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• Travelling at Magenic

  - by Chris G. Williams

  I occasionally get asked if we travel "a lot" at Magenic. Sometimes the question comes from job candidates. Other times it's clients, recruiters or friends. To give a simple yes or no answer would be a disservice to the person asking the question. So here is my standard answer:It depends.(That was the short version.  Here's the long version...)We do have some guys that are more "national" in focus, and they can travel a fair amount. They also receive a little extra in compensation for doing so. It's a balancing act, and not necessarily a one-size-fits-all situation. Not everyone is well suited to constant travel. Some folks enjoy it and some folks hate it.With our local guys, our general policy is to TRY and keep them close to home whenever possible, but sometimes the needs of the client will dictate otherwise. (As Spock would say... the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.)In most cases though, we really do try to avoid sending our guys on extended travel gigs (i.e. every week for 6 months) when a simple kickoff trip and occasional visit will do. This depends on the nature of the gig, of course. Some types of work lend themselves to this model better than others. Additionally, this can and does vary by office. If one office is having trouble staffing a gig (not enough available bodies) and another office has a few too many folks on the bench, well... you can connect the dots. But again, we try to keep that to a minimum.Lastly, we all have our own thresholds for what we consider "a lot" of travel. There are two parts to this threshold:Half of it is whatever you're accustomed to already. The other half is being honest with yourself about how much you [like/hate] dealing with airports, car rentals, taxis, hotels, disruptions to your workout schedule, time away from friends/family, etc.Knowing a bit about yourself will definitely help you decide how much travel is too much for you.

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• Link instead of Attaching

  - by Daniel Moth

  With email storage not being an issue in many companies (I think I currently have 25GB of storage on my email account, I don’t even think about storage), this encourages bad behaviors such as liberally attaching office documents to emails instead of sharing a link to the document in SharePoint or SkyDrive or some file share etc. Attaching a file admittedly has its usage scenarios too, but it should not be the default. I thought I'd list the reasons why sharing a link can be better than attaching files directly. In no particular order: Better Review. It allows multiple recipients to review the file and their comments are aggregated into a single document. The alternative is everyone having to detach the document, add their comments, then send back to you, and then you have to collate. Wirth the alternative, you also potentially miss out on recipients reading comments from other recipients. Always up to date. The attachment becomes a fork instead of an always up to date document. For example, you send the email on Thursday, I only open it on Tuesday: between those days you could have made updates that now I am missing because you decided to share a link instead of an attachment. Better bookmarking. When I need to find that document you shared, you are forcing me to search through my email (I may not even be running outlook), instead of opening the link which I have bookmarked in my browser or my collection of links in my OneNote or from the recent/pinned links of the office app on my task bar, etc. Can control access. If someone accidentally or naively forwards your link to someone outside your group/org who you’d prefer not to have access to it, the location of the document can be protected with specific access control. Can add more recipients. If someone adds people to the email thread in outlook, your attachment doesn't get re-attached - instead, the person added is left without the attachment unless someone remembers to re-attach it. If it was a link, they are immediately caught up without further actions. Enable Discovery. If you put it on a share, I may be able to discover other cool stuff that lives alongside that document. Save on storage. So this doesn't apply to me given my opening statement, but if in your company you do have such limitations, attaching files eats up storage on all recipients accounts and will also get "lost" when those people archive email (and lose completely at some point if they follow the company retention policy). Like I said, attachments do have their place, but they should be an explicit choice for explicit reasons rather than the default. Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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• MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0.11 has been released

  - by Andy Bang

  We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0.11 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. It will also be available via the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud in about 1 week. This is a maintenance release that includes a few new features and fixes a number of bugs. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the change log. You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then choose the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" side tab in the "Patch Search" portlet. You will also find the binaries on the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud in approximately 1 week. Choose "MySQL Database" as the Product Pack and you will find the Enterprise Monitor along with other MySQL products. Based on feedback from our customers, MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 3.0 offers many significant improvements over previous releases. Highlights include: Policy-based automatic scheduling of rules and event handling (including email notifications) make administration of scale-out easier and automatic Enhancements such as automatic discovery of MySQL instances, centralized agent configuration and multi-instance monitoring further improve ease of configuration and management The new cloud and virtualization-friendly, "agent-less" design allows remote monitoring of MySQL databases without the need for any remote agents Trends, projections and forecasting - Graphs and Event handlers inform you in advance of impending file system capacity problems Zero Configuration Query Analyzer - Works "out of the box" with MySQL 5.6 Performance_Schema (supported by 5.6.14 or later) False positives from flapping or spikes are avoided using exponential moving averages and other statistical techniques Advisors can analyze data across an entire group; for example, the Replication Configuration Advisor can scan an entire topology to find common configuration errors like duplicate server UUIDs or a slave whose version is less than its master's More information on the contents of this release is available here: What's new in MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0? MySQL Enterprise Edition: Demos MySQL Enterprise Monitor Frequently Asked Questions MySQL Enterprise Monitor Change History More information on MySQL Enterprise and the Enterprise Monitor can be found here: http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/ http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/monitor.html http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/query.html http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?142 If you are not a MySQL Enterprise customer and want to try the Monitor and Query Analyzer using our 30-day free customer trial, go to http://www.mysql.com/trials, or contact Sales at http://www.mysql.com/about/contact. If you haven't looked at MEM recently, and especially MEM 3.0, please do so now and let us know what you think. Thanks and Happy Monitoring! - The MySQL Enterprise Tools Development Team

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• “It Isn’t Easy At All; Otherwise, Everyone Would Be Doing It”

  - by Kathryn Perry

  A few months ago, JP Saunders (pictured left), who leads the go-to-market initiatives for the Oracle CX Service offering, kicked off a series of articles about modern customer service. He contends that to take care of customers?and the people that support those customers?companies need to make it easy to deliver consistently great experiences. But it’s not easy; it’s an art. The six posts in The Art of Easy series will help you better understand some of the customer service challenges you face and how to avoid common pitfalls. We pulled them all together here in one post for continuity and easy access. Saunders introduces the series with The Art of Easy: Make It Easy To Deliver Great Customer Service Experiences (Part 1). The Art of Easy: Offer Self Service With the Emphasis on Service (Part 2) by David Fulton (pictured left): David Fulton, Director of Product Management, Oracle Service Cloud, shares five tenets of customer self service that move an organization closer to becoming a modern customer service business. Easy Decisions For Complex Problems (Part 3) by Heike Lorenz (pictured right): Heike Lorenz, Director of Global Product Marketing, Policy Automation, writes about automating service policies to ensure that the correct decisions are being applied to the right people. The goal is to nurture the trusted relationships with customers during complex decision-making processes. Moving at the Speed of Easy (Part 4) by Chris Ulmand (pictured left): Chris Omland, Director of Product Management, Oracle Service Cloud, addresses the need for speed to keep up with customers’ expectations. His advice—start with a platform that enables agile innovation, respects a company’s unique needs, and has proven reliability to protect customer relationships. Knowledge Makes It Easy For Everyone (Part 5) by Nav Chakravarti (pictured rig: Vice President Nav Chakravarti, Oracle Service Cloud, talks about managing the knowledge that customers need and want. He coaches readers on delivering answers to customers’ questions easily, in context, with relevance, reliably, and accurately. Making Easy, Both Effective and Efficient (Part 6) by Melinda Uhland (pictured left): Melinda Uhland, Oracle CX Product Management teaches us that happy agents produce happy customers. A Modern Customer Service organization is one that invests in its agents and empowers them with tools to make them efficient and effective, which, in turn, improves customer results.

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• MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0.3 Is Now Available

  - by Andy Bang

  We are pleased to announce that MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0.3 is now available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) web site. It will also be available via the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud with the November update in about 1 week. This is a maintenance release that fixes a number of bugs. You can find more information on the contents of this release in the change log. You will find binaries for the new release on My Oracle Support. Choose the "Patches & Updates" tab, and then use the "Product or Family (Advanced Search)" feature. You will also find the binaries on the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud in approximately 1 week. Choose "MySQL Database" as the Product Pack and you will find the Enterprise Monitor along with other MySQL products. Based on feedback from our customers, MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 3.0 offers many significant improvements over previous releases. Highlights include: Policy-based automatic scheduling of rules and event handling (including email notifications) make administration of scale-out easier and automatic Enhancements such as automatic discovery of MySQL instances, centralized agent configuration and multi-instance monitoring further improve ease of configuration and management The new cloud and virtualization-friendly, "agent-less" design allows remote monitoring of MySQL databases without the need for any remote agents Trends, projections and forecasting - Graphs and Event handlers inform you in advance of impending file system capacity problems Zero Configuration Query Analyzer - Works "out of the box" with MySQL 5.6 Performance_Schema (supported by 5.6.14 or later) False positives from flapping or spikes are avoided using exponential moving averages and other statistical techniques Advisors can analyze data across an entire group; for example, the Replication Configuration Advisor can scan an entire topology to find common configuration errors like duplicate server UUIDs or a slave whose version is less than its master's More information on the contents of this release is available here: What's new in MySQL Enterprise Monitor 3.0? MySQL Enterprise Edition: Demos MySQL Enterprise Monitor Frequently Asked Questions MySQL Enterprise Monitor Change History More information on MySQL Enterprise and the Enterprise Monitor can be found here: http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/ http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/monitor.html http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/query.html http://forums.mysql.com/list.php?142 If you are not a MySQL Enterprise customer and want to try the Monitor and Query Analyzer using our 30-day free customer trial, go to http://www.mysql.com/trials, or contact Sales at http://www.mysql.com/about/contact. If you haven't looked at MEM recently, and especially MEM 3.0, please do so now and let us know what you think. Thanks and Happy Monitoring! - The MySQL Enterprise Tools Development Team

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• Office lights on or off in programming department? How to decide? [closed]

  - by smp7d

  At my company, the programmers who sit in the same area are constantly fighting over whether the lights stay on or off. Because there is no official policy it makes it a particularly sticky situation. We are a typical cube-farm and we have those typical cube-farm fluorescent lights and smaller ones at our desks. With the lights off, it is difficult to read and you would probably need to turn on your desk light (which some people do anyway). All programmers in our department do most of their reading on their monitor because of the nature of our business. Some feel that we should have a vote to decide whether the lights stay on or off. A couple who prefer 'lights on' feel that the vote would need to be unanimous to turn them off as having them on is the more natural office setting. Those who want them off point out that all other departments keep their lights off. I have heard all of the arguments: -Fluorescent lights cause eye strain -Reading in dark causes eye strain -The desk lights can be used if light is needed -People from other departments feel uncomfortable approaching us in the "dark" -The monitors are harder to see in the light ... Right now, some of the developers turn off the lights and some turn them on. It really just depends who last walked by the switch. I am a bit sick of the controversy as it feels a bit childish at the moment. I'm tired of hearing about it and I'm tired of having to talk about it. I tried to help them decide but as I explained, voting wasn't enough. Do other programming departments have this same argument? What is the standard or traditionally accepted option in a programming area? Are there any good reasons for one way or the other outside of preference? How can we decide fairly? EDIT Just a little more info... We do not have clients/visitors come into our office. We do have windows and hall lights that make our environment plenty bearable with the lights off. It kind of resembles a meeting room that has the lights off during a powerpoint presentation.

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• Help recovering broken OS (permissions issue)

  - by Guandalino

  (At the bottom there is an important update.) I was doing experiments in order to backup a remote account to my local system, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I'm not confident with duplicity and probably, due to wrong syntax, some local files have been replaced with remote files. This is just a supposition, I'm not sure this is the real cause of OS corruption. The corruption happened after experimenting with backups, so I think I did something wrong at this regard. I was aware there was a problem when I tried to access a command using sudo: $ sudo ls sudo: unable to open /etc/sudoers: Permission denied sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin This is how /etc/sudoers looks like: $ ls -ald /etc/sudoers -r--r----- 1 root root 788 Oct 2 18:30 /etc/sudoers At this point I tried to reboot and now this is the message I get: The system is running in low graphics mode. Your screen, graphics card and input device settings could not be detected correctly. You will need to configure these yourself. I tried to follow the wizard to configure these settings, but without luck (the system prevents me going on when I press "Next"). The thing that makes me a bit less worried is that all the data on the disk seems readable and I'm able to access them using a live cd. I run memtest and RAM seems to be OK. Do you have any idea about how to recover my system? I'm very glad to provide further information, just let me know what info could be helpful. UPDATE. The issue is about wrong permissions and this is how I discovered: I mounted the root partition of the broken OS on /mnt/broken/ (live CD) and did ls /mnt/broken/. I got a permission denied error, while I expected to have the directory listing. I had to do sudo ls /mnt/broken/ and this worked. Thus without having root permission via sudo it's impossible to access the root of broken os. The current output of ls -ld /mnt/broken/ is: drwxr-x--- 29 1000 812 4096 2012-12-08 21:58 /mnt/broken Any thoughts on how to restore the old (working) set of permissions?

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• Why C++ people loves multithreading when it comes to performances?

  - by user1849534

  I have a question, it's about why programmers seems to love concurrency and multi-threaded programs in general. I'm considering 2 main approach here: an async approach basically based on signals, or just an async approach as called by many papers and languages like the new C# 5.0 for example, and a "companion thread" that maanges the policy of your pipeline a concurrent approach or multi-threading approach I will just say that I'm thinking about the hardware here and the worst case scenario, and I have tested this 2 paradigms myself, the async paradigm is a winner at the point that I don't get why people 90% of the time talk about concurrency when they wont to speed up things or make a good use of their resources. I have tested multi-threaded programs and async program on an old machine with an Intel quad-core that doesn't offer a memory controller inside the CPU, the memory is managed entirely by the motherboard, well in this case performances are horrible with a multi-threaded application, even a relatively low number of threads like 3-4-5 can be a problem, the application is unresponsive and is just slow and unpleasant. A good async approach is, on the other hand, probably not faster but it's not worst either, my application just waits for the result and doesn't hangs, it's responsive and there is a much better scaling going on. I have also discovered that a context change in the threading world it's not that cheap in real world scenario, it's infact quite expensive especially when you have more than 2 threads that need to cycle and swap among each other to be computed. On modern CPUs the situation it's not really that different, the memory controller it's integrated but my point is that an x86 CPUs is basically a serial machine and the memory controller works the same way as with the old machine with an external memory controller on the motherboard. The context switch is still a relevant cost in my application and the fact that the memory controller it's integrated or that the newer CPU have more than 2 core it's not bargain for me. For what i have experienced the concurrent approach is good in theory but not that good in practice, with the memory model imposed by the hardware, it's hard to make a good use of this paradigm, also it introduces a lot of issues ranging from the use of my data structures to the join of multiple threads. Also both paradigms do not offer any security abut when the task or the job will be done in a certain point in time, making them really similar from a functional point of view. According to the X86 memory model, why the majority of people suggest to use concurrency with C++ and not just an async aproach ? Also why not considering the worst case scenario of a computer where the context switch is probably more expensive than the computation itself ?

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• Usage of Pirated software at a company

  - by hakesh

  Hi, I am redirected from stack over flow since the topic is ethics rather than about programming. Thank you for letting me know that. and please give me advices. So, I started to work at a company as an engineer a couple of months ago. It's a small company and what they basically do is answering service on phones. Now they are switching from normal phones to IP phones so that computers take more important place in the work. However, all the computers used by workers are equipped with pirated software ,even their operating systems are. Moreover, they don't even buy one license to make copies for other computers. In other words, they do not spend any money for the software in office. I am not saying copying a licensed one is legit, but the situation is too much. There is one guy who did installing those pirated soft. He does not feel any sense of guilt and even justified when I asked about it. and he is not even a specialist. He just searched on the internet to install pirated software. Our boss does not have any knowledge of computers, so he took cheaper way. How do you guys think about this? Since I am still new to the company, I am not doing maintenance or managing on those cracked computers. But I have to use those software daily. And later on I will be doing support, help desk kind of staff. I really don't want to take responsibility for operating pirated software. and from an aspect of developer and engineer, pirated software are not able to get legal support and it may work unexpectedly. So, I am thinking about changing job. Am I thinking too much? should I wait until I have more credit from the boss and try to change his policy? So far, the boss does not take any words from me. Any opinions are welcome. Thank you

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• SPARC T4 ?????????

  - by user12798668

  ????????????????????????????????????????????????????? SPARC T4 ????????????????????????????T4 ??????? SP(Service Processor) ??? ILOM ?? - set /SP/powermgmt policy=elastic ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????ILOM ? /SYS/VSP/history/0 ???????????????????????????? SPARC T4-1 ? OS ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ?? ?? = ?????(W)?????????????? Mar 26 12:04:54 = 294 Mar 26 12:03:53 = 292 Mar 26 12:02:53 = 292 Mar 26 12:01:53 = 293 Mar 26 12:00:53 = 292 Mar 26 11:59:53 = 293 Mar 26 11:58:54 = 293 Mar 26 11:57:54 = 294 Mar 26 11:56:54 = 293 Mar 26 11:55:54 = 348 ????????????????????? 90W ?????????! ?? psrinfo ????????????????... # psrinfo 0 on-line since 03/23/2012 17:39:28 1 on-line since 03/26/2012 20:53:56 ?? SPARC T4-1 ????????8 ????????? 8 CPU ??????? SPARC T4 CPU ? 1 ??????????????psrinfo ??????? 64 CPU ??? OS ?????????????????????? 2 CPU ??????????! ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????CPU ??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? 2 CPU ?????????????????????????????????? CPU ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? ??????????? SPARC T4 ????????????? Oracle VM Server for SPARC (OVM for SPARC) ?????????????????????????????????????????????????? Oracle VM Server for SPARC ???????????? ?10? ??????? - ??????? ??????????????????????????OTN ? How to Use the Power Management Controls on SPARC Servers ?????????????????????????????? ??????????????SPARC T4 ?????????????????? Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2012 ???????????????????? ?????????????????????????·????????????????????! 4/4(?) ???? K1-01?ENGINEERED FOR INNOVATION ???????????????(9:00-11:15) 4/5(?) ????????? G2-01 ???????&???????????IT???????????(11:50 - 13:20) ???????????!! Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2012 ???? URL http://www.oracle.com/openworld/jp-ja/index.html ?????? 7264 ???????????????

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• Microsoft Standalone CA - Set expiration date of an individual request

  - by Hall72215

  I have set up a Microsoft Standalone CA on 2008 R2 as a root CA. I'm trying to setup a subordinate Enterprise CA. I generated the certificate request, and submitted it to the root CA. Then, I ran the following command to set the expiration date to 20 years (the request ID is 5): certutil -setattributes 5 "ValidityPeriod:Years\nValidityPeriodUnits:20" Then, I approved the request, but it failed. The Request Status Code is: The specified time is invalid. 0x8007076d (WIN32: 1901) The Request Disposition Message is: Denied by Policy Module 0x8007076d, The requested validity period is invalid. Confirm that the validity period or expiration data and time specified in the request does not extend beyond the validity period of the CA certificate, the certificate template, and the CA. The validity period of the CA can be verified by running the following commands: certutil -getreg ca\validityPeriod & certutil -getreg ca\ValidityPeriodUnits The validity period of the CA certificate is 40 years (expires in 2052). The template condition doesn't apply since this is a standalone CA. The result of those commands is Years and 1, respectively. It appears that I will need to change the CA's validityPeriod and validityPeriodUnits. But, I want to keep the default expiration for a request at 1 year. Is there a way to set a maximum and default expiration, or am I going to have to change it, issue the certificate, and then change it back?

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• ignoring informational payload, type INVALID_COOKIE msgid=00000000

  - by user197279

  I'm configuring a site-to-site vpn between openswan ipsec and cisco asa 5540. After the step, i started ipesc service but the error i'm seeing is: ignoring informational payload, type INVALID_COOKIE msgid=00000000 Nov 5 09:42:30 pluto[11712]: "myVPN" #1: received and ignored informational message Nov 5 09:42:51 pluto[11712]: "myVPN" #1: ignoring informational payload, type INVALID_COOKIE msgid=00000000 Nov 5 09:42:51 pluto[11712]: "myVPN" #1: received and ignored informational message Nov 5 09:43:30 pluto[11712]: "myVPN" #1: max number of retransmissions (2) reached STATE_MAIN_I2 Nov 5 09:43:30 pluto[11712]: "myVPN" #1: starting keying attempt 2 of at most 3 Any advise why I'm getting this error on openswan? Also sudo ipsec whack --status gives: "myVPN": 10.0.xx.0/24===10.0.7x.x[54.209.y.yyy,+S=C]---10.0.xx.x...10.0.70.x---41.22x.4.xx<41.22x.4.xx[+S=C]===41.22y.4.yyy/32; unrouted; eroute owner: #0 000 "myVPN": myip=54.209.zz.zz; hisip=unset; 000 "myVPN": ike_life: 86400s; ipsec_life: 28800s; rekey_margin: 540s; rekey_fuzz: 100%; keyingtries: 3 000 "myVPN": policy: PSK+ENCRYPT+TUNNEL+DONTREKEY+UP+IKEv2ALLOW+SAREFTRACK+lKOD+rKOD; prio: 24,32; interface: eth0; 000 "myVPN": newest ISAKMP SA: #0; newest IPsec SA: #0; 000 "myVPN": IKE algorithms wanted: AES_CBC(7)_256-SHA1(2)_000-MODP1024(2); flags=-strict 000 "myVPN": IKE algorithms found: AES_CBC(7)_256-SHA1(2)_160-MODP1024(2) 000 "myVPN": ESP algorithms wanted: AES(12)_256-SHA1(2)_000; flags=-strict 000 "myVPN": ESP algorithms loaded: AES(12)_256-SHA1(2)_160 000 000 #5: "myVPN":500 STATE_MAIN_I2 (sent MI2, expecting MR2); EVENT_RETRANSMIT in 8s; nodpd; idle; import:admin initiate 000 #5: pending Phase 2 for "myVPN" replacing #0 Thanks.

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• This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your

  - by WebDude

  I am having a highly annoying problem on Windows 7 with Microsoft Outlook 2007. Whenever I click on any hyperlinks I am present with the message This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator and let's not forget the most ear-piecing "DING" to accompany this wonderful informative message. Now I have searched the web high and low for a solution here and most sources suggest the same solution of resetting your IE as your default browser. Tried .. failed A lot of sources suggest this has something to do with installing and uninstalling chrome. I have never installed Chrome but am actually consdering this to see if it by some chance fixes my computer. A lot of sources also point to a microsoft kb article 325478 which is focused around Windows XP and totally unrelated to my problem. I see there are some other queries on SuperUser with no resolution. Please can someone help solve this highly annoying issue. I am running Window 7 professional x64 Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft Security Essentials Running in a windows work group with default policy settings HELP!

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• Connecting to ItsHidden in Ubuntu 9.10 problems

  - by Ionel Bratianu

  I try to setup a VPN connection to ItsHidden on Ubuntu 9.10. I double-checked my credentials in the VPN configuration, but I don't think that this is problem. In my syslog I got these messages: Jan 11 14:38:46 NetworkManager: Starting VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp'... Jan 11 14:38:46 NetworkManager: VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp' started (org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp), PID 4502 Jan 11 14:38:46 NetworkManager: VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp' just appeared, activating connections Jan 11 14:38:46 NetworkManager: VPN plugin state changed: 1 Jan 11 14:38:46 NetworkManager: VPN plugin state changed: 3 Jan 11 14:38:46 pppd[4506]: Plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.5//nm-pptp-pppd-plugin.so loaded. Jan 11 14:38:46 NetworkManager: VPN connection 'ItsHidden' (Connect) reply received. Jan 11 14:38:46 pppd[4506]: pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 Jan 11 14:38:46 pppd[4506]: Using interface ppp0 Jan 11 14:38:46 NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices added (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0) Jan 11 14:38:46 NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: device added (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0): no ifupdown configuration found. Jan 11 14:38:46 pppd[4506]: Connect: ppp0 /dev/pts/1 Jan 11 14:39:06 pptp[4508]: nm-pptp-service-4502 fatal[get_ip_address:pptp.c:430]: gethostbyname 'vpn.itshidden.com': HOST NOT FOUND Jan 11 14:39:06 pppd[4506]: Modem hangup Jan 11 14:39:06 pppd[4506]: Connection terminated. Jan 11 14:39:06 NetworkManager: VPN plugin failed: 1 Jan 11 14:39:06 NetworkManager: SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices removed (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0) Jan 11 14:39:06 pppd[4506]: Exit. Jan 11 14:39:06 NetworkManager: VPN plugin failed: 1 Jan 11 14:39:06 NetworkManager: VPN plugin failed: 1 Jan 11 14:39:06 NetworkManager: VPN plugin state changed: 6 Jan 11 14:39:06 NetworkManager: VPN plugin state change reason: 0 Jan 11 14:39:06 NetworkManager: connection_state_changed(): Could not process the request because no VPN connection was active. Jan 11 14:39:06 NetworkManager: Policy set 'Auto eth0' (eth0) as default for routing and DNS. Jan 11 14:39:19 NetworkManager: [1263213559.003098] ensure_killed(): waiting for vpn service pid 4502 to exit Jan 11 14:39:19 NetworkManager: [1263213559.003289] ensure_killed(): vpn service pid 4502 cleaned up Because the gethostbyname is failing, I suppose that the NetworkManager doesn't know that I use proxies for accessing Internet. I'm not sure that this is the real problem. Could you tell me a solution to make gesthostbyname not failing anymore?

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• Using an alternate search platform in Commerce Server 2009

  - by Lewis Benge

  Although Microsoft Commerce Server 2009's architecture is built upon Microsoft SQL Server, and has the full power of the SQL Full Text Indexing Search Platform, there are time however when you may require a richer or alternate search platform. One of these scenarios if when you want to implement a faceted (refinement) search into your site, which provides dynamic refinements based on the search results dataset. Faceted search is becoming popular in most online retail environments as a way of providing an enhanced user experience when browsing a larger catalogue. This is powerful for two reasons, firstly with a traditional search it is down to a user to think of a search term suitable for the product they are trying to find. This typically will not return similar products or help in any way to refine a larger dataset. Faceted searches on the other hand provide a comprehensive list of product properties, grouped together by similarity to help the user narrow down the results returned, as the user progressively restricts the search criteria by selecting additional criteria to search again, these facets needs to continually refresh. The whole experience allows users to explore alternate brands, price-ranges, or find products they hadn't initially thought of or where looking for in a bid to enhance cross sell in the retail environment. The second advantage of this type of search from a business perspective is also to harvest the search result to start to profile your user. Even though anonymous users may routinely visit your site, and will not necessarily register or complete a transaction to build up marketing data- profiling, you can still achieve the same result by recording search facets used within the search sequence. Below is a faceted search scenario generated from eBay using the search term "server". By creating a search profile of clicking through Computer & Networking -> Servers -> Dell - > New and recording this information against my user profile you can start to predict with a lot more certainty what types of products I am interested in. This will allow you to apply shopping-cart analysis against your search data and provide great cross-sale or advertising opportunity, or personalise the user experience based on your prediction of what the user may be interested in. This type of search is extremely beneficial in e-Commerce environments but achieving it out of the box with Commerce Server and SQL Full Text indexing can be challenging. In many deployments it is often easier to use an alternate search platform such as Microsoft's FAST, Apache SOLR, or Endecca, however you still want these products to integrate natively into Commerce Server to ensure that up-to-date inventory information is presented, profile information is generated, and you provide a consistant API. To do so we make the most of the Commerce Server extensibilty points called operation sequence components. In this example I will be talking about Apache Solr hosted on Apache Tomcat, in this specific example I have used the SolrNet C# library to interface to the Java platform. Also I am not going to talk about Solr configuration of indexing – but in a production envionrment this would typically happen by using Powershell to call the Commerce Server management webservice to export your catalog as XML, apply an XSLT transform to the file to make it conform to SOLR and use a simple HTTP Post to send it to the search enginge for indexing. Essentially a sequance component is a step in a serial workflow used to call a data repository (which in most cases is usually the Commerce Server pipelines or databases) and map to and from a Commerce Entity object whilst enforcing any business rules. So the first step in the process is to add a new class library to your existing Commerce Server site. You will need to use a new library as Sequence Components will need to be strongly named to be deployed. Once you are inside of your new project, add a new class file and add a reference to the Microsoft.Commerce.Providers, Microsoft.Commerce.Contracts and the Microsoft.Commerce.Broker assemblies. Now make your new class derive from the base object Microsoft.Commerce.Providers.Components.OperationSequanceComponent and overide the ExecuteQueryMethod. Your screen will then look something similar ot this: As all we are doing on this component is conducting a search we are only interested in the ExecuteQuery method. This method accepts three arguments, queryOperation, operationCache, and response. The queryOperation will be the object in which we receive our search parameters, the cache allows access to the Commerce Server cache allowing us to store regulary accessed information, and the response object is the object which we will return the result of our search upon. Inside this method is simply where we are going to inject our logic for our third party search platform. As I am not going to explain the inner-workings of actually making a SOLR call, I'll simply provide the sample code here. I would highly recommend however looking at the SolrNet wiki as they have some great explinations of how the API works. What you will find however is that there are some further extensions required when attempting to integrate a custom search provider. Firstly you out of the box the CommerceQueryOperation you will receive into the method when conducting a search against a catalog is specifically geared towards a SQL Full Text Search with properties such as a Where clause. To make the operation you receive more relevant you will need to create another class, this time derived from Microsoft.Commerce.Contract.Messages.CommerceSearchCriteria and within this you need to detail the properties you will require to allow you to submit as parameters to the SOLR search API. My exmaple looks like this: [DataContract(Namespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/microsoft-multi-channel-commerce-foundation/types/2008/03")] public class CommerceCatalogSolrSearch : CommerceSearchCriteria { private Dictionary<string, string> _facetQueries;   public CommerceCatalogSolrSearch() { _facetQueries = new Dictionary<String, String>();   }     public Dictionary<String, String> FacetQueries { get { return _facetQueries; } set { _facetQueries = value; } }   public String SearchPhrase{ get; set; } public int PageIndex { get; set; } public int PageSize { get; set; } public IEnumerable<String> Facets { get; set; }   public string Sort { get; set; }   public new int FirstItemIndex { get { return (PageIndex-1)*PageSize; } }   public int LastItemIndex { get { return FirstItemIndex + PageSize; } } }  To allow you to construct a CommerceQueryOperation call within the API you will also need to construct another class to derived from Microsoft.Commerce.Common.MessageBuilders.CommerceSearchCriteriaBuilder and is simply used to construct an instance of the CommerceQueryOperation you have just created and expose the properties you want set. My Message builder looks like this: public class CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder : CommerceSearchCriteriaBuilder { private CommerceCatalogSolrSearch _solrSearch;   public CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder() { _solrSearch = new CommerceCatalogSolrSearch(); }   public String SearchPhrase { get { return _solrSearch.SearchPhrase; } set { _solrSearch.SearchPhrase = value; } }   public int PageIndex { get { return _solrSearch.PageIndex; } set { _solrSearch.PageIndex = value; } }   public int PageSize { get { return _solrSearch.PageSize; } set { _solrSearch.PageSize = value; } }   public Dictionary<String,String> FacetQueries { get { return _solrSearch.FacetQueries; } set { _solrSearch.FacetQueries = value; } }   public String[] Facets { get { return _solrSearch.Facets.ToArray(); } set { _solrSearch.Facets = value; } } public override CommerceSearchCriteria ToSearchCriteria() { return _solrSearch; } }  Once you have these two classes in place you can now safely cast the CommerceOperation you receive as an argument of the overidden ExecuteQuery method in the SequenceComponent to the CommerceCatalogSolrSearch operation you have just created, e.g. public CommerceCatalogSolrSearch TryGetSearchCriteria(CommerceOperation operation) { var searchCriteria = operation as CommerceQueryOperation; if (searchCriteria == null) throw new Exception("No search criteria present");   var local = (CommerceCatalogSolrSearch) searchCriteria.SearchCriteria; if (local == null) throw new Exception("Unexpected Search Criteria in Operation");   return local; }  Now you have all of your search parameters present, you can go off an call the external search platform API. You will of-course get proprietry objects returned, so the next step in the process is to convert the results being returned back into CommerceEntities. You do this via another extensibility point within the Commerce Server API called translatators. Translators are another separate class, this time derived inheriting the interface Microsoft.Commerce.Providers.Translators.IToCommerceEntityTranslator . As you can imaginge this interface is specific for the conversion of the object TO a CommerceEntity, you will need to implement a separate interface if you also need to go in the opposite direction. If you implement the required method for the interace you will get a single translate method which has a source onkect, destination CommerceEntity, and a collection of properties as arguments. For simplicity sake in this example I have hard-coded the mappings, however best practice would dictate you map the objects using your metadatadefintions.xml file . Once complete your translator would look something like the following: public class SolrEntityTranslator : IToCommerceEntityTranslator { #region IToCommerceEntityTranslator Members   public void Translate(object source, CommerceEntity destinationCommerceEntity, CommercePropertyCollection propertiesToReturn) { if (source.GetType().Equals(typeof (SearchProduct))) { var searchResult = (SearchProduct) source;   destinationCommerceEntity.Id = searchResult.ProductId; destinationCommerceEntity.SetPropertyValue("DisplayName", searchResult.Title); destinationCommerceEntity.ModelName = "Product";   } }  Once you have a translator in place you can then safely map the results of your search platform into Commerce Entities and attach them on to the CommerceResponse object in a fashion similar to this: foreach (SearchProduct result in matchingProducts) { var destinationEntity = new CommerceEntity(_returnModelName);   Translator.ToCommerceEntity(result, destinationEntity, _queryOperation.Model.Properties); response.CommerceEntities.Add(destinationEntity); }  In SOLR I actually have two objects being returned – a product, and a collection of facets so I have an additional translator for facet (which maps to a custom facet CommerceEntity) and my facet response from SOLR is passed into the Translator helper class seperatley. When all of this is pieced together you have sucessfully completed the extensiblity point coding. You would have created a new OperationSequanceComponent, a custom SearchCritiera object and message builder class, and translators to convert the objects into Commerce Entities. Now you simply need to configure them, and can start calling them in your code. Make sure you sign you assembly, compile it and identiy its signature. Next you need to put this a reference of your new assembly into the Channel.Config configuration file replacing that of the existing SQL Full Text component: You will also need to add your translators to the Translators node of your Channel.Config too: Lastly add any custom CommerceEntities you have developed to your MetaDataDefintions.xml file. Your configuration is now complete, and you should now be able to happily make a call to the Commerce Foundation API, which will act as a proxy to your third party search platform and return back CommerceEntities of your search results. If you require data to be enriched, or logged, or any other logic applied then simply add further sequence components into the OperationSequence (obviously keeping the search response first) to the node of your Channel.Config file. Now to call your code you simply request it as per any other CommerceQuery operation, but taking into account you may be receiving multiple types of CommerceEntity returned: public KeyValuePair<FacetCollection ,List<Product>> DoFacetedProductQuerySearch(string searchPhrase, string orderKey, string sortOrder, int recordIndex, int recordsPerPage, Dictionary<string, string> facetQueries, out int totalItemCount) { var products = new List<Product>(); var query = new CommerceQuery<CatalogEntity, CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder>();   query.SearchCriteria.PageIndex = recordIndex; query.SearchCriteria.PageSize = recordsPerPage; query.SearchCriteria.SearchPhrase = searchPhrase; query.SearchCriteria.FacetQueries = facetQueries;     totalItemCount = 0; CommerceResponse response = SiteContext.ProcessRequest(query.ToRequest()); var queryResponse = response.OperationResponses[0] as CommerceQueryOperationResponse;   // No results. Return the empty list if (queryResponse != null && queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Count == 0) return new KeyValuePair<FacetCollection, List<Product>>();   totalItemCount = (int)queryResponse.TotalItemCount;   // Prepare a multi-operation to retrieve the product variants var multiOperation = new CommerceMultiOperation();     //Add products to results foreach (Product product in queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Where(x => x.ModelName == "Product")) { var productQuery = new CommerceQuery<Product>(Product.ModelNameDefinition); productQuery.SearchCriteria.Model.Id = product.Id; productQuery.SearchCriteria.Model.CatalogId = product.CatalogId;   var variantQuery = new CommerceQueryRelatedItem<Variant>(Product.RelationshipName.Variants);   productQuery.RelatedOperations.Add(variantQuery);   multiOperation.Add(productQuery); }   CommerceResponse variantsResponse = SiteContext.ProcessRequest(multiOperation.ToRequest()); foreach (CommerceQueryOperationResponse queryOpResponse in variantsResponse.OperationResponses) { if (queryOpResponse.CommerceEntities.Count() > 0) products.Add(queryOpResponse.CommerceEntities[0]); }   //Get facet collection FacetCollection facetCollection = queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Where(x => x.ModelName == "FacetCollection").FirstOrDefault();     return new KeyValuePair<FacetCollection, List<Product>>(facetCollection, products); }    ..And that is it – simply a few classes and some configuration will allow you to extend the Commerce Server query operations to call a third party search platform, whilst still maintaing a unifed API in the remainder of your code. This logic stands for any extensibility within CommerceServer, which requires excution in a serial fashioon such as call to LOB systems or web service to validate or enrich data. Feel free to use this example on other applications, and if you have any questions please feel free to e-mail and I'll help out where I can!

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• psexec: "Access is Denied"?

  - by Electrons_Ahoy

  Inspired by my previous question here, I've been experimenting with PSExec. The goal is to trip off some fairly simple scripts / programs on one WindowsXP machine from another, and as PowerShell 2 doesn't yet do remoting on XP, PSexec seems like it'll solve my problems nicely. However, I can't get anything but the "Access is Denied" error. Here's what I've tried so far: I've got a pair of WindowsXP MCE machines, networked together in a workgroup without a server or domain controller. I've turned off "simple file sharing" on both machines. Under the security policy, Network Access: Sharing and Security model for local accounts is set to Classic, not Guest for both machines. There is an Administrative user for each computer that I know the passwords to. :) With all that, a command like "> psexec \\otherComputer -u adminUser cmd" prompts for the password (like it should) and then exits with: Couldn't access otherComputer: Access is denied. So, at this point I turn to the community. What step am I missing here?

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• Vista Power Management GPO

  - by Matt

  Hi, I've created a loopback GPO that has several settings (both computer and user) including a Custom User Interface (Access 2007 Application) and Power Management (has the computer sleep after being idle for 2 min). I'm also filtering so that this policy does not apply to "Admins" - only to "Users". The problem I'm having is when the "Users" login the Power Management settings don’t work, but they do for "Admins". For testing I'm allowing the "Users" to launch Task Manager and use the Run line, so I'll run Explorer and look at Power Management and it shows the settings from my GPO. So I created a test OU with copies of the aforementioned GPO, but removed the Custom User Interface and found the Power Management settings do work for both the "Users" and "Admins". When I add the Custom UI the Power Management settings break for the "User" but continue to work for "Admins". Do the Power Management options need to have User Interface be "Explorer.exe"? Is this a bug or am I doing this the wrong way? BTW the tablets are using Vista SP2. Any insight or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Matt

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• SQL Server 2005 Merge Replication to SQL Server CE 3.5

  - by user33067

  Hi, In my organization, we have a SQL Server 2005 database server (DBServer). Users of an application will normally be connected to DBServer, but, occasionally, would like to disconnect and continue their work on a laptop using SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 (SQLCE). Due to this, we have been looking into using Merge Replication between the DBServer and SQLCE. From what I have read about this process, IIS must be installed on "the server"... yet, I have found no indication to whether this is talking about DBServer or SQLCE. I had assumed the documentation was referring to DBServer and proposed this to our networking staff. That idea was quickly put to rest as it is not our policy to install IIS on an internal server. This is where our SQL Server 2005 web server (WebServer) entered the picture. The idea being that IIS would be installed on WebServer and would be the conduit for DBServer and SQLCE to communicate. This sounded like a good idea at first, until I started looking for documentation on this type of setup. Everything I have been able deals with a DBServer -- SQLCE -- DBServer setup... nothing on DBServer -- WebServer -- SQLCE -- WebServer -- DBServer. Questions: Is going with a 3 server setup ideal? Does anyone have documentation on this type of setup? Does IIS even need to be running on one of the big servers, or can it just run off the laptop with SQLCE on it? (I'd really like this option ;))

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• How do I renew an expired Ubuntu OpenLDAP SSL Certificate

  - by Doug Symes

  We went through the steps of revoking an SSL Certificate used by our OpenLDAP server and renewing it but we are unable to start slapd. Here are the commands we used: openssl verify hostname_domain_com_cert.pem We got back that the certificate was expired but "OK" We revoked the certificate we'd been using: openssl ca -revoke /etc/ssl/certs/hostname_domain_com_cert.pem Revoking worked fine. We created the new Cert Request by passing it the key file as input: openssl req -new -key hostname_domain_com_key.pem -out newreq.pem We generated a new certificate using the newly created request file "newreq.pem" openssl ca -policy policy_anything -out newcert.pem -infiles newreq.pem We looked at our cn=config.ldif file and found the locations for the key and cert and placed the newly dated certificate in the needed path. Still we are unable to start slapd with: service slapd start We get this message: Starting OpenLDAP: slapd - failed. The operation failed but no output was produced. For hints on what went wrong please refer to the system's logfiles (e.g. /var/log/syslog) or try running the daemon in Debug mode like via "slapd -d 16383" (warning: this will create copious output). Below, you can find the command line options used by this script to run slapd. Do not forget to specify those options if you want to look to debugging output: slapd -h 'ldap:/// ldapi:/// ldaps:///' -g openldap -u openldap -F /etc/ldap/slapd.d/ Here is what we found in /var/log/syslog Oct 23 20:18:25 ldap1 slapd[2710]: @(#) $OpenLDAP: slapd 2.4.21 (Dec 19 2011 15:40:04) $#012#011buildd@allspice:/build/buildd/openldap-2.4.21/debian/build/servers/slapd Oct 23 20:18:25 ldap1 slapd[2710]: main: TLS init def ctx failed: -1 Oct 23 20:18:25 ldap1 slapd[2710]: slapd stopped. Oct 23 20:18:25 ldap1 slapd[2710]: connections_destroy: nothing to destroy. We are not sure what else to try. Any ideas?

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• Legacy non-dpi-aware application resolution scaling?

  - by Miles Erickson

  Our environment prominently featuers an outdated but absolutely mission-critical Win32 application that is not dpi-aware. It is optimized for an 800x600 display. Most of our users now have 17"-20" displays with native resolutions ranging from 1280x1024 to 1680x1050. However, they still operate these displays at 800x600 because the text in this legacy application is otherwise too small. Of course, it also means that nothing quite fits on the screen in Office 2007. Most of our workstations still run Windows XP, but some are on Windows 7 and there are more to come. About one-third of our users run the app remotely via MS Terminal Services, and the remainder run it locally. Is anyone aware of any method that could be used to scale this specific application to about 170%, so that it would fill a 1280x1024 screen, without affecting other applications that work best at the display's native resolution? I know how to do this in Mac OS X, but I have never found a way to do it in Windows. Of course, this ideally would be something that we could push out via Group Policy. I suppose we even could create a custom MSI package to re-deploy the legacy application with some sort of display virtualization layer, if such a thing exists.

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• Side-By-Side Configuration Error VC90.CRT

  - by Swiss

  I keep receiving the following error when trying to run MikTeX 2.8 or Visual Studio 2008 on 64-Bit Windows Vista. It's particularly odd because both programs were working problem free until a few days ago. The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more detail. Opening the Application log provides the following information: Activation context generation failed for "C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.8\miktex\bin\texworks.exe". Error in manifest or policy file "C:\Program Files (x86)\MiKTeX 2.8\miktex\bin\Microsoft.VC90.CRT.MANIFEST" on line 4. Component identity found in manifest does not match the identity of the component requested. Reference is Microsoft.VC90.CRT,processorArchitecture="x86",publicKeyToken="1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b",type="win32",version="9.0.30729.4148". Definition is Microsoft.VC90.CRT,processorArchitecture="x86",publicKeyToken="1fc8b3b9a1e18e3b",type="win32",version="9.0.30729.1". Please use sxstrace.exe for detailed diagnosis. It looks like the problem is with Microsoft.VC90.CRT.MANIFEST, but I am not sure why or how to fix this problem. I have tried uninstalling/reinstalling Visual Studio and MikTeX, as well as uninstalling/reinstalling Microsoft's C++ Redistributable, but nothing seems to be fixing this problem.

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• lftp cannot connecto to IIS

  - by ruyrocha

  Hello, I can not connect to IIS using lftp as you can see here: <--- 200 Language is now English, UTF-8 encoding. ---> OPTS UTF8 ON <--- 200 OPTS UTF8 command successful - UTF8 encoding now ON. ---> HOST x.x.x.x <--- 504 Server cannot accept argument. ---> USER bla <--- 331 Password required for hgtrf. ---> PASS blabla <--- 230 User logged in. ---> PWD <--- 257 "/" is current directory. ---> PBSZ 0 <--- 200 PBSZ command successful. ---> PROT P <--- 534 Policy denies SSL. ---> PASV <--- 227 Entering Passive Mode (x.x.x.x,194,118). ---- Connecting data socket to (x.x.x.x) port 49782 **** Socket error (Connection refused) - reconnecting ---> LIST ---> ABOR ---- Closing aborted data socket ---- Closing control socket I could connect, list, retrieve and send files using standard ftp command. Do you have any suggestion?

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• iptables -P FORWARD DROP makes port forwarding slow

  - by Isaac

  I have three computers, linked like this: box1 (ubuntu) box2 router & gateway (debian) box3 (opensuse) [10.0.1.1] ---- [10.0.1.18,10.0.2.18,10.0.3.18] ---- [10.0.3.15] | box4, www [10.0.2.1] Among other things I want box2 to do nat and port forwarding, so that I can do ssh -p 2223 box2 to reach box3. For this I have the following iptables script: #!/bin/bash # flush iptables -F INPUT iptables -F FORWARD iptables -F OUTPUT iptables -t nat -F PREROUTING iptables -t nat -F POSTROUTING iptables -t nat -F OUTPUT # default default_action=DROP for chain in INPUT OUTPUT;do iptables -P $chain $default_action done iptables -P FORWARD DROP # allow ssh to local computer allowed_ssh_clients="10.0.1.1 10.0.3.15" for ip in $allowed_ssh_clients;do iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp --sport 22 -d $ip -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -s $ip -j ACCEPT done # allow DNS iptables -A OUTPUT -p udp --dport 53 -m state \ --state NEW,ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p udp --sport 53 -m state \ --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT # allow HTTP & HTTPS iptables -A OUTPUT -p tcp -m multiport --dports 80,443 -j ACCEPT iptables -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport --sports 80,443 -j ACCEPT # # ROUTING # # allow routing echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward # nat iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE # http iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --sport 80 -j ACCEPT # ssh redirect iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp -i eth1 --dport 2223 -j DNAT \ --to-destination 10.0.3.15:22 iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --sport 22 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --sport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT iptables -A FORWARD -p tcp --dport 1024:65535 -j ACCEPT iptables -I FORWARD -j LOG --log-prefix "iptables denied: " While this works, it takes about 10 seconds to get a password promt from my ssh command. Afterwards, the connection is as responsive as could be. If I change the default policy for my FORWARD chain to "ACCEPT", then the password promt is there imediatly. I have tried analysing the logs, but I can not spot a difference in the logs for ACCEPT/DROP in my FORWARD chain. Also I have tried allowing all the unprivileged ports, as box1 uses thoses for doing ssh to box2. Any hints? (If the whole setup seems strange to you - the point of the exercise is to understand iptables ;))

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• IP address spoofing using Source Routing

  - by iamrohitbanga

  With IP options we can specify the route we want an IP packet to take while connecting to a server. If we know that a particular server provides some extra functionality based on the IP address can we not utilize this by spoofing an IP packet so that the source IP address is the privileged IP address and one of the hosts on the Source Routing is our own. So if the privileged IP address is x1 and server IP address is x2 and my own IP address is x3. I send a packet from x1 to x2 which is supposed to pass through x3. x1 does not actually send the packet. It is just that x2 thinks the packet came from x1 via x3. Now in response if x2 uses the same routing policy (as a matter of courtesy to x1) then all packets would be received by x3. Will the destination typically use the same IP address sequences as specified in the routing header so that packets coming from the server pass through my IP where I can get the required information? Can we not spoof a TCP connection in the above case? Is this attack used in practice?

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