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• I want to virtualize my workstation (Tier 1), Looking for Bare Metal Hypervisor for consumer grade components

  - by Chase Florell

  I find myself in this similar bind at least once a year. The bind whereby I'm either upgrading a motherboard, or an OS hard drive. It drives me crazy to have to reinstall Windows, Visual Studio, all my addins, reconfigure my settings etc... every single time. I have a layout and I like and I want to stick with it. My question is... Is there a Bare Metal Hypervisor on the market that will enable me to virtualize my consumer grade workstation? I really want to avoid Host/Client virtualization. Bare Metal is definitely a better way to go for my needs. Is this a good approach, or am I going to suffer some other undesirable side effects by doing this? Clarification My machine has very limited purposes. My primary use is Visual Studio 2010 Professional where I develop ASP.NET MVC Web Applications. The second piece of software that I use (that's system intensive) is Photoshop CS3. Beyond that, my applications are limited to Outlook, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, LinqPad, and various other (small) apps. Beyond this, I'm considering working on a node.js project and might run ubuntu on the same hypervisor if possible. System Specs: Gigabyte Motherboard Intel i7 920 12 GB Ram basic 500GB 7200RPM HDD for OS 4 VelociRaptors in Raid 1/0 for build disk Dual GTS250 (512MB) Graphics cards (non SLI) for quad monitors On a side note I also wouldn't be opposed to an alternative suggestion if the limitations are too great. I could install the ESXi (or Zen Server) on my box, and build a separate "thin client" to RDP into the virtual machine. It appears as though RDP supports dual monitors. Edit (Dec 9, 2011) It's been nearly a year since I first asked this question. Since then, there have been a lot of great strides in Hypervisor technology... AND MokaFive is now released for corporate use. I'd love to dig into this question a little more and find out if there is a solid BareMetal Hypervisor for workstations running consumer grade components (IE: not Dell, HP, Lenovo, Etc).

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• How is DNS used by individual processes?

  - by atroon

  When resolving FQDNs or machine names to IP addresses on my local network (mycompany.internal) I can use dig on the command line (linux/mac) or nslookup (windows) to query the configured server and get a response. But trying to enter the FQDN or even just the machine name in a ping command or in a web browser results in 'Unknown Host' or DNS errors. Here's a sample, this one from the Mac: mac:~ atroon$ dig server.mycompany.internal ; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> server.mycompany.internal ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 5219 ;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;server.mycompany.internal. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: server.mycompany.internal. 1200 IN A 172.16.254.36 ;; Query time: 0 msec ;; SERVER: 172.16.254.8#53(172.16.254.8) ;; WHEN: Wed Dec 16 11:39:15 2009 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 55 mac:~ atroon$ ping server.mycompany.internal<br> ping: cannot resolve server.mycompany.internal: Unknown host I cannot for the life of me figure this one out. The DNS server is a SBS 2003 box which handles AD, some file/print, etc for a small company network. This issue happens to me about three times a week, and when I'm connected to the local network directly, the same switch as the server even. I can make any connection I want with IP addresses, I just can't make DNS work. Additionally, at the same time I'm experiencing this, other users are fine, which makes me think it's a problem on my Mac. But what sort of problem? How can dig send a query and get a reply, and ping say 'unknown host'? I'm posting here vs. serverfault because I think this is a local problem not a server problem...but if anyone can point me at the server, I guess we'll head down the street a domain or two.

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• Some domain names not resolving on local network

  - by Solignis

  I am not really sure where to start with this one... I have a small network setup with some linux servers (Ubuntu 11.04 Server). 2 servers are running BIND 9 (NS01, NS02), they are configured as master and slave respectively. 1 server is running Zimbra ZCS 7.1.1 (MX01), it has a private BIND 9 server running to achieve a split DNS configuration. This DNS server does not interact with the other two, it forwards queries it can resolve to the other 2 that is it. No zone transfers. Zimbra is hosting 3 domains at the moment, solignis.local, solignis.com, campbellsurvey.net. The problem From with in my network I cannot connect to mail.campbellsurvey.net. When I mean I cannot connect, I mean if I open firefox and type https://mail.campbellsurvey.net I go nowhere, the address is supposed to connect to my Zimbra webmail. But it goes nowhere, the odd thing is if I try the same task from outside of the network it brings the website up like normal. If I try to create an account in thunderbird to connect to the same server using IMAP4 or POP3 I get an error saying that thunderbird cannot find the domain name. Even the zimbra client fails too. It is like from with in my own walls that campbellsurvey.net does not exist. But if step outside I can get it work with no problem at all. I had thought maybe the problem was with the DNS server (BIND 9), so just to eliminate it as a possibility I configured a windows server I use for VMware VCenter as a DNS server to see what would happen. The result was the same, its like something is preventing connections to those domains, but I have checked various firewalls and such. I checked port forwards, etc. So I am running out of ideas I know this is not a lot of information to work from and I can give more details about certain things as needed. I am just trying to figure out what could be going wrong. Any help you could offer would be much appreciated.

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• Deployment/provisioning tool for commercial applications (not developed in-house)

  - by mfinni

  I help manage a few hosted commercial applications, and we have a lot of manual processes involved when doing new customer-instance deployments into the shared (multitenant) environment. Allow me to describe the most relevant features, and then we can talk about the tools. We have an application on AIX, that requires dozens of changes to config files (some plain text, some XML) as well as a good number of commands to be run on multiple servers - some to start the new instance, some to restart our shared authentication and reporting engines, etc. The config changes follow templates, of course. The servers in question will also depend on the initial conditions specified by the implementer/deployer - we may choose to deploy a given customer to our servers in Europe, or one set of servers may be active-active whereas a different set of servers is active-passive - in short, there's a lot of complications. We have another application that run on IIS 6 and SQL. The DBAs don't want any automation of the SQL components and that's fine with me, but automating the IIS bit would be great. For a new customer instance, we make a filesystem copy of a template Virtual Directory target named after the new customer, make a new AppPool to match, edit a VirDir template .xml file to replace the filepaths and AppPool names with the new ones, and then make a new VirDir from the modified template XML to point to the new filesystem folder and app pool. For the first case, something like ControlTier or Chef might be good. For the second, the new(ish) Web Deploy from MS would probably do a good job. Has anyone used these tools or others to do something similar for applications? More of a nice-to-have, not a fixed requirement - Has anyone used anything that works on both platforms? I'm looking for something free, because the official word is that within a year, we will have whatever HP has renamed the OpsWare suite, which should be able to do stuff like this. Edit - based on someone's suggestion, looking at CFengine for the AIX application, it doesn't seem to address my pain. The problem isn't keeping a given config synced across dozens of servers, we have rsync for that. The problem is that onboarding a new customer instance touches dozens of files, putting pieces of the same or similar information into them - some are new stanzas in existing files, some are new files, and some are new directories. This is a several-hours-long process that is also error-prone because it's mostly done by hand. I guess I'm looking for config-file generation and management. I have built a small Perl script to do something similar for a much smaller case - it binds a CSV file into variables, and then does a copy-and-search-and-replace from a set of template config files. I could probably do the same here.

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• Searching For a Desktop Security Software to harden Windows machines, anybody?

  - by MosheH

  I'm a network administrator of a small/medium network. I'm looking for a software (Free or Not) which can harden Windows Computers (XP And Win7) for the propose of hardening standalone desktop computers (not in domain network). Note: The computers are completely isolated (standalone), so i can't use active directory group policy. moreover, there are too many restriction that i need to apply, so it is not particle to set it up manual (one by one). Basically what I’m looking for is a software that can restrict and disable access for specific user accounts on the system. For Example: User john can only open one application and nothing else -- He don’t see no icon on the desktop or start menu, except for one or two applications which i want to allow. He can't Right click on the desktop, the task-bar icons are not shown, there is no folder options, etc... User marry can open a specific application and copy data to one folder on D drive. User Dan, have access to all drives but cannot install software, and so on... So far ,I've found only the following solutions, but they all seems to miss one or more feature: Desktop restriction Software 1. Faronics WINSelect The application seems to answer most of our needs except one feature which is very important to us but seems to be missing from WINSelect, which is "restriction per profile". WINSelect only allow to set up restrictions which are applied system-wide. If I have multiple user accounts on the system and want to apply different restrictions for each user, I cant. Deskman (No Restriction per user)- Same thing, no restriction per profile. Desktop Security Rx - not relevant, No Win7 Support. The only software that I've found which is offering a restriction per profile is " 1st Security Agent ". but its GUI is very complicated and not very intuitive. It's worth to mention that I'm not looking for "Internet Kiosk software" although they share some features with the one I need. All I need is a software (like http://www.faronics.com/standard/winselect/) that is offering a way to restrict Windows user interface. So if anybody know an Hardening software which allows to set-up user restrictions on Windows systems, It will be a big, big, big help for me! Thanks to you all

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• How to get the best LINPACK result and conquer the Top500?

  - by knweiss

  Given a large Linux HPC cluster with hundreds/thousands of nodes. What are your best practices to get the best possible LINPACK benchmark (HPL) result to submit for the Top500 supercomputer list? To give you an idea what kind of answers I would appreciate here are some sub-questions (with links): How to you tune the parameters (N, NB, P, Q, memory-alignment, etc) for the HPL.dat file (without spending too much time trying each possible permutation - esp with large problem sizes N)? Are there any Top500 submission rules to be aware of? What is allowed, what isn't? Which MPI product, which version? Does it make a difference? Any special host order in your MPI machine file? Do you use CPU pinning? How to you configure your interconnect? Which interconnect? Which BLAS package do you use for which CPU model? (Intel MKL, AMD ACML, GotoBLAS2, etc.) How do you prepare for the big run (on all nodes)? Start with small runs on a subset of nodes and then scale up? Is it really necessary to run LINPACK with a big run on all of the nodes (or is extrapolation allowed)? How do you optimize for the latest Intel/AMD CPUs? Hyperthreading? NUMA? Is it worth it to recompile the software stack or do you use precompiled binaries? Which settings? Which compiler optimizations, which compiler? (What about profile-based compilation?) How to get the best result given only a limited amount of time to do the benchmark run? (You can block a huge cluster forever) How do you prepare the individual nodes (stopping system daemons, freeing memory, etc)? How do you deal with hardware faults (ruining a huge run)? Are there any must-read documents or websites about this topic? E.g. I would love to hear about some background stories of some of the current Top500 systems and how they did their LINPACK benchmark. I deliberately don't want to mention concrete hardware details or discuss hardware recommendations because I don't want to limit the answers. However, feel free to mention hints e.g. for specific CPU models.

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• Managing hosts and iptables in scalable architecture

  - by hakunin

  Let's say I have a load balancer in front of 3 app servers. Let's say I also have these services available at certain IPs: Postgres server Redis server ElasticSearch server Memcached server 1 Memcached server 2 Memcached server 3 So that's 6 nodes at 6 different IP addresses. Naturally, every one of my 3 app servers needs to talk to these 6 servers above. Then, to make it a bit funkier, I also have 3 worker servers. And each worker also talks to the above 6 servers, but thankfully workers and apps never need to talk to each other. Now's the kicker. Everything is on Digital Ocean VPS. What that means is: you have no private network, no private IPs. You only have separate, random IP address on each machine. You can't mask them or anything. So in order to build a secure environment I would have to configure some iptables. For example: Open app servers be accessed by load balancer server Open redis, ES, PG, and each memcached servers to be accessed by each app's IP and each worker's IP This means that every time I add an app or worker I have to also reconfigure iptables in those above 6 servers to welcome the new app or worker. Is there a way to simplify this type of setup? I was thinking — what if there was a gateway machine between apps/workers and the above 6 machines. This way all the interaction would always happen via the gateway server, and when I add a new app or worker I wouldn't need to teach the 6 servers to let it in. If I went this route, then I'd hope a small 512mb server could handle that perhaps, and there wouldn't be almost any overhead. Or would there? Please help with best way to handle this situation. I would appreciate an answer as concrete as possible. I don't think this is too specific, because this general architecture is very common, and Digital Ocean is becoming increasingly popular. A concrete solution here would be much appreciated by many.

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• Port forwarding not working properly

  - by sudo work

  I'm trying to host a small web server from my home network; however, I have not been able to successfully port forward ports to the local server. My current network topology looks like this: Cable Modem/Router - Secondary Wireless Router - Many computers (including server) The modem/router I'm using is a Cisco (Scientific Atlantic) DPC2100, provided by my ISP. The wireless router that I'm using as the central hub to my home network is a Linksys E3000. The computer being used as a server is running Ubuntu 10.04 Server Edition. The main issue is that I can't access the server remotely, using my WAN IP address. I have port forwarded my wireless router; however, I believe that I need to somehow set my modem to bridge mode. As far as I can tell though, this isn't possible. Here are the various IP address settings: DPC2100 WAN: 69.xxx.xxx.xxx Internal IP: 192.168.100.1 Internal Network: 192.168.7.0 E3000 IP Address: 192.168.7.2 Gateway: 192.168.7.1 Internal IP: 192.168.1.1 Internal Network: 192.168.1.0 Server IP Address: 192.168.1.123 Gateway: 192.168.1.1 Now I can do an nmap at various nodes, and here are the results (from the server): nmap localhost: 22,25,53,80,110,139,143,445,631,993,995,3306,5432,8080 open nmap 192.168.7.2: 22,25,80 (filtered),110,139,445 open (ports I have forwarded in the E3000)* nmap 69.xxx.xxx.xxx: 1720 open *For some reason, I can SSH into the server at 192.168.7.2, but not view the website. Here are also some other settings: /etc/hosts/ 127.0.0.1 localhost 127.0.1.1 servername ::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback fe00::0 ip6-localnet ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix ff02::1 ip6-allnodes ff02::2 ip6-allrouters /etc/apache2/sites-available/default snippet <VirtualHost *:80> DocumentRoot /srv/www/ <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None </Directory> <Directory /var/www/> ... </Directory> ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/ <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin"> ... </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log LogLevel warn CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/" <Directory "/usr/share/doc/"> ... </Directory> </VirtualHost> Let me know if you need any other information; some stuff probably slipped my mind.

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• Which hardware to VM ratio for Build-Server virtualization?

  - by Martin

  Let's start with saying that I'm a total noob wrt. to server virtualization. That is, I use VMs often during development, but they're simple desktop machine things for me. Now to my problem: We have two (physical) build servers, one master, one slave running Jenkins to do daily tasks and build (Visual C++ Builds) our release packages for our software. As such these machines are critical to our company, because we do lot's releases and without a controlled environment to create them, we can't ship fixes. (And currently there's no proper backup of these machines in place, because they do not hold any data as such - it just would be a major pain to setup them again should they go bust. (But setting up backup that I'd know would work in case of HW failure would even be more pain, so we have skipped that until now.)) Therefore (and for scaling purposes) we would like to go virtual with these machines. Outsourcing to the cloud is not an option, not at all, so we'll have to use on-premises hardware and VM hosts. Each Build-Server (master or slave) is a fully configured (installs, licenses, shares in case of the master, ...) Windows Server box. I would now ideally like to just convert the (two) existing physical nodes to VM images and run them. Later add more VM slave instances as clones of the existing ones. And here begin my questions: Should I go for one VM per one hardware-box or should I go for something where a single hardware runs multiple VMs? That would mean a single point of failure hardware wise and doesn't seem like a good idea ... or?? Since we're doing C++ compilation with Visual Studio, I assume that during a build the hardware (processor cores + disk) will be fully utilized, so going with more than one build-node per hardware doesn't seem to make much sense?? Wrt. to hardware options, does it make any difference which VM software we use (VMWare, MS, Virtualbox, ... ?) (We're using Windows exclusively for our builds.) Regarding budget: We have a normal small company (20 developers) budget for this. ;-) That is, if it's going to cost a few k$ it's going to cost. If it's free - the better. I strongly prefer solutions where there's no multi-k$ maintenance costs per year.

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• recommendations for efficient offsite remote backup solution of vm's

  - by senorsmile

  I am looking for recommendations for backing up my current 6 vm's(and soon to grow to up to 20). Currently I am running a two node proxmox cluster(which is a debian base using kvm for virtualization with a custom web front end to administer). I have two nearly identical boxes with amd phenom II x4's and asus motherboards. Each has 4 500 GB sata2 hdd's, 1 for the os and other data for the proxmox install, and 3 using mdadm+drbd+lvm to share the 1.5 TB's of storage between the two machines. I mount lvm images to kvm for all of the virtual machines. I currently have the ability to do live transfer from one machine to the other, typically within seconds(it takes about 2 minutes on the largest vm running win2008 with m$ sql server). I am using proxmox's built-in vzdump utility to take snapshots of the vm's and store those on an external harddrive on the network. I then have jungledisk service (using rackspace) to sync the vzdump folder for remote offsite backup. This is all fine and dandy, but it's not very scalable. For one, the backups themselves can take up to a few hours every night. With jungledisk's block level incremental transfers, the sync only transfers a small portion of the data offsite, but that still takes at least a half an hour. The much better solution would of course be something that allows me to instantly take the difference of two time points (say what was written from 6am to 7am), zip it, then send that difference file to the backup server which would instantly transfer to the remote storage on rackspace. I have looked a little into zfs and it's ability to do send/receive. That coupled with a pipe of the data in bzip or something would seem perfect. However, it seems that implementing a nexenta server with zfs would essentially require at least one or two more dedicated storage servers to serve iSCSI block volumes (via zvol's???) to the proxmox servers. I would prefer to keep the setup as minimal as possible (i.e. NOT having separate storage servers) if at all possible. I have also briefly read about zumastor. It looks like it could also do what I want, but it appears to have halted development in 2008. So, zfs, zumastor or other?

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• VPN Connection Causes Internal LAN Connection Loss with Server

  - by sleepisfortheweak

  I've tried configuring basic PPTP VPN at my small business using a number of different tutorials. As far as I can tell, the actual VPN connection worked fine, but upon connecting a client, the Server 'disappears' from the internal LAN. The RRAS service must be stopped before the connection is restored. My Setup: The network is simply a DSL Gateway/Router to the outside functioning as NAT/Firewall/DHCP. The server is a Win Server 2008 machine at fixed IP 192.168.1.200. The server has 1 NIC, so I used the 'custom' option when configuring RRAS. The RRAS settings should be default except that I've disabled ports for connection types I'm not using and reduced PPTP ports to 10. I've also created an address pool and disabled DHCP packet forwarding. The server only functions as a File Share and now a VPN Server. Local LAN computers all have mapped network shares to the server authenticated based on Local User/Group setup on the server. The Problem: The moment a client connects through VPN, the server 'disappears' from the local network. All mapped drives disconnect and there is no response to a ping 192.168.1.200. Even if the client disconnects, the server does not re-appear at that address until the RRAS service is stopped. I've Tried: Using an Address Pool inside and outside the local subnet. Using DCHP Relay Checking Inbound/Outbound filters (none enabled) The fact that nothing I've tried has had any effect, and that I can connect and successfully obtain an IP tells me that it's something more fundamental I'm missing. My gut tells me that it's something to do with the second IP address added by the VPN client somehow taking over the interface or traffic from the local LAN accidently getting routed to the VPN client instead of handled at the server once RRAS has become 'active' when a client connects. Hopefully this may be obvious to someone with real IT experience. I've been doing this a while and almost never been stumped. I'm starting to think it might actually be something tricky since my setup is pretty basic yet refuses to work. I'll be happy to include more info if this doesn't ring any bells right away for anyone. Thanks

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• System won't boot: Gigabyte HD 7790 1GB OC GPU issue or Corsair VS550 PSU issue?

  - by MGOwen

  Installed a new GPU, and PC won't boot. Turn it on and: No monitor signal at all (tried HDMI and VGA via DVI, on 2 working monitors). CPU and GPU fans DO spin, but No system beeps, no sounds from drives (they might make a small noise in the first 1 second or so, but there's definitely no OS loading or anything like that) If hit "power off" button it turns off immediately (no holding down for 3 seconds like usual) If I put my old HD 5670 GPU back in, everything works fine. But (plot twist!) card is not totally dead. My friend put it in his PC, and it works fine (he even played a game for 15 minutes, no issues). He has a Corsair TX850 850W and a Gigabyte MB. So my main theory is: the GPU isn't getting enough power from the PSU. But is it: Bad PSU? Seems unlikely, since it works fine with the other GPU. Also, the PSU Is brand new and 550W (single 42A/504W 12V rail). Overkill for this GPU. Corsair is a decent brand, but maybe just mine is faulty? Bad GPU? Could it be drawing more power than it should be, somehow, or something? Supposedly HD 7790 needs only 21A/75W on the 12v rail, though this one is factory overclocked a bit... but should that triple the power requirement? Something else? Could there be a motherboard incompatibility somehow? Both MB and GPU are less than a year old and PCI Express 3.0 x16. Things I've tried: Re-seating the video card Testing PC with old GPU (works fine, same PCIe slot). Checked AMD's stated amp/watt requirements of a 7790 and my PSU (see above). My PSU can output twice the amps (single rail) and 5x the Wattage a 7790 needs. Here are the full specs: Gigabyte HD 7790 1GB OC GPU Corsair VS550 550W PSU 4GB RAM AsRock H61M U3S3 motherboard i3-2100 500GB SATA HDD (2007-ish) blu-ray drive (new) PCI 802.11g card Edit: Motherboard BIOS Update seems to have fixed it. (If anyone has same problem and it doesn't work, comment here).

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• NIC is receiving, but not transmitting at all?

  - by Shtééf

  I'm trying to fix a very strange problem remotely on a machine at a customer site. The machine is a Dell PowerEdge, I believe a 1950 (haven't verified, but the lspci output matches specs I found.) The machine has two similar NICs, identified as Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5708 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 12) by lspci, and using the bnx2 driver. (I suspect these are on-board and on the same controller, which is what I'm accustomed to for this type of machine.) The primary interface eth0 works perfectly, and is in fact how I am ssh'd in. However, the secondary interface eth1 is not transmitting. I can see this in ifconfig output, for example, where the TX field is always 0. However, it is receiving, and tcpdump shows ARP requests coming from the ISP's gateway on the other side. The interface is physically connected to a Siemens BSTU4 modem, configured by the ISP. The link is properly set to 10MBps and full duplex, without negotation, as the ISP requested. A small /30 subnet is configured. For the sake of anonimity, let's say the machine is 3.3.3.2/30, and the ISP's gateway .1. The machine has no firewall settings whatsoever. Even running something like arping -I eth1 3.3.3.1, and running tcpdump alongside, shows no traffic whatsoever being transmitted on the interface. (But the other side keeps steadily sending ARP requests, and that is all that can be seen.) What could be causing this? Here's some output, anonymized, which may hopefully help: $ ethtool eth1 Settings for eth1: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: Not reported Advertised auto-negotiation: No Speed: 10Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: off Supports Wake-on: d Wake-on: d Link detected: yes $ ip link show eth1 3: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000 link/ether 00:15:c5:xx:xx:xx brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff $ ip -4 addr show eth1 3: eth1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast qlen 1000 inet 3.3.3.2/30 brd 3.3.3.3 scope global eth1 $ ip -4 route show match 3.3.3.0/30 3.3.3.0/30 dev eth1 proto kernel scope link src 3.3.3.2 default via 10.0.0.5 dev eth0

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• Is there a Distributed SAN/Storage System out there?

  - by Joel Coel

  Like many other places, we ask our users not to save files to their local machines. Instead, we encourage that they be put on a file server so that others (with appropriate permissions) can use them and that the files are backed up properly. The result of this is that most users have large hard drives that are sitting mainly empty. It's 2010 now. Surely there is a system out there that lets you turn that empty space into a virtual SAN or document library? What I envision is a client program that is pushed out to users' PCs that coordinates with a central server. The server looks to users just like a normal file server, but instead of keeping entire file contents it merely keeps a record of where those files can be found among various user PCs. It then coordinates with the right clients to serve up file requests. The client software would be able to respond to such requests directly, as well as be smart enough to cache recent files locally. For redundancy the server could make sure files are copied to multiple PCs, perhaps allowing you to define groups in different locations so that an instance of the entire repository lives in each group to protect against a disaster in one building taking down everything else. Obviously you wouldn't point your database server here, but for simpler things I see several advantages: Files can often be transferred from a nearer machine. Disk space grows automatically as your company does. Should ultimately be cheaper, as you don't need to keep a separate set of disks I can see a few downsides as well: Occasional degradation of user pc performance, if the machine has to serve or accept a large file transfer during a busy period. Writes have to be propogated around the network several times (though I suspect this isn't really much of a problem, as reading happens in most places more than writing) Still need a way to send a complete copy of the data offsite occasionally, and this would make it very hard to do differentials Think of this like a cloud storage system that lives entirely within your corporate LAN and makes use of your existing user equipment. Our old main file server is due for retirement in about 2 years, and I'm looking into replacing it with a small SAN. I'm thinking something like this would be a better fit. As a school, we have a couple computer labs I can leave running that would be perfect for adding a little extra redundancy to the system. Unfortunately, the closest thing I can find is Dienst, and it's just a paper that dates back to 1994. Am I just using the wrong buzzwords in my searches, or does this really not exist? If not, is there a big downside that I'm missing?

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• General guidelines / workflow to convert or transfer video "professionally"?

  - by cloneman

  I'm an IT "professional" who sometimes has to deal with small video conversion / video cutting projects, and I'd like to learn "the right way" to do this. Every time I search Google, there's always a disaster for weird, low-maturity trialware, or random forums threads from 3-4 years ago indicating various antiquated method to do it. The big question is the following: What are the "general" guidelines and tools to transcode video into some efficient (lossless?) intermediary, for editing purposes, for the purpose of eventually re-encoding it after? It seems to me like even the simplest of formats and tasks are a disaster of endless trial & error, or expertise only known by hardened experts who have a swiss army kife of weird conversion tools that they use, almost as if mounting an attack against the project. Here are a few cases in point: Simple VOB files extracted from DVD footage can't be imported into Adobe Premiere directly. Virtualdub is an old software people keep recommending but doesn't seem to support newer formats. I don't even know how to tell with certainty which codecs a video has, and weather the image is interlaced or not, and what resolution and codecs I'm dealing with. Problems: Choosing a wrong interlace option which diminishes quality Choosing a wrong pixel aspect ratio (stretches the image) Choosing a wrong "project type" in Premiere causing footage to require scaling Being forced to use some weird program that will have any number of negative effects What I'm looking for: Books or "Real knowledge" on format conversions, recognized tools, etc. that aren't some random forum guides on how to deal with video formats. Workflow guidelines on identifying a format going from one format to another without problems as mentioned above. Documentation on what programs like Adobe Premiere can and can't do with regards to formats, so that I don't use a wrench as a hammer. TL;DR How should you convert or "prepare" a video file to ensure it will be supported by Premiere for editing? Is premiere a suitable program to handle cropping, encoding, or should other tools be used for this, when making a video montage from a variety of source formats? What are some good books to read that specifically deal with converting videos that use any number of codecs?

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• MongoDB and datasets that don't fit in RAM no matter how hard you shove

  - by sysadmin1138

  This is very system dependent, but chances are near certain we'll scale past some arbitrary cliff and get into Real Trouble. I'm curious what kind of rules-of-thumb exist for a good RAM to Disk-space ratio. We're planning our next round of systems, and need to make some choices regarding RAM, SSDs, and how much of each the new nodes will get. But now for some performance details! During normal workflow of a single project-run, MongoDB is hit with a very high percentage of writes (70-80%). Once the second stage of the processing pipeline hits, it's extremely high read as it needs to deduplicate records identified in the first half of processing. This is the workflow for which "keep your working set in RAM" is made for, and we're designing around that assumption. The entire dataset is continually hit with random queries from end-user derived sources; though the frequency is irregular, the size is usually pretty small (groups of 10 documents). Since this is user-facing, the replies need to be under the "bored-now" threshold of 3 seconds. This access pattern is much less likely to be in cache, so will be very likely to incur disk hits. A secondary processing workflow is high read of previous processing runs that may be days, weeks, or even months old, and is run infrequently but still needs to be zippy. Up to 100% of the documents in the previous processing run will be accessed. No amount of cache-warming can help with this, I suspect. Finished document sizes vary widely, but the median size is about 8K. The high-read portion of the normal project processing strongly suggests the use of Replicas to help distribute the Read traffic. I have read elsewhere that a 1:10 RAM-GB to HD-GB is a good rule-of-thumb for slow disks, As we are seriously considering using much faster SSDs, I'd like to know if there is a similar rule of thumb for fast disks. I know we're using Mongo in a way where cache-everything really isn't going to fly, which is why I'm looking at ways to engineer a system that can survive such usage. The entire dataset will likely be most of a TB within half a year and keep growing.

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• Removing file with strange characters in filename in OS X

  - by SiggyF

  After a memory error in my program, I am stuck with a file with a strange filename. It's proving quite resistant to all normal methods to remove files with strange names. The filename is: %8BUȅ҉%95d%F8%FF%FF\x0f%8E%8F%FD%FF%FF%8B%B5T%F8%FF%FF%8B%85\%F8%FF%FF\x03%85x%F8%FF%FF%8B%95D%F8%FF%FF%8B%BD%9C%F8%FF%FF%8D\x04%86%8B%B5@%F8%FF%FF%89%85%90%F8%FF%FF%8B%85X%F8%FF%FF\x03%85%9C%F8%FF%FF%C1%E7\x02%8B%8Dx I tried the following: rm * - "No such file or directory" rm -- filename - "No such file or directory" rm "filename" - "No such file or directory" ls -i to get the inode number - "No such file or directory" stat filename - "No such file or directory" zip the directory where the file is in - error occured while adding "" to the archive. delete directory in finder - error -43 in python: os.unlink(os.listdir(u'.')[0]) - OSError No such file or directory find . -type f -exec rm {} \; - "No such file or directory" checked for locks on the file with lsof - no locks All these attempts result in a file (long filename here) not found error, or error -43. Even the ls -i. I couldn't find anymore options, so before reformatting or repairing my filesystem (fsck might help) I thought maybe there is something I missed. I wrote this small c program to get the inode: #include <stdio.h> #include <stddef.h> #include <sys/types.h> int main(void) { DIR *dp; struct dirent *ep; dp = opendir ("./"); if (dp != NULL) { while (ep = readdir (dp)) { printf("d_ino=%ld, ", (unsigned long) ep->d_ino); printf("d_name=%s.\n", ep->d_name); } (void) closedir (dp); } else perror ("Couldn't open the directory"); return 0; } That works. I now have the inode, but the normal find -inum inode -exec rm '{}' \; doesn't work. I think I have to use the clri now.

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• Architectural advice - web camera remote access

  - by Alan Hollis

  I'm looking for architectural advice. I have a client who I've built a website for which essentially allows users to view their web cameras remotely. The current flow of data is as follows: User opens page to view web camera image. Javascript script polls url on server ( appended with unique timestamp ) every 1000ms Ftp connection is enabled for the cameras ftp user. Web camera opens ftp connection to server. Web camera begins taking photos. Web camera sends photo to ftp server. On image url request: Server reads latest image on hard drive uploaded via ftp for camera. Server deleted any older images from the server. This is working okay at the moment for a small amount of users/cameras ( about 10 users and around the same amount of cameras), but we're starting to worrying about the scalability of this approach. My original plan was instead of having the files read from the server, the web server would open up an ftp connection to the web server and read the latest images directly from there meaning we should have been able to scale horizontally fairly easily. But ftp connection establishment times were too slow ( mainly due to the fact that PHP out of the ox is unable to persist ftp connections ) and so we abandoned this approach and went straight for reading from the hard drive. The firmware provider for the cameras state they're able to build a http client which instead of using ftp to upload the image could post the image to a web server. This seems plausible enough to me, but I'm looking for some architectural advice. My current thought is a simple Nginx/PHP/Redis stack. Web camera issues post requests of latest image to Nginx/PHP and the latest image for that camera is stored in Redis. The clients can then pull the latest image from Redis which should be extremely quick as the images will always be stored in memory. The data flow would then become: User opens page to view web camera image. Javascript script polls url on server ( appended with unique timestamp ) every 1000ms Camera is sent an http request to start posting images to a provided url Web camera begins taking photos. Web camera sends post requests to server as fast as it can On image url request: Server reads latest image from redis Server tells redis to delete later image My questions are: Are there any greater overheads of transferring images via HTTP instead of FTP? Is there a simple way to calculate how many potential cameras we could have streaming at once? Is there any way to prevent potentially DOS'ing our own servers due to web camera requests? Is Redis a good solution to this problem? Should I abandon PHP/Ngix combination and go for something else? Is this proposed solution actually any good? Will adding HTTPs to the mix cause posting the image to become too slow? Thanks in advance Alan

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• bluetooth connection using pybluez

  - by srj0408

  I am working on bluetooth not exactly on bluetooth stack-development but to use bluetooth in one of my project. I had done all that before using some of the py-bluez commands like hciconfig, hcitool scan , then simple-agents and using serial module inside python. But that was quite random. We were able to connect only one specific device based on its bluetooth address and there was no facility of reconnection once the devices are disconnected. Now i want to try out this stuff in a sequential manner like this (i am doing that all on a RPI and for at present on ubuntu 12.04.) i) Store some names in a file along with some other information with respect to that device. ii) Run a script to find out the device in locality with those names and if any one if found, report that. For this step, i had taken a reference from BTBook , made available from MIT. Below is the script for the same, but that script only search for the single name. from bluetooth import * target_name = "XT1033" target_address = None nearby_devices = discover_devices() for address in nearby_devices: if target_name == lookup_name( address ): target_address = address break if target_address is not None: print "found target bluetooth device with address ", target_address connect_socket(target_address); else: print "could not find target bluetooth device nearby" iii) Connect the device using client sock. But i dont have any device on which i can write a simple python script. My client can be any device that will be publishing data. Now i came through a script in the same book, that actually connect to a client requesting permission to connect to server. from bluetooth import * port = 1 server_sock=BluetoothSocket( RFCOMM ) server_sock.bind(("",port)) server_sock.listen(1) client_sock, client_info = server_sock.accept() print "Accepted connection from ", client_info data = client_sock.recv(1024) print "received [%s]" % data client_sock.close() server_sock.close() here client_sock, client_info = server_sock.accept() provide the client address and port requested to be connected. Can i pass address obtained from the earlier script to this, so that it connect server to the client? iv) Then if client get disconnected, re-connect(a simple polling can be used.) All this stuff can be done using bash and py-bluez functions but i want to do that in a sequential manner.I am not a master in python but i can do some small stuff. Can any one guide me for the same or can direct me to more usefull resource through which i can continue my coding part after finding the "X", "Y" named devices.

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• Weird nfs performance: 1 thread better than 8, 8 better than 2!

  - by Joe

  I'm trying to determine the cause of poor nfs performance between two Xen Virtual Machines (client & server) running on the same host. Specifically, the speed at which I can sequentially read a 1GB file on the client is much lower than what would be expected based on the measured network connection speed between the two VMs and the measured speed of reading the file directly on the server. The VMs are running Ubuntu 9.04 and the server is using the nfs-kernel-server package. According to various NFS tuning resources, changing the number of nfsd threads (in my case kernel threads) can affect performance. Usually this advice is framed in terms of increasing the number from the default of 8 on heavily-used servers. What I find in my current configuration: RPCNFSDCOUNT=8: (default): 13.5-30 seconds to cat a 1GB file on the client so 35-80MB/sec RPCNFSDCOUNT=16: 18s to cat the file 60MB/s RPCNFSDCOUNT=1: 8-9 seconds to cat the file (!!?!) 125MB/s RPCNFSDCOUNT=2: 87s to cat the file 12MB/s I should mention that the file I'm exporting is on a RevoDrive SSD mounted on the server using Xen's PCI-passthrough; on the server I can cat the file in under seconds ( 250MB/s). I am dropping caches on the client before each test. I don't really want to leave the server configured with just one thread as I'm guessing that won't work so well when there are multiple clients, but I might be misunderstanding how that works. I have repeated the tests a few times (changing the server config in between) and the results are fairly consistent. So my question is: why is the best performance with 1 thread? A few other things I have tried changing, to little or no effect: increasing the values of /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ipfrag_low_thresh and /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ipfrag_high_thresh to 512K, 1M from the default 192K,256K increasing the value of /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_default and /proc/sys/net/core/rmem_max to 1M from the default of 128K mounting with client options rsize=32768, wsize=32768 From the output of sar -d I understand that the actual read sizes going to the underlying device are rather small (<100 bytes) but this doesn't cause a problem when reading the file locally on the client. The RevoDrive actually exposes two "SATA" devices /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, then dmraid picks up a fakeRAID-0 striped across them which I have mounted to /mnt/ssd and then bind-mounted to /export/ssd. I've done local tests on my file using both locations and see the good performance mentioned above. If answers/comments ask for more details I will add them.

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• Hardware for multipurpose home server

  - by Michael Dmitry Azarkevich

  Hi guys, I'm looking to set up a multipurpose home server and hoped you could help me with the hardware selection. First of all, the services it will provide: Hosting a MySQL database (for training and testing purposes) FTP server Personal Mail Server Home media server So with this in mind I've done some research, and found some viable solutions: A standard PC with the appropriate software (Either second hand or new) A non-solid state mini-ITX system A solid state, fanless mini-ITX system I've also noted the pros and cons of each system: A standard second hand PC with old hardware would be the cheapest option. It could also have lacking processing power, not enough RAM and generally faulty hardware. Also, huge power consumption heat generation and noise levels. A standard new PC would have top-notch hardware and will stay that way for quite some time, so it's a good investment. But again, the main problem is power consumption, heat generation and noise levels. A non-solid state mini-ITX system would have the advantages of lower power consumption, lower cost (as far as I can see) and long lasting hardware. But it will generate noise and heat which will be even worse because of the size. A solid state, fanless mini-ITX system would have all the advantages of a non-solid state mini-ITX but with minimal noise and heat. The main disadvantage is the read\write problems of flash memory. All in all I'm leaning towards a non-solid state mini-ITX because of the read\write issues of flash memory. So, after this overview of what I do know, my questions are: Are all these services even providable from a single server? To my best understanding they are, but then again, I might be wrong. Is any of these solutions viable? If yes, which one is the best for my purposes? If not, what would you suggest? Also, on a more software oriented note: OS wise, I'm planning to run Linux. I'm currently thinking of four options I've been recommended: CentOS, Gentoo, DSL (Damn Small Linux) and LFS (Linux From Scratch). Any thoughts on this? Any other distro you would recomend? Regarding FTP services, I've herd good things about FileZila. Anyone has any experience with that? Do you recommend it? Do you recommend something else? Regarding the Mail service, I know nothing about this except that it exists. Any software you recommend for this task? Home media, same as mail service. Any recommended software? Thank you very much.

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• Need help troubleshooting highly variable ping times

  - by Elliot.Bradshaw

  I'm at work using Citrix (think Remote Desktop) to connect to client sites. With my job I have to write a fair bit of code while I'm connected remotely via Citrix, so the latency of my internet connection is important. If I'm getting ping times above 250ms, then it becomes almost impossible to scroll, click or type with accuracy. Recently my Comcast business internet has been exhibiting highly variable ping times. If I ping google.com, I'll get pings that range from 9ms all the way up to 1300ms. The problem seems to be at its worst during the hours of 1PM to 4:30PM. Outside of those hours and the variance in pings settles down, mostly between 9ms and 50ms. The signal to noise ratio and upstream power are both fine on my modem--the values are here: http://pastebin.com/D4hWGPXf I ran a trace route from my computer to google.com (the results of which are here: http://pastebin.com/GcdjYvMh) and did another test ping to the IP of the first hop outside of our local network (73.98.44.1)--the variance in ping times existed in exactly the same manner as if I were pinging Google. Connecting directly to the cable modem by CAT5 makes no difference. Here is a screenshot demonstrating the variance of the ping times: http://postimage.org/image/haocdeauv/full/ -- as you can see it can get pretty bad. Three Comcast techs have been out (two of them were here when the problem wasn't happening) and they as well as the regional tier 2 Comcast support were unable to diagnose the problem. I now have a ticket open with tier 3 support, but have yet to hear back from them. Does anyone know what could cause these sorts of problems or have any idea from the traceroute above where it could be originating? The regional tier 2 guy tried to tell me that what I'm seeing is normal--are highly variable ping times like that ever acceptable? Anything I should ask Comcast to do or look at to get this problem fixed? Any tips/advice much appreciated! Edit: This is Comcast cable internet at a small start-up, we've ruled out congestion in our private LAN as a cause (i.e., no one's watching YouTube when the pings become variable). Update: Tier 3 Comcast support advised swapping out the modem, a tech came here today and did that--same problem persists.

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• VLAN issues between linux kernels 2.6 / 3.3 in an ESX / Cisco environment

  - by David Griffith

  I shall attempt to explain an issue I have encountered - I have a VM running on esx 4.1 with an interface connected to VLAN800 via an access port on a cisco 3750. It runs linux - kernel 2.6.24, and has about 5 to 10 Mbit of chatter on 10.10.0.0/16 and various multicast addresses to look after. I needed to isolate certain devices from certain other devices on the network, with all of them having to talk to that one VM. No, the address space can't be separated, nor can the networks be easily vlan'd apart. The software on the VM listens to one interface only. Private vlans appear to be the way to go. So as a test, I built a bridge on the VM that globs together the vlans as needed. All good, everything works as expected. But occasionally (sigh) there's some latency that trips up a couple of profinet devices on the network because, you know, you're not really supposed to trunk real-time protocols around the place willy-nilly. I shift it to our test/backup server - works nicely, but I don't want it to be running on the test server as we muck around with that a lot. So I says to myself, "I'll put it on a new VM for testing and tweaking." I download a small linux distro with kernel 3.3, and install as a new VM with a the vlans as separate interfaces for testing. I power up the testing VM - ok. I bring up all the separate interfaces - ok. I can ping the production VM, see all sorts of traffic going past with tshark, etc. I build a bridge and put the primary vlan on it - the production VM running 2.6 immediately loses its multicast traffic - Unicast is fine. (?) I shut down the bridge - still no multicast traffic (!?) I power-cycle the production VM(!?!?) - multicast traffic returns. I trunk everything into the testing VM and create vlan interfaces under linux instead - same result, as soon as I start the bridge.... no multicast on the production VM. Ok, so I take a break and leave things alone. I decide to play with a couple of ubiquiti bullet radios - I'm testing various firmware as a side project. I flash a radio with Open-wrt-12.09. I enable a trunk on a port on a cisco on our network so I can muck around with multiple vlans and SSIDs I power up the radio and connect - ok. I create a vlan interface from the trunk.... the same vlan as the production VM wayyyyy over there, three cisco routers away. Ok. I bridge the vlan interface to the wifi interface and immediately get a phone call. The production VM has (suprise!) lost its multicast traffic. Again, nothing comes back until I power-cycle the VM. What the hell is going on?

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• Nginx common configuration that I might have missed

  - by ApPeL

  I recently moved from Apache Mod_wsgi to Nginx, and I have seen a major improvement on speed a lowering on memory usage and I am generally very happy with the it. I am not a server expert, so please be gentle. I am wondering if there are any small configuration that I might have missed, that will cause me some issues in the long run... Please see my nginx.conf file user nginx nginx; worker_processes 4; error_log /var/log/nginx/error_log info; events { worker_connections 1024; use epoll; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] ' '"$request" $status $bytes_sent ' '"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" ' '"$gzip_ratio"'; client_header_timeout 10m; client_body_timeout 10m; send_timeout 10m; connection_pool_size 256; client_header_buffer_size 1k; large_client_header_buffers 4 2k; request_pool_size 4k; gzip on; gzip_min_length 1100; gzip_buffers 4 8k; gzip_types text/plain; output_buffers 1 32k; postpone_output 1460; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay on; keepalive_timeout 75 20; ignore_invalid_headers on; index index.html; server { listen 80; server_name localhost; location /media/ { root /www/django_test1/myapp; # Notice this is the /media folder that we create above } location /mediaadmin/ { alias /opt/python2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/; # Notice this is the /media folder that we create above } location / { # host and port to fastcgi server fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8080; fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr; fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name; fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string; fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type; fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length; fastcgi_pass_header Authorization; fastcgi_intercept_errors off; client_max_body_size 100M; } access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access_log main; error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.error_log; } }

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• Google Rules for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts.  These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future.  While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth.  So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success.  The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I created. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid black 1.0pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-border-alt:solid black .5pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insideh-themecolor:text1; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insidev-themecolor:text1; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Google Rule Industry Examples New Retailer Rule New Relationship Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond to customer comments that are critical of the product, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers. Listen to what your customers are saying about you.  Convert the critics to fans and the fans to influencers. New Architecture Join a network; be a platform Tesco and BestBuy released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new applications. Become a destination for information. New Publicness Life is public, so is business Zappos and WholeFoods founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and connecting to customers.  It's not always pretty, but it's genuine. Be transparent.  Share both your successes and failures with your customers. New Society Elegant organization Wet Seal helps their customers assemble outfits and show them off to each other.  Barnes & Noble has a community site that includes a bookclub. Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better. New Economy Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches lululemon found a niche for yoga inspired athletic wear.  Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs of T-shirts. Serve small markets with niche products. New Business Reality Decide what business you're in When Lowes realized catering to women brought the men along, their sales increased. Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy. New Attitude Trust the people and listen In 2008 Starbucks launched MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers. Use social networks as additional data points for making better merchandising decisions. New Ethic Be honest and transparent; don't be evil Target is giving away reusable shopping bags for Earth Day.  Kohl's has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays. Being green earns customers' respect and lowers costs too. New Speed Life is live H&M and Zara keep up with fashion trends. Be prepared to pounce on you customers' fickle interests. New Imperatives Encourage, enable and protect innovation 1-800-Flowers was the first do sales in Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce.  The Sears Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo. Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won't be stifled. Jeff will be a keynote speaker at Crosstalk, our upcoming annual user conference, so I'm looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on retail and the new economy.

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