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• Developing Mobile Applications: Web, Native, or Hybrid?

  - by Michelle Kimihira

  Authors: Joe Huang, Senior Principal Product Manager, Oracle Mobile Application Development Framework  and Carlos Chang, Senior Principal Product Director The proliferation of mobile devices and platforms represents a game-changing technology shift on a number of levels. Companies must decide not only the best strategic use of mobile platforms, but also how to most efficiently implement them. Inevitably, this conversation devolves to the developers, who face the task of developing and supporting mobile applications—not a simple task in light of the number of devices and platforms. Essentially, developers can choose from the following three different application approaches, each with its own set of pros and cons. Native Applications: This refers to apps built for and installed on a specific platform, such as iOS or Android, using a platform-specific software development kit (SDK).  For example, apps for Apple’s iPhone and iPad are designed to run specifically on iOS and are written in Xcode/Objective-C. Android has its own variation of Java, Windows uses C#, and so on.  Native apps written for one platform cannot be deployed on another. Native apps offer fast performance and access to native-device services but require additional resources to develop and maintain each platform, which can be expensive and time consuming. Mobile Web Applications: Unlike native apps, mobile web apps are not installed on the device; rather, they are accessed via a Web browser.  These are server-side applications that render HTML, typically adjusting the design depending on the type of device making the request.  There are no program coding constraints for writing server-side apps—they can be written in Java, C, PHP, etc., it doesn’t matter.  Instead, the server detects what type of mobile browser is pinging the server and adjusts accordingly. For example, it can deliver fully JavaScript and CSS-enabled content to smartphone browsers, while downgrading gracefully to basic HTML for feature phone browsers. Mobile apps work across platforms, but are limited to what you can do through a browser and require Internet connectivity. For certain types of applications, these constraints may not be an issue. Oracle supports mobile web applications via ADF Faces (for tablets) and ADF Mobile browser (Trinidad) for smartphone and feature phones. Hybrid Applications: As the name implies, hybrid apps combine technologies from native and mobile Web apps to gain the benefits each. For example, these apps are installed on a device, like their pure native app counterparts, while the user interface (UI) is based on HTML5.  This UI runs locally within the native container, which usually leverages the device’s browser engine.  The advantage of using HTML5 is a consistent, cross-platform UI that works well on most devices.  Combining this with the native container, which is installed on-device, provides mobile users with access to local device services, such as camera, GPS, and local device storage.  Native apps may offer greater flexibility in integrating with device native services.  However, since hybrid applications already provide device integrations that typical enterprise applications need, this is typically less of an issue.  The new Oracle ADF Mobile release is an HTML5 and Java hybrid framework that targets mobile app development to iOS and Android from one code base. So, Which is the Best Approach? The short answer is – the best choice depends on the type of application you are developing.  For instance, animation-intensive apps such as games would favor native apps, while hybrid applications may be better suited for enterprise mobile apps because they provide multi-platform support. Just for starters, the following issues must be considered when choosing a development path. Application Complexity: How complex is the application? A quick app that accesses a database or Web service for some data to display?  You can keep it simple, and a mobile Web app may suffice. However, for a mobile/field worker type of applications that supports mission critical functionality, hybrid or native applications are typically needed. Richness of User Interactivity: What type of user experience is required for the application?  Mobile browser-based app that’s optimized for mobile UI may suffice for quick lookup or productivity type of applications.  However, hybrid/native application would typically be required to deliver highly interactive user experiences needed for field-worker type of applications.  For example, interactive BI charts/graphs, maps, voice/email integration, etc.  In the most extreme case like gaming applications, native applications may be necessary to deliver the highly animated and graphically intensive user experience. Performance: What type of performance is required by the application functionality?  For instance, for real-time look up of data over the network, mobile app performance depends on network latency and server infrastructure capabilities.  If consistent performance is required, data would typically need to be cached, which is supported on hybrid or native applications only. Connectivity and Availability: What sort of connectivity will your application require? Does the app require Web access all the time in order to always retrieve the latest data from the server? Or do the requirements dictate offline support? While native and hybrid apps can be built to operate offline, Web mobile apps require Web connectivity. Multi-platform Requirements: The terms “consumerization of IT” and BYOD (bring your own device) effectively mean that the line between the consumer and the enterprise devices have become blurred. Employees are bringing their personal mobile devices to work and are often expecting that they work in the corporate network and access back-office applications.  Even if companies restrict access to the big dogs: (iPad, iPhone, Android phones and tablets, possibly Windows Phone and tablets), trying to support each platform natively will require increasing resources and domain expertise with each new language/platform. And let’s not forget the maintenance costs, involved in upgrading new versions of each platform.   Where multi-platform support is needed, Web mobile or hybrid apps probably have the advantage. Going native, and trying to support multiple operating systems may be cost prohibitive with existing resources and developer skills. Device-Services Access:  If your app needs to access local device services, such as the camera, contacts app, accelerometer, etc., then your choices are limited to native or hybrid applications.   Fragmentation: Apple controls Apple iOS and the only concern is what version iOS is running on any given device.   Not so Android, which is open source. There are many, many versions and variants of Android running on different devices, which can be a nightmare for app developers trying to support different devices running different flavors of Android.  (Is it an Amazon Kindle Fire? a Samsung Galaxy?  A Barnes & Noble Nook?) This is a nightmare scenario for native apps—on the other hand, a mobile Web or hybrid app, when properly designed, can shield you from these complexities because they are based on common frameworks.  Resources: How many developers can you dedicate to building and supporting mobile application development?  What are their existing skills sets?  If you’re considering native application development due to the complexity of the application under development, factor the costs of becoming proficient on a each platform’s OS and programming language. Add another platform, and that’s another language, another SDK. On the other side of the equation, Web mobile or hybrid applications are simpler to make, and readily support more platforms, but there may be performance trade-offs. Conclusion This only scratches the surface. However, I hope to have suggested some food for thought in choosing your mobile development strategy.  Do your due diligence, search the Web, read up on mobile, talk to peers, attend events. The development team at Oracle is working hard on mobile technologies to help customers extend enterprise applications to mobile faster and effectively.  To learn more on what Oracle has to offer, check out the Oracle ADF Mobile (hybrid) and ADF Faces/ADF Mobile browser (Web Mobile) solutions from Oracle.   Additional Information Blog: ADF Blog Product Information on OTN: ADF Mobile Product Information on Oracle.com: Oracle Fusion Middleware Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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• Securing an ADF Application using OES11g: Part 1

  - by user12587121

  Future releases of the Oracle stack should allow ADF applications to be secured natively with Oracle Entitlements Server (OES). In a sequence of postings here I explore one way to achive this with the current technology, namely OES 11.1.1.5 and ADF 11.1.1.6. ADF Security Basics ADF Bascis The Application Development Framework (ADF) is Oracle’s preferred technology for developing GUI based Java applications.  It can be used to develop a UI for Swing applications or, more typically in the Oracle stack, for Web and J2EE applications.  ADF is based on and extends the Java Server Faces (JSF) technology.  To get an idea, Oracle provides an online demo to showcase ADF components. ADF can be used to develop just the UI part of an application, where, for example, the data access layer is implemented using some custom Java beans or EJBs.  However ADF also has it’s own data access layer, ADF Business Components (ADF BC) that will allow rapid integration of data from data bases and Webservice interfaces to the ADF UI component.   In this way ADF helps implement the MVC  approach to building applications with UI and data components. The canonical tutorial for ADF is to open JDeveloper, define a connection to a database, drag and drop a table from the database view to a UI page, build and deploy.  One has an application up and running very quickly with the ability to quickly integrate changes to, for example, the DB schema. ADF allows web pages to be created graphically and components like tables, forms, text fields, graphs and so on to be easily added to a page.  On top of JSF Oracle have added drag and drop tooling with JDeveloper and declarative binding of the UI to the data layer, be it database, WebService or Java beans.  An important addition is the bounded task flow which is a reusable set of pages and transitions.   ADF adds some steps to the page lifecycle defined in JSF and adds extra widgets including powerful visualizations. It is worth pointing out that the Oracle Web Center product (portal, content management and so on) is based on and extends ADF. ADF Security ADF comes with it’s own security mechanism that is exposed by JDeveloper at development time and in the WLS Console and Enterprise Manager (EM) at run time. The security elements that need to be addressed in an ADF application are: authentication, authorization of access to web pages, task-flows, components within the pages and data being returned from the model layer. One  typically relies on WLS to handle authentication and because of this users and groups will also be handled by WLS.  Typically in a Dev environment, users and groups are stored in the WLS embedded LDAP server. One has a choice when enabling ADF security (Application->Secure->Configure ADF Security) about whether to turn on ADF authorization checking or not: In the case where authorization is enabled for ADF one defines a set of roles in which we place users and then we grant access to these roles to the different ADF elements (pages or task flows or elements in a page). An important notion here is the difference between Enterprise Roles and Application Roles. The idea behind an enterprise role is that is defined in terms of users and LDAP groups from the WLS identity store.  “Enterprise” in the sense that these are things available for use to all applications that use that store.  The other kind of role is an Application Role and the idea is that  a given application will make use of Enterprise roles and users to build up a set of roles for it’s own use.  These application roles will be available only to that application.   The general idea here is that the enterprise roles are relatively static (for example an Employees group in the LDAP directory) while application roles are more dynamic, possibly depending on time, location, accessed resource and so on.  One of the things that OES adds that is that we can define these dynamic membership conditions in Role Mapping Policies. To make this concrete, here is how, at design time in Jdeveloper, one assigns these rights in Jdeveloper, which puts them into a file called jazn-data.xml: When the ADF app is deployed to a WLS this JAZN security data is pushed to the system-jazn-data.xml file of the WLS deployment for the policies and application roles and to the WLS backing LDAP for the users and enterprise roles.  Note the difference here: after deploying the application we will see the users and enterprise roles show up in the WLS LDAP server.  But the policies and application roles are defined in the system-jazn-data.xml file.  Consult the embedded WLS LDAP server to manage users and enterprise roles by going to the domain console and then Security Realms->myrealm->Users and Groups: For production environments (or in future to share this data with OES) one would then perform the operation of “reassociating” this security policy and application role data to a DB schema (or an LDAP).  This is done in the EM console by reassociating the Security Provider.  This blog posting has more explanations and references on this reassociation process. If ADF Authentication and Authorization are enabled then the Security Policies for a deployed application can be managed in EM.  Our goal is to be able to manage security policies for the applicaiton rather via OES and it's console. Security Requirements for an ADF Application With this package tour of ADF security we can see that to secure an ADF application with we would expect to be able to take care of at least the following items: Authentication, including a user and user-group store Authorization for page access Authorization for bounded Task Flow access.  A bounded task flow has only one point of entry and so if we protect that entry point by calling to OES then all the pages in the flow are protected.  Authorization for viewing data coming from the data access layer In the next posting we will describe a sample ADF application and required security policies. References ADF Dev Guide: Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework: Enabling ADF Security in a Fusion Web Application Oracle tutorial on securing a sample ADF application, appears to require ADF 11.1.2 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:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} 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: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-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Christmas in the Clouds

  - by andrewbrust

  I have been spending the last 2 weeks immersing myself in a number of Windows Azure and SQL Azure technologies.  And in setting up a new business (I’ll speak more about that in the future), I have also become a customer of Microsoft’s BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services).  In short, it has been a fortnight of Microsoft cloud computing. On the Azure side, I’ve looked, of course, at Web Roles and Worker Roles.  But I’ve also looked at Azure Storage’s REST API (including coding to it directly), I’ve looked at Azure Drive and the new VM Role; I’ve looked quite a bit at SQL Azure (including the project “Houston” Silverlight UI) and I’ve looked at SQL Azure labs’ OData service too. I’ve also looked at DataMarket and its integration with both PowerPivot and native Excel.  Then there’s AppFabric Caching, SQL Azure Reporting (what I could learn of it) and the Visual Studio tooling for Azure, including the storage of certificate-based credentials.  And to round it out with some user stuff, on the BPOS side, I’ve been working with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and LiveMeeting. I have to say I like a lot of what I’ve been seeing.  Azure’s not perfect, and BPOS certainly isn’t either.  But there’s good stuff in all these products, and there’s a lot of value. Azure Goes Deep Most people know that Web and Worker roles put the platform in charge of spinning virtual machines up and down, and keeping them up to date. But you can go way beyond that now.  The still-in-beta VM Role gives you the power to craft the machine (much as does Amazon’s EC2), though it takes away the platform’s self-managing attributes.  It still spins instances up and down, making drive storage non-durable, but Azure Drive gives you the ability to store VHD files as blobs and mount them as virtual hard drives that are readable and writeable.  Whether with Azure Storage or SQL Azure, Azure does data.  And OData is everywhere.  Azure Table Storage supports an OData Interface.  So does SQL Azure and so does DataMarket (the former project “Dallas”).  That means that Azure data repositories aren’t just straightforward to provision and configure…they’re also easy to program against, from just about any programming environment, in a RESTful manner.  And for more .NET-centric implementations, Azure AppFabric caching takes the technology formerly known as “Velocity” and throws it up into the cloud, speeding data access even more. Snapping in Place Once you get the hang of it, this stuff just starts to work in a way that becomes natural to understand.  I wasn’t expecting that, and I was really happy to discover it. In retrospect, I am not surprised, because I think the various Azure teams are the center of gravity for Redmond’s innovation right now.  The products belie this and so do my observations of the product teams’ motivation and high morale.  It is really good to see this; Microsoft needs to lead somewhere, and they need to be seen as the underdog while doing so.  With Azure, both requirements are in place.   BPOS: Bad Acronym, Easy Setup BPOS is about products you already know; Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications Server.  As such, it’s hard not to be underwhelmed by BPOS.  Until you realize how easy it makes it to get all that stuff set up.  I would say that from sign-up to productive use took me about 45 minutes…and that included the time necessary to wrestle with my DNS provider, set up Outlook and my SmartPhone up to talk to the Exchange account, create my SharePoint site collection, and configure the Outlook Conferencing add-in to talk to the provisioned Live Meeting account. Never before did I think setting up my own Exchange mail could come anywhere close to the simplicity of setting up an SMTP/POP account, and yet BPOS actually made it faster.   What I want from my Azure Christmas Next Year Not everything about Microsoft’s cloud is good.  I close this post with a list of things I’d like to see addressed: BPOS offerings are still based on the 2007 Wave of Microsoft server technologies.  We need to get to 2010, and fast.  Arguably, the 2010 products should have been released to the off-premises channel before the on-premise sone.  Office 365 can’t come fast enough. Azure’s Internet tooling and domain naming, is scattered and confusing.  Deployed ASP.NET applications go to cloudapp.net; SQL Azure and Azure storage work off windows.net.  The Azure portal and Project Houston are at azure.com.  Then there’s appfabriclabs.com and sqlazurelabs.com.  There is a new Silverlight portal that replaces most, but not all of the HTML ones.  And Project Houston is Silvelright-based too, though separate from the Silverlight portal tooling. Microsoft is the king off tooling.  They should not make me keep an entire OneNote notebook full of portal links, account names, access keys, assemblies and namespaces and do so much CTRL-C/CTRL-V work.  I’d like to see more project templates, have them automatically reference the appropriate assemblies, generate the right using/Imports statements and prime my config files with the right markup.  Then I want a UI that lets me log in with my Live ID and pick the appropriate project, database, namespace and key string to get set up fast. Beta programs, if they’re open, should onboard me quickly.  I know the process is difficult and everyone’s going as fast as they can.  But I don’t know why it’s so difficult or why it takes so long.  Getting developers up to speed on new features quickly helps popularize the platform.  Make this a priority. Make Azure accessible from the simplicity platforms, i.e. ASP.NET Web Pages (Razor) and LightSwitch.  Support .NET 4 now.  Make WebMatrix, IIS Express and SQL Compact work with the Azure development fabric. Have HTML helpers make Azure programming easier.  Have LightSwitch work with SQL Azure and not require SQL Express.  LightSwitch has some promising Azure integration now.  But we need more.  WebMatrix has none and that’s just silly, now that the Extra Small Instance is being introduced. The Windows Azure Platform Training Kit is great.  But I want Microsoft to make it even better and I want them to evangelize it much more aggressively.  There’s a lot of good material on Azure development out there, but it’s scattered in the same way that the platform is.   The Training Kit ties a lot of disparate stuff together nicely.  Make it known. Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot All in all, diving deep into Azure was a good way to end the year.  Diving deeper into Azure should a great way to spend next year, not just for me, but for Microsoft too.

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• Get your TFS 2012 task board demo ready in under 1 minute

  - by Tarun Arora

  Release Notes – http://tfsdemosetup.codeplex.com/  | Download | Source Code | Report a Bug | Ideas In this blog post, I’ll show you how to use the ‘TfsDemoSetup’ application to configure and setup the TFS 2012 task board for a demo in well less than 1 minute Step 1 – Note what you get with a newly created Team Project Create a new Team Project on TFS Preview         2. Click Create Project         3. The project creation has completed        4. Open the team web access and have a look at the home page Note – Since I created the project I am the only Team Member       A default Team by the name AdventureWorks Team has been created       A few sprints have been assigned to the default team but no dates for sprint start and end have been specified        A default Area Path for the team is missing       Step 2. Download the TFS Demo Setup Console application from Codeplex 1. Navigate to the TFS Demo Setup project on codeplex https://tfsdemosetup.codeplex.com/       2. Download Instructions and TFSDemo_<version>      3. Follow the steps in the Instructions.txt file      4. Unzip TFSDemo_<version> and open the target folder. Two important files in this folder, DemoDictionary.xml – This file contains the settings using which the demo environment will be setup SetupTfsDemo.exe – This will run the TFS demo environment setup application       Step 3 – Configure the setup (i.e. team name, members, sprint dates, etc) 1. Open up DemoDictionary.xml      2. Walkthrough DemoDictionary.xml             a. Basic Team Details         <Name> – Specify the name of the team         <Description> – Specify a description to go with the team         <SetAsDefaultTeam> – This accepts a value “true/false” when set to true, the newly created team will be set as the default team in the project         <BacklogIterationPath> – Specify a backlog iteration path for the team     b. Iterations – The iterations you specify here will be set as the Teams iterations        <Iterations> – Accepts multiple <Iteration> nodes.        <Iteration> – This is the most granular level of an Iteration        <Path> – The path to the sprint, sample values, Release 1\Sprint 1 or Release 2\Sprint 2        <StartDate> – The sprint start date, this accepts the format yyyy-MM-dd        <FinishDate> – The sprint finish date, this accepts the format yyyy-MM-dd     c. Team Members – Team Members that need to be added to the newly created team will be added under this section         <TeamMembers> – Accepts multiple <TeamMember> nodes.         <TeamMember> – This is the most granular level of a Team Member         <User> – This accepts the username, if you are running this against TFSPreview then the live id of the user will need to be passed. If you are running this against TFS Server then the user id i.e. Domain\UserName will need to be passed          <Team> – Specify the name of the team that you want the user to be assigned to.     d. WorkItems – This section will allow you to add work items (product backlog Items and linked tasks) to the current sprint of the team         <WorkItems> – Accepts multiple <WorkItem> nodes.         <WorkItem> – Accepts one <ProductBacklogItem> and multiple <Task> nodes         <ProductBacklogItem> – Used to create a Product Backlog Item type work item               <Title> – The title of the Product Backlog Item               <Description> – The description of the Product Backlog Type Work Item               <AssignedTo> – Used to assign the work item to a team member. The team member name or email address can be passed.               <Effort> – The total effort required to complete the Product Backlog Item         <Task> – Used to create a linked task to the Product Backlog type work item               <Title> – The title of the task type work item               <Description> – The description of the Task Type Work Item               <AssignedTo> – Used to assign the work item to a team member. The team member name or email address can be passed.               <RemainingWork> – The remaining effort to complete the task type work item Step 4 – Setup the demo environment against the newly created Team Project 1. Run SetupTfsDemo.exe    2. Enter Y or y on the prompt to continue setting up TFS Demo setup.     3. Select the newly created Team project, for this blogpost I had created the Team Project – AdventureWorks, so that is what I’ll select in the Connect to TFS Server pop up    3. Click Connect and follow the messages that are written to the console application       Step 5 – Validate that the Demo environment is set up as per the configuration 1. The team web access is all lit up You have a Sprint, a burn down chart, team members…    2. The team Demo has been added and has been set up as the default team    3. The Sprint Backlog Iteration path, Sprints and Sprint start and finish dates have been set    4. The default area path has been setup    5. Taskboard – Backlog items view    6. Taskboard – Team members view      Step 6 – Exception Handling! 1. This solution has been tested against TFS 2012 Service/Server for the Scrum 2.1 process template. 2. You are likely to run into an exception if you mess up the config file 3. If the team already exists and you run the console app to set up the team (with the same name) you will run into exceptions. Please remember this is just an alpha release, if you have any feedback please leave a comment! Didn’t I say that it would just take 1 minute, Enjoy!

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 1)

  - by Simon Cooper

  SQL Compare is one of Red Gate's most successful SQL Server tools; it allows developers and DBAs to compare and synchronize the contents of their databases. Although similar tools exist for Oracle, they are quite noticeably lacking in the usability and stability that SQL Compare is known for in the SQL Server world. We could see a real need for a usable schema comparison tools for Oracle, and so the Schema Compare for Oracle project was born. Over the next few weeks, as we come up to release of v1, I'll be doing a series of posts on the development of Schema Compare for Oracle. For the first post, I thought I would start with the main pitfalls that we stumbled across when developing the product, especially from a SQL Server background. 1. Schemas and Databases The most obvious difference is that the concept of a 'database' is quite different between Oracle and SQL Server. On SQL Server, one server instance has multiple databases, each with separate schemas. There is typically little communication between separate databases, and most databases are no more than about 1000-2000 objects. This means SQL Compare can register an entire database in a reasonable amount of time, and cross-database dependencies probably won't be an issue. It is a quite different scene under Oracle, however. The terms 'database' and 'instance' are used interchangeably, (although technically 'database' refers to the datafiles on disk, and 'instance' the running Oracle process that reads & writes to the database), and a database is a single conceptual entity. This immediately presents problems, as it is infeasible to register an entire database as we do in SQL Compare; in my Oracle install, using the standard recommended options, there are 63975 system objects. If we tried to register all those, not only would it take hours, but the client would probably run out of memory before we finished. As a result, we had to allow people to specify what schemas they wanted to register. This decision had quite a few knock-on effects for the design, which I will cover in a future post. 2. Connecting to Oracle The next obvious difference is in actually connecting to Oracle – in SQL Server, you can specify a server and database, and off you go. On Oracle things are slightly more complicated. SIDs, Service Names, and TNS A database (the files on disk) must have a unique identifier for the databases on the system, called the SID. It also has a global database name, which consists of a name (which doesn't have to match the SID) and a domain. Alternatively, you can identify a database using a service name, which normally has a 1-to-1 relationship with instances, but may not if, for example, using RAC (Real Application Clusters) for redundancy and failover. You specify the computer and instance you want to connect to using TNS (Transparent Network Substrate). The user-visible parts are a config file (tnsnames.ora) on the client machine that specifies how to connect to an instance. For example, the entry for one of my test instances is: SC_11GDB1 = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = simonctest)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = 11gR1db1) ) ) This gives the hostname, port, and SID of the instance I want to connect to, and associates it with a name (SC_11GDB1). The tnsnames syntax also allows you to specify failover, multiple descriptions and address lists, and client load balancing. You can then specify this TNS identifier as the data source in a connection string. Although using ODP.NET (the .NET dlls provided by Oracle) was fine for internal prototype builds, once we released the EAP we discovered that this simply wasn't an acceptable solution for installs on other people's machines. Due to .NET assembly strong naming, users had to have installed on their machines the exact same version of the ODP.NET dlls as we had on our build server. We couldn't ship the ODP.NET dlls with our installer as the Oracle license agreement prohibited this, and we didn't want to force users to install another Oracle client just so they can run our program. To be able to list the TNS entries in the connection dialog, we also had to locate and parse the tnsnames.ora file, which was complicated by users with several Oracle client installs and intricate TNS entries. After much swearing at our computers, we eventually decided to use a third party Oracle connection library from Devart that we could ship with our program; this could use whatever client version was installed, parse the TNS entries for us, and also had the nice feature of being able to connect to an Oracle server without having any client installed at all. Unfortunately, their current license agreement prevents us from shipping an Oracle SDK, but that's a bridge we'll cross when we get to it. 3. Running synchronization scripts The most important difference is that in Oracle, DDL is non-transactional; you cannot rollback DDL statements like you can on SQL Server. Although we considered various solutions to this, including using the flashback archive or recycle bin, or generating an undo script, no reliable method of completely undoing a half-executed sync script has yet been found; so in this case we simply have to trust that the DBA or developer will check and verify the script before running it. However, before we got to that stage, we had to get the scripts to run in the first place... To run a synchronization script from SQL Compare we essentially pass the script over to the SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery method. However, when we tried to do the same for an OracleConnection we got a very strange error – 'ORA-00911: invalid character', even when running the most basic CREATE TABLE command. After much hair-pulling and Googling, we discovered that Oracle has got some very strange behaviour with semicolons at the end of statements. To understand what's going on, we need to take a quick foray into SQL and PL/SQL. PL/SQL is not T-SQL In SQL Server, T-SQL is the language used to interface with the database. It has DDL, DML, control flow, and many other nice features (like Turing-completeness) that you can mix and match in the same script. In Oracle, DDL SQL and PL/SQL are two completely separate languages, with different syntax, different datatypes and different execution engines within the instance. Oracle SQL is much more like 'pure' ANSI SQL, with no state, no control flow, and only the basic DML commands. PL/SQL is the Turing-complete language, but can only do DML and DCL (i.e. BEGIN TRANSATION commands). Any DDL or SQL commands that aren't recognised by the PL/SQL engine have to be passed back to the SQL engine via an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command. In PL/SQL, a semicolons is a valid token used to delimit the end of a statement. In SQL, a semicolon is not a valid token (even though the Oracle documentation gives them at the end of the syntax diagrams) . When you execute the command CREATE TABLE table1 (COL1 NUMBER); in SQL*Plus the semicolon on the end is a command to SQL*Plus to execute the preceding statement on the server; it strips off the semicolon before passing it on. SQL Developer does a similar thing. When executing a PL/SQL block, however, the syntax is like so: BEGIN INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (1); INSERT INTO table1 VALUES (2); END; / In this case, the semicolon is accepted by the PL/SQL engine as a statement delimiter, and instead the / is the command to SQL*Plus to execute the current block. This explains the ORA-00911 error we got when trying to run the CREATE TABLE command – the server is complaining about the semicolon on the end. This also means that there is no SQL syntax to execute more than one DDL command in the same OracleCommand. Therefore, we would have to do a round-trip to the server for every command we want to execute. Obviously, this would cause lots of network traffic and be very slow on slow or congested networks. Our first attempt at a solution was to wrap every SQL statement (without semicolon) inside an EXECUTE IMMEDIATE command in a PL/SQL block and pass that to the server to execute. One downside of this solution is that we get no feedback as to how the script execution is going; we're currently evaluating better solutions to this thorny issue. Next up: Dependencies; how we solved the problem of being unable to register the entire database, and the knock-on effects to the whole product.

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• Book Review: Brownfield Application Development in .NET

  - by DotNetBlues

  I recently finished reading the book Brownfield Application Development in .NET by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham.  The book is available from Manning.  First off, let me say that I'm a huge fan of Manning as a publisher.  I've found their books to be top-quality, over all.  As a Kindle owner, I also appreciate getting an ebook copy along with the dead tree copy.  I find ebooks to be much more convenient to read, but hard-copies are easier to reference. The book covers, surprisingly enough, working with brownfield applications.  Which is well and good, if that term has meaning to you.  It didn't for me.  Without retreading a chunk of the first chapter, the authors break code bases into three broad categories: greenfield, brownfield, and legacy.  Greenfield is, essentially, new development that hasn't had time to rust and is (hopefully) being approached with some discipline.  Legacy applications are those that are more or less stable and functional, that do not expect to see a lot of work done to them, and are more likely to be replaced than reworked. Brownfield code is the gray (brown?) area between the two and the authors argue, quite effectively, that it is the most likely state for an application to be in.  Brownfield code has, in some way, been allowed to tarnish around the edges and can be difficult to work with.  Although I hadn't realized it, most of the code I've worked on has been brownfield.  Sometimes, there's talk of scrapping and starting over.  Sometimes, the team dismisses increased discipline as ivory tower nonsense.  And, sometimes, I've been the ignorant culprit vexing my future self. The book is broken into two major sections, plus an introduction chapter and an appendix.  The first section covers what the authors refer to as "The Ecosystem" which consists of version control, build and integration, testing, metrics, and defect management.  The second section is on actually writing code for brownfield applications and discusses object-oriented principles, architecture, external dependencies, and, of course, how to deal with these when coming into an existing code base. The ecosystem section is just shy of 140 pages long and brings some real meat to the matter.  The focus on "pain points" immediately sets the tone as problem-solution, rather than academic.  The authors also approach some of the topics from a different angle than some essays I've read on similar topics.  For example, the chapter on automated testing is on just that -- automated testing.  It's all well and good to criticize a project as conflating integration tests with unit tests, but it really doesn't make anyone's life better.  The discussion on testing is more focused on the "right" level of testing for existing projects.  Sometimes, an integration test is the best you can do without gutting a section of functional code.  Even if you can sell other developers and/or management on doing so, it doesn't actually provide benefit to your customers to rewrite code that works.  This isn't to say the authors encourage sloppy coding.  Far from it.  Just that they point out the wisdom of ignoring the sleeping bear until after you deal with the snarling wolf. The other sections take a similarly real-world, workable approach to the pain points they address.  As the section moves from technical solutions like version control and continuous integration (CI) to the softer, process issues of metrics and defect tracking, the authors begin to gently suggest moving toward a zero defect count.  While that really sounds like an unreasonable goal for a lot of ongoing projects, it's quite apparent that the authors have first-hand experience with taming some gruesome projects.  The suggestions are grounded and workable, and the difficulty of some situations is explicitly acknowledged. I have to admit that I started getting bored by the end of the ecosystem section.  No matter how valuable I think a good project manager or business analyst is to a successful ALM, at the end of the day, I'm a gear-head.  Also, while I agreed with a lot of the ecosystem ideas, in theory, I didn't necessarily feel that a lot of the single-developer projects that I'm often involved in really needed that level of rigor.  It's only after reading the sidebars and commentary in the coding section that I had the context for the arguments made in favor of a strong ecosystem supporting the development process.  That isn't to say that I didn't support good product management -- indeed, I've probably pushed too hard, on occasion, for a strong ALM outside of just development.  This book gave me deeper insight into why some corners shouldn't be cut and how damaging certain sins of omission can be. The code section, though, kept me engaged for its entirety.  Many technical books can be used as reference material from day one.  The authors were clear, however, that this book is not one of these.  The first chapter of the section (chapter seven, over all) addresses object oriented (OO) practices.  I've read any number of definitions, discussions, and treatises on OO.  None of the chapter was new to me, but it was a good review, and I'm of the opinion that it's good to review the foundations of what you do, from time to time, so I didn't mind. The remainder of the book is really just about how to apply OOP to existing code -- and, just because all your code exists in classes does not mean that it's object oriented.  That topic has the potential to be extremely condescending, but the authors miraculously managed to never once make me feel like a dolt or that they were wagging their finger at me for my prior sins.  Instead, they continue the "pain points" and problem-solution presentation to give concrete examples of how to apply some pretty academic-sounding ideas.  That's a point worth emphasizing, as my experience with most OO discussions is that they stay in the academic realm.  This book gives some very, very good explanations of why things like the Liskov Substitution Principle exist and why a corporate programmer should even care.  Even if you know, with absolute certainty, that you'll never have to work on an existing code-base, I would recommend this book just for the clarity it provides on OOP. This book goes beyond just theory, or even real-world application.  It presents some methods for fixing problems that any developer can, and probably will, encounter in the wild.  First, the authors address refactoring application layers and internal dependencies.  Then, they take you through those layers from the UI to the data access layer and external dependencies.  Finally, they come full circle to tie it all back to the overall process.  By the time the book is done, you're left with a lot of ideas, but also a reasonable plan to begin to improve an existing project structure. Throughout the book, it's apparent that the authors have their own preferred methodology (TDD and domain-driven design), as well as some preferred tools.  The "Our .NET Toolbox" is something of a neon sign pointing to that latter point.  They do not beat the reader over the head with anything resembling a "One True Way" mentality.  Even for the most emphatic points, the tone is quite congenial and helpful.  With some of the near-theological divides that exist within the tech community, I found this to be one of the more remarkable characteristics of the book.  Although the authors favor tools that might be considered Alt.NET, there is no reason the advice and techniques given couldn't be quite successful in a pure Microsoft shop with Team Foundation Server.  For that matter, even though the book specifically addresses .NET, it could be applied to a Java and Oracle shop, as well.

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #031

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Find Table without Clustered Index – Find Table with no Primary Key Clustered index is very important concept for any table. They impact the performance very heavily. Here is a quick script to find tables without a clustered index. Replace TEXT with VARCHAR(MAX) – Stop using TEXT, NTEXT, IMAGE Data Types Question: “Is VARCHAR (MAX) big enough to store the TEXT field?” Answer: “Yes, VARCHAR(MAX) is big enough to accommodate TEXT field. TEXT, NTEXT and IMAGE data types of SQL Server 2000 will be deprecated in a future version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2005 provides backward compatibility to data types but it is recommended to use new data types which are VARHCAR (MAX), NVARCHAR (MAX) and VARBINARY (MAX).” Limiting Result Sets by Using TABLESAMPLE – Examples Introduced in SQL Server 2005, TABLESAMPLE allows you to extract a sampling of rows from a table in the FROM clause. The rows retrieved are random and they are are not in any order. This sampling can be based on a percentage of number of rows. You can use TABLESAMPLE when only a sampling of rows is necessary for the application instead of a full result set. User Defined Functions (UDF) Limitations UDF have its own advantage and usage but in this article we will see the limitation of UDF. Things UDF can not do and why Stored Procedure are considered as more flexible then UDFs. Stored Procedure are more flexibility then User Defined Functions(UDF). However, this blog post is a good read to know what are the limitations of UDF. Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility For a long time SQL Server stayed on the compatibility level of 80 which is of SQL Server 2000. However, as soon as SQL Server 2005 introduced the issue of compatibility was quite a major issue. Since that time MS has been releasing the versions at every 2-3 years, changing compatibility is a ever popular topic. In this blog post, we learn how we can do the same using T-SQL. We can also do the same using SSMS and here is the blog post for the same: Change Database Compatible Level – Backward Compatibility – Part 2 – Management Studio. Constraint on VARCHAR(MAX) Field To Limit It Certain Length How can I limit the VARCHAR(MAX) field with maximum length of 12500 characters only. His Question was valid as our application was allowed 12500 characters. First of all – this requirement is bit strange but if someone wants to do the same, they can do it as described in this blog post. 2008 UNPIVOT Table Example Understanding UNPIVOT can be very complicated at times. In this blog post, I have attempted to explain the same concept in very simple words. Create Default Constraint Over Table Column A simple straight to script blog post – I still use this blog quite many times for my own reference. UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function It took me 4 iteration to find this very simple function which can immediately get the day of the week in a single line. 2009 Find Hostname and Current Logged In User Name There are two tricks listed in this blog post where users can find out the hostname and current logged user name immediately and very easily. Interesting Observation of Logon Trigger On All Servers When I was doing a project, I made an interesting observation of executing a logon trigger multiple times. It was absolutely unexpected for me! As I was logging only once, naturally, I was expecting the entry only once. However, it did it multiple times on different threads – indeed an eccentric phenomenon at first sight! Difference Between Candidate Keys and Primary Key One needs to be very careful in selecting the Primary Key as an incorrect selection can adversely impact the database architect and future normalization. For a Candidate Key to qualify as a Primary Key, it should be Non-NULL and unique in any domain. I have observed quite often that Primary Keys are seldom changed. I would like to have your feedback on not changing a Primary Key. Create Multiple Filegroup For Single Database Why should one create multiple file group for any database and what are the advantages of the same. In this blog post, I explain the same in detail. List All Objects Created on All Filegroups in Database In this blog post we discuss the essential question – “How can I find which object belongs to which filegroup. Is there any way to know this?” 2010 DATE and TIME in SQL Server 2008 When DATE is converted to DATETIME it adds the of midnight. When TIME is converted to DATETIME it adds the date of 1900 and it is something one wants to consider if you are going to run scripts from SQL Server 2008 to earlier version with CONVERT. Disabled Index and Update Statistics If you do not need a nonclustered index, I suggest you to drop it as keeping them disabled is an overhead on your system. This is because every time the statistics are updated for system all the statistics for disabled indexes are also updated. Precision of SMALLDATETIME – A 1 Minute Precision The precision of the datatype SMALLDATETIME is 1 minute. It discards the seconds by rounding up or rounding down any seconds greater than zero. 2011 Getting Columns Headers without Result Data – SET FMTONLY ON SET FMTONLY ON returns only metadata to the client. It can be used to test the format of the response without actually running the query. When this setting is ON the resultset only have headers of the results but no data. Copy Database from Instance to Another Instance – Copy Paste in SQL Server SQL Server has a feature which copy database from one database to another database and it can be automated as well using SSIS. Make sure you have SQL Server Agent Turned on as this feature will create a job. Puzzle – SELECT * vs SELECT COUNT(*) If you have ever wondered SELECT * gives error when executed alone but SELECT COUNT(*) does not. Why? in that case, you should read this blog post. Creating All New Database with Full Recovery Model This blog post is very based on very interesting story where the user wants to do something by default for every single new database created. Model database is a secret weapon which should be used very carefully and with proper evalution. If used carefully this can be a very much beneficiary when we need a newly created database behave in certain fashion. 2012 In year 2012 I had two interesting series ran on the blog. If there is no fun in learning, the learning becomes a burden. For the same reason, I had decided to build a three part quiz around SEQUENCE. The quiz was to identify the next value of the sequence. I encourage all of you to take part in this fun quiz. Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 1 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 2 Guess the Next Value – Puzzle 3 Can anyone remember their final day of schooling?  This is probably a silly question because – of course you can!  Many people mark this as the most exciting, happiest day of their life.  It marks the end of testing, the end of following rules set by teachers, and the beginning of finally being able to earn money and work in your chosen field. Read five part series on developer training subject Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Augmenting your Social Efforts via Data as a Service (DaaS)

  - by Mike Stiles

  The following is the 3rd in a series of posts on the value of leveraging social data across your enterprise by Oracle VP Product Development Don Springer and Oracle Cloud Data and Insight Service Sr. Director Product Management Niraj Deo. In this post, we will discuss the approach and value of integrating additional “public” data via a cloud-based Data-as-as-Service platform (or DaaS) to augment your Socially Enabled Big Data Analytics and CX Management. Let’s assume you have a functional Social-CRM platform in place. You are now successfully and continuously listening and learning from your customers and key constituents in Social Media, you are identifying relevant posts and following up with direct engagement where warranted (both 1:1, 1:community, 1:all), and you are starting to integrate signals for communication into your appropriate Customer Experience (CX) Management systems as well as insights for analysis in your business intelligence application. What is the next step? Augmenting Social Data with other Public Data for More Advanced Analytics When we say advanced analytics, we are talking about understanding causality and correlation from a wide variety, volume and velocity of data to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to achieve and optimize business value. And in some cases, to predict future performance to make appropriate course corrections and change the outcome to your advantage while you can. The data to acquire, process and analyze this is very nuanced: It can vary across structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data It can span across content, profile, and communities of profiles data It is increasingly public, curated and user generated The key is not just getting the data, but making it value-added data and using it to help discover the insights to connect to and improve your KPIs. As we spend time working with our larger customers on advanced analytics, we have seen a need arise for more business applications to have the ability to ingest and use “quality” curated, social, transactional reference data and corresponding insights. The challenge for the enterprise has been getting this data inline into an easily accessible system and providing the contextual integration of the underlying data enriched with insights to be exported into the enterprise’s business applications. The following diagram shows the requirements for this next generation data and insights service or (DaaS): Some quick points on these requirements: Public Data, which in this context is about Common Business Entities, such as - Customers, Suppliers, Partners, Competitors (all are organizations) Contacts, Consumers, Employees (all are people) Products, Brands This data can be broadly categorized incrementally as - Base Utility data (address, industry classification) Public Master Reference data (trade style, hierarchy) Social/Web data (News, Feeds, Graph) Transactional Data generated by enterprise process, workflows etc. This Data has traits of high-volume, variety, velocity etc., and the technology needed to efficiently integrate this data for your needs includes - Change management of Public Reference Data across all categories Applied Big Data to extract statics as well as real-time insights Knowledge Diagnostics and Data Mining As you consider how to deploy this solution, many of our customers will be using an online “cloud” service that provides quality data and insights uniformly to all their necessary applications. In addition, they are requesting a service that is: Agile and Easy to Use: Applications integrated with the service can obtain data on-demand, quickly and simply Cost-effective: Pre-integrated into applications so customers don’t have to Has High Data Quality: Single point access to reference data for data quality and linkages to transactional, curated and social data Supports Data Governance: Becomes more manageable and cost-effective since control of data privacy and compliance can be enforced in a centralized place Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) Just as the cloud has transformed and now offers a better path for how an enterprise manages its IT from their infrastructure, platform, and software (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS), the next step is data (DaaS). Over the last 3 years, we have seen the market begin to offer a cloud-based data service and gain initial traction. On one side of the DaaS continuum, we see an “appliance” type of service that provides a single, reliable source of accurate business data plus social information about accounts, leads, contacts, etc. On the other side of the continuum we see more of an online market “exchange” approach where ISVs and Data Publishers can publish and sell premium datasets within the exchange, with the exchange providing a rich set of web interfaces to improve the ease of data integration. Why the difference? It depends on the provider’s philosophy on how fast the rate of commoditization of certain data types will occur. How do you decide the best approach? Our perspective, as shown in the diagram below, is that the enterprise should develop an elastic schema to support multi-domain applicability. This allows the enterprise to take the most flexible approach to harness the speed and breadth of public data to achieve value. The key tenet of the proposed approach is that an enterprise carefully federates common utility, master reference data end points, mobility considerations and content processing, so that they are pervasively available. One way you may already be familiar with this approach is in how you do Address Verification treatments for accounts, contacts etc. If you design and revise this service in such a way that it is also easily available to social analytic needs, you could extend this to launch geo-location based social use cases (marketing, sales etc.). Our fundamental belief is that value-added data achieved through enrichment with specialized algorithms, as well as applying business “know-how” to weight-factor KPIs based on innovative combinations across an ever-increasing variety, volume and velocity of data, will be where real value is achieved. Essentially, Data-as-a-Service becomes a single entry point for the ever-increasing richness and volume of public data, with enrichment and combined capabilities to extract and integrate the right data from the right sources with the right factoring at the right time for faster decision-making and action within your core business applications. As more data becomes available (and in many cases commoditized), this value-added data processing approach will provide you with ongoing competitive advantage. Let’s look at a quick example of creating a master reference relationship that could be used as an input for a variety of your already existing business applications. In phase 1, a simple master relationship is achieved between a company (e.g. General Motors) and a variety of car brands’ social insights. The reference data allows for easy sort, export and integration into a set of CRM use cases for analytics, sales and marketing CRM. In phase 2, as you create more data relationships (e.g. competitors, contacts, other brands) to have broader and deeper references (social profiles, social meta-data) for more use cases across CRM, HCM, SRM, etc. This is just the tip of the iceberg, as the amount of master reference relationships is constrained only by your imagination and the availability of quality curated data you have to work with. DaaS is just now emerging onto the marketplace as the next step in cloud transformation. For some of you, this may be the first you have heard about it. Let us know if you have questions, or perspectives. In the meantime, we will continue to share insights as we can.Photo: Erik Araujo, stock.xchng

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• ODEE Green Field (Windows) Part 4 - Documaker

  - by AndyL-Oracle

  Welcome back! We're about nearing completion of our installation of Oracle Documaker Enterprise Edition ("ODEE") in a green field. In my previous post, I covered the installation of SOA Suite for WebLogic. Before that, I covered the installation of WebLogic, and Oracle 11g database - all of which constitute the prerequisites for installing ODEE. Naturally, if your environment already has a WebLogic server and Oracle database, then you can skip all those components and go straight for the heart of the installation of ODEE. The ODEE installation is comprised of two procedures, the first covers the installation, which is running the installer and answering some questions. This will lay down the files necessary to install into the tiers (e.g. database schemas, WebLogic domains, etcetera). The second procedure is to deploy the configuration files into the various components (e.g. deploy the database schemas, WebLogic domains, SOA composites, etcetera). I will segment my posts accordingly! Let's get started, shall we? Unpack the installation files into a temporary directory location. This should extract a zip file. Extract that zip file into the temporary directory location. Navigate to and execute the installer in Disk1/setup.exe. You may have to allow the program to run if User Account Control is enabled. Once the dialog below is displayed, click Next. Select your ODEE Home - inside this directory is where all the files will be deployed. For ease of support, I recommend using the default, however you can put this wherever you want. Click Next. Select the database type, database connection type – note that the database name should match the value used for the connection type (e.g. if using SID, then the name should be IDMAKER; if using ServiceName, the name should be “idmaker.us.oracle.com”). Verify whether or not you want to enable advanced compression. Note: if you are not licensed for Oracle 11g Advanced Compression option do not use this option! Terrible, terrible calamities will befall you if you do! Click Next. Enter the Documaker Admin user name (default "dmkr_admin" is recommended for support purposes) and set the password. Update the System name and ID (must be unique) if you want/need to - since this is a green field install you should be able to use the default System ID. The only time you'd change this is if you were, for some reason, installing a new ODEE system into an existing schema that already had a system. Click Next. Enter the Assembly Line user name (default "dmkr_asline" is recommended) and set the password. Update the Assembly Line name and ID (must be unique) if you want/need to - it's quite possible that at some point you will create another assembly line, in which case you have several methods of doing so. One is to re-run the installer, and in this case you would pick a different assembly line ID and name. Click Next. Note: you can set the DB folder if needed (typically you don’t – see ODEE Installation Guide for specifics. Select the appropriate Application Server type - in this case, our green field install is going to use WebLogic - set the username to weblogic (this is required) and specify your chosen password. This credential will be used to access the application server console/control panel. Keep in mind that there are specific criteria on password choices that are required by WebLogic, but are not enforced by the installer (e.g. must contain a number, must be of a certain length, etcetera). Choose a strong password. Set the connection information for the JMS server. Note that for the 12.3.x version, the installer creates a separate JVM (WebLogic managed server) that hosts the JMS server, whereas prior editions place the JMS server on the AdminServer.  You may also specify a separate URL to the JMS server in case you intend to move the JMS resources to a separate/different server (e.g. back to AdminServer). You'll need to provide a login principal and credentials - for simplicity I usually make this the same as the WebLogic domain user, however this is not a secure practice! Make your JMS principal different from the WebLogic principal and choose a strong password, then click Next. Specify the Hot Folder(s) (comma-delimited if more than one) - this is the directory/directories that is/are monitored by ODEE for jobs to process. Click Next. If you will be setting up an SMTP server for ODEE to send emails, you may configure the connection details here. The details required are simple: hostname, port, user/password, and the sender's address (e.g. emails will appear to be sent by the address shown here so if the recipient clicks "reply", this is where it will go). Click Next. If you will be using Oracle WebCenter:Content (formerly known as Oracle UCM) you can enable this option and set the endpoints/credentials here. If you aren't sure, select False - you can always go back and enable this later. I'm almost 76% certain there will be a post sometime in the future that details how to configure ODEE + WCC:C! Click Next. If you will be using Oracle UMS for sending MMS/text messages, you can enable and set the endpoints/credentials here. As with UCM, if you're not sure, don't enable it - you can always set it later. Click Next. On this screen you can change the endpoints for the Documaker Web Service (DWS), and the endpoints for approval processing in Documaker Interactive. The deployment process for ODEE will create 3 managed WebLogic servers for hosting various Documaker components (JMS, Interactive, DWS, Dashboard, Documaker Administrator, etcetera) and it will set the ports used for each of these services. In this screen you can change these values if you know how you want to deploy these managed servers - but for now we'll just accept the defaults. Click Next. Verify the installation details and click Install. You can save the installation into a response file if you need to (which might be useful if you want to rerun this installation in an unattended fashion). Allow the installation to progress... Click Next. You can save the response file if needed (e.g. in case you forgot to save it earlier!) Click Finish. That's it, you're done with the initial installation. Have a look around the ODEE_HOME that you just installed (remember we selected c:\oracle\odee_1?) and look at the files that are laid down. Don't change anything just yet! Stay tuned for the next segment where we complete and verify the installation. 

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• General Policies and Procedures for Maintaining the Value of Data Assets

  Here is a general list for policies and procedures regarding maintaining the value of data assets. Data Backup Policies and Procedures Backups are very important when dealing with data because there is always the chance of losing data due to faulty hardware or a user activity. So the need for a strategic backup system should be mandatory for all companies. This being said, in the real world some companies that I have worked for do not really have a good data backup plan. Typically when companies tend to take this kind of approach in data backups usually the data is not really recoverable.  Unfortunately when companies do not regularly test their backup plans they get a false sense of security because they think that they are covered. However, I can tell you from personal and professional experience that a backup plan/system is never fully implemented until it is regularly tested prior to the time when it actually needs to be used. Disaster Recovery Plan Expanding on Backup Policies and Procedures, a company needs to also have a disaster recovery plan in order to protect its data in case of a catastrophic disaster.  Disaster recovery plans typically encompass how to restore all of a company’s data and infrastructure back to a restored operational status.  Most Disaster recovery plans also include time estimates on how long each step of the disaster recovery plan should take to be executed.  It is important to note that disaster recovery plans are never fully implemented until they have been tested just like backup plans. Disaster recovery plans should be tested regularly so that the business can be confident in not losing any or minimal data due to a catastrophic disaster. Firewall Policies and Content Filters One way companies can protect their data is by using a firewall to separate their internal network from the outside. Firewalls allow for enabling or disabling network access as data passes through it by applying various defined restrictions. Furthermore firewalls can also be used to prevent access from the internal network to the outside by these same factors. Common Firewall Restrictions Destination/Sender IP Address Destination/Sender Host Names Domain Names Network Ports Companies can also desire to restrict what their network user’s view on the internet through things like content filters. Content filters allow a company to track what webpages a person has accessed and can also restrict user’s access based on established rules set up in the content filter. This device and/or software can block access to domains or specific URLs based on a few factors. Common Content Filter Criteria Known malicious sites Specific Page Content Page Content Theme  Anti-Virus/Mal-ware Polices Fortunately, most companies utilize antivirus programs on all computers and servers for good reason, virus have been known to do the following: Corrupt/Invalidate Data, Destroy Data, and Steal Data. Anti-Virus applications are a great way to prevent any malicious application from being able to gain access to a company’s data.  However, anti-virus programs must be constantly updated because new viruses are always being created, and the anti-virus vendors need to distribute updates to their applications so that they can catch and remove them. Data Validation Policies and Procedures Data validation is very important to ensure that only accurate information is stored. The existence of invalid data can cause major problems when businesses attempt to use data for knowledge based decisions and for performance reporting. Data Scrubbing Policies and Procedures Data scrubbing is valuable to companies in one of two ways. The first can be used to clean data prior to being analyzed for report generation. The second is that it allows companies to remove things like personally Identifiable information from its data prior to transmit it between multiple environments or if the information is sent to an external location. An example of this can be seen with medical records in regards to HIPPA laws that prohibit the storage of specific personal and medical information. Additionally, I have professionally run in to a scenario where the Canadian government does not allow any Canadian’s personal information to be stored on a server not located in Canada. Encryption Practices The use of encryption is very valuable when a company needs to any personal information. This allows users with the appropriated access levels to view or confirm the existence or accuracy of data within a system by either decrypting the information or encrypting a piece of data and comparing it to the stored version.  Additionally, if for some unforeseen reason the data got in to the wrong hands then they would have to first decrypt the data before they could even be able to read it. Encryption just adds and additional layer of protection around data itself. Standard Normalization Practices The use of standard data normalization practices is very important when dealing with data because it can prevent allot of potential issues by eliminating the potential for unnecessary data duplication. Issues caused by data duplication include excess use of data storage, increased chance for invalidated data, and over use of data processing. Network and Database Security/Access Policies Every company has some form of network/data access policy even if they have none. These policies help secure data from being seen by inappropriate users along with preventing the data from being updated or deleted by users. In addition, without a good security policy there is a large potential for data to be corrupted by unassuming users or even stolen. Data Storage Policies Data storage polices are very important depending on how they are implemented especially when a company is trying to utilize them in conjunction with other policies like Data Backups. I have worked at companies where all network user folders are constantly backed up, and if a user wanted to ensure the existence of a piece of data in the form of a file then they had to store that file in their network folder. Conversely, I have also worked in places where when a user logs on or off of the network there entire user profile is backed up. Training Policies One of the biggest ways to prevent data loss and ensure that data will remain a company asset is through training. The practice of properly train employees on how to work with in systems that access data is crucial when trying to ensure a company’s data will remain an asset. Users need to be trained on how to manipulate a company’s data in order to perform their tasks to reduce the chances of invalidating data.

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• Projected Results

  - by Sylvie MacKenzie, PMP

  Excerpt from PROFIT - ORACLE - by Monica Mehta Yasser Mahmud has seen a revolution in project management over the past decade. During that time, the former Primavera product strategist (who joined Oracle when his company was acquired in 2008) has not only observed a transformation in the way IT systems support corporate projects but the role project portfolio management (PPM) plays in the enterprise. “15 years ago project management was the domain of project management office (PMO),” Mahmud recalls of earlier days. “But over the course of the past decade, we've seen it transform into a mission critical enterprise discipline, that has made Primavera indispensable in the board room. Now, as a senior manager, a board member, or a C-level executive you have direct and complete visibility into what’s kind of going on in the organization—at a level of detail that you're going to consume that information.” Now serving as Oracle’s vice president of product strategy and industry marketing, Mahmud shares his thoughts on how Oracle’s Primavera solutions have evolved and how best-in-class project portfolio management systems can help businesses stay competitive. Profit: What do you feel are the market dynamics that are changing project management today? Mahmud: First, the data explosion. We're generating data at twice the rate at which we can actually store it. The same concept applies for project-intensive organizations. A lot of data is gathered, but what are we really doing with it? Are we turning data into insight? Are we using that insight and turning it into foresight with analytics tools? This is a key driver that will separate the very good companies—the very competitive companies—from those that are not as competitive. Another trend is centered on the explosion of mobile computing. By the year 2013, an estimated 35 percent of the world’s workforce is going to be mobile. That’s one billion people. So the question is not if you're going to go mobile, it’s how fast you are going to go mobile. What kind of impact does that have on how the workforce participates in projects? What worked ten to fifteen years ago is not going to work today. It requires a real rethink around the interfaces and how data is actually presented. Profit: What is the role of project management in this new landscape? Mahmud: We recently conducted a PPM study with the Economist Intelligence Unit centered to determine how important project management is considered within organizations. Our target was primarily CFOs, CIOs, and senior managers and we discovered that while 95 percent of participants believed it critical to their business, only six percent were confident that projects were delivered on time and on budget. That’s a huge gap. Most organizations are looking for efficiency, especially in these volatile financial times. But senior management can’t keep track of every project in a large organization. As a result, executives are attempting to inventory the work being conducted under their watch. What is often needed is a very high-level assessment conducted at the board level to say, “Here are the 50 initiatives that we have underway. How do they line up with our strategic drivers?” This line of questioning can provide early warning that work and strategy are out of alignment; finding the gap between what the business needs to do and the actual performance scorecard. That’s low-hanging fruit for any executive looking to increase efficiency and save money. But it can only be obtained through proper assessment of existing projects—and you need a project system of record to get that done. Over the next decade or so, project management is going to transform into holistic work management. Business leaders will want make sure key projects align with corporate strategy, but also the ability to drill down into daily activity and smaller projects to make sure they line up as well. Keeping employees from working on tasks—even for a few hours—that don’t line up with corporate goals will, in many ways, become a competitive differentiator. Profit: How do all of these market challenges and shifting trends impact Oracle’s Primavera solutions and meeting customers’ needs? Mahmud: For Primavera, it’s a transformation from being a project management application to a PPM system in the enterprise. Also making that system a mission-critical application by connecting to other key applications within the ecosystem, such as the enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain, and CRM systems. Analytics have also become a huge component. Business analytics have made Oracle’s Primavera applications pertinent in the boardroom. Now, as a senior manager, a board member, a CXO, CIO, or CEO, you have direct visibility into what’s going on in the organization at a level that you're able to consume that information. In addition, all of this information pairs up really well with your financials and other data. Certainly, when you're an Oracle shop, you have that visibility that you didn’t have before from a project execution perspective. Profit: What new strategies and tools are being implemented to create a more efficient workplace for users? Mahmud: We believe very strongly that just because you call something an enterprise project portfolio management system doesn’t make it so—you have to get people to want to participate in the system. This can’t be mandated down from the top. It simply doesn’t work that way. A truly adoptable solution is one that makes it super easy for all types users to participate, by providing them interfaces where they live. Keeping that in mind, a major area of development has been alternative user interfaces. This is increasingly resulting in the creation of lighter weight, targeted interfaces such as iOS applications, and smartphones interfaces such as for iPhone and Android platform. Profit: How does this translate into the development of Oracle’s Primavera solutions? Mahmud: Let me give you a few examples. We recently announced the launch of our Primavera P6 Team Member application, which is a native iOS application for the iPhone. This interface makes it easier for team members to do their jobs quickly and effectively. Similarly, we introduced the Primavera analytics application, which can be consumed via mobile devices, and when married with Oracle Spatial capabilities, users can get a geographical view of what’s going on and which projects are occurring in various locations around the world. Lastly, we introduced advanced email integration that allows project team members to status work via E-mail. This functionality leverages the fact that users are in E-mail system throughout the day and allows them to status their work without the need to launch the Primavera application. It comes back to a mantra: provide as many alternative user interfaces as possible, so you can give people the ability to work, to participate, to raise issues, to create projects, in the places where they live. Do it in such a way that it’s non-intrusive, do it in such a way that it’s easy and intuitive and they can get it done in a short amount of time. If you do that, workers can get back to doing what they're actually getting paid for.

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• BI Applications overview

  - by sv744

  Welcome to Oracle BI applications blog! This blog will talk about various features, general roadmap, description of functionality and implementation steps related to Oracle BI applications. In the first post we start with an overview of the BI apps and will delve deeper into some of the topics below in the upcoming weeks and months. If there are other topics you would like us to talk about, pl feel free to provide feedback on that. The Oracle BI applications are a set of pre-built applications that enable pervasive BI by providing role-based insight for each functional area, including sales, service, marketing, contact center, finance, supplier/supply chain, HR/workforce, and executive management. For example, Sales Analytics includes role-based applications for sales executives, sales management, as well as front-line sales reps, each of whom have different needs. The applications integrate and transform data from a range of enterprise sources—including Siebel, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and others—into actionable intelligence for each business function and user role. This blog  starts with the key benefits and characteristics of Oracle BI applications. In a series of subsequent blogs, each of these points will be explained in detail. Why BI apps? Demonstrate the value of BI to a business user, show reports / dashboards / model that can answer their business questions as part of the sales cycle. Demonstrate technical feasibility of BI project and significantly lower risk and improve success Build Vs Buy benefit Don’t have to start with a blank sheet of paper. Help consolidate disparate systems Data integration in M&A situations Insulate BI consumers from changes in the OLTP Present OLTP data and highlight issues of poor data / missing data – and improve data quality and accuracy Prebuilt Integrations BI apps support prebuilt integrations against leading ERP sources: Fusion Applications, E- Business Suite, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Siebel, SAP Co-developed with inputs from functional experts in BI and Applications teams. Out of the box dimensional model to source model mappings Multi source and Multi Instance support Rich Data Model    BI apps have a very rich dimensionsal data model built over 10 years that incorporates best practises from BI modeling perspective as well as reflect the source system complexities  Thanks for reading a long post, and be on the lookout for future posts.  We will look forward to your valuable feedback on these topics as well as suggestions on what other topics would you like us to cover. I Conformed dimensional model across all business subject areas allows cross functional reporting, e.g. customer / supplier 360 Over 360 fact tables across 7 product areas CRM – 145, SCM – 47, Financials – 28, Procurement – 20, HCM – 27, Projects – 18, Campus Solutions – 21, PLM - 56 Supported by 300 physical dimensions Support for extensive calendars; Gregorian, enterprise and ledger based Conformed data model and metrics for real time vs warehouse based reporting  Multi-tenant enabled Extensive BI related transformations BI apps ETL and data integration support various transformations required for dimensional models and reporting requirements. All these have been distilled into common patterns and abstracted logic which can be readily reused across different modules Slowly Changing Dimension support Hierarchy flattening support Row / Column Hybrid Hierarchy Flattening As Is vs. As Was hierarchy support Currency Conversion :-  Support for 3 corporate, CRM, ledger and transaction currencies UOM conversion Internationalization / Localization Dynamic Data translations Code standardization (Domains) Historical Snapshots Cycle and process lifecycle computations Balance Facts Equalization of GL accounting chartfields/segments Standardized values for categorizing GL accounts Reconciliation between GL and subledgers to track accounted/transferred/posted transactions to GL Materialization of data only available through costly and complex APIs e.g. Fusion Payroll, EBS / Fusion Accruals Complex event Interpretation of source data – E.g. o    What constitutes a transfer o    Deriving supervisors via position hierarchy o    Deriving primary assignment in PSFT o    Categorizing and transposition to measures of Payroll Balances to specific metrics to support side by side comparison of measures of for example Fixed Salary, Variable Salary, Tax, Bonus, Overtime Payments. o    Counting of Events – E.g. converting events to fact counters so that for example the number of hires can easily be added up and compared alongside the total transfers and terminations. Multi pass processing of multiple sources e.g. headcount, salary, promotion, performance to allow side to side comparison. Adding value to data to aid analysis through banding, additional domain classifications and groupings to allow higher level analytical reporting and data discovery Calculation of complex measures examples: o    COGs, DSO, DPO, Inventory turns  etc o    Transfers within a Hierarchy or out of / into a hierarchy relative to view point in hierarchy. Configurability and Extensibility support  BI apps offer support for extensibility for various entities as automated extensibility or part of extension methodology Key Flex fields and Descriptive Flex support  Extensible attribute support (JDE)  Conformed Domains ETL Architecture BI apps offer a modular adapter architecture which allows support of multiple product lines into a single conformed model Multi Source Multi Technology Orchestration – creates load plan taking into account task dependencies and customers deployment to generate a plan based on a customers of multiple complex etl tasks Plan optimization allowing parallel ETL tasks Oracle: Bit map indexes and partition management High availability support    Follow the sun support. TCO BI apps support several utilities / capabilities that help with overall total cost of ownership and ensure a rapid implementation Improved cost of ownership – lower cost to deploy On-going support for new versions of the source application Task based setups flows Data Lineage Functional setup performed in Web UI by Functional person Configuration Test to Production support Security BI apps support both data and object security enabling implementations to quickly configure the application as per the reporting security needs Fine grain object security at report / dashboard and presentation catalog level Data Security integration with source systems  Extensible to support external data security rules Extensive Set of KPIs Over 7000 base and derived metrics across all modules Time series calculations (YoY, % growth etc) Common Currency and UOM reporting Cross subject area KPIs (analyzing HR vs GL data, drill from GL to AP/AR, etc) Prebuilt reports and dashboards 3000+ prebuilt reports supporting a large number of industries Hundreds of role based dashboards Dynamic currency conversion at dashboard level Highly tuned Performance The BI apps have been tuned over the years for both a very performant ETL and dashboard performance. The applications use best practises and advanced database features to enable the best possible performance. Optimized data model for BI and analytic queries Prebuilt aggregates& the ability for customers to create their own aggregates easily on warehouse facts allows for scalable end user performance Incremental extracts and loads Incremental Aggregate build Automatic table index and statistics management Parallel ETL loads Source system deletes handling Low latency extract with Golden Gate Micro ETL support Bitmap Indexes Partitioning support Modularized deployment, start small and add other subject areas seamlessly Source Specfic Staging and Real Time Schema Support for source specific operational reporting schema for EBS, PSFT, Siebel and JDE Application Integrations The BI apps also allow for integration with source systems as well as other applications that provide value add through BI and enable BI consumption during operational decision making Embedded dashboards for Fusion, EBS and Siebel applications Action Link support Marketing Segmentation Sales Predictor Dashboard Territory Management External Integrations The BI apps data integration choices include support for loading extenral data External data enrichment choices : UNSPSC, Item class etc. Extensible Spend Classification Broad Deployment Choices Exalytics support Databases :  Oracle, Exadata, Teradata, DB2, MSSQL ETL tool of choice : ODI (coming), Informatica Extensible and Customizable Extensible architecture and Methodology to add custom and external content Upgradable across releases

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• Getting Started With Tailoring Business Processes

  - by Richard Bingham

  In this article, and for the sake of simplicity, we will use the term “On-Premise” to mean a deployment where you have design-time development access to the instance, including administration of the technology components, the applications filesystem, and the database. In reality this might be a local development instance that is then supported by a team who can deploy your customizations to the restricted production instance equivalents. Tools Overview Firstly let’s look at the Design-Time tools within JDeveloper for customizing and extending the artifacts of a Business Process. In essence this falls into two buckets; SOA Composite Editor for working with BPEL processes, and the BPM Studio. The SOA Composite Editor As a standard extension to JDeveloper, this graphical design tool should be familiar to anyone previously worked with Oracle SOA Server. With easy-to-use modeling capability, backed-up by full XML source-view (for read-only), it provides everything that is needed to implement the technical design. In simple terms, once deployed to the remote SOA Server the composite components (like Mediator) leverage the Event Delivery Network (EDN) for interaction with the application logic. If you are customizing an existing Fusion Applications BPEL process then be aware that it does support MDS-based customization layers just like Page Composer where different customizations are used based on the run-time context, like for a specific Product or Business Unit. This also makes them safe from patching and upgrades, although only a single active version of the composite is available at run-time. This is defined by a field on the composite record, available in Enterprise Manager. Obviously if you wish to fire different activities and tasks based on the user context then you can should include switches to fork the flows in your custom BPEL process. Figure 1 – A BPEL process in Composite Editor The following describes the simplified steps for making customizations to BPEL processes. This is the most common method of changing the business processes of Fusion Applications, as over 400 BPEL-based composite applications are provided out-of-the-box. Setup your local Fusion Applications JDeveloper environment. The SOA Composite Editor should be installed as part of the Fusion Applications extension. If there are problems you can also find it under the ‘Check for Updates’ help menu option. Since SOA Server is not part of the JDeveloper integrated WebLogic Server, setup a standalone WebLogic environment for deploying and testing. Obviously you might use a Fusion Applications development instance also. Package the existing standard Fusion Applications SOA Composite using Enterprise Manager and export it as a complete SOA Archive (SAR) file, resulting in a local .jar file. You may need to ask your system administrator for this. Import the exported SAR .jar file into JDeveloper using the File menu, under the option ‘SOA Archive into SOA Project’. In JDeveloper set the appropriate customization layer values, and then change from the default role to the Fusion Applications Customization Developer role. Make the customizations and save the application project. Finally redeploy the composite application, either to a direct Application Server connection, or as a fresh SAR (jar) file that can then be re-imported and deployed via Enterprise Manager. The Business Process Management (BPM) Suite In addition to the relatively low-level development environment associated with BPEL process creation, Oracle provides a suite of products that allow business process adjustments to be made without the need for some of the programming skills.  The aim is to abstract much of the technical implementation and to provide a Business Analyst tools for immediately implementing organization changes. Obviously there are some limitations on what they can do, however the BPM Suite functionality increases with each release and for the majority of the cases the tools remains as applicable as its developer-orientated sister. At the current time business processes must be explicitly coded to support just one of these use-cases, either BPEL for developer use or BPM for business analyst use. That said, they both run on the same SOA Server in much the same way. The components bundled in each SOA Composite Application can be verified by inspection through Enterprise Manager. Figure 2 – A BPM Process in JDeveloper BPM Suite. BPM processes are written in a standard notation (BPMN) and the modeling tools are very similar to that of BPEL. The steps to deploy a custom BPM process are also essentially much the same, since the BPM process is bundled into a SOA Composite just like a BPEL process. As such the SOA Composite Editor  actually has support for both artifacts and even allows use of them together, such as a calling a BPM process as a partnerlink from a BPEL process. For more details see the references below. Business Analyst Tooling In addition to using JDeveloper extensions for BPM development, there are run-time tools that Business Analysts can use to make adjustments, so that without high costs of an IT project the system can be tuned to match changes to the business operation. The first tool to consider is the BPM Composer, deployed with the middleware SOA Server and accessible online, and for Fusion Applications it is under the Business Process icon on the homepage of the Application Composer. Figure 3 – Business Process Composer showing a CRM process flow. The key difference between this and using JDeveloper is that the BPM Composer has a Business Catalog prepopulated with features and functions that can be used, mostly through registered WebServices. This means no coding or complex interface development is required, simply drag-drop-configure. The items in the business catalog are seeded by either Oracle (as a BPM Template) or added to by your own custom development. You cannot create or generate catalog content from BPM Composer directly. As per the screenshot you can see the Business Catalog content in the BPM Project browser region. In addition, other online tools for use by Business Analysts include the BPM Worklist application for editing business rules and approval management configuration, plus the SOA Composer which focuses on non-approval business rules and domain value maps. At the current time there are only a handful of BPM processes shipped with Fusion Applications HCM and CRM, including on-boarding workers and processing customer registrations.  This also means a limited number of associated BPM Templates provided out-of-the-box, therefore a limited Business Catalog. That said, BPM-based extension is a powerful capability to leverage and will most likely develop going forwards, especially for use in SaaS deployments where full design-time JDeveloper access is not available. Further Reading For BPEL – Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide – Section 12 For BPM – Fusion Applications Extensibility Guide – Section 7 The product-specific documentation and implementation guides for Fusion Applications Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for SOA Suite Modeling and Implementation Guide for Oracle Business Process Management User’s Guide for Oracle Business Process Composer Oracle University courses on BPM Suite and SOA Development

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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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• Azure Task Scheduling Options

  - by charlie.mott

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

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• JPA 2.1 Schema Generation (TOTD #187)

  - by arungupta

  This blog explained some of the key features of JPA 2.1 earlier. Since then Schema Generation has been added to JPA 2.1. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) will provide more details about this new feature in JPA 2.1. Schema Generation refers to generation of database artifacts like tables, indexes, and constraints in a database schema. It may or may not involve generation of a proper database schema depending upon the credentials and authorization of the user. This helps in prototyping of your application where the required artifacts are generated either prior to application deployment or as part of EntityManagerFactory creation. This is also useful in environments that require provisioning database on demand, e.g. in a cloud. This feature will allow your JPA domain object model to be directly generated in a database. The generated schema may need to be tuned for actual production environment. This usecase is supported by allowing the schema generation to occur into DDL scripts which can then be further tuned by a DBA. The following set of properties in persistence.xml or specified during EntityManagerFactory creation controls the behaviour of schema generation. Property Name Purpose Values javax.persistence.schema-generation-action Controls action to be taken by persistence provider "none", "create", "drop-and-create", "drop" javax.persistence.schema-generation-target Controls whehter schema to be created in database, whether DDL scripts are to be created, or both "database", "scripts", "database-and-scripts" javax.persistence.ddl-create-script-target, javax.persistence.ddl-drop-script-target Controls target locations for writing of scripts. Writers are pre-configured for the persistence provider. Need to be specified only if scripts are to be generated. java.io.Writer (e.g. MyWriter.class) or URL strings javax.persistence.ddl-create-script-source, javax.persistence.ddl-drop-script-source Specifies locations from which DDL scripts are to be read. Readers are pre-configured for the persistence provider. java.io.Reader (e.g. MyReader.class) or URL strings javax.persistence.sql-load-script-source Specifies location of SQL bulk load script. java.io.Reader (e.g. MyReader.class) or URL string javax.persistence.schema-generation-connection JDBC connection to be used for schema generation javax.persistence.database-product-name, javax.persistence.database-major-version, javax.persistence.database-minor-version Needed if scripts are to be generated and no connection to target database. Values are those obtained from JDBC DatabaseMetaData. javax.persistence.create-database-schemas Whether Persistence Provider need to create schema in addition to creating database objects such as tables, sequences, constraints, etc. "true", "false" Section 11.2 in the JPA 2.1 specification defines the annotations used for schema generation process. For example, @Table, @Column, @CollectionTable, @JoinTable, @JoinColumn, are used to define the generated schema. Several layers of defaulting may be involved. For example, the table name is defaulted from entity name and entity name (which can be specified explicitly as well) is defaulted from the class name. However annotations may be used to override or customize the values. The following entity class: @Entity public class Employee {    @Id private int id;    private String name;     . . .     @ManyToOne     private Department dept; } is generated in the database with the following attributes: Maps to EMPLOYEE table in default schema "id" field is mapped to ID column as primary key "name" is mapped to NAME column with a default VARCHAR(255). The length of this field can be easily tuned using @Column. @ManyToOne is mapped to DEPT_ID foreign key column. Can be customized using JOIN_COLUMN. In addition to these properties, couple of new annotations are added to JPA 2.1: @Index - An index for the primary key is generated by default in a database. This new annotation will allow to define additional indexes, over a single or multiple columns, for a better performance. This is specified as part of @Table, @SecondaryTable, @CollectionTable, @JoinTable, and @TableGenerator. For example: @Table(indexes = {@Index(columnList="NAME"), @Index(columnList="DEPT_ID DESC")})@Entity public class Employee {    . . .} The generated table will have a default index on the primary key. In addition, two new indexes are defined on the NAME column (default ascending) and the foreign key that maps to the department in descending order. @ForeignKey - It is used to define foreign key constraint or to otherwise override or disable the persistence provider's default foreign key definition. Can be specified as part of JoinColumn(s), MapKeyJoinColumn(s), PrimaryKeyJoinColumn(s). For example: @Entity public class Employee {    @Id private int id;    private String name;    @ManyToOne    @JoinColumn(foreignKey=@ForeignKey(foreignKeyDefinition="FOREIGN KEY (MANAGER_ID) REFERENCES MANAGER"))    private Manager manager;     . . . } In this entity, the employee's manager is mapped by MANAGER_ID column in the MANAGER table. The value of foreignKeyDefinition would be a database specific string. A complete replay of Linda's talk at JavaOne 2012 can be seen here (click on CON4212_mp4_4212_001 in Media). These features will be available in GlassFish 4 promoted builds in the near future. JPA 2.1 will be delivered as part of Java EE 7. The different components in the Java EE 7 platform are tracked here. JPA 2.1 Expert Group has released Early Draft 2 of the specification. Section 9.4 and 11.2 provide all details about Schema Generation. The latest javadocs can be obtained from here. And the JPA EG would appreciate feedback.

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• JPA 2?EJB 3.1?JSF 2????????! WebLogic Server 12c?????????Java EE 6??????|WebLogic Channel|??????

  - by ???02

  ????????????????????????????????????????·???????????Java EE 6???????????????·????WebLogic Server 12c?(???)?????????Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse 12c?????Java EE 6??????3???????????????????????JSF 2.0?????????????????????????JAX-RS????RESTful?Web???????????????(???)?????????????JSF 2.0????????????????　Java EE 6??????????????????????????????????????JSF(JavaServer Faces) 2.0??????????Java EE?????????????????????????????????Struts????????????????????????????????JSF 2.0?Java EE 6??????????????????????????????????????????????????JSP(JavaServer Pages)?JSF???????????????????????·???????????????????????Web????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????　???????????????????????????????EJB??????????????EMPLOYEES??????????????????????XHTML????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????ManagedBean????????????JSF 2.0?????????????????????　?????????Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse(OEPE)?????????????????Eclipse(OEPE)???????·?????OOW?????????????????·???????????Properties?????????????????·???·????????????????????????????Project Facets????????????JavaServer Faces?????????????Apply?????????OK????????????　???JSF????????????????????????????ManagedBean???IndexBean?????????????OOW??????????????????·???????????????NEW?-?Class??????New Java Class??????????????????????Package????managed???Name????IndexBean???????Finish????????????　?????IndexBean??????·????????????????????????????????????????????IndexBean(IndexBean.java)?package managed;import java.util.ArrayList;import java.util.List;import javax.ejb.EJB;import javax.faces.bean.ManagedBean;import ejb.EmpLogic;import model.Employee;@ManagedBeanpublic class IndexBean {　　@EJB　　private EmpLogic empLogic;　　private String keyword;　　private List<Employee> results = new ArrayList<Employee>();　　public String getKeyword() {　　　　return keyword;　　}　　public void setKeyword(String keyword) {　　　　this.keyword = keyword;　　}　　public List getResults() {　　　　return results;　　}　　public void actionSearch() {　　　　results.clear();　　　　results.addAll(empLogic.getEmp(keyword));　　}}　????????????????keyword?results??????????????????????????????Session Bean???EmpLogic?????????????????@EJB?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????actionSearch??????????????EmpLogic?????????·????????????????????result????????　???ManagedBean?????????????????????????????????????????·??????OOW??????????????WebContent???????index.xhtml?????　???????????index.xhtml????????????????????????????????????????????????(Index.xhtml)?<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 　　"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"　　xmlns:ui="http://java.sun.com/jsf/facelets"　　xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"　　xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"><h:head>　　<title>Employee??????</title></h:head><h:body>　　<h:form>　　　　<h:inputText value="#{indexBean.keyword}" />　　　　<h:commandButton action="#{indexBean.actionSearch}" value="??" />　　　　<h:dataTable value="#{indexBean.results}" var="emp" border="1">　　　　　　<h:column>　　　　　　　　<f:facet name="header">　　　　　　　　　　<h:outputText value="employeeId" />　　　　　　　　</f:facet>　　　　　　　　<h:outputText value="#{emp.employeeId}" />　　　　　　</h:column>　　　　　　<h:column>　　　　　　　　<f:facet name="header">　　　　　　　　　　<h:outputText value="firstName" />　　　　　　　　</f:facet>　　　　　　　　<h:outputText value="#{emp.firstName}" />　　　　　　</h:column>　　　　　　<h:column>　　　　　　　　<f:facet name="header">　　　　　　　　　　<h:outputText value="lastName" />　　　　　　　　</f:facet>　　　　　　　　<h:outputText value="#{emp.lastName}" />　　　　　　</h:column>　　　　　　<h:column>　　　　　　　　<f:facet name="header">　　　　　　　　　　<h:outputText value="salary" />　　　　　　　　</f:facet>　　　　　　　　<h:outputText value="#{emp.salary}" />　　　　　　</h:column>　　　　</h:dataTable>　　</h:form></h:body></html>　index.xhtml???????????????????ManagedBean???IndexBean??????????????????????????????IndexBean?????actionSearch??????????h:commandButton????????????????????????????????????????　???Web???????????????(web.xml)??????web.xml???????·?????OOW???????????WebContent?-?WEB-INF??????　?????????????web-app??????????????welcome-file-list(????)?????????????Web???????????????(web.xml)?<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><web-app xmlns:javaee="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee" xmlns:web="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd" version="3.0">　　<javaee:display-name>OOW</javaee:display-name>　　<servlet>　　　　<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>　　　　<servlet-class>javax.faces.webapp.FacesServlet</servlet-class>　　　　<load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>　　</servlet>　　<servlet-mapping>　　　　<servlet-name>Faces Servlet</servlet-name>　　　　<url-pattern>/faces/*</url-pattern>　　</servlet-mapping>　　<welcome-file-list>　　　　<welcome-file>/faces/index.xhtml</welcome-file>　　</welcome-file-list></web-app>　???JSF?????????????????????????????　??????Java EE 6?JPA 2.0?EJB 3.1?JSF 2.0????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????·?????OOW???????????·???????????????Run As?-?Run on Server??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????Oracle WebLogic Server 12c(12.1.1)??????Next???????????????　?????????????????????Domain Directory??????Browse????????????????????????C:\Oracle\Middleware\user_projects\domains\base_domain??????Finish????????????　?????WebLogic Server?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????OEPE??Servers???????Oracle WebLogic Server 12c???????????·???????????????Properties??????????????????????????????WebLogic?-?Publishing????????????Publish as an exploded archive??????????????????OK????????????　???????????????????????????????????????????·?????OOW???????????·???????????????Run As?-?Run on Server??????????????????Finish????????????　???????????????????????????????????????????????·??????????????????????????????????????????firstName?????????????????JAX-RS???RESTful?Web???????　?????????JAX-RS????RESTful?Web???????????????　Java EE??????????Java EE 5???SOAP????Web??????????JAX-WS??????????Java EE 6????????JAX-RS?????????????RESTful?Web????????????·????????????????????????JAX-RS????????Session Bean??????·?????????Web???????????????????????????????????????????????JAX-RS??????????　?????????????????????????????JAX-RS???RESTful Web??????????????????????????·?????OOW???????????·???????????????Properties???????????????????????????Project Facets?????????????JAX-RS(Rest Web Services)???????????Further configuration required?????????????Modify Faceted Project???????????????JAX-RS??????·?????????????????JAX-RS Implementation Library??????Manage libraries????(???????????)??????????????　??????Preference(Filtered)???????????????New????????????????New User Library????????????????User library name????JAX-RS???????OK???????????????????Preference(Filtered)?????????????Add JARs????????????????????????C:\Oracle\Middleware\modules \com.sun.jersey.core_1.1.0.0_1-9.jar??????OK????????????　???Modify Faceted Project??????????JAX-RS Implementation Library????JAX-RS????????????????????JAX-RS servlet class name????com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.ServletContainer???????OK?????????????Project Facets???????????????????OK??????????????????　???RESTful Web??????????????????????????????????(???????EmpLogic?????????????)??RESTful Web?????????????EmpLogic(EmpLogic.java)?package ejb; import java.util.List; import javax.ejb.LocalBean; import javax.ejb.Stateless; import javax.persistence.EntityManager; import javax.persistence.PersistenceContext; import javax.ws.rs.GET;import javax.ws.rs.Path;import javax.ws.rs.PathParam;import javax.ws.rs.Produces;import model.Employee; @Stateless @LocalBean @Path("/emprest")public class EmpLogic { 　　　　@PersistenceContext(unitName = "OOW") 　　　　private EntityManager em; 　　　　public EmpLogic() { 　　　　}　　@GET　　@Path("/getname/{empno}")  // ?　　@Produces("text/plain")  // ?　　public String getEmpName(@PathParam("empno") long empno) {　　　　Employee e = em.find(Employee.class, empno);　　　　if (e == null) {　　　　　　return "no data.";　　　　} else {　　　　　　return e.getFirstName();　　　　}　　}}　?????????????????????@Path("/emprest ")????????????RESTful Web????????????HTTP??????????????JAX-RS????????????????????????RESTful Web?????Web??????????????????@Produces???????(?)??????????????????????????text/plain????????????????????????????application/xml?????????XML???????????application/json?????JSON??????????????????　???????????????Web???????????????????????????????????????·?????OOW???????????·???????????????Run As?-?Run on Server??????????????????Finish???????????????????Web??????http://localhost:7001/OOW/jaxrs/emprest/getname/186????????????????URL?????????(186)?employeeId?????????????firstName????????????????*　　　　*　　　　*　????????3??????WebLogic Server 12c?OEPE????Java EE 6?????????????????Java EE 6????????????????·????????????????????????????Java EE?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

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• start apache2 in chroot environment

  - by xero

  This is my first time I am trying to install Apache2 HTTP server in a chroot environment. That's why i decided to follow this procedure : http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/securing-apache-2-step-step my web server start with successful : root@ubuntu:/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl start [Tue Oct 29 01:49:15.879868 2013] [core:warn] [pid 10835] AH00117: Ignoring deprecated use of DefaultType in line 60 of /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf. AH00548: NameVirtualHost has no effect and will be removed in the next release /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf:81 AH00558: httpd: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.1.1. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message root@ubuntu:/chroot/httpd/etc# netstat -antu Active Internet connections (servers and established) Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address Foreign Address State tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:80 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN But at the end of part "Chrooting the server" i have always the same problem. When i try to start apache2 in chroot i have always this error : root@ubuntu:/chroot/httpd/etc# chroot /chroot/httpd /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl chroot: failed to run command `/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl': No such file or directory however my apachectl file exist : root@ubuntu:/chroot/httpd/etc# ls -l /chroot/httpd/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3437 Oct 29 02:28 /chroot/httpd/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl when I use strace to debug, there are errors with coreutils.mo and libc.mo : root@ubuntu:/chroot/httpd/etc# chroot /chroot/httpd /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd group hosts nsswitch.conf passwd passwords resolv.conf root@ubuntu:/chroot/httpd/etc# strace chroot /chroot/httpd /usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl execve("/usr/sbin/chroot", ["chroot", "/chroot/httpd", "/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl"], [/* 18 vars */]) = 0 brk(0) = 0x1e46000 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) mmap(NULL, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fe89563b000 access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=18263, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 18263, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x7fe895636000 close(3) = 0 access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\2\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0>\0\1\0\0\0\200\30\2\0\0\0\0\0"..., 832) = 832 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1815224, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 3929304, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0x7fe89505b000 mprotect(0x7fe895210000, 2097152, PROT_NONE) = 0 mmap(0x7fe895410000, 24576, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x1b5000) = 0x7fe895410000 mmap(0x7fe895416000, 17624, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fe895416000 close(3) = 0 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fe895635000 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fe895634000 mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0x7fe895633000 arch_prctl(ARCH_SET_FS, 0x7fe895634700) = 0 mprotect(0x7fe895410000, 16384, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x606000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 mprotect(0x7fe89563d000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 munmap(0x7fe895636000, 18263) = 0 brk(0) = 0x1e46000 brk(0x1e67000) = 0x1e67000 open("/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 3 fstat(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2919792, ...}) = 0 mmap(NULL, 2919792, PROT_READ, MAP_PRIVATE, 3, 0) = 0x7fe894d92000 close(3) = 0 chroot("/chroot/httpd") = 0 chdir("/") = 0 execve("/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl", ["/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl"], [/* 18 vars */]) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/locale.alias", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_US.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en/LC_MESSAGES/coreutils.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) write(2, "chroot: ", 8chroot: ) = 8 write(2, "failed to run command `/usr/loca"..., 56failed to run command `/usr/local/apache2/bin/apachectl') = 56 open("/usr/share/locale/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en_US.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_US.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_US.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_US/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en.UTF-8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/share/locale-langpack/en/LC_MESSAGES/libc.mo", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) write(2, ": No such file or directory", 27: No such file or directory) = 27 write(2, "\n", 1 ) = 1 close(1) = 0 close(2) = 0 exit_group(127) = ? using the tutorial I did not find and copie libraries following on my server. I suppose there is no link with coreutils.mo and libc.mo : /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1 /var/run/ld-elf.so.hints I don't understand what files i forgot to copy in my chroot environment to be able to start my apache2. Any ideas ?

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• ERROR: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt

  - by SPSamL

  I get this error after having edited a few pages in SharePoint 2010. I have to do an IISReset on both front ends to get this to resolve. I don't know how to fix it or even what else to supply here, but please let me know as the resets now happen several times per day. Log Name: Application Source: ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0 Date: 1/26/2011 11:12:48 AM Event ID: 1309 Task Category: Web Event Level: Warning Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: PINTSPSFE02.samcstl.org Description: Event code: 3005 Event message: An unhandled exception has occurred. Event time: 1/26/2011 11:12:48 AM Event time (UTC): 1/26/2011 5:12:48 PM Event ID: c52fb336b7f147a3913fff3617a99d57 Event sequence: 4965 Event occurrence: 2178 Event detail code: 0 Application information: Application domain: /LM/W3SVC/1449762715/ROOT-2-129405348166941887 Trust level: WSS_Minimal Application Virtual Path: / Application Path: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\ Machine name: PINTSPSFE02 Process information: Process ID: 5928 Process name: w3wp.exe Account name: SAMC\MossAppPool Exception information: Exception type: AccessViolationException Exception message: Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt. Request information: Request URL: http://mosscluster/Pages/Home.aspx Request path: /Pages/Home.aspx User host address: 10.3.60.26 User: SAMC\BARNMD Is authenticated: True Authentication Type: NTLM Thread account name: SAMC\MossAppPool Thread information: Thread ID: 110 Thread account name: SAMC\MossAppPool Is impersonating: False Stack trace: at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.MossObjectCache_Tracked.Delete(String key, Boolean recursive, DeletionReason reason) at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.MossObjectCache_Tracked.Get(String key) at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.Get(String objectTypeName, String id) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileServiceProxy.GetPartitionPropertiesCache(Guid applicationID) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.get_PartitionPropertiesCache() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.DataCache.get_PartitionProperties() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetMySitePortalUrl(SPUrlZone zone, Guid partitionID) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetMySitePortalUrl(SPUrlZone zone, SPServiceContext serviceContext) at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.EnsureMySiteUrls() at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.get_PortalMySiteUrlAvailable() at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.OnLoad(EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) Custom event details: Event Xml: <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event"> <System> <Provider Name="ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0" /> <EventID Qualifiers="32768">1309</EventID> <Level>3</Level> <Task>3</Task> <Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords> <TimeCreated SystemTime="2011-01-26T17:12:48.000000000Z" /> <EventRecordID>35834</EventRecordID> <Channel>Application</Channel> <Computer>PINTSPSFE02.samcstl.org</Computer> <Security /> </System> <EventData> <Data>3005</Data> <Data>An unhandled exception has occurred.</Data> <Data>1/26/2011 11:12:48 AM</Data> <Data>1/26/2011 5:12:48 PM</Data> <Data>c52fb336b7f147a3913fff3617a99d57</Data> <Data>4965</Data> <Data>2178</Data> <Data>0</Data> <Data>/LM/W3SVC/1449762715/ROOT-2-129405348166941887</Data> <Data>WSS_Minimal</Data> <Data>/</Data> <Data>C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\80\</Data> <Data>PINTSPSFE02</Data> <Data> </Data> <Data>5928</Data> <Data>w3wp.exe</Data> <Data>SAMC\MossAppPool</Data> <Data>AccessViolationException</Data> <Data></Data> <Data>http://mosscluster/Pages/Home.aspx</Data> <Data>/Pages/Home.aspx</Data> <Data>10.3.60.26</Data> <Data>SAMC\BARNMD</Data> <Data>True</Data> <Data>NTLM</Data> <Data>SAMC\MossAppPool</Data> <Data>110</Data> <Data>SAMC\MossAppPool</Data> <Data>False</Data> <Data> at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.MossObjectCache_Tracked.Delete(String key, Boolean recursive, DeletionReason reason) at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.MossObjectCache_Tracked.Get(String key) at Microsoft.Office.Server.ObjectCache.SPCache.Get(String objectTypeName, String id) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileServiceProxy.GetPartitionPropertiesCache(Guid applicationID) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.get_PartitionPropertiesCache() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.DataCache.get_PartitionProperties() at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetMySitePortalUrl(SPUrlZone zone, Guid partitionID) at Microsoft.Office.Server.Administration.UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetMySitePortalUrl(SPUrlZone zone, SPServiceContext serviceContext) at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.EnsureMySiteUrls() at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.get_PortalMySiteUrlAvailable() at Microsoft.Office.Server.WebControls.MyLinksRibbon.OnLoad(EventArgs e) at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() at System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) </Data> </EventData> </Event>

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• Using AuthzSVNAccessFile for controlling SVN Access produces HTTP 400 Bad Request

  - by meeper

  I have a new repository on an existing subversion server that requires us to perform path based authorization within the repository. I found that the AuthzSVNAccessFile directive in apache is directly responsible for allowing this functionality. After fixing several other problems such as AuthzSVNAccessFile preventing SVNListParentPath from operating properly, I am left with one single problem. I can checkout, I can update, I can commit, BUT I cannot execute an SVN COPY for performing branch/tagging operations. The moment I comment out the AuthzSVNAccessFile line in the Apache config everything works as expected except the obvious path authorizations. Versions: The server OS is Debian 6.0.7 (Squeeze) Apache 2.2.16-6+squeeze11 Server Subversion 1.6.12dfsg-7 Clients are running windows Clients tried are: TortoiseSVN 1.8.2 Build 24708 64bit SVN CLI Client 1.8.3 (r1516576) Authentication is performed via AD to a Windows 2003 domain and appears to be operating normally. I have stripped out all other configurations and repository setups to produce this single configuration that reproduces the problem. Apache Configuration: <VirtualHost *:443> ServerName svn-test.company.com ServerAlias /svn-test ServerAdmin [email protected] SSLEngine On SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/apache.pem ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/svn-test_error.log LogLevel warn CustomLog /var/log/apache2/svn-test_access.log combined ServerSignature On # Repository Access to all Repositories <Location "/"> DAV svn SVNParentPath /var/svn SVNListParentPath on AuthBasicProvider ldap AuthType Basic AuthzLDAPAuthoritative Off AuthName "Subversion Test Repository System" AuthLDAPURL "ldap://adserver.company.com:389/DC=corp,DC=company,DC=com?sAMAccountName?sub?(objectClass=*)" NONE AuthLDAPBindDN "CN=service_account,OU=ServiceIDs,OU=corp,OU=Delegated,DC=na,DC=corp,DC=company,DC=com" AuthLDAPBindPassword service_account_password Require valid-user SSLRequireSSL </Location> # <LocationMatch /.+> is a really dirty trick to make listing of repositories work # http://d.hatena.ne.jp/shimonoakio/20080130/1201686016 <LocationMatch /.+> AuthzSVNAccessFile /etc/apache2/svn_path_auth </LocationMatch> </VirtualHost> SVN Access File: [/] * = rw The repository used (AuthTestBasic) consists of the following directory structure and contains no externals (this is a literal listing, not an example): / /branches/ /tags/ /trunk/ /trunk/somefile.txt Tortoise produces the following error during a tag operation in it's tag result window: Adding directory failed: COPY on /authtestbasic/!svn/bc/2/trunk (400 Bad Request) The svn.exe CLI client produces the following error: C:\Users\e20epkt>svn copy https://servername/authtestbasic/trunk https://servername/authtestbasic/tags/tag1 -m "svn cli client" svn: E175002: Adding directory failed: COPY on /authtestbasic/!svn/bc/2/trunk (400 Bad Request) The Apache error log has nothing in it, however the apache access log has the following in it (IP addresses and usernames changed obviously): 10.1.2.100 - - [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "OPTIONS /authtestbasic/trunk HTTP/1.1" 401 2595 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "OPTIONS /authtestbasic/trunk HTTP/1.1" 200 996 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "OPTIONS /authtestbasic/trunk HTTP/1.1" 200 884 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "PROPFIND /authtestbasic/trunk HTTP/1.1" 207 692 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "PROPFIND /authtestbasic/!svn/vcc/default HTTP/1.1" 207 596 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "REPORT /authtestbasic/!svn/bc/0/trunk HTTP/1.1" 404 580 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "PROPFIND /authtestbasic/!svn/vcc/default HTTP/1.1" 207 596 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "REPORT /authtestbasic/!svn/bc/2/trunk HTTP/1.1" 200 674 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "PROPFIND /authtestbasic/!svn/bc/2/trunk HTTP/1.1" 207 548 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "PROPFIND /authtestbasic/tags/tag1 HTTP/1.1" 404 580 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "MKACTIVITY /authtestbasic/!svn/act/f1e9dc07-fb5e-5a41-ac22-907705ef6e5e HTTP/1.1" 201 708 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "PROPFIND /authtestbasic/tags HTTP/1.1" 207 580 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "CHECKOUT /authtestbasic/!svn/vcc/default HTTP/1.1" 201 708 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "PROPPATCH /authtestbasic/!svn/wbl/f1e9dc07-fb5e-5a41-ac22-907705ef6e5e/2 HTTP/1.1" 207 596 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "CHECKOUT /authtestbasic/!svn/ver/1/tags HTTP/1.1" 201 724 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "COPY /authtestbasic/!svn/bc/2/trunk HTTP/1.1" 400 596 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" 10.1.2.100 - myuseraccount [17/Oct/2013:11:53:40 -0700] "DELETE /authtestbasic/!svn/act/f1e9dc07-fb5e-5a41-ac22-907705ef6e5e HTTP/1.1" 204 1956 "-" "SVN/1.8.3 (x64-microsoft-windows) serf/1.3.1 TortoiseSVN-1.8.2.24708" You'll see that the second to last line contains the COPY command with the HTTP 400 response, however, there doesn't appear to be any indication as to why. Please note that, while yes this is a test repository on a test server, I am experiencing this same issue in this test setup where I have eliminated all other possible causes (mixed repository configurations, externals, etc). I have also confirmed that all files for the repository (/var/svn/authtestbasic) are owned by the Apache user www-data.

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• How to Configure Windows Machine to Allow File Sharing with DNS Alias

  - by Michael Ferrante

  I have not seen a single article posted anywhere online that brings together all the settings one would need to do to make this work properly on Windows, so I thought I would post it here. To facilitate failover schemes, a common technique is to use DNS CNAME records (DNS Aliases) for different machine roles. Then instead of changing the Windows computername of the actual machine name, one can switch a DNS record to point to a new host. This can work on Microsoft Windows machines, but to make it work with file sharing the following configuration steps need to be taken. Outline The Problem The Solution Allowing other machines to use filesharing via the DNS Alias (DisableStrictNameChecking) Allowing server machine to use filesharing with itself via the DNS Alias (BackConnectionHostNames) Providing browse capabilities for multiple NetBIOS names (OptionalNames) Register the Kerberos service principal names (SPNs) for other Windows functions like Printing (setspn) References 1. The Problem On Windows machines, file sharing can work via the computer name, with or without full qualification, or by the IP Address. By default, however, filesharing will not work with arbitrary DNS aliases. To enable filesharing and other Windows services to work with DNS aliases, you must make registry changes as detailed below and reboot the machine. 2. The Solution Allowing other machines to use filesharing via the DNS Alias (DisableStrictNameChecking) This change alone will allow other machines on the network to connect to the machine using any arbitrary hostname. (However this change will not allow a machine to connect to itself via a hostname, see BackConnectionHostNames below). Edit the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters and add a value DisableStrictNameChecking of type DWORD set to 1. Allowing server machine to use filesharing with itself via the DNS Alias (BackConnectionHostNames) This change is necessary for a DNS alias to work with filesharing from a machine to find itself. This creates the Local Security Authority host names that can be referenced in an NTLM authentication request. To do this, follow these steps for all the nodes on the client computer: To the registry subkey HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0, add new Multi-String Value BackConnectionHostNames In the Value data box, type the CNAME or the DNS alias, that is used for the local shares on the computer, and then click OK. Note: Type each host name on a separate line. Providing browse capabilities for multiple NetBIOS names (OptionalNames) Allows ability to see the network alias in the network browse list. Edit the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\parameters and add a value OptionalNames of type Multi-String Add in a newline delimited list of names that should be registered under the NetBIOS browse entries Names should match NetBIOS conventions (i.e. not FQDN, just hostname) Register the Kerberos service principal names (SPNs) for other Windows functions like Printing (setspn) NOTE: Should not need to do this for basic functions to work, documented here for completeness. We had one situation in which the DNS alias was not working because there was an old SPN record interfering, so if other steps aren't working check if there are any stray SPN records. You must register the Kerberos service principal names (SPNs), the host name, and the fully-qualified domain name (FQDN) for all the new DNS alias (CNAME) records. If you do not do this, a Kerberos ticket request for a DNS alias (CNAME) record may fail and return the error code KDC_ERR_S_SPRINCIPAL_UNKNOWN. To view the Kerberos SPNs for the new DNS alias records, use the Setspn command-line tool (setspn.exe). The Setspn tool is included in Windows Server 2003 Support Tools. You can install Windows Server 2003 Support Tools from the Support\Tools folder of the Windows Server 2003 startup disk. How to use the tool to list all records for a computername: setspn -L computername To register the SPN for the DNS alias (CNAME) records, use the Setspn tool with the following syntax: setspn -A host/your_ALIAS_name computername setspn -A host/your_ALIAS_name.company.com computername 3. References All the Microsoft references work via: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/ Connecting to SMB share on a Windows 2000-based computer or a Windows Server 2003-based computer may not work with an alias name Covers the basics of making file sharing work properly with DNS alias records from other computers to the server computer. KB281308 Error message when you try to access a server locally by using its FQDN or its CNAME alias after you install Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1: "Access denied" or "No network provider accepted the given network path" Covers how to make the DNS alias work with file sharing from the file server itself. KB926642 How to consolidate print servers by using DNS alias (CNAME) records in Windows Server 2003 and in Windows 2000 Server Covers more complex scenarios in which records in Active Directory may need to be updated for certain services to work properly and for browsing for such services to work properly, how to register the Kerberos service principal names (SPNs). KB870911 Distributed File System update to support consolidation roots in Windows Server 2003 Covers even more complex scenarios with DFS (discusses OptionalNames). KB829885

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• Using nginx + wordpress with all wordpress files in a subdirectory

  - by GorillaPatch

  My setup I am running nginx 0.7.67 on Debian Lenny as a webserver, not as a reverse proxy. I am using php5-fpm to handle my PHP requests, which works fine. My aim I would like to have a wordpress installation that is layed out as described here clean wordpress subversion installation. I would like to have a clean wordpress installation without cluttering my server root directory with all the wordpress files. That means that my wordpress installation would be in /wordpress and my themes and plugins inside /wordpress-content. The important point however is that if you navigate to my domain www.example.com then you would be taken directly to the wordpress blog, without having to specify the subdirectory where wordpress lives. I found a how-to at the nginx site installing wordpress but unfortunately this is for moving the entire wordpress directory instead of redirecting the traffic to it. I tried with the following configuration: example.conf in sites-available server { listen 80; server_name www.example.com; access_log /var/log/nginx/www.example.com.access.log main; root /var/www/example/htdocs; location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /wordpress/index.php?q=$uri&$args; } include /etc/nginx/includes/php5-wordpress.conf; include /etc/nginx/includes/deny.conf; } php5-wordpress.conf in includes location /wordpress { try_files $uri $uri/ /wordpress/index.php?q=$uri&$args; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_split_path_info ^(/wordpress)(/.*)$; fastcgi_ignore_client_abort on; fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.socket; fastcgi_index index.php; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi_params; } fastcgi_params fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string; fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method; fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type; fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length; fastcgi_param REQUEST_URI $request_uri; fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_URI $document_uri; fastcgi_param DOCUMENT_ROOT $document_root; fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol; fastcgi_param GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1; fastcgi_param SERVER_SOFTWARE nginx/$nginx_version; fastcgi_param REMOTE_ADDR $remote_addr; fastcgi_param REMOTE_PORT $remote_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr; fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name; # PHP only, required if PHP was built with --enable-force-cgi-redirect fastcgi_param REDIRECT_STATUS 200; The problems I have is that when I go to the adress "http://www.example.com" I get a 403 error as I disabled directory listing. Instead I would like my wordpress to appear then. Also if I navigate to "http://www.example.com/wordpress" I get a "file not found" error. However if I comment out the fastcgi_split_path_info line in my php5-wordpress.conf at least the wordpress installation works inside /wordpress. I need help how to debug this behavior or where I can find more information. Thanks alot. Update: Added error log entry for the 403 error. in the error.log I get the following entry for the 403 error: 2010/12/11 07:54:24 [error] 9496#0: *1 directory index of "/var/www/example/htdocs/" is forbidden, client: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX, server: www.example.com, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", host: "www.example.com" Update 2: Added the nginx.conf below: user www-data; worker_processes 1; error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log; pid /var/run/nginx.pid; events { worker_connections 1024; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] $status ' '"$request" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" ' '"$http_user_agent" "$http_x_forwarded_for"'; access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log; sendfile on; #tcp_nopush on; keepalive_timeout 65; tcp_nodelay on; gzip on; index index.php index.html; include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf; include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*; }

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• PHP pages working slow from time to time

  - by user1038179

  I have VPS with limit of 2GB of ram and 8 CPU cores. I have 5 sites on that VPS (one of them is just for testing, no visitors exept me). All 5 sites are image galleries, like wallpaper sites. Last week I noticed problem on one site (main domain, used for name servers, and also with most traffic, visitors). That site has two image galleries, one is old static html gallery made few years ago and another, main, is powered by ZENPhoto CMS. Also I have that same gallery CMS on another two sites on that same VPS (on one running site and on one just for testing site). On other two sites I have diferent PHP driven gallery. Problem is that after some time (it vary from 10 minutes to few hours after apache restart), loading of pages on main site becomes very slow, or I get 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error. So pages becomes unavailable. But just that part with new CMS gallery, old part of site with static html pages are working fast and just fine. Also other two sites with same CMS gallery and other two with different PHP driven gallery are working fine and fast at the same time. I thought it must be something with CMS on that main site, because other sites are working nice. Then I tryed to open contact and guest book pages on that main site which are outside of that CMS but also PHP pages, and they do not load too, but that same contact php scipts are working on other sites at the same time. So, when site starts to hangs, ONLY PHP generated content is not working, like I said other static pages are working. And, ONLY on that one main site I have problems. Then I need to restart Apache, after restart everything is vorking nice and fast, for some time, than again, just PHP pages on main site are becomming slower. If I do not restart apache that slowness take some time (several minutes, hours, depending ot traffic) and during that time PHP diven content is loading very slow or unavailable on that site. After sime time, on moments everything start to work and is fast again for some time, and again. In hours with more traffic PHP content is loading slowly or it is unavailable, in hours with less traffic it is sometimes fast and sometimes little bit slower than usually. And ones again, only on that main site, and only PHP driven pages, static pages are working fast even in most traffic hours also other sites with even same CMS are working fast. Currently I have about 7000 unique visitors on that site but site worked nice even with 11500 visitors per day. And about 17000 in total visitors on VPS, all sites ( about 3 pages per unique visitor). When site start to slow down sometimes in apache status I can see something like this: mod_fcgid status: Total FastCGI processes: 37 Process: php5 (/usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5)Pid Active Idle Accesses State 11300 39 28 7 Working 11274 47 28 7 Working 11296 40 29 3 Working 11283 45 30 3 Working 11304 36 31 1 Working 11282 46 32 3 Working 11292 42 33 1 Working 11289 44 34 1 Working 11305 35 35 0 Working 11273 48 36 2 Working 11280 47 39 1 Working 10125 133 40 12 Exiting(communication error) 11294 41 41 1 Exiting(communication error) 11277 47 42 2 Exiting(communication error) 11291 43 43 1 Exiting(communication error) 10187 108 43 10 Exiting(communication error) 10209 95 44 7 Exiting(communication error) 10171 113 44 5 Exiting(communication error) 11275 47 47 1 Exiting(communication error) 10144 125 48 8 Exiting(communication error) 10086 149 48 20 Exiting(communication error) 10212 94 49 5 Exiting(communication error) 10158 118 49 5 Exiting(communication error) 10169 114 50 4 Exiting(communication error) 10105 141 50 16 Exiting(communication error) 10094 146 50 15 Exiting(communication error) 10115 139 51 17 Exiting(communication error) 10213 93 51 9 Exiting(communication error) 10197 103 51 7 Exiting(communication error) Process: php5 (/usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5)Pid Active Idle Accesses State 7983 1079 2 149 Ready 7979 1079 11 151 Ready Process: php5 (/usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5)Pid Active Idle Accesses State 7990 1066 0 57 Ready 8001 1031 64 35 Ready 7999 1032 94 29 Ready 8000 1031 91 36 Ready 8002 1029 34 52 Ready Process: php5 (/usr/local/cpanel/cgi-sys/php5)Pid Active Idle Accesses State 7991 1064 29 115 Ready When it is working nicly there is no lines with "Exiting(communication error)" Active and Idle are time active and time since last request, in seconds. Here are system info. Sysem info: Total processors: 8 Processor #1 Vendor GenuineIntel Name Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5440 @ 2.83GHz Speed 88.320 MHz Cache 6144 KB All other seven are the same. System Information Linux vps.nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.nnn 2.6.18-028stab099.3 #1 SMP Wed Mar 7 15:20:22 MSK 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux Current Memory Usage total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 8388608 882164 7506444 0 0 0 -/+ buffers/cache: 882164 7506444 Swap: 0 0 0 Total: 8388608 882164 7506444 Current Disk Usage Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/vzfs 100G 34G 67G 34% / none System Details: Running on: Apache/2.2.22 System info: (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.22 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_fcgid/2.3.6 Powered by: PHP/5.3.10 Current Configuration Default PHP Version (.php files) 5 PHP 5 Handler fcgi PHP 4 Handler suphp Apache suEXEC on Apache Ruid2 off PHP 4 Handler suphp Apache suEXEC on Apache Configuration The following settings have been saved: fileetag: All keepalive: On keepalivetimeout: 3 maxclients: 150 maxkeepaliverequests: 10 maxrequestsperchild: 10000 maxspareservers: 10 minspareservers: 5 root_options: ExecCGI, FollowSymLinks, Includes, IncludesNOEXEC, Indexes, MultiViews, SymLinksIfOwnerMatch serverlimit: 256 serversignature: Off servertokens: Full sslciphersuite: ALL:!ADH:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:-LOW:-SSLv2:-EXP:!kEDH startservers: 5 timeout: 30 I hope, I explained my problem nicely. Any help would be nice.

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• Poor home office network performance and cannot figure out where the issue is

  - by Jeff Willener

  This is the most bizarre issue. I have worked with small to mid size networks for quite a long time and can say I'm comfortable connecting hardware. Where you will start to lose me is with managed switches and firewalls. To start, let me describe my network (sigh, shouldn't but I MUST solve this). 1) Comcast Cable Internet 2) Motorola SURFboard eXtreme Cable Modem. a) Model: SB6120 b) DOCSIS 3.0 and 2.0 support c) IPv4 and IPv6 support 3-A) Cisco Small Business RV220W Wireless N Firewall a) Latest firmware b) Model: RV220W-A-K9-NA c) WAN Port to Modem (2) d) vlan 1: work e) vlan 2: everything else. 3-B) D-Link DIR-615 Draft 802.11 N Wireless Router a) Latest firmware b) WAN Port to Modem (2) 4) Servers connected directly to firewall a) If firewall 3-A, then vlan 1 b) CAT5e patch cables c) Dell PowerEdge 1400SC w/ 10/100 integrated NIC (Domain Controller, DNS, former DHCP) d) Dell PowerEdge 400SC w/ 10/100/1000 integrated NIC (VMWare Server) 4) Linksys EZXS88W unmanaged Workgroup 10/100 Switch a) If firewall 3-A, then vlan 2 b) 25' CAT5e patch cable to firewall (3-A or 3-B) c) Connects xBox 360, Blu-Ray player, PC at TV 5) Office equipment connected directly to firewall a) If firewall 3-A, then vlan 1 b) ~80' CAT6 or CAT5e patch cable to firewall (3-A or 3-B) c) Connects 1) Dell Latitude laptop 10/100/1000 2) Dell Inspiron laptop 10/100 3) Dell Workstation 10/100/1000 (Pristine host, VMWare Workstation 7.x with many bridged VM's) 4) Brother Laser Printer 10/100 5) Epson All-In-One Workforce 310 10/100 5-A) NetGear FS116 unmanaged 10/100 switch a) I've had this switch for a long time and never had issues. 5-B) NetGear GS108 unmanaged 10/100/1000 switch a) Bought new for this issue and returned. 5-C) Linksys SE2500 unmanaged 10/100/1000 switch a) Bought new for this issue and returned. 5-D) TP-Link TL-SG10008D unmanaged 10/100/1000 a) Bought new for this issue and still have. 6) VLan 1 Wireless Connections (on same subnet if 3-B) a) Any of those at 5c b) HP Laptop 7) VLan 2 Wireless Connection (on same subnet if 3-B) a) IPad, IPod b) Compaq Laptop c) Epson Wireless Printer Shew, without hosting a diagram I hope that paints a good picture. The Issue The breakdown here is at item 5. No matter what I do I cannot have a switch at 5 and have to run everything wireless regardless of router. Issues related to using a switch (point 5 above) SpeedTest is good. Poor throughput to other devices if can communicate at all. Usually cannot ping other devices even on the same switch although, when able, ping times are good. Eventual lose of connectivity and can "sometimes" be restored by unplugging everything for several days, not minutes or hours but we're talking a week if at all. Directly connect to computer gives good internet connection however throughput to other devices connected to firewall is at best horrible. Yet printing doesn't seem to be an issue as long as they are connected via wireless. I have to force the RV220W to 1000Mb on the respective port if using a Gig Switch Issues related to using wireless in place of a switch (point 5 above) Poor throughput to other devices if can communicate. SpeedTest is good. Bottom line Internet speeds are awesome. By the way, Comcast went WAY above and beyond to make sure it was not them. They rewired EVERYTHING which did solve internet drops. Computer to computer connections are garbage Cannot get switch at 5 to work, yet other at 4 has never had an issue. Direct connection, bypass switch, is good for DHCP and internet. DNS must be on server, not firewall. Cisco insists its my switches but as you can see I have used four and two different cables with the same result. My gut feeling is something is happening with routing. But I'm not smart enough to know that answer. I run a lot of VM's at 5-c-3, could that cause it? What's different compared to my previous house is I have introduced Gigabit hardware (firewall/switches/computers). Some of my computers might have IPv6 turned on if I haven't turned it off already. I'm truly at a loss and hope anyone has some crazy idea how to solve this. Bottom line, I need a switch in my office behind the firewall. I've changed everything. The real crux is I will find a working solution and, again, after days it will stop working. So this means I cannot isolate if its a computer since I have to use them. Oh and a solution is not throwing more money at this. I'm well into $1k already. Yah, lame.

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• Bind9 as a caching resolver fails with mismatch ID on localhost but not external IP

  - by argibbs

  I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a machine on my private network. I have bind9 installed (v9.8.1-P1) via aptitude, so it appears to have put all the bits in the right places and the service starts automatically. I plan on adding some zones later, but first I'm just trying to get it working as a caching resolver. I installed bind, configured it, and starting using it. Initially I thought it was working ok, but then I found some sites weren't being resolved. I've pinned it down to being linked to the size of the result and bind failing-over to TCP mode. So: I'm trying to find out why bind is failing when I query for domain info and the result is 512 bytes (causing a truncation and retry on TCP). Specifically it fails with ID mismatches if I point dig at localhost, but works when I query the machine's own IP (192.168.0.2). This appears to be backwards to the problem that most people have when using bind (fails on external ip, works on localhost). If I do dig @localhost google.com (which has a response of <512 bytes) then it works; I get no warnings, and plenty of output. $ dig @localhost google.com ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> @localhost google.com [snip lots of output] ;; Query time: 39 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) ;; WHEN: Thu Oct 17 23:08:34 2013 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 495 If I do dig @localhost play.google.com (which has a larger response) then I get back something like: $ dig @localhost play.google.com ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. ;; ERROR: ID mismatch: expected ID 3696, got 27130 This seems to be standard, documented behaviour - when the UDP response is large (here 'large' == 512 bytes) it falls back to TCP. The ID mismatch is not expected though. If I do dig @192.168.0.2 play.google.com then I still get the warning about using TCP mode, but it otherwise works $ dig @192.168.0.2 play.google.com ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> @192.168.0.2 play.google.com [snip most of the output] ;; Query time: 5 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.0.2#53(192.168.0.2) ;; WHEN: Thu Oct 17 23:05:55 2013 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 521 At the moment I've not set up any zones in my local instance, so it's just acting as a caching resolver. My options config is pretty much unchanged from standard, I've got the following set: options { directory "/var/cache/bind"; allow-query { 192.168/16; 127.0.0.1; }; forwarders { 8.8.8.8; 8.8.4.4; }; dnssec-validation auto; edns-udp-size 4096 ; allow-transfer { any; }; auth-nxdomain no; # conform to RFC1035 listen-on-v6 { any; }; }; And my /etc/resolv.conf is just nameserver 127.0.0.1 search .local The problem definitely seems linked to the failover to TCP mode: if I do dig +bufsize=4096 @localhost play.google.com then it works; no warning about failover to TCP, no ID mismatch, and a standard looking result. To be honest, if there was a way to force bind to use a much larger UDP buffer, that'd probably be good enough for me, but all I've been able to find mention of is max-udp-size 4096 and that doesn't change the behaviour in any way. I've also tried setting edns-udp-size 512 in case the problem is some weird EDNS issue with my router (which seems unlikely since the +bufsize=4096 flag works fine). I've also tried dig +trace @localhost play.google.com; this works. No truncation/TCP warning, and a full result. I've also tried changing the servers used in the forwarder (e.g. to OpenDNS), but that makes no difference. There's one last data point: if I repetitively do dig @localhost play.google.com I don't always get an ID mismatch, but sometimes a REFUSED error. I'm much more likely to get a REFUSED error if I dig the non-localhost IP (192.168.0.2) first: $ dig @localhost play.google.com ;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode. ; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> @localhost play.google.com ; (1 server found) ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: 35104 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;play.google.com. IN A ;; Query time: 4 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) ;; WHEN: Thu Oct 17 23:20:13 2013 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 33 Any insights or things to try would be much appreciated.

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