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• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise

  - by John Murphy

  During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems.  Case in point, almost everyone has ordered from Amazon.com at one time or another. Our orders are as likely to be fulfilled by third parties as they are by Amazon itself. To deliver the order promptly and efficiently, Amazon has to send it to the right fulfillment location and know the availability in that location. It needs to be able to track status of the fulfillment and deal with exceptions. As a virtual enterprise, Amazon's operations, using thousands of trading partners, requires a very different approach to fulfillment than the traditional 'take an order and ship it from your own warehouse' model. Amazon had no choice but to develop a complex, expensive and custom solution to tackle this problem as there used to be no product solution available. Now, other companies who want to follow similar models have a better off-the-shelf choice -- Oracle Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO).  Consider how another of our customers is using our distributed orchestration solution. This major airplane manufacturer has a highly complex business and interacts regularly with the U.S. Government and major airlines. It sits in the middle of an intricate supply chain and needed to improve visibility across its many different entities. Oracle Fusion DOO gives the company an orchestration mechanism so it could improve quality, speed, flexibility, and consistency without requiring an organ transplant of these highly complex legacy systems. Many retailers face the challenge of dealing with brick and mortar, Web, and reseller channels. They all need to be knitted together into a virtual enterprise experience that is consistent for their customers. When a large U.K. grocer with a strong brick and mortar retail operation added an online business, they turned to Oracle Fusion DOO to bring these entities together. Disturbing the Peace with Acquisitions Quite often a company's ERP system is disrupted when it acquires a new company. An acquisition can inject a new set of processes and systems -- or even introduce an entirely new business like Sun's hardware did at Oracle. This challenge has been a driver for some of our DOO customers. A large power management company is using Oracle Fusion DOO to provide the flexibility to rapidly integrate additional products and services into its central fulfillment operation. The Flip Side of Fulfillment Meanwhile, we haven't ignored similar challenges on the supply side of the equation. Specifically, how to manage complex supply in a flexible way when there are multiple trading parties involved? How to manage the supply to suppliers? How to manage critical components that need to merge in a tier two or tier three supply chain? By investing in supply orchestration solutions for the virtual enterprise, we plan to give users better visibility into their network of suppliers to help them drive down costs. We also think this technology and full orchestration process can be applied to the financial side of organizations. An example is transactions that flow through complex internal structures to minimize tax exposure. We can help companies manage those transactions effectively by thinking about the internal organization as a virtual enterprise and bringing the same solution set to this internal challenge.  The Clear Front Runner No other company is investing in solving the virtual enterprise supply chain issues like Oracle is. Oracle is in a unique position to become the gold standard in this market space. We have the infrastructure of Oracle technology. We already have an Oracle Fusion DOO application which embraces the best of what's required in this area. And we're absolutely committed to extending our Fusion solution to other use cases and delivering even more business value.

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• Why Is Vertical Resolution Monitor Resolution so Often a Multiple of 360?

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  Stare at a list of monitor resolutions long enough and you might notice a pattern: many of the vertical resolutions, especially those of gaming or multimedia displays, are multiples of 360 (720, 1080, 1440, etc.) But why exactly is this the case? Is it arbitrary or is there something more at work? Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Trojandestroy recently noticed something about his display interface and needs answers: YouTube recently added 1440p functionality, and for the first time I realized that all (most?) vertical resolutions are multiples of 360. Is this just because the smallest common resolution is 480×360, and it’s convenient to use multiples? (Not doubting that multiples are convenient.) And/or was that the first viewable/conveniently sized resolution, so hardware (TVs, monitors, etc) grew with 360 in mind? Taking it further, why not have a square resolution? Or something else unusual? (Assuming it’s usual enough that it’s viewable). Is it merely a pleasing-the-eye situation? So why have the display be a multiple of 360? The Answer SuperUser contributor User26129 offers us not just an answer as to why the numerical pattern exists but a history of screen design in the process: Alright, there are a couple of questions and a lot of factors here. Resolutions are a really interesting field of psychooptics meeting marketing. First of all, why are the vertical resolutions on youtube multiples of 360. This is of course just arbitrary, there is no real reason this is the case. The reason is that resolution here is not the limiting factor for Youtube videos – bandwidth is. Youtube has to re-encode every video that is uploaded a couple of times, and tries to use as little re-encoding formats/bitrates/resolutions as possible to cover all the different use cases. For low-res mobile devices they have 360×240, for higher res mobile there’s 480p, and for the computer crowd there is 360p for 2xISDN/multiuser landlines, 720p for DSL and 1080p for higher speed internet. For a while there were some other codecs than h.264, but these are slowly being phased out with h.264 having essentially ‘won’ the format war and all computers being outfitted with hardware codecs for this. Now, there is some interesting psychooptics going on as well. As I said: resolution isn’t everything. 720p with really strong compression can and will look worse than 240p at a very high bitrate. But on the other side of the spectrum: throwing more bits at a certain resolution doesn’t magically make it better beyond some point. There is an optimum here, which of course depends on both resolution and codec. In general: the optimal bitrate is actually proportional to the resolution. So the next question is: what kind of resolution steps make sense? Apparently, people need about a 2x increase in resolution to really see (and prefer) a marked difference. Anything less than that and many people will simply not bother with the higher bitrates, they’d rather use their bandwidth for other stuff. This has been researched quite a long time ago and is the big reason why we went from 720×576 (415kpix) to 1280×720 (922kpix), and then again from 1280×720 to 1920×1080 (2MP). Stuff in between is not a viable optimization target. And again, 1440P is about 3.7MP, another ~2x increase over HD. You will see a difference there. 4K is the next step after that. Next up is that magical number of 360 vertical pixels. Actually, the magic number is 120 or 128. All resolutions are some kind of multiple of 120 pixels nowadays, back in the day they used to be multiples of 128. This is something that just grew out of LCD panel industry. LCD panels use what are called line drivers, little chips that sit on the sides of your LCD screen that control how bright each subpixel is. Because historically, for reasons I don’t really know for sure, probably memory constraints, these multiple-of-128 or multiple-of-120 resolutions already existed, the industry standard line drivers became drivers with 360 line outputs (1 per subpixel). If you would tear down your 1920×1080 screen, I would be putting money on there being 16 line drivers on the top/bottom and 9 on one of the sides. Oh hey, that’s 16:9. Guess how obvious that resolution choice was back when 16:9 was ‘invented’. Then there’s the issue of aspect ratio. This is really a completely different field of psychology, but it boils down to: historically, people have believed and measured that we have a sort of wide-screen view of the world. Naturally, people believed that the most natural representation of data on a screen would be in a wide-screen view, and this is where the great anamorphic revolution of the ’60s came from when films were shot in ever wider aspect ratios. Since then, this kind of knowledge has been refined and mostly debunked. Yes, we do have a wide-angle view, but the area where we can actually see sharply – the center of our vision – is fairly round. Slightly elliptical and squashed, but not really more than about 4:3 or 3:2. So for detailed viewing, for instance for reading text on a screen, you can utilize most of your detail vision by employing an almost-square screen, a bit like the screens up to the mid-2000s. However, again this is not how marketing took it. Computers in ye olden days were used mostly for productivity and detailed work, but as they commoditized and as the computer as media consumption device evolved, people didn’t necessarily use their computer for work most of the time. They used it to watch media content: movies, television series and photos. And for that kind of viewing, you get the most ‘immersion factor’ if the screen fills as much of your vision (including your peripheral vision) as possible. Which means widescreen. But there’s more marketing still. When detail work was still an important factor, people cared about resolution. As many pixels as possible on the screen. SGI was selling almost-4K CRTs! The most optimal way to get the maximum amount of pixels out of a glass substrate is to cut it as square as possible. 1:1 or 4:3 screens have the most pixels per diagonal inch. But with displays becoming more consumery, inch-size became more important, not amount of pixels. And this is a completely different optimization target. To get the most diagonal inches out of a substrate, you want to make the screen as wide as possible. First we got 16:10, then 16:9 and there have been moderately successful panel manufacturers making 22:9 and 2:1 screens (like Philips). Even though pixel density and absolute resolution went down for a couple of years, inch-sizes went up and that’s what sold. Why buy a 19″ 1280×1024 when you can buy a 21″ 1366×768? Eh… I think that about covers all the major aspects here. There’s more of course; bandwidth limits of HDMI, DVI, DP and of course VGA played a role, and if you go back to the pre-2000s, graphics memory, in-computer bandwdith and simply the limits of commercially available RAMDACs played an important role. But for today’s considerations, this is about all you need to know. Have something to add to the explanation? Sound off in the the comments. Want to read more answers from other tech-savvy Stack Exchange users? Check out the full discussion thread here.     

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• Why do we (really) program to interfaces?

  - by Kyle Burns

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

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• Webcast Q&A: Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter

  - by kellsey.ruppel

  Last Thursday we had the second webcast in our WebCenter in Action webcast series, "Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter, where customer Michael Chander from Qualcomm and Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal from Oracle Partner Keste shared how Oracle WebCenter is powering Qualcomm’s externally facing website and providing a seamless experience for their customers. In case you missed it, here's a recap of the Q&A.   Mike Chandler, Qualcomm Q: Did you run into any issues when integrating all of the different applications together?A: Definitely, our main challenges were in the area of user provisioning and security propagation, all the standard stuff you might expect when hooking up SSO for authentication and authorization. In addition, we spent several iterations getting the UI’s in sync. While everyone was given the same digital material to build too, each team interpreted and implemented it their own way. Initially as a user navigated, if you were looking for it, you could slight variations in color or font or width , stuff like that. So we had to pull all the developers responsible for the UI together and get pixel level agreement on a lot of things so we could ensure seamless transitions across applications. Q: What has been the biggest benefit your end users have seen?A: Wow, there have been several. An SSO enabled environment was huge a win for our users. The portal application that this replaced had not really been invested in by the business. With this project, we had full business participation and backing, and it really showed in some key areas like the shopping experience. For example, while ordering in the previous site, the items did not have any pictures or really usable descriptions. A tremendous amount of work was done to try and make the site more intuitive and user friendly. Site performance has also drastically improved thanks to new hardware, improved database design, and of course the fact that ADF has made great strides in runtime performance. Q: Was there any resistance internally when implementing the solution? If so, how did you overcome that?A: Within a large company, I’m sure there is always going to be competition for large projects, as there was here. Once we got through the technical analysis and settled on the technology choices, it was actually no resistance to implementing the solution. This project was fully driven by the business with the aim of long term growth. I can confidently say that the fact that this project was given the utmost importance by both the business and IT really help put down any resistance that you would typically see while implementing a new solution. Q: Given the performance, what do you estimate to be the top end capacity of the system? A:I think our top end capacity is really only limited by our hardware. I’m comfortable saying we could grow 10x on our current hardware, both in terms of transactions and users. We can easily spin up new JVM instances if needed. We already use less JVM’s than we had planned. In addition, ADF is doing a very good job with his connection pooling and application module pooling, so we see a very good ratio of users connected to the systems vs db connections, without impacting performace. Q: What's the overview or summary of feedback from the users interacting with the site?A: Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from both the business and our customers. They’re very happy with the new SSO environment , the new LAF, and the performance of the site. Of course, it’s not all roses. No matter what, there are always going to be people that don’t like the layout or the color scheme, etc. By and large though, customers are happy and the business is happy. Q: Can you describe the impressions about the site before and after the project within Qualcomm?A: Before the project, the site worked and people were using it, but most people were not happy with it. It was slow and tended to be a bit tempermental, for example a user would perform a transaction and the system would throw and unexpected error. The user could back up and retry the steps and things would work fine, so why didn’t work the first time?. From a UI perspective, we’d hear comments like it looked like it was built by a high school student.  Vince Casarez & Gourav Goyal, Keste Q: Did you run into any obstacles when implementing the solution?A: It's interesting some people call them "obstacles" on this project we just called them "dependencies".  There were both technical and business related dependencies that we had to work out. Mike points out the SSO dependencies and the coordination and synchronization between the teams to have a seamless login experience and a seamless end user experience.  There was also a set of dependencies on the User Acceptance testing to make sure that everyone understood the use cases for how the system would be used.  With a branching into a new market and trying to match a simple user experience as many consumer sites have today, there was always a tendency for the team members to provide their suggestions on how things could be simpler.  But with all the work up front on the user design and getting the business driving this set of experiences, this minimized the downstream suggestions that tend to distract a team.  In this case, all the work up front allowed us to enumerate the "dependencies" and keep the distractions to a minimum. Q: Was there a lot of custom work that needed to be done for this particular solution?A: The focus for this particular solution was really on the custom processes. The interesting thing is that with the data flows and the integration with applications, there are some pre-built integrations, but realistically for the process flow, we had to build those. The framework and tooling we used made things easier so we didn’t have to implement core functionality, like transitioning from screen to screen or from flow to flow. The design feature of Task Flows really helped speed the development and keep the component infrastructure in line with the dynamic processes.  Task flows and other elements like Skins are core to the infrastructure or technology stack of Oracle. This then allowed the team to center the project focus around the business flows and use cases to meet the core requirements and keep the project on time. Q: What do you think were the keys to success for rolling out WebCenter?A:  The 5 main keys to success were: 1) Sponsorship from the whole organization around this project from senior executive agreement, business owners driving functionality, and IT development alignment; 2) Upfront design planning and use case definition to clearly define the project scope and requirements; 3) Focussed development and project management aligned with the top level goals and drivers; 4) User acceptance and usability testing along the way to identify potential issues and direct resolution of the issues;  and 5) Constant prioritization of the issues for development to fix by the business.  It also helps to have great team chemistry and really smart people working on the project. If you missed the webcast, be sure to catch the replay to see a live demonstration of WebCenter in action!  Qualcomm Provides a Seamless Experience for Customers with Oracle WebCenter from Oracle WebCenter

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• WIF, ADFS 2 and WCF&ndash;Part 2: The Service

  - by Your DisplayName here!

  OK – so let’s first start with a simple WCF service and connect that to ADFS 2 for authentication. The service itself simply echoes back the user’s claims – just so we can make sure it actually works and to see how the ADFS 2 issuance rules emit claims for the service: [ServiceContract(Namespace = "urn:leastprivilege:samples")] public interface IService {     [OperationContract]     List<ViewClaim> GetClaims(); } public class Service : IService {     public List<ViewClaim> GetClaims()     {         var id = Thread.CurrentPrincipal.Identity as IClaimsIdentity;         return (from c in id.Claims                 select new ViewClaim                 {                     ClaimType = c.ClaimType,                     Value = c.Value,                     Issuer = c.Issuer,                     OriginalIssuer = c.OriginalIssuer                 }).ToList();     } } The ViewClaim data contract is simply a DTO that holds the claim information. Next is the WCF configuration – let’s have a look step by step. First I mapped all my http based services to the federation binding. This is achieved by using .NET 4.0’s protocol mapping feature (this can be also done the 3.x way – but in that scenario all services will be federated): <protocolMapping>   <add scheme="http" binding="ws2007FederationHttpBinding" /> </protocolMapping> Next, I provide a standard configuration for the federation binding: <bindings>   <ws2007FederationHttpBinding>     <binding>       <security mode="TransportWithMessageCredential">         <message establishSecurityContext="false">           <issuerMetadata address="https://server/adfs/services/trust/mex" />         </message>       </security>     </binding>   </ws2007FederationHttpBinding> </bindings> This binding points to our ADFS 2 installation metadata endpoint. This is all that is needed for svcutil (aka “Add Service Reference”) to generate the required client configuration. I also chose mixed mode security (SSL + basic message credential) for best performance. This binding also disables session – you can control that via the establishSecurityContext setting on the binding. This has its pros and cons. Something for a separate blog post, I guess. Next, the behavior section adds support for metadata and WIF: <behaviors>   <serviceBehaviors>     <behavior>       <serviceMetadata httpsGetEnabled="true" />       <federatedServiceHostConfiguration />     </behavior>   </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> The next step is to add the WIF specific configuration (in <microsoft.identityModel />). First we need to specify the key material that we will use to decrypt the incoming tokens. This is optional for web applications but for web services you need to protect the proof key – so this is mandatory (at least for symmetric proof keys, which is the default): <serviceCertificate>   <certificateReference storeLocation="LocalMachine"                         storeName="My"                         x509FindType="FindBySubjectDistinguishedName"                         findValue="CN=Service" /> </serviceCertificate> You also have to specify which incoming tokens you trust. This is accomplished by registering the thumbprint of the signing keys you want to accept. You get this information from the signing certificate configured in ADFS 2: <issuerNameRegistry type="...ConfigurationBasedIssuerNameRegistry">   <trustedIssuers>     <add thumbprint="d1 … db"           name="ADFS" />   </trustedIssuers> </issuerNameRegistry> The last step (promised) is to add the allowed audience URIs to the configuration – WCF clients use (by default – and we’ll come back to this) the endpoint address of the service: <audienceUris>   <add value="https://machine/soapadfs/service.svc" /> </audienceUris> OK – that’s it – now we have a basic WCF service that uses ADFS 2 for authentication. The next step will be to set-up ADFS to issue tokens for this service. Afterwards we can explore various options on how to use this service from a client. Stay tuned… (if you want to have a look at the full source code or peek at the upcoming parts – you can download the complete solution here)

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• Feedback on meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius

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

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• To SYNC or not to SYNC – Part 3

  - by AshishRay

  I can't believe it has been almost a year since my last blog post. I know, that's an absolute no-no in the blogosphere. And I know that "I have been busy" is not a good excuse. So - without trying to come up with an excuse - let me state this - my apologies for taking such a long time to write the next Part. Without further ado, here goes. This is Part 3 of a multi-part blog article where we are discussing various aspects of setting up Data Guard synchronous redo transport (SYNC). In Part 1 of this article, I debunked the myth that Data Guard SYNC is similar to a two-phase commit operation. In Part 2, I discussed the various ways that network latency may or may not impact a Data Guard SYNC configuration. In this article, I will talk in details regarding why Data Guard SYNC is a good thing. I will also talk about distance implications for setting up such a configuration. So, Why Good? Why is Data Guard SYNC a good thing? Because, at the end of the day, this gives you the assurance of zero data loss - it doesn’t matter what outage may befall your primary system. Befall! Boy, that sounds theatrical. But seriously - think about this - it minimizes your data risks. That’s a big deal. Whether you have an outage due to bad disks, faulty hardware components, hardware / software bugs, physical data corruptions, power failures, lightning that takes out significant part of your data center, fire that melts your assets, water leakage from the cooling system, human errors such as accidental deletion of online redo log files - it doesn’t matter - you can have that “Om - peace” look on your face and then you can failover to the standby system, without losing a single bit of data in your Oracle database. You will be a hero, as shown in this not so imaginary conversation: IT Manager: Well, what’s the status? You: John is doing the trace analysis on the storage array. IT Manager: So? How long is that gonna take? You: Well, he is stuck, waiting for a response from <insert your not-so-favorite storage vendor here>. IT Manager: So, no root cause yet? You: I told you, he is stuck. We have escalated with their Support, but you know how long these things take. IT Manager: Darn it - the site is down! You: Not really … IT Manager: What do you mean? You: John is stuck, but Sreeni has already done a failover to the Data Guard standby. IT Manager: Whoa, whoa - wait! Failover means we lost some data, why did you do this without letting the Business group know? You: We didn’t lose any data. Remember, we had set up Data Guard with SYNC? So now, any problems on the production – we just failover. No data loss, and we are up and running in minutes. The Business guys don’t need to know. IT Manager: Wow! Are we great or what!! You: I guess … Ok, so you get it - SYNC is good. But as my dear friend Larry Carpenter says, “TANSTAAFL”, or "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". Yes, of course - investing in Data Guard SYNC means that you have to invest in a low-latency network, you have to monitor your applications and database especially in peak load conditions, and you cannot under-provision your standby systems. But all these are good and necessary things, if you are supporting mission-critical apps that are supposed to be running 24x7. The peace of mind that this investment will give you is priceless, especially if you are serious about HA. How Far Can We Go? Someone may say at this point - well, I can’t use Data Guard SYNC over my coast-to-coast deployment. Most likely - true. So how far can you go? Well, we have customers who have deployed Data Guard SYNC over 300+ miles! Does this mean that you can also deploy over similar distances? Duh - no! I am going to say something here that most IT managers don’t like to hear - “It depends!” It depends on your application design, application response time / throughput requirements, network topology, etc. However, because of the optimal way we do SYNC, customers have been able to stretch Data Guard SYNC deployments over longer distances compared to traditional, storage-centric ways of doing this. The MAA Database 10.2 best practices paper Data Guard Redo Transport & Network Configuration, and Oracle Database 11.2 High Availability Best Practices Manual talk about some of these SYNC-related metrics. For example, a test deployment of Data Guard SYNC over 330 miles with 10ms latency showed an impact less than 5% for a busy OLTP application. Even if you can’t deploy Data Guard SYNC over your WAN distance, or if you already have an ASYNC standby located 1000-s of miles away, here’s another nifty way to boost your HA. Have a local standby, configured SYNC. How local is “local”? Again - it depends. One customer runs a local SYNC standby across the campus. Another customer runs it across 15 miles in another data center. Both of these customers are running Data Guard SYNC as their HA standard. If a localized outage affects their primary system, no problem! They have all the data available on the standby, to which they can failover. Very fast. In seconds. Wait - did I say “seconds”? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But you have to wait till the next blog article to find out more. I assure you tho’ that this time you won’t have to wait for another year for this.

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• laptop crashed: why?

  - by sds

  my linux (ubuntu 12.04) laptop crashed, and I am trying to figure out why. # last sds pts/4 :0 Tue Sep 4 10:01 still logged in sds pts/3 :0 Tue Sep 4 10:00 still logged in reboot system boot 3.2.0-29-generic Tue Sep 4 09:43 - 11:23 (01:40) sds pts/8 :0 Mon Sep 3 14:23 - crash (19:19) this seems to indicate a crash at 09:42 (= 14:23+19:19). as per another question, I looked at /var/log: auth.log: Sep 4 09:17:02 t520sds CRON[32744]: pam_unix(cron:session): session closed for user root Sep 4 09:43:17 t520sds lightdm: pam_unix(lightdm:session): session opened for user lightdm by (uid=0) no messages file syslog: Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819975] CPU0: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. kern.log: Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819969] CPU1: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819971] CPU2: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819974] CPU3: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:24:19 t520sds kernel: [219104.819975] CPU0: Package power limit normal Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: imklog 5.8.6, log source = /proc/kmsg started. Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpu I had a computation running until 9:24, but the system crashed 18 minutes later! kern.log has many pages of these: Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] total RAM covered: 8086M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 64K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 128K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 256K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 512K num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 1M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 2M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 4M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 8M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 16M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 38M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 32M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -16M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 64M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -16M Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 128M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 256M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 512M num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 1G num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: 0G Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 0.000000] *BAD*gran_size: 64K chunk_size: 2G num_reg: 10 lose cover RAM: -1G does this mean that my RAM is bad?! it also says Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 2.944123] EXT4-fs (sda1): INFO: recovery required on readonly filesystem Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 2.944126] EXT4-fs (sda1): write access will be enabled during recovery Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 3.088001] firewire_core: created device fw0: GUID f0def1ff8fbd7dff, S400 Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 8.929243] EXT4-fs (sda1): orphan cleanup on readonly fs Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 8.929249] EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 658984 ... Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343266] EXT4-fs (sda1): ext4_orphan_cleanup: deleting unreferenced inode 525343 Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343270] EXT4-fs (sda1): 56 orphan inodes deleted Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.343271] EXT4-fs (sda1): recovery complete Sep 4 09:43:16 t520sds kernel: [ 9.645799] EXT4-fs (sda1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: (null) does this mean my HD is bad? As per FaultyHardware, I tried smartctl -l selftest, which uncovered no errors: smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-3.2.0-30-generic] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Seagate Momentus 7200.4 Device Model: ST9500420AS Serial Number: 5VJE81YK LU WWN Device Id: 5 000c50 0440defe3 Firmware Version: 0003LVM1 User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB] Sector Size: 512 bytes logical/physical Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show] ATA Version is: 8 ATA Standard is: ATA-8-ACS revision 4 Local Time is: Mon Sep 10 16:40:04 2012 EDT SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED See vendor-specific Attribute list for marginal Attributes. General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity was completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed without error or no self-test has ever been run. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 0) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 109) minutes. Conveyance self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x103b) SCT Status supported. SCT Error Recovery Control supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 117 099 034 Pre-fail Always - 162843537 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 0 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 571 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 069 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 17210154023 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 174362787320258 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 097 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 020 Old_age Always - 571 184 End-to-End_Error 0x0032 100 100 099 Old_age Always - 0 187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 188 Command_Timeout 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1 189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 061 043 045 Old_age Always In_the_past 39 (0 11 44 26) 191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 84 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 20 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 2434 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 039 057 000 Old_age Always - 39 (0 15 0 0) 195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 041 041 000 Old_age Always - 162843537 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x000f 095 095 030 Pre-fail Always - 4540 (61955, 0) 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 254 Free_Fall_Sensor 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 4545 - SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay. Googling for the messages proved inconclusive, I can't even figure out whether the messages are routine or catastrophic. So, what do I do now?

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• The True Cost of a Solution

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  I had a Twitter chat recently with someone suggesting Oracle and SQL Server were losing out to OSS (Open Source Software) in the enterprise due to their issues with scaling or being too generic (one size fits all). I challenged that a bit, as my experience with enterprise sized clients has been different – adverse to OSS but receptive to an established vendor. The response I got was: Found it easier to influence change by showing how X can’t solve our problems or X is extremely costly to scale. Money talks. I think this is definitely the right approach for anyone pitching an alternate or alien technology as part of a solution: identify the issue, identify the solution, then present pros and cons including a cost/benefit analysis. What can happen though is we get tunnel vision and don’t present a full view of the costs associated with a solution. An “Acura”te Example (I’m so clever…) This is my dream vehicle, a Crystal Black Pearl coloured Acura MDX with the SH-AWD package! We’re a family of 4 (5 if my daughters ever get their wish of adding a dog), and I’ve always wanted a luxury type of vehicle, so this is a perfect replacement in a few years when our Rav 4 has hit the 8 – 10 year mark. MSRP – $62,890 But as we all know, that’s not *really* the cost of the vehicle. There’s taxes and fees added on, there’s the extended warranty if I choose to purchase it, there’s the finance rate that needs to be factored in… MSRP –   $62,890 Taxes –      $7,546 Warranty - $2,500 SubTotal – $72,936 Finance Charge – $ 1094.04 Grand Total – $74,030 Well! Glad we did that exercise – we discovered an extra $11k added on to the MSRP! Well now we have our true price…or do we? Lifetime of the Vehicle I’m expecting to have this vehicle for 7 – 10 years. While the hard cost of the vehicle is known and dealt with, the costs to run and maintain the vehicle are on top of this. I did some research, and here’s what I’ve found: Fuel and Mileage Gas prices are high as it is for regular fuel, but getting into an MDX will require that I *only* purchase premium fuel, which comes at a premium price. I need to expect my bill at the pump to be higher. Comparing the MDX to my 2007 Rav4 also shows I’ll be gassing up more often. The Rav4 has a city MPG of 21, while the MDX plummets to 16! The MDX does have a bigger fuel tank though, so all in all the number of times I hit the pumps might even out. Still, I estimate I’ll be spending approximately $8000 – $10000 more on gas over a 10 year period than my current Rav4. Service Options Limited Although I have options with my Toyota here in Winnipeg (we have 4 Toyota dealerships), I do go to my original dealer for any service work. Still, I like the fact that I have options. However, there’s only one Acura dealership in all of Winnipeg! So if, for whatever reason, I’m not satisfied with the level of service I’m stuck. Non Warranty Service Work Also let’s not forget that there’s a bulk of work required every year that is *not* covered under warranty – oil changes, tire rotations, brake pads, etc. I expect I’ll need to get new tires at the 5 years mark as well, which can easily be $1200 – $1500 (I just paid $1000 for new tires for the Rav4 and we’re at the 5 year mark). Now these aren’t going to be *new* costs that I’m not used to from our existing vehicles, but they should still be factored in. I’d budget $500/year, or $5000 over the 10 years I’ll own the vehicle. Final Assessment So let’s re-assess the true cost of my dream MDX: MSRP                    $62,890 Taxes                       $7,546 Warranty                 $2,500 Finance Charge         $1094 Gas                        $10,000 Service Work            $5000 Grand Total           $89,030 So now I have a better idea of 10 year cost overall, and I’ve identified some concerns with local service availability. And there’s now much more to consider over the original $62,890 price tag. Tying This Back to Technology Solutions The process that we just went through is no different than what organizations do when considering implementing a new system, technology, or technology based solution, within their environments. It’s easy to tout the short term cost savings of particular product/platform/technology in a vacuum. But its when you consider the wider impact that the true cost comes into play. Let’s create a scenario: A company is not happy with its current data reporting suite. An employee suggests moving to an open source solution. The selling points are: - Because its open source its free - The organization would have access to the source code so they could alter it however they wished - It provided features not available with the current reporting suite At first this sounds great to the management and executive, but then they start asking some questions and uncover more information: - The OSS product is built on a technology not used anywhere within the organization - There are no vendors offering product support for the OSS product - The OSS product requires a specific server platform to operate on, one that’s not standard in the organization All of a sudden, the true cost of implementing this solution is starting to become clearer. The company might save money on licensing costs, but their training costs would increase significantly – developers would need to learn how to develop in the technology the OSS solution was built on, IT staff must learn how to set up and maintain a new server platform within their existing infrastructure, and if a problem was found there was no vendor to contact for support. The true cost of implementing a “free” OSS solution is actually spinning up a project to implement it within the organization – no small cost. And that’s just the short-term cost. Now the organization must ensure they maintain trained staff who can make changes to the OSS reporting solution and IT staff that will stay knowledgeable in the new server platform. If those skills are very niche, then higher labour costs could be incurred if those people are hard to find or if trained employees use that knowledge as leverage for higher pay. Maybe a vendor exists that will contract out support, but then there are those costs to consider as well. And let’s not forget end-user training – in our example, anyone that runs reports will need to be trained on how to use the new system. Here’s the Point We still tend to look at software in an “off the shelf” kind of way. It’s very easy to say “oh, this product is better than vendor x’s product – and its free because its OSS!” but the reality is that implementing any new technology within an organization has a cost regardless of the retail price of the product. Training, integration, support – these are real costs that impact an organization and span multiple departments. Whether you’re pitching an improved business process, a new system, or a new technology, you need to consider the bigger picture costs of implementation. What you define as success (in our example, having better reporting functionality) might not be what others define as success if implementing your solution causes them issues. A true enterprise solution needs to consider the entire enterprise.

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• Slicing the EDG

  - by Antony Reynolds

  Different SOA Domain Configurations In this blog entry I would like to introduce three different configurations for a SOA environment.  I have omitted load balancers and OTD/OHS as they introduce a whole new round of discussion.  For each possible deployment architecture I have identified some of the advantages. Super Domain This is a single EDG style domain for everything needed for SOA/OSB.   It extends the standard EDG slightly but otherwise assumes a single “super” domain. This is basically the SOA EDG.  I have broken out JMS servers and Coherence servers to improve scalability and reduce dependencies. Key Points Separate JMS allows those servers to be kept up separately from rest of SOA Domain, allowing JMS clients to post messages even if rest of domain is unavailable. JMS servers are only used to host application specific JMS destinations, SOA/OSB JMS destinations remain in relevant SOA/OSB managed servers. Separate Coherence servers allow OSB cache to be offloaded from OSB servers. Use of Coherence by other components as a shared infrastructure data grid service. Coherence cluster may be managed by WLS but more likely run as a standalone Coherence cluster. Benefits Single Administration Point (1 Admin Server) Closely follows EDG with addition of application specific JMS servers and standalone Coherence servers for OSB caching and application specific caches. Coherence grid can be scaled independent of OSB/SOA. JMS queues provide for inter-application communication. Drawbacks Patching is an all or nothing affair. Startup time for SOA may be slow if large number of composites deployed. Multiple Domains This extends the EDG into multiple domains, allowing separate management and update of these domains.  I see this type of configuration quite often with customers, although some don't have OWSM, others don't have separate Coherence etc. SOA & BAM are kept in the same domain as little benefit is obtained by separating them. Key Points Separate JMS allows those servers to be kept up separately from rest of SOA Domain, allowing JMS clients to post messages even if other domains are unavailable. JMS servers are only used to host application specific JMS destinations, SOA/OSB JMS destinations remain in relevant SOA/OSB managed servers. Separate Coherence servers allow OSB cache to be offloaded from OSB servers. Use of Coherence by other components as a shared infrastructure data grid service. Coherence cluster may be managed by WLS but more likely run as a standalone Coherence cluster. Benefits Follows EDG but in separate domains and with addition of application specific JMS servers and standalone Coherence servers for OSB caching and application specific caches. Coherence grid can be scaled independent of OSB/SOA. JMS queues provide for inter-application communication. Patch lifecycle of OSB/SOA/JMS are no longer lock stepped. JMS may be kept running independently of other domains allowing applications to insert messages fro later consumption by SOA/OSB. OSB may be kept running independent of other domains, allowing service virtualization to continue independent of other domains availability. All domains use same OWSM policy store (MDS-WSM). Drawbacks Multiple domains to manage and configure. Multiple Admin servers (single view requires use of Grid Control) Multiple Admin servers/WSM clusters waste resources. Additional homes needed to enjoy benefits of separate patching. Cross domain trust needs setting up to simplify cross domain interactions. Startup time for SOA may be slow if large number of composites deployed. Shared Service Environment This model extends the previous multiple domain arrangement to provide a true shared service environment.This extends the previous model by allowing multiple additional SOA domains and/or other domains to take advantage of the shared services.  Only one non-shared domain is shown, but there could be multiple, allowing groups of applications to share patching independent of other application groups. Key Points Separate JMS allows those servers to be kept up separately from rest of SOA Domain, allowing JMS clients to post messages even if other domains are unavailable. JMS servers are only used to host application specific JMS destinations, SOA/OSB JMS destinations remain in relevant SOA/OSB managed servers. Separate Coherence servers allow OSB cache to be offloaded from OSB servers. Use of Coherence by other components as a shared infrastructure data grid service Coherence cluster may be managed by WLS but more likely run as a standalone Coherence cluster. Shared SOA Domain hosts Human Workflow Tasks BAM Common "utility" composites Single OSB domain provides "Enterprise Service Bus" All domains use same OWSM policy store (MDS-WSM) Benefits Follows EDG but in separate domains and with addition of application specific JMS servers and standalone Coherence servers for OSB caching and application specific caches. Coherence grid can be scaled independent of OSB/SOA. JMS queues provide for inter-application communication. Patch lifecycle of OSB/SOA/JMS are no longer lock stepped. JMS may be kept running independently of other domains allowing applications to insert messages fro later consumption by SOA/OSB. OSB may be kept running independent of other domains, allowing service virtualization to continue independent of other domains availability. All domains use same OWSM policy store (MDS-WSM). Supports large numbers of deployed composites in multiple domains. Single URL for Human Workflow end users. Single URL for BAM end users. Drawbacks Multiple domains to manage and configure. Multiple Admin servers (single view requires use of Grid Control) Multiple Admin servers/WSM clusters waste resources. Additional homes needed to enjoy benefits of separate patching. Cross domain trust needs setting up to simplify cross domain interactions. Human Workflow needs to be specially configured to point to shared services domain. Summary The alternatives in this blog allow for patching to have different impacts, depending on the model chosen.  Each organization must decide the tradeoffs for itself.  One extreme is to go for the shared services model and have one domain per SOA application.  This requires a lot of administration of the multiple domains.  The other extreme is to have a single super domain.  This makes the entire enterprise susceptible to an outage at the same time due to patching or other domain level changes.  Hopefully this blog will help your organization choose the right model for you.

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• Introduction to Human Workflow 11g

  - by agiovannetti

  Human Workflow is a component of SOA Suite just like BPEL, Mediator, Business Rules, etc. The Human Workflow component allows you to incorporate human intervention in a business process. You can use Human Workflow to create a business process that requires a manager to approve purchase orders greater than $10,000; or a business process that handles article reviews in which a group of reviewers need to vote/approve an article before it gets published. Human Workflow can handle the task assignment and routing as well as the generation of notifications to the participants. There are three common patterns or usages of Human Workflow: 1) Approval Scenarios: manage documents and other transactional data through approval chains . For example: approve expense report, vacation approval, hiring approval, etc. 2) Reviews by multiple users or groups: group collaboration and review of documents or proposals. For example, processing a sales quote which is subject to review by multiple people. 3) Case Management: workflows around work management or case management. For example, processing a service request. This could be routed to various people who all need to modify the task. It may also incorporate ad hoc routing which is unknown at design time. SOA 11g Human Workflow includes the following features: Assignment and routing of tasks to the correct users or groups. Deadlines, escalations, notifications, and other features required for ensuring the timely performance of a task. Presentation of tasks to end users through a variety of mechanisms, including a Worklist application. Organization, filtering, prioritization and other features required for end users to productively perform their tasks. Reports, reassignments, load balancing and other features required by supervisors and business owners to manage the performance of tasks. Human Workflow Architecture The Human Workflow component is divided into 3 modules: the service interface, the task definition and the client interface module. The Service Interface handles the interaction with BPEL and other components. The Client Interface handles the presentation of task data through clients like the Worklist application, portals and notification channels. The task definition module is in charge of managing the lifecycle of a task. Who should get the task assigned? What should happen next with the task? When must the task be completed? Should the task be escalated?, etc Stages and Participants When you create a Human Task you need to specify how the task is assigned and routed. The first step is to define the stages and participants. A stage is just a logical group. A participant can be a user, a group of users or an application role. The participants indicate the type of assignment and routing that will be performed. Stages can be sequential or in parallel. You can combine them to create any usage you require. See diagram below: Assignment and Routing There are different ways a task can be assigned and routed: Single Approver: task is assigned to a single user, group or role. For example, a vacation request is assigned to a manager. If the manager approves or rejects the request, the employee is notified with the decision. If the task is assigned to a group then once one of managers acts on it, the task is completed. Parallel : task is assigned to a set of people that must work in parallel. This is commonly used for voting. For example, a task gets approved once 50% of the participants approve it. You can also set it up to be a unanimous vote. Serial : participants must work in sequence. The most common scenario for this is management chain escalation. FYI (For Your Information) : task is assigned to participants who can view it, add comments and attachments, but can not modify or complete the task. Task Actions The following is the list of actions that can be performed on a task: Claim : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, then the task must be claimed first to be able to act on it. Escalate : if the participant is not able to complete a task, he/she can escalate it. The task is reassigned to his/her manager (up one level in a hierarchy). Pushback : the task is sent back to the previous assignee. Reassign :if the participant is a manager, he/she can delegate a task to his/her reports. Release : if a task is assigned to a group or multiple users, it can be released if the user who claimed the task cannot complete the task. Any of the other assignees can claim and complete the task. Request Information and Submit Information : use when the participant needs to supply more information or to request more information from the task creator or any of the previous assignees. Suspend and Resume :if a task is not relevant, it can be suspended. A suspension is indefinite. It does not expire until Resume is used to resume working on the task. Withdraw : if the creator of a task does not want to continue with it, for example, he wants to cancel a vacation request, he can withdraw the task. The business process determines what happens next. Renew : if a task is about to expire, the participant can renew it. The task expiration date is extended one week. Notifications Human Workflow provides a mechanism for sending notifications to participants to alert them of changes on a task. Notifications can be sent via email, telephone voice message, instant messaging (IM) or short message service (SMS). Notifications can be sent when the task status changes to any of the following: Assigned/renewed/delegated/reassigned/escalated Completed Error Expired Request Info Resume Suspended Added/Updated comments and/or attachments Updated Outcome Withdraw Other Actions (e.g. acquiring a task) Here is an example of an email notification: Worklist Application Oracle BPM Worklist application is the default user interface included in SOA Suite. It allows users to access and act on tasks that have been assigned to them. For example, from the Worklist application, a loan agent can review loan applications or a manager can approve employee vacation requests. Through the Worklist Application users can: Perform authorized actions on tasks, acquire and check out shared tasks, define personal to-do tasks and define subtasks. Filter tasks view based on various criteria. Work with standard work queues, such as high priority tasks, tasks due soon and so on. Work queues allow users to create a custom view to group a subset of tasks in the worklist, for example, high priority tasks, tasks due in 24 hours, expense approval tasks and more. Define custom work queues. Gain proxy access to part of another user's tasks. Define custom vacation rules and delegation rules. Enable group owners to define task dispatching rules for shared tasks. Collect a complete workflow history and audit trail. Use digital signatures for tasks. Run reports like Unattended tasks, Tasks productivity, etc. Here is a screenshoot of what the Worklist Application looks like. On the right hand side you can see the tasks that have been assigned to the user and the task's detail. References Introduction to SOA Suite 11g Human Workflow Webcast Note 1452937.2 Human Workflow Information Center Using the Human Workflow Service Component 11.1.1.6 Human Workflow Samples Human Workflow APIs Java Docs

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• OS8- AK8- The bad news...

  - by Steve Tunstall

  Ok I told you I would give you the bad news of AK8 to go along with all the cool new stuff, so here it is. It's not that bad, really, just things you need to be aware of. First, the 2013.1 code is being called OS8, AK8 and 2013.1 by different people. I mean different people INSIDE Oracle!! It was supposed to be easy, but it never is. So for the rest of this blog entry, I'm calling it AK8. AK8 is not compatible with the 7x10 series. Ever. The 7x10 series is not supported with AK8, and if you try to upgrade one, it will fail at the healthcheck. All 7x20 series, all of them regardless of age, are supported with AK8. Drive trays. Let's talk about drive trays and SAS cards. The older drive trays for the 7x20 series were called the "Riverwalk 2" or "DS2" trays. They were technically the "J4410" series JBODs that Sun used to sell a la carte before we stopped selling JBODs. Don't get me started on that, it still makes me mad. We used these for many years, and you can still buy them right now until December 15th, 2013, when they will no longer be sold. The DS2 tray only came as a 4u, 24 drive shelf. It held 3.5" drives, and you had a choice of 2TB, 3TB, 300GB or 600GB drives. The SAS HBA in the 7x20 series was called a "Thebe" card, with a part # of 7105394. The 7420, for example, came standard with two of these "Thebe" cards for connecting to the disk trays. Two Thebe cards could handle up to 12 trays, so one would add two more cards to go to 24 trays, or have up to six Thebe cards to handle 36 trays. This card was for external SAS only. It did not connect to the internal OS drives or the Readzillas, both of which used the internal SCSI controller of the server. These Riverwalk 2 trays ARE supported with AK8. You can upgrade your older 7420 or 7320, no problem, as-is. The much older Riverwalk 1 trays or J4400 trays are NOT supported by AK8. However, they were only used by the 7x10 series, and we already said that the 7x10 series was not supported. Here's where it gets tricky. Since last January, we have been selling the new style disk trays. We call them the "DE2-24P" and the "DE2-24C" trays. The "C" tray is for capacity drives, which are 3.5" 3TB or 4TB drives. The "P" trays are for performance drives, which are 2.5" 300GB and 900GB drives. These trays are NOT Riverwalk 2 trays, even though the "C" series may kind of look like it. Different manufacturer and different firmware. They are not new. Like I said, we've been selling them with the 7x20 series since last January. They are the only disk trays we will be selling going forward. Of course, AK8 supports them. So what's the problem? The problem is going to be for people who have to mix drive trays. Remember, your older 7x20 series has Thebe SAS2 HBAs. These have 2 SAS ports per card.  The new ZS3-2 and ZS3-4 systems, however, have the new "Thebe2" SAS2 HBAs. These Thebe2 cards have 4 ports per card. This is very cool, as we can now do more SAS channels with less cards. Instead of needing 4 SAS cards to grow to 24 trays like we did with the old Thebe cards, I can now do 24 trays with only 2 Thebe2 cards. This means more IO slots for fun things like Infiniband and 10G. So far, so good, right? These Thebe2 cards work with any disk tray. You can even mix older DS2 trays with the newer DE2 trays in the same system, as long as you have Thebe2 cards. Ah, there's your problem. You don't have Thebe2 cards in your old 7420, do you? Well, I told you the bad news wasn't that bad, right? We can take out your Thebe cards and replace them with Thebe2. You can then plug your older DS2 trays right back in, and also now get newer DE2 trays going forward. However, it's important that the trays are on different SAS channels. You can mix them in the same system, but not on the same channel. Ask your local SC if you need help with the new cable layout. By the way, the new ZS3-2 and ZS3-4 systems also include a new IO card called "Erie" cards. These are for INTERNAL SAS to the OS drives and the Readzillas. So those are now SAS2 instead of SATA like the older models. Yes, the Erie card uses an IO slot, but that's OK, because the Thebe2 cards allow us to use less SAS HBAs to grow the system, right? That's it. Not too much bad news and really not that bad. AK8 does not support the 7x10 series, and you may need new Thebe2 cards in your older systems if you want to add on newer DE2 trays. I think we can all agree that there are worse things out there. Like our Congress.   Next up.... More good news and cool AK8 tricks. Such as virtual NICS. 

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• Delight and Excite

  - by Applications User Experience

  Mick McGee, CEO & President, EchoUser Editor’s Note: EchoUser is a User Experience design firm in San Francisco and a member of the Oracle Usability Advisory Board. Mick and his staff regularly consult on Oracle Applications UX projects. Being part of a user experience design firm, we have the luxury of working with a lot of great people across many great companies. We get to help people solve their problems.  At least we used to. The basic design challenge is still the same; however, the goal is not necessarily to solve “problems” anymore; it is, “I want our products to delight and excite!” The question for us as UX professionals is how to design to those goals, and then how to assess them from a usability perspective. I’m not sure where I first heard “delight and excite” (A book? blog post? Facebook  status? Steve Jobs quote?), but now I hear these listed as user experience goals all the time. In particular, somewhat paradoxically, I routinely hear them in enterprise software conversations. And when asking these same enterprise companies what will make the project successful, we very often hear, “Make it like Apple.” In past days, it was “make it like Yahoo (or Amazon or Google“) but now Apple is the common benchmark. Steve Jobs and Apple were not secrets, but with Jobs’ passing and Apple becoming the world’s most valuable company in the last year, the impact of great design and experience is suddenly very widespread. In particular, users’ expectations have gone way up. Being an enterprise company is no shield to the general expectations that users now have, for all products. Designing a “Minimum Viable Product” The user experience challenge has historically been, to echo the words of Eric Ries (author of Lean Startup) , to create a “minimum viable product”: the proverbial, “make it good enough”. But, in our profession, the “minimum viable” part of that phrase has oftentimes, unfortunately, referred to the design and user experience. Technology typically dominated the focus of the biggest, most successful companies. Few have had the laser focus of Apple to also create and sell design and user experience alongside great technology. But now that Apple is the most valuable company in the world, copying their success is a common undertaking. Great design is now a premium offering that everyone wants, from the one-person startup to the largest companies, consumer and enterprise. This emerging business paradigm will have significant impact across the user experience design process and profession. One area that particularly interests me is, how are we going to evaluate these new emerging “delight and excite” experiences, which are further customized to each particular domain? How to Measure “Delight and Excite” Traditional usability measures of task completion rate, assists, time, and errors are still extremely useful in many situations; however, they are too blunt to offer much insight into emerging experiences “Satisfaction” is usually assessed in user testing, in roughly equivalent importance to the above objective metrics. Various surveys and scales have provided ways to measure satisfying UX, with whatever questions they include. However, to meet the demands of new business goals and keep users at the center of design and development processes, we have to explore new methods to better capture custom-experience goals and emotion-driven user responses. We have had success assessing custom experiences, including “delight and excite”, by employing a variety of user testing methods that tend to combine formative and summative techniques (formative being focused more on identifying usability issues and ways to improve design, and summative focused more on metrics). Our most successful tool has been one we’ve been using for a long time, Magnitude Estimation Technique (MET). But it’s not necessarily about MET as a measure, rather how it is created. Caption: For one client, EchoUser did two rounds of testing.  Each test was a mix of performing representative tasks and gathering qualitative impressions. Each user participated in an in-person moderated 1-on-1 session for 1 hour, using a testing set-up where they held the phone. The primary goal was to identify usability issues and recommend design improvements. MET is based on a definition of the desired experience, which users will then use to rate items of interest (usually tasks in a usability test). In other words, a custom experience definition needs to be created. This can then be used to measure satisfaction in accomplishing tasks; “delight and excite”; or anything else from strategic goals, user demands, or elsewhere. For reference, our standard MET definition in usability testing is: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well designed and productive an interface is to complete tasks.” Articulating the User Experience We’ve helped construct experience definitions for several clients to better match their business goals. One example is a modification of the above that was needed for a company that makes medical-related products: “User experience is your perception of how easy to use, well-designed, productive and safe an interface is for conducting tasks. ‘Safe’ is how free an environment (including devices, software, facilities, people, etc.) is from danger, risk, and injury.” Another example is from a company that is pushing hard to incorporate “delight” into their enterprise business line: “User experience is your perception of a product’s ease of use and learning, satisfaction and delight in design, and ability to accomplish objectives.” I find the last one particularly compelling in that there is little that identifies the experience as being for a highly technical enterprise application. That definition could easily be applied to any number of consumer products. We have gone further than the above, including “sexy” and “cool” where decision-makers insisted they were part of the desired experience. We also applied it to completely different experiences where the “interface” was, for example, riding public transit, the “tasks” were train rides, and we followed the participants through the train-riding journey and rated various aspects accordingly: “A good public transportation experience is a cost-effective way of reliably, conveniently, and safely getting me to my intended destination on time.” To construct these definitions, we’ve employed both bottom-up and top-down approaches, depending on circumstances. For bottom-up, user inputs help dictate the terms that best fit the desired experience (usually by way of cluster and factor analysis). Top-down depends on strategic, visionary goals expressed by upper management that we then attempt to integrate into product development (e.g., “delight and excite”). We like a combination of both approaches to push the innovation envelope, but still be mindful of current user concerns. Hopefully the idea of crafting your own custom experience, and a way to measure it, can provide you with some ideas how you can adapt your user experience needs to whatever company you are in. Whether product-development or service-oriented, nearly every company is ultimately providing a user experience. The Bottom Line Creating great experiences may have been popularized by Steve Jobs and Apple, but I’ll be honest, it’s a good feeling to be moving from “good enough” to “delight and excite,” despite the challenge that entails. In fact, it’s because of that challenge that we will expand what we do as UX professionals to help deliver and assess those experiences. I’m excited to see how we, Oracle, and the rest of the industry will live up to that challenge.

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• Making Those PanelBoxes Behave

  - by Duncan Mills

  I have a little problem to solve earlier this week - misbehaving <af:panelBox> components... What do I mean by that? Well here's the scenario, I have a page fragment containing a set of panelBoxes arranged vertically. As it happens, they are stamped out in a loop but that does not really matter. What I want to be able to do is to provide the user with a simple UI to close and open all of the panelBoxes in concert. This could also apply to showDetailHeader and similar items with a disclosed attrubute, but in this case it's good old panelBoxes.  Ok, so the basic solution to this should be self evident. I can set up a suitable scoped managed bean that the panelBoxes all refer to for their disclosed attribute state. Then the open all / close commandButtons in the UI can simply set the state of that bean for all the panelBoxes to pick up via EL on their disclosed attribute. Sound OK? Well that works basically without a hitch, but turns out that there is a slight problem and this is where the framework is attempting to be a little too helpful. The issue is that is the user manually discloses or hides a panelBox then that will override the value that the EL is setting. So for example. I start the page with all panelBoxes collapsed, all set by the EL state I'm storing on the session I manually disclose panelBox no 1. I press the Expand All button - all works as you would hope and all the panelBoxes are now disclosed, including of course panelBox 1 which I just expanded manually. Finally I press the Collapse All button and everything collapses except that first panelBox that I manually disclosed.  The problem is that the component remembers this manual disclosure and that overrides the value provided by the expression. If I change the viewId (navigate away and back) then the panelBox will start to behave again, until of course I touch it again! Now, the more astute amoungst you would think (as I did) Ah, sound like the MDS personalizaton stuff is getting in the way and the solution should simply be to set the dontPersist attribute to disclosed | ALL. Alas this does not fix the issue.  After a little noodling on the best way to approach this I came up with a solution that works well, although if you think of an alternative way do let me know. The principle is simple. In the disclosureListener for the panelBox I take a note of the clientID of the panelBox component that has been touched by the user along with the state. This all gets stored in a Map of Booleans in ViewScope which is keyed by clientID and stores the current disclosed state in the Boolean value.  The listener looks like this (it's held in a request scope backing bean for the page): public void handlePBDisclosureEvent(DisclosureEvent disclosureEvent) { String clientId = disclosureEvent.getComponent().getClientId(FacesContext.getCurrentInstance()); boolean state = disclosureEvent.isExpanded(); pbState.addTouchedPanelBox(clientId, state); } The pbState variable referenced here is a reference to the bean which will hold the state of the panelBoxes that lives in viewScope (recall that everything is re-set when the viewid is changed so keeping this in viewScope is just fine and cleans things up automatically). The addTouchedPanelBox() method looks like this: public void addTouchedPanelBox(String clientId, boolean state) { //create the cache if needed this is just a Map<String,Boolean> if (_touchedPanelBoxState == null) { _touchedPanelBoxState = new HashMap<String, Boolean>(); } // Simply put / replace _touchedPanelBoxState.put(clientId, state); } So that's the first part, we now have a record of every panelBox that the user has touched. So what do we do when the Collapse All or Expand All buttons are pressed? Here we do some JavaScript magic. Basically for each clientID that we have stored away, we issue a client side disclosure event from JavaScript - just as if the user had gone back and changed it manually. So here's the Collapse All button action: public String CloseAllAction() { submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); _uiManager.closeAllBoxes(); return null; }  The _uiManager.closeAllBoxes() method is just manipulating the master-state that all of the panelBoxes are bound to using EL. The interesting bit though is the line:  submitDiscloseOverride(pbState.getTouchedClientIds(true), false); To break that down, the first part is a call to that viewScoped state holder to ask for a list of clientIDs that need to be "tweaked": public String getTouchedClientIds(boolean targetState) { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); if (_touchedPanelBoxState != null && _touchedPanelBoxState.size() > 0) { for (Map.Entry<String, Boolean> entry : _touchedPanelBoxState.entrySet()) { if (entry.getValue() == targetState) { if (sb.length() > 0) { sb.append(','); } sb.append(entry.getKey()); } } } return sb.toString(); } You'll notice that this method only processes those panelBoxes that will be in the wrong state and returns those as a comma separated list. This is then processed by the submitDiscloseOverride() method: private void submitDiscloseOverride(String clientIdList, boolean targetDisclosureState) { if (clientIdList != null && clientIdList.length() > 0) { FacesContext fctx = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(); StringBuilder script = new StringBuilder(); script.append("overrideDiscloseHandler('"); script.append(clientIdList); script.append("',"); script.append(targetDisclosureState); script.append(");"); Service.getRenderKitService(fctx, ExtendedRenderKitService.class).addScript(fctx, script.toString()); } } This method constructs a JavaScript command to call a routine called overrideDiscloseHandler() in a script attached to the page (using the standard <af:resource> tag). That method parses out the list of clientIDs and sends the correct message to each one: function overrideDiscloseHandler(clientIdList, newState) { AdfLogger.LOGGER.logMessage(AdfLogger.INFO, "Disclosure Hander newState " + newState + " Called with: " + clientIdList); //Parse out the list of clientIds var clientIdArray = clientIdList.split(','); for (var i = 0; i < clientIdArray.length; i++){ var panelBox = flipPanel = AdfPage.PAGE.findComponentByAbsoluteId(clientIdArray[i]); if (panelBox.getComponentType() == "oracle.adf.RichPanelBox"){ panelBox.broadcast(new AdfDisclosureEvent(panelBox, newState)); } }  }  So there you go. You can see how, with a few tweaks the same code could be used for other components with disclosure that might suffer from the same problem, although I'd point out that the behavior I'm working around here us usually desirable. You can download the running example (11.1.2.2) from here. 

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• What's the best/most efficent way to create a semi-intelligent AI for a tic tac toe game?

  - by Link

  basically I am attempting to make a a efficient/smallish C game of Tic-Tac-Toe. I have implemented everything other then the AI for the computer so far. my squares are basically structs in an array with an assigned value based on the square. For example s[1].value = 1; therefore it's a x, and then a value of 3 would be a o. My question is whats the best way to create a semi-decent game playing AI for my tic-tac-toe game? I don't really want to use minimax, since It's not what I need. So how do I avoid a a lot of if statments and make it more efficient. Here is the rest of my code: #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <string.h> #include <time.h> struct state{ // defined int state; // 0 is tie, 1 is user loss, 2 is user win, 3 is ongoing game int moves; }; struct square{ // one square of the board int value; // 1 is x, 3 is o char sign; // no space used }; struct square s[9]; //set up the struct struct state gamestate = {0,0}; //nothing void setUpGame(){ // setup the game int i = 0; for(i = 0; i < 9; i++){ s[i].value = 0; s[i].sign = ' '; } gamestate.moves=0; printf("\nHi user! You're \"x\"! I'm \"o\"! Good Luck :)\n"); } void displayBoard(){// displays the game board printf("\n %c | %c | %c\n", s[6].sign, s[7].sign, s[8].sign); printf("-----------\n"); printf(" %c | %c | %c\n", s[3].sign, s[4].sign, s[5].sign); printf("-----------\n"); printf(" %c | %c | %c\n\n", s[0].sign, s[1].sign, s[2].sign); } void getHumanMove(){ // get move from human int i; while(1){ printf(">>:"); char line[255]; // input the move to play fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin); while(sscanf(line, "%d", &i) != 1) { //1 match of defined specifier on input line printf("Sorry, that's not a valid move!\n"); fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin); } if(s[i-1].value != 0){printf("Sorry, That moves already been taken!\n\n");continue;} break; } s[i-1].value = 1; s[i-1].sign = 'x'; gamestate.moves++; } int sum(int x, int y, int z){return(x*y*z);} void getCompMove(){ // get the move from the computer } void checkWinner(){ // check the winner int i; for(i = 6; i < 9; i++){ // check cols if((sum(s[i].value,s[i-3].value,s[i-6].value)) == 8){printf("The Winner is o!\n");gamestate.state=1;} if((sum(s[i].value,s[i-3].value,s[i-6].value)) == 1){printf("The Winner is x!\n");gamestate.state=2;} } for(i = 0; i < 7; i+=3){ // check rows if((sum(s[i].value,s[i+1].value,s[i+2].value)) == 8){printf("The Winner is o!\n");gamestate.state=1;} if((sum(s[i].value,s[i+1].value,s[i+2].value)) == 1){printf("The Winner is x!\n");gamestate.state=2;} } if((sum(s[0].value,s[4].value,s[8].value)) == 8){printf("The Winner is o!\n");gamestate.state=1;} if((sum(s[0].value,s[4].value,s[8].value)) == 1){printf("The Winner is x!\n");gamestate.state=2;} if((sum(s[2].value,s[4].value,s[6].value)) == 8){printf("The Winner is o!\n");gamestate.state=1;} if((sum(s[2].value,s[4].value,s[6].value)) == 1){printf("The Winner is x!\n");gamestate.state=2;} } void playGame(){ // start playing the game gamestate.state = 3; //set-up the gamestate srand(time(NULL)); int temp = (rand()%2) + 1; if(temp == 2){ // if two comp goes first temp = (rand()%2) + 1; if(temp == 2){ s[4].value = 2; s[4].sign = 'o'; gamestate.moves++; }else{ s[2].value = 2; s[2].sign = 'o'; gamestate.moves++; } } displayBoard(); while(gamestate.state == 3){ if(gamestate.moves<10); getHumanMove(); if(gamestate.moves<10); getCompMove(); checkWinner(); if(gamestate.state == 3 && gamestate.moves==9){ printf("The game is a tie :p\n"); break; } displayBoard(); } } int main(int argc, const char *argv[]){ printf("Welcome to Tic Tac Toe\nby The Elite Noob\nEnter 1-9 To play a move, standard numpad\n1 is bottom-left, 9 is top-right\n"); while(1){ // while game is being played printf("\nPress 1 to play a new game, or any other number to exit;\n>>:"); char line[255]; // input whether or not to play the game fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin); int choice; // user's choice about playing or not while(sscanf(line, "%d", &choice) != 1) { //1 match of defined specifier on input line printf("Sorry, that's not a valid option!\n"); fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin); } if(choice == 1){ setUpGame(); // set's up the game playGame(); // Play a Game }else {break;} // exit the application } printf("\nThank's For playing!\nHave a good Day!\n"); return 0; }

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• Why JSF Matters (to You)

  - by reza_rahman

        "Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge."                                                                                                    – Lao Tzu You may have noticed Thoughtworks recently crowned the likes AngularJS, etc imminent successors to server-side web frameworks. They apparently also deemed it necessary to single out JSF for righteous scorn. I have to say as I was reading the analysis I couldn't help but remember they also promptly jumped on the Ruby, Rails, Clojure, etc bandwagon a good few years ago seemingly similarly crowing these dynamic languages imminent successors to Java. I remember thinking then as I do now whether the folks at Thoughtworks are really that much smarter than me or if they are simply more prone to the Hipster buzz of the day. I'll let you make the final call on that one. I also noticed mention of "J2EE" in the context of JSF and had to wonder how up-to-date or knowledgeable the person writing the analysis actually was given that the term was basically retired almost a decade ago. There's one thing that I am absolutely sure about though - as a long time pretty happy user of JSF, I had no choice but to speak up on what I believe JSF offers. If you feel the same way, I would encourage you to support the team behind JSF whose hard work you may have benefited from over the years. True to his outspoken character PrimeFaces lead Cagatay Civici certainly did not mince words making the case for the JSF ecosystem - his excellent write-up is well worth a read. He specifically pointed out the practical problems in going whole hog with bare metal JavaScript, CSS, HTML for many development teams. I'll admit I had to smile when I read his closing sentence as well as the rather cheerful comments to the post from actual current JSF/PrimeFaces users that are apparently supposed to be on a gloomy death march. In a similar vein, OmniFaces developer Arjan Tijms did a great job pointing out the fact that despite the extremely competitive server-side Java Web UI space, JSF seems to manage to always consistently come out in either the number one or number two spot over many years and many data sources - do give his well-written message in the JAX-RS user forum a careful read. I don't think it's really reasonable to expect this to be the case for so many years if JSF was not at least a capable if not outstanding technology. If fact if you've ever wondered, Oracle itself is one of the largest JSF users on the planet. As Oracle's Shay Shmeltzer explains in a recent JSF Central interview, many of Oracle's strategic products such as ADF, ADF Mobile and Fusion Applications itself is built on JSF. There are well over 3,000 active developers working on these codebases. I don't think anyone can think of a more compelling reason to make sure that a technology is as effective as possible for practical development under real world conditions. Standing on the shoulders of the above giants, I feel like I can be pretty brief in making my own case for JSF: JSF is a powerful abstraction that brings the original Smalltalk MVC pattern to web development. This means cutting down boilerplate code to the bare minimum such that you really can think of just writing your view markup and then simply wire up some properties and event handlers on a POJO. The best way to see what this really means is to compare JSF code for a pretty small case to other approaches. You should then multiply the additional work for the typical enterprise project to try to understand what the productivity trade-offs are. This is reason alone for me to personally never take any other approach seriously as my primary web UI solution unless it can match the sheer productivity of JSF. Thanks to JSF's focus on components from the ground-up JSF has an extremely strong ecosystem that includes projects like PrimeFaces, RichFaces, OmniFaces, ICEFaces and of course ADF Faces/Mobile. These component libraries taken together constitute perhaps the largest widget set ever developed and optimized for a single web UI technology. To begin to grasp what this really means, just briefly browse the excellent PrimeFaces showcase and think about the fact that you can readily use the widgets on that showcase by just using some simple markup and knowing near to nothing about AJAX, JavaScript or CSS. JSF has the fair and legitimate advantage of being an open vendor neutral standard. This means that no single company, individual or insular clique controls JSF - openness, transparency, accountability, plurality, collaboration and inclusiveness is virtually guaranteed by the standards process itself. You have the option to choose between compatible implementations, escape any form of lock-in or even create your own compatible implementation! As you might gather from the quote at the top of the post, I am not a fan of crystal ball gazing and certainly don't want to engage in it myself. Who knows? However far-fetched it may seem maybe AngularJS is the only future we all have after all. If that is the case, so be it. Unlike what you might have been told, Java EE is about choice at heart and it can certainly work extremely well as a back-end for AngularJS. Likewise, you are also most certainly not limited to just JSF for working with Java EE - you have a rich set of choices like Struts 2, Vaadin, Errai, VRaptor 4, Wicket or perhaps even the new action-oriented web framework being considered for Java EE 8 based on the work in Jersey MVC... Please note that any views expressed here are my own only and certainly does not reflect the position of Oracle as a company.

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• What's new in EJB 3.2 ? - Java EE 7 chugging along!

  - by arungupta

  EJB 3.1 added a whole ton of features for simplicity and ease-of-use such as @Singleton, @Asynchronous, @Schedule, Portable JNDI name, EJBContainer.createEJBContainer, EJB 3.1 Lite, and many others. As part of Java EE 7, EJB 3.2 (JSR 345) is making progress and this blog will provide highlights from the work done so far. This release has been particularly kept small but include several minor improvements and tweaks for usability. More features in EJB.Lite Asynchronous session bean Non-persistent EJB Timer service This also means these features can be used in embeddable EJB container and there by improving testability of your application. Pruning - The following features were made Proposed Optional in Java EE 6 and are now made optional. EJB 2.1 and earlier Entity Bean Component Contract for CMP and BMP Client View of an EJB 2.1 and earlier Entity Bean EJB QL: Query Language for CMP Query Methods JAX-RPC-based Web Service Endpoints and Client View The optional features are moved to a separate document and as a result EJB specification is now split into Core and Optional documents. This allows the specification to be more readable and better organized. Updates and Improvements Transactional lifecycle callbacks in Stateful Session Beans, only for CMT. In EJB 3.1, the transaction context for lifecyle callback methods (@PostConstruct, @PreDestroy, @PostActivate, @PrePassivate) are defined as shown. @PostConstruct @PreDestroy @PrePassivate @PostActivate Stateless Unspecified Unspecified N/A N/A Stateful Unspecified Unspecified Unspecified Unspecified Singleton Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type N/A N/A In EJB 3.2, stateful session bean lifecycle callback methods can opt-in to be transactional. These methods are then executed in a transaction context as shown. @PostConstruct @PreDestroy @PrePassivate @PostActivate Stateless Unspecified Unspecified N/A N/A Stateful Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type Singleton Bean's transaction management type Bean's transaction management type N/A N/A For example, the following stateful session bean require a new transaction to be started for @PostConstruct and @PreDestroy lifecycle callback methods. @Statefulpublic class HelloBean {   @PersistenceContext(type=PersistenceContextType.EXTENDED)   private EntityManager em;    @TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRES_NEW)   @PostConstruct   public void init() {        myEntity = em.find(...);   }   @TransactionAttribute(TransactionAttributeType.REQUIRES_NEW)    @PostConstruct    public void destroy() {        em.flush();    }} Notice, by default the lifecycle callback methods are not transactional for backwards compatibility. They need to be explicitly opt-in to be made transactional. Opt-out of passivation for stateful session bean - If your stateful session bean needs to stick around or it has non-serializable field then the bean can be opt-out of passivation as shown. @Stateful(passivationCapable=false)public class HelloBean {    private NonSerializableType ref = ... . . .} Simplified the rules to define all local/remote views of the bean. For example, if the bean is defined as: @Statelesspublic class Bean implements Foo, Bar {    . . .} where Foo and Bar have no annotations of their own, then Foo and Bar are exposed as local views of the bean. The bean may be explicitly marked @Local as @Local@Statelesspublic class Bean implements Foo, Bar {    . . .} then this is the same behavior as explained above, i.e. Foo and Bar are local views. If the bean is marked @Remote as: @Remote@Statelesspublic class Bean implements Foo, Bar {    . . .} then Foo and Bar are remote views. If an interface is marked @Local or @Remote then each interface need to be explicitly marked explicitly to be exposed as a view. For example: @Remotepublic interface Foo { . . . }@Statelesspublic class Bean implements Foo, Bar {    . . .} only exposes one remote interface Foo. Section 4.9.7 from the specification provide more details about this feature. TimerService.getAllTimers is a newly added convenience API that returns all timers in the same bean. This is only for displaying the list of timers as the timer can only be canceled by its owner. Removed restriction to obtain the current class loader, and allow to use java.io package. This is handy if you want to do file access within your beans. JMS 2.0 alignment - A standard list of activation-config properties is now defined destinationLookup connectionFactoryLookup clientId subscriptionName shareSubscriptions Tons of other clarifications through out the spec. Appendix A provide a comprehensive list of changes since EJB 3.1. ThreadContext in Singleton is guaranteed to be thread-safe. Embeddable container implement Autocloseable. A complete replay of Enterprise JavaBeans Today and Tomorrow from JavaOne 2012 can be seen here (click on CON4654_mp4_4654_001 in Media). The specification is still evolving so the actual property or method names or their actual behavior may be different from the currently proposed ones. Are there any improvements that you'd like to see in EJB 3.2 ? The EJB 3.2 Expert Group would love to hear your feedback. An Early Draft of the specification is available. The latest version of the specification can always be downloaded from here. Java EE 7 Specification Status EJB Specification Project JIRA of EJB Specification JSR Expert Group Discussion Archive These features will start showing up in GlassFish 4 Promoted Builds soon.

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• ndd on Solaris 10

  - by user12620111

  This is mostly a repost of LaoTsao's Weblog with some tweaks. Last time that I tried to cut & paste directly off of his page, some of the XML was messed up. I run this from my MacBook. It should also work from your windows laptop if you use cygwin. ================If not already present, create a ssh key on you laptop================ # ssh-keygen -t rsa ================ Enable passwordless ssh from my laptop. Need to type in the root password for the remote machines. Then, I no longer need to type in the password when I ssh or scp from my laptop to servers. ================ #!/usr/bin/env bash for server in `cat servers.txt` do   echo root@$server   cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh root@$server "cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys" done ================ servers.txt ================ testhost1testhost2 ================ etc_system_addins ================ set rpcmod:clnt_max_conns=8 set zfs:zfs_arc_max=0x1000000000 set nfs:nfs3_bsize=131072 set nfs:nfs4_bsize=131072 ================ ndd-nettune.txt ================ #!/sbin/sh # # ident   "@(#)ndd-nettune.xml    1.0     01/08/06 SMI" . /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh . /lib/svc/share/net_include.sh # Make sure that the libraries essential to this stage of booting  can be found. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH echo "Performing Directory Server Tuning..." >> /tmp/smf.out # # Standard SuperCluster Tunables # /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_max_buf 2097152 /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_xmit_hiwat 1048576 /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_recv_hiwat 1048576 # Reset the library path now that we are past the critical stage unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH ================ ndd-nettune.xml ================ <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM "/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1"> <!-- ident "@(#)ndd-nettune.xml 1.0 04/09/21 SMI" --> <service_bundle type='manifest' name='SUNWcsr:ndd'>   <service name='network/ndd-nettune' type='service' version='1'>     <create_default_instance enabled='true' />     <single_instance />     <dependency name='fs-minimal' type='service' grouping='require_all' restart_on='none'>       <service_fmri value='svc:/system/filesystem/minimal' />     </dependency>     <dependency name='loopback-network' grouping='require_any' restart_on='none' type='service'>       <service_fmri value='svc:/network/loopback' />     </dependency>     <dependency name='physical-network' grouping='optional_all' restart_on='none' type='service'>       <service_fmri value='svc:/network/physical' />     </dependency>     <exec_method type='method' name='start' exec='/lib/svc/method/ndd-nettune' timeout_seconds='3' > </exec_method>     <exec_method type='method' name='stop'  exec=':true'                       timeout_seconds='3' > </exec_method>     <property_group name='startd' type='framework'>       <propval name='duration' type='astring' value='transient' />     </property_group>     <stability value='Unstable' />     <template>       <common_name>     <loctext xml:lang='C'> ndd network tuning </loctext>       </common_name>       <documentation>     <manpage title='ndd' section='1M' manpath='/usr/share/man' />       </documentation>     </template>   </service> </service_bundle> ================ system_tuning.sh ================ #!/usr/bin/env bash for server in `cat servers.txt` do   cat etc_system_addins | ssh root@$server "cat >> /etc/system"   scp ndd-nettune.xml root@${server}:/var/svc/manifest/site/ndd-nettune.xml   scp ndd-nettune.txt root@${server}:/lib/svc/method/ndd-nettune   ssh root@$server chmod +x /lib/svc/method/ndd-nettune   ssh root@$server svccfg validate /var/svc/manifest/site/ndd-nettune.xml   ssh root@$server svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/site/ndd-nettune.xml done

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• Java EE 7 Survey Results!

  - by reza_rahman

  On November 8th, the Java EE EG posted a survey to gather broad community feedback on a number of critical open issues. For reference, you can find the original survey here. We kept the survey open for about three weeks until November 30th. To our delight, over 1100 developers took time out of their busy lives to let their voices be heard! The results of the survey were sent to the EG on December 12th. The subsequent EG discussion is available here. The exact summary sent to the EG is available here. We would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one the individuals who took the survey. It is very appreciated, encouraging and worth it's weight in gold. In particular, I tried to capture just some of the high-quality, intelligent, thoughtful and professional comments in the summary to the EG. I highly encourage you to continue to stay involved, perhaps through the Adopt-a-JSR program. We would also like to sincerely thank java.net, JavaLobby, TSS and InfoQ for helping spread the word about the survey. Below is a brief summary of the results... APIs to Add to Java EE 7 Full/Web Profile The first question asked which of the four new candidate APIs (WebSocket, JSON-P, JBatch and JCache) should be added to the Java EE 7 Full and Web profile respectively. As the following graph shows, there was significant support for adding all the new APIs to the full profile: Support is relatively the weakest for Batch 1.0, but still good. A lot of folks saw WebSocket 1.0 as a critical technology with comments such as this one: "A modern web application needs Web Sockets as first class citizens" While it is clearly seen as being important, a number of commenters expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of a higher-level JSON data binding API as illustrated by this comment: "How come we don't have a Data Binding API for JSON" JCache was also seen as being very important as expressed with comments like: "JCache should really be that foundational technology on which other specs have no fear to depend on" The results for the Web Profile is not surprising. While there is strong support for adding WebSocket 1.0 and JSON-P 1.0 to the Web Profile, support for adding JCache 1.0 and Batch 1.0 is relatively weak. There was actually significant opposition to adding Batch 1. 0 (with 51.8% casting a 'No' vote). Enabling CDI by Default The second question asked was whether CDI should be enabled in Java EE environments by default. A significant majority of 73.3% developers supported enabling CDI, only 13.8% opposed. Comments such as these two reflect a strong general support for CDI as well as a desire for better Java EE alignment with CDI: "CDI makes Java EE quite valuable!" "Would prefer to unify EJB, CDI and JSF lifecycles" There is, however, a palpable concern around the performance impact of enabling CDI by default as exemplified by this comment: "Java EE projects in most cases use CDI, hence it is sensible to enable CDI by default when creating a Java EE application. However, there are several issues if CDI is enabled by default: scanning can be slow - not all libs use CDI (hence, scanning is not needed)" Another significant concern appears to be around backwards compatibility and conflict with other JSR 330 implementations like Spring: "I am leaning towards yes, however can easily imagine situations where errors would be caused by automatically activating CDI, especially in cases of backward compatibility where another DI engine (such as Spring and the like) happens to use the same mechanics to inject dependencies and in that case there would be an overlap in injections and probably an uncertain outcome" Some commenters such as this one attempt to suggest solutions to these potential issues: "If you have Spring in use and use javax.inject.Inject then you might get some unexpected behavior that could be equally confusing. I guess there will be a way to switch CDI off. I'm tempted to say yes but am cautious for this reason" Consistent Usage of @Inject The third question was around using CDI/JSR 330 @Inject consistently vs. allowing JSRs to create their own injection annotations. A slight majority of 53.3% developers supported using @Inject consistently across JSRs. 28.8% said using custom injection annotations is OK, while 18.0% were not sure. The vast majority of commenters were strongly supportive of CDI and general Java EE alignment with CDI as illistrated by these comments: "Dependency Injection should be standard from now on in EE. It should use CDI as that is the DI mechanism in EE and is quite powerful. Having a new JSR specific DI mechanism to deal with just means more reflection, more proxies. JSRs should also be constructed to allow some of their objects Injectable. @Inject @TransactionalCache or @Inject @JMXBean etc...they should define the annotations and stereotypes to make their code less procedural. Dog food it. If there is a shortcoming in CDI for a JSR fix it and we will all be grateful" "We're trying to make this a comprehensive platform, right? Injection should be a fundamental part of the platform; everything else should build on the same common infrastructure. Each-having-their-own is just a recipe for chaos and having to learn the same thing 10 different ways" Expanding the Use of @Stereotype The fourth question was about expanding CDI @Stereotype to cover annotations across Java EE beyond just CDI. A significant majority of 62.3% developers supported expanding the use of @Stereotype, only 13.3% opposed. A majority of commenters supported the idea as well as the theme of general CDI/Java EE alignment as expressed in these examples: "Just like defining new types for (compositions of) existing classes, stereotypes can help make software development easier" "This is especially important if many EJB services are decoupled from the EJB component model and can be applied via individual annotations to Java EE components. @Stateless is a nicely compact annotation. Code will not improve if that will have to be applied in the future as @Transactional, @Pooled, @Secured, @Singlethreaded, @...." Some, however, expressed concerns around increased complexity such as this commenter: "Could be very convenient, but I'm afraid if it wouldn't make some important class annotations less visible" Expanding Interceptor Use The final set of questions was about expanding interceptors further across Java EE... A very solid 96.3% of developers wanted to expand interceptor use to all Java EE components. 35.7% even wanted to expand interceptors to other Java EE managed classes. Most developers (54.9%) were not sure if there is any place that injection is supported that should not support interceptors. 32.8% thought any place that supports injection should also support interceptors. Only 12.2% were certain that there are places where injection should be supported but not interceptors. The comments reflected the diversity of opinions, generally supportive of interceptors: "I think interceptors are as fundamental as injection and should be available anywhere in the platform" "The whole usage of interceptors still needs to take hold in Java programming, but it is a powerful technology that needs some time in the Sun. Basically it should become part of Java SE, maybe the next step after lambas?" A distinct chain of thought separated interceptors from filters and listeners: "I think that the Servlet API already provides a rich set of possibilities to hook yourself into different Servlet container events. I don't find a need to 'pollute' the Servlet model with the Interceptors API"

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• Cisco ASA 5505 - L2TP over IPsec

  - by xraminx

  I have followed this document on cisco site to set up the L2TP over IPsec connection. When I try to establish a VPN to ASA 5505 from my Windows XP, after I click on "connect" button, the "Connecting ...." dialog box appears and after a while I get this error message: Error 800: Unable to establish VPN connection. The VPN server may be unreachable, or security parameters may not be configured properly for this connection. ASA version 7.2(4) ASDM version 5.2(4) Windows XP SP3 Windows XP and ASA 5505 are on the same LAN for test purposes. Edit 1: There are two VLANs defined on the cisco device (the standard setup on cisco ASA5505). - port 0 is on VLAN2, outside; - and ports 1 to 7 on VLAN1, inside. I run a cable from my linksys home router (10.50.10.1) to the cisco ASA5505 router on port 0 (outside). Port 0 have IP 192.168.1.1 used internally by cisco and I have also assigned the external IP 10.50.10.206 to port 0 (outside). I run a cable from Windows XP to Cisco router on port 1 (inside). Port 1 is assigned an IP from Cisco router 192.168.1.2. The Windows XP is also connected to my linksys home router via wireless (10.50.10.141). Edit 2: When I try to establish vpn, the Cisco device real time Log viewer shows 7 entries like this: Severity:5 Date:Sep 15 2009 Time: 14:51:29 SyslogID: 713904 Destination IP = 10.50.10.141, Decription: No crypto map bound to interface... dropping pkt Edit 3: This is the setup on the router right now. Result of the command: "show run" : Saved : ASA Version 7.2(4) ! hostname ciscoasa domain-name default.domain.invalid enable password HGFHGFGHFHGHGFHGF encrypted passwd NMMNMNMNMNMNMN encrypted names name 192.168.1.200 WebServer1 name 10.50.10.206 external-ip-address ! interface Vlan1 nameif inside security-level 100 ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 ! interface Vlan2 nameif outside security-level 0 ip address external-ip-address 255.0.0.0 ! interface Vlan3 no nameif security-level 50 no ip address ! interface Ethernet0/0 switchport access vlan 2 ! interface Ethernet0/1 ! interface Ethernet0/2 ! interface Ethernet0/3 ! interface Ethernet0/4 ! interface Ethernet0/5 ! interface Ethernet0/6 ! interface Ethernet0/7 ! ftp mode passive dns server-group DefaultDNS domain-name default.domain.invalid object-group service l2tp udp port-object eq 1701 access-list outside_access_in remark Allow incoming tcp/http access-list outside_access_in extended permit tcp any host WebServer1 eq www access-list outside_access_in extended permit udp any any eq 1701 access-list inside_nat0_outbound extended permit ip any 192.168.1.208 255.255.255.240 access-list inside_cryptomap_1 extended permit ip interface outside interface inside pager lines 24 logging enable logging asdm informational mtu inside 1500 mtu outside 1500 ip local pool PPTP-VPN 192.168.1.210-192.168.1.220 mask 255.255.255.0 icmp unreachable rate-limit 1 burst-size 1 asdm image disk0:/asdm-524.bin no asdm history enable arp timeout 14400 global (outside) 1 interface nat (inside) 0 access-list inside_nat0_outbound nat (inside) 1 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 static (inside,outside) tcp interface www WebServer1 www netmask 255.255.255.255 access-group outside_access_in in interface outside timeout xlate 3:00:00 timeout conn 1:00:00 half-closed 0:10:00 udp 0:02:00 icmp 0:00:02 timeout sunrpc 0:10:00 h323 0:05:00 h225 1:00:00 mgcp 0:05:00 mgcp-pat 0:05:00 timeout sip 0:30:00 sip_media 0:02:00 sip-invite 0:03:00 sip-disconnect 0:02:00 timeout sip-provisional-media 0:02:00 uauth 0:05:00 absolute http server enable http 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 inside no snmp-server location no snmp-server contact snmp-server enable traps snmp authentication linkup linkdown coldstart crypto ipsec transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_SHA esp-3des esp-sha-hmac crypto ipsec transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_SHA mode transport crypto ipsec transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_MD5 esp-3des esp-md5-hmac crypto ipsec transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_MD5 mode transport crypto map outside_map 1 match address inside_cryptomap_1 crypto map outside_map 1 set transform-set TRANS_ESP_3DES_MD5 crypto map outside_map interface inside crypto isakmp enable outside crypto isakmp policy 10 authentication pre-share encryption 3des hash md5 group 2 lifetime 86400 telnet timeout 5 ssh timeout 5 console timeout 0 dhcpd auto_config outside ! dhcpd address 192.168.1.2-192.168.1.33 inside dhcpd enable inside ! group-policy DefaultRAGroup internal group-policy DefaultRAGroup attributes dns-server value 192.168.1.1 vpn-tunnel-protocol IPSec l2tp-ipsec username myusername password FGHFGHFHGFHGFGFHF nt-encrypted tunnel-group DefaultRAGroup general-attributes address-pool PPTP-VPN default-group-policy DefaultRAGroup tunnel-group DefaultRAGroup ipsec-attributes pre-shared-key * tunnel-group DefaultRAGroup ppp-attributes no authentication chap authentication ms-chap-v2 ! ! prompt hostname context Cryptochecksum:a9331e84064f27e6220a8667bf5076c1 : end

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• Plesk 11: install Apache with SNI support

  - by Ueli

  If I try to update from standard Apache to Apache with SNI support with the Plesk installation program (example.com:8447), I get an error, that I have to remove apr-util-ldap-1.4.1-1.el5.x86_64 It's in german: Informationen über installierte Pakete abrufen... Installation started in background Datei wird heruntergeladen PSA_11.0.9/dist-rpm-CentOS-5-x86_64/build-11.0.9-cos5-x86_64.hdr.gz: 11%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..70%..81%..91%..100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen PSA_11.0.9/update-rpm-CentOS-5-x86_64/update-11.0.9-cos5-x86_64.hdr.gz: 10%..20%..30%..40%..50%..60%..70%..80%..90%..100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen PSA_11.0.9/thirdparty-rpm-CentOS-5-x86_64/thirdparty-11.0.9-cos5-x86_64.hdr.gz: 10%..26%..43%..77%..100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen BILLING_11.0.9/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-all-all/thirdparty-11.0.9-rhall-all.hdr.gz: 100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen BILLING_11.0.9/update-rpm-RedHat-all-all/update-11.0.9-rhall-all.hdr.gz: 100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen SITEBUILDER_11.0.10/thirdparty-rpm-RedHat-all-all/thirdparty-11.0.10-rhall-all.hdr.gz: 100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen SITEBUILDER_11.0.10/dist-rpm-RedHat-all-all/build-11.0.10-rhall-all.hdr.gz: 10%..22%..31%..41%..51%..65%..70%..80%..90%..100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen SITEBUILDER_11.0.10/update-rpm-RedHat-all-all/update-11.0.10-rhall-all.hdr.gz: 100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen APACHE_2.2.22/thirdparty-rpm-CentOS-5-x86_64/thirdparty-2.2.22-rh5-x86_64.hdr.gz: 19%..25%..35%..83%..93%..100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen APACHE_2.2.22/update-rpm-CentOS-5-x86_64/update-2.2.22-rh5-x86_64.hdr.gz: 100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen BILLING_11.0.9/dist-rpm-RedHat-all-all/build-11.0.9-rhall-all.hdr.gz: 11%..23%..31%..41%..52%..62%..73%..83%..91%..100% fertig. Datei wird heruntergeladen APACHE_2.2.22/dist-rpm-CentOS-5-x86_64/build-2.2.22-rh5-x86_64.hdr.gz: 36%..50%..100% fertig. Pakete, die installiert werden müssen, werden ermittelt. -> Error: Mit der Installation kann erst fortgefahren werden, wenn das Paket apr-util-ldap-1.4.1-1.el5.x86_64 vom System entfernt wird. Es wurden nicht alle Pakete installiert. Bitte beheben Sie dieses Problem und versuchen Sie, die Pakete erneut zu installieren. Wenn Sie das Problem nicht selbst beheben können, wenden Sie sich bitte an den technischen Support. - «Error: The installation can be continued only if the package apr-util-ldap-1.4.1-1.el5.x86_64 is removed from the system» But I can't uninstall apr-util-ldap-1.4.1-1.el5.x86_64 without removing a lot of important packages: Dependencies Resolved ========================================================================================================================================= Package Arch Version Repository Size ========================================================================================================================================= Removing: apr-util-ldap x86_64 1.4.1-1.el5 installed 9.0 k Removing for dependencies: SSHTerm noarch 0.2.2-10.12012310 installed 4.9 M awstats noarch 7.0-11122114.swsoft installed 3.5 M httpd x86_64 2.2.23-3.el5 installed 3.4 M mailman x86_64 3:2.1.9-6.el5_6.1 installed 34 M mod-spdy-beta x86_64 0.9.3.3-386 installed 2.4 M mod_perl x86_64 2.0.4-6.el5 installed 6.8 M mod_python x86_64 3.2.8-3.1 installed 1.2 M mod_ssl x86_64 1:2.2.23-3.el5 installed 179 k perl-Apache-ASP x86_64 2.59-0.93298 installed 543 k php53 x86_64 5.3.3-13.el5_8 installed 3.4 M php53-sqlite2 x86_64 5.3.2-11041315 installed 366 k plesk-core x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 79 M plesk-l10n noarch 11.0.9-cos5.build110120827.16 installed 21 M pp-sitebuilder noarch 11.0.10-38572.12072100 installed 181 M psa x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 473 k psa-awstats-configurator noarch 11.0.9-cos5.build110120606.19 installed 0.0 psa-backup-manager x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 8.6 M psa-backup-manager-vz x86_64 11.0.0-cos5.build110120123.10 installed 1.6 k psa-fileserver x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 364 k psa-firewall x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 550 k psa-health-monitor noarch 11.0.9-cos5.build110120606.19 installed 2.3 k psa-horde noarch 3.3.13-cos5.build110120606.19 installed 20 M psa-hotfix1-9.3.0 x86_64 9.3.0-cos5.build93100518.16 installed 23 k psa-imp noarch 4.3.11-cos5.build110120606.19 installed 12 M psa-ingo noarch 1.2.6-cos5.build110120606.19 installed 5.1 M psa-kronolith noarch 2.3.6-cos5.build110120606.19 installed 6.3 M psa-libxml-proxy x86_64 2.7.8-0.301910 installed 1.2 M psa-mailman-configurator x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 5.5 k psa-migration-agents x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 169 k psa-migration-manager x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 1.1 M psa-mimp noarch 1.1.4-cos5.build110120418.19 installed 2.9 M psa-miva x86_64 1:5.06-cos5.build1013111101.14 installed 4.5 M psa-mnemo noarch 2.2.5-cos5.build110120606.19 installed 4.1 M psa-mod-fcgid-configurator x86_64 2.0.0-cos5.build1013111101.14 installed 0.0 psa-mod_aclr2 x86_64 12021319-9e86c2f installed 8.1 k psa-mod_fcgid x86_64 2.3.6-12050315 installed 222 k psa-mod_rpaf x86_64 0.6-12021310 installed 7.7 k psa-passwd noarch 3.1.3-cos5.build1013111101.14 installed 3.7 M psa-php53-configurator x86_64 1.6.2-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 6.4 k psa-rubyrails-configurator x86_64 1.1.6-cos5.build1013111101.14 installed 0.0 psa-spamassassin x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 167 k psa-turba noarch 2.3.6-cos5.build110120606.19 installed 6.1 M psa-updates noarch 11.0.9-cos5.build110120704.10 installed 0.0 psa-vhost noarch 11.0.9-cos5.build110120606.19 installed 160 k psa-vpn x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 1.9 M psa-watchdog x86_64 11.0.9-cos5.build110120608.16 installed 2.9 M webalizer x86_64 2.01_10-30.1 installed 259 k Transaction Summary ========================================================================================================================================= Remove 48 Package(s) Reinstall 0 Package(s) Downgrade 0 Package(s) What should I do?

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• How to use BCDEdit to dual boot Windows installations?

  - by Ian Boyd

  What are the bcdedit commands necessary to setup dual boot between different installations of Windows?5 Background i recently installed Windows 8 onto a separate hard drive1. Now that Windows 8 in installed i want to dual-boot back to Windows 7. i have my two2 hard drives: So you can see that i have my two disks, with the partitions containing Windows: Windows 7: \\PhysicalDisk0 (partition 03) Windows 8: \\PhysicalDisk2 (partition 1) What i'm trying to figure out how is how to use bcdedit to instruct the thing that boots Windows that there is another Windows installation out there. Running bcdedit now, it shows current configuration: C:\WINDOWS\system32>bcdedit Windows Boot Manager -------------------- identifier {bootmgr} device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume2 description Windows Boot Manager locale en-US inherit {globalsettings} integrityservices Enable default {current} resumeobject {ce153eb7-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f} displayorder {current} toolsdisplayorder {memdiag} timeout 30 Windows Boot Loader ------------------- identifier {current} device partition=C: path \WINDOWS\system32\winload.exe description Windows 8 locale en-US inherit {bootloadersettings} recoverysequence {ce153eb9-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f} integrityservices Enable recoveryenabled Yes allowedinmemorysettings 0x15000075 osdevice partition=C: systemroot \WINDOWS resumeobject {ce153eb7-3786-11e2-87c0-e740e123299f} nx OptIn bootmenupolicy Standard hypervisorlaunchtype Auto i cannot find any documentation on the difference between Windows Boot Manager and Windows Boot Loader. Documentation There is some documentation on Bcdedit: Technet: Command Line Reference - Bcdedit Technet: Windows Automated Installation Kit - BCDEdit Command Line Options Whitepaper - BCDEdit Commands for Boot Environment (Word Document) But they don't explain how edit the binary boot configuration data If i had to guess, i would think that a Windows Boot Manager instructs the BIOS what program it should run. That program would give the user a set of boot choices. That leaves Windows Boot Loader do be a particular boot choice, that represents a particular installation of Windows. If that is the case i would need to create a new Windows Boot Loader entry. This means i might want to use the /create parameter: /create Creates a new boot entry: bcdedit [/store filename] /create [id] /d description [/application apptype | /inherit [apptype] | /inherit DEVICE | /device] So i assume a syntax of: >bcdedit /create /d "The old Windows 7" /application osloader Where application can be one of the following types: Apptype Description BOOTSECTOR The boot sector application OSLOADER The Windows boot loader RESUME A resume application Unfortunately, the only documentation about osloader is "The Windows boot loader". i don't see how that can differentiate between Windows 8 on one hard drive, and Windows 7 on another. The other possible parameter when /create a boot loader is >bcdedit /create /D "Windows Vista" /device "The Quick Brown Fox" Unfortunately the documentation is missing for /device: /device Optional. If id is not set to a well-known identifier, the option that is used to specify the new boot entry as an additional device options entry. Since i did not set id to a well-known identifier, i must set /device to "the option that is used to specify the new boot entry as an additional device options entry". i know all those words; they're all English. But i have on idea what it is saying; those words in that order seem nonsensical. So i'm somewhat stymied. i don't want to be like Dan Stolts from Microsoft: I found no content that was particularly helpful when I hosed my machine by playing with BCDEdit. This post would have been ok if there was much more detail especially on the /set command OSDevice, etc. So once I got my machine fixed, I documented the solution and the information is here.... i mean, if a Microsoft guy can't even figure out how to use BCDEdit to edit his BCD, then what chance to i have? Bonus Reading BCDEdit Command-Line Options Bcdedit Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 System Will NOT Boot After Making Changes To Boot Manager Using BCDEdit Visual BCD Editor4 Windows 7 and Windows 8 RTM Dual Boot Setup Footnotes 1 Since the Windows 8 installer would have damaged my Windows 7 install, i decided to unplug my "main" hard drive during the install. Which is a long-winded explanation of why the Windows 8 installer didn't detect the existing Windows 7 install. Normally the installer would have automatically created the required entries for dual-boot. Not that the reason i'm asking the question is important. 2 Really there's three drives, but the third is just bulk storage. The existence of a 3rd hard drive is irrelevant to the question. i only mention it in case someone wants to know why the screenshot has 3 hard drives when i only mention two. 3 i arbitrarily started numbering partitions at "zero"; not to imply that partitions are numbered starting at zero. i only mention partitions because i don't see how any boot-loader could do its job without knowing which partition, and which folder, an installation of Windows is located in. 4 i'm asking about BCDEdit. i tried Visual BCD Editor. It seems to be a visual BCD editor. That is to say that it's a GUI, but still uses the same terminology as BCDEdit, and requires the same knowledge that BCD doesn't document. 5 For simplicity sake we'll assume that all installation of Windows i want to dual-boot between are Windows Vista or later, making them all compatible with the BCDEdit and the binary boot loader. The alternative would require delving into the intricacies of the old ntloader. Nor am i asking about dual booting to Linux; or how to boot to a Virtual Hard Drive (vhd) image. Just modern versions of Windows on existing hard drives in the same machine. Note: You can ignore everything after the word Background. It's all pointless exposition to satisfy some people's need for "research effort" before they'll consider being helpful. Some people have even been known to summarily close questions unless there is research effort. Some people have been know to close questions if there is too much research effort. Some people close questions when i put the note saying that they can ignore everything after the Background out of spite. Some people are just grumpy.

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• "power limit notification" clobbering on 12G Dell servers with RHEL6

  - by Andrew B

  Server: Poweredge r620 OS: RHEL 6.4 Kernel: 2.6.32-358.18.1.el6.x86_64 I'm experiencing application alarms in my production environment. Critical CPU hungry processes are being starved of resources and causing a processing backlog. The problem is happening on all the 12th Generation Dell servers (r620s) in a recently deployed cluster. As near as I can tell, instances of this happening are matching up to peak CPU utilization, accompanied by massive amounts of "power limit notification" spam in dmesg. An excerpt of one of these events: Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU12: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU0: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU6: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU14: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU18: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU2: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU4: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU16: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU0: Package power limit notification (total events = 11) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU6: Package power limit notification (total events = 13) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU14: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU18: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU20: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU8: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU2: Package power limit notification (total events = 12) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU10: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU22: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU4: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU16: Package power limit notification (total events = 13) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU20: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU8: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU10: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU22: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU15: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU3: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU1: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU5: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU17: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU13: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU15: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU3: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU1: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU5: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU7: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU19: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU17: Package power limit notification (total events = 377) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU9: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU21: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU23: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU11: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU13: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU7: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU19: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU9: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU21: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU23: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) A little Google Fu reveals that this is typically associated with the CPU running hot, or voltage regulation kicking in. I don't think that's what is happening though. Temperature sensors for all servers in the cluster are running fine, Power Cap Policy is disabled in the iDRAC, and my System Profile is set to "Performance" on all of these servers: # omreport chassis biossetup | grep -A10 'System Profile' System Profile Settings ------------------------------------------ System Profile : Performance CPU Power Management : Maximum Performance Memory Frequency : Maximum Performance Turbo Boost : Enabled C1E : Disabled C States : Disabled Monitor/Mwait : Enabled Memory Patrol Scrub : Standard Memory Refresh Rate : 1x Memory Operating Voltage : Auto Collaborative CPU Performance Control : Disabled A Dell mailing list post describes the symptoms almost perfectly. Dell suggested that the author try using the Performance profile, but that didn't help. He ended up applying some settings in Dell's guide for configuring a server for low latency environments and one of those settings (or a combination thereof) seems to have fixed the problem. Kernel.org bug #36182 notes that power-limit interrupt debugging was enabled by default, which is causing performance degradation in scenarios where CPU voltage regulation is kicking in. A RHN KB article (RHN login required) mentions a problem impacting PE r620 and r720 servers not running the Performance profile, and recommends an update to a kernel released two weeks ago. ...Except we are running the Performance profile... Everything I can find online is running me in circles here. What's the heck is going on?

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• Using pfSense, OpenVPN Connects but Still Can't See the Network

  - by nicorellius

  I am having an OpenVPN issue. I have a pfSense box at home configured to allow traffic through a VPN tunnel. The client computer is Windows XP Home, behind a standard Comcast connection and a Netgear wireless router. I use OpenVPN to access my work network (from where I am trying to get out of in this post) from home (with an XP Pro machine behind pfSense), and this works fine. The client config is similar but has the changes specific to my setup... Here is my XP Home config: client dev tun proto tcp remote pfsense.*.org 1194 (starred out by me) resolv-retry infinite nobind persist-key persist-tun ca ca.crt cert client.crt key client.key ns-cert-type server comp-lzo verb 3 When I launch the OpenVPN GUI, the Tunnel TAP network connection turns red, and I can right-click that to connect to the server. Everything seems to work fine until I browse for the actual network. The Tunnel TAP connection turns green and it says connected to 10.1.1.6 (I have tried different IP pools here too with no luck). I can see the internal network fine, but my home network behind pfSense is not there. I have tried browsing there by using Tools Map Network Drive, using the browser, with no success. When I open the command line on the client and use the ipconfig -all command, I get the following: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : TAP-Win32 Adapter V9 Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : *** (starred out by me) Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.1.1.6 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.252 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 10.1.1.5 Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Monday, March 15, 2010 1:18:37 PM Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Tuesday, March 15, 2011 1:18:37 PM I noticed that the default gateway is not present. Could this be my problem? I am still relatively new to firewalls, VPN, and network configuration so I'm sure I am messing up something simple. Oh yah, I should note that I have firewall rules configured for pfSense to allow traffic through the WAN and the LAN. At first there was just the WAN firewall rule, because that is what I got from the literature I was reading. I then created a LAN rule as well, but I'm not sure if this was correct. Neither way works, though. Screen shots below: Any help is much appreciated.

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• All my emails to Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL are going to Spam, though I've implemented every validation

  - by Chetan

  Hi, I've implemented everything and checked everything (SPF, DomainKey, DKIM, reverse lookup), and only Gmail is allowing my emails to go to Inbox. Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL are all sending my messages to Spam. What am I doing wrong? Please help! Following are the headers of messages to Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL. I've changed names and domain names. The domain names I'm sending mail from are polluxapp.com and gemini.polluxapp.com. Yahoo: From Shift Licensing Tue Jan 26 21:55:14 2010 X-Apparently-To: [email protected] via 98.136.167.163; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:59:12 -0800 Return-Path: X-YahooFilteredBulk: 208.115.108.162 X-YMailISG: gPlFT1YWLDtTsHSCXAO2fxuGq5RdrsMxPffmkJFHiQyZW.2RGdDQ8OEpzWDYPS.MS_D5mvpu928sYN_86mQ2inD9zVLaVNyVVrmzIFCOHJO2gPwIG8c2L8WajG4ZRgoTwMFHkyEsefYtRLMg8AmHKnkS0PkPscwpVHtuUD91ghsTSqs4lxEMqhqw60US0cwMn_r_DrWNEUg_sESZsYeZpJcCCPL0wd6zcfKmtYaIkidsth3gWJPJgpwWtkgPvwsJUU_cmAQ8hAQ7RVM1usEs80PzihTLDR1yKc4RJCsesaf4NUO_yN1cPsbFyiaazKikC.eiQk4Z3VU.8O5Vd8i7mPNyOeAjyt7IgeA_ X-Originating-IP: [208.115.108.162] Authentication-Results: mta1035.mail.sk1.yahoo.com from=example.com; domainkeys=pass (ok); from=example.com; dkim=permerror (bad sig) Received: from 127.0.0.1 (EHLO gemini.example.com) (208.115.108.162) by mta1035.mail.sk1.yahoo.com with SMTP; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:59:12 -0800 Received: from gemini.example.com (gemini [127.0.0.1]) by gemini.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3984E21A0167 for ; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:55:14 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=example.com; h=to :subject:from:content-type:message-id:date; s=mail; bh=bRIHfxE3S e+YeCrIOqziZsiESJA=; b=J+D56Czff+6wGjQycLEvHyT32+06Nngf+6h7Ep6DL SmmJv3ihiAFJIJiPxiwLNpUsOSHhwJYjYQtynbBnag40A6EUBIsucDR+VoEYD+Cc 9L0dV3QD5D77VpG9PnRQDQa91R+NPIt5og9xbYfUWJ1b/jXkZopb0VTM+H9tandM 24= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=example.com; h=to:subject :from:content-type:message-id:date; q=dns; s=mail; b=pO5YvvjGTXs 3Qa83Ibq9woLq5VSsxUD5uoSrjNrW9ICMmdWyJpb9oT5byFR9hMthomTmfGWkkh6 3VxtD0hb0HVonN+1iheqJ9QBBOctadLCAOPZV3mfA99XUu7Y0DR2qtkU/UkSe8In 5PENWFbwub88ZsRDiW3hCbNHl+UO8Jsc= Received: by gemini.example.com (Postfix, from userid 502) id 386DE21A0166; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:55:14 -0800 (PST) To: [email protected] Subject: Shift License For James Xavier From: "Shift Licensing" Content-type: text/html Message-Id: <[email protected] Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:55:14 -0800 (PST) Content-Length: 282` Hotmail: X-Message-Delivery: Vj0xLjE7dXM9MDtsPTA7YT0wO0Q9MjtTQ0w9Ng== X-Message-Status: n:0 X-SID-PRA: [email protected] X-AUTH-Result: NONE X-Message-Info: 6sSXyD95QpWzUBaRfzf3NMbaiSGCCYGXSczlzLw49r01I25elu3oYM0V2uNa8BV2O7DOiFEeewTBKMtN+PW+ig== Received: from gemini.example.com ([208.115.108.162]) by snt0-mc4-f7.Snt0.hotmail.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:18:53 -0800 Received: from gemini.example.com (gemini [127.0.0.1]) by gemini.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9431321A0167 for ; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:18:53 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=gemini.example.com; h=to :subject:message-id:date:from; s=mail; bh=DLF0k+uELpY6If5o3SWlSj 7j0vw=; b=nAMpb47xTVh73y6a2rf6V1rtYHuufr46dtuwWtHyFC85QKfZJReJJL oFIPjgEC28/1wSdy8VbfLG1g64W1hvnJjet3rcyv3ANNYxnFaiH5yt3SDEiLxydS gjCmNcZXyiVsWtpv7atVRO/t/Own+oFB9zz/9mj43Bhm4bnZ2cTno= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gemini.example.com; h=to :subject:message-id:date:from; q=dns; s=mail; b=sFpNxlskyz4MYT38 BA/rQ6ZAcQjhy7STkLPckrCDVVZcE4/zukHyARq7guMtYCCEjXoIbVEtNikPC97F cGpJGGZrppTGjx62N0flxG8hvwejiJYnUJF1EIP4JckGWyEI+21vtWLLQ27eegtN fs9OkIQ2iUPC/4u8N1eqiff0VZU= Received: by gemini.example.com (Postfix, from userid 504) id 8ED7221A0166; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:18:53 -0800 (PST) To: [email protected] Subject: Testing this Message-Id: <[email protected] Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:18:53 -0800 (PST) From: [email protected] Return-Path: [email protected] X-OriginalArrivalTime: 26 Jan 2010 21:18:54.0039 (UTC) FILETIME=[29CEE670:01CA9ECD] AOL: X-AOL-UID: 3158.1902377530 X-AOL-DATE: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 5:07:23 PM Eastern Standard Time Return-Path: Received: from rly-mg06.mx.aol.com (rly-mg06.mail.aol.com [172.20.83.112]) by air-mg06.mail.aol.com (v126.13) with ESMTP id MAILINMG061-a1d4b5f6787a4; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:07:22 -0500 Received: from gemini.example.com (gemini.example.com [208.115.108.162]) by rly-mg06.mx.aol.com (v125.7) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINMG067-a1d4b5f6787a4; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:07:04 -0500 Received: from gemini.example.com (gemini [127.0.0.1]) by gemini.example.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 32B3821A0167 for ; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:07:03 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha1; c=relaxed; d=gemini.example.com; h=to :subject:message-id:date:from; s=mail; bh=RL0GLHd3dZ8IlIHoHIhA/U cLtUE=; b=BKg4p3qnaIdFRjAbvUa+Hwcyc6W91v4B4hN95dVymJrxyUBycWMUSC nzKmJ5QllhCYjwO+S7GrRdmlFpjBaK8kt2qmdCyC2UuiDF6xY6MXx/DBF56QpYtZ YDY4kXdiEMSbooH14B4CCPhaCTdC1wCtV0diat3EANCLxSDYAYq5k= DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; c=nofws; d=gemini.example.com; h=to :subject:message-id:date:from; q=dns; s=mail; b=fDSjNpfWs7TfGXda uio8qbJIyD+UmPL+C0GM1VeeV8FADj6JiYIT1nT3iBwSHlrLFCJ1wxPbE4d9CGl8 gQkPIV6T4TL7ha052nur0EOWoBLoBAOmhTshF/gsIY+/KMibbIczuRyTgIGVV5Tw GZVGFddVFOYgee7SAu0KNFm7aIk= Received: by gemini.example.com (Postfix, from userid 504) id 2D5F521A0166; Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:07:03 -0800 (PST) To: [email protected] Subject: Testing Message-Id: <[email protected] Date: Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:07:03 -0800 (PST) From: [email protected] X-AOL-IP: 208.115.108.162 X-AOL-SCOLL-AUTHENTICATION: mail_rly_antispam_dkim-d227.1 ; domain : gemini.example.com DKIM : pass X-Mailer: Unknown (No Version) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

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