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• Standard Oracle Fusion Middleware Installation fails on SOA ManagedServer start due to classpath pro

  - by Neuquino

  Hi, Trying to install Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR2 on windows (same thing happens on Linux). I have followed the guidelines provided in the http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12839_01/install.1111/e14318/toc.htm Installing the weblogic (11g) Oracle 11g databse installation Running the RCU utility to create schema Installed and copied relevant files for Java Bridge Configure the Fusion Middleware But i found that the SOA server is not getting up in the enterprise manager its showing as down. When i checked the logs iam getting the following error: oracle.jrf.wls.JRFStartup java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: oracle.jrf.wls.JRFStartup at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method) at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:247) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager.invokeClass(ClassDeploymentManager.java:253) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager.access$000(ClassDeploymentManager.java:54) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager$1.run(ClassDeploymentManager.java:205) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace <Jul 7, 2009 4:18:48 PM CEST> <Critical> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000286> <Failed to invoke startup class "SOAStartupClass", java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: oracle.bpel.services.common.util.GenerateBPMCryptoKey java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: oracle.bpel.services.common.util.GenerateBPMCryptoKey at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method) at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:247) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager.invokeClass(ClassDeploymentManager.java:253) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager.access$000(ClassDeploymentManager.java:54) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager$1.run(ClassDeploymentManager.java:205) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace <Jul 7, 2009 4:19:27 PM CEST> <Error> <Deployer> <BEA-149205> <Failed to initialize the application 'SocketAdapter' due to error weblogic.application.ModuleException: The ra.xml <connectionfactory-impl-class> class 'oracle.tip.adapter.socket.SocketConnectionFactory' could not be loaded from the resource adapter archive/application because of the following error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/OracleConnectionFactory.weblogic.application.ModuleException: The ra.xml <connectionfactory-impl-class> class 'oracle.tip.adapter.socket.SocketConnectionFactory' could not be loaded from the resource adapter archive/application because of the following error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/OracleConnectionFactory at weblogic.connector.deploy.ConnectorModule.prepare(ConnectorModule.java:228) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleListenerInvoker.prepare(ModuleListenerInvoker.java:93) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow$1.next(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:387) at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:37) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow.prepare(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:58) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace <Jul 7, 2009 4:19:27 PM CEST> <Error> <Deployer> <BEA-149205> <Failed to initialize the application 'MQSeriesAdapter' due to error weblogic.application.ModuleException: The ra.xml <connectionfactory-impl-class> class 'oracle.tip.adapter.mq.ConnectionFactoryImpl' could not be loaded from the resource adapter archive/application because of the following error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/OracleConnectionFactory.weblogic.application.ModuleException: The ra.xml <connectionfactory-impl-class> class 'oracle.tip.adapter.mq.ConnectionFactoryImpl' could not be loaded from the resource adapter archive/application because of the following error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/OracleConnectionFactory at weblogic.connector.deploy.ConnectorModule.prepare(ConnectorModule.java:228) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleListenerInvoker.prepare(ModuleListenerInvoker.java:93) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow$1.next(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:387) at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:37) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow.prepare(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:58) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace <Jul 7, 2009 4:19:27 PM CEST> <Error> <Deployer> <BEA-149205> <Failed to initialize the application 'OracleAppsAdapter' due to error weblogic.application.ModuleException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/exception/PCResourceException.weblogic.application.ModuleException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/exception/PCResourceException at weblogic.connector.deploy.ConnectorModule.prepare(ConnectorModule.java:238) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleListenerInvoker.prepare(ModuleListenerInvoker.java:93) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow$1.next(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:387) at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:37) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow.prepare(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:58) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/exception/PCResourceException at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredMethods0(Native Method) at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredMethods(Class.java:2427) at java.lang.Class.privateGetPublicMethods(Class.java:2547) at java.lang.Class.getMethods(Class.java:1410) at weblogic.connector.external.impl.RAComplianceChecker.checkOverrides(RAComplianceChecker.java:972) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace Can any one please tell me if i have missed any steps? thanks and regards, Naveen

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• Standard Oracle Fusion Middleware Installation fails on SOA ManagedServer start

  - by Neuquino

  Hi, Trying to install Oracle Fusion Middleware 11gR2 on windows (same thing happens on Linux). I have followed the guidelines provided in the http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E12839_01/install.1111/e14318/toc.htm Installing the weblogic (11g) Oracle 11g databse installation Running the RCU utility to create schema Installed and copied relevant files for Java Bridge Configure the Fusion Middleware But i found that the SOA server is not getting up in the enterprise manager its showing as down. When i checked the logs iam getting the following error: oracle.jrf.wls.JRFStartup java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: oracle.jrf.wls.JRFStartup at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method) at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:247) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager.invokeClass(ClassDeploymentManager.java:253) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager.access$000(ClassDeploymentManager.java:54) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager$1.run(ClassDeploymentManager.java:205) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace <Jul 7, 2009 4:18:48 PM CEST> <Critical> <WebLogicServer> <BEA-000286> <Failed to invoke startup class "SOAStartupClass", java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: oracle.bpel.services.common.util.GenerateBPMCryptoKey java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: oracle.bpel.services.common.util.GenerateBPMCryptoKey at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method) at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:247) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager.invokeClass(ClassDeploymentManager.java:253) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager.access$000(ClassDeploymentManager.java:54) at weblogic.management.deploy.classdeployment.ClassDeploymentManager$1.run(ClassDeploymentManager.java:205) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace <Jul 7, 2009 4:19:27 PM CEST> <Error> <Deployer> <BEA-149205> <Failed to initialize the application 'SocketAdapter' due to error weblogic.application.ModuleException: The ra.xml <connectionfactory-impl-class> class 'oracle.tip.adapter.socket.SocketConnectionFactory' could not be loaded from the resource adapter archive/application because of the following error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/OracleConnectionFactory.weblogic.application.ModuleException: The ra.xml <connectionfactory-impl-class> class 'oracle.tip.adapter.socket.SocketConnectionFactory' could not be loaded from the resource adapter archive/application because of the following error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/OracleConnectionFactory at weblogic.connector.deploy.ConnectorModule.prepare(ConnectorModule.java:228) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleListenerInvoker.prepare(ModuleListenerInvoker.java:93) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow$1.next(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:387) at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:37) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow.prepare(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:58) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace <Jul 7, 2009 4:19:27 PM CEST> <Error> <Deployer> <BEA-149205> <Failed to initialize the application 'MQSeriesAdapter' due to error weblogic.application.ModuleException: The ra.xml <connectionfactory-impl-class> class 'oracle.tip.adapter.mq.ConnectionFactoryImpl' could not be loaded from the resource adapter archive/application because of the following error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/OracleConnectionFactory.weblogic.application.ModuleException: The ra.xml <connectionfactory-impl-class> class 'oracle.tip.adapter.mq.ConnectionFactoryImpl' could not be loaded from the resource adapter archive/application because of the following error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/OracleConnectionFactory at weblogic.connector.deploy.ConnectorModule.prepare(ConnectorModule.java:228) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleListenerInvoker.prepare(ModuleListenerInvoker.java:93) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow$1.next(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:387) at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:37) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow.prepare(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:58) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace <Jul 7, 2009 4:19:27 PM CEST> <Error> <Deployer> <BEA-149205> <Failed to initialize the application 'OracleAppsAdapter' due to error weblogic.application.ModuleException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/exception/PCResourceException.weblogic.application.ModuleException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/exception/PCResourceException at weblogic.connector.deploy.ConnectorModule.prepare(ConnectorModule.java:238) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleListenerInvoker.prepare(ModuleListenerInvoker.java:93) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow$1.next(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:387) at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:37) at weblogic.application.internal.flow.DeploymentCallbackFlow.prepare(DeploymentCallbackFlow.java:58) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/tip/adapter/api/exception/PCResourceException at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredMethods0(Native Method) at java.lang.Class.privateGetDeclaredMethods(Class.java:2427) at java.lang.Class.privateGetPublicMethods(Class.java:2547) at java.lang.Class.getMethods(Class.java:1410) at weblogic.connector.external.impl.RAComplianceChecker.checkOverrides(RAComplianceChecker.java:972) Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace Can any one please tell me if i have missed any steps? thanks and regards, Naveen

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 03, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, May 03, 2010New Projects.radiko: エアログラス採用のシンプルなradiko(http://radiko.jp/)クライアントです。タスクトレイのアイコンからラジオ局の切り替えができます。7Scale: EmptyB2C MVC Plattform: The B2C MVC Plattform aims to be pluggable site framework to help small busisness accomplish basic tasks between business and customers.ElValWeb: The goal of the project to create full featured implementation of ModelValidatorProvider for Enterprise Library Application Validation Block, wich ...esatis yazilimi: asp.net yazılımı ile satış magazasi websitesi kur.IEnumerable.It sample code: IEnumerable.It sample codejQuery MicroAjax for ASP.NET: MicroAjax is a set of jQuery plugins and .NET components designed to provide simple, powerful and efficient Ajax centric web application design pat...Karbon VOS: Karbon VOS is an advanced Virtual Operating System Template for Visual Basic Express. It's developed in Visual Basic. Karbon VOS hopes to one day b...LINQ Mapper: LINQ Mapper translates simple LINQ queries between different sources. It allows you to write queries against your domain model, but have them run ...Meccano Silverlight Framework: Meccano is a new generation of frameworks for creation of LOB Silverlight applications based on MEF, RX, WCF, ADO.NET Data Services etc. It is inte...Multiuse Model View (MMV) Library: This project is an open source library for the Multiuse Model View (MMV) pattern for building robust WPF and ASP.Net applications. Visit my blog ht...Process Affinity Control: Process Affinity Control allows to set the affinity masks of processes based on rules.SilverSpatial: This project helps bridge the gap between Silverlight and Geo-Spatial data type (such as SQL Spatial). It implements the Well-Known-Binary (WKB) fo...StageAssets: Application for storing data about "things" and people in theatre. For example equipment, actors and so on.Stratosphere: Mono compatible library with set of primitives to work with scalable table, queue and block containers with corresponding implementations for Amazo...TRX Web-Viewer: A simple web-based application to upload and view VSTS 2008 and VSTS 2010 test result files with some basic lookup and feature-wise management of r...WDT2: WDT 2 is the school project to begin learning .NET enviroment, The main focus is on learning the use of almost all the componenets.WPF Behavior Library: WPF Behavior Library is a set of additional actions for WPF that allow you to add extra behaviors to a control quickly and easily. Currently the on...YouTubeEmbeddedVideo WebControl for ASP.NET: A Control to embed YouTube videos in ASP.NET pages. Works in C# and VB.NETNew Releases.radiko: beta: 東京局のみ対応 あとは手抜きActiveWorlds Managed .NET SDK: AwManaged Technology Preview - WIN32 (Alpha): This WIN32 release contains the Server Console Application. The Setup executable should be run as administrator on O.S. using UAC (Vista/Win7)AJAX Control Framework: v1.0.1.0: v1.0.1.0 - Contains a Bing Maps sample project, a number of bug fixes and a few performance improvements. - AJAX enable ANY custom control that der...App_Code (and Usercontrol) Editor (ACE): v1.0.0 alpha: The first alpha release of the AppCode Editor for Umbraco 4.0.3 is now available to download! Tested to work with usercontrols - pre-compilation wi...ElValWeb: ElValWeb 0.0.1.0: Version 0.0.1.0 contains client validation support forAndCompositeValidator ContainsCharactersValidator DomainValidator NotNullValidator Or...esatis yazilimi: magaza: magazanın yazılımları ve veri tabanının yazılımlarıGrunty OS: Grunty OS USB: Download Grunty OS for USBGrunty OS: Grunty OS.ISO: Grunty OS ISOKarbon VOS: Milestone 1 (Kaptua): Milestone 1...Live Meeting API Wrapper: LiveMeetingAPIWrapperV1.2: Added get meeting and update meeting.Multiuse Model View (MMV) Library: v0.3: first alpha release. Medium amount of functionality and some use cases tested.MVC Foolproof Validation: Beta 0.9.3774: Adds resource provided error messages, regular expression operators and a new RegularExpressionIf attribute.Process Affinity Control: Version 1.0.0: This is the first release. Planned features for the next release: No administrative privileges needed to run the manager Select the active scena...SharePoint 2010 Service Manager: SharePoint 2010 Service Manager 1.1: Added support to run under UAC with automatic security elevationSharePoint Event Handler Manager: Event Handler Manager 2.0: Please download the application here: http://www.ackermantech.com/registerevents.aspxSkyDrive Synchronizer: SkyDrive Sync Beta 0.1: Beta release includes: Upload and download Synchronize updated files Delete files on web/locally if not in source Split larger files into sma...Stratosphere: Stratosphere 1.0.0.0: Initial beta releaseSuggested Resources for .NET Developers: 0.8.0.0 VS2010 - focus on displaying content: This is the first release of Suggested Resources that can be downloaded from the internet. While there is still a lot of work to be done this rele...TRX Web-Viewer: TRX Web-Viewer V1.0: First working versionVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30502.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.04.00: !Whats New New Tag Mode: Search Referrers (Shows Search Tags From Google, Ask, Bing, Yahoo and the Dnn Site Search) Taxonomy Tags now contains L...Web/Cloud Applications Development Framework | Visual WebGui: 6.4 Beta 2e: Fully featured beta version of Visual WebGui Web/Cloud Applicaiton Development FrameworkWPF Behavior Library: WPF Behavior Library 0.1 Release: First alpha release of the WPF Behavior Library. It should be stable but doesn't have all of the features it will have in the future and the API ma...xvanneste: Sharepoint Social Network Client: Client permettant d'avoir accés au social network de sharepoint a l'exterieur du navigateur.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)iTuner - The iTunes CompanionASP.NETDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsIonics Isapi Rewrite Filterpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrHydroServer - CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System ServerAJAX Control Frameworkpatterns & practices: Azure Security GuidanceTinyProjectBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleDambach Linear Algebra Framework

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• Too Many Kittens To Juggle At Once

  - by Bil Simser

  Ahh, the Internet. That crazy, mixed up place where one tweet turns into a conversation between dozens of people and spawns a blogpost. This is the direct result of such an event this morning. It started innocently enough, with this: Then followed up by a blog post by Joel here. In the post, Joel introduces us to the term Business Solutions Architect with mad skillz like InfoPath, Access Services, Excel Services, building Workflows, and SSRS report creation, all while meeting the business needs of users in a SharePoint environment. I somewhat disagreed with Joel that this really wasn’t a new role (at least IMHO) and that a good Architect or BA should really be doing this job. As Joel pointed out when you’re building a SharePoint team this kind of role is often overlooked. Engineers might be able to build workflows but is the right workflow for the right problem? Michael Pisarek wrote about a SharePoint Business Architect a few months ago and it’s a pretty solid assessment. Again, I argue you really shouldn’t be looking for roles that don’t exist and I don’t suggest anyone create roles to hire people to fill them. That’s basically creating a solution looking for problems. Michael’s article does have some great points if you’re lost in the quagmire of SharePoint duties though (and I especially like John Ross’ quote “The coolest shit is worthless if it doesn’t meet business needs”). SharePoinTony summed it up nicely with “SharePoint Solutions knowledge is both lacking and underrated in most environments. Roles help”. Having someone on the team who can dance between a business user and a coder can be difficult. Remember the idea of telling something to someone and them passing it on to the next person. By the time the story comes round the circle it’s a shadow of it’s former self with little resemblance to the original tale. This is very much business requirements as they’re told by the user to a business analyst, written down on paper, read by an architect, tuned into a solution plan, and implemented by a developer. Transformations between what was said, what was heard, what was written down, and what was developed can be distant cousins. Not everyone has the skill of communication and even less have negotiation skills to suit the SharePoint platform. Negotiation is important because not everything can be (or should be) done in SharePoint. Sometimes it’s just not appropriate to build it on the SharePoint platform but someone needs to know enough about the platform and what limitations it might have, then communicate that (and/or negotiate) with a customer or user so it’s not about “You can’t have this” to “Let’s try it this way”. Visualize the possible instead of denying the impossible. So what is the right SharePoint team? My cromag brain came with a fairly simpleton answer (and I’m sure people will just say this is a cop-out). The perfect SharePoint team is just enough people to do the job that know the technology and business problem they’re solving. Bridge the gap between business need and technology platform and you have an architect. Communicate the needs of the business effectively so the entire team understands it and you have a business analyst. Can you get this with full time workers? Maybe but don’t expect miracles out of the gate. Also don’t take a consultant’s word as gospel. Some consultants just don’t have the diversity of the SharePoint platform to be worth their value so be careful. You really need someone who knows enough about SharePoint to be able to validate a consultants knowledge level. This is basically try for any consultant, not just a SharePoint one. Specialization is good and needed. A good, well-balanced SharePoint team is one of people that can solve problems with work with the technology, not against it. Having a top developer is great, but don’t rely on them to solve world hunger if they can’t communicate very well with users. An expert business analyst might be great at gathering requirements so the entire team can understand them, but if it means building 100% custom solutions because they don’t fit inside the SharePoint boundaries isn’t of much value. Just repeat. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. There is no silver bullet. A few people pointed out Nick Inglis’ article Excluding The Information Professional In SharePoint. It’s a good read too and hits home that maybe some developers and IT pros need some extra help in the information space. If you’re in an organization that needs labels on people, come up with something everyone understands and go with it. If that’s Business Solutions Architect, SharePoint Advisor, or Guy Who Knows A Lot About Portals, make it work for you. We all wish that one person could master all that is SharePoint but we also know that doesn’t scale very well and you quickly get into the hit-by-a-bus syndrome (with the organization coming to a full crawl when the guy or girl goes on vacation, gets sick, or pops out a baby). There are too many gaps in SharePoint knowledge to have any one person know it all and too many kittens to juggle all at once. We like to consider ourselves experts in our field, but trying to tackle too many roles at once and we end up being mediocre jack of all trades, master of none. Don't fall into this pit. It's a deep, dark hole you don't want to try to claw your way out of. Trust me. Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt. In the end I don’t disagree with Joel. SharePoint is a beast and not something that should be taken on by newbies. If you just read “Teach Yourself SharePoint in 24 Hours” and want to go build your corporate intranet or the next killer business solution with all your new found knowledge plan to pony up consultant dollars a few months later when everything goes to Hell in a handbasket and falls over. I’m not saying don’t build solutions in SharePoint. I’m just saying that building effective ones takes skill like any craft and not something you can just cobble together with a little bit of cursory knowledge. Thanks to *everyone* who participated in this tweet rush. It was fun and educational.

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• Wireless AAA for a small, bandwidth-limited hotel.

  - by Anthony Hiscox

  We (the tech I work with and myself) live in a remote northern town where Internet access is somewhat of a luxury, and bandwidth is quite limited. Here, overage charges ranging from few hundreds, to few thousands of dollars a month, is not uncommon. I myself incur regular monthly charges just through my regular Internet usage at home (I am allowed 10G for $60CAD!) As part of my work, I have found myself involved with several hotels that are feeling this. I know that I can come up with something to solve this problem, but I am relatively new to system administration and I don't want my dreams to overcome reality. So, I pass these ideas on to you, those with much more experience than I, in hopes you will share some of your thoughts and concerns. This system must be cost effective, yes the charges are high here, but the trust in technology is the lowest I've ever seen. Must be capable of helping client reduce their usage (squid) Allow a limited (throughput and total usage) amount of free Internet, as this is often franchise policy. Allow a user to track their bandwidth usage Allow (optional) higher speed and/or usage for an additional charge. This fee can be obtained at the front desk on checkout and should not require the use of PayPal or Credit Card. Unfortunately some franchises have ridiculous policies that require the use of a third party remote service to authenticate guests to your network. This means WPA is out, and it also means that I do not auth before Internet usage, that will be their job. However, I do require the ABILITY to perform authentication for Internet access if a hotel does not have this policy. I will still have to track bandwidth (under a guest account by default) and provide the same limiting, however the guest often will require a complete 'unlimited' access, in terms of existence, not throughput. Provide firewalling capabilities for hotels that have nothing, Office, and Guest network segregation (some of these guys are running their office on the guest network, with no encryption, and a simple TOS to get on!) Prevent guests from connecting to other guests, however provide a means to allow this to happen. IE. Each guest connects to a page and allows the other guest, this writes a iptables rule (with python-netfilter) and allows two rooms to play a game, for instance. My thoughts on how to implement this. One decent box (we'll call it a router now) with a lot of ram, and 3 NIC's: Internet Office Guests (AP's + In Room Ethernet) Router Firewall Rules Guest can talk to router only, through which they are routed to where they need to go, including Internet services. Office can be used to bridge Office to Internet if an existing solution is not in place, otherwise, it simply works for a network accessible web (webmin+python-webmin?) interface. Router Software: OpenVZ provides virtualization for a few services I don't really trust. Squid, FreeRADIUS and Apache. The only service directly accessible to guests is Apache. Apache has mod_wsgi and django, because I can write quickly using django and my needs are low. It also potentially has the FreeRADIUS mod, but there seems to be some caveats with this. Firewall rules are handled on the router with iptables. Webmin (or a custom django app maybe) provides abstracted control over any features that the staff may need to access. Python, if you haven't guessed it's the language I feel most comfortable in, and I use it for almost everything. And finally, has this been done, is it a overly massive project not worth taking on for one guy, and/or is there some tools I'm missing that could be making my life easier? For the record, I am fairly good with Python, but not very familiar with many other languages (I can struggle through PHP, it's a cosmetic issue there). I am also an avid linux user, and comfortable with config files and command line. Thank you for your time, I look forward to reading your responses. Edit: My apologies if this is not a Q&A in the sense that some were expecting, I'm just looking for ideas and to make sure I'm not trying to do something that's been done. I'm looking at pfSense now as a possible start for what I need.

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• Asterisk SIP digest authentication username mismatch

  - by Matt

  I have an asterisk system that I'm attempting to get to work as a backup for our 3com system. We already use it for a conference bridge. Our phones are the 3com 3C10402B, so I don't have the issue of older 3com phones that come without a SIP image. The 3com phones are communicating SIP with the Asterisk, but are unable to register because they present a digest username value that doesn't match what Asterisk thinks it should. As an example, here are the relevant lines from a successful registration from a soft phone: Server sends: WWW-Authenticate: Digest algorithm=MD5, realm="asterisk", nonce="1cac3853" Phone responds: Authorization: Digest username="2321", realm="asterisk", nonce="1cac3853", uri="sip:192.168.254.12", algorithm=md5, response="d32df9ec719817282460e7c2625b6120" For the 3com phone, those same lines look like this (and fails): Server sends: WWW-Authenticate: Digest algorithm=MD5, realm="asterisk", nonce="6c915c33" Phone responds: Authorization: Digest username="sip:[email protected]", realm="asterisk", nonce="6c915c33", uri="sip:192.168.254.12", opaque="", algorithm=MD5, response="a89df25f19e4b4598595f919dac9db81" Basically, Asterisk wants to see a username in the Digest username field of 2321, but the 3com phone is sending sip:[email protected]. Anyone know how to tell asterisk to accept this format of username in the digest authentication? Here is the sip.conf info for that extension: [2321] deny=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 disallow=all type=friend secret=1234 qualify=yes port=5060 permit=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0 nat=yes mailbox=2321@device host=dynamic dtmfmode=rfc2833 dial=SIP/2321 context=from-internal canreinvite=no callerid=device <2321 allow=ulaw, alaw call-limit=50 ... and for those interested in the grit, here is the debug output of the registration attempt: REGISTER sip:192.168.254.12 SIP/2.0 v: SIP/2.0/UDP 192.168.254.157:5060 t: f: i: fa4451d8-01d6-1cc2-13e4-00e0bb33beb9 CSeq: 18580 REGISTER Max-Forwards: 70 m: ;dt=544 Expires: 3600 User-Agent: 3Com-SIP-Phone/V8.0.1.3 X-3Com-PhoneInfo: firstRegistration=no; primaryCallP=192.168.254.12; secondaryCallP=0.0.0.0; --- (11 headers 0 lines) --- Using latest REGISTER request as basis request Sending to 192.168.254.157 : 5060 (no NAT) SIP/2.0 100 Trying Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 192.168.254.157:5060;received=192.168.254.157 From: To: Call-ID: fa4451d8-01d6-1cc2-13e4-00e0bb33beb9 CSeq: 18580 REGISTER User-Agent: Asterisk PBX Allow: INVITE, ACK, CANCEL, OPTIONS, BYE, REFER, SUBSCRIBE, NOTIFY Supported: replaces Contact: Content-Length: 0 SIP/2.0 401 Unauthorized Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 192.168.254.157:5060;received=192.168.254.157 From: To: ;tag=as3fb867e2 Call-ID: fa4451d8-01d6-1cc2-13e4-00e0bb33beb9 CSeq: 18580 REGISTER User-Agent: Asterisk PBX Allow: INVITE, ACK, CANCEL, OPTIONS, BYE, REFER, SUBSCRIBE, NOTIFY Supported: replaces WWW-Authenticate: Digest algorithm=MD5, realm="asterisk", nonce="6c915c33" Content-Length: 0 Scheduling destruction of SIP dialog 'fa4451d8-01d6-1cc2-13e4-00e0bb33beb9' in 32000 ms (Method: REGISTER) confbridge*CLI REGISTER sip:192.168.254.12 SIP/2.0 v: SIP/2.0/UDP 192.168.254.157:5060 t: f: i: fa4451d8-01d6-1cc2-13e4-00e0bb33beb9 CSeq: 18581 REGISTER Max-Forwards: 70 m: ;dt=544 Expires: 3600 User-Agent: 3Com-SIP-Phone/V8.0.1.3 Authorization: Digest username="sip:[email protected]", realm="asterisk", nonce="6c915c33", uri="sip:192.168.254.12", opaque="", algorithm=MD5, response="a89df25f19e4b4598595f919dac9db81" X-3Com-PhoneInfo: firstRegistration=no; primaryCallP=192.168.254.12; secondaryCallP=0.0.0.0; --- (12 headers 0 lines) --- Using latest REGISTER request as basis request Sending to 192.168.254.157 : 5060 (NAT) SIP/2.0 100 Trying Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 192.168.254.157:5060;received=192.168.254.157 From: To: Call-ID: fa4451d8-01d6-1cc2-13e4-00e0bb33beb9 CSeq: 18581 REGISTER User-Agent: Asterisk PBX Allow: INVITE, ACK, CANCEL, OPTIONS, BYE, REFER, SUBSCRIBE, NOTIFY Supported: replaces Contact: Content-Length: 0 SIP/2.0 403 Authentication user name does not match account name Via: SIP/2.0/UDP 192.168.254.157:5060;received=192.168.254.157 From: To: ;tag=as3fb867e2 Call-ID: fa4451d8-01d6-1cc2-13e4-00e0bb33beb9 CSeq: 18581 REGISTER User-Agent: Asterisk PBX Allow: INVITE, ACK, CANCEL, OPTIONS, BYE, REFER, SUBSCRIBE, NOTIFY Supported: replaces Content-Length: 0 Scheduling destruction of SIP dialog 'fa4451d8-01d6-1cc2-13e4-00e0bb33beb9' in 32000 ms (Method: REGISTER) Thanks for your input!

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• Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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• Detecting source of memory usage on a Linux box

  - by apeace

  I have a toy Linux box with 256mb RAM running Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS. Here is the output of free -m: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 245 122 122 0 19 64 -/+ buffers/cache: 38 206 Swap: 511 0 511 Unless I'm reading this wrong, 122mb is being used and only 84mb of that is disk cache. Here are all processes I'm running sorted by memory usage (ps -eo pmem,pcpu,rss,vsize,args | sort -k 1 -r): %MEM %CPU RSS VSZ COMMAND 5.0 0.0 12648 633140 node /home/node/main/sites.js 1.5 0.0 3884 251736 /usr/sbin/console-kit-daemon --no-daemon 1.3 0.0 3328 77108 sshd: apeace [priv] 0.9 0.0 2344 19624 -bash 0.7 0.0 1776 23620 /sbin/init 0.6 0.0 1624 77108 sshd: apeace@pts/0 0.6 0.0 1544 9940 redis-server /etc/redis/redis.conf 0.6 0.0 1524 25848 /usr/sbin/ntpd -p /var/run/ntpd.pid -g -u 103:105 0.5 0.0 1324 119880 rsyslogd -c4 0.4 0.0 1084 49308 /usr/sbin/sshd 0.4 0.0 1028 44376 /usr/sbin/exim4 -bd -q30m 0.3 0.0 904 6876 ps -eo pmem,pcpu,rss,vsize,args 0.3 0.0 888 21124 cron 0.3 0.0 868 23472 dbus-daemon --system --fork 0.2 0.0 732 19624 -bash 0.2 0.0 628 6128 /sbin/getty -8 38400 tty1 0.2 0.0 628 16952 upstart-udev-bridge --daemon 0.2 0.0 564 16800 udevd --daemon 0.2 0.0 552 16796 udevd --daemon 0.2 0.0 548 16796 udevd --daemon 0.0 0.0 0 0 [xenwatch] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [xenbus] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [sync_supers] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [netns] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [migration/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [migration/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [migration/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [migration/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kthreadd] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kswapd0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kstriped] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksoftirqd/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksoftirqd/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksoftirqd/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksoftirqd/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [ksnapd] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kseriod] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kjournald] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [khvcd] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [khelper] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kblockd/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kblockd/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kblockd/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [kblockd/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [flush-202:1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [events/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [events/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [events/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [events/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [crypto/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [crypto/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [crypto/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [crypto/0] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [cpuset] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [bdi-default] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [async/mgr] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [aio/3] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [aio/2] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [aio/1] 0.0 0.0 0 0 [aio/0] Now, I know that ps is not the best for viewing process memory usage, but that's because it tends to report more memory than is actually being used...meaning no matter how you look at it all my processes combined shouldn't be using near 122mb, even if you account for the disk cache. What's more, memory usage is growing all the time. I've had to restart my server once a week, because once my 256mb fills up it starts swapping, which it wouldn't do just for disk cache. Shouldn't there be some way for me to see the culprit?! I'm new to server admin, so please if there's something obvious I'm overlooking point it out to me. Just for good measure, the output of cat /proc/meminfo: MemTotal: 251140 kB MemFree: 124604 kB Buffers: 20536 kB Cached: 66136 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 65004 kB Inactive: 37576 kB Active(anon): 15932 kB Inactive(anon): 164 kB Active(file): 49072 kB Inactive(file): 37412 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB SwapTotal: 524284 kB SwapFree: 524284 kB Dirty: 8 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 15916 kB Mapped: 10668 kB Shmem: 188 kB Slab: 18604 kB SReclaimable: 10088 kB SUnreclaim: 8516 kB KernelStack: 536 kB PageTables: 1444 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 649852 kB Committed_AS: 64224 kB VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB VmallocUsed: 752 kB VmallocChunk: 34359737600 kB DirectMap4k: 262144 kB DirectMap2M: 0 kB EDIT: I had misinterpreted the meaning of free -m at first. But even so: the important thing is that my OS eventually begins to use swap memory if I don't restart my server, which disk caching wouldn't do. So where do I look to see what is using all this memory?

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• Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine

  - by danx

  Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine Cryptography is a major component of secure e-commerce. Since cryptography is compute intensive and adds a significant load to applications, such as SSL web servers (https), crypto performance is an important factor. Providing accelerated crypto hardware greatly helps these applications and will help lead to a wider adoption of cryptography, and lower cost, in e-commerce and other applications. The Intel Westmere microprocessor has six new instructions to acclerate AES encryption. They are called "AESNI" for "AES New Instructions". These are unprivileged instructions, so no "root", other elevated access, or context switch is required to execute these instructions. These instructions are used in a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine available in Solaris 11, the aesni engine. Previous Work Previously, AESNI instructions were introduced into the Solaris x86 kernel and libraries. That is, the "aes" kernel module (used by IPsec and other kernel modules) and the Solaris pkcs11 library (for user applications). These are available in Solaris 10 10/09 (update 8) and above, and Solaris 11. The work here is to add the aesni engine to OpenSSL. X86 AESNI Instructions Intel's Xeon 5600 is one of the processors that support AESNI. This processor is used in the Sun Fire X4170 M2 As mentioned above, six new instructions acclerate AES encryption in processor silicon. The new instructions are: aesenc performs one round of AES encryption. One encryption round is composed of these steps: substitute bytes, shift rows, mix columns, and xor the round key. aesenclast performs the final encryption round, which is the same as above, except omitting the mix columns (which is only needed for the next encryption round). aesdec performs one round of AES decryption aesdeclast performs the final AES decryption round aeskeygenassist Helps expand the user-provided key into a "key schedule" of keys, one per round aesimc performs an "inverse mixed columns" operation to convert the encryption key schedule into a decryption key schedule pclmulqdq Not a AESNI instruction, but performs "carryless multiply" operations to acclerate AES GCM mode. Since the AESNI instructions are implemented in hardware, they take a constant number of cycles and are not vulnerable to side-channel timing attacks that attempt to discern some bits of data from the time taken to encrypt or decrypt the data. Solaris x86 and OpenSSL Software Optimizations Having X86 AESNI hardware crypto instructions is all well and good, but how do we access it? The software is available with Solaris 11 and is used automatically if you are running Solaris x86 on a AESNI-capable processor. AESNI is used internally in the kernel through kernel crypto modules and is available in user space through the PKCS#11 library. For OpenSSL on Solaris 11, AESNI crypto is available directly with a new built-in OpenSSL 1.0 engine, called the "aesni engine." This is in lieu of the extra overhead of going through the Solaris OpenSSL pkcs11 engine, which accesses Solaris crypto and digest operations. Instead, AESNI assembly is included directly in the new aesni engine. Instead of including the aesni engine in a separate library in /lib/openssl/engines/, the aesni engine is "built-in", meaning it is included directly in OpenSSL's libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library. This reduces overhead and the need to manually specify the aesni engine. Since the engine is built-in (that is, in libcrypto.so.1.0.0), the openssl -engine command line flag or API call is not needed to access the engine—the aesni engine is used automatically on AESNI hardware. Ciphers and Digests supported by OpenSSL aesni engine The Openssl aesni engine auto-detects if it's running on AESNI hardware and uses AESNI encryption instructions for these ciphers: AES-128-CBC, AES-192-CBC, AES-256-CBC, AES-128-CFB128, AES-192-CFB128, AES-256-CFB128, AES-128-CTR, AES-192-CTR, AES-256-CTR, AES-128-ECB, AES-192-ECB, AES-256-ECB, AES-128-OFB, AES-192-OFB, and AES-256-OFB. Implementation of the OpenSSL aesni engine The AESNI assembly language routines are not a part of the regular Openssl 1.0.0 release. AESNI is a part of the "HEAD" ("development" or "unstable") branch of OpenSSL, for future release. But AESNI is also available as a separate patch provided by Intel to the OpenSSL project for OpenSSL 1.0.0. A minimal amount of "glue" code in the aesni engine works between the OpenSSL libcrypto.so.1.0.0 library and the assembly functions. The aesni engine code is separate from the base OpenSSL code and requires patching only a few source files to use it. That means OpenSSL can be more easily updated to future versions without losing the performance from the built-in aesni engine. OpenSSL aesni engine Performance Here's some graphs of aesni engine performance I measured by running openssl speed -evp $algorithm where $algorithm is aes-128-cbc, aes-192-cbc, and aes-256-cbc. These are using the 64-bit version of openssl on the same AESNI hardware, a Sun Fire X4170 M2 with a Intel Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz, running Solaris 11 FCS. "Before" is openssl without the aesni engine and "after" is openssl with the aesni engine. The numbers are MBytes/second. OpenSSL aesni engine performance on Sun Fire X4170 M2 (Xeon E5620 @2.40GHz) (Higher is better; "before"=OpenSSL on AESNI without AESNI engine software, "after"=OpenSSL AESNI engine) As you can see the speedup is dramatic for all 3 key lengths and for data sizes from 16 bytes to 8 Kbytes—AESNI is about 7.5-8x faster over hand-coded amd64 assembly (without aesni instructions). Verifying the OpenSSL aesni engine is present The easiest way to determine if you are running the aesni engine is to type "openssl engine" on the command line. No configuration, API, or command line options are needed to use the OpenSSL aesni engine. If you are running on Intel AESNI hardware with Solaris 11 FCS, you'll see this output indicating you are using the aesni engine: intel-westmere $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support If you are running on Intel without AESNI hardware you'll see this output indicating the hardware can't support the aesni engine: intel-nehalem $ openssl engine (aesni) Intel AES-NI engine (no-aesni) (dynamic) Dynamic engine loading support (pkcs11) PKCS #11 engine support For Solaris on SPARC or older Solaris OpenSSL software, you won't see any aesni engine line at all. Third-party OpenSSL software (built yourself or from outside Oracle) will not have the aesni engine either. Solaris 11 FCS comes with OpenSSL version 1.0.0e. The output of typing "openssl version" should be "OpenSSL 1.0.0e 6 Sep 2011". 64- and 32-bit OpenSSL OpenSSL comes in both 32- and 64-bit binaries. 64-bit executable is now the default, at /usr/bin/openssl, and OpenSSL 64-bit libraries at /lib/amd64/libcrypto.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0 The 32-bit executable is at /usr/bin/i86/openssl and the libraries are at /lib/libcrytpo.so.1.0.0 and libssl.so.1.0.0. Availability The OpenSSL AESNI engine is available in Solaris 11 x86 for both the 64- and 32-bit versions of OpenSSL. It is not available with Solaris 10. You must have a processor that supports AESNI instructions, otherwise OpenSSL will fallback to the older, slower AES implementation without AESNI. Processors that support AESNI include most Westmere and Sandy Bridge class processor architectures. Some low-end processors (such as for mobile/laptop platforms) do not support AESNI. The easiest way to determine if the processor supports AESNI is with the isainfo -v command—look for "amd64" and "aes" in the output: $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu Conclusion The Solaris 11 OpenSSL aesni engine provides easy access to powerful Intel AESNI hardware cryptography, in addition to Solaris userland PKCS#11 libraries and Solaris crypto kernel modules.

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• Networking in VirtualBox

  - by Fat Bloke

  Networking in VirtualBox is extremely powerful, but can also be a bit daunting, so here's a quick overview of the different ways you can setup networking in VirtualBox, with a few pointers as to which configurations should be used and when. VirtualBox allows you to configure up to 8 virtual NICs (Network Interface Controllers) for each guest vm (although only 4 are exposed in the GUI) and for each of these NICs you can configure: Which virtualized NIC-type is exposed to the Guest. Examples include: Intel PRO/1000 MT Server (82545EM),  AMD PCNet FAST III (Am79C973, the default) or  a Paravirtualized network adapter (virtio-net). How the NIC operates with respect to your Host's physical networking. The main modes are: Network Address Translation (NAT) Bridged networking Internal networking Host-only networking NAT with Port-forwarding The choice of NIC-type comes down to whether the guest has drivers for that NIC.  VirtualBox, suggests a NIC based on the guest OS-type that you specify during creation of the vm, and you rarely need to modify this. But the choice of networking mode depends on how you want to use your vm (client or server) and whether you want other machines on your network to see it. So let's look at each mode in a bit more detail... Network Address Translation (NAT) This is the default mode for new vm's and works great in most situations when the Guest is a "client" type of vm. (i.e. most network connections are outbound). Here's how it works: When the guest OS boots,  it typically uses DHCP to get an IP address. VirtualBox will field this DHCP request and tell the guest OS its assigned IP address and the gateway address for routing outbound connections. In this mode, every vm is assigned the same IP address (10.0.2.15) because each vm thinks they are on their own isolated network. And when they send their traffic via the gateway (10.0.2.2) VirtualBox rewrites the packets to make them appear as though they originated from the Host, rather than the Guest (running inside the Host). This means that the Guest will work even as the Host moves from network to network (e.g. laptop moving between locations), and from wireless to wired connections too. However, how does another computer initiate a connection into a Guest?  e.g. connecting to a web server running in the Guest. This is not (normally) possible using NAT mode as there is no route into the Guest OS. So for vm's running servers we need a different networking mode.... Bridged Networking Bridged Networking is used when you want your vm to be a full network citizen, i.e. to be an equal to your host machine on the network. In this mode, a virtual NIC is "bridged" to a physical NIC on your host, like this: The effect of this is that each VM has access to the physical network in the same way as your host. It can access any service on the network such as external DHCP services, name lookup services, and routing information just as the host does. Logically, the network looks like this: The downside of this mode is that if you run many vm's you can quickly run out of IP addresses or your network administrator gets fed up with you asking for statically assigned IP addresses. Secondly, if your host has multiple physical NICs (e.g. Wireless and Wired) you must reconfigure the bridge when your host jumps networks.  Hmm, so what if you want to run servers in vm's but don't want to involve your network administrator? Maybe one of the next 2 modes is for you... Internal Networking When you configure one or more vm's to sit on an Internal network, VirtualBox ensures that all traffic on that network stays within the host and is only visible to vm's on that virtual network. Configuration looks like this: The internal network ( in this example "intnet" ) is a totally isolated network and so is very "quiet". This is good for testing when you need a separate, clean network, and you can create sophisticated internal networks with vm's that provide their own services to the internal network. (e.g. Active Directory, DHCP, etc). Note that not even the Host is a member of the internal network, but this mode allows vm's to function even when the Host is not connected to a network (e.g. on a plane). Note that in this mode, VirtualBox provides no "convenience" services such as DHCP, so your machines must be statically configured or one of the vm's needs to provide a DHCP/Name service. Multiple internal networks are possible and you can configure vm's to have multiple NICs to sit across internal and other network modes and thereby provide routes if needed. But all this sounds tricky. What if you want an Internal Network that the host participates on with VirtualBox providing IP addresses to the Guests? Ah, then for this, you might want to consider Host-only Networking... Host-only Networking Host-only Networking is like Internal Networking in that you indicate which network the Guest sits on, in this case, "vboxnet0": All vm's sitting on this "vboxnet0" network will see each other, and additionally, the host can see these vm's too. However, other external machines cannot see Guests on this network, hence the name "Host-only". Logically, the network looks like this: This looks very similar to Internal Networking but the host is now on "vboxnet0" and can provide DHCP services. To configure how a Host-only network behaves, look in the VirtualBox Manager...Preferences...Network dialog: Port-Forwarding with NAT Networking Now you may think that we've provided enough modes here to handle every eventuality but here's just one more... What if you cart around a mobile-demo or dev environment on, say, a laptop and you have one or more vm's that you need other machines to connect into? And you are continually hopping onto different (customer?) networks. In this scenario: NAT - won't work because external machines need to connect in. Bridged - possibly an option, but does your customer want you eating IP addresses and can your software cope with changing networks? Internal - we need the vm(s) to be visible on the network, so this is no good. Host-only - same problem as above, we want external machines to connect in to the vm's. Enter Port-forwarding to save the day! Configure your vm's to use NAT networking; Add Port Forwarding rules; External machines connect to "host":"port number" and connections are forwarded by VirtualBox to the guest:port number specified. For example, if your vm runs a web server on port 80, you could set up rules like this:  ...which reads: "any connections on port 8080 on the Host will be forwarded onto this vm's port 80".  This provides a mobile demo system which won't need re-configuring every time you open your laptop lid. Summary VirtualBox has a very powerful set of options allowing you to set up almost any configuration your heart desires. For more information, check out the VirtualBox User Manual on Virtual Networking. -FB 

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• Creating vCard action result

  - by DigiMortal

  I added support for vCards to one of my ASP.NET MVC applications. I worked vCard support out as very simple and intelligent solution that fits perfectly to ASP.NET MVC applications. In this posting I will show you how to send vCards out as response to ASP.NET MVC request. We need three things: some vCard class, vCard action result, controller method to test vCard action result. Everything is very simple, let’s get hands on. vCard class As first thing we need vCard class. Last year I introduced vCard class that supports also images. Let’s take this class because it is easy to use and some dirty work is already done for us. NB! Take a look at ASP.NET example in the blog posting referred above. We need it later when we close the topic. Now think about how useful blogging and information sharing with others can be. With this class available at public I saved pretty much time now. :) vCardResult As we have vCard it is now time to write action result that we can use in our controllers. Here’s the code. public class vCardResult : ActionResult {     private vCard _card;       protected vCardResult() { }       public vCardResult(vCard card)     {         _card = card;     }       public override void ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context)     {         var response = context.HttpContext.Response;         response.ContentType = "text/vcard";         response.AddHeader("Content-Disposition", "attachment; fileName=" + _card.FirstName + " " + _card.LastName + ".vcf");           var cardString = _card.ToString();         var inputEncoding = Encoding.Default;         var outputEncoding = Encoding.GetEncoding("windows-1257");         var cardBytes = inputEncoding.GetBytes(cardString);           var outputBytes = Encoding.Convert(inputEncoding,                                 outputEncoding, cardBytes);           response.OutputStream.Write(outputBytes, 0, outputBytes.Length);     } } And we are done. Some notes: vCard is sent to browser as downloadable file (user can save or open it with Outlook or any other e-mail client that supports vCards), File name is made of first and last name of contact. Encoding is important because Outlook may not understand vCards otherwise (don’t know if this problem is solved in Outlook 2010). Using vCardResult in controller Now let’s tale a look at simple controller method that accepts person ID and returns vCardResult. public class ContactsController : Controller {       // ... other controller methods ...       public vCardResult vCard(int id)     {         var person = _partyRepository.GetPersonById(id);         var card = new vCard                 {                     FirstName=person.FirstName,                     LastName = person.LastName,                     StreetAddress = person.StreetAddress,                     City = person.City,                     CountryName = person.Country.Name,                       Mobile = person.Mobile,                     Phone = person.Phone,                     Email = person.Email,                 };           return new vCardResult(card);     } } Now you can run Visual Studio and check out how your vCard is moving from your web application to your e-mail client. Conclusion We took old code that worked well with ASP.NET Forms and we divided it into action result and controller method that uses vCard as bridge between our controller and action result. All functionality is located where it should be and we did nothing complex. We wrote only couple of lines of very easy code to achieve our goal. Do you understand now why I love ASP.NET MVC? :)

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• The blocking nature of aggregates

  - by Rob Farley

  I wrote a post recently about how query tuning isn’t just about how quickly the query runs – that if you have something (such as SSIS) that is consuming your data (and probably introducing a bottleneck), then it might be more important to have a query which focuses on getting the first bit of data out. You can read that post here.  In particular, we looked at two operators that could be used to ensure that a query returns only Distinct rows. and The Sort operator pulls in all the data, sorts it (discarding duplicates), and then pushes out the remaining rows. The Hash Match operator performs a Hashing function on each row as it comes in, and then looks to see if it’s created a Hash it’s seen before. If not, it pushes the row out. The Sort method is quicker, but has to wait until it’s gathered all the data before it can do the sort, and therefore blocks the data flow. But that was my last post. This one’s a bit different. This post is going to look at how Aggregate functions work, which ties nicely into this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. I’ve frequently explained about the fact that DISTINCT and GROUP BY are essentially the same function, although DISTINCT is the poorer cousin because you have less control over it, and you can’t apply aggregate functions. Just like the operators used for Distinct, there are different flavours of Aggregate operators – coming in blocking and non-blocking varieties. The example I like to use to explain this is a pile of playing cards. If I’m handed a pile of cards and asked to count how many cards there are in each suit, it’s going to help if the cards are already ordered. Suppose I’m playing a game of Bridge, I can easily glance at my hand and count how many there are in each suit, because I keep the pile of cards in order. Moving from left to right, I could tell you I have four Hearts in my hand, even before I’ve got to the end. By telling you that I have four Hearts as soon as I know, I demonstrate the principle of a non-blocking operation. This is known as a Stream Aggregate operation. It requires input which is sorted by whichever columns the grouping is on, and it will release a row as soon as the group changes – when I encounter a Spade, I know I don’t have any more Hearts in my hand. Alternatively, if the pile of cards are not sorted, I won’t know how many Hearts I have until I’ve looked through all the cards. In fact, to count them, I basically need to put them into little piles, and when I’ve finished making all those piles, I can count how many there are in each. Because I don’t know any of the final numbers until I’ve seen all the cards, this is blocking. This performs the aggregate function using a Hash Match. Observant readers will remember this from my Distinct example. You might remember that my earlier Hash Match operation – used for Distinct Flow – wasn’t blocking. But this one is. They’re essentially doing a similar operation, applying a Hash function to some data and seeing if the set of values have been seen before, but before, it needs more information than the mere existence of a new set of values, it needs to consider how many of them there are. A lot is dependent here on whether the data coming out of the source is sorted or not, and this is largely determined by the indexes that are being used. If you look in the Properties of an Index Scan, you’ll be able to see whether the order of the data is required by the plan. A property called Ordered will demonstrate this. In this particular example, the second plan is significantly faster, but is dependent on having ordered data. In fact, if I force a Stream Aggregate on unordered data (which I’m doing by telling it to use a different index), a Sort operation is needed, which makes my plan a lot slower. This is all very straight-forward stuff, and information that most people are fully aware of. I’m sure you’ve all read my good friend Paul White (@sql_kiwi)’s post on how the Query Optimizer chooses which type of aggregate function to apply. But let’s take a look at SQL Server Integration Services. SSIS gives us a Aggregate transformation for use in Data Flow Tasks, but it’s described as Blocking. The definitive article on Performance Tuning SSIS uses Sort and Aggregate as examples of Blocking Transformations. I’ve just shown you that Aggregate operations used by the Query Optimizer are not always blocking, but that the SSIS Aggregate component is an example of a blocking transformation. But is it always the case? After all, there are plenty of SSIS Performance Tuning talks out there that describe the value of sorted data in Data Flow Tasks, describing the IsSorted property that can be set through the Advanced Editor of your Source component. And so I set about testing the Aggregate transformation in SSIS, to prove for sure whether providing Sorted data would let the Aggregate transform behave like a Stream Aggregate. (Of course, I knew the answer already, but it helps to be able to demonstrate these things). A query that will produce a million rows in order was in order. Let me rephrase. I used a query which produced the numbers from 1 to 1000000, in a single field, ordered. The IsSorted flag was set on the source output, with the only column as SortKey 1. Performing an Aggregate function over this (counting the number of rows per distinct number) should produce an additional column with 1 in it. If this were being done in T-SQL, the ordered data would allow a Stream Aggregate to be used. In fact, if the Query Optimizer saw that the field had a Unique Index on it, it would be able to skip the Aggregate function completely, and just insert the value 1. This is a shortcut I wouldn’t be expecting from SSIS, but certainly the Stream behaviour would be nice. Unfortunately, it’s not the case. As you can see from the screenshots above, the data is pouring into the Aggregate function, and not being released until all million rows have been seen. It’s not doing a Stream Aggregate at all. This is expected behaviour. (I put that in bold, because I want you to realise this.) An SSIS transformation is a piece of code that runs. It’s a physical operation. When you write T-SQL and ask for an aggregation to be done, it’s a logical operation. The physical operation is either a Stream Aggregate or a Hash Match. In SSIS, you’re telling the system that you want a generic Aggregation, that will have to work with whatever data is passed in. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be possible to make a sometimes-blocking aggregation component in SSIS. A Custom Component could be created which could detect whether the SortKeys columns of the input matched the Grouping columns of the Aggregation, and either call the blocking code or the non-blocking code as appropriate. One day I’ll make one of those, and publish it on my blog. I’ve done it before with a Script Component, but as Script components are single-use, I was able to handle the data knowing everything about my data flow already. As per my previous post – there are a lot of aspects in which tuning SSIS and tuning execution plans use similar concepts. In both situations, it really helps to have a feel for what’s going on behind the scenes. Considering whether an operation is blocking or not is extremely relevant to performance, and that it’s not always obvious from the surface. In a future post, I’ll show the impact of blocking v non-blocking and synchronous v asynchronous components in SSIS, using some of LobsterPot’s Script Components and Custom Components as examples. When I get that sorted, I’ll make a Stream Aggregate component available for download.

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• The blocking nature of aggregates

  - by Rob Farley

  I wrote a post recently about how query tuning isn’t just about how quickly the query runs – that if you have something (such as SSIS) that is consuming your data (and probably introducing a bottleneck), then it might be more important to have a query which focuses on getting the first bit of data out. You can read that post here.  In particular, we looked at two operators that could be used to ensure that a query returns only Distinct rows. and The Sort operator pulls in all the data, sorts it (discarding duplicates), and then pushes out the remaining rows. The Hash Match operator performs a Hashing function on each row as it comes in, and then looks to see if it’s created a Hash it’s seen before. If not, it pushes the row out. The Sort method is quicker, but has to wait until it’s gathered all the data before it can do the sort, and therefore blocks the data flow. But that was my last post. This one’s a bit different. This post is going to look at how Aggregate functions work, which ties nicely into this month’s T-SQL Tuesday. I’ve frequently explained about the fact that DISTINCT and GROUP BY are essentially the same function, although DISTINCT is the poorer cousin because you have less control over it, and you can’t apply aggregate functions. Just like the operators used for Distinct, there are different flavours of Aggregate operators – coming in blocking and non-blocking varieties. The example I like to use to explain this is a pile of playing cards. If I’m handed a pile of cards and asked to count how many cards there are in each suit, it’s going to help if the cards are already ordered. Suppose I’m playing a game of Bridge, I can easily glance at my hand and count how many there are in each suit, because I keep the pile of cards in order. Moving from left to right, I could tell you I have four Hearts in my hand, even before I’ve got to the end. By telling you that I have four Hearts as soon as I know, I demonstrate the principle of a non-blocking operation. This is known as a Stream Aggregate operation. It requires input which is sorted by whichever columns the grouping is on, and it will release a row as soon as the group changes – when I encounter a Spade, I know I don’t have any more Hearts in my hand. Alternatively, if the pile of cards are not sorted, I won’t know how many Hearts I have until I’ve looked through all the cards. In fact, to count them, I basically need to put them into little piles, and when I’ve finished making all those piles, I can count how many there are in each. Because I don’t know any of the final numbers until I’ve seen all the cards, this is blocking. This performs the aggregate function using a Hash Match. Observant readers will remember this from my Distinct example. You might remember that my earlier Hash Match operation – used for Distinct Flow – wasn’t blocking. But this one is. They’re essentially doing a similar operation, applying a Hash function to some data and seeing if the set of values have been seen before, but before, it needs more information than the mere existence of a new set of values, it needs to consider how many of them there are. A lot is dependent here on whether the data coming out of the source is sorted or not, and this is largely determined by the indexes that are being used. If you look in the Properties of an Index Scan, you’ll be able to see whether the order of the data is required by the plan. A property called Ordered will demonstrate this. In this particular example, the second plan is significantly faster, but is dependent on having ordered data. In fact, if I force a Stream Aggregate on unordered data (which I’m doing by telling it to use a different index), a Sort operation is needed, which makes my plan a lot slower. This is all very straight-forward stuff, and information that most people are fully aware of. I’m sure you’ve all read my good friend Paul White (@sql_kiwi)’s post on how the Query Optimizer chooses which type of aggregate function to apply. But let’s take a look at SQL Server Integration Services. SSIS gives us a Aggregate transformation for use in Data Flow Tasks, but it’s described as Blocking. The definitive article on Performance Tuning SSIS uses Sort and Aggregate as examples of Blocking Transformations. I’ve just shown you that Aggregate operations used by the Query Optimizer are not always blocking, but that the SSIS Aggregate component is an example of a blocking transformation. But is it always the case? After all, there are plenty of SSIS Performance Tuning talks out there that describe the value of sorted data in Data Flow Tasks, describing the IsSorted property that can be set through the Advanced Editor of your Source component. And so I set about testing the Aggregate transformation in SSIS, to prove for sure whether providing Sorted data would let the Aggregate transform behave like a Stream Aggregate. (Of course, I knew the answer already, but it helps to be able to demonstrate these things). A query that will produce a million rows in order was in order. Let me rephrase. I used a query which produced the numbers from 1 to 1000000, in a single field, ordered. The IsSorted flag was set on the source output, with the only column as SortKey 1. Performing an Aggregate function over this (counting the number of rows per distinct number) should produce an additional column with 1 in it. If this were being done in T-SQL, the ordered data would allow a Stream Aggregate to be used. In fact, if the Query Optimizer saw that the field had a Unique Index on it, it would be able to skip the Aggregate function completely, and just insert the value 1. This is a shortcut I wouldn’t be expecting from SSIS, but certainly the Stream behaviour would be nice. Unfortunately, it’s not the case. As you can see from the screenshots above, the data is pouring into the Aggregate function, and not being released until all million rows have been seen. It’s not doing a Stream Aggregate at all. This is expected behaviour. (I put that in bold, because I want you to realise this.) An SSIS transformation is a piece of code that runs. It’s a physical operation. When you write T-SQL and ask for an aggregation to be done, it’s a logical operation. The physical operation is either a Stream Aggregate or a Hash Match. In SSIS, you’re telling the system that you want a generic Aggregation, that will have to work with whatever data is passed in. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be possible to make a sometimes-blocking aggregation component in SSIS. A Custom Component could be created which could detect whether the SortKeys columns of the input matched the Grouping columns of the Aggregation, and either call the blocking code or the non-blocking code as appropriate. One day I’ll make one of those, and publish it on my blog. I’ve done it before with a Script Component, but as Script components are single-use, I was able to handle the data knowing everything about my data flow already. As per my previous post – there are a lot of aspects in which tuning SSIS and tuning execution plans use similar concepts. In both situations, it really helps to have a feel for what’s going on behind the scenes. Considering whether an operation is blocking or not is extremely relevant to performance, and that it’s not always obvious from the surface. In a future post, I’ll show the impact of blocking v non-blocking and synchronous v asynchronous components in SSIS, using some of LobsterPot’s Script Components and Custom Components as examples. When I get that sorted, I’ll make a Stream Aggregate component available for download.

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt 3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  Start with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• Optimizing AES modes on Solaris for Intel Westmere

  - by danx

  Optimizing AES modes on Solaris for Intel Westmere Review AES is a strong method of symmetric (secret-key) encryption. It is a U.S. FIPS-approved cryptographic algorithm (FIPS 197) that operates on 16-byte blocks. AES has been available since 2001 and is widely used. However, AES by itself has a weakness. AES encryption isn't usually used by itself because identical blocks of plaintext are always encrypted into identical blocks of ciphertext. This encryption can be easily attacked with "dictionaries" of common blocks of text and allows one to more-easily discern the content of the unknown cryptotext. This mode of encryption is called "Electronic Code Book" (ECB), because one in theory can keep a "code book" of all known cryptotext and plaintext results to cipher and decipher AES. In practice, a complete "code book" is not practical, even in electronic form, but large dictionaries of common plaintext blocks is still possible. Here's a diagram of encrypting input data using AES ECB mode: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ AESKey-->(AES Encryption) AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | \/ \/ CipherTextOutput CipherTextOutput Block 1 Block 2 What's the solution to the same cleartext input producing the same ciphertext output? The solution is to further process the encrypted or decrypted text in such a way that the same text produces different output. This usually involves an Initialization Vector (IV) and XORing the decrypted or encrypted text. As an example, I'll illustrate CBC mode encryption: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ IV >----->(XOR) +------------->(XOR) +---> . . . . | | | | | | | | \/ | \/ | AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | | | | | | \/ | \/ | CipherTextOutput ------+ CipherTextOutput -------+ Block 1 Block 2 The steps for CBC encryption are: Start with a 16-byte Initialization Vector (IV), choosen randomly. XOR the IV with the first block of input plaintext Encrypt the result with AES using a user-provided key. The result is the first 16-bytes of output cryptotext. Use the cryptotext (instead of the IV) of the previous block to XOR with the next input block of plaintext Another mode besides CBC is Counter Mode (CTR). As with CBC mode, it also starts with a 16-byte IV. However, for subsequent blocks, the IV is just incremented by one. Also, the IV ix XORed with the AES encryption result (not the plain text input). Here's an illustration: Block 1 Block 2 PlainTextInput PlainTextInput | | | | \/ \/ AESKey-->(AES Encryption) AESKey-->(AES Encryption) | | | | \/ \/ IV >----->(XOR) IV + 1 >---->(XOR) IV + 2 ---> . . . . | | | | \/ \/ CipherTextOutput CipherTextOutput Block 1 Block 2 Optimization Which of these modes can be parallelized? ECB encryption/decryption can be parallelized because it does more than plain AES encryption and decryption, as mentioned above. CBC encryption can't be parallelized because it depends on the output of the previous block. However, CBC decryption can be parallelized because all the encrypted blocks are known at the beginning. CTR encryption and decryption can be parallelized because the input to each block is known--it's just the IV incremented by one for each subsequent block. So, in summary, for ECB, CBC, and CTR modes, encryption and decryption can be parallelized with the exception of CBC encryption. How do we parallelize encryption? By interleaving. Usually when reading and writing data there are pipeline "stalls" (idle processor cycles) that result from waiting for memory to be loaded or stored to or from CPU registers. Since the software is written to encrypt/decrypt the next data block where pipeline stalls usually occurs, we can avoid stalls and crypt with fewer cycles. This software processes 4 blocks at a time, which ensures virtually no waiting ("stalling") for reading or writing data in memory. Other Optimizations Besides interleaving, other optimizations performed are Loading the entire key schedule into the 128-bit %xmm registers. This is done once for per 4-block of data (since 4 blocks of data is processed, when present). The following is loaded: the entire "key schedule" (user input key preprocessed for encryption and decryption). This takes 11, 13, or 15 registers, for AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256, respectively The input data is loaded into another %xmm register The same register contains the output result after encrypting/decrypting Using SSSE 4 instructions (AESNI). Besides the aesenc, aesenclast, aesdec, aesdeclast, aeskeygenassist, and aesimc AESNI instructions, Intel has several other instructions that operate on the 128-bit %xmm registers. Some common instructions for encryption are: pxor exclusive or (very useful), movdqu load/store a %xmm register from/to memory, pshufb shuffle bytes for byte swapping, pclmulqdq carry-less multiply for GCM mode Combining AES encryption/decryption with CBC or CTR modes processing. Instead of loading input data twice (once for AES encryption/decryption, and again for modes (CTR or CBC, for example) processing, the input data is loaded once as both AES and modes operations occur at in the same function Performance Everyone likes pretty color charts, so here they are. I ran these on Solaris 11 running on a Piketon Platform system with a 4-core Intel Clarkdale processor @3.20GHz. Clarkdale which is part of the Westmere processor architecture family. The "before" case is Solaris 11, unmodified. Keep in mind that the "before" case already has been optimized with hand-coded Intel AESNI assembly. The "after" case has combined AES-NI and mode instructions, interleaved 4 blocks at-a-time. « For the first table, lower is better (milliseconds). The first table shows the performance improvement using the Solaris encrypt(1) and decrypt(1) CLI commands. I encrypted and decrypted a 1/2 GByte file on /tmp (swap tmpfs). Encryption improved by about 40% and decryption improved by about 80%. AES-128 is slighty faster than AES-256, as expected. The second table shows more detail timings for CBC, CTR, and ECB modes for the 3 AES key sizes and different data lengths. » The results shown are the percentage improvement as shown by an internal PKCS#11 microbenchmark. And keep in mind the previous baseline code already had optimized AESNI assembly! The keysize (AES-128, 192, or 256) makes little difference in relative percentage improvement (although, of course, AES-128 is faster than AES-256). Larger data sizes show better improvement than 128-byte data. Availability This software is in Solaris 11 FCS. It is available in the 64-bit libcrypto library and the "aes" Solaris kernel module. You must be running hardware that supports AESNI (for example, Intel Westmere and Sandy Bridge, microprocessor architectures). The easiest way to determine if AES-NI is available is with the isainfo(1) command. For example, $ isainfo -v 64-bit amd64 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov amd_sysc cx8 tsc fpu 32-bit i386 applications pclmulqdq aes sse4.2 sse4.1 ssse3 popcnt tscp ahf cx16 sse3 sse2 sse fxsr mmx cmov sep cx8 tsc fpu No special configuration or setup is needed to take advantage of this software. Solaris libraries and kernel automatically determine if it's running on AESNI-capable machines and execute the correctly-tuned software for the current microprocessor. Summary Maximum throughput of AES cipher modes can be achieved by combining AES encryption with modes processing, interleaving encryption of 4 blocks at a time, and using Intel's wide 128-bit %xmm registers and instructions. References "Block cipher modes of operation", Wikipedia Good overview of AES modes (ECB, CBC, CTR, etc.) "Advanced Encryption Standard", Wikipedia "Current Modes" describes NIST-approved block cipher modes (ECB,CBC, CFB, OFB, CCM, GCM)

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• Clustering for Mere Mortals (Pt3)

  - by Geoff N. Hiten

  The Controller Now we get to the meat of the matter.  You want a virtual cluster, the first thing you have to do is create your own portable domain.  IStart with a plain vanilla install of Windows 2003 R2 Standard on a semi-default VM. (1 GB RAM, 2 cores, 2 NICs, 128GB dynamically expanding VHD file).  I chose this because it had the smallest disk and memory footprint of any current supported Microsoft Server product.  I created the VM with a single dynamically expanding VHD, one fixed 16 GB VHD, and two NICs.  One NIC is connected to the outside world and the other one is part of an internal-only network.  The first NIC is set up as a DHCP client.  We will get to the other one later. I actually tried this with Windows 2008 R2, but it failed miserably.  Not sure whether it was 2008 R2 or the fact I tried to use cloned VMs in the cluster.  Clustering is one place where NewSID would really come in handy.  Too bad Microsoft bought and buried it. Load and Patch the OS (hence the need for the outside connection).This is a good time to go get dinner.  Maybe a movie too.  There are close to a hundred patches that need to be downloaded and applied.  Avoiding that mess was why I put so much time into trying to get the 2008 R2 version working.  Maybe next time.  Don’t forget to add the extensions for VMLite (or whatever virtualization product you prefer). Set a fixed IP address on the internal-only NIC.  Do not give it a gateway.  Put the same IP address for the NIC and for the DNS Server.  This IP should be in a range that is never available on your public network.  You will need all the addresses in the range available.  See the previous post for the exact settings I used. I chose 10.97.230.1 as the server.  The rest of the 10.97.230 range is what I will use later.  For the curious, those numbers are based on elements of my home address.  Not truly random, but good enough for this project. Do not bridge the network connections.  I never allowed the cluster nodes direct access to any public network. Format the fixed VHD and leave it alone for now. Promote the VM to a Domain Controller.  If you have never done this, don’t worry.  The only meaningful decision is what to call the new domain.  I prefer a bogus name that does not correspond to a real Top-Level Domain (TLD).  .com, .biz., .net, .org  are all TLDs that we know and love.  I chose .test as the TLD since it is descriptive AND it does not exist in the real world.  The domain is called MicroAD.  This gives me MicroAD.Test as my domain. During the promotion process, you will be prompted to install DNS as part of the Domain creation process.  You want to accept this option.  The installer will automatically assign this DNS server as the authoritative owner of the MicroAD.test DNS domain (not to be confused with the MicroAD.test Active Directory domain.) For the rest of the DCPROMO process, just accept the defaults. Now let’s make our IP address management easy.  Add the DHCP Role to the server.  Add the server (10.97.230.1 in this case) as the default gateway to assign to DHCP clients.  Here is where you have to be VERY careful and bind it ONLY to the Internal NIC.  Trust me, your network admin will NOT like an extra DHCP server “helping” out on her network.  Go ahead and create a range of 10-20 IP Addresses in your scope.  You might find other uses for a pocket domain controller <cough> Mirroring </cough> than just for building a cluster.  And Clustering in SQL 2008 and Windows 2008 R2 fully supports DHCP addresses. Now we have three of the five key roles ready.  Two more to go. Next comes file sharing.  Since your cluster node VMs will not have access to any outside, you have to have some way to get files into these VMs.  I simply go to the root of C: and create a “Shared” folder.  I then share it out and grant full control to “Everyone” to both the share and to the underlying NTFS folder.   This will be immensely useful for Service Packs, demo databases, and any other software that isn’t packaged as an ISO that we can mount to the VM. Finally we need to create a block-level multi-connect storage device.  The kind folks at Starwinds Software (http://www.starwindsoftware.com/) graciously gave me a non-expiring demo license for expressly this purpose.  Their iSCSI SAN software lets you create an iSCSI target from nearly any storage medium.  Refreshingly, their product does exactly what they say it does.  Thanks. Remember that 16 GB VHD file?  That is where we are going to carve into our LUNs.  I created an iSCSI folder off the root, just so I can keep everything organized.  I then carved 5 ea. 2 GB iSCSI targets from that folder.  I chose a fixed VHD for performance.  I tried this earlier with a dynamically expanding VHD, but too many layers of abstraction and sparseness combined to make it unusable even for a demo.  Stick with a fixed VHD so there is a one-to-one mapping between abstract and physical storage.  If you read the previous post, you know what I named these iSCSI LUNs and why.  Yes, I do have some left over space.  Always leave yourself room for future growth or options. This gets us up to where we can actually build the nodes and install SQL.  As with most clusters, the real work happens long before the individual nodes get installed and configured.  At least it does if you want the cluster to be a true high-availability platform.

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• Mac OS X 10.8 VPN Server: Bypass VPN for LAN traffic (routing LAN traffic to secondary connection)

  - by Dan Robson

  I have somewhat of an odd setup for a VPN server with OS X Mountain Lion. It's essentially being used as a bridge to bypass my company's firewall to our extranet connection - certain things our team needs to do require unfettered access to the outside, and changing IT policies to allow traffic through the main firewall is just not an option. The extranet connection is provided through a Wireless-N router (let's call it Wi-Fi X). My Mac Mini server is configured with the connection to this router as the primary connection, thus unfettered access to the internet via the router. Connections to this device on the immediate subnet are possible through the LAN port, but outside the subnet things are less reliable. I was able to configure the VPN server to provide IP addresses to clients in the 192.168.11.150-192.168.11.200 range using both PPTP and L2TP, and I'm able to connect to the extranet through the VPN using the standard Mac OS X VPN client in System Preferences, however unsurprisingly, a local address (let's call it internal.company.com) returns nothing. I tried to bypass the limitation of the VPN Server by setting up Routes in the VPN settings. Our company uses 13.x.x.x for all internal traffic, instead of 10.x.x.x, so the routing table looked something like this: IP Address ---------- Subnet Mask ---------- Configuration 0.0.0.0 248.0.0.0 Private 8.0.0.0 252.0.0.0 Private 12.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 Private 13.0.0.0 255.0.0.0 Public 14.0.0.0 254.0.0.0 Private 16.0.0.0 240.0.0.0 Private 32.0.0.0 224.0.0.0 Private 64.0.0.0 192.0.0.0 Private 128.0.0.0 128.0.0.0 Private I was under the impression that if nothing was entered here, all traffic was routed through the VPN. With something entered, only traffic specifically marked to go through the VPN would go through the VPN, and all other traffic would be up to the client to access using its own default connection. This is why I had to specifically mark every subnet except 13.x.x.x as Private. My suspicion is that since I can't reach the VPN server from outside the local subnet, it's not making a connection to the main DNS server and thus can't be reached on the larger network. I'm thinking that entering hostnames like internal.company.com aren't kicked back to the client to resolve, because the server has no idea that the IP address falls in the public range, since I suspect (probably should ping test it but don't have access to it right now) that it can't reach the DNS server to find out anything about that hostname. It seems to me that all my options for resolving this all boil down to the same type of solution: Figure out how to reach the DNS with the secondary connection on the server. I'm thinking that if I'm able to do [something] to get my server to recognize that it should also check my local gateway (let's say Server IP == 13.100.100.50 and Gateway IP == 13.100.100.1). From there Gateway IP can tell me to go find DNS Server at 13.1.1.1 and give me information about my internal network. I'm very confused about this path -- really not sure if I'm even making sense. I thought about trying to do this client side, but that doesn't make sense either, since that would add time to each and every client side setup. Plus, it just seems more logical to solve it on the server - I could either get rid of my routing table altogether or keep it - I think the only difference would be that internal traffic would also go through the server - probably an unnecessary burden on it. Any help out there? Or am I in over my head? Forward proxy or transparent proxy is also an option for me, although I have no idea how to set either of those up. (I know, Google is my friend.)

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• IP address reuse on macvlan devices

  - by Alex Bubnoff

  I'm trying to create easy to use and possibly simple testing environment for some product and got some strange behaviour of macvlan's. What I'm trying to achieve: make a toolset for one-line start/stop of lxc containers(via docker) bound to external ip(I have enough of it on host machine). So, I'm doing something like this: docker run -d -name=container_name container_image pipework eth1 container_name ip/prefix_len@gateway and pipework here does this: GUEST_IFNAME=ph$NSPID$eth1 ip link add link eth1 dev $GUEST_IFNAME type macvlan mode bridge ip link set eth1 up ip link set $GUEST_IFNAME netns $NSPID ip netns exec $NSPID ip link set $GUEST_IFNAME name eth1 ip netns exec $NSPID ip addr add $IPADDR dev eth1 ip netns exec $NSPID ip route delete default ip netns exec $NSPID ip link set eth1 up ip netns exec $NSPID ip route replace default via $GATEWAY ip netns exec $NSPID arping -c 1 -A -I eth1 $IPADDR And it works for first time per IP. But for second time and later packets for containers IP isn't getting into container, while all configuration seem fine. So it looks like this: External machine ? ping 212.76.131.212 ....silence.... Host machine root@ubuntu:~# ip link show eth1 2: eth1: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000 link/ether 00:15:17:c9:e1:c9 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff root@ubuntu:~# ip addr show eth1 2: eth1: mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP qlen 1000 link/ether 00:15:17:c9:e1:c9 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff root@ubuntu:~# tcpdump -v -i eth1 icmp tcpdump: WARNING: eth1: no IPv4 address assigned tcpdump: listening on eth1, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes 00:00:46.542042 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 60, id 9623, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 84) 5.134.221.98 212.76.131.212: ICMP echo request, id 6718, seq 2345, length 64 00:00:47.549969 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 60, id 9624, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 84) 5.134.221.98 212.76.131.212: ICMP echo request, id 6718, seq 2346, length 64 00:00:48.558143 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 60, id 9625, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 84) 5.134.221.98 212.76.131.212: ICMP echo request, id 6718, seq 2347, length 64 00:00:49.566319 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 60, id 9626, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 84) 5.134.221.98 212.76.131.212: ICMP echo request, id 6718, seq 2348, length 64 00:00:50.573999 IP (tos 0x0, ttl 60, id 9627, offset 0, flags [DF], proto ICMP (1), length 84) 5.134.221.98 212.76.131.212: ICMP echo request, id 6718, seq 2349, length 64 ^C 5 packets captured 5 packets received by filter 0 packets dropped by kernel 1 packet dropped by interface Host machine, netns of container root@ubuntu:~# ip netns exec 32053 ip link show eth1 48: eth1@if2: mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN link/ether b2:12:f7:cc:a1:9d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff root@ubuntu:~# ip netns exec 32053 ip addr show eth1 48: eth1@if2: mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN link/ether b2:12:f7:cc:a1:9d brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff inet 212.76.131.212/29 scope global eth1 inet6 fe80::b012:f7ff:fecc:a19d/64 scope link valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever root@ubuntu:~# ip netns exec 32053 tcpdump -v -i eth1 icmp tcpdump: listening on eth1, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 65535 bytes ....silence.... ^C 0 packets captured 0 packets received by filter 0 packets dropped by kernel So, can anyone say, what can it be? Can this be caused by not a bug in macvlan implementation? Is there any tools I can use to debug that configuration?

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• Instructions on how to configure a WebLogic Cluster and use it with Oracle Http Server

  - by Laurent Goldsztejn

  On October 17th I delivered a webcast on WebLogic Clustering that included a demo with Apache as the proxy server.  I realized that many steps are needed to set up the configuration I used during the demo.  The purpose of this article is to go through these steps to show how quickly and easily one can define a new cluster and then proxy requests via an Oracle Http Server (OHS). The domain configuration wizard offers the option to create a cluster.  The administration console or WLST, the Weblogic scripting tool can also be used to define a new cluster.  It can be created at any time but the servers that will participate in it cannot be in a running state. Cluster Creation using the configuration wizard Network and architecture requirements need to be considered while choosing between unicast and multicast. Multicast Vs. Unicast with WebLogic Clustering is of great help to make the best decision between the two messaging modes.  In addition, Configure Cluster offers details on each single field displayed above. After this initial configuration page, individual servers could be assigned to this newly created cluster although servers can be added later to the cluster.  What is not recommended is for the Admin server to participate in a cluster as the main purpose of the Admin server is to perform the bulk of the processing for the domain.  Servers need to stop before being assigned to a cluster.  There is also no minimum number of servers that have to participate in the cluster. At this point the configuration should be done and the cluster created successfully.  This can easily be verified from the console. Each clustered managed server can be launched to join the cluster.   At startup the following messages should be logged for each clustered managed server: <Notice> <WeblogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to STARTING> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000197> <Listening for announcements from cluster using messaging_mode cluster messaging> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000133> <Waiting to synchronize with other running members of cluster_name>  It's time to try sending requests to the cluster and we will do this with the help of Oracle Http Server to play the role of a proxy server to demonstrate load balancing.  Proxy Server configuration  The first step is to download Weblogic Server Web Server Plugin that will enhance the web server by handling requests aimed at being sent to the Weblogic cluster.  For our test Oracle Http Server (OHS) will be used.  However plug-ins are also available for Apache Http server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Oracle iPlanet Webserver or even WebLogic Server with the HttpClusterServlet. Once OHS is installed on the system, the configuration file, mod_wl_ohs.conf, will need to be altered to include Weblogic proxy specifics. First of all, add the following directive to instruct Apache to load the Weblogic shared object module extracted from the plugins file just downloaded. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl_ohs.so and then create an IfModule directive to encapsulate the following location block so that proxy will be enabled by path (each request including /wls will be directed directly to the WebLogic Cluster).  You could also proxy requests by MIME type using MatchExpression in the Location block. <IfModule weblogic_module> <Location /wls>    SetHandler weblogic-handler    PathTrim /wls    WebLogicCluster MS1_URL:port,MS2_URL:port    Debug ON    WLLogFile        c:/tmp/global_proxy.log     WLTempDir        "c:/myTemp"    DebugConfigInfo  On </Location> </IfModule> SetHandler specifies the handler for the plug-in module  PathTrim will instruct the plug-in to trim /w ls from the URL before forwarding the request to the cluster. The list of WebLogic Servers defined in WeblogicCluster could contain a mixed set of clustered and single servers.  However, the dynamic list returned for this parameter will only contain valid clustered servers and may contain more servers if not all clustered servers are listed in WeblogicCluster. Testing proxy and load balancing It's time to start OHS web server which should at this point be configured correctly to proxy requests to the clustered servers.  By default round-robin is the load balancing strategy set by WebLogic. Testing the load balancing can be easily done by disabling cookies on your browser given that a request containing a cookie attempts to connect to the primary server. If that attempt fails, the plug-in attempts to make a connection to the next available server in the list in a round-robin fashion.  With cookies enabled, you could use two different browsers to test the load balancing with a JSP page that contains the following: <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" language="java"  %>  <%  String path = request.getContextPath();   String getProtocol=request.getScheme();   String getDomain=request.getServerName();   String getPort=Integer.toString(request.getLocalPort());   String getPath = getProtocol+"://"+getDomain+":"+getPort+path+"/"; %> <html> <body> Receiving Server <%=getPath%> </body> </html>  Assuming that you name the JSP page Test.jsp and the webapp that contains it TestApp, your browsers should open the following URL: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp  Each browser should connect to a different clustered server and this simple JSP should confirm that.  The webapp that contains the JSP needs to be deployed to the cluster. You can also verify that the load is correctly balanced by looking at the proxy log file.  Each request generates a set of log entries that starts with : timestamp ================New Request: Each request is associated with a primary server and a secondary server if one is available.  For our test request, the following entries should appear in the log as well:Using Uri /wls/TestApp/Test.jsp After trimming path: '/TestApp/Test.jsp' The final request string is '/TestApp/Test.jsp' If an exception occurs, it should also be logged in the proxy log file with the prefix:timestamp *******Exception type   WeblogicBridgeConfig DebugConfigInfo enables runtime statistics and the production of configuration information.  For security purposes, this parameter should be turned off in production. http://webserver_host:port/path/xyz.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig will display a proxy bridge page detailing the plugin configuration followed by runtime statistics which could help in diagnosing issues along with the analyzing of the proxy log file.  In our example the url would be: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig  Here is how the top section of the screen can look like: The bottom part of the page contains runtime statistics, here is a snippet of it (unrelated with the previous JSP example).   This entire plugin configuration should be very similar with other web servers, what varies is the name of the proxy server configuration file. So, as you can see, it only takes a few minutes to configure a Weblogic cluster and get servers to join it. 

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• what is the best mid/high-end class audio/music creation audio sound card?

  - by Chris

  Hello, I have a computershop myself, and I repair computers. But one of the things I really don't know (yet) is the performace od audio cards for music creation with midi. I have searched and searched and came up with some good reviews, but after browsing for a couple of hours I could't see the trees trough the forrest :-D (it's a dutch expression) At one moment I thought the M-Audio - Delta 1010LT would be a good PCIe card, later on I read that this card was released years ago. (but that could be false information) Also any personal expierence would be great, but not necessairy. I have searched a few cards, and I hope someone can help me make a choice for a friend of mine. He's buget is between $100 and $350 I know there are audio cards from $ 500 - $1850,- this is just too expensive. The following specs are crucial: ASIO Midi Mic in minimal 5.1, 7.1 recommended it's not for airplay, but just to compose music at home. using Ableton and midi keyboard. 1. M-Audio - Delta 1010LT: 8 x 8 analog I/O 2 mic preamps or line inputs S/PDIF digital I/O (coaxial) with 2-channel PCM SCMS copy protection control digital I/O supports surround-encoded AC-3 and DTS pass-through 1 x 1 MIDI I/O directly drive up to 7.1 surround (bass management software included) software controlled 36-bit internal DSP digital mixing/routing +4dbu/-10dBV operation individually switched in software word clock I/O for sample accurate device synchronization 2. RME HDSP 9632: * Stereo Analog Ein- und Ausgang, symmetrisch*, 24-Bit/192kHz, > 110 dB SNR * Optionale Erweiterungsboards mit je 4 symmetrischen Ein- und Ausgängen * Alle analogen I/Os voll 192 kHz-fähig, also keine Reduzierung der Kanalzahl * 1 x ADAT Digital In/Out, 96 kHz-fähig (S/MUX) * 1 x SPDIF Digital In/Out, 192 kHz-fähig * 1 x Breakout Kabel für koaxialen SPDIF-Betrieb* * Also bis zu 16 Ein-und Ausgänge gleichzeitig nutzbar! * 1 x Stereo Kopfhörerausgang, parallel zum analogen Ausgang, aber eigene Pegelanpassung * 1 x MIDI I/O für 16 Kanäle Hi-Speed MIDI über Breakout Kabel * DIGICheck, RMEs einzigartiges Meter- und Analysetool mit Spectral Analyser, Professionelle Level Meter 2/8/16-Kanalig, Vector Audio Scope und diversen weiteren Analysefunktionen * HDSP Meter Bridge: Frei skalierbare Levelmeter mit Peak- und RMS Berechnung in Hardware * TotalMix: 512-Kanal Mischer mit 40 Bit interner Auflösung 3. EMU 1212M (1212 M) PCIe: * Top kwaliteit convertors 24-bit/192kHz convertors. * Hardware gestuurde effecten. * DSP zero-latency hardware mixen en monitoring. * Analoge en digitale I/O plus MIDI. * EMU Production Tools Software Bundle - Cakewalk SONAR , Steinberg Cubase LE, Ableton Live E-MU Edition **EMU 1212M PCI-e inputs/outputs:** * 2 balanced jack inputs. * 2 balanced jack outputs. * 24-bit/192kHz ADAT I/O. * 24-bit/192kHz Coaxiale S/PDif I/O switchable to AES/EBU. * MIDI I/O. 4. M-Audio Audiophile 192: - Up to 24-bit/192kHz audio - 2 balanced analog inputs (1/4” TRS) - 2 balanced analog outputs (1/4” TRS) - S/PDIF digital I/O (coaxial RCA connectors) with 2-channel PCM - SCMS copy protection control - Digital I/O supports surround-encoded AC-3 and DTS pass-through - Direct hardware input monitoring via separate balanced 1/4” TRS monitor outputs - Software routing of inputs and outputs - Digital I/O can be routed to/from external effects - 16-channel MIDI I/O - ASIO, WDM, GSIF 2 and Core Audio driver support for compatibility with most applications - 64-bit driver support for Windows - PCI 2.2 compatibility - Apple G5 compatible - Incompatible exceptions - Includes Ableton Live Lite music production software, so you can make music right away - Works with other Delta cards Technical Specifcations: - Compatibility - ASIO - WDM - GSIF 2 - Core Audio

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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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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 16, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 16, 2012Popular ReleasesCosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System): Release 92560: Prerequisites Visual Studio 2010 - Any version including Express. Express users must also install Visual Studio 2010 Integrated Shell runtime VMWare - Cosmos can run on real hardware as well as other virtualization environments but our default debug setup is configured for VMWare. VMWare Player (Free). or Workstation VMWare VIX API 1.11AutoUpdaterdotNET : Autoupdate for VB.NET and C# Developer: AutoUpdater.NET 1.1: Release Notes *New feature added that allows user to select remind later interval.Sumzlib: API document: API documentMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script: Install AdventureWorks2008 OLTP database from script The AdventureWorks database can be created by running the instawdb.sql DDL script contained in the AdventureWorks 2008 OLTP Script.zip file. The instawdb.sql script depends on two path environment variables: SqlSamplesDatabasePath and SqlSamplesSourceDataPath. The SqlSamplesDatabasePath environment variable is set to the default Microsoft ® SQL Server 2008 path. You will need to change the SqlSamplesSourceDataPath environment variable to th...HigLabo: HigLabo_20120613: Bug fix HigLabo.Mail Decode header encoded by CP1252Jasc (just another script compressor): 1.3.1: Updated Ajax Minifier to 4.55.WipeTouch, a jQuery touch plugin: 1.2.0: Changes since 1.1.0: New: wipeMove event, triggered while moving the mouse/finger. New: added "source" to the result object. Bug fix: sometimes vertical wipe events would not trigger correctly. Bug fix: improved tapToClick handler. General code refactoring. Windows Phone 7 is not supported, yet! Its behaviour is completely broken and would require some special tricks to make it work. Maybe in the future...Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 3.0.0.3026 (June 2012): Fixes: round( 0.0 ) local TimeZone name TimeZone search compiling multi-script-assemblies PhpString serialization DocDocument::loadHTMLFile() token_get_all() parse_url()BlackJumboDog: Ver5.6.4: 2012.06.13 Ver5.6.4 　(1) Web???????、???POST??????????????????Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 2.0.0.0 - Ferret: - Merging both 3.5 and 2.0 codebases to a single .NET 2.0 assembly. - MSBuild Task. - NAnt Task.Bumblebee: Version 0.3.1: Changed default config values to decent ones. Restricted visibility of Hive.fs to internal. Added some XML documentation. Added Array.shuffle utility. The dll is also available on NuGet My apologies, the initial source code referenced was missing one file which prevented it from building The source code contains two examples, one in C#, one in F#, illustrating the usage of the framework on the Travelling Salesman Problem: Source CodeSharePoint XSL Templates: SPXSLT 0.0.9: Added new template FixAmpersands. Fixed the contents of the MultiSelectValueCheck.xsl file, which was missing the stylesheet wrapper.ExcelFileEditor: .CS File: nothingBizTalk Scheduled Task Adapter: Release 4.0: Works with BizTalk Server 2010. Compiled in .NET Framework 4.0. In this new version are available small improvements compared to the current version (3.0). We can highlight the following improvements or changes: 24 hours support in “start time” property. Previous versions had an issue with setting the start time, as it shown 12 hours watch but no AM/PM. Daily scheduler review. Solved a small bug on Daily Properties: unable to switch between “Every day” and “on these days” Installation e...Weapsy - ASP.NET MVC CMS: 1.0.0 RC: - Upgrade to Entity Framework 4.3.1 - Added AutoMapper custom version (by nopCommerce Team) - Added missed model properties and localization resources of Plugin Definitions - Minor changes - Fixed some bugsXenta Framework - extensible enterprise n-tier application framework: Xenta Framework 1.8.0 Beta: Catalog and Publication reviews and ratings Store language packs in data base Improve reporting system Improve Import/Export system A lot of WebAdmin app UI improvements Initial implementation of the WebForum app DB indexes Improve and simplify architecture Less abstractions Modernize architecture Improve, simplify and unify API Simplify and improve testing A lot of new unit tests Codebase refactoring and ReSharpering Utilize Castle Windsor Utilize NHibernate ORM ...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.55: Properly handle IE extension to CSS3 grammar that allows for multiple parameters to functional pseudo-class selectors. add new switch -braces:(new|same) that affects where opening braces are placed in multi-line output. The default, "new" puts them on their own new line; "same" outputs them at the end of the previous line. add new optional values to the -inline switch: -inline:(force|noforce), which can be combined with the existing boolean value via comma-separators; value "force" (which...Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework: MMP Player Framework 2.7 (Silverlight and WP7): Additional DownloadsSMFv2.7 Full Installer (MSI) - This will install everything you need in order to develop your own SMF player application, including the IIS Smooth Streaming Client. It only includes the assemblies. If you want the source code please follow the link above. Smooth Streaming Sample Player - This is a pre-built player that includes support for IIS Smooth Streaming. You can configure the player to playback your content by simplying editing a configuration file - no need to co...Liberty: v3.2.1.0 Release 10th June 2012: Change Log -Added -Liberty is now digitally signed! If the certificate on Liberty.exe is missing, invalid, or does not state that it was developed by "Xbox Chaos, Open Source Developer," your copy of Liberty may have been altered in some (possibly malicious) way. -Reach Mass biped max health and shield changer -Fixed -H3/ODST Fixed all of the glitches that users kept reporting (also reverted the changes made in 3.2.0.2) -Reach Made some tag names clearer and more consistent between m...Media Companion: Media Companion 3.503b: It has been a while, so it's about time we release another build! Major effort has been for fixing trailer downloads, plus a little bit of work for episode guide tag in TV show NFOs.New Projects.NinJa (dotNinja): An extensive JavaScript Framework revolving around principles found in .NET and aiming to integrate full Intellisense support. bab-rizg: solve unemployment problemBizTalk Multi-part Message Attachments Zipper Pipeline Component: This pipeline component replaces all attachments of a multi-part message, in a send pipeline, for its zipped equivalent.Boggle.Net: A basic implementation of Boggle for WPF.CFScript: CFScript is an ANT-like scripting system for Compact Framework. Tasks like copying files, setting registry values o install CAB files can be done with CFScript.Diablo3: Diablo3Dygraphs.NET: Dygraphs.NETDynamics CRM plugin for nopCommerce: This plugins is a bridge between nopCommerce and Dynamics CRM. nms.gaming: Place holderProject Bright Star: Project Bright Star. Deal with it.RDFSharp: RDFSharp is a library designed to ease the development of .NET applications based on the RDF and Semantic Web data model.SlamCMS: An application framework that allows you to build content managed sites leveraging SharePoint 2010 for publishing with tools to query and manifest your data.test02: no

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• Let your Signature Experience drive IT-decision making

  - by Tania Le Voi

  Today’s CIO job description:  ‘’Align IT infrastructure and solutions with business goals and objectives ; AND while doing so reduce costs; BUT ALSO, be innovative, ensure the architectures are adaptable and agile as we need to act today on the changes that we may request tomorrow.”   Sound like an unachievable request? The fact is, reality dictates that CIO’s are put under this type of pressure to deliver more with less. In a past career phase I spent a few years as an IT Relationship Manager for a large Insurance company. This is a role that we see all too infrequently in many of our customers, and it’s a shame.  The purpose of this role was to build a bridge, a relationship between IT and the business. Key to achieving that goal was to ensure the same language was being spoken and more importantly that objectives were commonly understood - hence service and projects were delivered to time, to budget and actually solved the business problems. In reality IT and the business are already married, but the relationship is most often defined as ‘supplier’ of IT rather than a ‘trusted partner’. To deliver business value they need to understand how to work together effectively to attain this next level of partnership. The Business cannot compete if they do not get a new product to market ahead of the competition, or for example act in a timely manner to address a new industry problem such as a legislative change. An even better example is when the Application or Service fails and the Business takes a hit by bad publicity, being trending topics on social media and losing direct revenue from online channels. For this reason alone Business and IT need the alignment of their priorities and deliverables now more than ever! Take a look at Forrester’s recent study that found ‘many IT respondents considering themselves to be trusted partners of the business but their efforts are impaired by the inadequacy of tools and organizations’.  IT Meet the Business; Business Meet IT So what is going on? We talk about aligning the business with IT but the reality is it’s difficult to do. Like any relationship each side has different goals and needs and language can be a barrier; business vs. technology jargon! What if we could translate the needs of both sides into actionable information, backed by data both sides understand, presented in a meaningful way?  Well now we can with the Business-Driven Application Management capabilities in Oracle Enterprise Manager 12cR2! Enterprise Manager’s Business-Driven Application Management capabilities provide the information that IT needs to understand the impact of its decisions on business criteria.  No longer does IT need to be focused solely on speeds and feeds, performance and throughput – now IT can understand IT’s impact on business KPIs like inventory turns, order-to-cash cycle, pipeline-to-forecast, and similar.  Similarly, now the line of business can understand which IT services are most critical for the KPIs they care about. There are a good deal of resources on Oracle Technology Network that describe the functionality of these products, so I won’t’ rehash them here.  What I want to talk about is what you do with these products. What’s next after we meet? Where do you start? Step 1:  Identify the Signature Experience. This is THE business process (or set of processes) that is core to the business, the one that drives the economic engine, the process that a customer recognises the company brand for, reputation, the customer experience, the process that a CEO would state as his number one priority. The crème de la crème of your business! Once you have nailed this it gets easy as Enterprise Manager 12c makes it easy. Step 2:  Map the Signature Experience to underlying IT.  Taking the signature experience, map out the touch points of the components that play a part in ensuring this business transaction is successful end to end, think of it like mapping out a critical path; the applications, middleware, databases and hardware. Use the wealth of Enterprise Manager features such as Systems, Services, Business Application Targets and Business Transaction Management (BTM) to assist you. Adding Real User Experience Insight (RUEI) into the mix will make the end to end customer satisfaction story transparent. Work with the business and define meaningful key performance indicators (KPI’s) and thresholds to enable you to report and action upon. Step 3:  Observe the data over time.  You now have meaningful insight into every step enabling your signature experience and you understand the implication of that experience on your underlying IT.  Watch if for a few months, see what happens and reconvene with your business stakeholders and set clear and measurable targets which can re-define service levels.  Step 4:  Change the information about which you and the business communicate.  It’s amazing what happens when you and the business speak the same language.  You’ll be able to make more informed business and IT decisions. From here IT can identify where/how budget is spent whether on the level of support, performance, capacity, HA, DR, certification etc. IT SLA’s no longer need be focused on metrics such as %availability but structured around business process requirements. The power of this way of thinking doesn’t end here. IT staff get to see and understand how their own role contributes to the business making them accountable for the business service. Take a step further and appraise your staff on the business competencies that are linked to the service availability. For the business, the language barrier is removed by producing targeted reports on the signature experience core to the business and therefore key to the CEO. Chargeback or show back becomes easier to justify as the ‘cost of day per outage’ can be more easily calculated; the business will be able to translate the cost to the business to the cost/value of the underlying IT that supports it. Used this way, Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c is a key enabler to a harmonious relationship between the end customer the business and IT to deliver ultimate service and satisfaction. Just engage with the business upfront, make the signature experience visible and let Enterprise Manager 12c do the rest. In the next blog entry we will cover some of the Enterprise Manager features mentioned to enable you to implement this new way of working.  

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• Where is my VMware-ws FreeNAS CIFS(ZFS) bottle-neck?

  - by maka

  Background: I'm building a quiet HTPC + NAS that is also supposed to be used for general computer usage. I'm so far generally happy with things, it was just that I was expecting a little better IO performance. I have no clue if my expectations are unreal. The NAS is there as a general purpose file storage and as a media server for XBMC and other devices. ZFS is a requirement. Question: Where is my bottle-neck, and is there anything I can do config wise, to improve my performance? I'm thinking VM-disk settings could be something but I really have no idea where to go since I'm neither experienced with FreeNAS nor VMware-WS. Tests: When I'm on the host OS and copy files (from the SSD) to the CIFS share, I get around 30 Mbytes/sec read and write. When I'm on my laptop laptop, wired to the network, I get about the same specs. The test I've done are with a 16 GB ISO, and with about 200 MB of RARs and I've tried avoiding the RAM-cache by reading different files than the ones I'm writing ( 10 GB). It feels like having less CPU cores is a lot more efficient, since the resource manager in Windows reports less CPU-usage. With 4 cores in VMware, CPU usage was 50-80%, with 1 core it was 25-60%. EDIT: HD ActiveTime was quite high on SSD so I moved the page file, disabled hibernate and enabled Win DiskCache both on SSD and RAID. This resulted in no real performance difference for one file, but if i transferred 2 files the total speed went up to 50 Mbytes/s vs ~40. The ActiveTime avg also went down a lot (to ~20%) but has now higher bursts. DiskIO is on ~ 30-35 Mbytes/s avgs, with ~100Mb bursts. Network is on 200-250Mbits/s with ~45 active TCP connections. Hardware Asus F2A85-M Pro A10-5700 16GB DDR3 1600 OCZ Vertex 2 128GB SSD 2x Generic 1tb 7200 RPM drives as RAID0 (in win7) Intel Gigabit Desktop CT Software Host OS: Win7 (SSD) VMware Worksation 9 (SSD) FreeNAS 8.3 VM (20GB VDisk on SSD) CPU: I've tried 1, 2 and 4 cores. Virtualisation engine, Preferred mode: Automatic 10,24Gb ram 50Gb SCSI VDisk on the RAID0, VDisk is formatted as ZFS and exposed through CIFS through FreeNAS. NIC Bridge, Replicate physical network state Below are two typical process print-outs while I'm transfering one file to the CIFS share. last pid: 2707; load averages: 0.60, 0.43, 0.24 up 0+00:07:05 00:34:26 32 processes: 2 running, 30 sleeping Mem: 101M Active, 53M Inact, 1620M Wired, 2188K Cache, 149M Buf, 8117M Free Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND 2640 root 1 102 0 50164K 10364K RUN 0:25 25.98% smbd 1897 root 6 44 0 168M 74808K uwait 0:02 0.00% python last pid: 2746; load averages: 0.93, 0.60, 0.33 up 0+00:08:53 00:36:14 33 processes: 2 running, 31 sleeping Mem: 101M Active, 53M Inact, 4722M Wired, 2188K Cache, 152M Buf, 5015M Free Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND 2640 root 1 76 0 50164K 10364K RUN 0:52 16.99% smbd 1897 root 6 44 0 168M 74816K uwait 0:02 0.00% python I'm sorry if my question isn't phrased right, I'm really bad at these kind of things, and it is the first time I post here at SU. I also appreciate any other suggestions to something, I could have missed.

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• WNDR3700 Router + Cisco SG200-08 + LACP + Dual Uplink

  - by kobaltz

  Background I have a storage server that has several virtual machine images stored on them. I would store them locally, but I have limited space on my desktop (using SSD storage). I would like to increase the bandwidth between the desktop and the storage server by using two NICs on each computer. My original configuration allowed about 55MBps between the desktop and storage server. This storage server also has several TBs of documents, pictures, movies, vms, and ISO/programs. The storage server has 8 1.5TB hard drives in a RAID 10 configuration with a hardware RAID controller. The benchmarks on the RAID 10 are about 300MBps. Configuration In short, I am trying to bridge my switch and router. The switch is a small 8 port Cisco smart switch that supports 802.3ad LACP. I have two computers plugged into the switch, each with 2 Intel Gigabit NICs. The first computer is a Windows 7 machine that has the Intel ANS software installed. I have LACP configured with the computer and now show 3 NICs (2 Physical + 1 TEAM Virtual @ 2Gbps). It looks like this computer is configured correctly. I trunked the two ports that this computer is plugged into with the switch's web interface. The second computer is a homebrew storage box running debian. I also have the bonding enabled on this machine and the switch configured with LACP. Without having the WNDR3700 router in the picture yet, I am able to communicate between the Windows 7 machine and the debian box since they both have static IP addresses. With LACP enabled on both machines I am getting about 106-108MBps speeds. Issue I plug in a network cable from the switch into the router and enable DHCP on the desktop. I saw no need to have a static address on the desktop. My transfer rates are still from 106MBps-108MBps. While this is still a boost, I am trying to figure out how to get about 140-180MBps. I am thinking that I need to increase the bandwidth from the router to the switch. My switch allows 4 groups for port trunking. I plugged in a second network cable from the router to the switch. My question is, what is the proper way to fix this issue. Should I port trunk the two ports that are going from the switch to the router? Keep in mind that the router is a WNDR3700 and is unsure whether or not it supports LACP. I do have OpenWRT installed on the router, but it still wasn't clear in any documentation that I found if it supported 802.3ad LACP standards. I am also wondering if there needs to be anything changed within the Cisco settings. [Edit] - Corrected some numbers, wasn't really paying attention. It looks like the speeds though at least two NICs are bonded with LACP is still reaching the max bandwidth of one port. Is there a way to configure the switch so that I can increase this bandwidth? Also, on the storage server, I had a couple of extra NICs laying around and threw them on there as well. Another EDIT and More Findings I happened to look at the traffic of each individual NIC and think that I see the problem. I tested with a simple transfer for a 4GB file. I noticed that only one of the NICs was taking the load of the traffic. I then copied the file back to the Storage Server and noticed that the other NIC was sending out the traffic. I have 802.3ad LACP enabled on the two NICs and I see that it gets enabled dynamically on the switch's interface. Should I be using Static Link Aggregation?

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