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  • How much information do pdb files contain? (C# / .NET)

    - by Silver Dragon
    Is is wise to redistribute the pdb files along with a commercial application? Occasionally, I'm using the stack trace to get a more detailed error reporting logs from the deployed applications; can this functionality be achieved without relying to those files? Also, how much hints of the original source code does these files contain? Would it be easier to reverse-engineer my application using it?

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  • jquery Hover and while loop

    - by DragoN
    i have a table of php with while loop to show the records i added a jquery hover to do that : if hovered it show a message in same row but the problem is : if hover it show a message in all rows here is css: <style> .tansa{ position: absolute; margin-right: -60px; margin-top:-25px; background: #CBDFF3; border: 1px solid #4081C3; font-size: 0.88em; padding: 2px 7px; display: inline-block; border-radius: 8px; -moz-border-radius: 8px; -webkit-border-radius: 8px; line-height: 1.2em; text-shadow: 0 0 0em #FFF; overflow: hidden; text-align: center; color:black; display:none; } .arrow{ position: relative; width: 0; height: 0; top: -25px; border-top: 5px solid #000000; border-right: 5px solid transparent; border-left: 5px solid transparent; display:none; } </style> here is my php : <table><tr>row</tr> <?php $results = mysql_query("select * from MyTable"); while{$r = mysql_fetch_array($results)){ echo "<tr><td>Row : <img src='img/tans.png' width='24' height='24' class='tansef' /><span class='tansa' >the message</span><div class='arrow'></div></td></tr>"; } ?> </table> here is jquery $(document).ready(function(){ $('.tansef').hover(function(){ var sh = $('.tansa'); var sharrow = $('.arrow'); sh.show(); sharrow.show(); },function(){ var shs = $('.tansa'); var sharrows = $('.arrow'); shs.hide(); sharrows.hide(); }); }); any solution to show the message in each row only

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  • Apache taking up too much CPU

    - by andrewtweber
    I'm trying to manage a server on Amazon for a network of sites that receives about 100 million pageviews per month. Unfortunately, nobody out of my team of 5 developers has much server admin experience. Right now we have the MaxClients set to 1400. Currently our traffic is about average, and we have 1150 total Apache processes running, which use about 2% CPU each! Out of those 1150, 800 of them are currently sleeping, but still taking up CPU. I'm sure there are ways to optimize this. I have a few thoughts: It appears Apache is creating a new process for every single connection. Is this normal? Is there a way to more quickly kill the sleeping processes? Should we turn KeepAlive on? Each page loads about 15-20 medium-sized graphics and a lot of javascript/css. So, here's our Apache setup. We do plan on contracting a server admin asap, but I would really appreciate some advice until we can find someone. Timeout 25 KeepAlive Off MaxKeepAliveRequests 200 KeepAliveTimeout 5 <IfModule prefork.c> StartServers 100 MinSpareServers 20 MaxSpareServers 50 ServerLimit 1400 MaxClients 1400 MaxRequestsPerChild 5000 </IfModule> <IfModule worker.c> StartServers 4 MaxClients 400 MinSpareThreads 25 MaxSpareThreads 75 ThreadsPerChild 25 MaxRequestsPerChild 0 </IfModule> Full top output: top - 23:44:36 up 1 day, 6:43, 4 users, load average: 379.14, 379.17, 377.22 Tasks: 1153 total, 379 running, 774 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 71.9%us, 26.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 1.9%si, 0.0%st Mem: 70343000k total, 23768448k used, 46574552k free, 527376k buffers Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 10054596k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1756 mysql 20 0 10.2g 1.8g 5256 S 19.8 2.7 904:41.13 mysqld 21515 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4512 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.42 httpd 21524 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4032 R 2.1 0.0 0:32.63 httpd 21544 apache 20 0 394m 16m 4084 R 2.1 0.0 0:36.38 httpd 21643 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4360 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.20 httpd 21817 apache 20 0 396m 17m 4064 R 2.1 0.0 0:38.22 httpd 22134 apache 20 0 395m 17m 4584 R 2.1 0.0 0:35.62 httpd 22211 apache 20 0 397m 18m 4104 R 2.1 0.0 0:29.91 httpd 22267 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4636 R 2.1 0.0 0:35.29 httpd 22334 apache 20 0 397m 18m 4096 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.86 httpd 22549 apache 20 0 395m 17m 4056 R 2.1 0.0 0:31.01 httpd 22612 apache 20 0 397m 19m 4152 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.34 httpd 22721 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4060 R 2.1 0.0 0:32.76 httpd 22932 apache 20 0 396m 17m 4020 R 2.1 0.0 0:37.34 httpd 22933 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4060 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.77 httpd 22949 apache 20 0 396m 18m 4060 R 2.1 0.0 0:34.61 httpd 22956 apache 20 0 402m 24m 4072 R 2.1 0.0 0:41.45 httpd

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  • Running an rsync sweep before initializing lsyncd for synchronizing instances on EC2

    - by chrisallenlane
    My company uses several EC2 servers that will scale up and down according to the load we're receiving on our sites at any given moment. For the sake of our discussion here, we're running four instances: master.ourdomain.com - the file syncing "hub" of the webservers www1/www2/www3.ourdomain.com - three webservers which turn on or off as dictated by load I'm using lsyncd to keep all of the webservers in sync, and for the most part, it's working quite well. We're using a two-way syncing scheme, such that each webserver syncs against master, and master syncs against each webserver. Thus, the webservers are kept in sync, even though they aren't syncing against each other directly. I'm having one problem that I'm having a hard time solving,though. It occurs under these circumstances: When changes are made on master (perhaps after we've pushed new code), while some of the redundant webservers are sleeping And then a sleeping webserver wakes-up to absorb load Under that circumstance, I would like the following to happen: First, the newly-awoken webserver should sync its file structure - one way - against master, to bring its web application code up-to-date. Then, and only then, should it begin pushing changes in its file structure back to master. Unfortunately, currently, when a sleeping server is started, when lsyncd starts up, it pushes changes back to master before updating its own codebase, thus overwriting new code with old. Thus, before lsyncd starts, I'd like to be able to synchronize the webservers code against master's, perhaps by running a simple one-way rsync against the two machines. We're running lsyncd v.2, and I've tried to make this happen by using the "bash" configuration options documented in the lsyncd manual. My configuration file looks like this: settings = { logfile = "/home/user/log/lsyncd/log.txt", statusFile = "/home/user/log/lsyncd/status.txt", maxProcesses = 2, nodaemon = false, } bash = { onStartup = "rsync [email protected]:/home/user/www /home/user/www" } sync{ default.rsyncssh, source="/home/user/www/", host="[email protected]", targetdir="/home/user/www/", rsyncOpts="-ltus", excludeFrom="/home/user/conf/lsyncd/exclude" } (I've obviously redacted that file somewhat to protect the identities of the guilty.) Simply put, though, this just isn't working. How else might I approach this problem? I was looking at the --delete-after option in man rsync, but I don't think that does what I'm looking for. Are there any suggestions about how I should approach this problem? Thanks for lending your time and expertise. Chris

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  • Gnome 3 screensaver (not suspend) resume hook?

    - by Daniel
    Since whenever my laptop screen resumes sleeping (i.e. wakes up from screensaving) some settings are reset, such as keyboard backlight, I'd like to run some scripts each time this happens. I'm using gnome 3 with fedora 17 by the way. When researching this issue I came across pm-utils which allows one to hook anything to events handled by pm-utils but it seems to me monitor sleeping (i.e. screensaving) is not one of them. Looks like pm-utils only handles suspend and hybernate. So is there a way to hook up custom programs to screensaver?

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  • I&rsquo;m sorry RPGs, it&rsquo;s not you, it&rsquo;s me: The birth of my game idea

    - by George Clingerman
    One of the things I’ve had to give up in order to have some development time at night is gaming. It’s something I refused to admit for years but I’ve just had to face the facts. I’m no longer a gamer. I just don’t have hours and hours of free time to pour into gaming and when I do have hours and hours of free time I want to pour them into game development. That doesn’t mean I don’t game at all! I play games pretty much every day. It just means I’ve moved more into the casual game realm. It’s all I have time for when juggling priorities in my life. That means that games like Gears of War 2 sit shrink wrapped on my shelf and although I popped Dragon Age into my Xbox 360 one time, I barely made it through the opening sequence and haven’t had time to sit down and play again. Instead I’m playing short games like Jamestown, Atom Zombie Smasher, Fortix or if I have time to jump in and play a few rounds maybe some Monday Night Combat or Team Fortress 2. These are games I can instantly get into and play for just a short period of time and then walk away. Breath of Death VII saved my life: Back in the day (way, way back in the day) I used to be a pretty big RPG fan. Not big by a lot of RPG gamers' standards (most of the RPGs RPG fans about I’ve never heard of) but I used to LOVE to play them on the NES, SNES and Genesis and considered that my genre. Final Fantasy, Shining in the Darkness, Bard’s Tale, Faxanadu, Shadowrun, Ultima, Dragon Warrior, Chrono Trigger, Phantasy Star, Shining Force and well the list could go on but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head. I loved playing RPGs and they were my games of choice. After my first son was born (this was just about 12 years ago), I tried to continue playing RPGs and purchased games like Baldur’s Gate I & II, Neverwinter Nights, Fable, then a few of the Final Fantasy’s then Kingdom Hearts. I kept buying these games and then only playing for about fifteen minutes and never getting back to them. I still loved RPGs but they just no longer fit into my life (I still haven’t accepted that since I still purchased Dragon Age II for some reason and convinced myself I’d find the time). Adding three more sons to the mix (that’s 4 total) didn’t help much to finding more RPG time (except for Breath of Death VII and other XBLIG RPG titles, thanks guys!) All work and no RPG: A few months ago as I was sitting thinking about the lack of RPGs in my life and talking to my wife about why I wish RPGs were different and easier for a dad like me to get into. She seemed like she was listening, so I started listing all the things that made them impossible for me to play. Here’s a short list I came up with. They take 15 billion hours to complete I have a few minutes at a time I can grab to play them if I want to have time to code. At that rate it would take me 9 trillion years to beat just one RPG. There’s such long spans of times between when I can play them I forget what I was even doing so I have to spend most of the playtime I have just figuring that out and then my play time is over. Repeat. I’ll never finish one and since it takes so long to get to the fun part in an RPG, I’m never having fun. RPGs aren’t fun if you don’t have hours to play them at a time. As you can see based on my science and math, RPGs aren’t fun for me any more. From there my brain started toying around with ideas of RPGs that would work for me. They would have to be a short RPG, you know one you could beat in a single play session. A dad sized play session. I started thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a fifteen minute RPG? That got me laughing and I took that as a good sign that it sounded fun and so I thought about it a little more. I immediately discarded the idea of doing a real RPG. I’m sure a short RPG like that could be done but it wasn’t the vibe that I had in my head. No this was going to be something that just had the core essence of an RPG. In reality what I’d be making would be more of an arcade style game. One with high scores and lots of crazy action on the screen. And that’s when it hit me. It would be a speed run RPG. That’s the basics of the game I’m working on.   The Elevator Pitch: It’s a 2D top down RPG themed arcade game focused on speed. It sounds like an RPG, smells like an RPG but it’s merely emulating an RPG. The game is focused on fun and mayhem in RPG form with players leveling up in seconds instead of hours and rushing to finish quests as quickly as possible because they’ve only got fifteen minutes before EVIL overtakes the world. If the player takes longer than fifteen minutes, it’s game over man. One to four player co-operative play to really see just how fast players can level up and beat the game. Gamers will compete on leaderboards for bragging rights for fastest 1, 2, 3, and 4 player speed runs, lowest leveled characters to beat the game, highest leveled characters to beat the game and so on. Times will be tracked for everything from how long a player sat distributing stats, equipping items, talking to NPCs to running around the level. These stats will be shown at the end of each quest/level so the players can work on improving their speed run for that part of the game next time around. It’s the perfect RPG for those of us who only have fifteen minutes of game time! Where I’m at: I’m still at the prototyping stage attempting to but all the basic framework pieces in place that will at minimum give me one level to rush through. I’ve been working on this prototype for about a month now though so I’m going to have to step it up a bit or I’m not going to get finished in time (remember I’ve only got 85 days left!) Lots of the game code is in place (although pretty sloppy) but I still can’t play through that first quest/level just yet. That’s my goal to finish up by the end of next Sunday (3/25/2012). You can all hold me to that and cheer me on or heckle me throughout the week. Either way that should help me stay a bit more motivated and focused. In my head this feels like it’s going to be a fun game so I’m looking forward to seeing how it actually plays!

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  • “Advanced” talk to text program [on hold]

    - by Rocky
    So, I have asked this question on 3 sites before, without getting a good answer, basically what I need is: being able to put recorded voice in a file (preferrebly .txt) Automatic recording when saying a key-word Automatic stop of the recording after a bit of silence If you have any idea on how this is possible I would be very happy :) I tried dragon natural speaking before as someone said it would work (it did not) so unless you know how that is possible dont say it ;) (Not sure what site to ask this on)

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  • Implementing camera for 2d side scroller game ?

    - by Mr.Gando
    Hello, I'm implementing a 2D side scroller for iOS (using C/C++ with OpenGL) (beat'em up style like double dragon/final fight ). My scenes are composed of one cyclical background image ( the end of the image connects perfectly with the beginning ). This is to produce a cyclical scroll effect. I was wondering how could I implement a camera that follows my player movement ? ( Resources / Links are greatly appreciated with explanations :) )

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  • Good resources for language design

    - by Aaron Digulla
    There are lots of books about good web design, UI design, etc. With the advent of Xtext, it's very simple to write your own language. What are good books and resources about language design? I'm not looking for a book about compiler building (like the dragon book) but something that answers: How to create a grammar that is forgiving (like adding optional trailing commas)? Which grammar patterns cause problems for users of a language? How create a compact grammar without introducing ambiguities

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  • 25 Passwords to Avoid to Thwart Hackers

    SplashData, a vendor of smartphone productivity applications for consumers and businesses, recently released a list of the top 25 most commonly used passwords for 2011. The company compiled the list after analyzing files of stolen passwords that hackers posted online to share with their cybercriminal colleagues. Without further adieu, here is the list of passwords that made SplashData's top 25: password, 123456, 12345678, qwerty, abc123, monkey, 1234567, letmein, trustno1, dragon, baseball, 111111, iloveyou, master, sunshine, ashley, bailey, passw0rd, shadow, 123123, 654321, superman, qazwsx...

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  • What forms of non-interactive RPG battle systems exist?

    - by Landstander
    I am interested in systems that allow players to develop a battle plan or setup strategy for the party or characters prior to entering battle. During the battle the player either cannot input commands or can choose not to. Rule Based In this system the player can setup a list of rules in the form of [Condition - Action] that are then ordered by priority. Gambits in Final Fantasy XII Tactics in Dragon Age Origin & II

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  • Multiple Producers Single Consumer Queue

    - by Talguy
    I am new to multithreading and have designed a program that receives data from two microcontroller measuring various temperatures (Ambient and Water) and draws the data to the screen. Right now the program is singly threaded and its performance SUCKS A BIG ONE. I get basic design approaches with multithreading but not well enough to create a thread to do a task but what I don't get is how to get threads to perform seperate task and place the data into a shared data pool. I figured that I need to make a queue that has one consumer and multiple producers (would like to use std::queue). I have seen some code on the gtkmm threading docs that show a single Con/Pro queue and they would lock the queue object produce data and signal the sleeping thread that it is finished then the producer would sleep. For what I need would I need to sleep a thread, would there be data conflicts if i didn't sleep any of the threads, and would sleeping a thread cause a data signifcant data delay (I need realtime data to be drawn 30 frames a sec) How would I go about coding such a queue using the gtkmm/glibmm library.

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  • Putting a thread to sleep until event X occurs

    - by tipu
    I'm writing to many files in a threaded app and I'm creating one handler per file. I have HandlerFactory class that manages the distribution of these handlers. What I'd like to do is that thread A requests and gets foo.txt's file handle from the HandlerFactory class thread B requests foo.txt's file handler handler class recognizes that this file handle has been checked out handler class puts thread A to sleep thread B closes file handle using a wrapper method from HandlerFactory HandlerFactory notifies sleeping threads thread B wakes and successfully gets foo.txt's file handle This is what I have so far, def get_handler(self, file_path, type): self.lock.acquire() if file_path not in self.handlers: self.handlers[file_path] = open(file_path, type) elif not self.handlers[file_path].closed: time.sleep(1) self.lock.release() return self.handlers[file_path][type] I believe this covers the sleeping and handler retrieval successfully, but I am unsure how to wake up all threads, or even better wake up a specific thread.

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  • The clock hands of the buffer cache

    Over a leisurely beer at our local pub, the Waggon and Horses, Phil Factor was holding forth on the esoteric, but strangely poetic, language of SQL Server internals, riddled as it is with 'sleeping threads', 'stolen pages', and 'memory sweeps'. Suddenly, however, my attention was grabbed by his mention of the 'clock hands of the buffer cache'....Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Disable keyboard suspend key

    - by Jcubed
    How do I disable my keyboard's suspend key? My keyboard (Logitech k800) has a key for powering off the pc, in Ubuntu its working as a suspend button. I've tried assigning another shortcut to that button, but its not preventing the computer from sleeping. Also, I'm not sure if there's a difference between suspend and sleep, but it appears to be turning the computer completely off, but when I start it back up it resumes where it left off.

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  • Top 3 SEO Tips to Get Visibility in Search Engines

    Over the couple of years, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become an important issue for home based internet marketers. However, getting your site visible in the search engine is not an easy task that you think. Sadly, it's not like just hosting a site and adding some articles on the site and hence sleeping and thinking that you are making money.

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  • Xorg eating up too much RAM on Ubuntu 9.10 box

    - by Yang
    Xorg is eating up 444MB of 2GB total RAM on my Ubuntu 9.10 x86_64 machine with nvidia drivers installed for the nvidia G86 (GeForce 8300 GS). top shows: top - 18:21:41 up 6 days, 2:40, 9 users, load average: 0.46, 1.12, 1.22 Tasks: 266 total, 3 running, 262 sleeping, 1 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 8.4%us, 2.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 89.1%id, 0.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 2055736k total, 1965136k used, 90600k free, 3952k buffers Swap: 979924k total, 979908k used, 16k free, 102636k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1432 root 20 0 1154m 442m 7492 S 8 22.0 32:56.97 Xorg 18462 yang 20 0 1001m 219m 8356 S 0 10.9 5:13.25 chrome 24099 yang 20 0 865m 83m 13m S 0 4.2 0:06.91 chrome xrestop shows: xrestop - Display: :0.0 Monitoring 47 clients. XErrors: 0 Pixmaps: 40430K total, Other: 142K total, All: 40573K total res-base Wins GCs Fnts Pxms Misc Pxm mem Other Total PID Identifier 1c00000 21 46 1 19 697 9128K 18K 9146K 3169 x-nautilus-desktop 1000000 4 3 0 17 194 9000K 4K 9004K 3134 gnome-settings-daemon 1600000 51 2 1 25 1100 7648K 28K 7676K ? compiz For comparison, here's my other Ubuntu box, which also has compiz etc. enabled but with ATI RV370 (Radeon X300SE): top - 18:18:18 up 58 days, 4:27, 9 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Tasks: 224 total, 1 running, 223 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.8%id, 0.5%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 1024964k total, 987124k used, 37840k free, 247012k buffers Swap: 2048276k total, 94296k used, 1953980k free, 264744k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 24324 yang 20 0 61936 35m 6364 S 0 3.5 4:35.84 nxagent 1768 ntop 20 0 190m 32m 5388 S 1 3.2 283:36.15 ntop 1178 root 20 0 60588 29m 1788 S 0 3.0 5:48.89 console-kit-dae ... 1315 root 20 0 343m 4956 4020 S 0 0.5 3:43.87 Xorg Any ideas on how to get to the bottom of this? (i.e. not "Log out"/"Reboot") Thanks in advance.

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  • Nginx + uWSGI + Django performance stuck on 100rq/s

    - by dancio
    I have configured Nginx with uWSGI and Django on CentOS 6 x64 (3.06GHz i3 540, 4GB), which should easily handle 2500 rq/s but when I run ab test ( ab -n 1000 -c 100 ) performance stops at 92 - 100 rq/s. Nginx: user nginx; worker_processes 2; events { worker_connections 2048; use epoll; } uWSGI: Emperor /usr/sbin/uwsgi --master --no-orphans --pythonpath /var/python --emperor /var/python/*/uwsgi.ini [uwsgi] socket = 127.0.0.2:3031 master = true processes = 5 env = DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=x.settings env = HTTPS=on module = django.core.handlers.wsgi:WSGIHandler() disable-logging = true catch-exceptions = false post-buffering = 8192 harakiri = 30 harakiri-verbose = true vacuum = true listen = 500 optimize = 2 sysclt changes: # Increase TCP max buffer size setable using setsockopt() net.ipv4.tcp_rmem = 4096 87380 8388608 net.ipv4.tcp_wmem = 4096 87380 8388608 net.core.rmem_max = 8388608 net.core.wmem_max = 8388608 net.core.netdev_max_backlog = 5000 net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 5000 net.ipv4.tcp_window_scaling = 1 net.core.somaxconn = 2048 # Avoid a smurf attack net.ipv4.icmp_echo_ignore_broadcasts = 1 # Optimization for port usefor LBs # Increase system file descriptor limit fs.file-max = 65535 I did sysctl -p to enable changes. Idle server info: top - 13:34:58 up 102 days, 18:35, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 Tasks: 118 total, 1 running, 117 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3983068k total, 2125088k used, 1857980k free, 262528k buffers Swap: 2104504k total, 0k used, 2104504k free, 606996k cached free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3889 2075 1814 0 256 592 -/+ buffers/cache: 1226 2663 Swap: 2055 0 2055 **During the test:** top - 13:45:21 up 102 days, 18:46, 1 user, load average: 3.73, 1.51, 0.58 Tasks: 122 total, 8 running, 114 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 93.5%us, 5.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.2%id, 0.0%wa, 0.1%hi, 1.1%si, 0.0%st Mem: 3983068k total, 2127564k used, 1855504k free, 262580k buffers Swap: 2104504k total, 0k used, 2104504k free, 608760k cached free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3889 2125 1763 0 256 595 -/+ buffers/cache: 1274 2615 Swap: 2055 0 2055 iotop 30141 be/4 nginx 0.00 B/s 7.78 K/s 0.00 % 0.00 % nginx: wo~er process Where is the bottleneck ? Or what am I doing wrong ?

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  • Pain Comes Instantly

    - by user701213
    When I look back at recent blog entries – many of which are not all that current (more on where my available writing time is going later) – I am struck by how many of them focus on public policy or legislative issues instead of, say, the latest nefarious cyberattack or exploit (or everyone’s favorite new pastime: coining terms for the Coming Cyberpocalypse: “digital Pearl Harbor” is so 1941). Speaking of which, I personally hope evil hackers from Malefactoria will someday hack into my bathroom scale – which in a future time will be connected to the Internet because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great to have absolutely everything in your life Internet-enabled? – and recalibrate it so I’m 10 pounds thinner. The horror. In part, my focus on public policy is due to an admitted limitation of my skill set. I enjoy reading technical articles about exploits and cybersecurity trends, but writing a blog entry on those topics would take more research than I have time for and, quite honestly, doesn’t play to my strengths. The first rule of writing is “write what you know.” The bigger contributing factor to my recent paucity of blog entries is that more and more of my waking hours are spent engaging in “thrust and parry” activity involving emerging regulations of some sort or other. I’ve opined in earlier blogs about what constitutes good and reasonable public policy so nobody can accuse me of being reflexively anti-regulation. That said, you have so many cycles in the day, and most of us would rather spend it slaying actual dragons than participating in focus groups on whether dragons are really a problem, whether lassoing them (with organic, sustainable and recyclable lassos) is preferable to slaying them – after all, dragons are people, too - and whether we need lasso compliance auditors to make sure lassos are being used correctly and humanely. (A point that seems to evade many rule makers: slaying dragons actually accomplishes something, whereas talking about “approved dragon slaying procedures and requirements” wastes the time of those who are competent to dispatch actual dragons and who were doing so very well without the input of “dragon-slaying theorists.”) Unfortunately for so many of us who would just get on with doing our day jobs, cybersecurity is rapidly devolving into the “focus groups on dragon dispatching” realm, which actual dragons slayers have little choice but to participate in. The general trend in cybersecurity is that powers-that-be – which encompasses groups other than just legislators – are often increasingly concerned and therefore feel they need to Do Something About Cybersecurity. Many seem to believe that if only we had the right amount of regulation and oversight, there would be no data breaches: a breach simply must mean Someone Is At Fault and Needs Supervision. (Leaving aside the fact that we have lots of home invasions despite a) guard dogs b) liberal carry permits c) alarm systems d) etc.) Also note that many well-managed and security-aware organizations, like the US Department of Defense, still get hacked. More specifically, many powers-that-be feel they must direct industry in a multiplicity of ways, up to and including how we actually build and deploy information technology systems. The more prescriptive the requirement, the more regulators or overseers a) can be seen to be doing something b) feel as if they are doing something regardless of whether they are actually doing something useful or cost effective. Note: an unfortunate concomitant of Doing Something is that often the cure is worse than the ailment. That is, doing what overseers want creates unfortunate byproducts that they either didn’t foresee or worse, don’t care about. After all, the logic goes, we Did Something. Prescriptive practice in the IT industry is problematic for a number of reasons. For a start, prescriptive guidance is really only appropriate if: • It is cost effective• It is “current” (meaning, the guidance doesn’t require the use of the technical equivalent of buggy whips long after horse-drawn transportation has become passé)*• It is practical (that is, pragmatic, proven and effective in the real world, not theoretical and unproven)• It solves the right problem With the above in mind, heading up the list of “you must be joking” regulations are recent disturbing developments in the Payment Card Industry (PCI) world. I’d like to give PCI kahunas the benefit of the doubt about their intentions, except that efforts by Oracle among others to make them aware of “unfortunate side effects of your requirements” – which is as tactful I can be for reasons that I believe will become obvious below - have gone, to-date, unanswered and more importantly, unchanged. A little background on PCI before I get too wound up. In 2008, the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Security Standards Council (SSC) introduced the Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS). That standard requires vendors of payment applications to ensure that their products implement specific requirements and undergo security assessment procedures. In order to have an application listed as a Validated Payment Application (VPA) and available for use by merchants, software vendors are required to execute the PCI Payment Application Vendor Release Agreement (VRA). (Are you still with me through all the acronyms?) Beginning in August 2010, the VRA imposed new obligations on vendors that are extraordinary and extraordinarily bad, short-sighted and unworkable. Specifically, PCI requires vendors to disclose (dare we say “tell all?”) to PCI any known security vulnerabilities and associated security breaches involving VPAs. ASAP. Think about the impact of that. PCI is asking a vendor to disclose to them: • Specific details of security vulnerabilities • Including exploit information or technical details of the vulnerability • Whether or not there is any mitigation available (as in a patch) PCI, in turn, has the right to blab about any and all of the above – specifically, to distribute all the gory details of what is disclosed - to the PCI SSC, qualified security assessors (QSAs), and any affiliate or agent or adviser of those entities, who are in turn permitted to share it with their respective affiliates, agents, employees, contractors, merchants, processors, service providers and other business partners. This assorted crew can’t be more than, oh, hundreds of thousands of entities. Does anybody believe that several hundred thousand people can keep a secret? Or that several hundred thousand people are all equally trustworthy? Or that not one of the people getting all that information would blab vulnerability details to a bad guy, even by accident? Or be a bad guy who uses the information to break into systems? (Wait, was that the Easter Bunny that just hopped by? Bringing world peace, no doubt.) Sarcasm aside, common sense tells us that telling lots of people a secret is guaranteed to “unsecret” the secret. Notably, being provided details of a vulnerability (without a patch) is of little or no use to companies running the affected application. Few users have the technological sophistication to create a workaround, and even if they do, most workarounds break some other functionality in the application or surrounding environment. Also, given the differences among corporate implementations of any application, it is highly unlikely that a single workaround is going to work for all corporate users. So until a patch is developed by the vendor, users remain at risk of exploit: even more so if the details of vulnerability have been widely shared. Sharing that information widely before a patch is available therefore does not help users, and instead helps only those wanting to exploit known security bugs. There’s a shocker for you. Furthermore, we already know that insider information about security vulnerabilities inevitably leaks, which is why most vendors closely hold such information and limit dissemination until a patch is available (and frequently limit dissemination of technical details even with the release of a patch). That’s the industry norm, not that PCI seems to realize or acknowledge that. Why would anybody release a bunch of highly technical exploit information to a cast of thousands, whose only “vetting” is that they are members of a PCI consortium? Oracle has had personal experience with this problem, which is one reason why information on security vulnerabilities at Oracle is “need to know” (we use our own row level access control to limit access to security bugs in our bug database, and thus less than 1% of development has access to this information), and we don’t provide some customers with more information than others or with vulnerability information and/or patches earlier than others. Failure to remember “insider information always leaks” creates problems in the general case, and has created problems for us specifically. A number of years ago, one of the UK intelligence agencies had information about a non-public security vulnerability in an Oracle product that they circulated among other UK and Commonwealth defense and intelligence entities. Nobody, it should be pointed out, bothered to report the problem to Oracle, even though only Oracle could produce a patch. The vulnerability was finally reported to Oracle by (drum roll) a US-based commercial company, to whom the information had leaked. (Note: every time I tell this story, the MI-whatever agency that created the problem gets a bit shirty with us. I know they meant well and have improved their vulnerability handling/sharing processes but, dudes, next time you find an Oracle vulnerability, try reporting it to us first before blabbing to lots of people who can’t actually fix the problem. Thank you!) Getting back to PCI: clearly, these new disclosure obligations increase the risk of exploitation of a vulnerability in a VPA and thus, of misappropriation of payment card data and customer information that a VPA processes, stores or transmits. It stands to reason that VRA’s current requirement for the widespread distribution of security vulnerability exploit details -- at any time, but particularly before a vendor can issue a patch or a workaround -- is very poor public policy. It effectively publicizes information of great value to potential attackers while not providing compensating benefits - actually, any benefits - to payment card merchants or consumers. In fact, it magnifies the risk to payment card merchants and consumers. The risk is most prominent in the time before a patch has been released, since customers often have little option but to continue using an application or system despite the risks. However, the risk is not limited to the time before a patch is issued: customers often need days, or weeks, to apply patches to systems, based upon the complexity of the issue and dependence on surrounding programs. Rather than decreasing the available window of exploit, this requirement increases the available window of exploit, both as to time available to exploit a vulnerability and the ease with which it can be exploited. Also, why would hackers focus on finding new vulnerabilities to exploit if they can get “EZHack” handed to them in such a manner: a) a vulnerability b) in a payment application c) with exploit code: the “Hacking Trifecta!“ It’s fair to say that this is probably the exact opposite of what PCI – or any of us – would want. Established industry practice concerning vulnerability handling avoids the risks created by the VRA’s vulnerability disclosure requirements. Specifically, the norm is not to release information about a security bug until the associated patch (or a pretty darn good workaround) has been issued. Once a patch is available, the notice to the user community is a high-level communication discussing the product at issue, the level of risk associated with the vulnerability, and how to apply the patch. The notices do not include either the specific customers affected by the vulnerability or forensic reports with maps of the exploit (both of which are required by the current VRA). In this way, customers have the tools they need to prioritize patching and to help prevent an attack, and the information released does not increase the risk of exploit. Furthermore, many vendors already use industry standards for vulnerability description: Common Vulnerability Enumeration (CVE) and Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS). CVE helps ensure that customers know which particular issues a patch addresses and CVSS helps customers determine how severe a vulnerability is on a relative scale. Industry already provides the tools customers need to know what the patch contains and how bad the problem is that the patch remediates. So, what’s a poor vendor to do? Oracle is reaching out to other vendors subject to PCI and attempting to enlist then in a broad effort to engage PCI in rethinking (that is, eradicating) these requirements. I would therefore urge all who care about this issue, but especially those in the vendor community whose applications are subject to PCI and who may not have know they were being asked to tell-all to PCI and put their customers at risk, to do one of the following: • Contact PCI with your concerns• Contact Oracle (we are looking for vendors to sign our statement of concern)• And make sure you tell your customers that you have to rat them out to PCI if there is a breach involving the payment application I like to be charitable and say “PCI meant well” but in as important a public policy issue as what you disclose about vulnerabilities, to whom and when, meaning well isn’t enough. We need to do well. PCI, as regards this particular issue, has not done well, and has compounded the error by thus far being nonresponsive to those of us who have labored mightily to try to explain why they might want to rethink telling the entire planet about security problems with no solutions. By Way of Explanation… Non-related to PCI whatsoever, and the explanation for why I have not been blogging a lot recently, I have been working on Other Writing Venues with my sister Diane (who has also worked in the tech sector, inflicting upgrades on unsuspecting and largely ungrateful end users). I am pleased to note that we have recently (self-)published the first in the Miss Information Technology Murder Mystery series, Outsourcing Murder. The genre might best be described as “chick lit meets geek scene.” Our sisterly nom de plume is Maddi Davidson and (shameless plug follows): you can order the paper version of the book on Amazon, or the Kindle or Nook versions on www.amazon.com or www.bn.com, respectively. From our book jacket: Emma Jones, a 20-something IT consultant, is working on an outsourcing project at Tahiti Tacos, a restaurant chain offering Polynexican cuisine: refried poi, anyone? Emma despises her boss Padmanabh, a brilliant but arrogant partner in GD Consulting. When Emma discovers His-Royal-Padness’s body (verdict: death by cricket bat), she becomes a suspect.With her overprotective family and her best friend Stacey providing endless support and advice, Emma stumbles her way through an investigation of Padmanabh’s murder, bolstered by fusion food feeding frenzies, endless cups of frou-frou coffee and serious surfing sessions. While Stacey knows a PI who owes her a favor, landlady Magda urges Emma to tart up her underwear drawer before the next cute cop with a search warrant arrives. Emma’s mother offers to fix her up with a PhD student at Berkeley and showers her with self-defense gizmos while her old lover Keoni beckons from Hawai’i. And everyone, even Shaun the barista, knows a good lawyer. Book 2, Denial of Service, is coming out this summer. * Given the rate of change in technology, today’s “thou shalts” are easily next year’s “buggy whip guidance.”

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