMPP Include etc/extra/httpd-xampp.conf Include "/opt/lampp/apache2/conf/httpd.conf" I used command shown in this example. I used below lines to change and add group Add group "groupadd www" Add user to group "usermod -aG www root" Change htdocs group "chgrp -R www /opt/lampp/htdocs" Change sitedir group "chgrp -R www /opt/lampp/htdocs/mysite" Change htdocs chmod "chmod 2775 /opt/lampp/htdocs" Change sitedir chmod "chmod 2775 /opt/lampp/htdocs/mysite" And then I changed my vhosts.conf file # Virtual Hosts # # Required modules: mod_log_config # If you want to maintain multiple domains/hostnames on your # machine you can setup VirtualHost containers for them. Most configurations # use only name-based virtual hosts so the server doesn't need to worry about # IP addresses. This is indicated by the asterisks in the directives below. # # Please see the documentation at # <URL:http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/vhosts/> # for further details before you try to setup virtual hosts. # # You may use the command line option '-S' to verify your virtual host # configuration. # # VirtualHost example: # Almost any Apache directive may go into a VirtualHost container. # The first VirtualHost section is used for all requests that do not # match a ServerName or ServerAlias in any <VirtualHost> block. # <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "/opt/lampp/docs/dummy-host.example.com" ServerName dummy-host.example.com ServerAlias www.dummy-host.example.com ErrorLog "logs/dummy-host.example.com-error_log" CustomLog "logs/dummy-host.example.com-access_log" common </VirtualHost> <VirtualHost *:80> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "/opt/lampp/docs/dummy-host2.example.com" ServerName dummy-host2.example.com ErrorLog "logs/dummy-host2.example.com-error_log" CustomLog "logs/dummy-host2.example.com-access_log" common </VirtualHost> NameVirtualHost * <VirtualHost *> ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot "/opt/lampp/htdocs/mysite" ServerName mysite.com ServerAlias mysite.com ErrorLog "/opt/lampp/htdocs/mysite/errorlogs" CustomLog "/opt/lampp/htdocs/mysite/customlog" common <Directory "/opt/lampp/htdocs/mysite"> Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes ExecCGI AllowOverride All Order Allow,Deny Allow from all Require all granted </Directory> </VirtualHost> but still its not working and I am getting 403 error on my ip and domain however I can access phpmyadmin. If anyone can help me, please help me.

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• ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0 Review

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  (This is my first review as a part of the GeeksWithBlogs.net Influencers program. It’s a program in which I (and the others who have been selected for it) get the opportunity to check out new products and services and write reviews about them. We don’t get paid for this, but we do generally get to keep a copy of the software or retain an account for some period of time on the service that we review. In this case I received a copy of Red Gate Software’s ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0, which was released in January. I don’t have any upgrade rights nor is my review guided, restrained, influenced, or otherwise controlled by Red Gate or anyone else. But I do get to keep the software license. I will always be clear about what I received whenever I do a review – I leave it up to you to decide whether you believe I can be objective. I believe I can be. If I used something and really didn’t like it, keeping a copy of it wouldn’t be worth anything to me. In that case though, I would simply uninstall/deactivate/whatever the software or service and tell the company what I didn’t like about it so they could (hopefully) make it better in the future. I don’t think it’d be polite to write up a terrible review, nor do I think it would be a particularly good use of my time. There are people who get paid for a living to review things, so I leave it to them to tell you what they think is bad and why. I’ll only spend my time telling you about things I think are good.) Overview of Common .NET Memory Problems When coming to land of managed memory from the wilds of unmanaged code, it’s easy to say to one’s self, “Wow! Now I never have to worry about memory problems again!” But this simply isn’t true. Managed code environments, such as .NET, make many, many things easier. You will never have to worry about memory corruption due to a bad pointer, for example (unless you’re working with unsafe code, of course). But managed code has its own set of memory concerns. For example, failing to unsubscribe from events when you are done with them leaves the publisher of an event with a reference to the subscriber. If you eliminate all your own references to the subscriber, then that memory is effectively lost since the GC won’t delete it because of the publishing object’s reference. When the publishing object itself becomes subject to garbage collection then you’ll get that memory back finally, but that could take a very long time depending of the life of the publisher. Another common source of resource leaks is failing to properly release unmanaged resources. When writing a class that contains members that hold unmanaged resources (e.g. any of the Stream-derived classes, IsolatedStorageFile, most classes ending in “Reader” or “Writer”), you should always implement IDisposable, making sure to use a properly written Dispose method. And when you are using an instance of a class that implements IDisposable, you should always make sure to use a 'using' statement in order to ensure that the object’s unmanaged resources are disposed of properly. (A ‘using’ statement is a nicer, cleaner looking, and easier to use version of a try-finally block. The compiler actually translates it as though it were a try-finally block. Note that Code Analysis warning 2202 (CA2202) will often be triggered by nested using blocks. A properly written dispose method ensures that it only runs once such that calling dispose multiple times should not be a problem. Nonetheless, CA2202 exists and if you want to avoid triggering it then you should write your code such that only the innermost IDisposable object uses a ‘using’ statement, with any outer code making use of appropriate try-finally blocks instead). Then, of course, there are situations where you are operating in a memory-constrained environment or else you want to limit or even eliminate allocations within a certain part of your program (e.g. within the main game loop of an XNA game) in order to avoid having the GC run. On the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7, for example, for every 1 MB of heap allocations you make, the GC runs; the added time of a GC collection can cause a game to drop frames or run slowly thereby making it look bad. Eliminating allocations (or else minimizing them and calling an explicit Collect at an appropriate time) is a common way of avoiding this (the other way is to simplify your heap so that the GC’s latency is low enough not to cause performance issues). ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0 When the opportunity to review Red Gate’s recently released ANTS Memory Profiler 7.0 arose, I jumped at it. In order to review it, I was given a free copy (which does not include upgrade rights for future versions) which I am allowed to keep. For those of you who are familiar with ANTS Memory Profiler, you can find a list of new features and enhancements here. If you are an experienced .NET developer who is familiar with .NET memory management issues, ANTS Memory Profiler is great. More importantly still, if you are new to .NET development or you have no experience or limited experience with memory profiling, ANTS Memory Profiler is awesome. From the very beginning, it guides you through the process of memory profiling. If you’re experienced and just want dive in however, it doesn’t get in your way. The help items GAHSFLASHDAJLDJA are well designed and located right next to the UI controls so that they are easy to find without being intrusive. When you first launch it, it presents you with a “Getting Started” screen that contains links to “Memory profiling video tutorials”, “Strategies for memory profiling”, and the “ANTS Memory Profiler forum”. I’m normally the kind of person who looks at a screen like that only to find the “Don’t show this again” checkbox. Since I was doing a review, though, I decided I should examine them. I was pleasantly surprised. The overview video clocks in at three minutes and fifty seconds. It begins by showing you how to get started profiling an application. It explains that profiling is done by taking memory snapshots periodically while your program is running and then comparing them. ANTS Memory Profiler (I’m just going to call it “ANTS MP” from here) analyzes these snapshots in the background while your application is running. It briefly mentions a new feature in Version 7, a new API that give you the ability to trigger snapshots from within your application’s source code (more about this below). You can also, and this is the more common way you would do it, take a memory snapshot at any time from within the ANTS MP window by clicking the “Take Memory Snapshot” button in the upper right corner. The overview video goes on to demonstrate a basic profiling session on an application that pulls information from a database and displays it. It shows how to switch which snapshots you are comparing, explains the different sections of the Summary view and what they are showing, and proceeds to show you how to investigate memory problems using the “Instance Categorizer” to track the path from an object (or set of objects) to the GC’s root in order to find what things along the path are holding a reference to it/them. For a set of objects, you can then click on it and get the “Instance List” view. This displays all of the individual objects (including their individual sizes, values, etc.) of that type which share the same path to the GC root. You can then click on one of the objects to generate an “Instance Retention Graph” view. This lets you track directly up to see the reference chain for that individual object. In the overview video, it turned out that there was an event handler which was holding on to a reference, thereby keeping a large number of strings that should have been freed in memory. Lastly the video shows the “Class List” view, which lets you dig in deeply to find problems that might not have been clear when following the previous workflow. Once you have at least one memory snapshot you can begin analyzing. The main interface is in the “Analysis” tab. You can also switch to the “Session Overview” tab, which gives you several bar charts highlighting basic memory data about the snapshots you’ve taken. If you hover over the individual bars (and the individual colors in bars that have more than one), you will see a detailed text description of what the bar is representing visually. The Session Overview is good for a quick summary of memory usage and information about the different heaps. You are going to spend most of your time in the Analysis tab, but it’s good to remember that the Session Overview is there to give you some quick feedback on basic memory usage stats. As described above in the summary of the overview video, there is a certain natural workflow to the Analysis tab. You’ll spin up your application and take some snapshots at various times such as before and after clicking a button to open a window or before and after closing a window. Taking these snapshots lets you examine what is happening with memory. You would normally expect that a lot of memory would be freed up when closing a window or exiting a document. By taking snapshots before and after performing an action like that you can see whether or not the memory is really being freed. If you already know an area that’s giving you trouble, you can run your application just like normal until just before getting to that part and then you can take a few strategic snapshots that should help you pin down the problem. Something the overview didn’t go into is how to use the “Filters” section at the bottom of ANTS MP together with the Class List view in order to narrow things down. The video tutorials page has a nice 3 minute intro video called “How to use the filters”. It’s a nice introduction and covers some of the basics. I’m going to cover a bit more because I think they’re a really neat, really helpful feature. Large programs can bring up thousands of classes. Even simple programs can instantiate far more classes than you might realize. In a basic .NET 4 WPF application for example (and when I say basic, I mean just MainWindow.xaml with a button added to it), the unfiltered Class List view will have in excess of 1000 classes (my simple test app had anywhere from 1066 to 1148 classes depending on which snapshot I was using as the “Current” snapshot). This is amazing in some ways as it shows you how in stark detail just how immensely powerful the WPF framework is. But hunting through 1100 classes isn’t productive, no matter how cool it is that there are that many classes instantiated and doing all sorts of awesome things. Let’s say you wanted to examine just the classes your application contains source code for (in my simple example, that would be the MainWindow and App). Under “Basic Filters”, click on “Classes with source” under “Show only…”. Voilà. Down from 1070 classes in the snapshot I was using as “Current” to 2 classes. If you then click on a class’s name, it will show you (to the right of the class name) two little icon buttons. Hover over them and you will see that you can click one to view the Instance Categorizer for the class and another to view the Instance List for the class. You can also show classes based on which heap they live on. If you chose both a Baseline snapshot and a Current snapshot then you can use the “Comparing snapshots” filters to show only: “New objects”; “Surviving objects”; “Survivors in growing classes”; or “Zombie objects” (if you aren’t sure what one of these means, you can click the helpful “?” in a green circle icon to bring up a popup that explains them and provides context). Remember that your selection(s) under the “Show only…” heading will still apply, so you should update those selections to make sure you are seeing the view you want. There are also links under the “What is my memory problem?” heading that can help you diagnose the problems you are seeing including one for “I don’t know which kind I have” for situations where you know generally that your application has some problems but aren’t sure what the behavior you have been seeing (OutOfMemoryExceptions, continually growing memory usage, larger memory use than expected at certain points in the program). The Basic Filters are not the only filters there are. “Filter by Object Type” gives you the ability to filter by: “Objects that are disposable”; “Objects that are/are not disposed”; “Objects that are/are not GC roots” (GC roots are things like static variables); and “Objects that implement _______”. “Objects that implement” is particularly neat. Once you check the box, you can then add one or more classes and interfaces that an object must implement in order to survive the filtering. Lastly there is “Filter by Reference”, which gives you the option to pare down the list based on whether an object is “Kept in memory exclusively by” a particular item, a class/interface, or a namespace; whether an object is “Referenced by” one or more of those choices; and whether an object is “Never referenced by” one or more of those choices. Remember that filtering is cumulative, so anything you had set in one of the filter sections still remains in effect unless and until you go back and change it. There’s quite a bit more to ANTS MP – it’s a very full featured product – but I think I touched on all of the most significant pieces. You can use it to debug: a .NET executable; an ASP.NET web application (running on IIS); an ASP.NET web application (running on Visual Studio’s built-in web development server); a Silverlight 4 browser application; a Windows service; a COM+ server; and even something called an XBAP (local XAML browser application). You can also attach to a .NET 4 process to profile an application that’s already running. The startup screen also has a large number of “Charting Options” that let you adjust which statistics ANTS MP should collect. The default selection is a good, minimal set. It’s worth your time to browse through the charting options to examine other statistics that may also help you diagnose a particular problem. The more statistics ANTS MP collects, the longer it will take to collect statistics. So just turning everything on is probably a bad idea. But the option to selectively add in additional performance counters from the extensive list could be a very helpful thing for your memory profiling as it lets you see additional data that might provide clues about a particular problem that has been bothering you. ANTS MP integrates very nicely with all versions of Visual Studio that support plugins (i.e. all of the non-Express versions). Just note that if you choose “Profile Memory” from the “ANTS” menu that it will launch profiling for whichever project you have set as the Startup project. One quick tip from my experience so far using ANTS MP: if you want to properly understand your memory usage in an application you’ve written, first create an “empty” version of the type of project you are going to profile (a WPF application, an XNA game, etc.) and do a quick profiling session on that so that you know the baseline memory usage of the framework itself. By “empty” I mean just create a new project of that type in Visual Studio then compile it and run it with profiling – don’t do anything special or add in anything (except perhaps for any external libraries you’re planning to use). The first thing I tried ANTS MP out on was a demo XNA project of an editor that I’ve been working on for quite some time that involves a custom extension to XNA’s content pipeline. The first time I ran it and saw the unmanaged memory usage I was convinced I had some horrible bug that was creating extra copies of texture data (the demo project didn’t have a lot of texture data so when I saw a lot of unmanaged memory I instantly figured I was doing something wrong). Then I thought to run an empty project through and when I saw that the amount of unmanaged memory was virtually identical, it dawned on me that the CLR itself sits in unmanaged memory and that (thankfully) there was nothing wrong with my code! Quite a relief. Earlier, when discussing the overview video, I mentioned the API that lets you take snapshots from within your application. I gave it a quick trial and it’s very easy to integrate and make use of and is a really nice addition (especially for projects where you want to know what, if any, allocations there are in a specific, complicated section of code). The only concern I had was that if I hadn’t watched the overview video I might never have known it existed. Even then it took me five minutes of hunting around Red Gate’s website before I found the “Taking snapshots from your code" article that explains what DLL you need to add as a reference and what method of what class you should call in order to take an automatic snapshot (including the helpful warning to wrap it in a try-catch block since, under certain circumstances, it can raise an exception, such as trying to call it more than 5 times in 30 seconds. The difficulty in discovering and then finding information about the automatic snapshots API was one thing I thought could use improvement. Another thing I think would make it even better would be local copies of the webpages it links to. Although I’m generally always connected to the internet, I imagine there are more than a few developers who aren’t or who are behind very restrictive firewalls. For them (and for me, too, if my internet connection happens to be down), it would be nice to have those documents installed locally or to have the option to download an additional “documentation” package that would add local copies. Another thing that I wish could be easier to manage is the Filters area. Finding and setting individual filters is very easy as is understanding what those filter do. And breaking it up into three sections (basic, by object, and by reference) makes sense. But I could easily see myself running a long profiling session and forgetting that I had set some filter a long while earlier in a different filter section and then spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out why some problem that was clearly visible in the data wasn’t showing up in, e.g. the instance list before remembering to check all the filters for that one setting that was only culling a few things from view. Some sort of indicator icon next to the filter section names that appears you have at least one filter set in that area would be a nice visual clue to remind me that “oh yeah, I told it to only show objects on the Gen 2 heap! That’s why I’m not seeing those instances of the SuperMagic class!” Something that would be nice (but that Red Gate cannot really do anything about) would be if this could be used in Windows Phone 7 development. If Microsoft and Red Gate could work together to make this happen (even if just on the WP7 emulator), that would be amazing. Especially given the memory constraints that apps and games running on mobile devices need to work within, a good memory profiler would be a phenomenally helpful tool. If anyone at Microsoft reads this, it’d be really great if you could make something like that happen. Perhaps even a (subsidized) custom version just for WP7 development. (For XNA games, of course, you can create a Windows version of the game and use ANTS MP on the Windows version in order to get a better picture of your memory situation. For Silverlight on WP7, though, there’s quite a bit of educated guess work and WeakReference creation followed by forced collections in order to find the source of a memory problem.) The only other thing I found myself wanting was a “Back” button. Between my Windows Phone 7, Zune, and other things, I’ve grown very used to having a “back stack” that lets me just navigate back to where I came from. The ANTS MP interface is surprisingly easy to use given how much it lets you do, and once you start using it for any amount of time, you learn all of the different areas such that you know where to go. And it does remember the state of the areas you were previously in, of course. So if you go to, e.g., the Instance Retention Graph from the Class List and then return back to the Class List, it will remember which class you had selected and all that other state information. Still, a “Back” button would be a welcome addition to a future release. Bottom Line ANTS Memory Profiler is not an inexpensive tool. But my time is valuable. I can easily see ANTS MP saving me enough time tracking down memory problems to justify it on a cost basis. More importantly to me, knowing what is happening memory-wise in my programs and having the confidence that my code doesn’t have any hidden time bombs in it that will cause it to OOM if I leave it running for longer than I do when I spin it up real quickly for debugging or just to see how a new feature looks and feels is a good feeling. It’s a feeling that I like having and want to continue to have. I got the current version for free in order to review it. Having done so, I’ve now added it to my must-have tools and will gladly lay out the money for the next version when it comes out. It has a 14 day free trial, so if you aren’t sure if it’s right for you or if you think it seems interesting but aren’t really sure if it’s worth shelling out the money for it, give it a try.

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• Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

  - by Ben Rees

  .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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• Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

  - by Rick Strahl

  originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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• Ubuntu missing from the Grub menu

  - by varevarao

  Recently I've had some audio issues with Ubuntu (using precise), and in the process of trying to resolve that I ran a dist-upgrade. Everything went just fine, and the sound seemed good, until I rebooted my machine for the first time since the dist-upgrade. All I see now in the Grub menu at startup is memtest86+, another memtest variant, and Windows 7. It's not showing any of the linux kernels that Ubuntu is running on. I am attaching my bootinfoscript: Boot Info Script 0.61.full + Boot-Repair extra info [Boot-Info November 20th 2012] ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos6)/boot/grub on this drive. sda1: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: vfat Boot sector type: Dell Utility: FAT16 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sda2: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sda3: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows 7 Boot files: sda4: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: Extended Partition Boot sector type: Unknown Boot sector info: sda5: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: According to the info in the boot sector, sda5 starts at sector 2048. Operating System: Boot files: sda6: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: Grub2 (v1.99-2.00) Boot sector info: Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the boot sector of sda6 and looks at sector 220046240 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos6)/boot/grub on this drive. Operating System: Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS Boot files: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/core.img sda7: __________________________________________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: ============================ Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda _____________________________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sda1 63 273,104 273,042 de Dell Utility /dev/sda2 * 274,432 19,406,847 19,132,416 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda3 19,406,848 218,274,364 198,867,517 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda4 218,275,838 625,139,711 406,863,874 f W95 Extended (LBA) /dev/sda5 328,630,272 625,139,711 296,509,440 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda6 218,275,840 324,030,463 105,754,624 83 Linux /dev/sda7 324,032,512 328,626,175 4,593,664 82 Linux swap / Solaris "blkid" output: ________________________________________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/loop0 squashfs /dev/sda1 07DA-0512 vfat DellUtility /dev/sda2 8834146034145392 ntfs RECOVERY /dev/sda3 48E2189DE21890F4 ntfs OS /dev/sda5 BC2A44C02A447982 ntfs Varshneya /dev/sda6 34731459-4b0f-46ac-a9bf-cb360a2c947c ext4 /dev/sda7 dcb9ce9b-799a-4c65-b008-887b01775670 swap /dev/sr0 iso9660 Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS i386 ================================ Mount points: ================================= Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/loop0 /rofs squashfs (ro,noatime) /dev/sda6 /mnt ext4 (rw) /dev/sr0 /cdrom iso9660 (ro,noatime) =========================== sda6/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="0" if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { insmod vbe insmod vga insmod video_bochs insmod video_cirrus } insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos6)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 34731459-4b0f-46ac-a9bf-cb360a2c947c if loadfont /boot/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=auto load_video insmod gfxterm insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos6)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 34731459-4b0f-46ac-a9bf-cb360a2c947c set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en_US insmod gettext fi terminal_output gfxterm if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=10 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### function gfxmode { set gfxpayload="${1}" if [ "${1}" = "keep" ]; then set vt_handoff=vt.handoff=7 else set vt_handoff= fi } if [ "${recordfail}" != 1 ]; then if [ -e ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt ]; then if hwmatch ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3; then if [ ${match} = 0 ]; then set linux_gfx_mode=keep else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=keep fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi export linux_gfx_mode if [ "${linux_gfx_mode}" != "text" ]; then load_video; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos6)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 34731459-4b0f-46ac-a9bf-cb360a2c947c linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos6)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 34731459-4b0f-46ac-a9bf-cb360a2c947c linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda2)" --class windows --class os { insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='(hd0,msdos2)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 8834146034145392 chainloader +1 } ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =============================== sda6/etc/fstab: ================================ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier # for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name # devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sda6 during installation UUID=34731459-4b0f-46ac-a9bf-cb360a2c947c / ext4 errors=remount-ro,user_xattr 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sda7 during installation UUID=dcb9ce9b-799a-4c65-b008-887b01775670 none swap sw 0 0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- =================== sda6: Location of files loaded by Grub: ==================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) 104.851909637 = 112.583880704 boot/grub/core.img 1 121.191410065 = 130.128285696 boot/grub/grub.cfg 1 ======================== Unknown MBRs/Boot Sectors/etc: ======================== Unknown BootLoader on sda4 00000000 eb 0f 2a 5d f4 b7 75 f2 e9 56 12 b8 50 b4 79 ec |..*]..u..V..P.y.| 00000010 89 91 ca c3 16 40 31 d0 ae c4 53 3d c7 dd d7 98 |[email protected]=....| 00000020 bd a4 f2 a4 e8 ab fc ea 36 30 1b 34 cf 8a 28 30 |........60.4..(0| 00000030 43 95 6c 31 3e 76 93 58 84 37 99 c3 ae 3a 88 a3 |C.l1>v.X.7...:..| 00000040 c2 a6 36 2a f8 e0 e1 03 91 8d a1 50 cd ad b0 b5 |..6*.......P....| 00000050 ad 69 3a 49 63 1f 4a 33 97 6e 0c 71 bf 7d bd 35 |.i:Ic.J3.n.q.}.5| 00000060 86 c5 17 93 b4 9f e5 af e0 c4 6f f4 6f f9 4b dd |..........o.o.K.| 00000070 14 39 e2 9e b9 36 ca b1 56 5b d9 b1 66 2c 05 b2 |.9...6..V[..f,..| 00000080 5d 5b 99 c0 db e6 81 27 ab c2 e1 55 00 ac 0b 2c |][.....'...U...,| 00000090 24 d3 8e 54 b0 3d ab 58 e4 23 fc 3a 79 93 fb 5e |$..T.=.X.#.:y..^| 000000a0 94 5a 3a c2 16 4e 56 cb 1b 7f 7e b3 4c 38 ca 5b |.Z:..NV...~.L8.[| 000000b0 ca ab c1 2c 2a 64 e7 77 fe 2a ba ee 08 33 b5 9b |...,*d.w.*...3..| 000000c0 d0 c2 b4 a8 fc 73 4f 01 fd 03 61 75 eb 6d 1a 74 |.....sO...au.m.t| 000000d0 5f 79 31 7f ed e6 f5 99 21 36 16 ed 25 d9 6d 2b |_y1.....!6..%.m+| 000000e0 5f f4 42 b8 9d 01 89 10 fe df a4 98 e7 ab ab ea |_.B.............| 000000f0 1d 1c 44 e1 49 d9 19 c9 ab f5 41 eb 4a 32 c2 39 |..D.I.....A.J2.9| 00000100 87 57 f6 f6 f3 b5 4d 17 72 f2 b1 16 19 aa ec 24 |.W....M.r......$| 00000110 39 bd e3 b1 68 b3 b0 7f fa 2a 3a 2e 99 ed db 8a |9...h....*:.....| 00000120 f8 61 b4 ef 9d 7d 85 95 ed ad eb 9e 71 f4 27 d3 |.a...}......q.'.| 00000130 f3 04 8b 8a 69 98 02 72 df e1 f9 83 27 5b 01 4c |....i..r....'[.L| 00000140 d4 9a b9 3b db ca 1e 40 35 db 6f c1 52 c0 7f 27 |...;[email protected]..'| 00000150 8a 1d bc 34 89 24 b6 e3 fd ec a1 2a e5 9e d1 8f |...4.$.....*....| 00000160 77 e0 d5 52 c0 4c c4 38 38 3c 28 19 bf 20 f0 03 |w..R.L.88<(.. ..| 00000170 38 a4 b1 b5 ed 6a b8 f7 a9 7b 65 b1 7b 64 4a 33 |8....j...{e.{dJ3| 00000180 66 1a 60 29 38 1d 5b 52 40 31 de a5 0c 0f cc 6f |f.`)8.[[email protected]| 00000190 dd 31 6d 3d f0 2a 32 85 67 66 ca 4f 02 aa 0d 30 |.1m=.*2.gf.O...0| 000001a0 66 c9 b2 33 c2 4b 8a fa 3c 7b 52 02 00 88 8e cf |f..3.K..<{R.....| 000001b0 67 1e d4 20 49 1d 1a b8 71 ad c2 d4 37 9d 00 fe |g.. I...q...7...| 000001c0 ff ff 07 fe ff ff 02 e0 93 06 00 60 ac 11 00 fe |...........`....| 000001d0 ff ff 05 fe ff ff 01 00 00 00 01 b0 4d 06 00 00 |............M...| 000001e0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 000001f0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 55 aa |..............U.| 00000200 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION : =================== log of boot-repair 2012-11-24__09h45 =================== boot-repair version : 3.195~ppa2~precise boot-sav version : 3.195~ppa2~precise glade2script version : 3.2.2~ppa45~precise boot-sav-extra version : 3.195~ppa2~precise boot-repair is executed in live-session (Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS, precise, Ubuntu, i686) CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=/casper/initrd.lz quiet splash -- =================== os-prober: /dev/sda2:Windows 7 (loader):Windows:chain /dev/sda6:Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS (12.04):Ubuntu:linux =================== blkid: /dev/sda1: SEC_TYPE="msdos" LABEL="DellUtility" UUID="07DA-0512" TYPE="vfat" /dev/sda2: LABEL="RECOVERY" UUID="8834146034145392" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda3: LABEL="OS" UUID="48E2189DE21890F4" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/sda5: LABEL="Varshneya" UUID="BC2A44C02A447982" TYPE="ntfs" /dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs" /dev/sda6: UUID="34731459-4b0f-46ac-a9bf-cb360a2c947c" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda7: UUID="dcb9ce9b-799a-4c65-b008-887b01775670" TYPE="swap" /dev/sr0: LABEL="Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS i386" TYPE="iso9660" 1 disks with OS, 2 OS : 1 Linux, 0 MacOS, 1 Windows, 0 unknown type OS. Windows not detected by os-prober on sda3. Warning: extended partition does not start at a cylinder boundary. DOS and Linux will interpret the contents differently. =================== /mnt/etc/default/grub : # If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update # /boot/grub/grub.cfg. # For full documentation of the options in this file, see: # info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration' GRUB_DEFAULT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true GRUB_TIMEOUT=10 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian` GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="" # Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs # This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains # the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...) #GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef" # Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only) #GRUB_TERMINAL=console # The resolution used on graphical terminal # note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE # you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo' #GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480 # Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux #GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true # Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries #GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" # Uncomment to get a beep at grub start #GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1" =================== /mnt/etc/grub.d/ : drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 22 16:15 grub.d total 56 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6743 Sep 12 20:19 00_header -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 5522 Sep 12 20:05 05_debian_theme -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7407 Sep 12 20:19 10_linux -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 6335 Sep 12 20:19 20_linux_xen -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1588 Sep 24 2010 20_memtest86+ -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7603 Sep 12 20:19 30_os-prober -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 214 Sep 12 20:19 40_custom -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 95 Sep 12 20:19 41_custom -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 483 Sep 12 20:19 README =================== No kernel in /mnt/boot: grub memtest86+.bin memtest86+_multiboot.bin =================== UEFI/Legacy mode: This live-session is not EFI-compatible. SecureBoot maybe enabled. =================== PARTITIONS & DISKS: sda1 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, not-far, /mnt/boot-sav/sda1. sda2 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, is-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, bootmgr, is-winboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, not-far, /mnt/boot-sav/sda2. sda3 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, is-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, haswinload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, /mnt/boot-sav/sda3. sda5 : sda, not-sepboot, no-grubenv nogrub, no-docgrub, no-update-grub, 32, no-boot, no-os, not--efi--part, part-has-no-fstab, part-has-no-fstab, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, nopakmgr, nogrubinstall, no---usr, part-has-no-fstab, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, /mnt/boot-sav/sda5. sda6 : sda, not-sepboot, grubenv-ok grub2, grub-pc, update-grub, 64, no-kernel, is-os, not--efi--part, fstab-without-boot, fstab-without-efi, no-nt, no-winload, no-recov-nor-hid, no-bmgr, notwinboot, apt-get, grub-install, with--usr, fstab-without-usr, not-sep-usr, standard, farbios, /mnt. sda : not-GPT, BIOSboot-not-needed, has-no-EFIpart, not-usb, has-os, 63 sectors * 512 bytes =================== parted -l: Model: ATA ST9320423AS (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 320GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32.3kB 140MB 140MB primary fat16 diag 2 141MB 9936MB 9796MB primary ntfs boot 3 9936MB 112GB 102GB primary ntfs 4 112GB 320GB 208GB extended lba 6 112GB 166GB 54.1GB logical ext4 7 166GB 168GB 2352MB logical linux-swap(v1) 5 168GB 320GB 152GB logical ntfs Model: HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GA31N (scsi) Disk /dev/sr0: 4700MB Sector size (logical/physical): 2048B/2048B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 131kB 2916MB 2916MB primary boot, hidden =================== parted -lm: BYT; /dev/sda:320GB:scsi:512:512:msdos:ATA ST9320423AS; 1:32.3kB:140MB:140MB:fat16::diag; 2:141MB:9936MB:9796MB:ntfs::boot; 3:9936MB:112GB:102GB:ntfs::; 4:112GB:320GB:208GB:::lba; 6:112GB:166GB:54.1GB:ext4::; 7:166GB:168GB:2352MB:linux-swap(v1)::; 5:168GB:320GB:152GB:ntfs::; BYT; /dev/sr0:4700MB:scsi:2048:2048:msdos:HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GA31N; 1:131kB:2916MB:2916MB:::boot, hidden; =================== mount: /cow on / type overlayfs (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev) udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,mode=0755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=0620) tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755) /dev/sr0 on /cdrom type iso9660 (ro,noatime) /dev/loop0 on /rofs type squashfs (ro,noatime) none on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw) none on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw) none on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw) tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880) none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev) gvfs-fuse-daemon on /home/ubuntu/.gvfs type fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon (rw,nosuid,nodev,user=ubuntu) /dev/sda6 on /mnt type ext4 (rw) /dev on /mnt/dev type none (rw,bind) /proc on /mnt/proc type none (rw,bind) /sys on /mnt/sys type none (rw,bind) /usr on /mnt/usr type none (rw,bind) /dev/sda1 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda1 type vfat (rw) /dev/sda2 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda2 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) /dev/sda3 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda3 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) /dev/sda5 on /mnt/boot-sav/sda5 type fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,blksize=4096) =================== ls: /sys/block/sda (filtered): alignment_offset bdi capability dev device discard_alignment events events_async events_poll_msecs ext_range holders inflight power queue range removable ro sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7 size slaves stat subsystem trace uevent /sys/block/sr0 (filtered): alignment_offset bdi capability dev device discard_alignment events events_async events_poll_msecs ext_range holders inflight power queue range removable ro size slaves stat subsystem trace uevent /dev (filtered): autofs block bsg btrfs-control bus cdrom cdrw char console core cpu cpu_dma_latency disk dri dvd dvdrw ecryptfs fb0 fd full fuse fw0 hidraw0 hpet input kmsg log mapper mcelog mei mem net network_latency network_throughput null oldmem port ppp psaux ptmx pts random rfkill rtc rtc0 sda sda1 sda2 sda3 sda4 sda5 sda6 sda7 sg0 sg1 shm snapshot snd sr0 stderr stdin stdout uinput urandom usbmon0 usbmon1 usbmon2 v4l vga_arbiter video0 zero ls /dev/mapper: control =================== df -Th: Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /cow overlayfs 1.9G 113M 1.8G 6% / udev devtmpfs 1.9G 12K 1.9G 1% /dev tmpfs tmpfs 777M 872K 776M 1% /run /dev/sr0 iso9660 696M 696M 0 100% /cdrom /dev/loop0 squashfs 667M 667M 0 100% /rofs tmpfs tmpfs 1.9G 20K 1.9G 1% /tmp none tmpfs 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock none tmpfs 1.9G 176K 1.9G 1% /run/shm /dev/sda6 ext4 51G 27G 22G 56% /mnt /dev/sda1 vfat 134M 9.1M 125M 7% /mnt/boot-sav/sda1 /dev/sda2 fuseblk 9.2G 5.6G 3.6G 61% /mnt/boot-sav/sda2 /dev/sda3 fuseblk 95G 80G 16G 84% /mnt/boot-sav/sda3 /dev/sda5 fuseblk 142G 130G 12G 92% /mnt/boot-sav/sda5 =================== fdisk -l: Disk /dev/sda: 320.1 GB, 320072933376 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 38913 cylinders, total 625142448 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xb8000000 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 63 273104 136521 de Dell Utility /dev/sda2 * 274432 19406847 9566208 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda3 19406848 218274364 99433758+ 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda4 218275838 625139711 203431937 f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 328630272 625139711 148254720 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT /dev/sda6 218275840 324030463 52877312 83 Linux /dev/sda7 324032512 328626175 2296832 82 Linux swap / Solaris Partition table entries are not in disk order =================== Repair blockers 64bits detected. Please use this software in a 64bits session. (Please use Ubuntu-Secure-Remix-64bits (www.sourceforge.net/p/ubuntu-secured) which contains a 64bits-compatible version of this software.) This will enable this feature. =================== Final advice in case of recommended repair The boot files of [Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS] are far from the start of the disk. Your BIOS may not detect them. You may want to retry after creating a /boot partition (EXT4, >200MB, start of the disk). This can be performed via tools such as gParted. Then select this partition via the [Separate /boot partition:] option of [Boot Repair]. (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootPartition) =================== Default settings Recommended-Repair This setting would reinstall the grub2 of sda6 into the MBR of sda, using the following options: kernel-purge Additional repair would be performed: unhide-bootmenu-10s fix-windows-boot =================== Settings chosen by the user Boot-Info This setting will not act on the MBR. No change has been performed on your computer. See you soon! pastebinit packages needed dpkg-preconfigure: unable to re-open stdin: No such file or directory pastebin.com ko (), using paste.ubuntu Please report this message to [email protected] Any help would be great, I'm really missing Ubuntu (hate being stuck in the Windows world).

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• FreeBSD performance tuning. Sysctls, loader.conf, kernel.

  - by SaveTheRbtz

  I wanted to share knowledge of tuning FreeBSD via sysctls, so i'm posting them with comments. Based on Igor Sysoev (author of nginx) presentation about FreeBSD tuning up to 100,000-200,000 active connections. Sysctls are for 7.x FreeBSD. Since 7.2 amd64 some of them are tuned well by default. Prior 7.0 some of them are boot only (set via /boot/loader.conf) or does not exist at all. Highload web server sysctls: # Max. backlog size kern.ipc.somaxconn=4096 # Shared memory // 7.2+ can use shared memory > 2Gb kern.ipc.shmmax=2147483648 # Sockets kern.ipc.maxsockets=204800 # Do not use lager sockbufs on 8.0 # ( http://old.nabble.com/Significant-performance-regression-for-increased-maxsockbuf-on-8.0-RELEASE-tt26745981.html#a26745981 ) kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=262144 # Recive clusters (on amd64 7.2+ 65k is default) # For such high value vm.kmem_size must be increased to 3G #kern.ipc.nmbclusters=229376 # Jumbo pagesize(4k/8k) clusters # Used as general packet storage for jumbo frames # can be monitored via `netstat -m` #kern.ipc.nmbjumbop=192000 # Jumbo 9k/16k clusters # If you are using them #kern.ipc.nmbjumbo9=24000 #kern.ipc.nmbjumbo16=10240 # Every socket is a file, so increase them kern.maxfiles=204800 kern.maxfilesperproc=200000 kern.maxvnodes=200000 # Turn off receive autotuning #net.inet.tcp.recvbuf_auto=0 # Small receive space, only usable on http-server, on file server this # should be increased to 65535 or even more #net.inet.tcp.recvspace=8192 # Small send space is useful for http servers that serve small files # Autotuned since 7.x net.inet.tcp.sendspace=16384 # This should be enabled if you going to use big spaces (>64k) #net.inet.tcp.rfc1323=1 # Turn this off on highspeed, lossless connections (LAN 1Gbit+) #net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0 # This feature is useful if you are serving data over modems, Gigabit Ethernet, # or even high speed WAN links (or any other link with a high bandwidth delay product), # especially if you are also using window scaling or have configured a large send window. # You can try setting it to 0 on fileserver with 1GBit+ interfaces # Automatically disables on small RTT ( http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/netinet/tcp_subr.c?#rev1.237 ) #net.inet.tcp.inflight.enable=0 # Disable randomizing of ports to avoid false RST # Before usage check SA here www.bsdcan.org/2006/papers/ImprovingTCPIP.pdf # (it's also says that port randomization auto-disables at some conn.rates, but I didn't tested it thou) #net.inet.ip.portrange.randomized=0 # Increase portrange # For outgoing connections only. Good for seed-boxes and ftp servers. net.inet.ip.portrange.first=1024 net.inet.ip.portrange.last=65535 # Security net.inet.ip.redirect=0 net.inet.ip.sourceroute=0 net.inet.ip.accept_sourceroute=0 net.inet.icmp.maskrepl=0 net.inet.icmp.log_redirect=0 net.inet.icmp.drop_redirect=1 net.inet.tcp.drop_synfin=1 # Security net.inet.udp.blackhole=1 net.inet.tcp.blackhole=2 # Increases default TTL, sometimes useful # Default is 64 net.inet.ip.ttl=128 # Lessen max segment life to conserve resources # ACK waiting time in miliseconds (default: 30000 from RFC) net.inet.tcp.msl=5000 # Max bumber of timewait sockets net.inet.tcp.maxtcptw=40960 # Don't use tw on local connections # As of 15 Apr 2009. Igor Sysoev says that nolocaltimewait has some buggy realization. # So disable it or now till get fixed #net.inet.tcp.nolocaltimewait=1 # FIN_WAIT_2 state fast recycle net.inet.tcp.fast_finwait2_recycle=1 # Time before tcp keepalive probe is sent # default is 2 hours (7200000) #net.inet.tcp.keepidle=60000 # Should be increased until net.inet.ip.intr_queue_drops is zero net.inet.ip.intr_queue_maxlen=4096 # Interrupt handling via multiple CPU, but with context switch. # You can play with it. Default is 1; #net.isr.direct=0 # This is for routers only #net.inet.ip.forwarding=1 #net.inet.ip.fastforwarding=1 # This speed ups dummynet when channel isn't saturated net.inet.ip.dummynet.io_fast=1 # Increase dummynet(4) hash #net.inet.ip.dummynet.hash_size=2048 #net.inet.ip.dummynet.max_chain_len # Should be increased when you have A LOT of files on server # (Increase until vfs.ufs.dirhash_mem becames lower) vfs.ufs.dirhash_maxmem=67108864 # Explicit Congestion Notification (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicit_Congestion_Notification) net.inet.tcp.ecn.enable=1 # Flowtable - flow caching mechanism # Useful for routers #net.inet.flowtable.enable=1 #net.inet.flowtable.nmbflows=65535 # Extreme polling tuning #kern.polling.burst_max=1000 #kern.polling.each_burst=1000 #kern.polling.reg_frac=100 #kern.polling.user_frac=1 #kern.polling.idle_poll=0 # IPFW dynamic rules and timeouts tuning # Increase dyn_buckets till net.inet.ip.fw.curr_dyn_buckets is lower net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_buckets=65536 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_max=65536 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_ack_lifetime=120 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_syn_lifetime=10 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_fin_lifetime=2 net.inet.ip.fw.dyn_short_lifetime=10 # Make packets pass firewall only once when using dummynet # i.e. packets going thru pipe are passing out from firewall with accept #net.inet.ip.fw.one_pass=1 # shm_use_phys Wires all shared pages, making them unswappable # Use this to lessen Virtual Memory Manager's work when using Shared Mem. # Useful for databases #kern.ipc.shm_use_phys=1 /boot/loader.conf: # Accept filters for data, http and DNS requests # Usefull when your software uses select() instead of kevent/kqueue or when you under DDoS # DNS accf available on 8.0+ accf_data_load="YES" accf_http_load="YES" accf_dns_load="YES" # Async IO system calls aio_load="YES" # Adds NCQ support in FreeBSD # WARNING! all ad[0-9]+ devices will be renamed to ada[0-9]+ # 8.0+ only #ahci_load= #siis_load= # Increase kernel memory size to 3G. # # Use ONLY if you have KVA_PAGES in kernel configuration, and you have more than 3G RAM # Otherwise panic will happen on next reboot! # # It's required for high buffer sizes: kern.ipc.nmbjumbop, kern.ipc.nmbclusters, etc # Useful on highload stateful firewalls, proxies or ZFS fileservers # (FreeBSD 7.2+ amd64 users: Check that current value is lower!) #vm.kmem_size="3G" # Older versions of FreeBSD can't tune maxfiles on the fly #kern.maxfiles="200000" # Useful for databases # Sets maximum data size to 1G # (FreeBSD 7.2+ amd64 users: Check that current value is lower!) #kern.maxdsiz="1G" # Maximum buffer size(vfs.maxbufspace) # You can check current one via vfs.bufspace # Should be lowered/upped depending on server's load-type # Usually decreased to preserve kmem # (default is 200M) #kern.maxbcache="512M" # Sendfile buffers # For i386 only #kern.ipc.nsfbufs=10240 # syncache Hash table tuning net.inet.tcp.syncache.hashsize=1024 net.inet.tcp.syncache.bucketlimit=100 # Incresed hostcache net.inet.tcp.hostcache.hashsize="16384" net.inet.tcp.hostcache.bucketlimit="100" # TCP control-block Hash table tuning net.inet.tcp.tcbhashsize=4096 # Enable superpages, for 7.2+ only # Also read http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2009-November/030094.html vm.pmap.pg_ps_enabled=1 # Usefull if you are using Intel-Gigabit NIC #hw.em.rxd=4096 #hw.em.txd=4096 #hw.em.rx_process_limit="-1" # Also if you have ALOT interrupts on NIC - play with following parameters # NOTE: You should set them for every NIC #dev.em.0.rx_int_delay: 250 #dev.em.0.tx_int_delay: 250 #dev.em.0.rx_abs_int_delay: 250 #dev.em.0.tx_abs_int_delay: 250 # There is also multithreaded version of em drivers can be found here: # http://people.yandex-team.ru/~wawa/ # # for additional em monitoring and statistics use # `sysctl dev.em.0.stats=1 ; dmesg` # #Same tunings for igb #hw.igb.rxd=4096 #hw.igb.txd=4096 #hw.igb.rx_process_limit=100 # Some useful netisr tunables. See sysctl net.isr #net.isr.defaultqlimit=4096 #net.isr.maxqlimit: 10240 # Bind netisr threads to CPUs #net.isr.bindthreads=1 # Nicer boot logo =) loader_logo="beastie" And finally here is my additions to GENERIC kernel # Just some of them, see also # cat /sys/{i386,amd64,}/conf/NOTES # This one useful only on i386 #options KVA_PAGES=512 # You can play with HZ in environments with high interrupt rate (default is 1000) # 100 is for my notebook to prolong it's battery life #options HZ=100 # Polling is goot on network loads with high packet rates and low-end NICs # NB! Do not enable it if you want more than one netisr thread #options DEVICE_POLLING # Eliminate datacopy on socket read-write # To take advantage with zero copy sockets you should have an MTU of 8K(amd64) # (4k for i386). This req. is only for receiving data. # Read more in man zero_copy_sockets #options ZERO_COPY_SOCKETS # Support TCP sign. Used for IPSec options TCP_SIGNATURE options IPSEC # This ones can be loaded as modules. They described in loader.conf section #options ACCEPT_FILTER_DATA #options ACCEPT_FILTER_HTTP # Adding ipfw, also can be loaded as modules options IPFIREWALL options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE options IPFIREWALL_VERBOSE_LIMIT=10 options IPFIREWALL_DEFAULT_TO_ACCEPT options IPFIREWALL_FORWARD # Adding kernel NAT options IPFIREWALL_NAT options LIBALIAS # Traffic shaping options DUMMYNET # Divert, i.e. for userspace NAT options IPDIVERT # This is for OpenBSD's pf firewall device pf device pflog # pf's QoS - ALTQ options ALTQ options ALTQ_CBQ # Class Bases Queuing (CBQ) options ALTQ_RED # Random Early Detection (RED) options ALTQ_RIO # RED In/Out options ALTQ_HFSC # Hierarchical Packet Scheduler (HFSC) options ALTQ_PRIQ # Priority Queuing (PRIQ) options ALTQ_NOPCC # Required for SMP build # Pretty console # Manual can be found here http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=6134 #options VESA #options SC_PIXEL_MODE # Disable reboot on Ctrl Alt Del #options SC_DISABLE_REBOOT # Change normal|kernel messages color options SC_NORM_ATTR=(FG_GREEN|BG_BLACK) options SC_KERNEL_CONS_ATTR=(FG_YELLOW|BG_BLACK) # More scroll space options SC_HISTORY_SIZE=8192 # Adding hardware crypto device device crypto device cryptodev # Useful network interfaces device vlan device tap #Virtual Ethernet driver device gre #IP over IP tunneling device if_bridge #Bridge interface device pfsync #synchronization interface for PF device carp #Common Address Redundancy Protocol device enc #IPsec interface device lagg #Link aggregation interface device stf #IPv4-IPv6 port # Also for my notebook, but may be used with Opteron #device amdtemp # Support for ECMP. More than one route for destination # Works even with default route so one can use it as LB for two ISP # For now code is unstable and panics (panic: rtfree 2) on route deletions. #options RADIX_MPATH # Multicast routing #options MROUTING #options PIM # DTrace options KDTRACE_HOOKS # all architectures - enable general DTrace hooks options DDB_CTF # all architectures - kernel ELF linker loads CTF data #options KDTRACE_FRAME # amd64-only # Adaptive spining in lockmgr (8.x+) # See http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg10782.html options ADAPTIVE_LOCKMGRS # UTF-8 in console (9.x+) #options TEKEN_UTF8 #options TEKEN_XTERM # NCQ support # WARNING! all ad[0-9]+ devices will be renamed to ada[0-9]+ #options ATA_CAM # FreeBSD 9+ # Deadlock resolver thread # For additional information see http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg18124.html #options DEADLKRES PS. Also most of FreeBSD's limits can be monitored by # vmstat -z and # limits PPS. variety of network counters can be monitored via # netstat -s In FreeBSD-9 netstat's -Q option appeared, try following command to display netisr stats # netstat -Q PPPS. also see # man 7 tuning PPPPS. I wanted to thank FreeBSD community, especially author of nginx - Igor Sysoev, nginx-ru@ and FreeBSD-performance@ mailing lists for providing useful information about FreeBSD tuning. So here is the question: What tunings are you using on yours FreeBSD servers? You can also post your /etc/sysctl.conf, /boot/loader.conf, kernel options, etc with description of its' meaning (do not copy-paste from sysctl -d). Don't forget to specify server type (web, smb, gateway, etc) Let's share experience!

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• BSOD Before Windows Will Loads - Graphics Related

  - by Brian

  Alright deep breath here: (Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit btw) Today I installed Star Craft 2 Beta. After trying to log in, it had some issues where it said my device stopped working (referring to my video device I have to imagine). After I force quit the game there were some random "hot" (various colors if i remember correctly) pixels on the screen. I decided to reboot and try again with similar results. I figured that maybe my display drivers could stand to be updated (I don't frequently update them as I don't often run into problems). I went out to nVidia's website and grabbed the latest drivers for Windows 7 64 bit GeForce 9 series. (I have SLi-ed 9800 GTs). Everything seemed to install fine and I performed the restart. This is when things went from bad (can't play SC2 beta ;) ) to worse (can't boot into windows!). Initially the very first splash screen - I think it's the bios splash screen - had lines of colored pixels covering it. It then displayed a screen that had lots of "(" on it. After that it showed the normal windows 7 splash screen as if it were going to load into Windows. Before getting much further, it BSODed on me. It was a 0x0000003B stop error. At nvlddmkm.sys. A little digging let verified that this was a problem with an nVidia graphics device, not a real shocker. Windows decided it would try to help me diagnose the problem, which it's only answer to was a System Restore, which did nothing to alleviate the problem. I was able to boot up fine in safe mode and was not able to roll back the driver, however I did uninstall the driver and reboot. I still had the graphical anomalies during the first two screens (same colored "."'s and weird "("'s), but there was NOT a stop error. Windows loaded up, found a default driver for the device and installed it and I restarted to let it load - and had yet another BSOD Stop error. Repeat driver uninstall, this time I reloaded the same version (I think it's possible that I was running a 32 bit version or a vista versus windows 7 version, but I don't have that information handy) of the nVidia driver from their website. Restart, same anomalies, same Stop Error. I am at a loss - At this point all I can think is that the firmware for the Video cards got fried or there's actual damage to the cards which I sincerely hope is not the case but the sooner I know the better. Any insight into what I might be able to do to troubleshoot/fix this problem would be most helpful. Attached below is a dump from DxDiag. Please let me know if there is more info that I could provide. ------------------ System Information ------------------ Time of this report: 3/18/2010, 23:22:48 Machine name: BRIAN-PC Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (6.1, Build 7600) (7600.win7_rtm.090713-1255) Language: English (Regional Setting: English) System Manufacturer: Dell Inc System Model: XPS 630i BIOS: Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.3GHz Memory: 8192MB RAM Available OS Memory: 8190MB RAM Page File: 1855MB used, 14521MB available Windows Dir: C:\Windows DirectX Version: DirectX 11 DX Setup Parameters: Not found User DPI Setting: Using System DPI System DPI Setting: 96 DPI (100 percent) DWM DPI Scaling: Disabled DxDiag Version: 6.01.7600.16385 32bit Unicode DxDiag Previously: Crashed in DirectShow (stage 1). Re-running DxDiag with "dontskip" command line parameter or choosing not to bypass information gathering when prompted might result in DxDiag successfully obtaining this information ------------ DxDiag Notes ------------ Display Tab 1: No problems found. Sound Tab 1: No problems found. Sound Tab 2: No problems found. Sound Tab 3: No problems found. Input Tab: No problems found. -------------------- DirectX Debug Levels -------------------- Direct3D: 0/4 (retail) DirectDraw: 0/4 (retail) DirectInput: 0/5 (retail) DirectMusic: 0/5 (retail) DirectPlay: 0/9 (retail) DirectSound: 0/5 (retail) DirectShow: 0/6 (retail) --------------- Display Devices --------------- Card name: Manufacturer: Chip type: DAC type: Device Key: Enum\ Display Memory: n/a Dedicated Memory: n/a Shared Memory: n/a Current Mode: 1600 x 1200 (32 bit) (1Hz) Driver Name: Driver File Version: () Driver Version: DDI Version: unknown Driver Model: unknown Driver Attributes: Final Retail Driver Date/Size: , 0 bytes WHQL Logo'd: n/a WHQL Date Stamp: n/a Device Identifier: {D7B70EE0-4340-11CF-B123-B03DAEC2CB35} Vendor ID: 0x0000 Device ID: 0x0000 SubSys ID: 0x00000000 Revision ID: 0x0000 Driver Strong Name: Unknown Rank Of Driver: Unknown Video Accel: Deinterlace Caps: n/a D3D9 Overlay: n/a DXVA-HD: n/a DDraw Status: Not Available D3D Status: Not Available AGP Status: Not Available ------------- Sound Devices ------------- Description: Speakers (Realtek High Definition Audio) Default Sound Playback: Yes Default Voice Playback: Yes Hardware ID: HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_10280249&REV_1001 Manufacturer ID: 1 Product ID: 100 Type: WDM Driver Name: RTKVHD64.sys Driver Version: 6.00.0001.5667 (English) Driver Attributes: Final Retail WHQL Logo'd: n/a Date and Size: 8/18/2008 04:05:28, 1485592 bytes Other Files: Driver Provider: Realtek Semiconductor Corp. HW Accel Level: Basic Cap Flags: 0x0 Min/Max Sample Rate: 0, 0 Static/Strm HW Mix Bufs: 0, 0 Static/Strm HW 3D Bufs: 0, 0 HW Memory: 0 Voice Management: No EAX(tm) 2.0 Listen/Src: No, No I3DL2(tm) Listen/Src: No, No Sensaura(tm) ZoomFX(tm): No Description: Realtek Digital Output (Realtek High Definition Audio) Default Sound Playback: No Default Voice Playback: No Hardware ID: HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_10280249&REV_1001 Manufacturer ID: 1 Product ID: 100 Type: WDM Driver Name: RTKVHD64.sys Driver Version: 6.00.0001.5667 (English) Driver Attributes: Final Retail WHQL Logo'd: n/a Date and Size: 8/18/2008 04:05:28, 1485592 bytes Other Files: Driver Provider: Realtek Semiconductor Corp. HW Accel Level: Basic Cap Flags: 0x0 Min/Max Sample Rate: 0, 0 Static/Strm HW Mix Bufs: 0, 0 Static/Strm HW 3D Bufs: 0, 0 HW Memory: 0 Voice Management: No EAX(tm) 2.0 Listen/Src: No, No I3DL2(tm) Listen/Src: No, No Sensaura(tm) ZoomFX(tm): No Description: Realtek HDMI Output (Realtek High Definition Audio) Default Sound Playback: No Default Voice Playback: No Hardware ID: HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0888&SUBSYS_10280249&REV_1001 Manufacturer ID: 1 Product ID: 100 Type: WDM Driver Name: RTKVHD64.sys Driver Version: 6.00.0001.5667 (English) Driver Attributes: Final Retail WHQL Logo'd: n/a Date and Size: 8/18/2008 04:05:28, 1485592 bytes Other Files: Driver Provider: Realtek Semiconductor Corp. HW Accel Level: Basic Cap Flags: 0x0 Min/Max Sample Rate: 0, 0 Static/Strm HW Mix Bufs: 0, 0 Static/Strm HW 3D Bufs: 0, 0 HW Memory: 0 Voice Management: No EAX(tm) 2.0 Listen/Src: No, No I3DL2(tm) Listen/Src: No, No Sensaura(tm) ZoomFX(tm): No --------------------- Sound Capture Devices --------------------- Description: Microphone (Realtek High Definition Audio) Default Sound Capture: Yes Default Voice Capture: Yes Driver Name: RTKVHD64.sys Driver Version: 6.00.0001.5667 (English) Driver Attributes: Final Retail Date and Size: 8/18/2008 04:05:28, 1485592 bytes Cap Flags: 0x0 Format Flags: 0x0 Description: Realtek Digital Input (Realtek High Definition Audio) Default Sound Capture: No Default Voice Capture: No Driver Name: RTKVHD64.sys Driver Version: 6.00.0001.5667 (English) Driver Attributes: Final Retail Date and Size: 8/18/2008 04:05:28, 1485592 bytes Cap Flags: 0x0 Format Flags: 0x0 ------------------- DirectInput Devices ------------------- Device Name: Mouse Attached: 1 Controller ID: n/a Vendor/Product ID: n/a FF Driver: n/a Device Name: Keyboard Attached: 1 Controller ID: n/a Vendor/Product ID: n/a FF Driver: n/a Device Name: ESA FW Update Attached: 1 Controller ID: 0x0 Vendor/Product ID: 0x0955, 0x000A FF Driver: n/a Poll w/ Interrupt: No ----------- USB Devices ----------- + USB Root Hub | Vendor/Product ID: 0x10DE, 0x026D | Matching Device ID: usb\root_hub | Service: usbhub | +-+ USB Input Device | | Vendor/Product ID: 0x0955, 0x000A | | Location: Port_#0002.Hub_#0001 | | Matching Device ID: generic_hid_device | | Service: HidUsb | | | +-+ HID-compliant device | | | Vendor/Product ID: 0x0955, 0x000A | | | Matching Device ID: hid_device | | +-+ USB Input Device | | Vendor/Product ID: 0x046D, 0xC01E | | Location: Port_#0003.Hub_#0001 | | Matching Device ID: generic_hid_device | | Service: HidUsb | | | +-+ HID-compliant mouse | | | Vendor/Product ID: 0x046D, 0xC01E | | | Matching Device ID: hid_device_system_mouse | | | Service: mouhid ---------------- Gameport Devices ---------------- ------------ PS/2 Devices ------------ + Standard PS/2 Keyboard | Matching Device ID: *pnp0303 | Service: i8042prt | + Terminal Server Keyboard Driver | Matching Device ID: root\rdp_kbd | Upper Filters: kbdclass | Service: TermDD | + Terminal Server Mouse Driver | Matching Device ID: root\rdp_mou | Upper Filters: mouclass | Service: TermDD ------------------------ Disk & DVD/CD-ROM Drives ------------------------ Drive: C: Free Space: 324.3 GB Total Space: 608.4 GB File System: NTFS Model: WDC WD64 00AAKS-75A7B SCSI Disk Device Drive: D: Free Space: 1.0 GB Total Space: 2.0 GB File System: NTFS Model: WDC WD64 00AAKS-75A7B SCSI Disk Device Drive: E: Model: TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-H653F SCSI CdRom Device Driver: c:\windows\system32\drivers\cdrom.sys, 6.01.7600.16385 (English), , 0 bytes -------------- System Devices -------------- Name: PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03B7&SUBSYS_000010DE&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&18 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03AF&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&0A Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard host CPU bridge Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03A3&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A2\3&2411E6FE&1&00 Driver: n/a Name: NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0267&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&78 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03B6&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&10 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03AE&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&09 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0272&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A3\3&2411E6FE&1&52 Driver: n/a Name: NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0266&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&70 Driver: n/a Name: LSI 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_11C1&DEV_5811&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_70\4&14591D7E&0&2880 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03B5&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&06 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03AD&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&08 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0270&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A2\3&2411E6FE&1&48 Driver: n/a Name: Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0265&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&68 Driver: n/a Name: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0605&SUBSYS_062D10DE&REV_A2\4&4BABE2A&0&0028 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03B4&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&07 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03AC&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&01 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_026F&SUBSYS_CB8410DE&REV_A2\3&2411E6FE&1&80 Driver: n/a Name: NVIDIA nForce PCI System Management Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0264&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A3\3&2411E6FE&1&51 Driver: n/a Name: NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0605&SUBSYS_062D10DE&REV_A2\4&10BD3C89&0&0018 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03B3&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&0E Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03AB&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&04 Driver: n/a Name: Standard Enhanced PCI to USB Host Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_026E&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A3\3&2411E6FE&1&59 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard ISA bridge Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0260&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A3\3&2411E6FE&1&50 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03BC&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&11 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03B2&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&0D Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03AA&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&02 Driver: n/a Name: Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_026D&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A3\3&2411E6FE&1&58 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03BA&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&12 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03B1&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&0C Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03A9&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&03 Driver: n/a Name: High Definition Audio Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_026C&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A2\3&2411E6FE&1&81 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03B8&SUBSYS_000010DE&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&28 Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03B0&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A1\3&2411E6FE&1&0B Driver: n/a Name: PCI standard RAM Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_03A8&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A2\3&2411E6FE&1&05 Driver: n/a Name: NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller Device ID: PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0269&SUBSYS_02491028&REV_A3\3&2411E6FE&1&A0 Driver: n/a --------------- EVR Power Information --------------- Current Setting: {5C67A112-A4C9-483F-B4A7-1D473BECAFDC} (Quality) Quality Flags: 2576 Enabled: Force throttling Allow half deinterlace Allow scaling Decode Power Usage: 100 Balanced Flags: 1424 Enabled: Force throttling Allow batching Force half deinterlace Force scaling Decode Power Usage: 50 PowerFlags: 1424 Enabled: Force throttling Allow batching Force half deinterlace Force scaling Decode Power Usage: 0

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• Bacula & Multiple Tape Devices, and so on

  - by Tom O'Connor

  Bacula won't make use of 2 tape devices simultaneously. (Search for #-#-# for the TL;DR) A little background, perhaps. In the process of trying to get a decent working backup solution (backing up 20TB ain't cheap, or easy) at $dayjob, we bought a bunch of things to make it work. Firstly, there's a Spectra Logic T50e autochanger, 40 slots of LTO5 goodness, and that robot's got a pair of IBM HH5 Ultrium LTO5 drives, connected via FibreChannel Arbitrated Loop to our backup server. There's the backup server.. A Dell R715 with 2x 16 core AMD 62xx CPUs, and 32GB of RAM. Yummy. That server's got 2 Emulex FCe-12000E cards, and an Intel X520-SR dual port 10GE NIC. We were also sold Commvault Backup (non-NDMP). Here's where it gets really complicated. Spectra Logic and Commvault both sent respective engineers, who set up the library and the software. Commvault was running fine, in so far as the controller was working fine. The Dell server has Ubuntu 12.04 server, and runs the MediaAgent for CommVault, and mounts our BlueArc NAS as NFS to a few mountpoints, like /home, and some stuff in /mnt. When backing up from the NFS mountpoints, we were seeing ~= 290GB/hr throughput. That's CRAP, considering we've got 20-odd TB to get through, in a <48 hour backup window. The rated maximum on the BlueArc is 700MB/s (2460GB/hr), the rated maximum write speed on the tape devices is 140MB/s, per drive, so that's 492GB/hr (or double it, for the total throughput). So, the next step was to benchmark NFS performance with IOzone, and it turns out that we get epic write performance (across 20 threads), and it's like 1.5-2.5TB/hr write, but read performance is fecking hopeless. I couldn't ever get higher than 343GB/hr maximum. So let's assume that the 343GB/hr is a theoretical maximum for read performance on the NAS, then we should in theory be able to get that performance out of a) CommVault, and b) any other backup agent. Not the case. Commvault seems to only ever give me 200-250GB/hr throughput, and out of experimentation, I installed Bacula to see what the state of play there is. If, for example, Bacula gave consistently better performance and speeds than Commvault, then we'd be able to say "**$.$ Refunds Plz $.$**" #-#-# Alas, I found a different problem with Bacula. Commvault seems pretty happy to read from one part of the mountpoint with one thread, and stream that to a Tape device, whilst reading from some other directory with the other thread, and writing to the 2nd drive in the autochanger. I can't for the life of me get Bacula to mount and write to two tape drives simultaneously. Things I've tried: Setting Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 in the Director, File and Storage Daemons Setting Prefer Mounted Volumes = no in the Job Definition Setting multiple devices in the Autochanger resource. Documentation seems to be very single-drive centric, and we feel a little like we've strapped a rocket to a hamster, with this one. The majority of example Bacula configurations are for DDS4 drives, manual tape swapping, and FreeBSD or IRIX systems. I should probably add that I'm not too bothered if this isn't possible, but I'd be surprised. I basically want to use Bacula as proof to stick it to the software vendors that they're overpriced ;) I read somewhere that @KyleBrandt has done something similar with a modern Tape solution.. Configuration Files: *bacula-dir.conf* # # Default Bacula Director Configuration file Director { # define myself Name = backuphost-1-dir DIRport = 9101 # where we listen for UA connections QueryFile = "/etc/bacula/scripts/query.sql" WorkingDirectory = "/var/lib/bacula" PidDirectory = "/var/run/bacula" Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 Password = "yourekiddingright" # Console password Messages = Daemon DirAddress = 0.0.0.0 #DirAddress = 127.0.0.1 } JobDefs { Name = "DefaultFileJob" Type = Backup Level = Incremental Client = backuphost-1-fd FileSet = "Full Set" Schedule = "WeeklyCycle" Storage = File Messages = Standard Pool = File Priority = 10 Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%c.bsr" } JobDefs { Name = "DefaultTapeJob" Type = Backup Level = Incremental Client = backuphost-1-fd FileSet = "Full Set" Schedule = "WeeklyCycle" Storage = "SpectraLogic" Messages = Standard Pool = AllTapes Priority = 10 Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%c.bsr" Prefer Mounted Volumes = no } # # Define the main nightly save backup job # By default, this job will back up to disk in /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir Job { Name = "BackupClient1" JobDefs = "DefaultFileJob" } Job { Name = "BackupThisVolume" JobDefs = "DefaultTapeJob" FileSet = "SpecialVolume" } #Job { # Name = "BackupClient2" # Client = backuphost-12-fd # JobDefs = "DefaultJob" #} # Backup the catalog database (after the nightly save) Job { Name = "BackupCatalog" JobDefs = "DefaultFileJob" Level = Full FileSet="Catalog" Schedule = "WeeklyCycleAfterBackup" # This creates an ASCII copy of the catalog # Arguments to make_catalog_backup.pl are: # make_catalog_backup.pl <catalog-name> RunBeforeJob = "/etc/bacula/scripts/make_catalog_backup.pl MyCatalog" # This deletes the copy of the catalog RunAfterJob = "/etc/bacula/scripts/delete_catalog_backup" Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%n.bsr" Priority = 11 # run after main backup } # # Standard Restore template, to be changed by Console program # Only one such job is needed for all Jobs/Clients/Storage ... # Job { Name = "RestoreFiles" Type = Restore Client=backuphost-1-fd FileSet="Full Set" Storage = File Pool = Default Messages = Standard Where = /srv/bacula/restore } FileSet { Name = "SpecialVolume" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = /mnt/SpecialVolume } Exclude { File = /var/lib/bacula File = /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir File = /proc File = /tmp File = /.journal File = /.fsck } } # List of files to be backed up FileSet { Name = "Full Set" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = /usr/sbin } Exclude { File = /var/lib/bacula File = /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir File = /proc File = /tmp File = /.journal File = /.fsck } } Schedule { Name = "WeeklyCycle" Run = Full 1st sun at 23:05 Run = Differential 2nd-5th sun at 23:05 Run = Incremental mon-sat at 23:05 } # This schedule does the catalog. It starts after the WeeklyCycle Schedule { Name = "WeeklyCycleAfterBackup" Run = Full sun-sat at 23:10 } # This is the backup of the catalog FileSet { Name = "Catalog" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = "/var/lib/bacula/bacula.sql" } } # Client (File Services) to backup Client { Name = backuphost-1-fd Address = localhost FDPort = 9102 Catalog = MyCatalog Password = "surelyyourejoking" # password for FileDaemon File Retention = 30 days # 30 days Job Retention = 6 months # six months AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files } # # Second Client (File Services) to backup # You should change Name, Address, and Password before using # #Client { # Name = backuphost-12-fd # Address = localhost2 # FDPort = 9102 # Catalog = MyCatalog # Password = "i'mnotjokinganddontcallmeshirley" # password for FileDaemon 2 # File Retention = 30 days # 30 days # Job Retention = 6 months # six months # AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files #} # Definition of file storage device Storage { Name = File # Do not use "localhost" here Address = localhost # N.B. Use a fully qualified name here SDPort = 9103 Password = "lalalalala" Device = FileStorage Media Type = File } Storage { Name = "SpectraLogic" Address = localhost SDPort = 9103 Password = "linkedinmakethebestpasswords" Device = Drive-1 Device = Drive-2 Media Type = LTO5 Autochanger = yes } # Generic catalog service Catalog { Name = MyCatalog # Uncomment the following line if you want the dbi driver # dbdriver = "dbi:sqlite3"; dbaddress = 127.0.0.1; dbport = dbname = "bacula"; DB Address = ""; dbuser = "bacula"; dbpassword = "bbmaster63" } # Reasonable message delivery -- send most everything to email address # and to the console Messages { Name = Standard mailcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"\(Bacula\) \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula: %t %e of %c %l\" %r" operatorcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"\(Bacula\) \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula: Intervention needed for %j\" %r" mail = root@localhost = all, !skipped operator = root@localhost = mount console = all, !skipped, !saved # # WARNING! the following will create a file that you must cycle from # time to time as it will grow indefinitely. However, it will # also keep all your messages if they scroll off the console. # append = "/var/lib/bacula/log" = all, !skipped catalog = all } # # Message delivery for daemon messages (no job). Messages { Name = Daemon mailcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"\(Bacula\) \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula daemon message\" %r" mail = root@localhost = all, !skipped console = all, !skipped, !saved append = "/var/lib/bacula/log" = all, !skipped } # Default pool definition Pool { Name = Default Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 365 days # one year } # File Pool definition Pool { Name = File Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 365 days # one year Maximum Volume Bytes = 50G # Limit Volume size to something reasonable Maximum Volumes = 100 # Limit number of Volumes in Pool } Pool { Name = AllTapes Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 31 days # one Moth } # Scratch pool definition Pool { Name = Scratch Pool Type = Backup } # # Restricted console used by tray-monitor to get the status of the director # Console { Name = backuphost-1-mon Password = "LastFMalsostorePasswordsLikeThis" CommandACL = status, .status } bacula-sd.conf # # Default Bacula Storage Daemon Configuration file # Storage { # definition of myself Name = backuphost-1-sd SDPort = 9103 # Director's port WorkingDirectory = "/var/lib/bacula" Pid Directory = "/var/run/bacula" Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 SDAddress = 0.0.0.0 # SDAddress = 127.0.0.1 } # # List Directors who are permitted to contact Storage daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-dir Password = "passwordslinplaintext" } # # Restricted Director, used by tray-monitor to get the # status of the storage daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-mon Password = "totalinsecurityabound" Monitor = yes } Device { Name = FileStorage Media Type = File Archive Device = /srv/bacula/archive LabelMedia = yes; # lets Bacula label unlabeled media Random Access = Yes; AutomaticMount = yes; # when device opened, read it RemovableMedia = no; AlwaysOpen = no; } Autochanger { Name = SpectraLogic Device = Drive-1 Device = Drive-2 Changer Command = "/etc/bacula/scripts/mtx-changer %c %o %S %a %d" Changer Device = /dev/sg4 } Device { Name = Drive-1 Drive Index = 0 Archive Device = /dev/nst0 Changer Device = /dev/sg4 Media Type = LTO5 AutoChanger = yes RemovableMedia = yes; AutomaticMount = yes; AlwaysOpen = yes; RandomAccess = no; LabelMedia = yes } Device { Name = Drive-2 Drive Index = 1 Archive Device = /dev/nst1 Changer Device = /dev/sg4 Media Type = LTO5 AutoChanger = yes RemovableMedia = yes; AutomaticMount = yes; AlwaysOpen = yes; RandomAccess = no; LabelMedia = yes } # # Send all messages to the Director, # mount messages also are sent to the email address # Messages { Name = Standard director = backuphost-1-dir = all } bacula-fd.conf # # Default Bacula File Daemon Configuration file # # # List Directors who are permitted to contact this File daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-dir Password = "hahahahahaha" } # # Restricted Director, used by tray-monitor to get the # status of the file daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-mon Password = "hohohohohho" Monitor = yes } # # "Global" File daemon configuration specifications # FileDaemon { # this is me Name = backuphost-1-fd FDport = 9102 # where we listen for the director WorkingDirectory = /var/lib/bacula Pid Directory = /var/run/bacula Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 #FDAddress = 127.0.0.1 FDAddress = 0.0.0.0 } # Send all messages except skipped files back to Director Messages { Name = Standard director = backuphost-1-dir = all, !skipped, !restored }

  Read the article

• When gaming computer freezes with a blank screen and a buzzing sound

  - by The Colour Of Heartache

  I have a problem with random freezes when playing games. Sometimes it's fine for hours, other times it dosn't last even one. I tried googling around and I found recomendations to update my graphics drivers and to test for overheating. The graphics drivers haven't helped worked and Furmark created a consistant heat higher than I get during a crash. I even tried running a game using the Linux dual boot and WINE, that crashed too. Here are the tempreture logs leading up to the latest crash. The GPU dosn't hit 80, and I've hit 90 with no crash on firmark. DATE TIME MHz CPU_0 CPU_1 CPU_2 CPU_3 LOAD% GPU 04/05/12 15:21:00 3200.16 63 58 57 56 15.4 77 04/05/12 15:21:05 3200.16 63 59 58 56 15.8 76 04/05/12 15:21:10 3200.16 62 59 58 55 15.1 78 04/05/12 15:21:15 3200.16 63 59 58 56 16.5 77 04/05/12 15:21:20 3200.16 64 58 58 57 15.3 77 04/05/12 15:21:25 3200.16 63 58 59 56 15.8 78 04/05/12 15:21:30 3200.16 63 58 58 57 15.8 77 04/05/12 15:21:35 3200.16 63 58 58 56 17.0 77 04/05/12 15:21:40 3200.16 63 59 59 56 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:21:45 3200.16 63 58 58 58 15.6 77 04/05/12 15:21:50 3200.16 63 58 58 58 15.8 77 04/05/12 15:21:55 3200.16 63 58 59 56 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:22:00 3200.16 63 58 58 57 15.8 77 04/05/12 15:21:05 3200.16 63 58 58 56 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:21:10 3200.16 63 57 58 56 15.3 78 04/05/12 15:21:15 3200.16 64 58 58 56 15.4 78 04/05/12 15:21:20 3200.16 63 58 58 56 15.4 77 04/05/12 15:21:25 3200.16 62 58 58 57 15.6 77 04/05/12 15:21:30 3200.16 62 58 58 57 15.8 77 04/05/12 15:21:35 3200.16 63 59 58 56 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:21:40 3200.16 63 58 58 56 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:21:45 3200.16 63 59 58 56 15.6 77 04/05/12 15:21:50 3200.16 62 59 58 58 15.8 77 04/05/12 15:21:55 3200.16 63 58 58 57 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:22:00 3200.16 63 58 58 56 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:22:05 3200.16 63 58 58 56 16.3 77 04/05/12 15:22:10 3200.16 64 58 59 56 15.7 77 04/05/12 15:22:15 3200.16 63 58 60 57 17.2 77 04/05/12 15:22:20 3200.16 63 58 58 56 15.5 78 04/05/12 15:22:25 3200.16 63 58 60 57 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:22:30 3200.16 63 59 59 57 15.6 76 04/05/12 15:22:35 3200.16 64 59 60 57 17.7 77 04/05/12 15:22:40 3200.16 63 59 58 57 16.0 77 04/05/12 15:22:45 3200.16 64 58 58 57 15.8 77 04/05/12 15:22:50 3200.16 63 59 58 56 15.8 77 04/05/12 15:22:55 3200.16 63 58 59 57 15.8 78 04/05/12 15:23:00 3200.16 63 59 58 57 15.7 77 04/05/12 15:22:05 3200.16 62 58 57 58 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:22:10 3200.16 63 58 59 57 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:22:15 3200.16 63 59 58 56 17.1 77 04/05/12 15:22:20 3200.16 63 58 59 57 16.0 77 04/05/12 15:22:25 3200.16 63 58 58 57 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:22:30 3200.16 63 59 59 57 15.7 77 04/05/12 15:22:35 3200.16 64 59 58 58 21.0 77 04/05/12 15:22:40 3200.16 63 59 58 58 16.0 77 04/05/12 15:22:45 3200.16 64 59 59 57 15.7 77 04/05/12 15:22:50 3200.16 63 59 58 56 15.8 78 04/05/12 15:22:55 3200.16 63 59 58 57 15.8 78 04/05/12 15:23:00 3200.16 63 59 57 57 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:23:05 3200.16 64 58 58 58 15.7 77 04/05/12 15:23:10 3200.16 63 59 58 56 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:23:15 3200.16 64 59 58 57 16.6 77 04/05/12 15:23:20 3200.16 63 59 58 58 16.0 77 04/05/12 15:23:25 3200.16 63 58 58 57 15.7 77 04/05/12 15:23:30 3200.16 63 59 58 56 15.4 78 04/05/12 15:23:35 3200.16 64 60 59 61 17.7 77 04/05/12 15:23:40 3200.16 63 59 58 57 15.6 77 04/05/12 15:23:45 1600.08 53 54 53 52 4.4 76 04/05/12 15:23:50 3200.16 63 59 57 56 15.8 77 04/05/12 15:23:55 3200.16 63 58 57 57 15.6 77 04/05/12 15:24:00 3200.16 63 58 58 58 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:23:05 3200.16 64 59 58 56 15.6 77 04/05/12 15:23:10 3200.16 64 59 58 57 15.9 77 04/05/12 15:23:15 3200.16 63 59 58 59 16.7 77 04/05/12 15:23:20 3200.16 64 58 58 58 16.0 77 04/05/12 15:23:25 3200.16 64 58 58 57 15.7 77 04/05/12 15:23:30 3200.16 64 58 58 57 15.2 78 04/05/12 15:23:35 3200.16 63 59 59 58 17.8 77 04/05/12 15:23:40 3200.16 63 59 59 58 15.8 77 04/05/12 15:23:45 1600.08 53 54 53 52 4.7 76 04/05/12 15:23:50 3200.16 63 59 57 56 16.9 77 04/05/12 15:23:55 3200.16 63 58 59 56 15.7 77 04/05/12 15:24:00 3200.16 63 58 59 57 15.9 77 I also got a dmp file, here's what BlueScreenView gave me. The first three lines were in red, the summery says that the crash was casued by hal.dll and the address hal.dll+12903 Filename Address in Stack From Address To Address Size Time Stamp Time String Product Name File Description File Version Company Full Path hal.dll hal.dll+12903 fffff800`033e0000 fffff800`03429000 0x00049000 0x4a5bdf08 14/07/2009 02:27:36 ntoskrnl.exe ntoskrnl.exe+185923 fffff800`02e05000 fffff800`033e0000 0x005db000 0x4ec7a284 19/11/2011 13:35:16 Microsoft® Windows® Operating System NT Kernel & System 6.1.7600.16917 (win7_gdr.111118-2330) Microsoft Corporation C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe pci.sys pci.sys+9aff fffff880`0108f000 fffff880`010c2000 0x00033000 0x4a5bc117 14/07/2009 00:19:51 kdcom.dll fffff800`00bc4000 fffff800`00bce000 0x0000a000 0x4d4d40d9 05/02/2011 13:21:45 mcupdate_GenuineIntel.dll fffff880`00c26000 fffff880`00c6a000 0x00044000 0x4a5bdf66 14/07/2009 02:29:10 PSHED.dll fffff880`00c6a000 fffff880`00c7e000 0x00014000 0x4a5be027 14/07/2009 02:32:23 Microsoft® Windows® Operating System Platform Specific Hardware Error Driver 6.1.7600.16385 (win7_rtm.090713-1255) Microsoft Corporation C:\Windows\system32\PSHED.dll CLFS.SYS fffff880`00c7e000 fffff880`00cdc000 0x0005e000 0x4a5bc11d 14/07/2009 00:19:57 CI.dll fffff880`00cdc000 fffff880`00d9c000 0x000c0000 0x4a5be01d 14/07/2009 02:32:13 Wdf01000.sys fffff880`00e0e000 fffff880`00eb2000 0x000a4000 0x4a5bc19f 14/07/2009 00:22:07 WDFLDR.SYS fffff880`00eb2000 fffff880`00ec1000 0x0000f000 0x4a5bc11a 14/07/2009 00:19:54 sptd.sys fffff880`00ec1000 fffff880`00fe7000 0x00126000 0x4ad24632 11/10/2009 21:55:14 WMILIB.SYS fffff880`00fe7000 fffff880`00ff0000 0x00009000 0x4a5bc117 14/07/2009 00:19:51 SCSIPORT.SYS fffff880`00d9c000 fffff880`00dcb000 0x0002f000 0x4a5bcac0 14/07/2009 01:01:04 ACPI.sys fffff880`01021000 fffff880`01078000 0x00057000 0x4a5bc106 14/07/2009 00:19:34 msisadrv.sys fffff880`01078000 fffff880`01082000 0x0000a000 0x4a5bc0fe 14/07/2009 00:19:26 vdrvroot.sys fffff880`01082000 fffff880`0108f000 0x0000d000 0x4a5bcadb 14/07/2009 01:01:31 partmgr.sys fffff880`010c2000 fffff880`010d7000 0x00015000 0x4a5bc11e 14/07/2009 00:19:58 volmgr.sys fffff880`010d7000 fffff880`010ec000 0x00015000 0x4a5bc11d 14/07/2009 00:19:57 volmgrx.sys fffff880`010ec000 fffff880`01148000 0x0005c000 0x4a5bc141 14/07/2009 00:20:33 pciide.sys fffff880`01148000 fffff880`0114f000 0x00007000 0x4a5bc115 14/07/2009 00:19:49 PCIIDEX.SYS fffff880`0114f000 fffff880`0115f000 0x00010000 0x4a5bc114 14/07/2009 00:19:48 mountmgr.sys fffff880`0115f000 fffff880`01179000 0x0001a000 0x4a5bc11a 14/07/2009 00:19:54 atapi.sys fffff880`01179000 fffff880`01182000 0x00009000 0x4a5bc113 14/07/2009 00:19:47 ataport.SYS fffff880`01182000 fffff880`011ac000 0x0002a000 0x4a5bc118 14/07/2009 00:19:52 msahci.sys fffff880`011ac000 fffff880`011b7000 0x0000b000 0x4a5bcabd 14/07/2009 01:01:01 amdxata.sys fffff880`011b7000 fffff880`011c2000 0x0000b000 0x4ba3a3ca 19/03/2010 17:18:18 fltmgr.sys fffff880`01211000 fffff880`0125d000 0x0004c000 0x4a5bc11f 14/07/2009 00:19:59 fileinfo.sys fffff880`0125d000 fffff880`01271000 0x00014000 0x4a5bc481 14/07/2009 00:34:25 Ntfs.sys fffff880`0145c000 fffff880`015fe000 0x001a2000 0x4d79996d 11/03/2011 04:39:25 msrpc.sys fffff880`01271000 fffff880`012cf000 0x0005e000 0x4a5bc17c 14/07/2009 00:21:32 ksecdd.sys fffff880`01400000 fffff880`0141a000 0x0001a000 0x4ec48579 17/11/2011 04:54:33 cng.sys fffff880`012cf000 fffff880`01342000 0x00073000 0x4ec48cfb 17/11/2011 05:26:35 pcw.sys fffff880`0141a000 fffff880`0142b000 0x00011000 0x4a5bc0ff 14/07/2009 00:19:27 Fs_Rec.sys fffff880`0142b000 fffff880`01435000 0x0000a000 0x4a5bc111 14/07/2009 00:19:45 ndis.sys fffff880`01653000 fffff880`01745000 0x000f2000 0x4a5bc184 14/07/2009 00:21:40 NETIO.SYS fffff880`01745000 fffff880`017a5000 0x00060000 0x4bbe946f 09/04/2010 03:43:59 ksecpkg.sys fffff880`017a5000 fffff880`017d0000 0x0002b000 0x4ec48d32 17/11/2011 05:27:30 tcpip.sys fffff880`01802000 fffff880`01a00000 0x001fe000 0x4e83eb7f 29/09/2011 04:52:31 fwpkclnt.sys fffff880`01600000 fffff880`0164a000 0x0004a000 0x4a5bc164 14/07/2009 00:21:08 vmstorfl.sys fffff880`017d0000 fffff880`017e0000 0x00010000 0x4a5bc67e 14/07/2009 00:42:54 volsnap.sys fffff880`01342000 fffff880`0138e000 0x0004c000 0x4a5bc128 14/07/2009 00:20:08 spldr.sys fffff880`017e0000 fffff880`017e8000 0x00008000 0x4a0858bb 11/05/2009 17:56:27 rdyboost.sys fffff880`0138e000 fffff880`013c8000 0x0003a000 0x4a5bc48a 14/07/2009 00:34:34 mup.sys fffff880`017e8000 fffff880`017fa000 0x00012000 0x4a5bc201 14/07/2009 00:23:45 hwpolicy.sys fffff880`0164a000 fffff880`01653000 0x00009000 0x4a5bc0fa 14/07/2009 00:19:22 fvevol.sys fffff880`011c2000 fffff880`011fc000 0x0003a000 0x4abd7db2 26/09/2009 03:34:26 disk.sys fffff880`01435000 fffff880`0144b000 0x00016000 0x4a5bc11d 14/07/2009 00:19:57 CLASSPNP.SYS fffff880`013c8000 fffff880`013f8000 0x00030000 0x4a5bc11e 14/07/2009 00:19:58 cdrom.sys fffff880`00dcb000 fffff880`00df5000 0x0002a000 0x4a5bc11a 14/07/2009 00:19:54 MpFilter.sys fffff880`02c1a000 fffff880`02c4b000 0x00031000 0x4d9cc801 06/04/2011 21:07:29 Null.SYS fffff880`02c4b000 fffff880`02c54000 0x00009000 0x4a5bc109 14/07/2009 00:19:37 Beep.SYS fffff880`02c54000 fffff880`02c5b000 0x00007000 0x4a5bca8d 14/07/2009 01:00:13 vga.sys fffff880`02c5b000 fffff880`02c69000 0x0000e000 0x4a5bc587 14/07/2009 00:38:47 VIDEOPRT.SYS fffff880`02c69000 fffff880`02c8e000 0x00025000 0x4a5bc58b 14/07/2009 00:38:51 watchdog.sys fffff880`02c8e000 fffff880`02c9e000 0x00010000 0x4a5bc53f 14/07/2009 00:37:35 RDPCDD.sys fffff880`02c9e000 fffff880`02ca7000 0x00009000 0x4a5bce62 14/07/2009 01:16:34 rdpencdd.sys fffff880`02ca7000 fffff880`02cb0000 0x00009000 0x4a5bce62 14/07/2009 01:16:34 rdprefmp.sys fffff880`02cb0000 fffff880`02cb9000 0x00009000 0x4a5bce63 14/07/2009 01:16:35 Msfs.SYS fffff880`02cb9000 fffff880`02cc4000 0x0000b000 0x4a5bc113 14/07/2009 00:19:47 Npfs.SYS fffff880`02cc4000 fffff880`02cd5000 0x00011000 0x4a5bc114 14/07/2009 00:19:48 tdx.sys fffff880`02cd5000 fffff880`02cf3000 0x0001e000 0x4a5bc16b 14/07/2009 00:21:15 TDI.SYS fffff880`02cf3000 fffff880`02d00000 0x0000d000 0x4a5bc16e 14/07/2009 00:21:18 afd.sys fffff880`02d00000 fffff880`02d89000 0x00089000 0x4efa940c 28/12/2011 04:59:08 netbt.sys fffff880`02d89000 fffff880`02dce000 0x00045000 0x4a5bc178 14/07/2009 00:21:28 ws2ifsl.sys fffff880`02dce000 fffff880`02dd9000 0x0000b000 0x4a5bccf9 14/07/2009 01:10:33 wfplwf.sys fffff880`02dd9000 fffff880`02de2000 0x00009000 0x4a5bccb6 14/07/2009 01:09:26 pacer.sys fffff880`00c00000 fffff880`00c26000 0x00026000 0x4a5bccc5 14/07/2009 01:09:41 vpcnfltr.sys fffff880`02de2000 fffff880`02df6000 0x00014000 0x4ab97aae 23/09/2009 02:32:30 netbios.sys fffff880`02c00000 fffff880`02c0f000 0x0000f000 0x4a5bccb6 14/07/2009 01:09:26 serial.sys fffff880`04075000 fffff880`04092000 0x0001d000 0x4a5bcaa8 14/07/2009 01:00:40 wanarp.sys fffff880`04092000 fffff880`040ad000 0x0001b000 0x4a5bcced 14/07/2009 01:10:21 vpcvmm.sys fffff880`040ad000 fffff880`04103180 0x00056180 0x4ab97ab6 23/09/2009 02:32:38 termdd.sys fffff880`04104000 fffff880`04118000 0x00014000 0x4a5bce64 14/07/2009 01:16:36 rdbss.sys fffff880`04118000 fffff880`04169000 0x00051000 0x4a5bc219 14/07/2009 00:24:09 nsiproxy.sys fffff880`04169000 fffff880`04175000 0x0000c000 0x4a5bc15e 14/07/2009 00:21:02 mssmbios.sys fffff880`04175000 fffff880`04180000 0x0000b000 0x4a5bc3be 14/07/2009 00:31:10 discache.sys fffff880`04180000 fffff880`0418f000 0x0000f000 0x4a5bc52e 14/07/2009 00:37:18 csc.sys fffff880`04280000 fffff880`04303000 0x00083000 0x4a5bc22a 14/07/2009 00:24:26 dfsc.sys fffff880`04303000 fffff880`04321000 0x0001e000 0x4db78623 27/04/2011 03:57:39 blbdrive.sys fffff880`04321000 fffff880`04332000 0x00011000 0x4a5bc4df 14/07/2009 00:35:59 tunnel.sys fffff880`04332000 fffff880`04358000 0x00026000 0x4a5bccc1 14/07/2009 01:09:37 intelppm.sys fffff880`04358000 fffff880`0436e000 0x00016000 0x4a5bc0fd 14/07/2009 00:19:25 nvlddmkm.sys fffff880`0fe34000 fffff880`10b52000 0x00d1e000 0x4f4e68c4 29/02/2012 19:04:52 nvBridge.kmd fffff880`10b52000 fffff880`10b53180 0x00001180 0x4d27c482 08/01/2011 02:57:22 dxgkrnl.sys fffff880`04450000 fffff880`04544000 0x000f4000 0x4d3fa1a0 26/01/2011 05:22:56 dxgmms1.sys fffff880`04544000 fffff880`0458a000 0x00046000 0x4d3fa174 26/01/2011 05:22:12 usbuhci.sys fffff880`0458a000 fffff880`04597000 0x0000d000 0x4d8c0a8f 25/03/2011 04:22:55 USBPORT.SYS fffff880`04597000 fffff880`045ed000 0x00056000 0x4d8c0a97 25/03/2011 04:23:03 usbehci.sys fffff880`045ed000 fffff880`045fe000 0x00011000 0x4d8c0a91 25/03/2011 04:22:57 HDAudBus.sys fffff880`04400000 fffff880`04424000 0x00024000 0x4a5bcbf5 14/07/2009 01:06:13 1394ohci.sys fffff880`10b54000 fffff880`10b92000 0x0003e000 0x4a5bcc30 14/07/2009 01:07:12 Rt64win7.sys fffff880`10b92000 fffff880`10bc4000 0x00032000 0x49a65b0d 26/02/2009 10:04:13 i8042prt.sys fffff880`04424000 fffff880`04442000 0x0001e000 0x4a5bc11d 14/07/2009 00:19:57 kbdclass.sys fffff880`10bc4000 fffff880`10bd3000 0x0000f000 0x4a5bc116 14/07/2009 00:19:50 VMkbd.sys fffff880`04442000 fffff880`0444d000 0x0000b000 0x4b5a836f 23/01/2010 06:04:47 serenum.sys fffff880`10bd3000 fffff880`10bdf000 0x0000c000 0x4a5bcaa1 14/07/2009 01:00:33 av1shsvl.SYS fffff880`0436e000 fffff880`043b3000 0x00045000 0x4a5cf4d7 14/07/2009 22:12:55 wmiacpi.sys fffff880`10bdf000 fffff880`10be8000 0x00009000 0x4a5bc3b6 14/07/2009 00:31:02 CompositeBus.sys fffff880`10be8000 fffff880`10bf8000 0x00010000 0x4a5bcaa1 14/07/2009 01:00:33 AgileVpn.sys fffff880`0fe00000 fffff880`0fe16000 0x00016000 0x4a5bccf0 14/07/2009 01:10:24 rasl2tp.sys fffff880`043b3000 fffff880`043d7000 0x00024000 0x4a5bcce3 14/07/2009 01:10:11 ndistapi.sys fffff880`0fe16000 fffff880`0fe22000 0x0000c000 0x4a5bccd8 14/07/2009 01:10:00 ndiswan.sys fffff880`04200000 fffff880`0422f000 0x0002f000 0x4a5bcce3 14/07/2009 01:10:11 raspppoe.sys fffff880`0422f000 fffff880`0424a000 0x0001b000 0x4a5bcce9 14/07/2009 01:10:17 raspptp.sys fffff880`0424a000 fffff880`0426b000 0x00021000 0x4a5bccea 14/07/2009 01:10:18 rassstp.sys fffff880`043d7000 fffff880`043f1000 0x0001a000 0x4a5bccf1 14/07/2009 01:10:25 tapoas.sys fffff880`0fe22000 fffff880`0fe2f000 0x0000d000 0x4c3a627f 12/07/2010 01:31:59 tap0901.sys fffff880`043f1000 fffff880`043fe000 0x0000d000 0x4b22da33 12/12/2009 00:48:03 rdpbus.sys fffff880`0426b000 fffff880`04276000 0x0000b000 0x4a5bceaa 14/07/2009 01:17:46 mouclass.sys fffff880`0418f000 fffff880`0419e000 0x0000f000 0x4a5bc116 14/07/2009 00:19:50 swenum.sys fffff880`0444d000 fffff880`0444e480 0x00001480 0x4a5bca92 14/07/2009 01:00:18 ks.sys fffff880`0419e000 fffff880`041e1000 0x00043000 0x4b8f37d9 04/03/2010 05:32:25 umbus.sys fffff880`041e1000 fffff880`041f3000 0x00012000 0x4a5bcc20 14/07/2009 01:06:56 vpcusb.sys fffff880`04000000 fffff880`0401d000 0x0001d000 0x4ab97ab7 23/09/2009 02:32:39 usbrpm.sys fffff880`0401d000 fffff880`0402c000 0x0000f000 0x4a5bd2c2 14/07/2009 01:35:14 USBD.SYS fffff880`045fe000 fffff880`045fff00 0x00001f00 0x4d8c0a8b 25/03/2011 04:22:51 vmnetadapter.sys fffff880`10bf8000 fffff880`10c00000 0x00008000 0x4a800ce5 10/08/2009 13:04:53 VMNET.SYS fffff880`04276000 fffff880`04280000 0x0000a000 0x4a800ce2 10/08/2009 13:04:50 vpchbus.sys fffff880`0402c000 fffff880`04068000 0x0003c000 0x4ab97ab0 23/09/2009 02:32:32 usbhub.sys fffff880`04c26000 fffff880`04c80000 0x0005a000 0x4d8c0aaa 25/03/2011 04:23:22 NDProxy.SYS fffff880`04c80000 fffff880`04c95000 0x00015000 0x4a5bccdd 14/07/2009 01:10:05 HdAudio.sys fffff880`04c95000 fffff880`04cf1000 0x0005c000 0x4a5bcc23 14/07/2009 01:06:59 portcls.sys fffff880`04cf1000 fffff880`04d2e000 0x0003d000 0x4a5bcc03 14/07/2009 01:06:27 drmk.sys fffff880`04d2e000 fffff880`04d50000 0x00022000 0x4a5bd8e5 14/07/2009 02:01:25 ksthunk.sys fffff880`04d50000 fffff880`04d55200 0x00005200 0x4a5bca93 14/07/2009 01:00:19 win32k.sys fffff960`000c0000 fffff960`003d4000 0x00314000 0x00000000 Dxapi.sys fffff880`04d56000 fffff880`04d62000 0x0000c000 0x4a5bc574 14/07/2009 00:38:28 udfs.sys fffff880`04d62000 fffff880`04db6000 0x00054000 0x4a5bc1f9 14/07/2009 00:23:37 monitor.sys fffff880`04db6000 fffff880`04dc4000 0x0000e000 0x4a5bc58c 14/07/2009 00:38:52 TSDDD.dll fffff960`004c0000 fffff960`004ca000 0x0000a000 0x00000000 hidusb.sys fffff880`04dc4000 fffff880`04dd2000 0x0000e000 0x4a5bcbfe 14/07/2009 01:06:22 HIDCLASS.SYS fffff880`04dd2000 fffff880`04deb000 0x00019000 0x4a5bcbfd 14/07/2009 01:06:21 HIDPARSE.SYS fffff880`04deb000 fffff880`04df3080 0x00008080 0x4a5bcbf9 14/07/2009 01:06:17 cdd.dll fffff960`00660000 fffff960`00687000 0x00027000 0x00000000 mouhid.sys fffff880`04c00000 fffff880`04c0d000 0x0000d000 0x4a5bca94 14/07/2009 01:00:20 luafv.sys fffff880`05a78000 fffff880`05a9b000 0x00023000 0x4a5bc295 14/07/2009 00:26:13 WudfPf.sys fffff880`05a9b000 fffff880`05abc000 0x00021000 0x4a5bcbd1 14/07/2009 01:05:37 crashdmp.sys fffff880`05abc000 fffff880`05aca000 0x0000e000 0x4a5bcabd 14/07/2009 01:01:01 dump_dumpata.sys fffff880`05aca000 fffff880`05ad6000 0x0000c000 0x4a5bc113 14/07/2009 00:19:47 dump_msahci.sys fffff880`05ad6000 fffff880`05ae1000 0x0000b000 0x4a5bcabd 14/07/2009 01:01:01 dump_dumpfve.sys fffff880`05ae1000 fffff880`05af4000 0x00013000 0x4a5bc18f 14/07/2009 00:21:51 vmnetbridge.sys fffff880`05af4000 fffff880`05b04000 0x00010000 0x4a800d26 10/08/2009 13:05:58 lltdio.sys fffff880`05b04000 fffff880`05b19000 0x00015000 0x4a5bcc92 14/07/2009 01:08:50 rspndr.sys fffff880`05b19000 fffff880`05b31000 0x00018000 0x4a5bcc92 14/07/2009 01:08:50 HTTP.sys fffff880`05b31000 fffff880`05bf9000 0x000c8000 0x4a5bc1a8 14/07/2009 00:22:16 bowser.sys fffff880`05a00000 fffff880`05a1e000 0x0001e000 0x4d6497da 23/02/2011 06:15:06 mpsdrv.sys fffff880`05a1e000 fffff880`05a36000 0x00018000 0x4a5bcc79 14/07/2009 01:08:25 mrxsmb.sys fffff880`05a36000 fffff880`05a63000 0x0002d000 0x4dc0bf1a 04/05/2011 03:51:06 mrxsmb10.sys fffff880`066ce000 fffff880`0671c000 0x0004e000 0x4e17c0a7 09/07/2011 03:44:55 mrxsmb20.sys fffff880`0671c000 fffff880`0673f000 0x00023000 0x4dc0bf19 04/05/2011 03:51:05 hcmon.sys fffff880`0673f000 fffff880`0674b000 0x0000c000 0x4b5a765b 23/01/2010 05:08:59 vmci.sys fffff880`0674b000 fffff880`06763000 0x00018000 0x4b5a6e03 23/01/2010 04:33:23 vmx86.sys fffff880`06896000 fffff880`0696c000 0x000d6000 0x4b5a8e0d 23/01/2010 06:50:05 MpNWMon.sys fffff880`0696c000 fffff880`0697c000 0x00010000 0x4d9cc7fb 06/04/2011 21:07:23 peauth.sys fffff880`06600000 fffff880`066a6000 0x000a6000 0x4a5bd8df 14/07/2009 02:01:19 secdrv.SYS fffff880`0697c000 fffff880`06987000 0x0000b000 0x4508052e 13/09/2006 14:18:38 srvnet.sys fffff880`06987000 fffff880`069b4000 0x0002d000 0x4dba2ca3 29/04/2011 04:12:35 tcpipreg.sys fffff880`069b4000 fffff880`069c6000 0x00012000 0x4a5bcccd 14/07/2009 01:09:49 vmnetuserif.sys fffff880`069c6000 fffff880`069d0000 0x0000a000 0x4b5a7a6b 23/01/2010 05:26:19 vstor2-mntapi10.sys fffff880`069d0000 fffff880`069dc000 0x0000c000 0x49e94462 18/04/2009 04:09:22 vstor2-ws60.sys fffff880`069dc000 fffff880`069e8000 0x0000c000 0x4ad39a52 12/10/2009 22:06:26 srv2.sys fffff880`06800000 fffff880`06867000 0x00067000 0x4dba2cb3 29/04/2011 04:12:51 srv.sys fffff880`06763000 fffff880`067f8000 0x00095000 0x4dba2cc1 29/04/2011 04:13:05 NisDrvWFP.sys fffff880`06867000 fffff880`0687f000 0x00018000 0x4d9cc855 06/04/2011 21:08:53 WinRing0x64.sys fffff880`0687f000 fffff880`06886000 0x00007000 0x488b26c1 26/07/2008 14:29:37 asyncmac.sys fffff880`0aa8f000 fffff880`0aa9a000 0x0000b000 0x4a5bcce5 14/07/2009 01:10:13 nvoclk64.sys fffff880`0aa9a000 fffff880`0aaaa000 0x00010000 0x4ab00e3d 15/09/2009 22:59:25 I'd apreciate any help because I'm well outside of my comfort zone.

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• Unstable DNS with bind

  - by yasser abd

  we have a Centos machine called jupiter, on which I have installed bind9, On every other machine the DNS is set to be the IP address of jupiter (192.168.2.101), as you can see in the output of the following command in windows >ipconfig /all Windows IP Configuration Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : mypcs Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . : Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Hybrid IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-1A-A0-AC-E4-CC DHCP Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes Link-local IPv6 Address . . . . . : fe80::c16d:3ae4:5907:30c4%8(Preferred) IPv4 Address. . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.98(Preferred) Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:26:11 AM Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Sunday, September 23, 2012 10:26:10 AM Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.1 DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.1 DHCPv6 IAID . . . . . . . . . . . : 201333408 DHCPv6 Client DUID. . . . . . . . : 00-01-00-01-16-3A-50-01-00-1A-A0-AC-E4-CC DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.2.101 192.168.2.1 192.168.2.1 NetBIOS over Tcpip. . . . . . . . : Enabled All machines can always nslookup one of the domain (mydomain.com) that is set in the jupiter's DNS server, you can see that in the output of nslookup on the same windows machine: >nslookup mydomain.com Server: UnKnown Address: 192.168.2.101 Name: mydomain.com Address: 192.168.2.100 The problem is, sometimes mydomain.com can not be pinged, here is the output of the ping on the same windows machine >ping mydomain.com Ping request could not find host mydomain.com. Please check the name and try again. This looks very random, and happens once in a while, so the machine can lookup the DNS records but can't ping it, nor can browse the website that is hosted on mydomain.com, which should resolve to 192.168.2.100 On a linux machine that has the same DNS settings, the output of dig command for mydomain is as follows: $ dig mydomain.com ; <<>> DiG 9.8.2rc1-RedHat-9.8.2-0.10.rc1.el6_3.2 <<>> mydomain.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 36090 ;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;mydomain.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: mydomain.com. 86400 IN A 192.168.2.100 ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: mydomain.com. 86400 IN NS jupiter. ;; ADDITIONAL SECTION: jupiter. 86400 IN A 192.168.2.101 ;; Query time: 1 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.2.101#53(192.168.2.101) ;; WHEN: Thu Sep 20 16:32:14 2012 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 83 We've never had the same problem on MACs, they always resolve mydomain.com Here is how I have defined mydomain.com on Bind9's configs on Jupiter, notice that the name of the machine on 192.168.2.100 is venus, so I have this file: /var/named/named.venus: $TTL 1D @ IN SOA jupiter. admin.ourcompany.com. ( 2003052800 ; serial 86400 ; refresh 300 ; retry 604800 ; expire 3600 ; minimum ) @ IN NS jupiter. @ IN A 192.168.2.100 * IN A 192.168.2.100 /var/named/zones/named.venus.zone zone "mydomain.com" IN {type master;file "/var/named/named.venus";allow-update {none;};}; One thing to note is that I haven't defined reverse DNS lookups, only the forward DNS lookups are defined in Bind9 configs, not sure if that's relevant or not. So my question is, why is this being so unstable? what could be the cause?

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• After connecting wlan0 to bridge interface (and then removing it), can't connect to AP

  - by gmonk

  I'm on a laptop running Debian Jessie with kernel 3.13-1-amd64; lspci shows that my wireless NIC + driver is 04:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Wireless 3160 (rev 83) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Dual Band Wireless-AC 3160 Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi This has been working without any problems, until I tried creating a bridge for lxc containers to use. I did the same thing as this person here: How-to set up a network bridge on a laptop for LXC use? -- and ended up having the same problem as this poster did, so I decided to "undo" my actions. This hasn't been successful. Actions taken so far: To configure the bridge: #> ip link add type veth #> iw dev wlan0 set 4addr on #> ifconfig veth0 up #> brctl addbr br0 #> brctl addif br0 wlan0 #> brctl addif br0 veth0 #> ifconfig br0 192.168.0.4/24 #> ifconfig wlan0 0.0.0.0 To "deconfigure": #> brctl delif br0 wlan0 #> brctl delif br0 veth0 #> iw dev wlan0 set 4addr off #> ifconfig veth0 down #> ifconfig wlan0 down #> ifconfig br0 down #> brctl delbr br0 Now, dmesg and /var/log/syslog show repeated attempts at connecting to the AP that was working before, which fail after authentication: May 27 09:16:01 myhostname kernel: [11350.757172] wlan0: authenticate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 May 27 09:16:01 myhostname kernel: [11350.759036] wlan0: send auth to 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (try 1/3) May 27 09:16:01 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: scanning -> authenticating May 27 09:16:01 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: Trying to associate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (SSID='myaccesspoint' freq=2437 MHz) May 27 09:16:01 myhostname kernel: [11350.762615] wlan0: authenticated May 27 09:16:01 myhostname kernel: [11350.762753] iwlwifi 0000:04:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP May 27 09:16:01 myhostname kernel: [11350.762755] iwlwifi 0000:04:00.0 wlan0: disabling VHT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP May 27 09:16:01 myhostname kernel: [11350.765080] wlan0: associate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (try 1/3) May 27 09:16:01 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: authenticating -> associating May 27 09:16:01 myhostname kernel: [11350.767474] wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (capab=0x411 status=12 aid=0) May 27 09:16:01 myhostname kernel: [11350.767476] wlan0: 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 denied association (code=12) May 27 09:16:01 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT bssid=00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 status_code=12 May 27 09:16:01 myhostname kernel: [11350.788475] wlan0: deauthenticating from 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 by local choice (reason=3) May 27 09:16:01 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: associating -> disconnected May 27 09:16:01 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: disconnected -> scanning May 27 09:16:02 myhostname dhclient: DHCPDISCOVER on wlan0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14 May 27 09:16:04 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: SME: Trying to authenticate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (SSID='myaccesspoint' freq=2437 MHz) May 27 09:16:04 myhostname kernel: [11354.559579] wlan0: authenticate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 May 27 09:16:04 myhostname kernel: [11354.561458] wlan0: send auth to 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (try 1/3) May 27 09:16:04 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: Trying to associate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (SSID='myaccesspoint' freq=2437 MHz) May 27 09:16:04 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: scanning -> associating May 27 09:16:04 myhostname kernel: [11354.563445] wlan0: authenticated May 27 09:16:04 myhostname kernel: [11354.563631] iwlwifi 0000:04:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP May 27 09:16:04 myhostname kernel: [11354.563633] iwlwifi 0000:04:00.0 wlan0: disabling VHT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP May 27 09:16:04 myhostname kernel: [11354.565727] wlan0: associate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (try 1/3) May 27 09:16:04 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: Associated with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 May 27 09:16:04 myhostname kernel: [11354.568091] wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=9) May 27 09:16:04 myhostname kernel: [11354.569030] wlan0: associated May 27 09:16:04 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: associating -> associated May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.978204] wlan0: deauthenticated from 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (Reason: 15) May 27 09:16:05 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 reason=15 May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.992729] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.995004] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated: May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.995005] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp) May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.995006] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.995007] cfg80211: (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.995007] cfg80211: (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.995008] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.995009] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:05 myhostname kernel: [11354.995010] cfg80211: (57240000 KHz - 63720000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 0 mBm) May 27 09:16:05 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: associated -> disconnected May 27 09:16:05 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: disconnected -> scanning May 27 09:16:09 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: SME: Trying to authenticate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (SSID='myaccesspoint' freq=2437 MHz) May 27 09:16:09 myhostname kernel: [11358.763968] wlan0: authenticate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 May 27 09:16:09 myhostname kernel: [11358.765796] wlan0: send auth to 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (try 1/3) May 27 09:16:09 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: scanning -> authenticating May 27 09:16:09 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: Trying to associate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (SSID='myaccesspoint' freq=2437 MHz) May 27 09:16:09 myhostname kernel: [11358.769957] wlan0: authenticated May 27 09:16:09 myhostname kernel: [11358.770102] iwlwifi 0000:04:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP May 27 09:16:09 myhostname kernel: [11358.770104] iwlwifi 0000:04:00.0 wlan0: disabling VHT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP May 27 09:16:09 myhostname kernel: [11358.770846] wlan0: associate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (try 1/3) May 27 09:16:09 myhostname kernel: [11358.773358] wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (capab=0x411 status=12 aid=0) May 27 09:16:09 myhostname kernel: [11358.773361] wlan0: 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 denied association (code=12) May 27 09:16:09 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: authenticating -> associating May 27 09:16:09 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-ASSOC-REJECT bssid=00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 status_code=12 May 27 09:16:09 myhostname kernel: [11358.802187] wlan0: deauthenticating from 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 by local choice (reason=3) May 27 09:16:09 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: associating -> disconnected May 27 09:16:09 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: disconnected -> scanning May 27 09:16:12 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: SME: Trying to authenticate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (SSID='myaccesspoint' freq=2437 MHz) May 27 09:16:12 myhostname kernel: [11362.573442] wlan0: authenticate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 May 27 09:16:12 myhostname kernel: [11362.575270] wlan0: send auth to 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (try 1/3) May 27 09:16:12 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: scanning -> authenticating May 27 09:16:12 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: Trying to associate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (SSID='myaccesspoint' freq=2437 MHz) May 27 09:16:12 myhostname kernel: [11362.580334] wlan0: authenticated May 27 09:16:12 myhostname kernel: [11362.580503] iwlwifi 0000:04:00.0 wlan0: disabling HT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP May 27 09:16:12 myhostname kernel: [11362.580516] iwlwifi 0000:04:00.0 wlan0: disabling VHT as WMM/QoS is not supported by the AP May 27 09:16:12 myhostname kernel: [11362.583508] wlan0: associate with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (try 1/3) May 27 09:16:12 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: authenticating -> associating May 27 09:16:12 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: Associated with 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 May 27 09:16:12 myhostname kernel: [11362.585908] wlan0: RX AssocResp from 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (capab=0x411 status=0 aid=9) May 27 09:16:12 myhostname kernel: [11362.586781] wlan0: associated May 27 09:16:12 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: associating -> associated May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.947693] wlan0: deauthenticated from 00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 (Reason: 15) May 27 09:16:13 myhostname wpa_supplicant[8946]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-DISCONNECTED bssid=00:18:f8:54:a3:d6 reason=15 May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.973461] cfg80211: Calling CRDA to update world regulatory domain May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.975673] cfg80211: World regulatory domain updated: May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.975675] cfg80211: (start_freq - end_freq @ bandwidth), (max_antenna_gain, max_eirp) May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.975676] cfg80211: (2402000 KHz - 2472000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.975677] cfg80211: (2457000 KHz - 2482000 KHz @ 40000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.975678] cfg80211: (2474000 KHz - 2494000 KHz @ 20000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.975678] cfg80211: (5170000 KHz - 5250000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.975679] cfg80211: (5735000 KHz - 5835000 KHz @ 80000 KHz), (N/A, 2000 mBm) May 27 09:16:13 myhostname kernel: [11362.975679] cfg80211: (57240000 KHz - 63720000 KHz @ 2160000 KHz), (N/A, 0 mBm) May 27 09:16:13 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: associated -> disconnected May 27 09:16:13 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: disconnected -> scanning May 27 09:16:14 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <warn> Activation (wlan0/wireless): association took too long. May 27 09:16:14 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): device state change: config -> failed (reason 'no-secrets') [50 120 7] May 27 09:16:14 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> Marking connection 'Auto myaccesspoint' invalid. May 27 09:16:14 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <warn> Activation (wlan0) failed for connection 'Auto myaccesspoint' May 27 09:16:14 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): device state change: failed -> disconnected (reason 'none') [120 30 0] May 27 09:16:14 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): deactivating device (reason 'none') [0] May 27 09:16:14 myhostname NetworkManager[13992]: <info> (wlan0): supplicant interface state: scanning -> disconnected The things that jump out at me are "deauthenticating ... by local choice( reason=3)" and the lines that contain "(reason=15)". I've tried various fixes: iwconfig wlan0 power off killing wpa_supplicant connecting with iwconfig + dhclient instead of gnome's network -manager explicitly configuring wlan0 in /etc/network/interfaces creating a /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf file ...but nothing seems to work. I'm not sure what I did wrong, or what step I've skipped in trying to get wlan0 back as a non-bridged device -- I removed it from the bridge and then deleted the bridge itself. Any ideas?

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• InternalsVisibleTo attribute and security vulnerability

  - by Sergey Litvinov

  I found one issue with InternalsVisibleTo attribute usage. The idea of InternalsVisibleTo attribute to allow some other assemblies to use internal classes\methods of this assembly. To make it work you need sign your assemblies. So, if other assemblies isn't specified in main assembly and if they have incorrect public key, then they can't use Internal members. But the issue in Reflection Emit type generation. For example, we have CorpLibrary1 assembly and it has such class: public class TestApi { internal virtual void DoSomething() { Console.WriteLine("Base DoSomething"); } public void DoApiTest() { // some internal logic // ... // call internal method DoSomething(); } } This assembly is marked with such attribute to allow another CorpLibrary2 to make inheritor for that TestAPI and override behaviour of DoSomething method. [assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("CorpLibrary2, PublicKey=0024000004800000940000000602000000240000525341310004000001000100434D9C5E1F9055BF7970B0C106AAA447271ECE0F8FC56F6AF3A906353F0B848A8346DC13C42A6530B4ED2E6CB8A1E56278E664E61C0D633A6F58643A7B8448CB0B15E31218FB8FE17F63906D3BF7E20B9D1A9F7B1C8CD11877C0AF079D454C21F24D5A85A8765395E5CC5252F0BE85CFEB65896EC69FCC75201E09795AAA07D0")] The issue is that I'm able to override this internal DoSomething method and break class logic. My steps to do it: Generate new assembly in runtime via AssemblyBuilder Get AssemblyName from CorpLibrary1 and copy PublikKey to new assembly Generate new assembly that will inherit TestApi class As PublicKey and name of generated assembly is the same as in InternalsVisibleTo, then we can generate new DoSomething method that will override internal method in TestAPI assembly Then we have another assembly that isn't related to this CorpLibrary1 and can't use internal members. We have such test code in it: class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { var builder = new FakeBuilder(InjectBadCode, "DoSomething", true); TestApi fakeType = builder.CreateFake(); fakeType.DoApiTest(); // it will display: // Inject bad code // Base DoSomething Console.ReadLine(); } public static void InjectBadCode() { Console.WriteLine("Inject bad code"); } } And this FakeBuilder class has such code: /// /// Builder that will generate inheritor for specified assembly and will overload specified internal virtual method /// /// Target type public class FakeBuilder { private readonly Action _callback; private readonly Type _targetType; private readonly string _targetMethodName; private readonly string _slotName; private readonly bool _callBaseMethod; public FakeBuilder(Action callback, string targetMethodName, bool callBaseMethod) { int randomId = new Random((int)DateTime.Now.Ticks).Next(); _slotName = string.Format("FakeSlot_{0}", randomId); _callback = callback; _targetType = typeof(TFakeType); _targetMethodName = targetMethodName; _callBaseMethod = callBaseMethod; } public TFakeType CreateFake() { // as CorpLibrary1 can't use code from unreferences assemblies, we need to store this Action somewhere. // And Thread is not bad place for that. It's not the best place as it won't work in multithread application, but it's just a sample LocalDataStoreSlot slot = Thread.AllocateNamedDataSlot(_slotName); Thread.SetData(slot, _callback); // then we generate new assembly with the same nameand public key as target assembly trusts by InternalsVisibleTo attribute var newTypeName = _targetType.Name + "Fake"; var targetAssembly = Assembly.GetAssembly(_targetType); AssemblyName an = new AssemblyName(); an.Name = GetFakeAssemblyName(targetAssembly); // copying public key to new generated assembly var assemblyName = targetAssembly.GetName(); an.SetPublicKey(assemblyName.GetPublicKey()); an.SetPublicKeyToken(assemblyName.GetPublicKeyToken()); AssemblyBuilder assemblyBuilder = Thread.GetDomain().DefineDynamicAssembly(an, AssemblyBuilderAccess.RunAndSave); ModuleBuilder moduleBuilder = assemblyBuilder.DefineDynamicModule(assemblyBuilder.GetName().Name, true); // create inheritor for specified type TypeBuilder typeBuilder = moduleBuilder.DefineType(newTypeName, TypeAttributes.Public | TypeAttributes.Class, _targetType); // LambdaExpression.CompileToMethod can be used only with static methods, so we need to create another method that will call our Inject method // we can do the same via ILGenerator, but expression trees are more easy to use MethodInfo methodInfo = CreateMethodInfo(moduleBuilder); MethodBuilder methodBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineMethod(_targetMethodName, MethodAttributes.Public | MethodAttributes.Virtual); ILGenerator ilGenerator = methodBuilder.GetILGenerator(); // call our static method that will call inject method ilGenerator.EmitCall(OpCodes.Call, methodInfo, null); // in case if we need, then we put call to base method if (_callBaseMethod) { var baseMethodInfo = _targetType.GetMethod(_targetMethodName, BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance); // place this to stack ilGenerator.Emit(OpCodes.Ldarg_0); // call the base method ilGenerator.EmitCall(OpCodes.Call, baseMethodInfo, new Type[0]); // return ilGenerator.Emit(OpCodes.Ret); } // generate type, create it and return to caller Type cheatType = typeBuilder.CreateType(); object type = Activator.CreateInstance(cheatType); return (TFakeType)type; } /// /// Get name of assembly from InternalsVisibleTo AssemblyName /// private static string GetFakeAssemblyName(Assembly assembly) { var internalsVisibleAttr = assembly.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(InternalsVisibleToAttribute), true).FirstOrDefault() as InternalsVisibleToAttribute; if (internalsVisibleAttr == null) { throw new InvalidOperationException("Assembly hasn't InternalVisibleTo attribute"); } var ind = internalsVisibleAttr.AssemblyName.IndexOf(","); var name = internalsVisibleAttr.AssemblyName.Substring(0, ind); return name; } /// /// Generate such code: /// ((Action)Thread.GetData(Thread.GetNamedDataSlot(_slotName))).Invoke(); /// private LambdaExpression MakeStaticExpressionMethod() { var allocateMethod = typeof(Thread).GetMethod("GetNamedDataSlot", BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.Public); var getDataMethod = typeof(Thread).GetMethod("GetData", BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.Public); var call = Expression.Call(allocateMethod, Expression.Constant(_slotName)); var getCall = Expression.Call(getDataMethod, call); var convCall = Expression.Convert(getCall, typeof(Action)); var invokExpr = Expression.Invoke(convCall); var lambda = Expression.Lambda(invokExpr); return lambda; } /// /// Generate static class with one static function that will execute Action from Thread NamedDataSlot /// private MethodInfo CreateMethodInfo(ModuleBuilder moduleBuilder) { var methodName = "_StaticTestMethod_" + _slotName; var className = "_StaticClass_" + _slotName; TypeBuilder typeBuilder = moduleBuilder.DefineType(className, TypeAttributes.Public | TypeAttributes.Class); MethodBuilder methodBuilder = typeBuilder.DefineMethod(methodName, MethodAttributes.Static | MethodAttributes.Public); LambdaExpression expression = MakeStaticExpressionMethod(); expression.CompileToMethod(methodBuilder); var type = typeBuilder.CreateType(); return type.GetMethod(methodName, BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.Public); } } remarks about sample: as we need to execute code from another assembly, CorpLibrary1 hasn't access to it, so we need to store this delegate somewhere. Just for testing I stored it in Thread NamedDataSlot. It won't work in multithreaded applications, but it's just a sample. I know that we use Reflection to get private\internal members of any class, but within reflection we can't override them. But this issue is allows anyone to override internal class\method if that assembly has InternalsVisibleTo attribute. I tested it on .Net 3.5\4 and it works for both of them. How does it possible to just copy PublicKey without private key and use it in runtime? The whole sample can be found there - https://github.com/sergey-litvinov/Tests_InternalsVisibleTo UPDATE1: That test code in Program and FakeBuilder classes hasn't access to key.sn file and that library isn't signed, so it hasn't public key at all. It just copying it from CorpLibrary1 by using Reflection.Emit

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• Large Object Heap Fragmentation

  - by Paul Ruane

  The C#/.NET application I am working on is suffering from a slow memory leak. I have used CDB with SOS to try to determine what is happening but the data does not seem to make any sense so I was hoping one of you may have experienced this before. The application is running on the 64 bit framework. It is continuously calculating and serialising data to a remote host and is hitting the Large Object Heap (LOH) a fair bit. However, most of the LOH objects I expect to be transient: once the calculation is complete and has been sent to the remote host, the memory should be freed. What I am seeing, however, is a large number of (live) object arrays interleaved with free blocks of memory, e.g., taking a random segment from the LOH: 0:000> !DumpHeap 000000005b5b1000 000000006351da10 Address MT Size ... 000000005d4f92e0 0000064280c7c970 16147872 000000005e45f880 00000000001661d0 1901752 Free 000000005e62fd38 00000642788d8ba8 1056 <-- 000000005e630158 00000000001661d0 5988848 Free 000000005ebe6348 00000642788d8ba8 1056 000000005ebe6768 00000000001661d0 6481336 Free 000000005f214d20 00000642788d8ba8 1056 000000005f215140 00000000001661d0 7346016 Free 000000005f9168a0 00000642788d8ba8 1056 000000005f916cc0 00000000001661d0 7611648 Free 00000000600591c0 00000642788d8ba8 1056 00000000600595e0 00000000001661d0 264808 Free ... Obviously I would expect this to be the case if my application were creating long-lived, large objects during each calculation. (It does do this and I accept there will be a degree of LOH fragmentation but that is not the problem here.) The problem is the very small (1056 byte) object arrays you can see in the above dump which I cannot see in code being created and which are remaining rooted somehow. Also note that CDB is not reporting the type when the heap segment is dumped: I am not sure if this is related or not. If I dump the marked (<--) object, CDB/SOS reports it fine: 0:015> !DumpObj 000000005e62fd38 Name: System.Object[] MethodTable: 00000642788d8ba8 EEClass: 00000642789d7660 Size: 1056(0x420) bytes Array: Rank 1, Number of elements 128, Type CLASS Element Type: System.Object Fields: None The elements of the object array are all strings and the strings are recognisable as from our application code. Also, I am unable to find their GC roots as the !GCRoot command hangs and never comes back (I have even tried leaving it overnight). So, I would very much appreciate it if anyone could shed any light as to why these small (<85k) object arrays are ending up on the LOH: what situations will .NET put a small object array in there? Also, does anyone happen to know of an alternative way of ascertaining the roots of these objects? Thanks in advance. Update 1 Another theory I came up with late yesterday is that these object arrays started out large but have been shrunk leaving the blocks of free memory that are evident in the memory dumps. What makes me suspicious is that the object arrays always appear to be 1056 bytes long (128 elements), 128 * 8 for the references and 32 bytes of overhead. The idea is that perhaps some unsafe code in a library or in the CLR is corrupting the number of elements field in the array header. Bit of a long shot I know... Update 2 Thanks to Brian Rasmussen (see accepted answer) the problem has been identified as fragmentation of the LOH caused by the string intern table! I wrote a quick test application to confirm this: static void Main() { const int ITERATIONS = 100000; for (int index = 0; index < ITERATIONS; ++index) { string str = "NonInterned" + index; Console.Out.WriteLine(str); } Console.Out.WriteLine("Continue."); Console.In.ReadLine(); for (int index = 0; index < ITERATIONS; ++index) { string str = string.Intern("Interned" + index); Console.Out.WriteLine(str); } Console.Out.WriteLine("Continue?"); Console.In.ReadLine(); } The application first creates and dereferences unique strings in a loop. This is just to prove that the memory does not leak in this scenario. Obviously it should not and it does not. In the second loop, unique strings are created and interned. This action roots them in the intern table. What I did not realise is how the intern table is represented. It appears it consists of a set of pages -- object arrays of 128 string elements -- that are created in the LOH. This is more evident in CDB/SOS: 0:000> .loadby sos mscorwks 0:000> !EEHeap -gc Number of GC Heaps: 1 generation 0 starts at 0x00f7a9b0 generation 1 starts at 0x00e79c3c generation 2 starts at 0x00b21000 ephemeral segment allocation context: none segment begin allocated size 00b20000 00b21000 010029bc 0x004e19bc(5118396) Large object heap starts at 0x01b21000 segment begin allocated size 01b20000 01b21000 01b8ade0 0x00069de0(433632) Total Size 0x54b79c(5552028) ------------------------------ GC Heap Size 0x54b79c(5552028) Taking a dump of the LOH segment reveals the pattern I saw in the leaking application: 0:000> !DumpHeap 01b21000 01b8ade0 ... 01b8a120 793040bc 528 01b8a330 00175e88 16 Free 01b8a340 793040bc 528 01b8a550 00175e88 16 Free 01b8a560 793040bc 528 01b8a770 00175e88 16 Free 01b8a780 793040bc 528 01b8a990 00175e88 16 Free 01b8a9a0 793040bc 528 01b8abb0 00175e88 16 Free 01b8abc0 793040bc 528 01b8add0 00175e88 16 Free total 1568 objects Statistics: MT Count TotalSize Class Name 00175e88 784 12544 Free 793040bc 784 421088 System.Object[] Total 1568 objects Note that the object array size is 528 (rather than 1056) because my workstation is 32 bit and the application server is 64 bit. The object arrays are still 128 elements long. So the moral to this story is to be very careful interning. If the string you are interning is not known to be a member of a finite set then your application will leak due to fragmentation of the LOH, at least in version 2 of the CLR. In our application's case, there is general code in the deserialisation code path that interns entity identifiers during unmarshalling: I now strongly suspect this is the culprit. However, the developer's intentions were obviously good as they wanted to make sure that if the same entity is deserialised multiple times then only one instance of the identifier string will be maintained in memory.

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• Need help with workflow in Alfresco

  - by Scott Gartner

  Hello SO community, I haven't had any luck getting help in the Alfresco forums, and I'm hoping for more here. We are building an application based on Alfresco and jBPM and I have defined a workflow, but I have either defined it wrong or am missing something or there are bugs in Alfresco integration with jBPM and I need help figuring out which and fixing it. Here is the problem: I have an advanced workflow and I am trying to launch it from JavaScript. Here is the code I'm using to start the workflow: var nodeId = args.nodeid; var document = search.findNode("workspace://SpacesStore/" + nodeId); var workflowAction = actions.create("start-workflow"); workflowAction.parameters.workflowName = "jbpm$nmwf:MyWorkflow"; workflowAction.parameters["bpm:workflowDescription"] = "Please edit: " + document.name; workflowAction.parameters["bpm:assignees"] = [people.getPerson("admin"), people.getPerson("andyg")]; var futureDate = new Date(); futureDate.setDate(futureDate.getDate() + 7); workflowAction.parameters["bpm:workflowDueDate"] = futureDate; workflowAction.execute(document); This runs fine and e-mail sent from the start node's default transition fires just fine. However, when I go looking for the workflow in my task list it is not there, but it is in my completed task list. The default transition (the only transition) from the start node points at a task node which has four transitions. There are 8 tasks and 22 transitions in the workflow. When I use the workflow console to start the workflow and end the start task, it properly follows the default start node transition to the next task. The new task shows up in "show tasks" but does not show up in "show my tasks" (apparently because the task was marked completed for some reason, though it is not in the "end" node). The task is: task id: jbpm$111 , name: nmwf:submitInEditing , properties: 18 If I do "show transitions" it looks just as I would expect: path: jbpm$62-@ , node: In Editing , active: true task id: jbpm$111 , name: nmwf:submitInEditing, title: submitInEditing title , desc: submitInEditing description , properties: 18 transition id: Submit for Approval , title: Submit for Approval transition id: Request Copyediting Review , title: Request Copyediting Review transition id: Request Legal Review , title: Request Legal Review transition id: Request Review , title: Request Review I don't want to post the entire workflow as it's large, but here are the first two nodes: First the swimlanes: <swimlane name="initiator"></swimlane> <swimlane name="Content Providers"> <assignment actor-id="Content Providers"> <actor>#{bpm_assignees}</actor> </assignment> </swimlane> Now the nodes: <start-state name="start"> <task name="nmwf:submitTask" swimlane="initiator"/> <transition name="" to="In Editing"> <action> <runas>admin</runas> <script> /* Code to send e-mail that a new workflow was started. I get this e-mail. */ </script> </action> </transition> </start-state> <task-node name="In Editing"> <task name="nmwf:submitInEditing" swimlane="Content Providers" /> <!-- I put e-mail sending code in each of these transitions, but none are firing. --> <transition to="In Approval" name="Submit for Approval"></transition> <transition to="In Copyediting" name="Request Copyediting Review"></transition> <transition to="In Legal Review" name="Request Legal Review"></transition> <transition to="In Review" name="Request Review"></transition> </task-node> Here is the model for these two nodes: <type name="nmwf:submitTask"> <parent>bpm:startTask</parent> <mandatory-aspects> <aspect>bpm:assignees</aspect> </mandatory-aspects> </type> <type name="nmwf:submitInEditing"> <parent>bpm:workflowTask</parent> <mandatory-aspects> <aspect>bpm:assignees</aspect> </mandatory-aspects> </type> Here is a pseudo-log of running the workflow in the workflow console: :: deploy alfresco/extension/workflow/processdefinition.xml deployed definition id: jbpm$69 , name: jbpm$nmwf:MyWorkflow , title: nmwf:MyWorkflow , version: 28 :: var bpm:assignees* person admin,andyg set var {http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}assignees = [workspace://SpacesStore/73cf1b28-21aa-40ca-9dde-1cff492d0268, workspace://SpacesStore/03297e91-0b89-4db6-b764-5ada2d167424] :: var bpm:package package 1 set var {http://www.alfresco.org/model/bpm/1.0}package = workspace://SpacesStore/6e2bbbbd-b728-4403-be37-dfce55a83641 :: start bpm:assignees bpm:package started workflow id: jbpm$63 , def: nmwf:MyWorkflow path: jbpm$63-@ , node: start , active: true task id: jbpm$112 , name: nmwf:submitTask, title: submitTask title , desc: submitTask description , properties: 16 transition id: [default] , title: Task Done :: show transitions path: jbpm$63-@ , node: start , active: true task id: jbpm$112 , name: nmwf:submitTask, title: submitTask title , desc: submitTask description , properties: 17 transition id: [default] , title: Task Done :: end task jbpm$112 signal sent - path id: jbpm$63-@ path: jbpm$63-@ , node: In Editing , active: true task id: jbpm$113 , name: nmwf:submitInEditing, title: submitInEditing title , desc: submitInEditing description , properties: 17 transition id: Submit for Approval , title: Submit for Approval transition id: Request Copyediting Review , title: Request Copyediting Review transition id: Request Legal Review , title: Request Legal Review transition id: Request Review , title: Request Review :: show tasks task id: jbpm$113 , name: nmwf:submitInEditing , properties: 18 :: show my tasks admin: [there is no output here] I have been making the assumption that the bpm:assignees that I am setting before starting the workflow initially are getting passed to the first task node "In Editing". Clearly the assignees are on the task object and not on the workflow object. I added the assignees aspect to the start-state task so that it could hold them (after I had a problem; initially they were not there) and possibly they are still sitting there, but the start-state has ended before I even get control back from the web script (not that it would help if it wasn't ended, I need it to be in "In Editing" as the start-state is only used to log that the workflow was started). It has always confused me that the properties that I need to set on each task need to be requested before the task is entered (when you choose a transition you must provide the data for the next task before you can actually move to the next task as you have to validate that you have all of the required data first and then signal the transition). However, the code to start the workflow is asynchronous and therefore does not return either the started workflow or the current task (which in my case would be "In Editing"). So, either way you cannot set variables such as bpm:assignees and bpm:dueDate. I wonder if this is the problem with the user task list. I'm setting the assignees in the property list, but maybe those assignees are going to the start-state task and are not getting passed to the "In Editing" task? Note that this is my first jBPM workflow, so please don't assume I know what I'm doing. If you see something that looks off, it probably is and I just don't know it. Thanks in advance for any advice or help,

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• Simplemodal: four times on a page leads to extra "next" or "previous" button

  - by DDF

  We are experiencing a problem with each instance of the call to the simplemodal div class .basic-modal-content adding an extra next or previous button in the modal windows. We are using simplemodal in four places on a page using a common JS in the container (provided below) and a common CSS format for the modal windows. In one area we are using six "statements" in a window with a next and previous button. I would include a picture of the modal window but it's being disallowed by the system as I'm a first time poster to this forum. In the other three areas we are using three "biographies" in a similar window with the ability to see each of the three bios from each of modal windows. We are using a common Simplemodal JS script in the page which has the following code: <script> $(function() { $('a').each(function() { $(this).click(function() { $('#modal_' + this.id).modal({ overlayClose:true }); }); }); var num_divs = $('div.basic-modal-content').length; $('div.basic-modal-content').each(function(i) { /* if there is a previous div add a link to it */ if (i > 0) { /* get the ID for previous div */ var prev_id = $(this).prev('.basic-modal-content').attr('id'); /* add the link with click event */ $('<a href="#" class="simplemodal-container-prev"></a>') .click(function() { $.modal.close(); $('#' + prev_id).modal({overlayClose:true}); }) .appendTo($(this)); } /* if there is a next div add a link to it */ if (i < num_divs - 1) { /* get the ID for next div */ var next_id = $(this).next('.basic-modal-content').attr('id'); /* add the link with click event */ $('<a href="#" class="simplemodal-container-next"></a>') .click(function() { $.modal.close(); $('#' + next_id).modal({overlayClose:true}); }) .appendTo($(this)); } }); }); </script> and some CSS to create an image for each window that shows the progress bar through the ul/li list. The code to produce the above looks like this: <h1>Our HEADLINE</h1> <div id='basic-modal'> <ul> <li><a href='#' id='one'>TEXT 1</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='two'>TEXT 2</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='three'>TEXT 3</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='four'>TEXT 4</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='five'>TEXT 5</a></li> <li><a href='#' id='six'>TEXT 6</a></li> </ul> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_one"> <img src="link to modal_one.png" alt="progress bar"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>body text</p> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_two"> <img src="link to modal_two.png" alt="progress bar"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>body text</p> </div> <div> ... other divs 3 4 and 5 </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_six"> <img src="link to modal_six.png" alt="progress bar"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>body text</p> </div> </div> The ul/li structure works on the main page for the links. The modal windows allow one to browse through all of the six TEXTs. There is a common CSS style to the windows and a custom image in each of the modal windows derived from the "#modal_[number] img" CSS in the form of a progress bar. It should be noted that the first modal window in the first set of ul/li (the six) do not exhibit the extra previous button. Here is the relevant code from one of the three biographic links. You will note that the biographic links each have to have all three in this current configuration. <h4>Our HEADLINE</h4> <div class="bottom-widget-text"> <img src="picture" alt="not relevant to the simplemodal problem"/> <p>Read about person NUMBER 1 by clicking on the following link: <a href='#' id='seven' >Expand</a> </p> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_seven"> <img src="link to modal_seven.png" alt="portrait 1"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>BIOGRAPHY</p> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_eight"> <img src="link to modal_eight.png" alt="portrait 2"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>BIOGRAPHY</p> </div> <div class="basic-modal-content" id="modal_nine"> <img src="link to modal_nine.png" alt="portrait 3"/> <h3>headline text</h3> <p>BIOGRAPHY</p> </div> </div> Similarly the "biographies" open up from a different area of the page. The modal windows allow one to browse through all three of the BIOs. The bios use the SAME CSS style windows and a custom image in each of the modal windows derived from the "#modal_[number] img" CSS in the form of a portrait. Everything is working well except one thing: the first six windows have an extra next button that leads to an image of the close widow button only. Similarly, the BIOs pages have extra previous button that leads to the same "close button only" shown above. We want to maintain the same base CSS for the modal windows for this page. We want to keep the JS simple. The only behavior that is bad is the extra previous and next bottons that appear to be spurious. So is this a fix to the JS? Or do I have the instances of the modal windows too entangled? Perhaps there is a better method for having multiple instances of a simplemodal window on the same page? Or is the problem the "#" variable being common to each of the uses of the JS? Thanks in advance. DDF

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