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• How to get more information from the system crash

  - by viraptor

  I'd like to debug an issue I'm having with a linux (debian stable) server, but I'm running out of ideas of how to confirm any diagnosis. Some background: The servers are running DL160 class with hardware raid between two disks. They're running a lot of services, mostly utilising network interface and CPU. There are 8 cpus and 7 "main" most cpu-hungry processes are bound to one core each via cpu affinity. Other random background scripts are not forced anywhere. The filesystem is writing ~1.5k blocks/s the whole time (goes up above 2k/s in peak times). Normal CPU usage for those servers is ~60% on 7 cores and some minimal usage on the last (whatever's running on shells usually). What actually happens is that the "main" services start using 100% CPU at some point, mainly stuck in kernel time. After a couple of seconds, LA goes over 400 and we lose any way to connect to the box (KVM is on it's way, but not there yet). Sometimes we see a kernel reporting hung task (but not always): [118951.272884] INFO: task zsh:15911 blocked for more than 120 seconds. [118951.272955] "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message. [118951.273037] zsh D 0000000000000000 0 15911 1 [118951.273093] ffff8101898c3c48 0000000000000046 0000000000000000 ffffffffa0155e0a [118951.273183] ffff8101a753a080 ffff81021f1c5570 ffff8101a753a308 000000051f0fd740 [118951.273274] 0000000000000246 0000000000000000 00000000ffffffbd 0000000000000001 [118951.273335] Call Trace: [118951.273424] [<ffffffffa0155e0a>] :ext3:__ext3_journal_dirty_metadata+0x1e/0x46 [118951.273510] [<ffffffff804294f6>] schedule_timeout+0x1e/0xad [118951.273563] [<ffffffff8027577c>] __pagevec_free+0x21/0x2e [118951.273613] [<ffffffff80428b0b>] wait_for_common+0xcf/0x13a [118951.273692] [<ffffffff8022c168>] default_wake_function+0x0/0xe .... This would point at raid / disk failure, however sometimes the tasks are hung on kernel's gettsc which would indicate some general weird hardware behaviour. It's also running mysql (almost read-only, 99% cache hit), which seems to spawn a lot more threads during the system problems. During the day it does ~200kq/s (selects) and ~10q/s (writes). The host is never running out of memory or swapping, no oom reports are spotted. We've got many boxes with similar/same hardware and they all seem to behave that way, but I'm not sure which part fails, so it's probably not a good idea to just grab something more powerful and hope the problem goes away. Applications themselves don't really report anything wrong when they're running. I can run anything safely on the same hardware in an isolated environment. What can I do to narrow down the problem? Where else should I look for explanation?

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• DLINK WBR-1310B Wireless Router seems to hang...

  - by Ira Baxter

  I have a brand new DLINK-1310B Wireless Router (box never before opened, although I bought it at the neighborhood computer junk store). I am using it at home (and in fact am using it at this instant from a wireless laptop). When operative, I can ping it at 192.168.0.1, and I can log into it from the PC attached to it by LAN and from the wireless PC at //192.168.0.1. In the course of the day since I've installed, it seems to have locked up 3 times. Each time the symptoms are my web browser (or other IP service, e.g., POP3) stops with a "No internet connection" error. Attempts to contact the router via 192.168.0.1 get no reaction, from either the wireless laptop or from the hardwired PC sitting next to it. It doesn't respond to pings to that address either. Power cycling the router fixes it. I've seen discussion in other questions about aging cheap electronics. Its too new to be aged. Anybody else seen this behavior with a DLINK-1310? Or do I just need to exchange it for another and try again? (I hate rolling dice, I bought the DLINK because a previous Linksys died of apparant heating problems, how many do I have to cycle through before I get something that works and is long-term stable?). Remarkably, nobody talks about how much software is in a router. Is the stuff just buggy? EDIT: Happened again, while I was working on the wireless Vista laptop. (Seems like once an hour?) I was a little more careful this time. The wireless laptop can ping it. It can't get the login screen. I visited the LAN-connected PC (takes me a minute to walk from the laptop to the PC at the other end of the house), and attempted to visit a random web page. Surprise, that worked! And, now, after a minute walking back to the laptop, I can reconnect the wireless laptop, and get to the login page from it. Strange the time/date has been reset back to 2002. (I'll swear I set it and saved the system configuration after updating the firmware; it made me redo every other bit of reconfiguration again). Is there something funny about wireless leases expiring? The router says the leases it is handing out are good for 180 minutes, and the delay-to-inaccessible was only about an hour. The DSL connection seems to have a 10 minute lease.

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• DNS NS and domain clarification

  - by thejartender

  I am really trying to get my home web server up and I don't seem to be succeeding. My web server withing my host system is running my web application and is viewable at the current isp ip 88.89.190.171 over WAN indicating that the webapp is fine and that router ports are forwarded. I have set up a DNS on this system with a single name server in the network and I manage to ping it with ping ns.thejarbar.org I have registered this private name server at my current hosting provider. My domain (thejarbar.org) is obviously registered and I have pointed it to my name server. My question here is if it is simply a matter of waiting on propagation for me to be able to ping my domain? Another way of asking this is if the fact that my name server is discoverable indicates that I have set it up correctly to be used? I have tested with dig and dig -x on my host and have A records for the name server. The server is not the Authorative server so I am concerned that this may be the reason why my site is not discoverable. Is there anything else I may need to so still? I only have one ns. currently, but should this succeed I will be purchasing a more stable secondary system to host my development applications. This is my best chance at getting work (freelance development) due to illness) and this I feel is the last step I need to succeed. Please note that this is temporarily a home server and I will most likely be using it as part of a professional setup very soon I will likely have to repeat this question therefore in a prefessional context in a few weeks as nothing will be different other than the fact that I am going to have a server running elsewhere. I am using bind9 and Ubuntu 12.10 and my records are: $TTL 3D @ IN SOA ns.thejarbar.org. email. ( 13112012 28800 3600 604800 38400 ); thejarbar.org. IN A 10.0.0.42 @ IN NS ns.thejarbar,org. yuccalaptop IN A 10.0.0.19 ns IN A 10.0.0.42 gw IN A 10.0.0.138 www IN CNAME thejarbar.org. $TTL 3D 0.0.10.in-addr.arpa. IN SOA ns.thejarbar.org. email. ( 13112012 28800 3600 604800 38400 ); 0.0.10.in-addr.arpa. IN NS ns.thejarbar.org. 42 IN PTR thejarbar.org. 19 IN PTR yuccalaptop.thejarbar.org. 138 IN PTR gw.thejarbar.org. My localhost IP is 10.0.0.42 I wish for this to be my host and name server.

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• What is good usage scenario for Rackspace Cloud Files CDN (powered by AKAMAI) [closed]

  - by Andrew Smith

  I have just setup my website as static page via Rackspace CDN / Akamai. www.example.co.uk is an alias for d9771e6f24423091aebc-345678991111238fabcdef6114258d0e1.r61.cf3.rackcdn.com. d9771e6f24423091aebc-345678991111238fabcdef6114258d0e1.r61.cf3.rackcdn.com is an alias for a61.rackcdn.com. a61.rackcdn.com is an alias for a61.rackcdn.com.mdc.edgesuite.net. a61.rackcdn.com.mdc.edgesuite.net is an alias for a63.dscg10.akamai.net. a63.dscg10.akamai.net has address 63.166.98.41 a63.dscg10.akamai.net has address 63.166.98.40 a63.dscg10.akamai.net has IPv6 address 2001:428:4c02::cda8:ecb9 a63.dscg10.akamai.net has IPv6 address 2001:428:4c02::cda8:ed09 The HTTP header: HTTP/1.0 200 OK Last-Modified: Fri, 19 Oct 2012 23:27:41 GMT ETag: fdf9e14b77def799e09e8ce815a521da X-Timestamp: 1350689261.23382 Content-Type: text/html X-Trans-Id: tx457979be3bd746c2b4e5403a1189cdbc Cache-Control: public, max-age=900 Expires: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 22:18:56 GMT Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 22:03:56 GMT Content-Length: 7124 Connection: keep-alive I am wondering, if it's really the fastest solution to power the website? By investigating it thru http://www.just-ping.com/ it seems, that from many places the ping is very high, and during quick investigation I found that they use GeoIP to resolve addresses based on WHOIS, which is not accurate and because of that from many places the ping is above 300ms (for example, if ISP is in balgladore and request is routed to bangladore even if it's 300ms, for period of 1 month), while by just using Amazon Web Services and Route 53 Anycast DNS servers and only 4 EC2 instances it seems that for example India is always below 100ms, while using Akamai it goes above 300ms in some cases, and this is because Route 53 is using BGP. By quickly checking the Akamai, it seems that they are not getting feedback from the traffic - the high ping stays constant even if I keep downloading large files and videos, which is opposite to what they say on their website. They state, that they optimize the performance by taking feedback from the requests, while it seems they just use GeoIP with per City resolution (which are mostly big cities). Because of this, AWS with Route 53 / Anycast DNS seems to be much more reliable, as well EdgeCast which is using BGP, but I dont know how much does it cost to deploy static website. Actually, I dont know if EdgeCast is not a lie, because from isolated places there are many errors - so their performance is at the cost of quality of delivery, because of BGP switching the routes during transfer of large files. So I was wondering, what is really Akamai good for, because they dont seem to pose any strength in any field in what I do understand now, except they offer some software based WAF on their website, but what I really care about is the core distribiution, so the question is? Is really Akamai good for Videos? For static websites? ??? I found so far AWS most usable with most consistent ping and stable transfers.

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• Chrome Problems on Windows 8

  - by Akshat Mittal

  There are a lot of problems with Chrome (24.0.1312.14 beta || But all this happened before update also) on Windows 8. Problems and explanations are listed below: Google Chrome re-draw time: When I switch tabs, the window retains the content of the previous tab and displays that even if I move my mouse, if only refreshes (re-draws) when there is a change on the webpage (like on hover) or I do a select all (or scroll). One thing to note is that the hover and select happens on the real page and not the retained image-like thing of the older webpage. Chrome is slow and laggy: Websites such as Facebook and Twitter (and more) have gone extremely laggy on Chrome (Win 8). When I was using Windows 7, I never experienced a lag or something. Also when using HTML-5 Websites, the transition (the -webkit-transition in CSS) goes extremely slow at times. Plugins Crash: Plugins like Flash Player, Shockwave Player, and more that are in-built into Chrome Crashes a lot, even when doing simple tasks like playing YouTube Videos, displaying ads or something. Chrome Crashes: Chrome has crashed over 100 times in the past month. Google Chrome just crashes randomly or I don't know the reason. Random Page crashes: Chrome results chrome://crash/(Copy-Paste this in address bar) on random pages even when the page is just loaded, I understand that this can happen on heavy HTML5 or JS websites but what about HTML only websites! Most of the things above happens on Super User also, Super User never had any problem when using Chrome on Windows 7. UPDATE 1: @magicandre1981 Commented for trying to disable Hardware Acceleration. I tried it, it somewhat solved the problem but din't fix it. I am still experiencing all the above issues but less frequently (maybe because Chrome Restarted Completely) UPDATE 2: @avirk asked me to try a Stable Version of Chrome and Firefox, I din't experience any lag in Firefox, a little (negligible) lag in Chrome 22 (Maybe because its a new copy of Chrome, I haven't used it much). Is anybody else experiencing such issues? Does anybody has a solution to any of these? Any Help is appreciated! Thank You!

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• Why many applications close after opening a document or doing a specific actions?

  - by Mohsen Farjami

  I have some encrypted pdf files that have no problem and in my last windows, I could open them easily with Adobe Reader 9.2 and other pdf readers. But now, I can only open non-encrypted pdf files and one encrypted file with Adobe Reader. every time I open almost any encrypted pdf, it closes itself. Also, when I try to search a folder for a keyword with Foxit Reader, once it closed. This is not related to Adobe Reader, because I have the same problem with Word 2007. When I open a document, sometimes it closes instantly and sometimes it closes after a few seconds and sometimes it is stable. My windows is Fresh. I have installed it a few days ago. I have ESET Smart Security 5.2 and I have updated it today. OS: XP Pro SP3, RAM: 3 GB, CPU: 2 GHZ, HDD: 320 GB My installed applications: Adobe AIR Adobe Flash Player 11 ActiveX Adobe Flash Player 11 Plugin Adobe Photoshop CS4 Adobe Reader 9.2 Atheros Wireless LAN Client Adapter Babylon Bluetooth Stack for Windows by Toshiba CCleaner Conexant HD Audio Dell Touchpad ESET Smart Security Farsi (101) Custom Foxit Reader Framing Studio 3.27 Google Chrome Hard Disk Sentinel PRO HDAUDIO Soft Data Fax Modem with SmartCP Intel(R) Graphics Media Accelerator Driver IrfanView (remove only) Java(TM) 6 Update 18 K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 8.8.0 Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Service Pack 1 Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Microsoft Data Access Components KB870669 Microsoft Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 Microsoft User-Mode Driver Framework Feature Pack 1.0.0 (Pre-Release 5348) Mozilla Firefox 7.0.1 (x86 en-US) Notepad++ Office Tab FreeEdition 8.50 ParsQuran PerfectDisk 12 Professional Registry First Aid RICOH R5C83x/84x Flash Media Controller Driver Ver.3.54.06 Sahar Money Manager 2.5 Stickies 7.1d The KMPlayer (remove only) TurboLaunch 5.1.2 Unlocker 1.9.1 USB Safely Remove 4.2 Virastyar Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Second Edition Runtime Winamp Windows Internet Explorer 8 Windows Media Player 11.0.5358.4826 Windows XP Service Pack 3 WinRAR 4.11 (32-bit) WorkPause 1.2 Z Dictionary My startup applications: WorkPause USB Safely Remove TurboLaunch SunJavaUpdateSched Stickies rfagent Persistence ParsQuran Daily Verse ITSecMng IgfxTray HotKeysCmds Hard Disk Sentinel egui disable shift+delete CTFMON.EXE Bluetooth Manager Babylon Client Apoint AdobeCS4ServiceManager Adobe Reader Speed Launcher Adobe ARM What should I do to solve it? If you recommend installing Windows again, what guarantees that it won't happen again?

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• How to get wireless working (properly) with Sitecom Wireless USB micro adapter 300N on Windows 7?

  - by Timo

  The question says it all, but more detail follows ;) I've got a new computer that runs Windows 7 64-bits (Home Edition) and I'd like to connect it to my wireless home network (Sitecom wireless gigabit router 300N wl-352 v1 002) with a Sitecom wireless USB micro adaptapter 300 wl-352 V2 001. After installing the router (i.e. connected to the modem and power) and ensuring that wireless is indeed enabled, I've installed the driver of the USB adapter on the new computer described above. After the installation (drivers and utility on CD) completes successfull I rebooted my computer and inserted the USB adapter. After discovering the right network and connecting to it using the network key, a connection is succesfully made. (Using the Sitecom 300N USB Wireless LAN utility). In the LAN utility I can see that the signal strength is approximately 50% and connection quality is approximately 80%. Judging from these numbers I assumed that all was fine and started to use the connection (reading news on nu.nl, a dutch news site), but noticed that the connection was lost several times in a very short time span, but each time the connections was resumed, resulting in the 50/80 percent numbers described above. However, the website was not loaded completely and often a timeout would be reported. When inspecting the drivers through Device Management (Windows' Apparaatbeheer in dutch) there were no errors/warnings; everything seemed to be in order. In an attempt to solve this, I downloaded the latest drivers for the USB adapter, but the problems remained. Finally I tried to connect the computer with a Siemens Gigaset USB Adapter 108. This process was a troublesome since I had to download a driver (from the site above) and tell Windows (7) to use the Windows Vista driver when installing the new hardware, since there is (was) no Windows 7 driver available. This resulted in a usable connection, although not very stable when reconfiguring the router. Which took the form of selecting a different wireless channel on the router, even using the Sitecom utility mentioned above to check if there were other networks communicating on that channel (and thus picking a channel that was not used by other networks). Again no result when changing back to the Sitecom USB adapter. Note that this means (I think) that I could use the internet connection with the Siemens adapter, meaning the problem was not in the router. So: How to get wireless working (properly) with Sitecom Wireless USB micro adapter 300N on Windows 7? PS Sorry, but should be able to post one link, while I had links in place for the USB adapter, router and the siemens adapter in place as well, but I'm not (yet) allowed to post these... (The site says I can post one link, but only when no links are present will it allow me to post the question...)

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• Installing and configuring Zend Framework 2 server-wide [Ubuntu] and test driving ZendSkeletonApplication

  - by kinologik

  I'm trying to have ZF2 installed for all my subdomains at once (Ubuntu 12.04). ZF2 just launched its first stable version, so I wanted to install it on my development server and finally get my hands dirty with it. I downloaded ZF2 and unzipped the files in /var/ZF2/ (which now contains Zend/[all components]). I then edited /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini and added the path to the ZF2 files: include_path = ".:/var/ZF2" I then downloaded the ZendSkeletonApplication and unzipped it in /var/www/skeleton. I know it is suggested to composer.phar to install ZF2 application, but: I don't want to make a local installation of ZF2... I want to make a server-wide installation be able to use my Zend components on all my domains/subdomains on my development server. Before using any automatic installation process, I'd really like to understand that process by doing it manually at first. Obviously, something goes wrong when I fire ZendSkeletonApplication, and I get the following when hit the following URL: http://www.myDevServer.com/skeleton/public/ Fatal error: Uncaught exception 'RuntimeException' with message 'Unable to load ZF2. Run `php composer.phar install` or define a ZF2_PATH environment variable.' in /var/www/skeleton/init_autoloader.php:48 Stack trace: #0 /var/www/skeleton/public/index.php(9): include() #1 {main} thrown in /var/www/skeleton/init_autoloader.php on line 48 I have skimmed through the docs, tutorials and the like, but there are no straight forward answer to this kind of configuration. In the official doc, in the (very short) installation chapter, I see a reference to adding an include path in PHP. But no example... http://zf2.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ref/installation.html Once you have a copy of Zend Framework available, your application needs to be able to access the framework classes found in the library folder. Though there are several ways to achieve this, your PHP include_path needs to contain the path to Zend Framework’s library. But then, when I get to the "Getting Started" chapter, it's all composer.phar and nothing else... http://zf2.readthedocs.org/en/latest/user-guide/skeleton-application.html I'm no sysAdmin, just a Zend enthusiast. I'm pretty sure this PEBKAC problem might be obvious for those who already got in ZF2 previous betas. Thanks for helping my out. EDIT: Problem was resolved, thanks to Daniel M. Just setting up ZF2_PATH in httpd.conf was all that was needed. SetEnv ZF2_PATH /var/ZF2 I also removed the include_path reference in php.ini and everything works just fine. So I have no idea why Zend suggested to include it there in their official docs.

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• Default permission for newly-created files/folders using ACLs not respected by commands like "unzip"

  - by Ngoc Pham

  I am having trouble with setting up a system for multiple users accessing the same set of files. I've read tuts and docs around and played with ACLs but haven't succeeded yet. MY SCENARIO: Have multiple users, for example, user1 and user2, which is belong to a group called sharedusers. They must have all WRITE permission to a same set of files and directories, say underlying in /userdata/sharing/. I have the folder's group set to sharedusers and SGID to have all newly created files/dirs inside set to same group. ubuntu@home:/userdata$ ll drwxr-sr-x 2 ubuntu sharedusers 4096 Nov 24 03:51 sharing/ I set ACLs for this directory so I can have permission of sub dirs/files inheritted from its parents. ubuntu@home:/userdata$ setfacl -m group:sharedusers:rwx sharing/ ubuntu@home:/userdata$ setfacl -d -m group:sharedusers:rwx sharing/ Here's what I've got: ubuntu@home:/userdata$ getfacl sharing/ # file: sharing/ # owner: ubuntu # group: sharedusers # flags: -s- user::rwx group::r-x group:sharedusers:rwx mask::rwx other::r-x default:user::rwx default:group::r-x default:group:sharedusers:rwx default:mask::rwx default:other::r-x Seems okay as when I create new folder with new files inside and the permission is correct. ubuntu@home:/userdata/sharing$ mkdir a && cd a ubuntu@home:/userdata/sharing/a$ touch a_test ubuntu@home:/userdata/sharing/a$ getfacl a_test # file: a_test # owner: ubuntu # group: sharedusers user::rw- group::r-x #effective:r-- group:sharedusers:rwx #effective:rw- mask::rw- other::r-- As you can see, the sharedusers group has effective permission rw-. HOWEVER, if I have a zip file, and use unzip -q command to unzip the file inside the folder sharing, the extracted folders don't have group write permisison. Therefore, the users from group sharedusers cannot modify files under those extracted folders. ubuntu@home:/userdata/sharing$ unzip -q Joomla_3.0.2-Stable-Full_Package.zip ubuntu@home:/userdata/sharing$ ll drwxrwsr-x+ 2 ubuntu sharedusers 4096 Nov 24 04:00 a/ drwxr-xr-x+ 10 ubuntu sharedusers 4096 Nov 7 01:52 administrator/ drwxr-xr-x+ 13 ubuntu sharedusers 4096 Nov 7 01:52 components/ You an spot the difference in permissions between folder a (created before) and folder administrator extracted by unzip. And the ACLs of a files inside administrator: ubuntu@home:/userdata/sharing$ getfacl administrator/index.php # file: administrator/index.php # owner: ubuntu # group: ubuntu user::rw- group::r-x #effective:r-- group:sharedusers:rwx #effective:r-- mask::r-- other::r-- It also has ubuntu group, not sharedusers group as expected. Could someone please explain the problem and give me advice? Thank you in advance!

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• Can't validate mine, sudo nor root in Debian "Jessie" Gnome anymore?

  - by Janar

  I'm Debian beginner & GUI guy in a bit of trouble? Can't login as sudo/gksu/root/su nor as (main/super)user after removed user password via Gnome-user-settings. History of actions (Probably irrelevant though) Installed Debian "Jessie" GNU/Linux with xFce GUI (en-US) as only OS. HardWare is ThinkPad w510. Skipped root user password in setup, to get sudo for superuser easily. Logged in (as always had) with Gnome (3.4.x), not once with xFCE. (installed Xfce. Installed xFce only to achieve more control (easier management) over packages this way, to set-up gnome much more by mine likes. Added more jessie repros (same ones as in Wheesy stable by default but for Jessie as, Jessie only had repros for security updates by default). Installed lots of gtk(3) & gnome(3) based soft; (- restarted again after this) Installed propietary graphics card driver for mine nvidia quadro. (- restarted once again after that one) Installed more stuff related to mine work/school/devel. The actual problem Had a plan to restart again, but wanted to set up auto-login first, instead set user password to none (don't ask why / perhaps caused by being awake for a looooong time), noticed it, and set also to auto-login, but couldn't undo mine previous mistake to create new password for me. As mine password is set to none I would have expected that simply return in pass prompt for emty password field would do, but it won't authenticate. I tried Alt+F2 "gksu gedit" as well as: sudo wget "https://www.some-page.eu/file.ext" and "su" in terminals, none has applied (quite logical actually - as I'm sudoer and highest ranked super user, besides only user in computer). Current stand Everything worked & still works nice after this accident, besides this password prompts part. To spoked to log-out nor restart. Synaptic package-manager is still open with root rights (only one, that has left open prior to the issue and not closed since, just in case). Goggled for help and read some manuals/faqs/how-tos - mostly lead to sudoers file management, but not found one specifically for mine issue - so still not any smarter. Really hope, that I don't have to redo OS inst all over again, by just one stupid mistake. Thanks for your reply :-)

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• Network switching issues with MacOS 10.7?

  - by Denis

  I'm having a wired problem and hope somebody can tip me, what way should I dig to. I'm using MacBookPro with Lion 10.7.3 both at my working place & at home. At working place, we have a domain-based network with 802.1x authorization (more than 400 computers) and to connect it I'm using Ethernet cable. IP range is 10.10.2.*. All network settings are setup automatically by DHCP. Also, in settings, I have Network Account Server setup in the User&Groups Settings for my work Domain server - and it is available only from corporate network. At home, I have an ADSL router, that shares Internet connection by WiFi in NAT mode. I'm using WiFi to connect it. Router gives out addresses from 192.168.1.* range and all settings are also set up by router's DHCP. So, my problem is the following. When I come back home from the office, I open my MacBook and AirPort automatically connects my WiFi network. After this, for about 1 minute I'm able to browse sites & ping hosts successfully. But after this minute, network connection is broken down. All pings return time-out. trace route to google.com stops on 192.168.1.1 (which is my router). This lasts for 3-4 minutes. After that network connection is automatically repaired and all pings go smoothly again. At the same time, when my MacBook return timeouts, I can successfully ping any host from my wife's MacBook - so this doesn't look like router issue. When I come to the office, I don't have any issues and Internet connection is available & stable moments after ethernet cable plugged in. Do anybody has any clues about this? What should I monitor & what settings look for resolving this issue? Please, ask, what additional information should I provide. Hoping for good advice & thanks in advance!

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• Wifi randomly drops on Windows 8 laptop

  - by JosiahS

  First of all, I did a lot of research on this problem, and I wasn't able to come to any helpful conclusion. I've finally decided that I need advice from those who might know where to look. So don't let me down. :P I used to have an older Windows 7 laptop, which worked great for basic office and web browsing. However, I wanted something that would play actual modern games. So I recently bought a Sager NP8235 with the Intel Wireless-AC 7260 wifi card, and installed Windows 8 Pro on it. And ever since, I've been having problems with the wifi. Generally, what happens is if I leave the laptop on but inactive for an extended amount of time (I've estimated it around an hour to two), the wifi will start dropping randomly. If I happened to have a download going at the time, it usually causes the download to fail. Or, if I put the laptop to sleep overnight, the next morning I usually have to restart the computer because the wifi device apparently stops working (it literally won't turn on). Also, and most frustrating, whenever I'm on a video chat (like Skype), after about ten minutes, the connection will start lagging like crazy, until it forces Skype to end the call. After that, I usually have to disable and reenable the wifi to get it working again. I know it isn't our internet, because all the other computers in our house (~8) don't have any issues. Even the old Windows 7 laptop (connected also over wifi) works just fine, scoring the normal ~3Mbps average on speedtest.net (yes, I know our internet is slow, we live out in the country). Additionally, when I connect the Sager directly to the router via ethernet, the internet instantly starts working just great. Like I said, I've done a lot of googling to figure out what's going on, and I haven't been able to find anything that worked for me. Is it Windows 8 conflicting with the Wifi drivers? As of this writing, I have the Intel drivers v16.1.5.2 installed (without the extra Intel software). Or is it our router? It's a TP-Link TL-WR841ND, set to the default settings. The Sager is currently being assigned to a static IP, if that makes any difference. And yet, the old windows 7 laptop has a much more stable connection than the Sager. Anyone have any ideas? At this point, I'd appreciate even knowing what the problem is.

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• Opscenter repair service times out. ERROR: Requested range intersects a local range [...]

  - by jlemire-zs

  My production cluster had the repair service enabled since april 16th with the default 9 days time to completion and repairs would complete properly. However, since may 22nd, it is being disabled automatically by Opscenter: From /var/log/opscenter/opscenterd.log: [...] 2014-06-03 21:13:47-0400 [zs_prod] ERROR: Repair task (<Node 10.1.0.22='6417880425364517165'>, (-4019838962446882275L, -4006140687792135587L), set(['zs_logging', 'OpsCenter'])) timed out after 3600 seconds. 2014-06-03 22:16:44-0400 [zs_prod] ERROR: Repair task (<Node 10.1.0.22='6417880425364517165'>, (-4006140687792135587L, -4006140687792135586L), set(['zs_logging', 'OpsCenter'])) timed out after 3600 seconds. 2014-06-03 22:16:44-0400 [zs_prod] ERROR: More than 100 errors during repair service, shutting down repair service 2014-06-03 22:16:44-0400 [zs_prod] INFO: Stopping repair service [...] From /var/log/opscenter/repair_service/zs_prod.log: [...] 2014-06-03 22:16:44-0400 [zs_prod] ERROR: Repair task (<Node 10.1.0.22='6417880425364517165'>, (-4006140687792135587L, -4006140687792135586L), set(['zs_logging', 'OpsCenter'])) timed out after 3600 seconds. 2014-06-03 22:16:44-0400 [zs_prod] ERROR: Task (<Node 10.1.0.22='6417880425364517165'>, (-4006140687792135587L, -4006140687792135586L), set(['zs_logging', 'OpsCenter'])) has failed 1 times. 2014-06-03 22:16:44-0400 [zs_prod] ERROR: 101 errors have ocurred out of 100 allowed. 2014-06-03 22:16:44-0400 [zs_prod] ERROR: More than 100 errors during repair service, shutting down repair service 2014-06-03 22:16:44-0400 [zs_prod] INFO: Stopping repair service On the nodes on which the repair fails, from /var/log/cassandra/system.log: ERROR [RMI TCP Connection(93502)-10.1.0.22] 2014-06-03 20:12:28,858 StorageService.java (line 2560) Repair session failed: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Requested range intersects a local range but is not fully contained in one; this would lead to i mprecise repair at org.apache.cassandra.service.ActiveRepairService.getNeighbors(ActiveRepairService.java:164) at org.apache.cassandra.repair.RepairSession.<init>(RepairSession.java:128) at org.apache.cassandra.repair.RepairSession.<init>(RepairSession.java:117) at org.apache.cassandra.service.ActiveRepairService.submitRepairSession(ActiveRepairService.java:97) at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService.forceKeyspaceRepair(StorageService.java:2620) at org.apache.cassandra.service.StorageService$5.runMayThrow(StorageService.java:2556) at org.apache.cassandra.utils.WrappedRunnable.run(WrappedRunnable.java:28) These errors, which only occurs if the repair service is running, are the only errors these nodes experience. Outside of the repair task, the Cassandra cluster works perfectly. I am running Opscenter 4.1.2 with a 6 nodes DSE 4.0.2 cluster installed on linux virtual machines. The nodes run a vanilla installation of Ubuntu Server 12.04 64-bit and DSE was installed and secured according to the provided installation documentation. I have been experiencing that problem on my development cluster for a while too (with DSE 4.0.0, 4.0.1 and 4.0.2), but I thought this was because of some configuration error on my part. The problem has appeared spontaneously at some point too. The Cassandra cluster has been working very smoothly with a good write throughput. It is very stable and has enough resources to work with. We did not notice any problems with the applications that depend on it.

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• Can't ping Ip over bridge

  - by tmn29a

  I'm unable to ping another host over a bridge I created, I can't see the error -.- It's a remote machine running debian stable with some backports for which I want to set up DHCP on the new Subnet 172.30.xxx.xxx to be used for KVM-Guests. ifconfig : bond0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr e4:11:5b:d4:94:30 inet addr:10.54.2.84 Bcast:10.54.2.127 Mask:255.255.255.192 inet6 addr: fe80::e611:5bff:fed4:9430/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MASTER MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:34277 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:18379 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:2638709 (2.5 MiB) TX bytes:2887894 (2.7 MiB) br0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr f2:fc:4d:7f:15:f0 inet addr:172.30.254.66 Bcast:172.30.254.127 Mask:255.255.255.192 inet6 addr: fe80::f0fc:4dff:fe7f:15f0/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:252 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 RX bytes:0 (0.0 B) TX bytes:10800 (10.5 KiB) Pings : ping -I br0 172.30.xxx.65 PING 172.30.xxx.65 (172.30.xxx.65) from 172.30.xxx.66 br0: 56(84) bytes of data. --- 172.30.xxx.65 ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 0 received, 100% packet loss, time 2017ms ping -I bond0 172.30.254.65 PING 172.30.xxx.65 (172.30.xxx.65) from 10.54.2.84 bond0: 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from 172.30.x.65: icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.599 ms 64 bytes from 172.30.x.65: icmp_req=2 ttl=64 time=0.575 ms 64 bytes from 172.30.x.65: icmp_req=3 ttl=64 time=0.565 ms --- 172.30.x.65 ping statistics --- 3 packets transmitted, 3 received, 0% packet loss, time 1999ms rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.565/0.579/0.599/0.031 ms Route : Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 172.30.x.64 * 255.255.255.192 U 0 0 0 br0 10.54.x.64 * 255.255.255.192 U 0 0 0 bond0 default 10.54.x.65 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 bond0 default 172.30.x.65 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 br0 The Interface : cat /etc/network/interfaces auto lo br0 iface lo inet loopback # Bonding Interface auto bond0 iface bond0 inet static address 10.54.x.84 netmask 255.255.255.192 network 10.54.x.64 gateway 10.54.x.65 slaves eth0 eth1 bond_mode active-backup bond_miimon 100 bond_downdelay 200 bond_updelay 200 iface br0 inet static bridge_ports bond0 address 172.30.x.66 broadcast 172.30.x.127 netmask 255.255.x.192 gateway 172.30.x.65 bridge_maxwait 0 If you need more info please ask. Thanks for your help !

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• Should I choose KVM/XEN over OpenVZ or use them together?

  - by Krystian

  I've got a dual xeon e5504 server, with [for now] only 8GB of ram. Storage is'n impressive either: 3x 146GB sas in raid5 + 500GB sata drives. Currently it works as a development server, but it's over speced for our needs and since our development methods changed through last 2 years we decided it will work as a production system for some of our applications + we would like to have a separate system for testing/research. Our apps are mainly web apps deployed on tomcats [plural as some of the apps require older versions] and connected to Postgres. I would like to have a production system, where only httpd+tomcat+db are setup and nothing else runs there. Sterile system. Apart from that, I would like a test system, where I can play with different JVM settings, deploy my test apps, play with tomcat/httpd settings and restart them without interfering with the production system. Apart from that, I would like to be able to play with different linux flavors, with newer kernels to test how they work etc. I know, this is not possible with OpenVZ and I would have to choose KVM for that. I am thinking about merging the two, and setting up a KVM to be able to work with different systems [linux only to be frank] + use openVZ to setup separate machines for my development needs. I would simply go with that, but reading here and there about the performance impact full virtualization has over containers and looking at the specs of my server makes me think twice about it. I don't want to loose too much performance, especially because of the nature of my apps [few JVMs running at the same time]. It will be my first time with virtualization, apart from using desktop virtualbox/vmserver. Although I am a fast learner I don't want to mess with the main system so much that it will break the production apps or make them crawl. Although they are more or less internal apps and they don't produce much load, they need to be stable. I've read, that KVM host is a normal linux installation and it allows to run normal processes on it. If that is so, does it allow to run openVZ as well? I mean... can I have KVM and OpenVZ running on the same system/kernel? Or do I have to setup another system to run OpenVZ containers? How much performance impact can this have for me? Will my hardware suffice? oh and one more thing... unfortunately I'm quite limited with the funds... I'm looking for a free solution only :/

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• New MySQL Cluster 7.3 Previews: Foreign Keys, NoSQL Node.js API and Auto-Tuned Clusters

  - by Mat Keep

  At this weeks MySQL Connect conference, Oracle previewed an exciting new wave of developments for MySQL Cluster, further extending its simplicity and flexibility by expanding the range of use-cases, adding new NoSQL options, and automating configuration. What’s new: Development Release 1: MySQL Cluster 7.3 with Foreign Keys Early Access “Labs” Preview: MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js Early Access “Labs” Preview: MySQL Cluster GUI-Based Auto-Installer In this blog, I'll introduce you to the features being previewed. Review the blogs listed below for more detail on each of the specific features discussed. Save the date!: A live webinar is scheduled for Thursday 25th October at 0900 Pacific Time / 1600UTC where we will discuss each of these enhancements in more detail. Registration will be open soon and published to the MySQL webinars page MySQL Cluster 7.3: Development Release 1 The first MySQL Cluster 7.3 Development Milestone Release (DMR) previews Foreign Keys, bringing powerful new functionality to MySQL Cluster while eliminating development complexity. Foreign Key support has been one of the most requested enhancements to MySQL Cluster – enabling users to simplify their data models and application logic – while extending the range of use-cases for both custom projects requiring referential integrity and packaged applications, such as eCommerce, CRM, CMS, etc. Implementation The Foreign Key functionality is implemented directly within the MySQL Cluster data nodes, allowing any client API accessing the cluster to benefit from them – whether they are SQL or one of the NoSQL interfaces (Memcached, C++, Java, JPA, HTTP/REST or the new Node.js API - discussed later.) The core referential actions defined in the SQL:2003 standard are implemented: CASCADE RESTRICT NO ACTION SET NULL In addition, the MySQL Cluster implementation supports the online adding and dropping of Foreign Keys, ensuring the Cluster continues to serve both read and write requests during the operation.  This represents a further enhancement to MySQL Cluster's support for on0line schema changes, ie adding and dropping indexes, adding columns, etc.  Read this blog for a demonstration of using Foreign Keys with MySQL Cluster.  Getting Started with MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR1: Users can download either the source or binary and evaluate the MySQL Cluster 7.3 DMR with Foreign Keys now! (Select the Development Release tab). MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js Node.js is hot! In a little over 3 years, it has become one of the most popular environments for developing next generation web, cloud, mobile and social applications. Bringing JavaScript from the browser to the server, the design goal of Node.js is to build new real-time applications supporting millions of client connections, serviced by a single CPU core. Making it simple to further extend the flexibility and power of Node.js to the database layer, we are previewing the Node.js Javascript API for MySQL Cluster as an Early Access release, available for download now from http://labs.mysql.com/. Select the following build: MySQL-Cluster-NoSQL-Connector-for-Node-js Alternatively, you can clone the project at the MySQL GitHub page.  Implemented as a module for the V8 engine, the new API provides Node.js with a native, asynchronous JavaScript interface that can be used to both query and receive results sets directly from MySQL Cluster, without transformations to SQL. Figure 1: MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js enables end-to-end JavaScript development Rather than just presenting a simple interface to the database, the Node.js module integrates the MySQL Cluster native API library directly within the web application itself, enabling developers to seamlessly couple their high performance, distributed applications with a high performance, distributed, persistence layer delivering 99.999% availability. The new Node.js API joins a rich array of NoSQL interfaces available for MySQL Cluster. Whichever API is chosen for an application, SQL and NoSQL can be used concurrently across the same data set, providing the ultimate in developer flexibility.  Get started with MySQL Cluster NoSQL API for Node.js tutorial MySQL Cluster GUI-Based Auto-Installer Compatible with both MySQL Cluster 7.2 and 7.3, the Auto-Installer makes it simple for DevOps teams to quickly configure and provision highly optimized MySQL Cluster deployments – whether on-premise or in the cloud. Implemented with a standard HTML GUI and Python-based web server back-end, the Auto-Installer intelligently configures MySQL Cluster based on application requirements and auto-discovered hardware resources Figure 2: Automated Tuning and Configuration of MySQL Cluster Developed by the same engineering team responsible for the MySQL Cluster database, the installer provides standardized configurations that make it simple, quick and easy to build stable and high performance clustered environments. The auto-installer is previewed as an Early Access release, available for download now from http://labs.mysql.com/, by selecting the MySQL-Cluster-Auto-Installer build. You can read more about getting started with the MySQL Cluster auto-installer here. Watch the YouTube video for a demonstration of using the MySQL Cluster auto-installer Getting Started with MySQL Cluster If you are new to MySQL Cluster, the Getting Started guide will walk you through installing an evaluation cluster on a singe host (these guides reflect MySQL Cluster 7.2, but apply equally well to 7.3 and the Early Access previews). Or use the new MySQL Cluster Auto-Installer! Download the Guide to Scaling Web Databases with MySQL Cluster (to learn more about its architecture, design and ideal use-cases). Post any questions to the MySQL Cluster forum where our Engineering team and the MySQL Cluster community will attempt to assist you. Post any bugs you find to the MySQL bug tracking system (select MySQL Cluster from the Category drop-down menu) And if you have any feedback, please post them to the Comments section here or in the blogs referenced in this article. Summary MySQL Cluster 7.2 is the GA, production-ready release of MySQL Cluster. The first Development Release of MySQL Cluster 7.3 and the Early Access previews give you the opportunity to preview and evaluate future developments in the MySQL Cluster database, and we are very excited to be able to share that with you. Let us know how you get along with MySQL Cluster 7.3, and other features that you want to see in future releases, by using the comments of this blog.

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• Logical Domain Modeling Made Simple

  - by Knut Vatsendvik

  How can logical domain modeling be made simple and collaborative? Many non-technical end-users, managers and business domain experts find it difficult to understand the visual models offered by many UML tools. This creates trouble in capturing and verifying the information that goes into a logical domain model. The tools are also too advanced and complex for a non-technical user to learn and use. We have therefore, in our current project, ended up with using Confluence as tool for designing the logical domain model with the help of a few very useful plugins. Big thanks to Ole Nymoen and Per Spilling for their expertise in this field that made this posting possible. Confluence Plugins Here is a list of Confluence plugins used in this solution. Install these before trying out the macros used below. Plugin Description Copy Space Allows a space administrator to copy a space, including the pages within the space Metadata Supports adding metadata to Wiki pages Label Manages labeling of pages Linking Contains macros for linking to templates, the dashboard and other Table Enhances the table capability in Confluence Creating a Confluence Space First we need to create a new confluence space for the domain model. Click the link Create a Space located below the list of spaces on the Dashboard. Please contact your Confluence administrator is you do not have permissions to do this.   For illustrative purpose all attributes and entities in this posting are based on my imaginary project manager domain model. When a logical domain model is good enough for being implemented, do a copy of the Confluence Space (see Copy Space plugin). In this way you create a stable version of the logical domain model while further design can continue with the new copied space. Typical will the implementation phase result in a database design and/or a XSD schema design. Add Space Templates Go to the Home page of your Confluence Space. Navigate to the Browse drop-down menu and click on Advanced. Then click the Templates option in the left navigation panel. Click Add New Space Template to add the following three templates. Name: attribute {metadata-list} || Name | | || Type | | || Format | | || Description | | {metadata-list} {add-label:attribute} Name: primary-type {metadata-list} || Name | || || Type | || || Format | || || Description | || {metadata-list} {add-label:primary-type} Name: complex-type {metadata-list} || Name | || || Description |  || {metadata-list} h3. Attributes || Name || Type || Format || Description || | [name] | {metadata-from:name|Type} | {metadata-from:name|Format} | {metadata-from:name|Description} | {add-label:complex-type,entity} The metadata-list macro (see Metadata plugin) will save a list of metadata values to the page. The add-label macro (see Label plugin) will automatically label the page. Primary Types Page Our first page to add will act as container for our primary types. Switch to Wiki markup when adding the following content to the page. | (+) {add-page:template=primary-type|parent=@self}Add new primary type{add-page} | {metadata-report:Name,Type,Format,Description|sort=Name|root=@self|pages=@descendents} Once the page is created, click the Add new primary type (create-page macro) to start creating a new pages. Here is an example of input to the LocalDate page. Embrace the LocalDate with square brackets [] to make the page linkable. Again switch to Wiki markup before editing. {metadata-list} || Name | [LocalDate] || || Type | Date || || Format | YYYY-MM-DD || || Description | Date in local time zone. YYYY = year, MM = month and DD = day || {metadata-list} {add-label:primary-type} The metadata-report macro will show a tabular report of all child pages.   Attributes Page The next page will act as container for all of our attributes. | (+) {add-page:template=attribute|parent=@self|title=attribute}Add new attribute{add-page} | {metadata-report:Name,Type,Format,Description|sort=Name|pages=@descendants} Here is an example of input to the startDate page. {metadata-list} || Name | [startDate] || || Type | [LocalDate] || || Format | {metadata-from:LocalDate|Format} || || Description | The projects start date || {metadata-list} {add-label:attribute} Using the metadata-from macro we fetch the text from the previously created LocalDate page. Complex Types Page The last page in this example shows how attributes can be combined together to form more complex types.   h3. Intro Overview of complex types in the domain model. | (+) {add-page:template=complex-type|parent=@self}Add a new complex type{add-page}\\ | {metadata-report:Name,Description|sort=Name|root=@self|pages=@descendents} Here is an example of input to the ProjectType page. {metadata-list} || Name | [ProjectType] || || Description | Represents a project || {metadata-list} h3. Attributes || Name || Type || Format || Description || | [projectId] | {metadata-from:projectId|Type} | {metadata-from:projectId|Format} | {metadata-from:projectId|Description} | | [name] | {metadata-from:name|Type} | {metadata-from:name|Format} | {metadata-from:name|Description} | | [description] | {metadata-from:description|Type} | {metadata-from:description|Format} | {metadata-from:description|Description} | | [startDate] | {metadata-from:startDate|Type} | {metadata-from:startDate|Format} | {metadata-from:startDate|Description} | {add-label:complex-type,entity} Gives us this Conclusion Using a web-based corporate Wiki like Confluence to create a logical domain model increases the collaboration between people with different roles in the enterprise. It’s my believe that this helps the domain model to be more accurate, and better documented. In our real project we have more pages than illustrated here to complete the documentation. We do also still use UML tools to create different types of diagrams that Confluence do not support. As a last tip, an ImageMap plugin can make those diagrams clickable when used in pages. Enjoy!

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• Partition Wise Joins

  - by jean-pierre.dijcks

  Some say they are the holy grail of parallel computing and PWJ is the basis for a shared nothing system and the only join method that is available on a shared nothing system (yes this is oversimplified!). The magic in Oracle is of course that is one of many ways to join data. And yes, this is the old flexibility vs. simplicity discussion all over, so I won't go there... the point is that what you must do in a shared nothing system, you can do in Oracle with the same speed and methods. The Theory A partition wise join is a join between (for simplicity) two tables that are partitioned on the same column with the same partitioning scheme. In shared nothing this is effectively hard partitioning locating data on a specific node / storage combo. In Oracle is is logical partitioning. If you now join the two tables on that partitioned column you can break up the join in smaller joins exactly along the partitions in the data. Since they are partitioned (grouped) into the same buckets, all values required to do the join live in the equivalent bucket on either sides. No need to talk to anyone else, no need to redistribute data to anyone else... in short, the optimal join method for parallel processing of two large data sets. PWJ's in Oracle Since we do not hard partition the data across nodes in Oracle we use the Partitioning option to the database to create the buckets, then set the Degree of Parallelism (or run Auto DOP - see here) and get our PWJs. The main questions always asked are: How many partitions should I create? What should my DOP be? In a shared nothing system the answer is of course, as many partitions as there are nodes which will be your DOP. In Oracle we do want you to look at the workload and concurrency, and once you know that to understand the following rules of thumb. Within Oracle we have more ways of joining of data, so it is important to understand some of the PWJ ideas and what it means if you have an uneven distribution across processes. Assume we have a simple scenario where we partition the data on a hash key resulting in 4 hash partitions (H1 -H4). We have 2 parallel processes that have been tasked with reading these partitions (P1 - P2). The work is evenly divided assuming the partitions are the same size and we can scan this in time t1 as shown below. Now assume that we have changed the system and have a 5th partition but still have our 2 workers P1 and P2. The time it takes is actually 50% more assuming the 5th partition has the same size as the original H1 - H4 partitions. In other words to scan these 5 partitions, the time t2 it takes is not 1/5th more expensive, it is a lot more expensive and some other join plans may now start to look exciting to the optimizer. Just to post the disclaimer, it is not as simple as I state it here, but you get the idea on how much more expensive this plan may now look... Based on this little example there are a few rules of thumb to follow to get the partition wise joins. First, choose a DOP that is a factor of two (2). So always choose something like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on... Second, choose a number of partitions that is larger or equal to 2* DOP. Third, make sure the number of partitions is divisible through 2 without orphans. This is also known as an even number... Fourth, choose a stable partition count strategy, which is typically hash, which can be a sub partitioning strategy rather than the main strategy (range - hash is a popular one). Fifth, make sure you do this on the join key between the two large tables you want to join (and this should be the obvious one...). Translating this into an example: DOP = 8 (determined based on concurrency or by using Auto DOP with a cap due to concurrency) says that the number of partitions >= 16. Number of hash (sub) partitions = 32, which gives each process four partitions to work on. This number is somewhat arbitrary and depends on your data and system. In this case my main reasoning is that if you get more room on the box you can easily move the DOP for the query to 16 without repartitioning... and of course it makes for no leftovers on the table... And yes, we recommend up-to-date statistics. And before you start complaining, do read this post on a cool way to do stats in 11.

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• Upgrading to Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2: Top Tips One Must Know

  - by AnkurGupta

  Recently Oracle announced incremental release of Enterprise Manager 12c called Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 (EM12c R2) which includes several new exciting features (Press announcement). Right before the official release, we upgraded an internal production site from EM 12c R1 to EM 12c R2 and had an extremely pleasant experience. Let me share few key takeaways as well as few tips from this upgrade exercise. I - Why Should You Upgrade To Enterprise Manager 12c Release 2 While an upgrade is usually recommended primarily to take benefit of the latest features (which is valid for this upgrade as well), I found several other compelling reasons purely from deployment perspective. Standardize your EM deployment:  Enterprise Manager comprises of several different components (OMS, agents, plug-ins, etc) and it might be possible that these are at varied patch levels in your environment. For instance, in case of an environment containing Bundle Patch 1 (customer announcement), there is a good chance that you may not have all the components up-to-date. There are two possible reasons. Bundle Patch 1 involved patching different components (OMS, agents, plug-ins) with multiple one-off patches which may not have been applied to all components yet. Bundle Patch 1 for different platforms were not released together. Which means you may not have got the chance to patch all the components on different platforms. Note: BP1 patches are not mandatory to upgrade to EM12c R2 release EM 12c R2 provides an excellent opportunity to standardize your Cloud Control environment (OMS, repository and agents) and plug-ins to latest versions in single shot. All platform releases are made available simultaneously: For the very first time in the history of EM release, all the platforms were released on day one itself, which means you do not need to wait for platform specific binaries for EM OMS or Agent to perform install or upgrades in a heterogeneous environment. Highly refined and automated process – Upgrade process is by far the smoothest and the cleanest as compared to previous releases of Enterprise manager. Following are the ones that stand out. Automatic Plug-in management – Plug-in upgrade along with new plug-in deployment is supported in upgrade installer wizard which means bulk of the updates to OMS and repository can be done in the same workflow. Saves time and minimizes user inputs. Plug-in Upgrade or Migrate Auto Update: While doing the OMS and repository upgrade, you can use Auto Update screen in Oracle Universal Installer to check for any updates/patches. That will help you to avoid the know issues and will make sure that your upgrade is successful. Allows mass upgrade of EM Agents – A new dedicated menu has been added in the EM console for agent upgrade. Agent upgrade workflow is extremely simple that requires agent name as the only input. ADM / JVMD Manager/Agent upgrade – complete process is supported via UI screens. EM12c R2 Upgrade Guide is much simpler to follow as compared to those for earlier releases. This is attributed to the simpler upgrade process. Robust and Performing Platform: EM12c R2 release not only includes several new features, but also provides a more stable platform which incorporates several fixes and enhancements in the Enterprise Manager framework. II - Few Tips To Remember In my last post (blog link) I shared few tips and tricks from my experience applying the Bundle Patch. Recently I upgraded the same site to EM 12c R2 and found few points that you must take note of, while planning this upgrade. The tips below are also applicable to EM 12c R1 environments that do not have Bundle Patch 1 patches applied. Verify the monitored application certification – Specific targets like E-Business Suite have not yet been certified as managed target in EM 12c R2. Therefore make sure to recheck the Enterprise Manager certification Matrix on My Oracle Support before planning the upgrade. Plan downtime – Because EM 12c R2 is an incremental release of EM 12c, for EM 12c R1 to EM 12c R2 upgrade supports only 1-system upgrade approach, which mean there will be downtime. OMS name change after upgrade – In case of multi OMS environments, additional OMS is renamed after upgrade, which has few implications when you upgrade JVMD and ADP agents on OMS. This is well documented in upgrade guide but make sure you read through all the notes. Upgrading BI Publisher– EM12c R2 is certified with BI Publisher 11.1.1.6.0 only. Therefore in case you are using EM 12c R1 which is integrated with BI Publisher 11.1.1.5.0, you must upgrade the BI Publisher to 11.1.1.6.0. Follow the steps from Advanced Installation and Configuration Guide here. Perform Post upgrade Tasks – Make sure to perform post upgrade steps mentioned in documentation here. These include critical changes that must be done right after upgrade to get the right configuration. For instance Database plug-in should be upgraded to Revision 3 (12.1.0.2.0 [u120804]). Delete old OMS Home – EM12c R1 to EM12c R2 is an out of place upgrade, which means it creates a new oracle home for OMS, plug-ins, etc. Therefore please ensure that You have sufficient extra space for new OMS before starting the upgrade process. You clean up the old OMS home after the upgrade process. Steps are available here. DO NOT remove the agent home on OMS host, because agent is upgraded in-place. If you have standby OMS setup then do look into the steps to upgrade the standby OMS from the upgrade guide before going ahead. Read the right documentation – Make sure to follow the Upgrade guide which provides the most comprehensive information on EM12c R2 upgrade process. Additionally you can refer other resources to get familiar with upgrade concepts. Recorded webcast - Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 Installation and Upgrade Overview Presentation - Understanding Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 Upgrade We are very excited about this latest release and will look forward to hear back any feedback from your upgrade experience!

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• How do you use blog content?

  - by fatherjack

  Do you write a blog, have you ever thought about it? I think people fall into one of a few categories when it comes to blogs, especially blogs with technical content. Writing articles furiously - daily, twice daily and reading dozens of others. Writing the odd piece of content and read plenty of others' output. Started a blog once and its fizzled out but reading lots. Thought about starting a blog someday but never got around to it, hopping into the occasional blog when a link or a Tweet takes them there. Never thought about writing one but often catching content from them when Google (or other preferred search engine) finds content related to their search. Now I am not saying that either of these is right or wrong, nor am I saying that anyone should feel any compulsion to be in any particular category. What I would say is that you as a blog reader have the power to move blog writers from one category to another. How, you might ask? How do I have any power over a blog writer? It is very simple - feedback. If you give feedback then the blog writer knows that they are reaching an audience, if there is no response then they we are simply writing down our thoughts for what could amount to nothing more than a feeble amount of exercise and a few more key stokes towards the onset of RSI. Most blogs have a mechanism to alert the writer when there are comments, and personally speaking, if an email is received saying there has been a response to a blog article then there is a rush of enthusiasm, a moment of excitement that someone is actually reading and considering the text that was submitted and made available for the whole world to read. I am relatively new to this blog game and could be in some extended honeymoon period as I have also recently been incorporated into the Simple Talk 'stable'. I can understand that once you get to the "Dizzy Heights of Ozar" (www.brentozar.com) then getting comments and feedback might not be such a pleasure and may even be rather more of a chore but that, I guess, is the price of fame. For us mere mortals starting out blogging, getting feedback (or even at the moment for me, simply the hope of getting feedback) is what keeps it going. The hope that you will pick a topic that hasn't been done recently by Brad McGehee, Grant Fritchey,  Paul Randall, Thomas LaRock or any one of the dozen of rock star bloggers listed here or others from SQLServerPedia and so on, and then do it well enough to be found, reviewed, or <shudder> (re)tweeted to bring more visitors is what we are striving for, along with the fact that the content we might produce is something that will be of benefit to others. There is only so much point to typing content that no-one is reading and putting it on a blog. You may as well just write it in a diary. A technical blog is not like, say, a blog covering photography techniques where the way to frame and take a picture stands true whether it was written last week, last year or last century - technical content goes sour, quite quickly. There isn't much call for articles about yesterdays technology unless its something that still applies to current versions too, so some content written no more than 2 years ago isn't worth having now. The combination of a piece of content that you know is going to not last long and the fact that no-one reads it is a strong force against writing anything else. Getting feedback counters that despair and gives a value to writing something new. I would say that any feedback is good but there are obviously comments that are just so negative or otherwise badly phrased that they would hasten the demise of a blog but, in general most feedback will encourage a writer. It may not be a comment that supports or agrees with the main theme of a post but if it generates discussion or opens up a previously unexplored viewpoint it is contributing to the blog and is therefore encouraging to the writer. Even if you only say "thank you" before you leave a blog, having taken a section of script to use for yourself or having been given a few links to some content that has widened your knowledge it will be so welcome to the blog owner. Isn't it also the decent thing to do, acknowledging that you have benefited from another's efforts?

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• Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/robz/archive/2014/08/07/puppet-making-windows-awesome-since-2011.aspxPuppet was one of the first configuration management (CM) tools to support Windows, way back in 2011. It has the heaviest investment on Windows infrastructure with 1/3 of the platform client development staff being Windows folks.  It appears that Microsoft believed an end state configuration tool like Puppet was the way forward, so much so that they cloned Puppet’s DSL (domain-specific language) in many ways and are calling it PowerShell DSC. Puppet Labs is pushing the envelope on Windows. Here are several things to note: Puppet x64 Ruby support for Windows coming in v3.7.0. An awesome ACL module (with order, SIDs and very granular control of permissions it is best of any CM). A wealth of modules that work with Windows on the Forge (and more on GitHub). Documentation solely for Windows folks - https://docs.puppetlabs.com/windows. Some of the common learning points with Puppet on Windows user are noted in this recent blog post. Microsoft OpenTech supports Puppet. Azure has the ability to deploy a Puppet Master (http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/microsoft). At Microsoft //Build 2014 in the Day 2 Keynote Puppet Labs CEO Luke Kanies co-presented with Mark Russonivich (http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/KEY02  fast forward to 19:30)! Puppet has a Visual Studio Plugin! It can be overwhelming learning a new tool like Puppet at first, but Puppet Labs has some resources to help you on that path. Take a look at the Learning VM, which has a quest-based learning tool. For real-time questions, feel free to drop onto #puppet on freenode.net (yes, some folks still use IRC) with questions, and #puppet-dev with thoughts/feedback on the language itself. You can subscribe to puppet-users / puppet-dev mailing lists. There is also ask.puppetlabs.com for questions and Server Fault if you want to go to a Stack Exchange site. There are books written on learning Puppet. There are even Puppet User Groups (PUGs) and other community resources! Puppet does take some time to learn, but with anything you need to learn, you need to weigh the benefits versus the ramp up time. I learned NHibernate once, it had a very high ramp time back then but was the only game on the street. Puppet’s ramp up time is considerably less than that. The advantage is that you are learning a DSL, and it can apply to multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, OS X, etc.) with the same Puppet resource constructs. As you learn Puppet you may wonder why it has a DSL instead of just leveraging the language of Ruby (or maybe this is one of those things that keeps you up wondering at night). I like the DSL over a small layer on top of Ruby. It allows the Puppet language to be portable and go more places. It makes you think about the end state of what you want to achieve in a declarative sense instead of in an imperative sense. You may also find that right now Puppet doesn’t run manifests (scripts) in order of the way resources are specified. This is the number one learning point for most folks. As a long time consternation of some folks about Puppet, manifest ordering was not possible in the past. In fact it might be why some other CMs exist! As of 3.3.0, Puppet can do manifest ordering, and it will be the default in Puppet 4. http://puppetlabs.com/blog/introducing-manifest-ordered-resources You may have caught earlier that I mentioned PowerShell DSC. But what about DSC? Shouldn’t that be what Windows users want to choose? Other CMs are integrating with DSC, will Puppet follow suit and integrate with DSC? The biggest concern that I have with DSC is it’s lack of visibility in fine-grained reporting of changes (which Puppet has). The other is that it is a very young Microsoft product (pre version 3, you know what they say :) ). I tried getting it working in December and ran into some issues. I’m hoping that newer releases are there that actually work, it does have some promising capabilities, it just doesn’t quite come up to the standard of something that should be used in production. In contrast Puppet is almost a ten year old language with an active community! It’s very stable, and when trusting your business to configuration management, you want something that has been around awhile and has been proven. Give DSC another couple of releases and you might see more folks integrating with it. That said there may be a future with DSC integration. Portability and fine-grained reporting of configuration changes are reasons to take a closer look at Puppet on Windows. Yes, Puppet on Windows is here to stay and it’s continually getting better folks.

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• Using SQL Source Control with Fortress or Vault &ndash; Part 1

  - by AjarnMark

  I am fanatical when it comes to managing the source code for my company.  Everything that we build (in source form) gets put into our source control management system.  And I’m not just talking about the UI and middle-tier code written in C# and ASP.NET, but also the back-end database stuff, which at times has been a pain.  We even script out our Scheduled Jobs and keep a copy of those under source control. The UI and middle-tier stuff has long been easy to manage as we mostly use Visual Studio which has integration with source control systems built in.  But the SQL code has been a little harder to deal with.  I have been doing this for many years, well before Microsoft came up with Data Dude, so I had already established a methodology that, while not as smooth as VS, nonetheless let me keep things well controlled, and allowed doing my database development in my tool of choice, Query Analyzer in days gone by, and now SQL Server Management Studio.  It just makes sense to me that if I’m going to do database development, let’s use the database tool set.  (Although, I have to admit I was pretty impressed with the demo of Juneau that Don Box did at the PASS Summit this year.)  So as I was saying, I had developed a methodology that worked well for us (and I’ll probably outline in a future post) but it could use some improvement. When Solutions and Projects were first introduced in SQL Management Studio, I thought we were finally going to get our same experience that we have in Visual Studio.  Well, let’s say I was underwhelmed by Version 1 in SQL 2005, and apparently so were enough other people that by the time SQL 2008 came out, Microsoft decided that Solutions and Projects would be deprecated and completely removed from a future version.  So much for that idea. Then I came across SQL Source Control from Red-Gate.  I have used several tools from Red-Gate in the past, including my favorites SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, and SQL Refactor.  SQL Prompt is worth its weight in gold, and the others are great, too.  Earlier this year, we upgraded from our earlier product bundles to the new Developer Bundle, and in the process added SQL Source Control to our collection.  I thought this might really be the golden ticket I was looking for.  But my hopes were quickly dashed when I discovered that it only integrated with Microsoft Team Foundation Server and Subversion as the source code repositories.  We have been using SourceGear’s Vault and Fortress products for years, and I wholeheartedly endorse them.  So I was out of luck for the time being, although there were a number of people voting for Vault/Fortress support on their feedback forum (as did I) so I had hope that maybe next year I could look at it again. But just a couple of weeks ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive notice in my email that Red-Gate had an Early Access version of SQL Source Control that worked with Vault and Fortress, so I quickly downloaded it and have been putting it through its paces.  So far, I really like what I see, and I have been quite impressed with Red-Gate’s responsiveness when I have contacted them with any issues or concerns that I have had.  I have had several communications with Gyorgy Pocsi at Red-Gate and he has been immensely helpful and responsive. I must say that development with SQL Source Control is very different from what I have been used to.  This post is getting long enough, so I’ll save some of the details for a separate write-up, but the short story is that in my regular mode, it’s all about the script files.  Script files are King and you dare not make a change to the database other than by way of a script file, or you are in deep trouble.  With SQL Source Control, you make your changes to your development database however you like.  I still prefer writing most of my changes in T-SQL, but you can also use any of the GUI functionality of SSMS to make your changes, and SQL Source Control “manages” the script for you.  Basically, when you first link your database to source control, the tool generates scripts for every primary object (tables and their indexes are together in one script, not broken out into separate scripts like DB Projects do) and those scripts are checked into your source control.  So, if you needed to, you could still do a GET from your source control repository and build the database from scratch.  But for the day-to-day work, SQL Source Control uses the same technique as SQL Compare to determine what changes have been made to your development database and how to represent those in your repository scripts.  I think that once I retrain myself to just work in the database and quit worrying about having to find and open the right script file, that this will actually make us more efficient. And for deployment purposes, SQL Source Control integrates with the full SQL Compare utility to produce a synchronization script (or do a live sync).  This is similar in concept to Microsoft’s DACPAC, if you’re familiar with that. If you are not currently keeping your database development efforts under source control, definitely examine this tool.  If you already have a methodology that is working for you, then I still think this is worth a review and comparison to your current approach.  You may find it more efficient.  But remember that the version which integrates with Vault/Fortress is still in pre-release mode, so treat it with a little caution.  I have found it to be fairly stable, but there was one bug that I found which had inconvenient side-effects and could have really been frustrating if I had been running this on my normal active development machine.  However, I can verify that that bug has been fixed in a more recent build version (did I mention Red-Gate’s responsiveness?).

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• Stumbling Through: Making a case for the K2 Case Management Framework

  I have recently attended a three-day training session on K2s Case Management Framework (CMF), a free framework built on top of K2s blackpearl workflow product, and I have come away with several different impressions for some of the different aspects of the framework.  Before we get into the details, what is the Case Management Framework?  It is essentially a suite of tools that, when used together, solve many common workflow scenarios.  The tool has been developed over time by K2 consultants that have realized they tend to solve the same problems over and over for various clients, so they attempted to package all of those common solutions into one framework.  Most of these common problems involve workflow process that arent necessarily direct and would tend to be difficult to model.  Such solutions could be achieved in blackpearl alone, but the workflows would be complex and difficult to follow and maintain over time.  CMF attempts to simplify such scenarios not so much by black-boxing the workflow processes, but by providing different points of entry to the processes allowing them to be simpler, moving the complexity to a middle layer.  It is not a solution in and of itself, development is still required to tie the pieces together. CMF is under continuous development, both a plus and a minus in that bugs are fixed quickly and features added regularly, but it may be difficult to know which versions are the most stable.  CMF is not an officially supported K2 product, which means you will not get technical support but you will get access to the source code. The example given of a business process that would fit well into CMF is that of a file cabinet, where each folder in said file cabinet is a case that contains all of the data associated with one complaint/customer/incident/etc. and various users can access that case at any time and take one of a set of pre-determined actions on it.  When I was given that example, my first thought was that any workflow I have ever developed in the past could be made to fit this model there must be more than just this model to help decide if CMF is the right solution.  As the training went on, we learned that one of the key features of CMF is SharePoint integration as each case gets a SharePoint site created for it, and there are a number of excellent web parts that can be used to design a portal for users to get at all the information on their cases.  While CMF does not require SharePoint, without it you will be missing out on a huge portion of functionality that CMF offers.  My opinion is that without SharePoint integration, you may as well write your workflows and other components the old fashioned way. When I heard that each case gets its own SharePoint site created for it, warning bells immediately went off in my head as I felt that depending on the data load, a CMF enabled solution could quickly overwhelm SharePoint with thousands of sites so we have yet another deciding factor for CMF:  Just how many cases will your solution be creating?  While it is not necessary to use the site-per-case model, it is one of the more useful parts of the framework.  Without it, you are losing a big chunk of what CMF has to offer. When it comes to developing on top of the Case Management Framework, it becomes a matter of configuring what makes up a case, what can be done to a case, where each action on a case should take the user, and then typing up actions to case statuses.  This last step is one that I immediately warmed up to, as just about every workflow Ive designed in the past needed some sort of mapping table to set the status of a work item based on the action being taken definitely one of those common solutions that it is good to see rolled up into a re-useable entity (and it gets a nice configuration UI to boot!).  This concept is a little different than traditional workflow design, in that you dont have to think of an end-to-end process around passing a case along a path, rather, you must envision the case as central object with workflow threads branching off of it and doing their own thing with the case data.  Certainly there can be certain workflow threads that get rather complex, but the idea is that they RELATE to the case, they dont BECOME the case (though it is still possible with action->status mappings to prevent certain actions in certain cases, so it isnt always a wide-open free for all of actions on a case). I realize that this description of the Case Management Framework merely scratches the surface on what the product actually can do, and I dont think Ive conclusively defined for what sort of business scenario you can make a case for Case Management Framework.  What I do hope to have accomplished with this post is to raise awareness of CMF there is a (free!) product out there that could potentially simplify a tangled workflow process and give (for free!) a very useful set of SharePoint web parts and a nice set of (free!) reports.  The best way to see if it will truly fit your needs is to give it a try did I mention it is FREE?  Er, ok, so it is free, but only obtainable at this time for K2 partnersDid 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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• 5 minutes WIF: Make your ASP.NET application use test-STS

  - by DigiMortal

  Windows Identity Foundation (WIF) provides us with simple and dummy STS application we can use to develop our system with no actual STS in place. In this posting I will show you how to add STS support to your existing application and how to generate dummy application that plays you real STS. Word of caution! Although it is relatively easy to build your own STS using WIF tools I don’t recommend you to build it. Identity providers must be highly secure and stable in every means and this makes development of your own STS very complex task. If it is possible then use some known STS solution. I suppose you have WIF and WIF SDK installed on your development machine. If you don’t then here are the links to download pages: Windows Identity Foundation Windows Identity Foundation SDK Adding STS support to your web application Suppose you have web application and you want to externalize authentication so your application is able to detect users, send unauthenticated users to login and work in other terms exactly like it worked before. WIF tools provide you with all you need. 1. Click on your web application project and select “Add STS reference…” from context menu to start adding or updating STS settings for web application. 2. Insert your application URI in application settings window. Note that web.config file is already selected for you. I inserted URI that corresponds to my web application address under IIS Express. This URI must exist (later) because otherwise you cannot use dummy STS service. 3. Select “Create a new STS project in the current solution” and click Next button. 4. Summary screen gives you information about how your site will use STS. You can run this wizard always when you have to modify STS parameters. Click Finish. If everything goes like expected then new web site will be added to your solution and it is named as YourWebAppName_STS. Dummy STS application Image on right shows you dummy STS web site. Yes, it is created as web site project not as web application. But it still works nice and you don’t have to make there any modifications. It just works but it is dummy one. Why dummy STS? Some points about dummy STS web site: Dummy STS is not template for your own custom STS identity provider. Dummy STS is very good and simple replacement of real STS so you have more flexible development environment and you don’t have to authenticate yourself in real service. Of course, you can modify dummy STS web site to mimic some behavior of your real STS. Pages in dummy STS Dummy STS has two pages – Login.aspx and  Default.aspx. Default.aspx is the page that handles requests to STS service. Login.aspx is the page where authentication takes place. Dummy STS authenticates users using FBA. You can insert whatever username you like and dummy STS still works. You can take a look at the code behind these pages to get some idea about how this dummy service is built up. But again – this service is there to simplify your life as developer. Authenticating users using dummy STS If you are using development web server that ships with Visual Studio 2010 I suggest you to switch over to IIS or IIS Express and make some more configuration changes as described in my previous posting Making WIF local STS to work with your ASP.NET application. When you are done with these little modifications you are ready to run your application and see how authentication works. If everything is okay then you are redirected to dummy STS login page when running your web application. Adam Carter is provided as username by default. If you click on submit button you are authenticated and redirected to application page. In my case it looks like this. Conclusion As you saw it is very easy to set up your own dummy STS web site for testing purposes. You coded nothing. You just ran wizard, inserted some data, modified configuration a little bit and you were done. Later, when your application goes to production you can run again this STS configuration utility and it generates correct settings for your real STS service automatically.

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• Take Advantage of Oracle's Ongoing Assurance Effort!

  - by eric.maurice

  Hi, this is Eric Maurice again! A few years ago, I posted a blog entry, which discussed the psychology of patching. The point of this blog entry was that a natural tendency existed for systems and database administrators to be reluctant to apply patches, even security patches, because of the fear of "breaking" the system. Unfortunately, this belief in the principle "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!" creates significant risks for organizations. Running systems without applying the proper security patches can greatly compromise the security posture of the organization because the security controls available in the affected system may be compromised as a result of the existence of the unfixed vulnerabilities. As a result, Oracle continues to strongly recommend that customers apply all security fixes as soon as possible. Most recently, I have had a number of conversations with customers who questioned the need to upgrade their highly stable but otherwise unsupported Oracle systems. These customers wanted to know more about the kind of security risks they were exposed to, by running obsolete versions of Oracle software. As per Oracle Support Policies, Critical Patch Updates are produced for currently supported products. In other words, Critical Patch Updates are not created by Oracle for product versions that are no longer covered under the Premier Support or Extended Support phases of the Lifetime Support Policy. One statement used in each Critical Patch Update Advisory is particularly important: "We recommend that customers upgrade to a supported version of Oracle products in order to obtain patches. Unsupported products, releases and versions are not tested for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by this Critical Patch Update. However, it is likely that earlier versions of affected releases are also affected by these vulnerabilities." The purpose of this warning is to inform Oracle customers that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed in each Critical Patch Update may affect older versions of a specific product line. In other words, each Critical Patch Update provides a number of fixes for currently supported versions of a given product line (this information is listed for each bug in the Risk Matrices of the Critical Patch Update Advisory), but the unsupported versions in the same product line, while they may be affected by the vulnerabilities, will not receive the fixes, and are therefore vulnerable to attacks. The risk assumed by organizations wishing to remain on unsupported versions is amplified by the behavior of malicious hackers, who typically will attempt to, and sometimes succeed in, reverse-engineering the content of vendors' security fixes. As a result, it is not uncommon for exploits to be published soon after Oracle discloses vulnerabilities with the release of a Critical Patch Update or Security Alert. Let's consider now the nature of the vulnerabilities that may exist in obsolete versions of Oracle software. A number of severe vulnerabilities have been fixed by Oracle over the years. While Oracle does not test unsupported products, releases and versions for the presence of vulnerabilities addressed by each Critical Patch Update, it should be assumed that a number of the vulnerabilities fixed with the Critical Patch Update program do exist in unsupported versions (regardless of the product considered). The most severe vulnerabilities fixed in past Critical Patch Updates may result in full compromise of the targeted systems, down to the OS level, by remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 10.0) or almost as critically, may result in the compromise of the affected systems (without compromising the underlying OS) by a remote and unauthenticated users (these vulnerabilities receive a CVSS Base Score of 7.5). Such vulnerabilities may result in complete takeover of the targeted machine (for the CVSS 10.0), or may result in allowing the attacker the ability to create a denial of service against the affected system or even hijacking or stealing all the data hosted by the compromised system (for the CVSS 7.5). The bottom line is that organizations should assume the worst case: that the most critical vulnerabilities are present in their unsupported version; therefore, it is Oracle's recommendation that all organizations move to supported systems and apply security patches in a timely fashion. Organizations that currently run supported versions but may be late in their security patch release level can quickly catch up because most Critical Patch Updates are cumulative. With a few exceptions noted in Oracle's Critical Patch Update Advisory, the application of the most recent Critical Patch Update will bring these products to current security patch level and provide the organization with the best possible security posture for their patch level. Furthermore, organizations are encouraged to upgrade to most recent versions as this will greatly improve their security posture. At Oracle, our security fixing policies state that security fixes are produced for the main code line first, and as a result, our products benefit from the mistakes made in previous version(s). Our ongoing assurance effort ensures that we work diligently to fix the vulnerabilities we find, and aim at constantly improving the security posture our products provide by default. Patch sets include numerous in-depth fixes in addition to those delivered through the Critical Patch Update and, in certain instances, important security fixes require major architectural changes that can only be included in new product releases (and cannot be backported through the Critical Patch Update program). For More Information: • Mary Ann Davidson is giving a webcast interview on Oracle Software Security Assurance on February 24th. The registration link for attending this webcast is located at http://event.on24.com/r.htm?e=280304&s=1&k=6A7152F62313CA09F77EBCEEA9B6294F&partnerref=EricMblog • A blog entry discussing Oracle's practices for ensuring the quality of Critical patch Updates can be found at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2009/07/ensuring_critical_patch_update_quality.html • The blog entry "To patch or not to patch" is located at http://blogs.oracle.com/security/2008/01/to_patch_or_not_to_patch.html • Oracle's Support Policies are located at http://www.oracle.com/us/support/policies/index.html • The Critical Patch Update & Security Alert page is located at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/security/alerts-086861.html

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