wmi query - Page 701 - Developer IT

$.post is not working

- by BEBO

i am trying to post data to Mysql using jquery $.post and php page. my code is not running and nothing is added to the mysql table. I am not sure if the path i am creating is wrong but any help would be appreciated. Jquery location: f_js/tasks/TaskTest.js <script type="text/javascript"> $(document).ready(function(){ $("#AddTask").click(function(){ var acct = $('#acct').val(); var quicktask = $('#quicktask').val(); var user = $('#user').val(); $.post('addTask.php',{acct:acct,quicktask:quicktask,user:user}, function(data){ $('#result').fadeIn('slow').html(data); }); }); }); </script> addTask.php (runs the jqeury code) <?php include 'dbconnect.php'; include 'sessions.php'; $acct = $_POST['acct']; $task = $_POST['quicktask']; $taskstatus = 'Active'; //get task Creator $user = $_POST['user']; //query task creator from users table $allusers = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$user'"); while ($rows = mysql_fetch_array($allusers)) { //get first and last name for task creator $taskOwner = $rows['user_firstname']; $taskOwnerLast = $rows['user_lastname']; $taskOwnerFull = $taskOwner." ".$taskOwnerLast; mysql_query("INSERT INTO tasks (taskresource, tasktitle, taskdetail, taskstatus, taskowner, taskOwnerFullName) VALUES ('$acct', '$task', '$task', '$taskstatus', '$user', '$taskOwnerFull' )"); echo "inserted"; } ?> Accountview.php finally the front page <html> <div class="input-cont "> <input type="text" class="form-control col-lg-12" placeholder="Add a quick Task..." name ="quicktask" id="quicktask"> </div> <div class="form-group"> <div class="pull-right chat-features"> <a href="javascript:;"> <i class="icon-camera"></i> </a> <a href="javascript:;"> <i class="icon-link"></i> </a> <input type="button" class="btn btn-danger" name="AddTask" id="AddTask" value="Add" /> <input type="hidden" name="acct" id="acct" value="<?php echo $_REQUEST['acctname']?>"/> <input type="hidden" name="user" id="user" value="<?php $username = $_SESSION['username']; echo $username?>"/> <div id="result">result</div> </div> </div>  <script src="js/jquery.js"></script> <script src="f_js/tasks/TaskTest.js"></script>  <script src="js/common-scripts.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="assets/gritter/js/jquery.gritter.js"></script> <script src="js/gritter.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script> </html> Firebug reponse: Response Headers Connection Keep-Alive Content-Length 0 Content-Type text/html Date Fri, 08 Nov 2013 21:48:50 GMT Keep-Alive timeout=5, max=100 Server Apache/2.4.4 (Win32) OpenSSL/0.9.8y PHP/5.4.16 X-Powered-By PHP/5.4.16 refresh 5; URL=index.php Request Headers Accept */* Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate Accept-Language en-US,en;q=0.5 Content-Length 13 Content-Type application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8 Cookie PHPSESSID=6gufl3guiiddreg8cdlc0htnc6 Host localhost Referer http://localhost/betahtml/AccountView.php?acctname=client%201 User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 X-Requested-With XMLHttpRequest

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delete row from mysql through generated table with records

- by HennySmafter

I am using 2 pages. On one page it generates a table with the records and a delete button. After pressing delete it goes to the second page which should delete the record. But it doesn't. Below is the code that I am using. PS: The code is adapted from a tutorial I found through Google a while ago. delete_overzicht.php <?php // Load Joomla! configuration file require_once('../../../configuration.php'); // Create a JConfig object $config = new JConfig(); // Get the required codes from the configuration file $server = $config->host; $username = $config->user; $password = $config->password; $database = $config->db; // Connect to db $con = mysqli_connect($server,$username,$password,$database); if (!$con){ die('Could not connect: ' . mysqli_error($con)); } mysqli_select_db($con,$database); // Get results $result = mysqli_query($con,"SELECT * FROM cypg8_overzicht"); echo "<table border='1' id='example' class='tablesorter'><thead><tr><th>Formulier Id</th><th>Domeinnaam</th><th>Bedrijfsnaam</th><th>Datum</th><th>Periode</th><th>Subtotaal</th><th>Dealernaam</th><th>Verwijderen</th></tr></thead><tbody>"; while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)) { echo "<tr>"; echo "<td>" . $row['formuliernummer'] . "</td>"; echo "<td>" . $row['domeinnaam'] . "</td>"; echo "<td>" . $row['bedrijfsnaam'] . "</td>"; echo "<td>" . $row['datum'] . "</td>"; echo "<td>" . $row['periode'] . "</td>"; echo "<td> € " . $row['subtotaal'] . "</td>"; echo "<td>" . $row['dealercontactpersoon'] . "</td>"; echo "<td><a href='delete.php?id=" . $row['id'] . "'>Verwijderen </a></td>"; echo "</tr>"; } echo "</tbody></table>"; mysqli_close($con); ?> delete.php <?php // Load Joomla! configuration file require_once('../../../configuration.php'); // Create a JConfig object $config = new JConfig(); // Get the required codes from the configuration file $server = $config->host; $username = $config->user; $password = $config->password; $database = $config->db; // Connect to db $con = mysqli_connect($server,$username,$password,$database); if (!$con){ die('Could not connect: ' . mysqli_error($con)); } mysqli_select_db($con,$database); // Check whether the value for id is transmitted if (isset($_GET['id'])) { // Put the value in a separate variable $id = $_GET['id']; // Query the database for the details of the chosen id $result = mysqli_query($con,"DELETE * FROM cypg8_overzicht WHERE id = $id"); } else { die("No valid id specified!"); } ?> Thanks to everyone who is willing to help!

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mysql: Bind on unix socket: Permission denied

- by Alex

Can't start mysql with: sudo /usr/bin/mysqld_safe --datadir=/srv/mysql/myDB --log-error=/srv/mysql/logs/mysqld-myDB.log --pid-file=/srv/mysql/pids/mysqld-myDB.pid --user=mysql --socket=/srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock --port=3700 120222 13:40:48 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /srv/mysql/myDB 120222 13:40:54 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /srv/mysql/pids/mysqld-myDB.pid ended /srv/mysql/logs/mysqld-myDB.log: 120222 13:43:53 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /srv/mysql/myDB 120222 13:43:53 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. /usr/sbin/mysqld: Table 'plugin' is read only 120222 13:43:53 [ERROR] Can't open the mysql.plugin table. Please run mysql_upgrade to create it. 120222 13:43:53 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool 120222 13:43:53 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 32 4232720908 120222 13:43:53 [ERROR] Can't start server : Bind on unix socket: Permission denied 120222 13:43:53 [ERROR] Do you already have another mysqld server running on socket: /srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock ? 120222 13:43:53 [ERROR] Aborting 120222 13:43:53 InnoDB: Starting shutdown... One instance mysqld is running: $ ps aux | grep mysql mysql 1093 0.0 0.2 169972 18700 ? Ssl 11:50 0:02 /usr/sbin/mysqld $ Port 3700 is available: $ netstat -a | grep 3700 $ Directory with sockets is empty: $ ls /srv/mysql/sockets/ $ There are all permissions: $ ls -l /srv/mysql/ total 20 drwxrwxrwx 2 mysql mysql 4096 2012-02-22 13:28 logs drwxrwxrwx 13 mysql mysql 4096 2012-02-22 13:44 myDB drwxrwxrwx 2 mysql mysql 4096 2012-02-22 12:55 pids drwxrwxrwx 2 mysql mysql 4096 2012-02-22 12:55 sockets drwxrwxrwx 2 mysql mysql 4096 2012-02-22 13:25 version Apparmor config: $cat /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld # vim:syntax=apparmor # Last Modified: Tue Jun 19 17:37:30 2007 #include <tunables/global> /usr/sbin/mysqld flags=(complain) { #include <abstractions/base> #include <abstractions/nameservice> #include <abstractions/user-tmp> #include <abstractions/mysql> #include <abstractions/winbind> capability dac_override, capability sys_resource, capability setgid, capability setuid, network tcp, /etc/hosts.allow r, /etc/hosts.deny r, /etc/mysql/*.pem r, /etc/mysql/conf.d/ r, /etc/mysql/conf.d/* r, /etc/mysql/*.cnf r, /usr/lib/mysql/plugin/ r, /usr/lib/mysql/plugin/*.so* mr, /usr/sbin/mysqld mr, /usr/share/mysql/** r, /var/log/mysql.log rw, /var/log/mysql.err rw, /var/lib/mysql/ r, /var/lib/mysql/** rwk, /var/log/mysql/ r, /var/log/mysql/* rw, /{,var/}run/mysqld/mysqld.pid w, /{,var/}run/mysqld/mysqld.sock w, /srv/mysql/ r, /srv/mysql/** rwk, /sys/devices/system/cpu/ r, # Site-specific additions and overrides. See local/README for details. #include <local/usr.sbin.mysqld> } Any suggestions? UPD1: $ touch /srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock $ sudo chown mysql:mysql /srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock $ ls -l /srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock -rw-rw-r-- 1 mysql mysql 0 2012-02-22 14:29 /srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock $ sudo /usr/bin/mysqld_safe --datadir=/srv/mysql/myDB --log-error=/srv/mysql/logs/mysqld-myDB.log --pid-file=/srv/mysql/pids/mysqld-myDB.pid --user=mysql --socket=/srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock --port=3700 120222 14:30:18 mysqld_safe Can't log to error log and syslog at the same time. Remove all --log-error configuration options for --syslog to take effect. 120222 14:30:18 mysqld_safe Logging to '/srv/mysql/logs/mysqld-myDB.log'. 120222 14:30:18 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /srv/mysqlmyDB 120222 14:30:24 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /srv/mysql/pids/mysqld-myDB.pid ended $ ls -l /srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock ls: cannot access /srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock: No such file or directory $ UPD2: $ sudo netstat -lnp | grep mysql tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:3306 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 1093/mysqld unix 2 [ ACC ] STREAM LISTENING 5912 1093/mysqld /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock $ sudo lsof | grep /srv/mysql/sockets/mysql-myDB.sock lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfs-fuse-daemon file system /home/sears/.gvfs Output information may be incomplete. UPD3: $ cat /etc/mysql/my.cnf # # The MySQL database server configuration file. # # You can copy this to one of: # - "/etc/mysql/my.cnf" to set global options, # - "~/.my.cnf" to set user-specific options. # # One can use all long options that the program supports. # Run program with --help to get a list of available options and with # --print-defaults to see which it would actually understand and use. # # For explanations see # http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/server-system-variables.html # This will be passed to all mysql clients # It has been reported that passwords should be enclosed with ticks/quotes # escpecially if they contain "#" chars... # Remember to edit /etc/mysql/debian.cnf when changing the socket location. [client] port = 3306 socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock # Here is entries for some specific programs # The following values assume you have at least 32M ram # This was formally known as [safe_mysqld]. Both versions are currently parsed. [mysqld_safe] socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock nice = 0 [mysqld] # # * Basic Settings # # # * IMPORTANT # If you make changes to these settings and your system uses apparmor, you may # also need to also adjust /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld. # user = mysql socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock port = 3306 basedir = /usr datadir = /var/lib/mysql tmpdir = /tmp skip-external-locking # # Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on # localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure. #bind-address = 127.0.0.1 # # * Fine Tuning # key_buffer = 16M max_allowed_packet = 16M thread_stack = 192K thread_cache_size = 8 # This replaces the startup script and checks MyISAM tables if needed # the first time they are touched myisam-recover = BACKUP #max_connections = 100 #table_cache = 64 #thread_concurrency = 10 # # * Query Cache Configuration # query_cache_limit = 1M query_cache_size = 16M # # * Logging and Replication # # Both location gets rotated by the cronjob. # Be aware that this log type is a performance killer. # As of 5.1 you can enable the log at runtime! #general_log_file = /var/log/mysql/mysql.log #general_log = 1 log_error = /var/log/mysql/error.log # Here you can see queries with especially long duration #log_slow_queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log #long_query_time = 2 #log-queries-not-using-indexes # # The following can be used as easy to replay backup logs or for replication. # note: if you are setting up a replication slave, see README.Debian about # other settings you may need to change. #server-id = 1 #log_bin = /var/log/mysql/mysql-bin.log expire_logs_days = 10 max_binlog_size = 100M #binlog_do_db = include_database_name #binlog_ignore_db = include_database_name # # * InnoDB # # InnoDB is enabled by default with a 10MB datafile in /var/lib/mysql/. # Read the manual for more InnoDB related options. There are many! # # * Security Features # # Read the manual, too, if you want chroot! # chroot = /var/lib/mysql/ # # For generating SSL certificates I recommend the OpenSSL GUI "tinyca". # # ssl-ca=/etc/mysql/cacert.pem # ssl-cert=/etc/mysql/server-cert.pem # ssl-key=/etc/mysql/server-key.pem [mysqldump] quick quote-names max_allowed_packet = 16M [mysql] #no-auto-rehash # faster start of mysql but no tab completition [isamchk] key_buffer = 16M # # * IMPORTANT: Additional settings that can override those from this file! # The files must end with '.cnf', otherwise they'll be ignored. # !includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/

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Where do I find scripts generated by SharePoint MCMS Migration Profiles

- by HipCzeck

I am attempting to migrate data from an Microsoft Content Management Server (MCMS) 2002 instance into a new Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) 2007 installation using the Manage Microsoft Content Management Server Migration Profiles tool in the Operations space of MOSS Central Administration. When analyzing the profile, I receive 4 warnings, all of which may be safely ignored, but when I actually execute the migration profile, I get the same warnings and an additional error with a description of: Line 6: Incorrect syntax near ';'. I have seen this error numerous times when mucking about in SQL Server and recognize it as a Transact SQL error message, but can't find the actual SQL statement that is being executed so that I may determine the source of the error. EDIT: After enabling verbose logging on the MCMS 2002 Migration category, and poring through the Unified Logging Service (ULS) logs, I received a more complete stack trace at the point of the error, and a couple more anomalies listed below. Anomalies: The following is an abbreviated listing from the ULS logs around the time of the pre-migration analysis. 01 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Start ConnectionCheck 02 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose End ConnectionCheck 03 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Start DatabaseCheck 04 MCMS 2002 Migration High Extra table SiteDeployLock will not be migrated 05 MCMS 2002 Migration High Analysis: Extra index PK__SiteDeployLock__05D8E0BE 06 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose End DatabaseCheck 07 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: RootCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 08 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: RightsGroupNameCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 09 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: InvalidNameCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 10 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: LeafNameCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 11 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: LeafLengthCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 12 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: TemplateNameCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 13 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: TemplateCollisionCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 14 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: PlaceholderCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 15 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: CheckedOutItemsCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 16 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: SubmittedItemsCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 17 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: DeletedItemsCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 18 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: UserCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 19 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: FileSizeCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 20 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium Pre-migration analysis: HostHeaderMapCheckTask is skipped because database check is blocked. 21 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Start Server check 22 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose End Server check 23 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Start Server emptyness check 24 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose End Server emptyness check 25 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium PreMigrationAnalyzer: Dry run starts 26 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose CleanLockProcedure: start. 27 MCMS 2002 Migration High CleanLockProcedure: connection system lock is null 28 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Finished all tasks 29 MCMS 2002 Migration High PreMigrationAnalyzer ends with True 30 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Migration profile status is changed to AnalysisPassed Specifically, the two High level alerts on lines 4 and 5 are reflected in the migration report as warnings when running Pre-migration Analysis or running the migration profile. In addition, two other warnings appear in the migration report indicating two tables containing data (LayoutProperty and NodeLayout) that should be empty. According to the documentation, warnings are not sufficient cause to stop migration from occurring. Other anomalies are on lines 7-20 indicating a series of tests that are skipped because database check is blocked. The ULS doesn't give any additional warnings to indicate that the database check was blocked or exited in exceptional circumstances. After switching the profile from pre-migration analysis to exporting, there is one medium level warning that LastChangeTime is not set or incorrect. (null). As with all the skipped test names and SQL table names from the warnings, the major search engines are unable (with the exception of LayoutProperty) to find any reference to these objects or tests. Finally, the section of the log indicating the actual live migration attempt is appended below: 01 MCMS 2002 Migration Medium LastChangeTime is not set or incorrect. (null) 02 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Set export lock 03 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose CleanLockProcedure: start. 04 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose CleanLockProcedure: end. 05 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Prepare for export 06 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Open connection... 07 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Create temporary stored procedures 08 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Create temporary tables... 09 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Initialize temporary tables... 10 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose InitializeTemporaryTables: start 11 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Initialize export table... 12 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose InitializeExportTable: start 13 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose CleanLockProcedure: start. 14 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose CleanLockProcedure: end. 15 MCMS 2002 Migration High Migration throws exception: Line 6: Incorrect syntax near ';'.. Stacktrace: at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection) at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.ThrowExceptionAndWarning(TdsParserStateObject stateObj) at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.Run(RunBehavior runBehavior, SqlCommand cmdHandler, SqlDataReader dataStream, BulkCopySimpleResultSet bulkCopyHandler, TdsParserStateObject stateObj) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteNonQueryTds(String methodName, Boolean async) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.InternalExecuteNonQuery(DbAsyncResult result, String methodName, Boolean sendToPipe) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration... 16 MCMS 2002 Migration High ....MigrationBatchCommand.ExecuteImmediate(String command) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationBatchCommand.ExecuteWaitingCommands() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationDBSerializer.SerializeSelectedExportObject(StringCollection objectAttribs) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationDataAccess.InitializeExportTable(ScopeType scopeType) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationDataAccess.InitializeTemporaryTables(DateTime lastChangeTime) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationDataAccess.InitializeDatabase(DateTime lastChangeTime, Boolean isAnalysis, SqlConnection connection) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Admin... 17 MCMS 2002 Migration High ...stration.MigrationDataAccess.InitializeDatabase(DateTime lastChangeTime, Boolean isAnalysis) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentMigration.Export(MigrationDataAccess dataAccess) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentMigration.MigrateInternal(). 18 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose MigrationProfile: GetInstance. Start. 19 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose MigrationProfile: GetInstance. End. 20 MCMS 2002 Migration Verbose Migration profile status is changed to Failed The stack trace of the failed parsing of the SQL command appear on lines 15-17. A cleaner version of the stack trace is appended below. Full Stack Trace: Migration throws exception: Line 6: Incorrect syntax near ';'.. at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlConnection.OnError(SqlException exception, Boolean breakConnection) at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.ThrowExceptionAndWarning( TdsParserStateObject stateObj) at System.Data.SqlClient.TdsParser.Run(RunBehavior runBehavior, SqlCommand cmdHandler, SqlDataReader dataStream, BulkCopySimpleResultSet bulkCopyHandler, TdsParserStateObject stateObj) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.RunExecuteNonQueryTds(String methodName, Boolean async) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.InternalExecuteNonQuery(DbAsyncResult result, String methodName, Boolean sendToPipe) at System.Data.SqlClient.SqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationBatchCommand .ExecuteImmediate(String command) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationBatchCommand .ExecuteWaitingCommands() at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationDBSerializer .SerializeSelectedExportObject(StringCollection objectAttribs) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationDataAccess .InitializeExportTable(ScopeType scopeType) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationDataAccess .InitializeTemporaryTables(DateTime lastChangeTime) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationDataAccess .InitializeDatabase(DateTime lastChangeTime, Boolean isAnalysis, SqlConnection connection) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Internal.Administration.MigrationDataAccess .InitializeDatabase(DateTime lastChangeTime, Boolean isAnalysis) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentMigration.Export (MigrationDataAccess dataAccess) at Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentMigration .MigrateInternal(). None of this log information indicates the SQL command that is failing a parser check. I've checked the SQL servers hosting the source and destination databases for a trace of the query, but neither seems to have triggered the parse failure condition. That appears to have happened on the SharePoint server. Are there any other locations I should investigate that might tell me where to find the source of the error?

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SQL Server 08 Express error when connecting to localhost - "Timeout expired". Works with ::1 or 127

- by Adam A

EDIT New info: Navigating to localhost:1434 in Chrome gives me an "ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE", while other ports give me an "Oops! This link appears to be broken". So it seems to binding ok there? So here's my setup so far: I've configured Windows Firewall to allow TCP on 1433 and UDP on 1434. I've set up SQL Server to use any IP on Port 1433 (using the SQL Server Configuration Manager). My hosts file contains the default entries ("127.0.0.1 localhost" and "::1 localhost"). I sometimes have a debug session of Visual Web Developer running a webserver, but it's on a specific port (localhost:5XXXX). What I've tried: I CAN ping localhost in a cmd prompt. I CAN connect to the database through SSMS if I specify 127.0.0.1 or ::1 as the server name. I CAN'T connect to the database through SSMS (or ADO.NET) if I specify localhost as the server name. I've tried both Windows and SQL Authentication The error I get is the standard Can't connect to localhost. Additional Information -- Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. (Microsoft Sql Server) Other considerations: Stopping the Visual Web Developer web server from the taskbar doesn't affect the sql problem. The SQL error log says that it's listening on some piped name url at start up (I don't see how this would affect localhost but not 127.0.0.1 though). I could probably just use 127.0.0.1 everywhere, but it scares me that localhost isn't working and I'd like to figure out why. I'm not much of a networking or sql server guy so I'm stuck. If you want me to try anything to help diagnose just put it in a comment and I'll give it a go. Netstat results: Setting SDK environment relative to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1 Targeting Windows Server 2008 x86 DEBUG C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1netstat -ano | findstr 1434 UDP 0.0.0.0:1434 *:* 6868 UDP [::]:1434 *:* 6868 C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1netstat -ano | findstr 1433 TCP 0.0.0.0:1433 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 2268 TCP 127.0.0.1:1433 127.0.0.1:50758 ESTABLISHED 2268 TCP 127.0.0.1:50758 127.0.0.1:1433 ESTABLISHED 5008 TCP [::]:1433 [::]:0 LISTENING 2268 TCP [::1]:1433 [::1]:51202 ESTABLISHED 2268 TCP [::1]:1433 [::1]:51616 ESTABLISHED 2268 TCP [::1]:51202 [::1]:1433 ESTABLISHED 5008 TCP [::1]:51616 [::1]:1433 ESTABLISHED 5008 C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1 SQL Server Log File: In case it helps 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (SP1) - 10.0.2531.0 (Intel X86) Mar 29 2009 10:27:29 Copyright (c) 1988-2008 Microsoft Corporation Express Edition on Windows NT 6.0 (Build 6002: Service Pack 2) 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server (c) 2005 Microsoft Corporation. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server All rights reserved. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server Server process ID is 2268. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server System Manufacturer: 'Dell Inc.', System Model: 'Inspiron 1545'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server Authentication mode is MIXED. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server Logging SQL Server messages in file 'c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\Log\ERRORLOG'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server This instance of SQL Server last reported using a process ID of 7396 at 1/30/2010 12:57:38 PM (local) 1/30/2010 5:57:38 PM (UTC). This is an informational message only; no user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server Registry startup parameters: -d c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA\master.mdf -e c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\Log\ERRORLOG -l c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA\mastlog.ldf 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server SQL Server is starting at normal priority base (=7). This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server Detected 2 CPUs. This is an informational message; no user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.08 Server Using dynamic lock allocation. Initial allocation of 2500 Lock blocks and 5000 Lock Owner blocks per node. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.17 Server Node configuration: node 0: CPU mask: 0x00000003 Active CPU mask: 0x00000003. This message provides a description of the NUMA configuration for this computer. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.30 spid7s Starting up database 'master'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.41 spid7s Recovery is writing a checkpoint in database 'master' (1). This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.67 spid7s FILESTREAM: effective level = 0, configured level = 0, file system access share name = 'SQLEXPRESS'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.92 spid7s SQL Trace ID 1 was started by login "sa". 2010-01-30 12:58:59.94 spid7s Starting up database 'mssqlsystemresource'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.95 spid7s The resource database build version is 10.00.2531. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.82 spid7s Server name is 'DELL\SQLEXPRESS'. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.83 Server A self-generated certificate was successfully loaded for encryption. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.84 Server Server is listening on [ 'any' 1433]. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.84 Server Server is listening on [ 'any' 1433]. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.84 spid10s Starting up database 'model'. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.85 Server Server local connection provider is ready to accept connection on [ \\.\pipe\SQLLocal\SQLEXPRESS ]. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.86 Server Server local connection provider is ready to accept connection on [ \\.\pipe\MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS\sql\query ]. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.86 Server Dedicated administrator connection support was not started because it is disabled on this edition of SQL Server. If you want to use a dedicated administrator connection, restart SQL Server using the trace flag 7806. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.87 Server The SQL Server Network Interface library could not register the Service Principal Name (SPN) for the SQL Server service. Error: 0x54b, state: 3. Failure to register an SPN may cause integrated authentication to fall back to NTLM instead of Kerberos. This is an informational message. Further action is only required if Kerberos authentication is required by authentication policies. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.87 spid7s Informational: No full-text supported languages found. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.87 Server SQL Server is now ready for client connections. This is an informational message; no user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.91 spid7s Starting up database 'msdb'. 2010-01-30 12:59:01.21 spid10s Clearing tempdb database. 2010-01-30 12:59:02.78 spid10s Starting up database 'tempdb'. 2010-01-30 12:59:03.30 spid13s The Service Broker protocol transport is disabled or not configured. 2010-01-30 12:59:03.30 spid13s The Database Mirroring protocol transport is disabled or not configured. 2010-01-30 12:59:03.31 spid7s Recovery is complete. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:03.31 spid13s Service Broker manager has started.

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SQL Server 08 Express error when connecting to localhost - "Timeout expired". Works with ::1 or 127.0.0.1

- by Adam A

EDIT New info: Navigating to localhost:1434 in Chrome gives me an "ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE", while other ports give me an "Oops! This link appears to be broken". So it seems to binding ok there? So here's my setup so far: I've configured Windows Firewall to allow TCP on 1433 and UDP on 1434. I've set up SQL Server to use any IP on Port 1433 (using the SQL Server Configuration Manager). My hosts file contains the default entries ("127.0.0.1 localhost" and "::1 localhost"). I sometimes have a debug session of Visual Web Developer running a webserver, but it's on a specific port (localhost:5XXXX). What I've tried: I CAN ping localhost in a cmd prompt. I CAN connect to the database through SSMS if I specify 127.0.0.1 or ::1 as the server name. I CAN'T connect to the database through SSMS (or ADO.NET) if I specify localhost as the server name. I've tried both Windows and SQL Authentication The error I get is the standard Can't connect to localhost. Additional Information -- Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding. (Microsoft Sql Server) Other considerations: Stopping the Visual Web Developer web server from the taskbar doesn't affect the sql problem. The SQL error log says that it's listening on some piped name url at start up (I don't see how this would affect localhost but not 127.0.0.1 though). I could probably just use 127.0.0.1 everywhere, but it scares me that localhost isn't working and I'd like to figure out why. I'm not much of a networking or sql server guy so I'm stuck. If you want me to try anything to help diagnose just put it in a comment and I'll give it a go. Netstat results: Setting SDK environment relative to C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1 Targeting Windows Server 2008 x86 DEBUG C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1netstat -ano | findstr 1434 UDP 0.0.0.0:1434 *:* 6868 UDP [::]:1434 *:* 6868 C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1netstat -ano | findstr 1433 TCP 0.0.0.0:1433 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 2268 TCP 127.0.0.1:1433 127.0.0.1:50758 ESTABLISHED 2268 TCP 127.0.0.1:50758 127.0.0.1:1433 ESTABLISHED 5008 TCP [::]:1433 [::]:0 LISTENING 2268 TCP [::1]:1433 [::1]:51202 ESTABLISHED 2268 TCP [::1]:1433 [::1]:51616 ESTABLISHED 2268 TCP [::1]:51202 [::1]:1433 ESTABLISHED 5008 TCP [::1]:51616 [::1]:1433 ESTABLISHED 5008 C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.1 SQL Server Log File: In case it helps 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (SP1) - 10.0.2531.0 (Intel X86) Mar 29 2009 10:27:29 Copyright (c) 1988-2008 Microsoft Corporation Express Edition on Windows NT 6.0 (Build 6002: Service Pack 2) 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server (c) 2005 Microsoft Corporation. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server All rights reserved. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server Server process ID is 2268. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server System Manufacturer: 'Dell Inc.', System Model: 'Inspiron 1545'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.01 Server Authentication mode is MIXED. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server Logging SQL Server messages in file 'c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\Log\ERRORLOG'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server This instance of SQL Server last reported using a process ID of 7396 at 1/30/2010 12:57:38 PM (local) 1/30/2010 5:57:38 PM (UTC). This is an informational message only; no user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server Registry startup parameters: -d c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA\master.mdf -e c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\Log\ERRORLOG -l c:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL10.SQLEXPRESS\MSSQL\DATA\mastlog.ldf 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server SQL Server is starting at normal priority base (=7). This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.02 Server Detected 2 CPUs. This is an informational message; no user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.08 Server Using dynamic lock allocation. Initial allocation of 2500 Lock blocks and 5000 Lock Owner blocks per node. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.17 Server Node configuration: node 0: CPU mask: 0x00000003 Active CPU mask: 0x00000003. This message provides a description of the NUMA configuration for this computer. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.30 spid7s Starting up database 'master'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.41 spid7s Recovery is writing a checkpoint in database 'master' (1). This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.67 spid7s FILESTREAM: effective level = 0, configured level = 0, file system access share name = 'SQLEXPRESS'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.92 spid7s SQL Trace ID 1 was started by login "sa". 2010-01-30 12:58:59.94 spid7s Starting up database 'mssqlsystemresource'. 2010-01-30 12:58:59.95 spid7s The resource database build version is 10.00.2531. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.82 spid7s Server name is 'DELL\SQLEXPRESS'. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.83 Server A self-generated certificate was successfully loaded for encryption. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.84 Server Server is listening on [ 'any' 1433]. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.84 Server Server is listening on [ 'any' 1433]. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.84 spid10s Starting up database 'model'. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.85 Server Server local connection provider is ready to accept connection on [ \\.\pipe\SQLLocal\SQLEXPRESS ]. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.86 Server Server local connection provider is ready to accept connection on [ \\.\pipe\MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS\sql\query ]. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.86 Server Dedicated administrator connection support was not started because it is disabled on this edition of SQL Server. If you want to use a dedicated administrator connection, restart SQL Server using the trace flag 7806. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.87 Server The SQL Server Network Interface library could not register the Service Principal Name (SPN) for the SQL Server service. Error: 0x54b, state: 3. Failure to register an SPN may cause integrated authentication to fall back to NTLM instead of Kerberos. This is an informational message. Further action is only required if Kerberos authentication is required by authentication policies. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.87 spid7s Informational: No full-text supported languages found. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.87 Server SQL Server is now ready for client connections. This is an informational message; no user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:00.91 spid7s Starting up database 'msdb'. 2010-01-30 12:59:01.21 spid10s Clearing tempdb database. 2010-01-30 12:59:02.78 spid10s Starting up database 'tempdb'. 2010-01-30 12:59:03.30 spid13s The Service Broker protocol transport is disabled or not configured. 2010-01-30 12:59:03.30 spid13s The Database Mirroring protocol transport is disabled or not configured. 2010-01-30 12:59:03.31 spid7s Recovery is complete. This is an informational message only. No user action is required. 2010-01-30 12:59:03.31 spid13s Service Broker manager has started.

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Unable to receive any emails using postfix, dovecot, mysql, and virtual domain/mailboxes

- by stkdev248

I have been working on configuring my mail server for the last couple of weeks using postfix, dovecot, and mysql. I have one virtual domain and a few virtual mailboxes. Using squirrelmail I have been able to log into my accounts and send emails out (e.g. I can send to googlemail just fine), however I am not able to receive any emails--not from the outside world nor from within my own network. I am able to telnet in using localhost, my private ip, and my public ip on port 25 without any problems (I've tried it from the server itself and from another computer on my network). This is what I get in my logs when I send an email from my googlemail account to my mail server: mail.log Apr 14 07:36:06 server1 postfix/qmgr[1721]: BE01B520538: from=, size=733, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Apr 14 07:36:06 server1 postfix/pipe[3371]: 78BC0520510: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=45421, delays=45421/0/0/0.13, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied) Apr 14 07:36:06 server1 postfix/pipe[3391]: 8261B520534: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=38036, delays=38036/0.06/0/0.12, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) Apr 14 07:36:06 server1 postfix/pipe[3378]: 63927520532: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=38105, delays=38105/0.02/0/0.17, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) Apr 14 07:36:06 server1 postfix/pipe[3375]: 07F65520522: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=39467, delays=39467/0.01/0/0.17, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) Apr 14 07:36:06 server1 postfix/pipe[3381]: EEDE9520527: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=38361, delays=38360/0.04/0/0.15, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) Apr 14 07:36:06 server1 postfix/pipe[3379]: 67DFF520517: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=40475, delays=40475/0.03/0/0.16, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) Apr 14 07:36:06 server1 postfix/pipe[3387]: 3C7A052052E: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=38259, delays=38259/0.05/0/0.13, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) Apr 14 07:36:06 server1 postfix/pipe[3394]: BE01B520538: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=37682, delays=37682/0.07/0/0.11, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) Apr 14 07:36:07 server1 postfix/pipe[3384]: 3C7A052052E: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=38261, delays=38259/0.04/0/1.3, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) Apr 14 07:39:23 server1 postfix/anvil[3368]: statistics: max connection rate 1/60s for (smtp:209.85.213.169) at Apr 14 07:35:32 Apr 14 07:39:23 server1 postfix/anvil[3368]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:209.85.213.169) at Apr 14 07:35:32 Apr 14 07:39:23 server1 postfix/anvil[3368]: statistics: max cache size 1 at Apr 14 07:35:32 Apr 14 07:41:06 server1 postfix/qmgr[1721]: ED6005203B7: from=, size=1463, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Apr 14 07:41:06 server1 postfix/pipe[4594]: ED6005203B7: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=334, delays=334/0.01/0/0.13, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) Apr 14 07:51:06 server1 postfix/qmgr[1721]: ED6005203B7: from=, size=1463, nrcpt=1 (queue active) Apr 14 07:51:06 server1 postfix/pipe[4604]: ED6005203B7: to=, relay=dovecot, delay=933, delays=933/0.02/0/0.12, dsn=4.3.0, status=deferred (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ) mail-dovecot-log (the log I set for debugging): Apr 14 07:28:26 auth: Info: mysql(127.0.0.1): Connected to database postfixadmin Apr 14 07:28:26 auth: Debug: sql([email protected],127.0.0.1): query: SELECT password FROM mailbox WHERE username = '[email protected]' Apr 14 07:28:26 auth: Debug: client out: OK 1 [email protected] Apr 14 07:28:26 auth: Debug: master in: REQUEST 1809973249 3356 1 7cfb822db820fc5da67d0776b107cb3f Apr 14 07:28:26 auth: Debug: sql([email protected],127.0.0.1): SELECT '/home/vmail/mydomain.com/some.user1' as home, 5000 AS uid, 5000 AS gid FROM mailbox WHERE username = '[email protected]' Apr 14 07:28:26 auth: Debug: master out: USER 1809973249 [email protected] home=/home/vmail/mydomain.com/some.user1 uid=5000 gid=5000 Apr 14 07:28:26 imap-login: Info: Login: user=, method=PLAIN, rip=127.0.0.1, lip=127.0.0.1, mpid=3360, secured Apr 14 07:28:26 imap([email protected]): Debug: Effective uid=5000, gid=5000, home=/home/vmail/mydomain.com/some.user1 Apr 14 07:28:26 imap([email protected]): Debug: maildir++: root=/home/vmail/mydomain.com/some.user1/Maildir, index=/home/vmail/mydomain.com/some.user1/Maildir/indexes, control=, inbox=/home/vmail/mydomain.com/some.user1/Maildir Apr 14 07:48:31 imap([email protected]): Info: Disconnected: Logged out bytes=85/681 From the output above I'm pretty sure that my problems all stem from (temporary failure. Command output: Can't open log file /var/log/mail-dovecot.log: Permission denied ), but I have no idea why I'm getting that error. I've have the permissions to that log set just like the other mail logs: root@server1:~# ls -l /var/log/mail* -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 196653 2012-04-14 07:58 /var/log/mail-dovecot.log -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 62778 2012-04-13 21:04 /var/log/mail.err -rw-r----- 1 syslog adm 497767 2012-04-14 08:01 /var/log/mail.log Does anyone have any idea what I may be doing wrong? Here are my main.cf and master.cf files: main.cf: # See /usr/share/postfix/main.cf.dist for a commented, more complete version # Debian specific: Specifying a file name will cause the first # line of that file to be used as the name. The Debian default # is /etc/mailname. #myorigin = /etc/mailname smtpd_banner = $myhostname ESMTP $mail_name (Ubuntu) biff = no # appending .domain is the MUA's job. append_dot_mydomain = no # Uncomment the next line to generate "delayed mail" warnings #delay_warning_time = 4h readme_directory = no # TLS parameters smtpd_tls_cert_file=/etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem smtpd_tls_key_file=/etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key smtpd_use_tls=yes smtpd_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtpd_scache smtp_tls_session_cache_database = btree:${data_directory}/smtp_scache # See /usr/share/doc/postfix/TLS_README.gz in the postfix-doc package for # information on enabling SSL in the smtp client. myhostname = server1.mydomain.com alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases myorigin = /etc/mailname mydestination = relayhost = mynetworks = 127.0.0.0/8 [::ffff:127.0.0.0]/104 [::1]/128 mailbox_command = procmail -a "$EXTENSION" mailbox_size_limit = 0 recipient_delimiter = + inet_interfaces = all # Virtual Configs virtual_uid_maps = static:5000 virtual_gid_maps = static:5000 virtual_mailbox_base = /home/vmail virtual_mailbox_domains = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_mailbox_domains.cf virtual_mailbox_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_mailbox_maps.cf virtual_alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_virtual_alias_maps.cf relay_domains = mysql:/etc/postfix/mysql_relay_domains.cf smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_non_fqdn_hostname, reject_non_fqdn_sender, reject_non_fqdn_recipient, reject_unauth_destination, reject_unauth_pipelining, reject_invalid_hostname smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes smtpd_sasl_security_options = noanonymous virtual_transport=dovecot dovecot_destination_recipient_limit = 1 master.cf: # # Postfix master process configuration file. For details on the format # of the file, see the master(5) manual page (command: "man 5 master"). # # Do not forget to execute "postfix reload" after editing this file. # # ========================================================================== # service type private unpriv chroot wakeup maxproc command + args # (yes) (yes) (yes) (never) (100) # ========================================================================== smtp inet n - - - - smtpd #smtp inet n - - - 1 postscreen #smtpd pass - - - - - smtpd #dnsblog unix - - - - 0 dnsblog #tlsproxy unix - - - - 0 tlsproxy #submission inet n - - - - smtpd # -o smtpd_tls_security_level=encrypt # -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes # -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject # -o milter_macro_daemon_name=ORIGINATING #smtps inet n - - - - smtpd # -o smtpd_tls_wrappermode=yes # -o smtpd_sasl_auth_enable=yes # -o smtpd_client_restrictions=permit_sasl_authenticated,reject # -o milter_macro_daemon_name=ORIGINATING #628 inet n - - - - qmqpd pickup fifo n - - 60 1 pickup cleanup unix n - - - 0 cleanup qmgr fifo n - n 300 1 qmgr #qmgr fifo n - - 300 1 oqmgr tlsmgr unix - - - 1000? 1 tlsmgr rewrite unix - - - - - trivial-rewrite bounce unix - - - - 0 bounce defer unix - - - - 0 bounce trace unix - - - - 0 bounce verify unix - - - - 1 verify flush unix n - - 1000? 0 flush proxymap unix - - n - - proxymap proxywrite unix - - n - 1 proxymap smtp unix - - - - - smtp # When relaying mail as backup MX, disable fallback_relay to avoid MX loops relay unix - - - - - smtp -o smtp_fallback_relay= # -o smtp_helo_timeout=5 -o smtp_connect_timeout=5 showq unix n - - - - showq error unix - - - - - error retry unix - - - - - error discard unix - - - - - discard local unix - n n - - local virtual unix - n n - - virtual lmtp unix - - - - - lmtp anvil unix - - - - 1 anvil scache unix - - - - 1 scache # # ==================================================================== # Interfaces to non-Postfix software. Be sure to examine the manual # pages of the non-Postfix software to find out what options it wants. # # Many of the following services use the Postfix pipe(8) delivery # agent. See the pipe(8) man page for information about ${recipient} # and other message envelope options. # ==================================================================== # # maildrop. See the Postfix MAILDROP_README file for details. # Also specify in main.cf: maildrop_destination_recipient_limit=1 # maildrop unix - n n - - pipe flags=DRhu user=vmail argv=/usr/bin/maildrop -d ${recipient} # # ==================================================================== # # Recent Cyrus versions can use the existing "lmtp" master.cf entry. # # Specify in cyrus.conf: # lmtp cmd="lmtpd -a" listen="localhost:lmtp" proto=tcp4 # # Specify in main.cf one or more of the following: # mailbox_transport = lmtp:inet:localhost # virtual_transport = lmtp:inet:localhost # # ==================================================================== # # Cyrus 2.1.5 (Amos Gouaux) # Also specify in main.cf: cyrus_destination_recipient_limit=1 # #cyrus unix - n n - - pipe # user=cyrus argv=/cyrus/bin/deliver -e -r ${sender} -m ${extension} ${user} # # ==================================================================== # Old example of delivery via Cyrus. # #old-cyrus unix - n n - - pipe # flags=R user=cyrus argv=/cyrus/bin/deliver -e -m ${extension} ${user} # # ==================================================================== # # See the Postfix UUCP_README file for configuration details. # uucp unix - n n - - pipe flags=Fqhu user=uucp argv=uux -r -n -z -a$sender - $nexthop!rmail ($recipient) # # Other external delivery methods. # ifmail unix - n n - - pipe flags=F user=ftn argv=/usr/lib/ifmail/ifmail -r $nexthop ($recipient) bsmtp unix - n n - - pipe flags=Fq. user=bsmtp argv=/usr/lib/bsmtp/bsmtp -t$nexthop -f$sender $recipient scalemail-backend unix - n n - 2 pipe flags=R user=scalemail argv=/usr/lib/scalemail/bin/scalemail-store ${nexthop} ${user} ${extension} mailman unix - n n - - pipe flags=FR user=list argv=/usr/lib/mailman/bin/postfix-to-mailman.py ${nexthop} ${user} dovecot unix - n n - - pipe flags=DRhu user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -d ${recipient}

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I need advices: small memory footprint linux mail server with spam filtering

- by petermolnar

I have a VPS which is originally destined to be a webserver but some minimal mail capabilities are needed to be deployed as well, including sending and receiving as standalone server. The current setup is the following: Postfix reveices the mail, the users are in virtual tables, stored in MySQL on connection all servers are tested with policyd-weight service against some DNSBLs all mail is runs through SpamAssassin spamd with the help of spamc client the mail is then delivered with Dovecot 2' LDA (local delivery agent), virtual users as well As you saw... there's no virus scanner running, and that's for a reason: clamav eats all the memory possible and also, virus mails are all filtered out with this setup (I've tested the same with ClamAV enabled for 1,5 years, no virus mail ever got even to ClamAV) I don't use amavisd and I really don't want to. You only need that monster if you have plenty of memory and lots of simultaneous scanners. It's also a nightmare to fine tune by hand. I run policyd-weight instead of policyd and native DNSBLs in postfix. I don't like to send someone away because a single service listed them. Important statement: everything works fine. I receive very small amount of spam, nearly never get a false positive and most of the bad mail is stopped by policyd-weight. The only "problem" that I feel the services at total uses a bit much memory alltogether. I've already cut the modules of spamassassin (see below), but I'd really like to hear some advices how to cut the memory footprint as low as possible, mostly: what plugins SpamAssassin really needs and what are more or less useless, regarding to my current postfix & policyd-weight setup? SpamAssassin rules are also compiled with sa-compile (sa-update runs once a week from cron, compile runs right after that) These are some of the current configurations that may matter, please tell me if you need anything more. postfix/master.cf (parts only) dovecot unix - n n - - pipe flags=DRhu user=vmail:vmail argv=/usr/bin/spamc -e /usr/lib/dovecot/deliver -d ${recipient} -f {sender} postfix/main.cf (parts only) smtpd_helo_required = yes smtpd_helo_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, reject_invalid_hostname, permit smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_invalid_hostname, reject_non_fqdn_hostname, reject_non_fqdn_recipient, reject_unknown_recipient_domain, reject_unauth_pipelining, reject_unauth_destination, check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:12525, permit policyd-weight.conf (parts only) $REJECTMSG = "550 Mail appeared to be SPAM or forged. Ask your Mail/DNS-Administrator to correct HELO and DNS MX settings or to get removed from DNSBLs"; $REJECTLEVEL = 4; $DEFER_STRING = 'IN_SPAMCOP= BOGUS_MX='; $DEFER_ACTION = '450'; $DEFER_LEVEL = 5; $DNSERRMSG = '450 No DNS entries for your MTA, HELO and Domain. Contact YOUR administrator'; # 1: ON, 0: OFF (default) # If ON request that ALL clients are only checked against RBLs $dnsbl_checks_only = 0; # 1: ON (default), 0: OFF # When set to ON it logs only RBLs which affect scoring (positive or negative) $LOG_BAD_RBL_ONLY = 1; ## DNSBL settings @dnsbl_score = ( # host, hit, miss, log name 'dnsbl.ahbl.org', 3, -1, 'dnsbl.ahbl.org', 'dnsbl.njabl.org', 3, -1, 'dnsbl.njabl.org', 'dnsbl.sorbs.net', 3, -1, 'dnsbl.sorbs.net', 'bl.spamcop.net', 3, -1, 'bl.spamcop.net', 'zen.spamhaus.org', 3, -1, 'zen.spamhaus.org', 'pbl.spamhaus.org', 3, -1, 'pbl.spamhaus.org', 'cbl.abuseat.org', 3, -1, 'cbl.abuseat.org', 'list.dsbl.org', 3, -1, 'list.dsbl.org', ); # If Client IP is listed in MORE DNSBLS than this var, it gets REJECTed immediately $MAXDNSBLHITS = 3; # alternatively, if the score of DNSBLs is ABOVE this level, reject immediately $MAXDNSBLSCORE = 9; $MAXDNSBLMSG = '550 Az levelezoszerveruk IP cime tul sok spamlistan talahato, kerjuk ellenorizze! / Your MTA is listed in too many DNSBLs; please check.'; ## RHSBL settings @rhsbl_score = ( 'multi.surbl.org', 4, 0, 'multi.surbl.org', 'rhsbl.ahbl.org', 4, 0, 'rhsbl.ahbl.org', 'dsn.rfc-ignorant.org', 4, 0, 'dsn.rfc-ignorant.org', # 'postmaster.rfc-ignorant.org', 0.1, 0, 'postmaster.rfc-ignorant.org', # 'abuse.rfc-ignorant.org', 0.1, 0, 'abuse.rfc-ignorant.org' ); # skip a RBL if this RBL had this many continuous errors $BL_ERROR_SKIP = 2; # skip a RBL for that many times $BL_SKIP_RELEASE = 10; ## cache stuff # must be a directory (add trailing slash) $LOCKPATH = '/var/run/policyd-weight/'; # socket path for the cache daemon. $SPATH = $LOCKPATH.'/polw.sock'; # how many seconds the cache may be idle before starting maintenance routines #NOTE: standard maintenance jobs happen regardless of this setting. $MAXIDLECACHE = 60; # after this number of requests do following maintenance jobs: checking for config changes $MAINTENANCE_LEVEL = 5; # negative (i.e. SPAM) result cache settings ################################## # set to 0 to disable caching for spam results. To this level the cache will be cleaned. $CACHESIZE = 2000; # at this number of entries cleanup takes place $CACHEMAXSIZE = 4000; $CACHEREJECTMSG = '550 temporarily blocked because of previous errors'; # after NTTL retries the cache entry is deleted $NTTL = 1; # client MUST NOT retry within this seconds in order to decrease TTL counter $NTIME = 30; # positve (i.,e. HAM) result cache settings ################################### # set to 0 to disable caching of HAM. To this number of entries the cache will be cleaned $POSCACHESIZE = 1000; # at this number of entries cleanup takes place $POSCACHEMAXSIZE = 2000; $POSCACHEMSG = 'using cached result'; #after PTTL requests the HAM entry must succeed one time the RBL checks again $PTTL = 60; # after $PTIME in HAM Cache the client must pass one time the RBL checks again. #Values must be nonfractal. Accepted time-units: s, m, h, d $PTIME = '3h'; # The client must pass this time the RBL checks in order to be listed as hard-HAM # After this time the client will pass immediately for PTTL within PTIME $TEMP_PTIME = '1d'; ## DNS settings # Retries for ONE DNS-Lookup $DNS_RETRIES = 1; # Retry-interval for ONE DNS-Lookup $DNS_RETRY_IVAL = 5; # max error count for unresponded queries in a complete policy query $MAXDNSERR = 3; $MAXDNSERRMSG = 'passed - too many local DNS-errors'; # persistent udp connection for DNS queries. #broken in Net::DNS version 0.51. Works with Net::DNS 0.53; DEFAULT: off $PUDP= 0; # Force the usage of Net::DNS for RBL lookups. # Normally policyd-weight tries to use a faster RBL lookup routine instead of Net::DNS $USE_NET_DNS = 0; # A list of space separated NS IPs # This overrides resolv.conf settings # Example: $NS = '1.2.3.4 1.2.3.5'; # DEFAULT: empty $NS = ''; # timeout for receiving from cache instance $IPC_TIMEOUT = 2; # If set to 1 policyd-weight closes connections to smtpd clients in order to avoid too many #established connections to one policyd-weight child $TRY_BALANCE = 0; # scores for checks, WARNING: they may manipulate eachother # or be factors for other scores. # HIT score, MISS Score @client_ip_eq_helo_score = (1.5, -1.25 ); @helo_score = (1.5, -2 ); @helo_score = (0, -2 ); @helo_from_mx_eq_ip_score= (1.5, -3.1 ); @helo_numeric_score= (2.5, 0 ); @from_match_regex_verified_helo= (1,-2 ); @from_match_regex_unverified_helo = (1.6, -1.5 ); @from_match_regex_failed_helo = (2.5, 0 ); @helo_seems_dialup = (1.5, 0 ); @failed_helo_seems_dialup= (2, 0 ); @helo_ip_in_client_subnet= (0,-1.2 ); @helo_ip_in_cl16_subnet = (0,-0.41 ); #@client_seems_dialup_score = (3.75, 0 ); @client_seems_dialup_score = (0, 0 ); @from_multiparted = (1.09, 0 ); @from_anon= (1.17, 0 ); @bogus_mx_score = (2.1, 0 ); @random_sender_score = (0.25, 0 ); @rhsbl_penalty_score = (3.1, 0 ); @enforce_dyndns_score = (3, 0 ); spamassassin/init.pre (I've put the .pre files together) loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Hashcash loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::SPF loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Pyzor loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Razor2 loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::AutoLearnThreshold loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::MIMEHeader loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::ReplaceTags loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Check loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::HTTPSMismatch loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::URIDetail loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Bayes loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::BodyEval loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::DNSEval loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::HTMLEval loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::HeaderEval loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::MIMEEval loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::RelayEval loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::URIEval loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::WLBLEval loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::VBounce loadplugin Mail::SpamAssassin::Plugin::Rule2XSBody spamassassin/local.cf (parts) use_bayes 1 bayes_auto_learn 1 bayes_store_module Mail::SpamAssassin::BayesStore::MySQL bayes_sql_dsn DBI:mysql:db:127.0.0.1:3306 bayes_sql_username user bayes_sql_password pass bayes_ignore_header X-Bogosity bayes_ignore_header X-Spam-Flag bayes_ignore_header X-Spam-Status ### User settings user_scores_dsn DBI:mysql:db:127.0.0.1:3306 user_scores_sql_password user user_scores_sql_username pass user_scores_sql_custom_query SELECT preference, value FROM _TABLE_ WHERE username = _USERNAME_ OR username = '$GLOBAL' OR username = CONCAT('%',_DOMAIN_) ORDER BY username ASC # for better speed score DNS_FROM_AHBL_RHSBL 0 score __RFC_IGNORANT_ENVFROM 0 score DNS_FROM_RFC_DSN 0 score DNS_FROM_RFC_BOGUSMX 0 score __DNS_FROM_RFC_POST 0 score __DNS_FROM_RFC_ABUSE 0 score __DNS_FROM_RFC_WHOIS 0 UPDATE 01 As adaptr advised I remove policyd-weight and configured postfix postscreen, this resulted approximately -15-20 MB from RAM usage and a lot faster work. I'm not sure it's working at full capacity but it seems promising.

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Bacula windows client could not connect to Bacula director

- by pr0f-r00t

I have a Bacula server on my Linux Debian squeeze host (Bacula version 5.0.2) and a Bacula client on Windows XP SP3. On my network each client can see each other, can share files and can ping. On my local server I could run bconsole and the server responds but when I run bconsole or bat on my windows client the server does not respond. Here are my configuration files: bacula-dir.conf: # # Default Bacula Director Configuration file # # The only thing that MUST be changed is to add one or more # file or directory names in the Include directive of the # FileSet resource. # # For Bacula release 5.0.2 (28 April 2010) -- debian squeeze/sid # # You might also want to change the default email address # from root to your address. See the "mail" and "operator" # directives in the Messages resource. # Director { # define myself Name = nima-desktop-dir DIRport = 9101 # where we listen for UA connections QueryFile = "/etc/bacula/scripts/query.sql" WorkingDirectory = "/var/lib/bacula" PidDirectory = "/var/run/bacula" Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 1 Password = "Cv70F6pf1t6pBopT4vQOnigDrR0v3L" # Console password Messages = Daemon DirAddress = 127.0.0.1 # DirAddress = 72.16.208.1 } JobDefs { Name = "DefaultJob" Type = Backup Level = Incremental Client = nima-desktop-fd FileSet = "Full Set" Schedule = "WeeklyCycle" Storage = File Messages = Standard Pool = File Priority = 10 Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%c.bsr" } # # Define the main nightly save backup job # By default, this job will back up to disk in /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir Job { Name = "BackupClient1" JobDefs = "DefaultJob" } #Job { # Name = "BackupClient2" # Client = nima-desktop2-fd # JobDefs = "DefaultJob" #} # Backup the catalog database (after the nightly save) Job { Name = "BackupCatalog" JobDefs = "DefaultJob" Level = Full FileSet="Catalog" Schedule = "WeeklyCycleAfterBackup" # This creates an ASCII copy of the catalog # Arguments to make_catalog_backup.pl are: # make_catalog_backup.pl <catalog-name> RunBeforeJob = "/etc/bacula/scripts/make_catalog_backup.pl MyCatalog" # This deletes the copy of the catalog RunAfterJob = "/etc/bacula/scripts/delete_catalog_backup" Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%n.bsr" Priority = 11 # run after main backup } # # Standard Restore template, to be changed by Console program # Only one such job is needed for all Jobs/Clients/Storage ... # Job { Name = "RestoreFiles" Type = Restore Client=nima-desktop-fd FileSet="Full Set" Storage = File Pool = Default Messages = Standard Where = /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir/bacula-restores } # job for vmware windows host Job { Name = "nimaxp-fd" Type = Backup Client = nimaxp-fd FileSet = "nimaxp-fs" Schedule = "WeeklyCycle" Storage = File Messages = Standard Pool = Default Write Bootstrap = "/var/bacula/working/rsys-win-www-1-fd.bsr" #Change this } # job for vmware windows host Job { Name = "arg-michael-fd" Type = Backup Client = nimaxp-fd FileSet = "arg-michael-fs" Schedule = "WeeklyCycle" Storage = File Messages = Standard Pool = Default Write Bootstrap = "/var/bacula/working/rsys-win-www-1-fd.bsr" #Change this } # List of files to be backed up FileSet { Name = "Full Set" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } # # Put your list of files here, preceded by 'File =', one per line # or include an external list with: # # File = <file-name # # Note: / backs up everything on the root partition. # if you have other partitions such as /usr or /home # you will probably want to add them too. # # By default this is defined to point to the Bacula binary # directory to give a reasonable FileSet to backup to # disk storage during initial testing. # File = /usr/sbin } # # If you backup the root directory, the following two excluded # files can be useful # Exclude { File = /var/lib/bacula File = /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir File = /proc File = /tmp File = /.journal File = /.fsck } } # List of files to be backed up FileSet { Name = "nimaxp-fs" Enable VSS = yes Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = "C:\softwares" File = C:/softwares File = "C:/softwares" } } # List of files to be backed up FileSet { Name = "arg-michael-fs" Enable VSS = yes Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = "C:\softwares" File = C:/softwares File = "C:/softwares" } } # # When to do the backups, full backup on first sunday of the month, # differential (i.e. incremental since full) every other sunday, # and incremental backups other days Schedule { Name = "WeeklyCycle" Run = Full 1st sun at 23:05 Run = Differential 2nd-5th sun at 23:05 Run = Incremental mon-sat at 23:05 } # This schedule does the catalog. It starts after the WeeklyCycle Schedule { Name = "WeeklyCycleAfterBackup" Run = Full sun-sat at 23:10 } # This is the backup of the catalog FileSet { Name = "Catalog" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = "/var/lib/bacula/bacula.sql" } } # Client (File Services) to backup Client { Name = nima-desktop-fd Address = localhost FDPort = 9102 Catalog = MyCatalog Password = "_MOfxEuRzxijc0DIMcBqtyx9iW1tzE7V6" # password for FileDaemon File Retention = 30 days # 30 days Job Retention = 6 months # six months AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files } # Client file service for vmware windows host Client { Name = nimaxp-fd Address = nimaxp FDPort = 9102 Catalog = MyCatalog Password = "Ku8F1YAhDz5EMUQjiC9CcSw95Aho9XbXailUmjOaAXJP" # password for FileDaemon File Retention = 30 days # 30 days Job Retention = 6 months # six months AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files } # Client file service for vmware windows host Client { Name = arg-michael-fd Address = 192.168.0.61 FDPort = 9102 Catalog = MyCatalog Password = "b4E9FU6s/9Zm4BVFFnbXVKhlyd/zWxj0oWITKK6CALR/" # password for FileDaemon File Retention = 30 days # 30 days Job Retention = 6 months # six months AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files } # # Second Client (File Services) to backup # You should change Name, Address, and Password before using # #Client { # Name = nima-desktop2-fd # Address = localhost2 # FDPort = 9102 # Catalog = MyCatalog # Password = "_MOfxEuRzxijc0DIMcBqtyx9iW1tzE7V62" # password for FileDaemon 2 # File Retention = 30 days # 30 days # Job Retention = 6 months # six months # AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files #} # Definition of file storage device Storage { Name = File # Do not use "localhost" here Address = localhost # N.B. Use a fully qualified name here SDPort = 9103 Password = "Cj-gtxugC4dAymY01VTSlUgMTT5LFMHf9" Device = FileStorage Media Type = File } # Definition of DDS tape storage device #Storage { # Name = DDS-4 # Do not use "localhost" here # Address = localhost # N.B. Use a fully qualified name here # SDPort = 9103 # Password = "Cj-gtxugC4dAymY01VTSlUgMTT5LFMHf9" # password for Storage daemon # Device = DDS-4 # must be same as Device in Storage daemon # Media Type = DDS-4 # must be same as MediaType in Storage daemon # Autochanger = yes # enable for autochanger device #} # Definition of 8mm tape storage device #Storage { # Name = "8mmDrive" # Do not use "localhost" here # Address = localhost # N.B. Use a fully qualified name here # SDPort = 9103 # Password = "Cj-gtxugC4dAymY01VTSlUgMTT5LFMHf9" # Device = "Exabyte 8mm" # MediaType = "8mm" #} # Definition of DVD storage device #Storage { # Name = "DVD" # Do not use "localhost" here # Address = localhost # N.B. Use a fully qualified name here # SDPort = 9103 # Password = "Cj-gtxugC4dAymY01VTSlUgMTT5LFMHf9" # Device = "DVD Writer" # MediaType = "DVD" #} # Generic catalog service Catalog { Name = MyCatalog # Uncomment the following line if you want the dbi driver # dbdriver = "dbi:sqlite3"; dbaddress = 127.0.0.1; dbport = dbname = "bacula"; dbuser = ""; dbpassword = "" } # Reasonable message delivery -- send most everything to email address # and to the console Messages { Name = Standard # # NOTE! If you send to two email or more email addresses, you will need # to replace the %r in the from field (-f part) with a single valid # email address in both the mailcommand and the operatorcommand. # What this does is, it sets the email address that emails would display # in the FROM field, which is by default the same email as they're being # sent to. However, if you send email to more than one address, then # you'll have to set the FROM address manually, to a single address. # for example, a '[email protected]', is better since that tends to # tell (most) people that its coming from an automated source. # mailcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"$Bacula$ \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula: %t %e of %c %l\" %r" operatorcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"$Bacula$ \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula: Intervention needed for %j\" %r" mail = root@localhost = all, !skipped operator = root@localhost = mount console = all, !skipped, !saved # # WARNING! the following will create a file that you must cycle from # time to time as it will grow indefinitely. However, it will # also keep all your messages if they scroll off the console. # append = "/var/lib/bacula/log" = all, !skipped catalog = all } # # Message delivery for daemon messages (no job). Messages { Name = Daemon mailcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"$Bacula$ \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula daemon message\" %r" mail = root@localhost = all, !skipped console = all, !skipped, !saved append = "/var/lib/bacula/log" = all, !skipped } # Default pool definition Pool { Name = Default Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 365 days # one year } # File Pool definition Pool { Name = File Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 365 days # one year Maximum Volume Bytes = 50G # Limit Volume size to something reasonable Maximum Volumes = 100 # Limit number of Volumes in Pool } # Scratch pool definition Pool { Name = Scratch Pool Type = Backup } # # Restricted console used by tray-monitor to get the status of the director # Console { Name = nima-desktop-mon Password = "-T0h6HCXWYNy0wWqOomysMvRGflQ_TA6c" CommandACL = status, .status } bacula-fd.conf on client: # # Default Bacula File Daemon Configuration file # # For Bacula release 5.0.3 (08/05/10) -- Windows MinGW32 # # There is not much to change here except perhaps the # File daemon Name # # # "Global" File daemon configuration specifications # FileDaemon { # this is me Name = nimaxp-fd FDport = 9102 # where we listen for the director WorkingDirectory = "C:\\Program Files\\Bacula\\working" Pid Directory = "C:\\Program Files\\Bacula\\working" # Plugin Directory = "C:\\Program Files\\Bacula\\plugins" Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 10 } # # List Directors who are permitted to contact this File daemon # Director { Name = Nima-desktop-dir Password = "Cv70F6pf1t6pBopT4vQOnigDrR0v3L" } # # Restricted Director, used by tray-monitor to get the # status of the file daemon # Director { Name = nimaxp-mon Password = "q5b5g+LkzDXorMViFwOn1/TUnjUyDlg+gRTBp236GrU3" Monitor = yes } # Send all messages except skipped files back to Director Messages { Name = Standard director = Nima-desktop = all, !skipped, !restored } I have checked my firewall and disabled the firewall but it doesn't work.

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Bacula & Multiple Tape Devices, and so on

- by Tom O'Connor

Bacula won't make use of 2 tape devices simultaneously. (Search for #-#-# for the TL;DR) A little background, perhaps. In the process of trying to get a decent working backup solution (backing up 20TB ain't cheap, or easy) at $dayjob, we bought a bunch of things to make it work. Firstly, there's a Spectra Logic T50e autochanger, 40 slots of LTO5 goodness, and that robot's got a pair of IBM HH5 Ultrium LTO5 drives, connected via FibreChannel Arbitrated Loop to our backup server. There's the backup server.. A Dell R715 with 2x 16 core AMD 62xx CPUs, and 32GB of RAM. Yummy. That server's got 2 Emulex FCe-12000E cards, and an Intel X520-SR dual port 10GE NIC. We were also sold Commvault Backup (non-NDMP). Here's where it gets really complicated. Spectra Logic and Commvault both sent respective engineers, who set up the library and the software. Commvault was running fine, in so far as the controller was working fine. The Dell server has Ubuntu 12.04 server, and runs the MediaAgent for CommVault, and mounts our BlueArc NAS as NFS to a few mountpoints, like /home, and some stuff in /mnt. When backing up from the NFS mountpoints, we were seeing ~= 290GB/hr throughput. That's CRAP, considering we've got 20-odd TB to get through, in a <48 hour backup window. The rated maximum on the BlueArc is 700MB/s (2460GB/hr), the rated maximum write speed on the tape devices is 140MB/s, per drive, so that's 492GB/hr (or double it, for the total throughput). So, the next step was to benchmark NFS performance with IOzone, and it turns out that we get epic write performance (across 20 threads), and it's like 1.5-2.5TB/hr write, but read performance is fecking hopeless. I couldn't ever get higher than 343GB/hr maximum. So let's assume that the 343GB/hr is a theoretical maximum for read performance on the NAS, then we should in theory be able to get that performance out of a) CommVault, and b) any other backup agent. Not the case. Commvault seems to only ever give me 200-250GB/hr throughput, and out of experimentation, I installed Bacula to see what the state of play there is. If, for example, Bacula gave consistently better performance and speeds than Commvault, then we'd be able to say "**$.$ Refunds Plz $.$**" #-#-# Alas, I found a different problem with Bacula. Commvault seems pretty happy to read from one part of the mountpoint with one thread, and stream that to a Tape device, whilst reading from some other directory with the other thread, and writing to the 2nd drive in the autochanger. I can't for the life of me get Bacula to mount and write to two tape drives simultaneously. Things I've tried: Setting Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 in the Director, File and Storage Daemons Setting Prefer Mounted Volumes = no in the Job Definition Setting multiple devices in the Autochanger resource. Documentation seems to be very single-drive centric, and we feel a little like we've strapped a rocket to a hamster, with this one. The majority of example Bacula configurations are for DDS4 drives, manual tape swapping, and FreeBSD or IRIX systems. I should probably add that I'm not too bothered if this isn't possible, but I'd be surprised. I basically want to use Bacula as proof to stick it to the software vendors that they're overpriced ;) I read somewhere that @KyleBrandt has done something similar with a modern Tape solution.. Configuration Files: *bacula-dir.conf* # # Default Bacula Director Configuration file Director { # define myself Name = backuphost-1-dir DIRport = 9101 # where we listen for UA connections QueryFile = "/etc/bacula/scripts/query.sql" WorkingDirectory = "/var/lib/bacula" PidDirectory = "/var/run/bacula" Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 Password = "yourekiddingright" # Console password Messages = Daemon DirAddress = 0.0.0.0 #DirAddress = 127.0.0.1 } JobDefs { Name = "DefaultFileJob" Type = Backup Level = Incremental Client = backuphost-1-fd FileSet = "Full Set" Schedule = "WeeklyCycle" Storage = File Messages = Standard Pool = File Priority = 10 Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%c.bsr" } JobDefs { Name = "DefaultTapeJob" Type = Backup Level = Incremental Client = backuphost-1-fd FileSet = "Full Set" Schedule = "WeeklyCycle" Storage = "SpectraLogic" Messages = Standard Pool = AllTapes Priority = 10 Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%c.bsr" Prefer Mounted Volumes = no } # # Define the main nightly save backup job # By default, this job will back up to disk in /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir Job { Name = "BackupClient1" JobDefs = "DefaultFileJob" } Job { Name = "BackupThisVolume" JobDefs = "DefaultTapeJob" FileSet = "SpecialVolume" } #Job { # Name = "BackupClient2" # Client = backuphost-12-fd # JobDefs = "DefaultJob" #} # Backup the catalog database (after the nightly save) Job { Name = "BackupCatalog" JobDefs = "DefaultFileJob" Level = Full FileSet="Catalog" Schedule = "WeeklyCycleAfterBackup" # This creates an ASCII copy of the catalog # Arguments to make_catalog_backup.pl are: # make_catalog_backup.pl <catalog-name> RunBeforeJob = "/etc/bacula/scripts/make_catalog_backup.pl MyCatalog" # This deletes the copy of the catalog RunAfterJob = "/etc/bacula/scripts/delete_catalog_backup" Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/%n.bsr" Priority = 11 # run after main backup } # # Standard Restore template, to be changed by Console program # Only one such job is needed for all Jobs/Clients/Storage ... # Job { Name = "RestoreFiles" Type = Restore Client=backuphost-1-fd FileSet="Full Set" Storage = File Pool = Default Messages = Standard Where = /srv/bacula/restore } FileSet { Name = "SpecialVolume" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = /mnt/SpecialVolume } Exclude { File = /var/lib/bacula File = /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir File = /proc File = /tmp File = /.journal File = /.fsck } } # List of files to be backed up FileSet { Name = "Full Set" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = /usr/sbin } Exclude { File = /var/lib/bacula File = /nonexistant/path/to/file/archive/dir File = /proc File = /tmp File = /.journal File = /.fsck } } Schedule { Name = "WeeklyCycle" Run = Full 1st sun at 23:05 Run = Differential 2nd-5th sun at 23:05 Run = Incremental mon-sat at 23:05 } # This schedule does the catalog. It starts after the WeeklyCycle Schedule { Name = "WeeklyCycleAfterBackup" Run = Full sun-sat at 23:10 } # This is the backup of the catalog FileSet { Name = "Catalog" Include { Options { signature = MD5 } File = "/var/lib/bacula/bacula.sql" } } # Client (File Services) to backup Client { Name = backuphost-1-fd Address = localhost FDPort = 9102 Catalog = MyCatalog Password = "surelyyourejoking" # password for FileDaemon File Retention = 30 days # 30 days Job Retention = 6 months # six months AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files } # # Second Client (File Services) to backup # You should change Name, Address, and Password before using # #Client { # Name = backuphost-12-fd # Address = localhost2 # FDPort = 9102 # Catalog = MyCatalog # Password = "i'mnotjokinganddontcallmeshirley" # password for FileDaemon 2 # File Retention = 30 days # 30 days # Job Retention = 6 months # six months # AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired Jobs/Files #} # Definition of file storage device Storage { Name = File # Do not use "localhost" here Address = localhost # N.B. Use a fully qualified name here SDPort = 9103 Password = "lalalalala" Device = FileStorage Media Type = File } Storage { Name = "SpectraLogic" Address = localhost SDPort = 9103 Password = "linkedinmakethebestpasswords" Device = Drive-1 Device = Drive-2 Media Type = LTO5 Autochanger = yes } # Generic catalog service Catalog { Name = MyCatalog # Uncomment the following line if you want the dbi driver # dbdriver = "dbi:sqlite3"; dbaddress = 127.0.0.1; dbport = dbname = "bacula"; DB Address = ""; dbuser = "bacula"; dbpassword = "bbmaster63" } # Reasonable message delivery -- send most everything to email address # and to the console Messages { Name = Standard mailcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"$Bacula$ \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula: %t %e of %c %l\" %r" operatorcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"$Bacula$ \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula: Intervention needed for %j\" %r" mail = root@localhost = all, !skipped operator = root@localhost = mount console = all, !skipped, !saved # # WARNING! the following will create a file that you must cycle from # time to time as it will grow indefinitely. However, it will # also keep all your messages if they scroll off the console. # append = "/var/lib/bacula/log" = all, !skipped catalog = all } # # Message delivery for daemon messages (no job). Messages { Name = Daemon mailcommand = "/usr/lib/bacula/bsmtp -h localhost -f \"$Bacula$ \<%r\>\" -s \"Bacula daemon message\" %r" mail = root@localhost = all, !skipped console = all, !skipped, !saved append = "/var/lib/bacula/log" = all, !skipped } # Default pool definition Pool { Name = Default Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 365 days # one year } # File Pool definition Pool { Name = File Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 365 days # one year Maximum Volume Bytes = 50G # Limit Volume size to something reasonable Maximum Volumes = 100 # Limit number of Volumes in Pool } Pool { Name = AllTapes Pool Type = Backup Recycle = yes AutoPrune = yes # Prune expired volumes Volume Retention = 31 days # one Moth } # Scratch pool definition Pool { Name = Scratch Pool Type = Backup } # # Restricted console used by tray-monitor to get the status of the director # Console { Name = backuphost-1-mon Password = "LastFMalsostorePasswordsLikeThis" CommandACL = status, .status } bacula-sd.conf # # Default Bacula Storage Daemon Configuration file # Storage { # definition of myself Name = backuphost-1-sd SDPort = 9103 # Director's port WorkingDirectory = "/var/lib/bacula" Pid Directory = "/var/run/bacula" Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 SDAddress = 0.0.0.0 # SDAddress = 127.0.0.1 } # # List Directors who are permitted to contact Storage daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-dir Password = "passwordslinplaintext" } # # Restricted Director, used by tray-monitor to get the # status of the storage daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-mon Password = "totalinsecurityabound" Monitor = yes } Device { Name = FileStorage Media Type = File Archive Device = /srv/bacula/archive LabelMedia = yes; # lets Bacula label unlabeled media Random Access = Yes; AutomaticMount = yes; # when device opened, read it RemovableMedia = no; AlwaysOpen = no; } Autochanger { Name = SpectraLogic Device = Drive-1 Device = Drive-2 Changer Command = "/etc/bacula/scripts/mtx-changer %c %o %S %a %d" Changer Device = /dev/sg4 } Device { Name = Drive-1 Drive Index = 0 Archive Device = /dev/nst0 Changer Device = /dev/sg4 Media Type = LTO5 AutoChanger = yes RemovableMedia = yes; AutomaticMount = yes; AlwaysOpen = yes; RandomAccess = no; LabelMedia = yes } Device { Name = Drive-2 Drive Index = 1 Archive Device = /dev/nst1 Changer Device = /dev/sg4 Media Type = LTO5 AutoChanger = yes RemovableMedia = yes; AutomaticMount = yes; AlwaysOpen = yes; RandomAccess = no; LabelMedia = yes } # # Send all messages to the Director, # mount messages also are sent to the email address # Messages { Name = Standard director = backuphost-1-dir = all } bacula-fd.conf # # Default Bacula File Daemon Configuration file # # # List Directors who are permitted to contact this File daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-dir Password = "hahahahahaha" } # # Restricted Director, used by tray-monitor to get the # status of the file daemon # Director { Name = backuphost-1-mon Password = "hohohohohho" Monitor = yes } # # "Global" File daemon configuration specifications # FileDaemon { # this is me Name = backuphost-1-fd FDport = 9102 # where we listen for the director WorkingDirectory = /var/lib/bacula Pid Directory = /var/run/bacula Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 20 #FDAddress = 127.0.0.1 FDAddress = 0.0.0.0 } # Send all messages except skipped files back to Director Messages { Name = Standard director = backuphost-1-dir = all, !skipped, !restored }

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Windows 7 explorer always crashes, opens small "Personalized Settings" window

- by Ian Sellar

My Windows 7 desktop PC, built by me, started acting very weird in the last couple of days. I use it quite often, about half of the time through TeamViewer. Explorer would crash and restart randomly, almost always through TeamViewer. This made me suspect that TeamViewer was the problem but I have reproduced it with and without TeamViewer several times. The only way I can seem to get the problem not to occur is by booting into Safe Mode. I have used CCleaner and Malwarebytes to make sure it wasn't a registry error or malware causing the problem, and I have tried the fix in the seemly related issue here as well every other fix I have found online including removing security updates KB980408 and KB2926765 as well as using "sfc /scannow" and a bunch of other things I can't remember. More recently when I try to start explorer it is popping up a small window that says "Personalized Settings" on the top, but is completely empty and crashes instantly. The only way I can get it to disappear is to kill the explorer.exe process. I wish I could take a screenshot but I can't seem to open paint or even find the exe. I have tried restarting it, I have tried starting it while the personalized settings window was open. I have come up with two lists of processes the first is the list of active processes when I boot into safe mode and explorer seems to work fine. The second is the list of processes that I can narrow it down to in normal boot and still replicate the problem. There is one process that I can't seem to close. NisSrv.exe which is describes as "Microsoft Network Realtime Inspection Service". When I try to close the process NisSrv.exe it says "The operation could not be completed. Access is denied." When I try to close the related service it gives the same message. Image Name PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage ========================= ======== ================ =========== ============ System Idle Process 0 Services 0 24 K System 4 Services 0 2,660 K smss.exe 304 Services 0 1,196 K csrss.exe 408 Services 0 4,156 K wininit.exe 444 Services 0 4,608 K csrss.exe 452 Console 1 8,700 K services.exe 492 Services 0 7,700 K winlogon.exe 524 Console 1 5,756 K lsass.exe 536 Services 0 10,644 K lsm.exe 544 Services 0 4,316 K svchost.exe 652 Services 0 8,976 K MsMpEng.exe 804 Services 0 40,696 K explorer.exe 1332 Console 1 85,220 K ctfmon.exe 1376 Console 1 3,680 K dllhost.exe 1624 Console 1 8,656 K chrome.exe 1408 Console 1 98,504 K WmiPrvSE.exe 2352 Services 0 6,472 K chrome.exe 1744 Console 1 65,116 K taskmgr.exe 372 Console 1 14,948 K cmd.exe 2776 Console 1 2,960 K conhost.exe 1816 Console 1 3,580 K tasklist.exe 2308 Console 1 5,868 K And the list of processes I have narrowed it down to. Image Name PID Session Name Session# Mem Usage ========================= ======== ================ =========== ============ System Idle Process 0 Services 0 24 K System 4 Services 0 2,808 K smss.exe 316 Services 0 1,216 K csrss.exe 484 Services 0 4,532 K wininit.exe 596 Services 0 4,604 K csrss.exe 604 Console 1 23,676 K services.exe 652 Services 0 11,344 K lsass.exe 668 Services 0 12,692 K lsm.exe 676 Services 0 4,464 K MsMpEng.exe 972 Services 0 68,436 K winlogon.exe 168 Console 1 7,784 K svchost.exe 496 Services 0 19,140 K NisSrv.exe 3176 Services 0 808 K svchost.exe 1684 Services 0 11,260 K taskmgr.exe 4524 Console 1 20,696 K cmd.exe 4764 Console 1 7,224 K conhost.exe 4772 Console 1 6,916 K sublime_text.exe 2340 Console 1 45,012 K dllhost.exe 4476 Console 1 8,736 K tasklist.exe 3796 Console 1 5,768 K WmiPrvSE.exe 1768 Services 0 6,344 K Here is the event data xml from event viewer for the error I am getting. <EventData> <Data>explorer.exe</Data> <Data>6.1.7601.17567</Data> <Data>4d672ee4</Data> <Data>vrfcore.dll</Data> <Data>6.3.9600.16384</Data> <Data>5215f8f5</Data> <Data>80000003</Data> <Data>0000000000003a00</Data> <Data>12e4</Data> <Data>01cfb84fa70f89dc</Data> <Data>C:\Windows\system32\explorer.exe</Data> <Data>C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\vrfcore.dll</Data> <Data>e5957093-2442-11e4-9f8a-94de806ed9cb</Data> </EventData> I was looking through the eventvwr log again and I found this, possibly related <EventData> <Data>runonce.exe</Data> <Data>6.1.7601.17514</Data> <Data>4ce7a253</Data> <Data>MSVCR100.dll</Data> <Data>10.0.40219.325</Data> <Data>4df2bcac</Data> <Data>c0000005</Data> <Data>000000000003c145</Data> <Data>670</Data> <Data>01cfb8dabbd85942</Data> <Data>C:\Windows\system32\runonce.exe</Data> <Data>C:\Windows\system32\MSVCR100.dll</Data> <Data>fa6f82b9-24cd-11e4-80a8-94de806ed9cb</Data> </EventData> And the general error details Faulting application name: Explorer.EXE, version: 6.1.7601.17567, time stamp: 0x4d672ee4 Faulting module name: vrfcore.dll, version: 6.3.9600.16384, time stamp: 0x5215f8f5 Exception code: 0x80000003 Fault offset: 0x0000000000003a00 Faulting process id: 0xc38 Faulting application start time: 0x01cfb84e5e852c5f Faulting application path: C:\Windows\Explorer.EXE Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\vrfcore.dll Report Id: 9dc19e6d-2441-11e4-9f8a-94de806ed9cb Another probably unrelated error that I seem to be getting pretty often. Event filter with query "SELECT * FROM __InstanceModificationEvent WITHIN 60 WHERE TargetInstance ISA "Win32_Processor" AND TargetInstance.LoadPercentage > 99" could not be reactivated in namespace "//./root/CIMV2" because of error 0x80041003. Events cannot be delivered through this filter until the problem is corrected. My explorer tab in Autoruns seen below along with the error when I try to uncheck something. I should add that I seem to be able to disable shell extensions with ShellExView but I still can't get explorer to start correctly. EXPLORER SHELL UPDATE - See screenshot below I can access the explorer right click menu through a file manager I downloaded called NexusFile, but still no luck starting explorer. Another round of errors that I am getting regarding Windows Search Service The search service has detected corrupted data files in the index {id=4700}. The service will attempt to automatically correct this problem by rebuilding the index. Details: The content index catalog is corrupt. (HRESULT : 0xc0041801) (0xc0041801) followed by The Windows Search Service is being stopped because there is a problem with the indexer: The catalog is corrupt. Details: The content index catalog is corrupt. (HRESULT : 0xc0041801) (0xc0041801 and The plug-in in <Search.JetPropStore> cannot be initialized. Context: Windows Application, SystemIndex Catalog Details: The content index catalog is corrupt. (HRESULT : 0xc0041801) (0xc0041801) and The gatherer object cannot be initialized. Context: Windows Application, SystemIndex Catalog Details: The content index catalog is corrupt. (HRESULT : 0xc0041801) (0xc0041801) and The Windows Search Service cannot load the property store information. Context: Windows Application, SystemIndex Catalog Details: The content index database is corrupt. (HRESULT : 0xc0041800) (0xc0041800) WER Log http://pastebin.com/WXKGDT4Q I'll add information as I remember it or people request it.

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Bind can only work for the DNS server inside zone

- by Bob

I got a big problem when I added a new zone to my current Bind configuration. ===============/etc/named.conf=============== include "/etc/rndc.key"; controls { inet 127.0.0.1 port 953 allow { 127.0.0.1; } keys { "rndckey"; }; }; acl "trusted" { 127.0.0.1; 208.43.81.157; 69.4.236.88; }; options { directory "/var/named"; allow-query { any; }; recursion yes; allow-recursion { trusted; }; }; zone "." { type hint; file "root.hints"; }; zone "2comu.com" { type master; file "2comu.com.db"; allow-update { none; }; }; zone "usa-diamond.com" { type master; file "usa-diamond.com.db"; allow-update { none; }; }; ===============/var/named/2comu.com.db=============== $TTL 86400 @ IN SOA ns1.2comu.com. root.2comu.com. ( 2011011101 3600 300 3600000 3600 ) IN NS ns1.2comu.com. IN NS ns2.2comu.com. IN MX 10 email.2comu.com. ns1.2comu.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 ns2.2comu.com. IN A 69.4.236.88 www.2comu.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 ftp.2comu.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 email.2comu.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 ===============/var/named/usa-diamond.com=============== $TTL 86400 @ IN SOA ns1.2comu.com. root.usa-diamond.com. ( 2011011115 3600 300 3600000 3600 ) IN NS ns1.2comu.com. IN NS ns2.2comu.com. www.usa-diamond.com. IN A 208.43.81.157 ================================================================ All of the configurations inside domain 2comu.com work well. But when www.usa-diamond.com doesn't work at all. When I tried "dig +trace www.usa-diamond.com", I got the following message ================================================================ ; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_4.2 <<>> +trace usa-diamond.com ;; global options: printcmd . 517603 IN NS c.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS d.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS e.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS f.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS g.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS h.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS i.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS j.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS k.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS l.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS m.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS a.root-servers.net. . 517603 IN NS b.root-servers.net. ;; Received 500 bytes from 208.43.81.157#53(208.43.81.157) in 0 ms com. 172800 IN NS j.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS d.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS e.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS i.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS f.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS m.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS b.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS k.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS l.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS c.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS h.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS a.gtld-servers.net. com. 172800 IN NS g.gtld-servers.net. ;; Received 505 bytes from 192.33.4.12#53(c.root-servers.net) in 3 ms usa-diamond.com. 172800 IN NS ns1.2comu.com. usa-diamond.com. 172800 IN NS ns2.2comu.com. ;; Received 107 bytes from 192.48.79.30#53(j.gtld-servers.net) in 177 ms ;; Received 33 bytes from 208.43.81.157#53(ns1.2comu.com) in 0 ms ========================================================================= It seems I can't get any answer from ns1.2comu.com. Can anyone give some suggestions? Thanks a lot. Bob

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Windows using the DNS suffix search list on all lookups, even valid FQDNs. How to stop this?

- by RealityGone

When doing DNS lookups (specifically using nslookup, for some reason most things are not effected) Windows XP Pro SP3 is using the DNS suffix search list for every single one. Even for fully qualified domain names. For example I lookup "www.microsoft.com" but windows actually asks for "www.microsoft.com.eondream.com" (eondream.com is my primary domain). Now I can fix the issue by removing the Primary DNS suffix, but it seems to me that the DNS suffix search list should be for short, invalid names (where dots=0 or something). I'm sure I have a misconfiguration somewhere in windows but I don't know where. I've changed every option I can think of or find. Below is the output of ipconfig /all and nslookup (with debug & db2 enabled). This is using a static IP & (internal) DNS server. C:\ipconfig /all Windows IP Configuration Host Name . . . . . . . . . . . . : frayedlogic Primary Dns Suffix . . . . . . . : eondream.com Node Type . . . . . . . . . . . . : Unknown IP Routing Enabled. . . . . . . . : No WINS Proxy Enabled. . . . . . . . : No DNS Suffix Search List. . . . . . : eondream.com Ethernet adapter Wireless Network Connection: Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-Card Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-1B-FC-29-EB-6B Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : No IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.13.32 Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0 Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.13.13 DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.19.19 C:\nslookup Default Server: shardik.eondream.com Address: 192.168.19.19 set debug set db2 www.microsoft.com Server: shardik.eondream.com Address: 192.168.19.19 ------------ Got answer: HEADER: opcode = QUERY, id = 2, rcode = NOERROR header flags: response, want recursion, recursion avail. questions = 1, answers = 1, authority records = 0, additional = 0 QUESTIONS: www.microsoft.com.eondream.com, type = A, class = IN ANSWERS: - www.microsoft.com.eondream.com internet address = 208.69.36.132 ttl = 0 (0 secs) ------------ Non-authoritative answer: Name: www.microsoft.com.eondream.com Address: 208.69.36.132 (Note: it resolves to that IP because I use the opendns service and that is their suggestion page or whatever you want to call it) If I am reading the nslookup output correctly then it is not a problem with my DNS server because windows is actually asking for the incorrect domain.

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Microsoft and jQuery

- by Rick Strahl

The jQuery JavaScript library has been steadily getting more popular and with recent developments from Microsoft, jQuery is also getting ever more exposure on the ASP.NET platform including now directly from Microsoft. jQuery is a light weight, open source DOM manipulation library for JavaScript that has changed how many developers think about JavaScript. You can download it and find more information on jQuery on www.jquery.com. For me jQuery has had a huge impact on how I develop Web applications and was probably the main reason I went from dreading to do JavaScript development to actually looking forward to implementing client side JavaScript functionality. It has also had a profound impact on my JavaScript skill level for me by seeing how the library accomplishes things (and often reviewing the terse but excellent source code). jQuery made an uncomfortable development platform (JavaScript + DOM) a joy to work on. Although jQuery is by no means the only JavaScript library out there, its ease of use, small size, huge community of plug-ins and pure usefulness has made it easily the most popular JavaScript library available today. As a long time jQuery user, I’ve been excited to see the developments from Microsoft that are bringing jQuery to more ASP.NET developers and providing more integration with jQuery for ASP.NET’s core features rather than relying on the ASP.NET AJAX library. Microsoft and jQuery – making Friends jQuery is an open source project but in the last couple of years Microsoft has really thrown its weight behind supporting this open source library as a supported component on the Microsoft platform. When I say supported I literally mean supported: Microsoft now offers actual tech support for jQuery as part of their Product Support Services (PSS) as jQuery integration has become part of several of the ASP.NET toolkits and ships in several of the default Web project templates in Visual Studio 2010. The ASP.NET MVC 3 framework (still in Beta) also uses jQuery for a variety of client side support features including client side validation and we can look forward toward more integration of client side functionality via jQuery in both MVC and WebForms in the future. In other words jQuery is becoming an optional but included component of the ASP.NET platform. PSS support means that support staff will answer jQuery related support questions as part of any support incidents related to ASP.NET which provides some piece of mind to some corporate development shops that require end to end support from Microsoft. In addition to including jQuery and supporting it, Microsoft has also been getting involved in providing development resources for extending jQuery’s functionality via plug-ins. Microsoft’s last version of the Microsoft Ajax Library – which is the successor to the native ASP.NET AJAX Library – included some really cool functionality for client templates, databinding and localization. As it turns out Microsoft has rebuilt most of that functionality using jQuery as the base API and provided jQuery plug-ins of these components. Very recently these three plug-ins were submitted and have been approved for inclusion in the official jQuery plug-in repository and been taken over by the jQuery team for further improvements and maintenance. Even more surprising: The jQuery-templates component has actually been approved for inclusion in the next major update of the jQuery core in jQuery V1.5, which means it will become a native feature that doesn’t require additional script files to be loaded. Imagine this – an open source contribution from Microsoft that has been accepted into a major open source project for a core feature improvement. Microsoft has come a long way indeed! What the Microsoft Involvement with jQuery means to you For Microsoft jQuery support is a strategic decision that affects their direction in client side development, but nothing stopped you from using jQuery in your applications prior to Microsoft’s official backing and in fact a large chunk of developers did so readily prior to Microsoft’s announcement. Official support from Microsoft brings a few benefits to developers however. jQuery support in Visual Studio 2010 means built-in support for jQuery IntelliSense, automatically added jQuery scripts in many projects types and a common base for client side functionality that actually uses what most developers are already using. If you have already been using jQuery and were worried about straying from the Microsoft line and their internal Microsoft Ajax Library – worry no more. With official support and the change in direction towards jQuery Microsoft is now following along what most in the ASP.NET community had already been doing by using jQuery, which is likely the reason for Microsoft’s shift in direction in the first place. ASP.NET AJAX and the Microsoft AJAX Library weren’t bad technology – there was tons of useful functionality buried in these libraries. However, these libraries never got off the ground, mainly because early incarnations were squarely aimed at control/component developers rather than application developers. For all the functionality that these controls provided for control developers they lacked in useful and easily usable application developer functionality that was easily accessible in day to day client side development. The result was that even though Microsoft shipped support for these tools in the box (in .NET 3.5 and 4.0), other than for the internal support in ASP.NET for things like the UpdatePanel and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit as well as some third party vendors, the Microsoft client libraries were largely ignored by the developer community opening the door for other client side solutions. Microsoft seems to be acknowledging developer choice in this case: Many more developers were going down the jQuery path rather than using the Microsoft built libraries and there seems to be little sense in continuing development of a technology that largely goes unused by the majority of developers. Kudos for Microsoft for recognizing this and gracefully changing directions. Note that even though there will be no further development in the Microsoft client libraries they will continue to be supported so if you’re using them in your applications there’s no reason to start running for the exit in a panic and start re-writing everything with jQuery. Although that might be a reasonable choice in some cases, jQuery and the Microsoft libraries work well side by side so that you can leave existing solutions untouched even as you enhance them with jQuery. The Microsoft jQuery Plug-ins – Solid Core Features One of the most interesting developments in Microsoft’s embracing of jQuery is that Microsoft has started contributing to jQuery via standard mechanism set for jQuery developers: By submitting plug-ins. Microsoft took some of the nicest new features of the unpublished Microsoft Ajax Client Library and re-wrote these components for jQuery and then submitted them as plug-ins to the jQuery plug-in repository. Accepted plug-ins get taken over by the jQuery team and that’s exactly what happened with the three plug-ins submitted by Microsoft with the templating plug-in even getting slated to be published as part of the jQuery core in the next major release (1.5). The following plug-ins are provided by Microsoft: jQuery Templates – a client side template rendering engine jQuery Data Link – a client side databinder that can synchronize changes without code jQuery Globalization – provides formatting and conversion features for dates and numbers The first two are ports of functionality that was slated for the Microsoft Ajax Library while functionality for the globalization library provides functionality that was already found in the original ASP.NET AJAX library. To me all three plug-ins address a pressing need in client side applications and provide functionality I’ve previously used in other incarnations, but with more complete implementations. Let’s take a close look at these plug-ins. jQuery Templates http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/templates/ Client side templating is a key component for building rich JavaScript applications in the browser. Templating on the client lets you avoid from manually creating markup by creating DOM nodes and injecting them individually into the document via code. Rather you can create markup templates – similar to the way you create classic ASP server markup – and merge data into these templates to render HTML which you can then inject into the document or replace existing content with. Output from templates are rendered as a jQuery matched set and can then be easily inserted into the document as needed. Templating is key to minimize client side code and reduce repeated code for rendering logic. Instead a single template can be used in many places for updating and adding content to existing pages. Further if you build pure AJAX interfaces that rely entirely on client rendering of the initial page content, templates allow you to a use a single markup template to handle all rendering of each specific HTML section/element. I’ve used a number of different client rendering template engines with jQuery in the past including jTemplates (a PHP style templating engine) and a modified version of John Resig’s MicroTemplating engine which I built into my own set of libraries because it’s such a commonly used feature in my client side applications. jQuery templates adds a much richer templating model that allows for sub-templates and access to the data items. Like John Resig’s original Micro Template engine, the core basics of the templating engine create JavaScript code which means that templates can include JavaScript code. To give you a basic idea of how templates work imagine I have an application that downloads a set of stock quotes based on a symbol list then displays them in the document. To do this you can create an ‘item’ template that describes how each of the quotes is renderd as a template inside of the document: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div><div>${LastPrice}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div><div>${LastQuoteTimeString}</div> </div> </script> The ‘template’ is little more than HTML with some markup expressions inside of it that define the template language. Notice the embedded ${} expressions which reference data from the quote objects returned from an AJAX call on the server. You can embed any JavaScript or value expression in these template expressions. There are also a number of structural commands like {{if}} and {{each}} that provide for rudimentary logic inside of your templates as well as commands ({{tmpl}} and {{wrap}}) for nesting templates. You can find more about the full set of markup expressions available in the documentation. To load up this data you can use code like the following: <script type="text/javascript"> //var Proxy = new ServiceProxy("../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/"); $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnGetQuotes").click(GetQuotes); }); function GetQuotes() { var symbols = $("#txtSymbols").val().split(","); $.ajax({ url: "../PageMethods/PageMethodsService.asmx/GetStockQuotes", data: JSON.stringify({ symbols: symbols }), // parameter map type: "POST", // data has to be POSTed contentType: "application/json", timeout: 10000, dataType: "json", success: function (result) { var quotes = result.d; var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); $("#quoteDisplay").empty().append(jEl); }, error: function (xhr, status) { alert(status + "\r\n" + xhr.responseText); } }); }; </script> In this case an ASMX AJAX service is called to retrieve the stock quotes. The service returns an array of quote objects. The result is returned as an object with the .d property (in Microsoft service style) that returns the actual array of quotes. The template is applied with: var jEl = $("#stockTemplate").tmpl(quotes); which selects the template script tag and uses the .tmpl() function to apply the data to it. The result is a jQuery matched set of elements that can then be appended to the quote display element in the page. The template is merged against an array in this example. When the result is an array the template is automatically applied to each each array item. If you pass a single data item – like say a stock quote – the template works exactly the same way but is applied only once. Templates also have access to a $data item which provides the current data item and information about the tempalte that is currently executing. This makes it possible to keep context within the context of the template itself and also to pass context from a parent template to a child template which is very powerful. Templates can be evaluated by using the template selector and calling the .tmpl() function on the jQuery matched set as shown above or you can use the static $.tmpl() function to provide a template as a string. This allows you to dynamically create templates in code or – more likely – to load templates from the server via AJAX calls. In short there are options The above shows off some of the basics, but there’s much for functionality available in the template engine. Check the documentation link for more information and links to additional examples. The plug-in download also comes with a number of examples that demonstrate functionality. jQuery templates will become a native component in jQuery Core 1.5, so it’s definitely worthwhile checking out the engine today and get familiar with this interface. As much as I’m stoked about templating becoming part of the jQuery core because it’s such an integral part of many applications, there are also a couple shortcomings in the current incarnation: Lack of Error Handling Currently if you embed an expression that is invalid it’s simply not rendered. There’s no error rendered into the template nor do the various template functions throw errors which leaves finding of bugs as a runtime exercise. I would like some mechanism – optional if possible – to be able to get error info of what is failing in a template when it’s rendered. No String Output Templates are always rendered into a jQuery matched set and there’s no way that I can see to directly render to a string. String output can be useful for debugging as well as opening up templating for creating non-HTML string output. Limited JavaScript Access Unlike John Resig’s original MicroTemplating Engine which was entirely based on JavaScript code generation these templates are limited to a few structured commands that can ‘execute’. There’s no code execution inside of script code which means you’re limited to calling expressions available in global objects or the data item passed in. This may or may not be a big deal depending on the complexity of your template logic. Error handling has been discussed quite a bit and it’s likely there will be some solution to that particualar issue by the time jQuery templates ship. The others are relatively minor issues but something to think about anyway. jQuery Data Link http://api.jquery.com/category/plugins/data-link/ jQuery Data Link provides the ability to do two-way data binding between input controls and an underlying object’s properties. The typical scenario is linking a textbox to a property of an object and have the object updated when the text in the textbox is changed and have the textbox change when the value in the object or the entire object changes. The plug-in also supports converter functions that can be applied to provide the conversion logic from string to some other value typically necessary for mapping things like textbox string input to say a number property and potentially applying additional formatting and calculations. In theory this sounds great, however in reality this plug-in has some serious usability issues. Using the plug-in you can do things like the following to bind data: person = { firstName: "rick", lastName: "strahl"}; $(document).ready( function() { // provide for two-way linking of inputs $("form").link(person); // bind to non-input elements explicitly $("#objFirst").link(person, { firstName: { name: "objFirst", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); $("#objLast").link(person, { lastName: { name: "objLast", convertBack: function (value, source, target) { $(target).text(value); } } }); }); This code hooks up two-way linking between a couple of textboxes on the page and the person object. The first line in the .ready() handler provides mapping of object to form field with the same field names as properties on the object. Note that .link() does NOT bind items into the textboxes when you call .link() – changes are mapped only when values change and you move out of the field. Strike one. The two following commands allow manual binding of values to specific DOM elements which is effectively a one-way bind. You specify the object and a then an explicit mapping where name is an ID in the document. The converter is required to explicitly assign the value to the element. Strike two. You can also detect changes to the underlying object and cause updates to the input elements bound. Unfortunately the syntax to do this is not very natural as you have to rely on the jQuery data object. To update an object’s properties and get change notification looks like this: function updateFirstName() { $(person).data("firstName", person.firstName + " (code updated)"); } This works fine in causing any linked fields to be updated. In the bindings above both the firstName input field and objFirst DOM element gets updated. But the syntax requires you to use a jQuery .data() call for each property change to ensure that the changes are tracked properly. Really? Sure you’re binding through multiple layers of abstraction now but how is that better than just manually assigning values? The code savings (if any) are going to be minimal. As much as I would like to have a WPF/Silverlight/Observable-like binding mechanism in client script, this plug-in doesn’t help much towards that goal in its current incarnation. While you can bind values, the ‘binder’ is too limited to be really useful. If initial values can’t be assigned from the mappings you’re going to end up duplicating work loading the data using some other mechanism. There’s no easy way to re-bind data with a different object altogether since updates trigger only through the .data members. Finally, any non-input elements have to be bound via code that’s fairly verbose and frankly may be more voluminous than what you might write by hand for manual binding and unbinding. Two way binding can be very useful but it has to be easy and most importantly natural. If it’s more work to hook up a binding than writing a couple of lines to do binding/unbinding this sort of thing helps very little in most scenarios. In talking to some of the developers the feature set for Data Link is not complete and they are still soliciting input for features and functionality. If you have ideas on how you want this feature to be more useful get involved and post your recommendations. As it stands, it looks to me like this component needs a lot of love to become useful. For this component to really provide value, bindings need to be able to be refreshed easily and work at the object level, not just the property level. It seems to me we would be much better served by a model binder object that can perform these binding/unbinding tasks in bulk rather than a tool where each link has to be mapped first. I also find the choice of creating a jQuery plug-in questionable – it seems a standalone object – albeit one that relies on the jQuery library – would provide a more intuitive interface than the current forcing of options onto a plug-in style interface. Out of the three Microsoft created components this is by far the least useful and least polished implementation at this point. jQuery Globalization http://github.com/jquery/jquery-global Globalization in JavaScript applications often gets short shrift and part of the reason for this is that natively in JavaScript there’s little support for formatting and parsing of numbers and dates. There are a number of JavaScript libraries out there that provide some support for globalization, but most are limited to a particular portion of globalization. As .NET developers we’re fairly spoiled by the richness of APIs provided in the framework and when dealing with client development one really notices the lack of these features. While you may not necessarily need to localize your application the globalization plug-in also helps with some basic tasks for non-localized applications: Dealing with formatting and parsing of dates and time values. Dates in particular are problematic in JavaScript as there are no formatters whatsoever except the .toString() method which outputs a verbose and next to useless long string. With the globalization plug-in you get a good chunk of the formatting and parsing functionality that the .NET framework provides on the server. You can write code like the following for example to format numbers and dates: var date = new Date(); var output = $.format(date, "MMM. dd, yy") + "\r\n" + $.format(date, "d") + "\r\n" + // 10/25/2010 $.format(1222.32213, "N2") + "\r\n" + $.format(1222.33, "c") + "\r\n"; alert(output); This becomes even more useful if you combine it with templates which can also include any JavaScript expressions. Assuming the globalization plug-in is loaded you can create template expressions that use the $.format function. Here’s the template I used earlier for the stock quote again with a couple of formats applied: <script id="stockTemplate" type="text/x-jquery-tmpl"> <div id="divStockQuote" class="errordisplay" style="width: 500px;"> <div class="label">Company:</div><div><b>${Company}(${Symbol})</b></div> <div class="label">Last Price:</div> <div>${$.format(LastPrice,"N2")}</div> <div class="label">Net Change:</div><div> {{if NetChange > 0}} <b style="color:green" >${NetChange}</b> {{else}} <b style="color:red" >${NetChange}</b> {{/if}} </div> <div class="label">Last Update:</div> <div>${$.format(LastQuoteTime,"MMM dd, yyyy")}</div> </div> </script> There are also parsing methods that can parse dates and numbers from strings into numbers easily: alert($.parseDate("25.10.2010")); alert($.parseInt("12.222")); // de-DE uses . for thousands separators As you can see culture specific options are taken into account when parsing. The globalization plugin provides rich support for a variety of locales: Get a list of all available cultures Query cultures for culture items (like currency symbol, separators etc.) Localized string names for all calendar related items (days of week, months) Generated off of .NET’s supported locales In short you get much of the same functionality that you already might be using in .NET on the server side. The plugin includes a huge number of locales and an Globalization.all.min.js file that contains the text defaults for each of these locales as well as small locale specific script files that define each of the locale specific settings. It’s highly recommended that you NOT use the huge globalization file that includes all locales, but rather add script references to only those languages you explicitly care about. Overall this plug-in is a welcome helper. Even if you use it with a single locale (like en-US) and do no other localization, you’ll gain solid support for number and date formatting which is a vital feature of many applications. Changes for Microsoft It’s good to see Microsoft coming out of its shell and away from the ‘not-built-here’ mentality that has been so pervasive in the past. It’s especially good to see it applied to jQuery – a technology that has stood in drastic contrast to Microsoft’s own internal efforts in terms of design, usage model and… popularity. It’s great to see that Microsoft is paying attention to what customers prefer to use and supporting the customer sentiment – even if it meant drastically changing course of policy and moving into a more open and sharing environment in the process. The additional jQuery support that has been introduced in the last two years certainly has made lives easier for many developers on the ASP.NET platform. It’s also nice to see Microsoft submitting proposals through the standard jQuery process of plug-ins and getting accepted for various very useful projects. Certainly the jQuery Templates plug-in is going to be very useful to many especially since it will be baked into the jQuery core in jQuery 1.5. I hope we see more of this type of involvement from Microsoft in the future. Kudos!© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery ASP.NET

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NoSQL with RavenDB and ASP.NET MVC - Part 1

- by shiju

A while back, I have blogged NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC Part 1 and Part 2 on how to use MongoDB with an ASP.NET MVC application. The NoSQL movement is getting big attention and RavenDB is the latest addition to the NoSQL and document database world. RavenDB is an Open Source (with a commercial option) document database for the .NET/Windows platform developed by Ayende Rahien. Raven stores schema-less JSON documents, allow you to define indexes using Linq queries and focus on low latency and high performance. RavenDB is .NET focused document database which comes with a fully functional .NET client API and supports LINQ. RavenDB comes with two components, a server and a client API. RavenDB is a REST based system, so you can write your own HTTP cleint API. As a .NET developer, RavenDB is becoming my favorite document database. Unlike other document databases, RavenDB is supports transactions using System.Transactions. Also it's supports both embedded and server mode of database. You can access RavenDB site at http://ravendb.netA demo App with ASP.NET MVCLet's create a simple demo app with RavenDB and ASP.NET MVC. To work with RavenDB, do the following steps. Go to http://ravendb.net/download and download the latest build.Unzip the downloaded file.Go to the /Server directory and run the RavenDB.exe. This will start the RavenDB server listening on localhost:8080You can change the port of RavenDB by modifying the "Raven/Port" appSetting value in the RavenDB.exe.config file.When running the RavenDB, it will automatically create a database in the /Data directory. You can change the directory name data by modifying "Raven/DataDirt" appSetting value in the RavenDB.exe.config file.RavenDB provides a browser based admin tool. When the Raven server is running, You can be access the browser based admin tool and view and edit documents and index using your browser admin tool. The web admin tool available at http://localhost:8080The below is the some screen shots of web admin tool Working with ASP.NET MVC To working with RavenDB in our demo ASP.NET MVC application, do the following steps Step 1 - Add reference to Raven Cleint API In our ASP.NET MVC application, Add a reference to the Raven.Client.Lightweight.dll from the Client directory. Step 2 - Create DocumentStoreThe document store would be created once per application. Let's create a DocumentStore on application start-up in the Global.asax.cs. documentStore = new DocumentStore { Url = "http://localhost:8080/" }; documentStore.Initialise(); The above code will create a Raven DB document store and will be listening the server locahost at port 8080 Step 3 - Create DocumentSession on BeginRequest Let's create a DocumentSession on BeginRequest event in the Global.asax.cs. We are using the document session for every unit of work. In our demo app, every HTTP request would be a single Unit of Work (UoW). BeginRequest += (sender, args) => HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] = documentStore.OpenSession(); Step 4 - Destroy the DocumentSession on EndRequest EndRequest += (o, eventArgs) => { var disposable = HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] as IDisposable; if (disposable != null) disposable.Dispose(); }; At the end of HTTP request, we are destroying the DocumentSession object.The below code block shown all the code in the Global.asax.cs private const string RavenSessionKey = "RavenMVC.Session"; private static DocumentStore documentStore; protected void Application_Start() { //Create a DocumentStore in Application_Start //DocumentStore should be created once per application and stored as a singleton. documentStore = new DocumentStore { Url = "http://localhost:8080/" }; documentStore.Initialise(); AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas(); RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); //DI using Unity 2.0 ConfigureUnity(); } public MvcApplication() { //Create a DocumentSession on BeginRequest //create a document session for every unit of work BeginRequest += (sender, args) => HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] = documentStore.OpenSession(); //Destroy the DocumentSession on EndRequest EndRequest += (o, eventArgs) => { var disposable = HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey] as IDisposable; if (disposable != null) disposable.Dispose(); }; } //Getting the current DocumentSession public static IDocumentSession CurrentSession { get { return (IDocumentSession)HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey]; } } We have setup all necessary code in the Global.asax.cs for working with RavenDB. For our demo app, Let’s write a domain class public class Category { public string Id { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")] [StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")] public string Name { get; set;} public string Description { get; set; } } We have created simple domain entity Category. Let's create repository class for performing CRUD operations against our domain entity Category. public interface ICategoryRepository { Category Load(string id); IEnumerable<Category> GetCategories(); void Save(Category category); void Delete(string id); } public class CategoryRepository : ICategoryRepository { private IDocumentSession session; public CategoryRepository() { session = MvcApplication.CurrentSession; } //Load category based on Id public Category Load(string id) { return session.Load<Category>(id); } //Get all categories public IEnumerable<Category> GetCategories() { var categories= session.LuceneQuery<Category>() .WaitForNonStaleResults() .ToArray(); return categories; } //Insert/Update category public void Save(Category category) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(category.Id)) { //insert new record session.Store(category); } else { //edit record var categoryToEdit = Load(category.Id); categoryToEdit.Name = category.Name; categoryToEdit.Description = category.Description; } //save the document session session.SaveChanges(); } //delete a category public void Delete(string id) { var category = Load(id); session.Delete<Category>(category); session.SaveChanges(); } } For every CRUD operations, we are taking the current document session object from HttpContext object. session = MvcApplication.CurrentSession; We are calling the static method CurrentSession from the Global.asax.cs public static IDocumentSession CurrentSession { get { return (IDocumentSession)HttpContext.Current.Items[RavenSessionKey]; } } Retrieve Entities The Load method get the single Category object based on the Id. RavenDB is working based on the REST principles and the Id would be like categories/1. The Id would be created by automatically when a new object is inserted to the document store. The REST uri categories/1 represents a single category object with Id representation of 1. public Category Load(string id) { return session.Load<Category>(id); } The GetCategories method returns all the categories calling the session.LuceneQuery method. RavenDB is using a lucen query syntax for querying. I will explain more details about querying and indexing in my future posts. public IEnumerable<Category> GetCategories() { var categories= session.LuceneQuery<Category>() .WaitForNonStaleResults() .ToArray(); return categories; } Insert/Update entityFor insert/Update a Category entity, we have created Save method in repository class. If the Id property of Category is null, we call Store method of Documentsession for insert a new record. For editing a existing record, we load the Category object and assign the values to the loaded Category object. The session.SaveChanges() will save the changes to document store. //Insert/Update category public void Save(Category category) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(category.Id)) { //insert new record session.Store(category); } else { //edit record var categoryToEdit = Load(category.Id); categoryToEdit.Name = category.Name; categoryToEdit.Description = category.Description; } //save the document session session.SaveChanges(); } Delete Entity In the Delete method, we call the document session's delete method and call the SaveChanges method to reflect changes in the document store. public void Delete(string id) { var category = Load(id); session.Delete<Category>(category); session.SaveChanges(); } Let’s create ASP.NET MVC controller and controller actions for handling CRUD operations for the domain class Category public class CategoryController : Controller { private ICategoryRepository categoyRepository; //DI enabled constructor public CategoryController(ICategoryRepository categoyRepository) { this.categoyRepository = categoyRepository; } public ActionResult Index() { var categories = categoyRepository.GetCategories(); if (categories == null) return RedirectToAction("Create"); return View(categories); } [HttpGet] public ActionResult Edit(string id) { var category = categoyRepository.Load(id); return View("Save",category); } // GET: /Category/Create [HttpGet] public ActionResult Create() { var category = new Category(); return View("Save", category); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Save(Category category) { if (!ModelState.IsValid) { return View("Save", category); } categoyRepository.Save(category); return RedirectToAction("Index"); } [HttpPost] public ActionResult Delete(string id) { categoyRepository.Delete(id); var categories = categoyRepository.GetCategories(); return PartialView("CategoryList", categories); } } RavenDB is an awesome document database and I hope that it will be the winner in .NET space of document database world. The source code of demo application available at http://ravenmvc.codeplex.com/

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Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

- by mbcrump

Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created. Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands. For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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Announcing release of ASP.NET MVC 3, IIS Express, SQL CE 4, Web Farm Framework, Orchard, WebMatrix

- by ScottGu

I’m excited to announce the release today of several products: ASP.NET MVC 3 NuGet IIS Express 7.5 SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Orchard 1.0 WebMatrix 1.0 The above products are all free. They build upon the .NET 4 and VS 2010 release, and add a ton of additional value to ASP.NET (both Web Forms and MVC) and the Microsoft Web Server stack. ASP.NET MVC 3 Today we are shipping the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3. You can download and install ASP.NET MVC 3 here. The ASP.NET MVC 3 source code (released under an OSI-compliant open source license) can also optionally be downloaded here. ASP.NET MVC 3 is a significant update that brings with it a bunch of great features. Some of the improvements include: Razor ASP.NET MVC 3 ships with a new view-engine option called “Razor” (in addition to continuing to support/enhance the existing .aspx view engine). Razor minimizes the number of characters and keystrokes required when writing a view template, and enables a fast, fluid coding workflow. Unlike most template syntaxes, with Razor you do not need to interrupt your coding to explicitly denote the start and end of server blocks within your HTML. The Razor parser is smart enough to infer this from your code. This enables a compact and expressive syntax which is clean, fast and fun to type. You can learn more about Razor from some of the blog posts I’ve done about it over the last 6 months Introducing Razor New @model keyword in Razor Layouts with Razor Server-Side Comments with Razor Razor’s @: and <text> syntax Implicit and Explicit code nuggets with Razor Layouts and Sections with Razor Today’s release supports full code intellisense support for Razor (both VB and C#) with Visual Studio 2010 and the free Visual Web Developer 2010 Express. JavaScript Improvements ASP.NET MVC 3 enables richer JavaScript scenarios and takes advantage of emerging HTML5 capabilities. The AJAX and Validation helpers in ASP.NET MVC 3 now use an Unobtrusive JavaScript based approach. Unobtrusive JavaScript avoids injecting inline JavaScript into HTML, and enables cleaner separation of behavior using the new HTML 5 “data-“ attribute convention (which conveniently works on older browsers as well – including IE6). This keeps your HTML tight and clean, and makes it easier to optionally swap out or customize JS libraries. ASP.NET MVC 3 now includes built-in support for posting JSON-based parameters from client-side JavaScript to action methods on the server. This makes it easier to exchange data across the client and server, and build rich JavaScript front-ends. We think this capability will be particularly useful going forward with scenarios involving client templates and data binding (including the jQuery plugins the ASP.NET team recently contributed to the jQuery project). Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC included the core jQuery library. ASP.NET MVC 3 also now ships the jQuery Validate plugin (which our validation helpers use for client-side validation scenarios). We are also now shipping and including jQuery UI by default as well (which provides a rich set of client-side JavaScript UI widgets for you to use within projects). Improved Validation ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a bunch of validation enhancements that make it even easier to work with data. Client-side validation is now enabled by default with ASP.NET MVC 3 (using an onbtrusive javascript implementation). Today’s release also includes built-in support for Remote Validation - which enables you to annotate a model class with a validation attribute that causes ASP.NET MVC to perform a remote validation call to a server method when validating input on the client. The validation features introduced within .NET 4’s System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace are now supported by ASP.NET MVC 3. This includes support for the new IValidatableObject interface – which enables you to perform model-level validation, and allows you to provide validation error messages specific to the state of the overall model, or between two properties within the model. ASP.NET MVC 3 also supports the improvements made to the ValidationAttribute class in .NET 4. ValidationAttribute now supports a new IsValid overload that provides more information about the current validation context, such as what object is being validated. This enables richer scenarios where you can validate the current value based on another property of the model. We’ve shipped a built-in [Compare] validation attribute with ASP.NET MVC 3 that uses this support and makes it easy out of the box to compare and validate two property values. You can use any data access API or technology with ASP.NET MVC. This past year, though, we’ve worked closely with the .NET data team to ensure that the new EF Code First library works really well for ASP.NET MVC applications. These two posts of mine cover the latest EF Code First preview and demonstrates how to use it with ASP.NET MVC 3 to enable easy editing of data (with end to end client+server validation support). The final release of EF Code First will ship in the next few weeks. Today we are also publishing the first preview of a new MvcScaffolding project. It enables you to easily scaffold ASP.NET MVC 3 Controllers and Views, and works great with EF Code-First (and is pluggable to support other data providers). You can learn more about it – and install it via NuGet today - from Steve Sanderson’s MvcScaffolding blog post. Output Caching Previous releases of ASP.NET MVC supported output caching content at a URL or action-method level. With ASP.NET MVC V3 we are also enabling support for partial page output caching – which allows you to easily output cache regions or fragments of a response as opposed to the entire thing. This ends up being super useful in a lot of scenarios, and enables you to dramatically reduce the work your application does on the server. The new partial page output caching support in ASP.NET MVC 3 enables you to easily re-use cached sub-regions/fragments of a page across multiple URLs on a site. It supports the ability to cache the content either on the web-server, or optionally cache it within a distributed cache server like Windows Server AppFabric or memcached. I’ll post some tutorials on my blog that show how to take advantage of ASP.NET MVC 3’s new output caching support for partial page scenarios in the future. Better Dependency Injection ASP.NET MVC 3 provides better support for applying Dependency Injection (DI) and integrating with Dependency Injection/IOC containers. With ASP.NET MVC 3 you no longer need to author custom ControllerFactory classes in order to enable DI with Controllers. You can instead just register a Dependency Injection framework with ASP.NET MVC 3 and it will resolve dependencies not only for Controllers, but also for Views, Action Filters, Model Binders, Value Providers, Validation Providers, and Model Metadata Providers that you use within your application. This makes it much easier to cleanly integrate dependency injection within your projects. Other Goodies ASP.NET MVC 3 includes dozens of other nice improvements that help to both reduce the amount of code you write, and make the code you do write cleaner. Here are just a few examples: Improved New Project dialog that makes it easy to start new ASP.NET MVC 3 projects from templates. Improved Add->View Scaffolding support that enables the generation of even cleaner view templates. New ViewBag property that uses .NET 4’s dynamic support to make it easy to pass late-bound data from Controllers to Views. Global Filters support that allows specifying cross-cutting filter attributes (like [HandleError]) across all Controllers within an app. New [AllowHtml] attribute that allows for more granular request validation when binding form posted data to models. Sessionless controller support that allows fine grained control over whether SessionState is enabled on a Controller. New ActionResult types like HttpNotFoundResult and RedirectPermanent for common HTTP scenarios. New Html.Raw() helper to indicate that output should not be HTML encoded. New Crypto helpers for salting and hashing passwords. And much, much more… Learn More about ASP.NET MVC 3 We will be posting lots of tutorials and samples on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the weeks ahead. Below are two good ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials available on the site today: Build your First ASP.NET MVC 3 Application: VB and C# Building the ASP.NET MVC 3 Music Store We’ll post additional ASP.NET MVC 3 tutorials and videos on the http://asp.net/mvc site in the future. Visit it regularly to find new tutorials as they are published. How to Upgrade Existing Projects ASP.NET MVC 3 is compatible with ASP.NET MVC 2 – which means it should be easy to update existing MVC projects to ASP.NET MVC 3. The new features in ASP.NET MVC 3 build on top of the foundational work we’ve already done with the MVC 1 and MVC 2 releases – which means that the skills, knowledge, libraries, and books you’ve acquired are all directly applicable with the MVC 3 release. MVC 3 adds new features and capabilities – it doesn’t obsolete existing ones. You can upgrade existing ASP.NET MVC 2 projects by following the manual upgrade steps in the release notes. Alternatively, you can use this automated ASP.NET MVC 3 upgrade tool to easily update your existing projects. Localized Builds Today’s ASP.NET MVC 3 release is available in English. We will be releasing localized versions of ASP.NET MVC 3 (in 9 languages) in a few days. I’ll blog pointers to the localized downloads once they are available. NuGet Today we are also shipping NuGet – a free, open source, package manager that makes it easy for you to find, install, and use open source libraries in your projects. It works with all .NET project types (including ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, WPF, WinForms, Silverlight, and Class Libraries). You can download and install it here. NuGet enables developers who maintain open source projects (for example, .NET projects like Moq, NHibernate, Ninject, StructureMap, NUnit, Windsor, Raven, Elmah, etc) to package up their libraries and register them with an online gallery/catalog that is searchable. The client-side NuGet tools – which include full Visual Studio integration – make it trivial for any .NET developer who wants to use one of these libraries to easily find and install it within the project they are working on. NuGet handles dependency management between libraries (for example: library1 depends on library2). It also makes it easy to update (and optionally remove) libraries from your projects later. It supports updating web.config files (if a package needs configuration settings). It also allows packages to add PowerShell scripts to a project (for example: scaffold commands). Importantly, NuGet is transparent and clean – and does not install anything at the system level. Instead it is focused on making it easy to manage libraries you use with your projects. Our goal with NuGet is to make it as simple as possible to integrate open source libraries within .NET projects. NuGet Gallery This week we also launched a beta version of the http://nuget.org web-site – which allows anyone to easily search and browse an online gallery of open source packages available via NuGet. The site also now allows developers to optionally submit new packages that they wish to share with others. You can learn more about how to create and share a package here. There are hundreds of open-source .NET projects already within the NuGet Gallery today. We hope to have thousands there in the future. IIS Express 7.5 Today we are also shipping IIS Express 7.5. IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that is optimized for developer scenarios. It works for both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC project types. We think IIS Express combines the ease of use of the ASP.NET Web Server (aka Cassini) currently built-into Visual Studio today with the full power of IIS. Specifically: It’s lightweight and easy to install (less than 5Mb download and a quick install) It does not require an administrator account to run/debug applications from Visual Studio It enables a full web-server feature set – including SSL, URL Rewrite, and other IIS 7.x modules It supports and enables the same extensibility model and web.config file settings that IIS 7.x support It can be installed side-by-side with the full IIS web server as well as the ASP.NET Development Server (they do not conflict at all) It works on Windows XP and higher operating systems – giving you a full IIS 7.x developer feature-set on all Windows OS platforms IIS Express (like the ASP.NET Development Server) can be quickly launched to run a site from a directory on disk. It does not require any registration/configuration steps. This makes it really easy to launch and run for development scenarios. You can also optionally redistribute IIS Express with your own applications if you want a lightweight web-server. The standard IIS Express EULA now includes redistributable rights. Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for IIS Express. Read my VS 2010 SP1 and IIS Express blog post to learn more about what it enables. SQL Server Compact Edition 4 Today we are also shipping SQL Server Compact Edition 4 (aka SQL CE 4). SQL CE is a free, embedded, database engine that enables easy database storage. No Database Installation Required SQL CE does not require you to run a setup or install a database server in order to use it. You can simply copy the SQL CE binaries into the \bin directory of your ASP.NET application, and then your web application can use it as a database engine. No setup or extra security permissions are required for it to run. You do not need to have an administrator account on the machine. Just copy your web application onto any server and it will work. This is true even of medium-trust applications running in a web hosting environment. SQL CE runs in-memory within your ASP.NET application and will start-up when you first access a SQL CE database, and will automatically shutdown when your application is unloaded. SQL CE databases are stored as files that live within the \App_Data folder of your ASP.NET Applications. Works with Existing Data APIs SQL CE 4 works with existing .NET-based data APIs, and supports a SQL Server compatible query syntax. This means you can use existing data APIs like ADO.NET, as well as use higher-level ORMs like Entity Framework and NHibernate with SQL CE. This enables you to use the same data programming skills and data APIs you know today. Supports Development, Testing and Production Scenarios SQL CE can be used for development scenarios, testing scenarios, and light production usage scenarios. With the SQL CE 4 release we’ve done the engineering work to ensure that SQL CE won’t crash or deadlock when used in a multi-threaded server scenario (like ASP.NET). This is a big change from previous releases of SQL CE – which were designed for client-only scenarios and which explicitly blocked running in web-server environments. Starting with SQL CE 4 you can use it in a web-server as well. There are no license restrictions with SQL CE. It is also totally free. Tooling Support with VS 2010 SP1 Visual Studio 2010 SP1 adds support for SQL CE 4 and ASP.NET Projects. Read my VS 2010 SP1 and SQL CE 4 blog post to learn more about what it enables. Web Deploy and Web Farm Framework 2.0 Today we are also releasing Microsoft Web Deploy V2 and Microsoft Web Farm Framework V2. These services provide a flexible and powerful way to deploy ASP.NET applications onto either a single server, or across a web farm of machines. You can learn more about these capabilities from my previous blog posts on them: Introducing the Microsoft Web Farm Framework Automating Deployment with Microsoft Web Deploy Visit the http://iis.net website to learn more and install them. Both are free. Orchard 1.0 Today we are also releasing Orchard v1.0. Orchard is a free, open source, community based project. It provides Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging System support out of the box, and makes it possible to easily create and manage web-sites without having to write code (site owners can customize a site through the browser-based editing tools built-into Orchard). Read these tutorials to learn more about how you can setup and manage your own Orchard site. Orchard itself is built as an ASP.NET MVC 3 application using Razor view templates (and by default uses SQL CE 4 for data storage). Developers wishing to extend an Orchard site with custom functionality can open and edit it as a Visual Studio project – and add new ASP.NET MVC Controllers/Views to it. WebMatrix 1.0 WebMatrix is a new, free, web development tool from Microsoft that provides a suite of technologies that make it easier to enable website development. It enables a developer to start a new site by browsing and downloading an app template from an online gallery of web applications (which includes popular apps like Umbraco, DotNetNuke, Orchard, WordPress, Drupal and Joomla). Alternatively it also enables developers to create and code web sites from scratch. WebMatrix is task focused and helps guide developers as they work on sites. WebMatrix includes IIS Express, SQL CE 4, and ASP.NET - providing an integrated web-server, database and programming framework combination. It also includes built-in web publishing support which makes it easy to find and deploy sites to web hosting providers. You can learn more about WebMatrix from my Introducing WebMatrix blog post this summer. Visit http://microsoft.com/web to download and install it today. Summary I’m really excited about today’s releases – they provide a bunch of additional value that makes web development with ASP.NET, Visual Studio and the Microsoft Web Server a lot better. A lot of folks worked hard to share this with you today. On behalf of my whole team – we hope you enjoy them! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Using jQuery to POST Form Data to an ASP.NET ASMX AJAX Web Service

- by Rick Strahl

The other day I got a question about how to call an ASP.NET ASMX Web Service or PageMethods with the POST data from a Web Form (or any HTML form for that matter). The idea is that you should be able to call an endpoint URL, send it regular urlencoded POST data and then use Request.Form[] to retrieve the posted data as needed. My first reaction was that you can’t do it, because ASP.NET ASMX AJAX services (as well as Page Methods and WCF REST AJAX Services) require that the content POSTed to the server is posted as JSON and sent with an application/json or application/x-javascript content type. IOW, you can’t directly call an ASP.NET AJAX service with regular urlencoded data. Note that there are other ways to accomplish this. You can use ASP.NET MVC and a custom route, an HTTP Handler or separate ASPX page, or even a WCF REST service that’s configured to use non-JSON inputs. However if you want to use an ASP.NET AJAX service (or Page Methods) with a little bit of setup work it’s actually quite easy to capture all the form variables on the client and ship them up to the server. The basic steps needed to make this happen are: Capture form variables into an array on the client with jQuery’s .serializeArray() function Use $.ajax() or my ServiceProxy class to make an AJAX call to the server to send this array On the server create a custom type that matches the .serializeArray() name/value structure Create extension methods on NameValue[] to easily extract form variables Create a [WebMethod] that accepts this name/value type as an array (NameValue[]) This seems like a lot of work but realize that steps 3 and 4 are a one time setup step that can be reused in your entire site or multiple applications. Let’s look at a short example that looks like this as a base form of fields to ship to the server: The HTML for this form looks something like this: <div id="divMessage" class="errordisplay" style="display: none"> </div> <div> <div class="label">Name:</div> <div><asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtName" /></div> </div> <div> <div class="label">Company:</div> <div><asp:TextBox runat="server" ID="txtCompany"/></div> </div> <div> <div class="label" ></div> <div> <asp:DropDownList runat="server" ID="lstAttending"> <asp:ListItem Text="Attending" Value="Attending"/> <asp:ListItem Text="Not Attending" Value="NotAttending" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Maybe Attending" Value="MaybeAttending" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Not Sure Yet" Value="NotSureYet" /> </asp:DropDownList> </div> </div> <div> <div class="label">Special Needs:<br /> <small>(check all that apply)</small></div> <div> <asp:ListBox runat="server" ID="lstSpecialNeeds" SelectionMode="Multiple"> <asp:ListItem Text="Vegitarian" Value="Vegitarian" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Vegan" Value="Vegan" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Kosher" Value="Kosher" /> <asp:ListItem Text="Special Access" Value="SpecialAccess" /> <asp:ListItem Text="No Binder" Value="NoBinder" /> </asp:ListBox> </div> </div> <div> <div class="label"></div> <div> <asp:CheckBox ID="chkAdditionalGuests" Text="Additional Guests" runat="server" /> </div> </div> <hr /> <input type="button" id="btnSubmit" value="Send Registration" /> The form includes a few different kinds of form fields including a multi-selection listbox to demonstrate retrieving multiple values. Setting up the Server Side [WebMethod] The [WebMethod] on the server we’re going to call is going to be very simple and just capture the content of these values and echo then back as a formatted HTML string. Obviously this is overly simplistic but it serves to demonstrate the simple point of capturing the POST data on the server in an AJAX callback. public class PageMethodsService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string SendRegistration(NameValue[] formVars) { StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(); sb.AppendFormat("Thank you {0}, <br/><br/>", HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(formVars.Form("txtName"))); sb.AppendLine("You've entered the following: <hr/>"); foreach (NameValue nv in formVars) { // strip out ASP.NET form vars like _ViewState/_EventValidation if (!nv.name.StartsWith("__")) { if (nv.name.StartsWith("txt") || nv.name.StartsWith("lst") || nv.name.StartsWith("chk")) sb.Append(nv.name.Substring(3)); else sb.Append(nv.name); sb.AppendLine(": " + HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(nv.value) + "<br/>"); } } sb.AppendLine("<hr/>"); string[] needs = formVars.FormMultiple("lstSpecialNeeds"); if (needs == null) sb.AppendLine("No Special Needs"); else { sb.AppendLine("Special Needs: <br/>"); foreach (string need in needs) { sb.AppendLine("  " + need + "<br/>"); } } return sb.ToString(); } } The key feature of this method is that it receives a custom type called NameValue[] which is an array of NameValue objects that map the structure that the jQuery .serializeArray() function generates. There are two custom types involved in this: The actual NameValue type and a NameValueExtensions class that defines a couple of extension methods for the NameValue[] array type to allow for single (.Form()) and multiple (.FormMultiple()) value retrieval by name. The NameValue class is as simple as this and simply maps the structure of the array elements of .serializeArray(): public class NameValue { public string name { get; set; } public string value { get; set; } } The extension method class defines the .Form() and .FormMultiple() methods to allow easy retrieval of form variables from the returned array: /// <summary> /// Simple NameValue class that maps name and value /// properties that can be used with jQuery's /// $.serializeArray() function and JSON requests /// </summary> public static class NameValueExtensionMethods { /// <summary> /// Retrieves a single form variable from the list of /// form variables stored /// </summary> /// <param name="formVars"></param> /// <param name="name">formvar to retrieve</param> /// <returns>value or string.Empty if not found</returns> public static string Form(this NameValue[] formVars, string name) { var matches = formVars.Where(nv => nv.name.ToLower() == name.ToLower()).FirstOrDefault(); if (matches != null) return matches.value; return string.Empty; } /// <summary> /// Retrieves multiple selection form variables from the list of /// form variables stored. /// </summary> /// <param name="formVars"></param> /// <param name="name">The name of the form var to retrieve</param> /// <returns>values as string[] or null if no match is found</returns> public static string[] FormMultiple(this NameValue[] formVars, string name) { var matches = formVars.Where(nv => nv.name.ToLower() == name.ToLower()).Select(nv => nv.value).ToArray(); if (matches.Length == 0) return null; return matches; } } Using these extension methods it’s easy to retrieve individual values from the array: string name = formVars.Form("txtName"); or multiple values: string[] needs = formVars.FormMultiple("lstSpecialNeeds"); if (needs != null) { // do something with matches } Using these functions in the SendRegistration method it’s easy to retrieve a few form variables directly (txtName and the multiple selections of lstSpecialNeeds) or to iterate over the whole list of values. Of course this is an overly simple example – in typical app you’d probably want to validate the input data and save it to the database and then return some sort of confirmation or possibly an updated data list back to the client. Since this is a full AJAX service callback realize that you don’t have to return simple string values – you can return any of the supported result types (which are most serializable types) including complex hierarchical objects and arrays that make sense to your client code. POSTing Form Variables from the Client to the AJAX Service To call the AJAX service method on the client is straight forward and requires only use of little native jQuery plus JSON serialization functionality. To start add jQuery and the json2.js library to your page: <script src="Scripts/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="Scripts/json2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> json2.js can be found here (be sure to remove the first line from the file): http://www.json.org/json2.js It’s required to handle JSON serialization for those browsers that don’t support it natively. With those script references in the document let’s hookup the button click handler and call the service: $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSubmit").click(sendRegistration); }); function sendRegistration() { var arForm = $("#form1").serializeArray(); $.ajax({ url: "PageMethodsService.asmx/SendRegistration", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ formVars: arForm }), dataType: "json", success: function (result) { var jEl = $("#divMessage"); jEl.html(result.d).fadeIn(1000); setTimeout(function () { jEl.fadeOut(1000) }, 5000); }, error: function (xhr, status) { alert("An error occurred: " + status); } }); } The key feature in this code is the $("#form1").serializeArray(); call which serializes all the form fields of form1 into an array. Each form var is represented as an object with a name/value property. This array is then serialized into JSON with: JSON.stringify({ formVars: arForm }) The format for the parameter list in AJAX service calls is an object with one property for each parameter of the method. In this case its a single parameter called formVars and we’re assigning the array of form variables to it. The URL to call on the server is the name of the Service (or ASPX Page for Page Methods) plus the name of the method to call. On return the success callback receives the result from the AJAX callback which in this case is the formatted string which is simply assigned to an element in the form and displayed. Remember the result type is whatever the method returns – it doesn’t have to be a string. Note that ASP.NET AJAX and WCF REST return JSON data as a wrapped object so the result has a ‘d’ property that holds the actual response: jEl.html(result.d).fadeIn(1000); Slightly simpler: Using ServiceProxy.js If you want things slightly cleaner you can use the ServiceProxy.js class I’ve mentioned here before. The ServiceProxy class handles a few things for calling ASP.NET and WCF services more cleanly: Automatic JSON encoding Automatic fix up of ‘d’ wrapper property Automatic Date conversion on the client Simplified error handling Reusable and abstracted To add the service proxy add: <script src="Scripts/ServiceProxy.js" type="text/javascript"></script> and then change the code to this slightly simpler version: <script type="text/javascript"> proxy = new ServiceProxy("PageMethodsService.asmx/"); $(document).ready(function () { $("#btnSubmit").click(sendRegistration); }); function sendRegistration() { var arForm = $("#form1").serializeArray(); proxy.invoke("SendRegistration", { formVars: arForm }, function (result) { var jEl = $("#divMessage"); jEl.html(result).fadeIn(1000); setTimeout(function () { jEl.fadeOut(1000) }, 5000); }, function (error) { alert(error.message); } ); } The code is not very different but it makes the call as simple as specifying the method to call, the parameters to pass and the actions to take on success and error. No more remembering which content type and data types to use and manually serializing to JSON. This code also removes the “d” property processing in the response and provides more consistent error handling in that the call always returns an error object regardless of a server error or a communication error unlike the native $.ajax() call. Either approach works and both are pretty easy. The ServiceProxy really pays off if you use lots of service calls and especially if you need to deal with date values returned from the server on the client. Summary Making Web Service calls and getting POST data to the server is not always the best option – ASP.NET and WCF AJAX services are meant to work with data in objects. However, in some situations it’s simply easier to POST all the captured form data to the server instead of mapping all properties from the input fields to some sort of message object first. For this approach the above POST mechanism is useful as it puts the parsing of the data on the server and leaves the client code lean and mean. It’s even easy to build a custom model binder on the server that can map the array values to properties on an object generically with some relatively simple Reflection code and without having to manually map form vars to properties and do string conversions. Keep in mind though that other approaches also abound. ASP.NET MVC makes it pretty easy to create custom routes to data and the built in model binder makes it very easy to deal with inbound form POST data in its original urlencoded format. The West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit also includes functionality for AJAX callbacks using plain POST values. All that’s needed is a Method parameter to query/form value to specify the method to be called on the server. After that the content type is completely optional and up to the consumer. It’d be nice if the ASP.NET AJAX Service and WCF AJAX Services weren’t so tightly bound to the content type so that you could more easily create open access service endpoints that can take advantage of urlencoded data that is everywhere in existing pages. It would make it much easier to create basic REST endpoints without complicated service configuration. Ah one can dream! In the meantime I hope this article has given you some ideas on how you can transfer POST data from the client to the server using JSON – it might be useful in other scenarios beyond ASP.NET AJAX services as well. Additional Resources ServiceProxy.js A small JavaScript library that wraps $.ajax() to call ASP.NET AJAX and WCF AJAX Services. Includes date parsing extensions to the JSON object, a global dataFilter for processing dates on all jQuery JSON requests, provides cleanup for the .NET wrapped message format and handles errors in a consistent fashion. Making jQuery Calls to WCF/ASMX with a ServiceProxy Client More information on calling ASMX and WCF AJAX services with jQuery and some more background on ServiceProxy.js. Note the implementation has slightly changed since the article was written. ww.jquery.js The West Wind West Wind Web Toolkit also includes ServiceProxy.js in the West Wind jQuery extension library. This version is slightly different and includes embedded json encoding/decoding based on json2.js.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in jQuery ASP.NET AJAX

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Custom ASP.NET Routing to an HttpHandler

- by Rick Strahl

As of version 4.0 ASP.NET natively supports routing via the now built-in System.Web.Routing namespace. Routing features are automatically integrated into the HtttpRuntime via a few custom interfaces. New Web Forms Routing Support In ASP.NET 4.0 there are a host of improvements including routing support baked into Web Forms via a RouteData property available on the Page class and RouteCollection.MapPageRoute() route handler that makes it easy to route to Web forms. To map ASP.NET Page routes is as simple as setting up the routes with MapPageRoute:protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes); } void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.MapPageRoute("StockQuote", "StockQuote/{symbol}", "StockQuote.aspx"); routes.MapPageRoute("StockQuotes", "StockQuotes/{symbolList}", "StockQuotes.aspx"); } and then accessing the route data in the page you can then use the new Page class RouteData property to retrieve the dynamic route data information:public partial class StockQuote1 : System.Web.UI.Page { protected StockQuote Quote = null; protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string symbol = RouteData.Values["symbol"] as string; StockServer server = new StockServer(); Quote = server.GetStockQuote(symbol); // display stock data in Page View } } Simple, quick and doesn’t require much explanation. If you’re using WebForms most of your routing needs should be served just fine by this simple mechanism. Kudos to the ASP.NET team for putting this in the box and making it easy! How Routing Works To handle Routing in ASP.NET involves these steps: Registering Routes Creating a custom RouteHandler to retrieve an HttpHandler Attaching RouteData to your HttpHandler Picking up Route Information in your Request code Registering routes makes ASP.NET aware of the Routes you want to handle via the static RouteTable.Routes collection. You basically add routes to this collection to let ASP.NET know which URL patterns it should watch for. You typically hook up routes off a RegisterRoutes method that fires in Application_Start as I did in the example above to ensure routes are added only once when the application first starts up. When you create a route, you pass in a RouteHandler instance which ASP.NET caches and reuses as routes are matched. Once registered ASP.NET monitors the routes and if a match is found just prior to the HttpHandler instantiation, ASP.NET uses the RouteHandler registered for the route and calls GetHandler() on it to retrieve an HttpHandler instance. The RouteHandler.GetHandler() method is responsible for creating an instance of an HttpHandler that is to handle the request and – if necessary – to assign any additional custom data to the handler. At minimum you probably want to pass the RouteData to the handler so the handler can identify the request based on the route data available. To do this you typically add a RouteData property to your handler and then assign the property from the RouteHandlers request context. This is essentially how Page.RouteData comes into being and this approach should work well for any custom handler implementation that requires RouteData. It’s a shame that ASP.NET doesn’t have a top level intrinsic object that’s accessible off the HttpContext object to provide route data more generically, but since RouteData is directly tied to HttpHandlers and not all handlers support it it might cause some confusion of when it’s actually available. Bottom line is that if you want to hold on to RouteData you have to assign it to a custom property of the handler or else pass it to the handler via Context.Items[] object that can be retrieved on an as needed basis. It’s important to understand that routing is hooked up via RouteHandlers that are responsible for loading HttpHandler instances. RouteHandlers are invoked for every request that matches a route and through this RouteHandler instance the Handler gains access to the current RouteData. Because of this logic it’s important to understand that Routing is really tied to HttpHandlers and not available prior to handler instantiation, which is pretty late in the HttpRuntime’s request pipeline. IOW, Routing works with Handlers but not with earlier in the pipeline within Modules. Specifically ASP.NET calls RouteHandler.GetHandler() from the PostResolveRequestCache HttpRuntime pipeline event. Here’s the call stack at the beginning of the GetHandler() call: which fires just before handler resolution. Non-Page Routing – You need to build custom RouteHandlers If you need to route to a custom Http Handler or other non-Page (and non-MVC) endpoint in the HttpRuntime, there is no generic mapping support available. You need to create a custom RouteHandler that can manage creating an instance of an HttpHandler that is fired in response to a routed request. Depending on what you are doing this process can be simple or fairly involved as your code is responsible based on the route data provided which handler to instantiate, and more importantly how to pass the route data on to the Handler. Luckily creating a RouteHandler is easy by implementing the IRouteHandler interface which has only a single GetHttpHandler(RequestContext context) method. In this method you can pick up the requestContext.RouteData, instantiate the HttpHandler of choice, and assign the RouteData to it. Then pass back the handler and you’re done.Here’s a simple example of GetHttpHandler() method that dynamically creates a handler based on a passed in Handler type./// <summary> /// Retrieves an Http Handler based on the type specified in the constructor /// </summary> /// <param name="requestContext"></param> /// <returns></returns> IHttpHandler IRouteHandler.GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { IHttpHandler handler = Activator.CreateInstance(CallbackHandlerType) as IHttpHandler; // If we're dealing with a Callback Handler // pass the RouteData for this route to the Handler if (handler is CallbackHandler) ((CallbackHandler)handler).RouteData = requestContext.RouteData; return handler; } Note that this code checks for a specific type of handler and if it matches assigns the RouteData to this handler. This is optional but quite a common scenario if you want to work with RouteData. If the handler you need to instantiate isn’t under your control but you still need to pass RouteData to Handler code, an alternative is to pass the RouteData via the HttpContext.Items collection:IHttpHandler IRouteHandler.GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { IHttpHandler handler = Activator.CreateInstance(CallbackHandlerType) as IHttpHandler; requestContext.HttpContext.Items["RouteData"] = requestContext.RouteData; return handler; } The code in the handler implementation can then pick up the RouteData from the context collection as needed:RouteData routeData = HttpContext.Current.Items["RouteData"] as RouteData This isn’t as clean as having an explicit RouteData property, but it does have the advantage that the route data is visible anywhere in the Handler’s code chain. It’s definitely preferable to create a custom property on your handler, but the Context work-around works in a pinch when you don’t’ own the handler code and have dynamic code executing as part of the handler execution. An Example of a Custom RouteHandler: Attribute Based Route Implementation In this post I’m going to discuss a custom routine implementation I built for my CallbackHandler class in the West Wind Web & Ajax Toolkit. CallbackHandler can be very easily used for creating AJAX, REST and POX requests following RPC style method mapping. You can pass parameters via URL query string, POST data or raw data structures, and you can retrieve results as JSON, XML or raw string/binary data. It’s a quick and easy way to build service interfaces with no fuss. As a quick review here’s how CallbackHandler works: You create an Http Handler that derives from CallbackHandler You implement methods that have a [CallbackMethod] Attribute and that’s it. Here’s an example of an CallbackHandler implementation in an ashx.cs based handler:// RestService.ashx.cs public class RestService : CallbackHandler { [CallbackMethod] public StockQuote GetStockQuote(string symbol) { StockServer server = new StockServer(); return server.GetStockQuote(symbol); } [CallbackMethod] public StockQuote[] GetStockQuotes(string symbolList) { StockServer server = new StockServer(); string[] symbols = symbolList.Split(new char[2] { ',',';' },StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); return server.GetStockQuotes(symbols); } } CallbackHandler makes it super easy to create a method on the server, pass data to it via POST, QueryString or raw JSON/XML data, and then retrieve the results easily back in various formats. This works wonderful and I’ve used these tools in many projects for myself and with clients. But one thing missing has been the ability to create clean URLs. Typical URLs looked like this: http://www.west-wind.com/WestwindWebToolkit/samples/Rest/StockService.ashx?Method=GetStockQuote&symbol=msfthttp://www.west-wind.com/WestwindWebToolkit/samples/Rest/StockService.ashx?Method=GetStockQuotes&symbolList=msft,intc,gld,slw,mwe&format=xml which works and is clear enough, but also clearly very ugly. It would be much nicer if URLs could look like this: http://www.west-wind.com//WestwindWebtoolkit/Samples/StockQuote/msfthttp://www.west-wind.com/WestwindWebtoolkit/Samples/StockQuotes/msft,intc,gld,slw?format=xml (the Virtual Root in this sample is WestWindWebToolkit/Samples and StockQuote/{symbol} is the route)(If you use FireFox try using the JSONView plug-in make it easier to view JSON content) So, taking a clue from the WCF REST tools that use RouteUrls I set out to create a way to specify RouteUrls for each of the endpoints. The change made basically allows changing the above to: [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="RestService/StockQuote/{symbol}")] public StockQuote GetStockQuote(string symbol) { StockServer server = new StockServer(); return server.GetStockQuote(symbol); } [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl = "RestService/StockQuotes/{symbolList}")] public StockQuote[] GetStockQuotes(string symbolList) { StockServer server = new StockServer(); string[] symbols = symbolList.Split(new char[2] { ',',';' },StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); return server.GetStockQuotes(symbols); } where a RouteUrl is specified as part of the Callback attribute. And with the changes made with RouteUrls I can now get URLs like the second set shown earlier. So how does that work? Let’s find out… How to Create Custom Routes As mentioned earlier Routing is made up of several steps: Creating a custom RouteHandler to create HttpHandler instances Mapping the actual Routes to the RouteHandler Retrieving the RouteData and actually doing something useful with it in the HttpHandler In the CallbackHandler routing example above this works out to something like this: Create a custom RouteHandler that includes a property to track the method to call Set up the routes using Reflection against the class Looking for any RouteUrls in the CallbackMethod attribute Add a RouteData property to the CallbackHandler so we can access the RouteData in the code of the handler Creating a Custom Route Handler To make the above work I created a custom RouteHandler class that includes the actual IRouteHandler implementation as well as a generic and static method to automatically register all routes marked with the [CallbackMethod(RouteUrl="…")] attribute. Here’s the code:/// <summary> /// Route handler that can create instances of CallbackHandler derived /// callback classes. The route handler tracks the method name and /// creates an instance of the service in a predictable manner /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TCallbackHandler">CallbackHandler type</typeparam> public class CallbackHandlerRouteHandler : IRouteHandler { /// <summary> /// Method name that is to be called on this route. /// Set by the automatically generated RegisterRoutes /// invokation. /// </summary> public string MethodName { get; set; } /// <summary> /// The type of the handler we're going to instantiate. /// Needed so we can semi-generically instantiate the /// handler and call the method on it. /// </summary> public Type CallbackHandlerType { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Constructor to pass in the two required components we /// need to create an instance of our handler. /// </summary> /// <param name="methodName"></param> /// <param name="callbackHandlerType"></param> public CallbackHandlerRouteHandler(string methodName, Type callbackHandlerType) { MethodName = methodName; CallbackHandlerType = callbackHandlerType; } /// <summary> /// Retrieves an Http Handler based on the type specified in the constructor /// </summary> /// <param name="requestContext"></param> /// <returns></returns> IHttpHandler IRouteHandler.GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { IHttpHandler handler = Activator.CreateInstance(CallbackHandlerType) as IHttpHandler; // If we're dealing with a Callback Handler // pass the RouteData for this route to the Handler if (handler is CallbackHandler) ((CallbackHandler)handler).RouteData = requestContext.RouteData; return handler; } /// <summary> /// Generic method to register all routes from a CallbackHandler /// that have RouteUrls defined on the [CallbackMethod] attribute /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TCallbackHandler">CallbackHandler Type</typeparam> /// <param name="routes"></param> public static void RegisterRoutes<TCallbackHandler>(RouteCollection routes) { // find all methods var methods = typeof(TCallbackHandler).GetMethods(BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public); foreach (var method in methods) { var attrs = method.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(CallbackMethodAttribute), false); if (attrs.Length < 1) continue; CallbackMethodAttribute attr = attrs[0] as CallbackMethodAttribute; if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(attr.RouteUrl)) continue; // Add the route routes.Add(method.Name, new Route(attr.RouteUrl, new CallbackHandlerRouteHandler(method.Name, typeof(TCallbackHandler)))); } } } The RouteHandler implements IRouteHandler, and its responsibility via the GetHandler method is to create an HttpHandler based on the route data. When ASP.NET calls GetHandler it passes a requestContext parameter which includes a requestContext.RouteData property. This parameter holds the current request’s route data as well as an instance of the current RouteHandler. If you look at GetHttpHandler() you can see that the code creates an instance of the handler we are interested in and then sets the RouteData property on the handler. This is how you can pass the current request’s RouteData to the handler. The RouteData object also has a RouteData.RouteHandler property that is also available to the Handler later, which is useful in order to get additional information about the current route. In our case here the RouteHandler includes a MethodName property that identifies the method to execute in the handler since that value no longer comes from the URL so we need to figure out the method name some other way. The method name is mapped explicitly when the RouteHandler is created and here the static method that auto-registers all CallbackMethods with RouteUrls sets the method name when it creates the routes while reflecting over the methods (more on this in a minute). The important point here is that you can attach additional properties to the RouteHandler and you can then later access the RouteHandler and its properties later in the Handler to pick up these custom values. This is a crucial feature in that the RouteHandler serves in passing additional context to the handler so it knows what actions to perform. The automatic route registration is handled by the static RegisterRoutes<TCallbackHandler> method. This method is generic and totally reusable for any CallbackHandler type handler. To register a CallbackHandler and any RouteUrls it has defined you simple use code like this in Application_Start (or other application startup code):protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Register Routes for RestService CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes<RestService>(RouteTable.Routes); } If you have multiple CallbackHandler style services you can make multiple calls to RegisterRoutes for each of the service types. RegisterRoutes internally uses reflection to run through all the methods of the Handler, looking for CallbackMethod attributes and whether a RouteUrl is specified. If it is a new instance of a CallbackHandlerRouteHandler is created and the name of the method and the type are set. routes.Add(method.Name, new Route(attr.RouteUrl, new CallbackHandlerRouteHandler(method.Name, typeof(TCallbackHandler) )) ); While the routing with CallbackHandlerRouteHandler is set up automatically for all methods that use the RouteUrl attribute, you can also use code to hook up those routes manually and skip using the attribute. The code for this is straightforward and just requires that you manually map each individual route to each method you want a routed: protected void Application_Start(objectsender, EventArgs e){ RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);}void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes) { routes.Add("StockQuote Route",new Route("StockQuote/{symbol}", new CallbackHandlerRouteHandler("GetStockQuote",typeof(RestService) ) ) ); routes.Add("StockQuotes Route",new Route("StockQuotes/{symbolList}", new CallbackHandlerRouteHandler("GetStockQuotes",typeof(RestService) ) ) );}I think it’s clearly easier to have CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes() do this automatically for you based on RouteUrl attributes, but some people have a real aversion to attaching logic via attributes. Just realize that the option to manually create your routes is available as well. Using the RouteData in the Handler A RouteHandler’s responsibility is to create an HttpHandler and as mentioned earlier, natively IHttpHandler doesn’t have any support for RouteData. In order to utilize RouteData in your handler code you have to pass the RouteData to the handler. In my CallbackHandlerRouteHandler when it creates the HttpHandler instance it creates the instance and then assigns the custom RouteData property on the handler:IHttpHandler handler = Activator.CreateInstance(CallbackHandlerType) as IHttpHandler; if (handler is CallbackHandler) ((CallbackHandler)handler).RouteData = requestContext.RouteData; return handler; Again this only works if you actually add a RouteData property to your handler explicitly as I did in my CallbackHandler implementation:/// <summary> /// Optionally store RouteData on this handler /// so we can access it internally /// </summary> public RouteData RouteData {get; set; } and the RouteHandler needs to set it when it creates the handler instance. Once you have the route data in your handler you can access Route Keys and Values and also the RouteHandler. Since my RouteHandler has a custom property for the MethodName to retrieve it from within the handler I can do something like this now to retrieve the MethodName (this example is actually not in the handler but target is an instance pass to the processor): // check for Route Data method name if (target is CallbackHandler) { var routeData = ((CallbackHandler)target).RouteData; if (routeData != null) methodToCall = ((CallbackHandlerRouteHandler)routeData.RouteHandler).MethodName; } When I need to access the dynamic values in the route ( symbol in StockQuote/{symbol}) I can retrieve it easily with the Values collection (RouteData.Values["symbol"]). In my CallbackHandler processing logic I’m basically looking for matching parameter names to Route parameters: // look for parameters in the routeif(routeData != null){ string parmString = routeData.Values[parameter.Name] as string; adjustedParms[parmCounter] = ReflectionUtils.StringToTypedValue(parmString, parameter.ParameterType);} And with that we’ve come full circle. We’ve created a custom RouteHandler() that passes the RouteData to the handler it creates. We’ve registered our routes to use the RouteHandler, and we’ve utilized the route data in our handler. For completeness sake here’s the routine that executes a method call based on the parameters passed in and one of the options is to retrieve the inbound parameters off RouteData (as well as from POST data or QueryString parameters):internal object ExecuteMethod(string method, object target, string[] parameters, CallbackMethodParameterType paramType, ref CallbackMethodAttribute callbackMethodAttribute) { HttpRequest Request = HttpContext.Current.Request; object Result = null; // Stores parsed parameters (from string JSON or QUeryString Values) object[] adjustedParms = null; Type PageType = target.GetType(); MethodInfo MI = PageType.GetMethod(method, BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Public | BindingFlags.NonPublic); if (MI == null) throw new InvalidOperationException("Invalid Server Method."); object[] methods = MI.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(CallbackMethodAttribute), false); if (methods.Length < 1) throw new InvalidOperationException("Server method is not accessible due to missing CallbackMethod attribute"); if (callbackMethodAttribute != null) callbackMethodAttribute = methods[0] as CallbackMethodAttribute; ParameterInfo[] parms = MI.GetParameters(); JSONSerializer serializer = new JSONSerializer(); RouteData routeData = null; if (target is CallbackHandler) routeData = ((CallbackHandler)target).RouteData; int parmCounter = 0; adjustedParms = new object[parms.Length]; foreach (ParameterInfo parameter in parms) { // Retrieve parameters out of QueryString or POST buffer if (parameters == null) { // look for parameters in the route if (routeData != null) { string parmString = routeData.Values[parameter.Name] as string; adjustedParms[parmCounter] = ReflectionUtils.StringToTypedValue(parmString, parameter.ParameterType); } // GET parameter are parsed as plain string values - no JSON encoding else if (HttpContext.Current.Request.HttpMethod == "GET") { // Look up the parameter by name string parmString = Request.QueryString[parameter.Name]; adjustedParms[parmCounter] = ReflectionUtils.StringToTypedValue(parmString, parameter.ParameterType); } // POST parameters are treated as methodParameters that are JSON encoded else if (paramType == CallbackMethodParameterType.Json) //string newVariable = methodParameters.GetValue(parmCounter) as string; adjustedParms[parmCounter] = serializer.Deserialize(Request.Params["parm" + (parmCounter + 1).ToString()], parameter.ParameterType); else adjustedParms[parmCounter] = SerializationUtils.DeSerializeObject( Request.Params["parm" + (parmCounter + 1).ToString()], parameter.ParameterType); } else if (paramType == CallbackMethodParameterType.Json) adjustedParms[parmCounter] = serializer.Deserialize(parameters[parmCounter], parameter.ParameterType); else adjustedParms[parmCounter] = SerializationUtils.DeSerializeObject(parameters[parmCounter], parameter.ParameterType); parmCounter++; } Result = MI.Invoke(target, adjustedParms); return Result; } The code basically uses Reflection to loop through all the parameters available on the method and tries to assign the parameters from RouteData, QueryString or POST variables. The parameters are converted into their appropriate types and then used to eventually make a Reflection based method call. What’s sweet is that the RouteData retrieval is just another option for dealing with the inbound data in this scenario and it adds exactly two lines of code plus the code to retrieve the MethodName I showed previously – a seriously low impact addition that adds a lot of extra value to this endpoint callback processing implementation. Debugging your Routes If you create a lot of routes it’s easy to run into Route conflicts where multiple routes have the same path and overlap with each other. This can be difficult to debug especially if you are using automatically generated routes like the routes created by CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes. Luckily there’s a tool that can help you out with this nicely. Phill Haack created a RouteDebugging tool you can download and add to your project. The easiest way to do this is to grab and add this to your project is to use NuGet (Add Library Package from your Project’s Reference Nodes): which adds a RouteDebug assembly to your project. Once installed you can easily debug your routes with this simple line of code which needs to be installed at application startup:protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { CallbackHandlerRouteHandler.RegisterRoutes<StockService>(RouteTable.Routes); // Debug your routes RouteDebug.RouteDebugger.RewriteRoutesForTesting(RouteTable.Routes); } Any routed URL then displays something like this: The screen shows you your current route data and all the routes that are mapped along with a flag that displays which route was actually matched. This is useful – if you have any overlap of routes you will be able to see which routes are triggered – the first one in the sequence wins. This tool has saved my ass on a few occasions – and with NuGet now it’s easy to add it to your project in a few seconds and then remove it when you’re done. Routing Around Custom routing seems slightly complicated on first blush due to its disconnected components of RouteHandler, route registration and mapping of custom handlers. But once you understand the relationship between a RouteHandler, the RouteData and how to pass it to a handler, utilizing of Routing becomes a lot easier as you can easily pass context from the registration to the RouteHandler and through to the HttpHandler. The most important thing to understand when building custom routing solutions is to figure out how to map URLs in such a way that the handler can figure out all the pieces it needs to process the request. This can be via URL routing parameters and as I did in my example by passing additional context information as part of the RouteHandler instance that provides the proper execution context. In my case this ‘context’ was the method name, but it could be an actual static value like an enum identifying an operation or category in an application. Basically user supplied data comes in through the url and static application internal data can be passed via RouteHandler property values. Routing can make your application URLs easier to read by non-techie types regardless of whether you’re building Service type or REST applications, or full on Web interfaces. Routing in ASP.NET 4.0 makes it possible to create just about any extensionless URLs you can dream up and custom RouteHanmdler References Sample ProjectIncludes the sample CallbackHandler service discussed here along with compiled versionsof the Westwind.Web and Westwind.Utilities assemblies. (requires .NET 4.0/VS 2010) West Wind Web Toolkit includes full implementation of CallbackHandler and the Routing Handler West Wind Web Toolkit Source CodeContains the full source code to the Westwind.Web and Westwind.Utilities assemblies usedin these samples. Includes the source described in the post.(Latest build in the Subversion Repository) CallbackHandler Source(Relevant code to this article tree in Westwind.Web assembly) JSONView FireFoxPluginA simple FireFox Plugin to easily view JSON data natively in FireFox.For IE you can use a registry hack to display JSON as raw text.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in ASP.NET AJAX HTTP

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vmware network installation problem

- by shantanu

After installation from vmware_bunddle it shows network device error during configuration(First run). Log File: 2012-04-03T20:01:24.881+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Log for VMware Workstation pid=5766 version=8.0.2 build=build-591240 option=Release 2012-04-03T20:01:24.881+06:00| vthread-3| I120: The process is 64-bit. 2012-04-03T20:01:24.881+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Host codepage=UTF-8 encoding=UTF-8 2012-04-03T20:01:24.881+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Host is Linux 3.2.0-19-generic Ubuntu precise (development branch) 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Msg_Reset: 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: [msg.dictionary.load.openFailed] Cannot open file "/usr/lib/vmware/settings": No such file or directory. 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: ---------------------------------------- 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: PREF Optional preferences file not found at /usr/lib/vmware/settings. Using default values. 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Msg_Reset: 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: [msg.dictionary.load.openFailed] Cannot open file "/root/.vmware/config": No such file or directory. 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: ---------------------------------------- 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: PREF Optional preferences file not found at /root/.vmware/config. Using default values. 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Msg_Reset: 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: [msg.dictionary.load.openFailed] Cannot open file "/root/.vmware/preferences": No such file or directory. 2012-04-03T20:01:24.880+06:00| vthread-3| I120: ---------------------------------------- 2012-04-03T20:01:24.881+06:00| vthread-3| I120: PREF Failed to load user preferences. 2012-04-03T20:01:24.881+06:00| vthread-3| W110: Logging to /tmp/vmware-root/modconfig-5766.log 2012-04-03T20:01:25.200+06:00| vthread-3| I120: modconf query interface initialized 2012-04-03T20:01:25.201+06:00| vthread-3| I120: modconf library initialized 2012-04-03T20:01:25.269+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:25.278+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/preferred/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:01:25.278+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed to find /lib/modules/preferred/build/include/linux/version.h 2012-04-03T20:01:25.278+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed version test: /lib/modules/preferred/build/include/linux/version.h not found. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.278+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:01:25.284+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:25.306+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:25.355+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.355+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:01:25.362+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:25.383+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:25.434+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.502+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.507+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.511+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.516+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.521+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.561+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.566+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.571+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.576+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.581+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.586+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/preferred/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:01:25.586+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed to find /lib/modules/preferred/build/include/linux/version.h 2012-04-03T20:01:25.586+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed version test: /lib/modules/preferred/build/include/linux/version.h not found. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.586+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:01:25.593+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:25.614+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:25.663+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.740+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.747+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.752+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.757+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.762+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.767+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/preferred/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:01:25.767+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed to find /lib/modules/preferred/build/include/linux/version.h 2012-04-03T20:01:25.767+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed version test: /lib/modules/preferred/build/include/linux/version.h not found. 2012-04-03T20:01:25.767+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:01:25.772+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:25.792+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:25.843+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:01:26.838+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:26.848+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:26.853+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:26.858+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:26.863+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:28.460+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:28.460+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:01:28.466+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:28.488+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:28.542+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:01:28.542+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmmon. 2012-04-03T20:01:28.553+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmmon module. 2012-04-03T20:01:28.615+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:36.499+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Installing module vmmon from /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon.o to /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc. 2012-04-03T20:01:36.507+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Registering file: /usr/lib/vmware-installer/2.0/vmware-installer --register-file vmware-vmx regular /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc/vmmon.ko 2012-04-03T20:01:58.314+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:01:58.315+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:01:58.336+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:58.379+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:01:58.431+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:01:58.431+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmnet. 2012-04-03T20:01:58.431+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmnet module. 2012-04-03T20:01:58.541+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmnet-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:05.973+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed to compile module vmnet! 2012-04-03T20:02:05.984+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:02:05.984+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:02:05.990+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:06.015+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:06.067+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:02:06.067+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmblock. 2012-04-03T20:02:06.067+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmblock module. 2012-04-03T20:02:06.141+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmblock-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:13.531+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Installing module vmblock from /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmblock.o to /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc. 2012-04-03T20:02:13.532+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Registering file: /usr/lib/vmware-installer/2.0/vmware-installer --register-file vmware-vmx regular /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc/vmblock.ko 2012-04-03T20:02:19.090+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:02:19.090+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:02:19.097+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:19.117+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:19.173+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:02:19.173+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmci. 2012-04-03T20:02:19.174+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmci module. 2012-04-03T20:02:19.284+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmci-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:28.525+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Installing module vmci from /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmci.o to /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc. 2012-04-03T20:02:28.526+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Registering file: /usr/lib/vmware-installer/2.0/vmware-installer --register-file vmware-vmx regular /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc/vmci.ko 2012-04-03T20:02:31.760+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:02:31.760+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:02:31.766+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:31.786+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:31.838+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:02:31.838+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmci. 2012-04-03T20:02:31.839+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmci module. 2012-04-03T20:02:31.864+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmci-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:33.684+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vsock. 2012-04-03T20:02:33.685+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vsock module. 2012-04-03T20:02:33.809+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vsock-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:02:41.050+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Installing module vsock from /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vsock.o to /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc. 2012-04-03T20:02:41.051+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Registering file: /usr/lib/vmware-installer/2.0/vmware-installer --register-file vmware-vmx regular /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc/vsock.ko 2012-04-03T20:03:02.757+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.762+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.767+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.771+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.776+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.782+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/preferred/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:03:02.782+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed to find /lib/modules/preferred/build/include/linux/version.h 2012-04-03T20:03:02.782+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed version test: /lib/modules/preferred/build/include/linux/version.h not found. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.782+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:03:02.790+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:02.814+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:02.865+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.958+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.968+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.973+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.978+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:02.983+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:04.372+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:04.372+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:03:04.378+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:04.399+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:04.452+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:03:04.452+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmmon. 2012-04-03T20:03:04.452+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmmon module. 2012-04-03T20:03:04.486+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:05.976+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Installing module vmmon from /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmmon.o to /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc. 2012-04-03T20:03:05.977+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Registering file: /usr/lib/vmware-installer/2.0/vmware-installer --register-file vmware-vmx regular /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc/vmmon.ko 2012-04-03T20:03:09.056+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:09.057+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:03:09.065+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:09.090+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:09.142+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:03:09.142+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmnet. 2012-04-03T20:03:09.142+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmnet module. 2012-04-03T20:03:09.169+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmnet-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:12.072+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Failed to compile module vmnet! 2012-04-03T20:03:12.090+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:12.090+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:03:12.098+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:12.121+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:12.179+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:03:12.179+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmblock. 2012-04-03T20:03:12.179+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmblock module. 2012-04-03T20:03:12.205+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmblock-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:15.340+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Installing module vmblock from /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmblock.o to /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc. 2012-04-03T20:03:15.341+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Registering file: /usr/lib/vmware-installer/2.0/vmware-installer --register-file vmware-vmx regular /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc/vmblock.ko 2012-04-03T20:03:18.451+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:18.451+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:03:18.457+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:18.480+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:18.531+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:03:18.531+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmci. 2012-04-03T20:03:18.531+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmci module. 2012-04-03T20:03:18.569+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmci-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:19.787+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Installing module vmci from /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmci.o to /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc. 2012-04-03T20:03:19.789+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Registering file: /usr/lib/vmware-installer/2.0/vmware-installer --register-file vmware-vmx regular /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc/vmci.ko 2012-04-03T20:03:22.933+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Trying to find a suitable PBM set for kernel 3.2.0-19-generic. 2012-04-03T20:03:22.933+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Validating path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic 2012-04-03T20:03:22.939+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:22.959+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Your GCC version: 4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:23.009+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Header path /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include for kernel release 3.2.0-19-generic is valid. 2012-04-03T20:03:23.009+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vmci. 2012-04-03T20:03:23.009+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vmci module. 2012-04-03T20:03:23.034+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vmci-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:24.227+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module vsock. 2012-04-03T20:03:24.227+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Extracting the sources of the vsock module. 2012-04-03T20:03:24.254+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Building module with command: /usr/bin/make -j -C /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vsock-only auto-build SUPPORT_SMP=1 HEADER_DIR=/lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/build/include CC=/usr/bin/gcc GREP=/usr/bin/make IS_GCC_3=no VMCCVER=4.6 2012-04-03T20:03:26.125+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Installing module vsock from /tmp/vmware-root/modules/vsock.o to /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc. 2012-04-03T20:03:26.126+06:00| vthread-3| I120: Registering file: /usr/lib/vmware-installer/2.0/vmware-installer --register-file vmware-vmx regular /lib/modules/3.2.0-19-generic/misc/vsock.ko My System details: cpu : AMD APU dual core E450 ram: 2GB ubuntu: 12.04 (64 bit) I have downloaded Latest vmware version. Thanks in advance

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Toorcon 15 (2013)

- by danx

The Toorcon gang (senior staff): h1kari (founder), nfiltr8, and Geo Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Making Attacks Go Backwards Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) Toorcon 15 is the 15th annual security conference held in San Diego. I've attended about a third of them and blogged about previous conferences I attended here starting in 2003. As always, I've only summarized the talks I attended and interested me enough to write about them. Be aware that I may have misrepresented the speaker's remarks and that they are not my remarks or opinion, or those of my employer, so don't quote me or them. Those seeking further details may contact the speakers directly or use The Google. For some talks, I have a URL for further information. A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Andrew Furtak and Oleksandr Bazhaniuk Yuri Bulygin, Oleksandr ("Alex") Bazhaniuk, and (not present) Andrew Furtak Yuri and Alex talked about UEFI and Bootkits and bypassing MS Windows 8 Secure Boot, with vendor recommendations. They previously gave this talk at the BlackHat 2013 conference. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Overview UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is interface between hardware and OS. UEFI is processor and architecture independent. Malware can replace bootloader (bootx64.efi, bootmgfw.efi). Once replaced can modify kernel. Trivial to replace bootloader. Today many legacy bootkits—UEFI replaces them most of them. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot verifies everything you load, either through signatures or hashes. UEFI firmware relies on secure update (with signed update). You would think Secure Boot would rely on ROM (such as used for phones0, but you can't do that for PCs—PCs use writable memory with signatures DXE core verifies the UEFI boat loader(s) OS Loader (winload.efi, winresume.efi) verifies the OS kernel A chain of trust is established with a root key (Platform Key, PK), which is a cert belonging to the platform vendor. Key Exchange Keys (KEKs) verify an "authorized" database (db), and "forbidden" database (dbx). X.509 certs with SHA-1/SHA-256 hashes. Keys are stored in non-volatile (NV) flash-based NVRAM. Boot Services (BS) allow adding/deleting keys (can't be accessed once OS starts—which uses Run-Time (RT)). Root cert uses RSA-2048 public keys and PKCS#7 format signatures. SecureBoot — enable disable image signature checks SetupMode — update keys, self-signed keys, and secure boot variables CustomMode — allows updating keys Secure Boot policy settings are: always execute, never execute, allow execute on security violation, defer execute on security violation, deny execute on security violation, query user on security violation Attacking MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Secure Boot does NOT protect from physical access. Can disable from console. Each BIOS vendor implements Secure Boot differently. There are several platform and BIOS vendors. It becomes a "zoo" of implementations—which can be taken advantage of. Secure Boot is secure only when all vendors implement it correctly. Allow only UEFI firmware signed updates protect UEFI firmware from direct modification in flash memory protect FW update components program SPI controller securely protect secure boot policy settings in nvram protect runtime api disable compatibility support module which allows unsigned legacy Can corrupt the Platform Key (PK) EFI root certificate variable in SPI flash. If PK is not found, FW enters setup mode wich secure boot turned off. Can also exploit TPM in a similar manner. One is not supposed to be able to directly modify the PK in SPI flash from the OS though. But they found a bug that they can exploit from User Mode (undisclosed) and demoed the exploit. It loaded and ran their own bootkit. The exploit requires a reboot. Multiple vendors are vulnerable. They will disclose this exploit to vendors in the future. Recommendations: allow only signed updates protect UEFI fw in ROM protect EFI variable store in ROM Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Yoel Gluck and Angelo Prado Angelo Prado and Yoel Gluck, Salesforce.com CRIME is software that performs a "compression oracle attack." This is possible because the SSL protocol doesn't hide length, and because SSL compresses the header. CRIME requests with every possible character and measures the ciphertext length. Look for the plaintext which compresses the most and looks for the cookie one byte-at-a-time. SSL Compression uses LZ77 to reduce redundancy. Huffman coding replaces common byte sequences with shorter codes. US CERT thinks the SSL compression problem is fixed, but it isn't. They convinced CERT that it wasn't fixed and they issued a CVE. BREACH, breachattrack.com BREACH exploits the SSL response body (Accept-Encoding response, Content-Encoding). It takes advantage of the fact that the response is not compressed. BREACH uses gzip and needs fairly "stable" pages that are static for ~30 seconds. It needs attacker-supplied content (say from a web form or added to a URL parameter). BREACH listens to a session's requests and responses, then inserts extra requests and responses. Eventually, BREACH guesses a session's secret key. Can use compression to guess contents one byte at-a-time. For example, "Supersecret SupersecreX" (a wrong guess) compresses 10 bytes, and "Supersecret Supersecret" (a correct guess) compresses 11 bytes, so it can find each character by guessing every character. To start the guess, BREACH needs at least three known initial characters in the response sequence. Compression length then "leaks" information. Some roadblocks include no winners (all guesses wrong) or too many winners (multiple possibilities that compress the same). The solutions include: lookahead (guess 2 or 3 characters at-a-time instead of 1 character). Expensive rollback to last known conflict check compression ratio can brute-force first 3 "bootstrap" characters, if needed (expensive) block ciphers hide exact plain text length. Solution is to align response in advance to block size Mitigations length: use variable padding secrets: dynamic CSRF tokens per request secret: change over time separate secret to input-less servlets Future work eiter understand DEFLATE/GZIP HTTPS extensions Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Ryan Huber Ryan Huber, Risk I/O Ryan first discussed various ways to do a denial of service (DoS) attack against web services. One usual method is to find a slow web page and do several wgets. Or download large files. Apache is not well suited at handling a large number of connections, but one can put something in front of it Can use Apache alternatives, such as nginx How to identify malicious hosts short, sudden web requests user-agent is obvious (curl, python) same url requested repeatedly no web page referer (not normal) hidden links. hide a link and see if a bot gets it restricted access if not your geo IP (unless the website is global) missing common headers in request regular timing first seen IP at beginning of attack count requests per hosts (usually a very large number) Use of captcha can mitigate attacks, but you'll lose a lot of genuine users. Bouncer, goo.gl/c2vyEc and www.github.com/rawdigits/Bouncer Bouncer is software written by Ryan in netflow. Bouncer has a small, unobtrusive footprint and detects DoS attempts. It closes blacklisted sockets immediately (not nice about it, no proper close connection). Aggregator collects requests and controls your web proxies. Need NTP on the front end web servers for clean data for use by bouncer. Bouncer is also useful for a popularity storm ("Slashdotting") and scraper storms. Future features: gzip collection data, documentation, consumer library, multitask, logging destroyed connections. Takeaways: DoS mitigation is easier with a complete picture Bouncer designed to make it easier to detect and defend DoS—not a complete cure Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman, Adobe ASSET, blogs.adobe.com/asset/ Peleus and Karthik talked about response to mass-customized exploits. Attackers behave much like a business. "Mass customization" refers to concept discussed in the book Future Perfect by Stan Davis of Harvard Business School. Mass customization is differentiating a product for an individual customer, but at a mass production price. For example, the same individual with a debit card receives basically the same customized ATM experience around the world. Or designing your own PC from commodity parts. Exploit kits are another example of mass customization. The kits support multiple browsers and plugins, allows new modules. Exploit kits are cheap and customizable. Organized gangs use exploit kits. A group at Berkeley looked at 77,000 malicious websites (Grier et al., "Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service", 2012). They found 10,000 distinct binaries among them, but derived from only a dozen or so exploit kits. Characteristics of Mass Malware: potent, resilient, relatively low cost Technical characteristics: multiple OS, multipe payloads, multiple scenarios, multiple languages, obfuscation Response time for 0-day exploits has gone down from ~40 days 5 years ago to about ~10 days now. So the drive with malware is towards mass customized exploits, to avoid detection There's plenty of evicence that exploit development has Project Manager bureaucracy. They infer from the malware edicts to: support all versions of reader support all versions of windows support all versions of flash support all browsers write large complex, difficult to main code (8750 lines of JavaScript for example Exploits have "loose coupling" of multipe versions of software (adobe), OS, and browser. This allows specific attacks against specific versions of multiple pieces of software. Also allows exploits of more obscure software/OS/browsers and obscure versions. Gave examples of exploits that exploited 2, 3, 6, or 14 separate bugs. However, these complete exploits are more likely to be buggy or fragile in themselves and easier to defeat. Future research includes normalizing malware and Javascript. Conclusion: The coming trend is that mass-malware with mass zero-day attacks will result in mass customization of attacks. x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Richard Wartell Richard Wartell The attack vector we are addressing here is: First some malware causes a buffer overflow. The malware has no program access, but input access and buffer overflow code onto stack Later the stack became non-executable. The workaround malware used was to write a bogus return address to the stack jumping to malware Later came ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to randomize memory layout and make addresses non-deterministic. The workaround malware used was to jump t existing code segments in the program that can be used in bad ways "RoP" is Return-oriented Programming attacks. RoP attacks use your own code and write return address on stack to (existing) expoitable code found in program ("gadgets"). Pinkie Pie was paid $60K last year for a RoP attack. One solution is using anti-RoP compilers that compile source code with NO return instructions. ASLR does not randomize address space, just "gadgets". IPR/ILR ("Instruction Location Randomization") randomizes each instruction with a virtual machine. Richard's goal was to randomize a binary with no source code access. He created "STIR" (Self-Transofrming Instruction Relocation). STIR disassembles binary and operates on "basic blocks" of code. The STIR disassembler is conservative in what to disassemble. Each basic block is moved to a random location in memory. Next, STIR writes new code sections with copies of "basic blocks" of code in randomized locations. The old code is copied and rewritten with jumps to new code. the original code sections in the file is marked non-executible. STIR has better entropy than ASLR in location of code. Makes brute force attacks much harder. STIR runs on MS Windows (PEM) and Linux (ELF). It eliminated 99.96% or more "gadgets" (i.e., moved the address). Overhead usually 5-10% on MS Windows, about 1.5-4% on Linux (but some code actually runs faster!). The unique thing about STIR is it requires no source access and the modified binary fully works! Current work is to rewrite code to enforce security policies. For example, don't create a *.{exe,msi,bat} file. Or don't connect to the network after reading from the disk. Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Collin Greene Collin Greene, Facebook Collin talked about Facebook's bug bounty program. Background at FB: FB has good security frameworks, such as security teams, external audits, and cc'ing on diffs. But there's lots of "deep, dark, forgotten" parts of legacy FB code. Collin gave several examples of bountied bugs. Some bounty submissions were on software purchased from a third-party (but bounty claimers don't know and don't care). We use security questions, as does everyone else, but they are basically insecure (often easily discoverable). Collin didn't expect many bugs from the bounty program, but they ended getting 20+ good bugs in first 24 hours and good submissions continue to come in. Bug bounties bring people in with different perspectives, and are paid only for success. Bug bounty is a better use of a fixed amount of time and money versus just code review or static code analysis. The Bounty program started July 2011 and paid out $1.5 million to date. 14% of the submissions have been high priority problems that needed to be fixed immediately. The best bugs come from a small % of submitters (as with everything else)—the top paid submitters are paid 6 figures a year. Spammers like to backstab competitors. The youngest sumitter was 13. Some submitters have been hired. Bug bounties also allows to see bugs that were missed by tools or reviews, allowing improvement in the process. Bug bounties might not work for traditional software companies where the product has release cycle or is not on Internet. Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Anna Shubina Anna Shubina, Dartmouth Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (I missed the start of her talk because another track went overtime. But I have the DVD of the talk, so I'll expand later) IPsec leaves fingerprints. Using netcat, one can easily visually distinguish various crypto chaining modes just from packet timing on a chart (example, DES-CBC versus AES-CBC) One can tell a lot about VPNs just from ping roundtrips (such as what router is used) Delayed packets are not informative about a network, especially if far away from the network More needed to explore about how TCP works in real life with respect to timing Making Attacks Go Backwards Fuzzynop FuzzyNop, Mandiant This talk is not about threat attribution (finding who), product solutions, politics, or sales pitches. But who are making these malware threats? It's not a single person or group—they have diverse skill levels. There's a lot of fat-fingered fumblers out there. Always look for low-hanging fruit first: "hiding" malware in the temp, recycle, or root directories creation of unnamed scheduled tasks obvious names of files and syscalls ("ClearEventLog") uncleared event logs. Clearing event log in itself, and time of clearing, is a red flag and good first clue to look for on a suspect system Reverse engineering is hard. Disassembler use takes practice and skill. A popular tool is IDA Pro, but it takes multiple interactive iterations to get a clean disassembly. Key loggers are used a lot in targeted attacks. They are typically custom code or built in a backdoor. A big tip-off is that non-printable characters need to be printed out (such as "[Ctrl]" "[RightShift]") or time stamp printf strings. Look for these in files. Presence is not proof they are used. Absence is not proof they are not used. Java exploits. Can parse jar file with idxparser.py and decomile Java file. Java typially used to target tech companies. Backdoors are the main persistence mechanism (provided externally) for malware. Also malware typically needs command and control. Application of Artificial Intelligence in Ad-Hoc Static Code Analysis John Ashaman John Ashaman, Security Innovation Initially John tried to analyze open source files with open source static analysis tools, but these showed thousands of false positives. Also tried using grep, but tis fails to find anything even mildly complex. So next John decided to write his own tool. His approach was to first generate a call graph then analyze the graph. However, the problem is that making a call graph is really hard. For example, one problem is "evil" coding techniques, such as passing function pointer. First the tool generated an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with the nodes created from method declarations and edges created from method use. Then the tool generated a control flow graph with the goal to find a path through the AST (a maze) from source to sink. The algorithm is to look at adjacent nodes to see if any are "scary" (a vulnerability), using heuristics for search order. The tool, called "Scat" (Static Code Analysis Tool), currently looks for C# vulnerabilities and some simple PHP. Later, he plans to add more PHP, then JSP and Java. For more information see his posts in Security Innovation blog and NRefactory on GitHub. Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Sometimes in emailing or posting TCP/IP packets to analyze problems, you may want to mask the IP address. But to do this correctly, you need to mask the checksum too, or you'll leak information about the IP. Problem reports found in stackoverflow.com, sans.org, and pastebin.org are usually not masked, but a few companies do care. If only the IP is masked, the IP may be guessed from checksum (that is, it leaks data). Other parts of packet may leak more data about the IP. TCP and IP checksums both refer to the same data, so can get more bits of information out of using both checksums than just using one checksum. Also, one can usually determine the OS from the TTL field and ports in a packet header. If we get hundreds of possible results (16x each masked nibble that is unknown), one can do other things to narrow the results, such as look at packet contents for domain or geo information. With hundreds of results, can import as CSV format into a spreadsheet. Can corelate with geo data and see where each possibility is located. Eric then demoed a real email report with a masked IP packet attached. Was able to find the exact IP address, given the geo and university of the sender. Point is if you're going to mask a packet, do it right. Eric wouldn't usually bother, but do it correctly if at all, to not create a false impression of security. Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Sergey Bratus Sergey Bratus, Dartmouth College (and Julian Bangert and Rebecca Shapiro, not present) "Reflections on Trusting Trust" refers to Ken Thompson's classic 1984 paper. "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself." There's invisible links in the chain-of-trust, such as "well-installed microcode bugs" or in the compiler, and other planted bugs. Thompson showed how a compiler can introduce and propagate bugs in unmodified source. But suppose if there's no bugs and you trust the author, can you trust the code? Hell No! There's too many factors—it's Babylonian in nature. Why not? Well, Input is not well-defined/recognized (code's assumptions about "checked" input will be violated (bug/vunerabiliy). For example, HTML is recursive, but Regex checking is not recursive. Input well-formed but so complex there's no telling what it does For example, ELF file parsing is complex and has multiple ways of parsing. Input is seen differently by different pieces of program or toolchain Any Input is a program input executes on input handlers (drives state changes & transitions) only a well-defined execution model can be trusted (regex/DFA, PDA, CFG) Input handler either is a "recognizer" for the inputs as a well-defined language (see langsec.org) or it's a "virtual machine" for inputs to drive into pwn-age ELF ABI (UNIX/Linux executible file format) case study. Problems can arise from these steps (without planting bugs): compiler linker loader ld.so/rtld relocator DWARF (debugger info) exceptions The problem is you can't really automatically analyze code (it's the "halting problem" and undecidable). Only solution is to freeze code and sign it. But you can't freeze everything! Can't freeze ASLR or loading—must have tables and metadata. Any sufficiently complex input data is the same as VM byte code Example, ELF relocation entries + dynamic symbols == a Turing Complete Machine (TM). @bxsays created a Turing machine in Linux from relocation data (not code) in an ELF file. For more information, see Rebecca "bx" Shapiro's presentation from last year's Toorcon, "Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata" @bxsays did same thing with Mach-O bytecode Or a DWARF exception handling data .eh_frame + glibc == Turning Machine X86 MMU (IDT, GDT, TSS): used address translation to create a Turning Machine. Page handler reads and writes (on page fault) memory. Uses a page table, which can be used as Turning Machine byte code. Example on Github using this TM that will fly a glider across the screen Next Sergey talked about "Parser Differentials". That having one input format, but two parsers, will create confusion and opportunity for exploitation. For example, CSRs are parsed during creation by cert requestor and again by another parser at the CA. Another example is ELF—several parsers in OS tool chain, which are all different. Can have two different Program Headers (PHDRs) because ld.so parses multiple PHDRs. The second PHDR can completely transform the executable. This is described in paper in the first issue of International Journal of PoC. Conclusions trusting computers not only about bugs! Bugs are part of a problem, but no by far all of it complex data formats means bugs no "chain of trust" in Babylon! (that is, with parser differentials) we need to squeeze complexity out of data until data stops being "code equivalent" Further information See and langsec.org. USENIX WOOT 2013 (Workshop on Offensive Technologies) for "weird machines" papers and videos.

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Setting up a local AI server - easy with Solaris 11

- by Stefan Hinker

Many things are new in Solaris 11, Autoinstall is one of them. If, like me, you've known Jumpstart for the last 2 centuries or so, you'll have to start from scratch. Well, almost, as the concepts are similar, and it's not all that difficult. Just new. I wanted to have an AI server that I could use for demo purposes, on the train if need be. That answers the question of hardware requirements: portable. But let's start at the beginning. First, you need an OS image, of course. In the new world of Solaris 11, it is now called a repository. The original can be downloaded from the Solaris 11 page at Oracle. What you want is the "Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Repository Image", which comes in two parts that can be combined using cat. MD5 checksums for these (and all other downloads from that page) are available closer to the top of the page. With that, building the repository is quick and simple: # zfs create -o mountpoint=/export/repo rpool/ai/repo # zfs create rpool/ai/repo/s11 # mount -o ro -F hsfs /tmp/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso /mnt # rsync -aP /mnt/repo /export/repo/s11 # umount /mnt # pkgrepo rebuild -s /export/repo/sol11/repo # zfs snapshot rpool/ai/repo/sol11@fcs # pkgrepo info -s /export/repo/sol11/repo PUBLISHER PACKAGES STATUS UPDATED solaris 4292 online 2012-03-12T20:47:15.378639Z That's all there's to it. Let's make a snapshot, just to be on the safe side. You never know when one will come in handy. To use this repository, you could just add it as a file-based publisher: # pkg set-publisher -g file:///export/repo/sol11/repo solaris In case I'd want to access this repository through a (virtual) network, i'll now quickly activate the repository-service: # svccfg -s application/pkg/server \ setprop pkg/inst_root=/export/repo/sol11/repo # svccfg -s application/pkg/server setprop pkg/readonly=true # svcadm refresh application/pkg/server # svcadm enable application/pkg/server That's all you need - now point your browser to http://localhost/ to view your beautiful repository-server. Step 1 is done. All of this, by the way, is nicely documented in the README file that's contained in the repository image. Of course, we already have updates to the original release. You can find them in MOS in the Oracle Solaris 11 Support Repository Updates (SRU) Index. You can simply add these to your existing repository or create separate repositories for each SRU. The individual SRUs are self-sufficient and incremental - SRU4 includes all updates from SRU2 and SRU3. With ZFS, you can also get both: A full repository with all updates and at the same time incremental ones up to each of the updates: # mount -o ro -F hsfs /tmp/sol-11-1111-sru4-05-incr-repo.iso /mnt # pkgrecv -s /mnt/repo -d /export/repo/sol11/repo '*' # umount /mnt # pkgrepo rebuild -s /export/repo/sol11/repo # zfs snapshot rpool/ai/repo/sol11@sru4 # zfs set snapdir=visible rpool/ai/repo/sol11 # svcadm restart svc:/application/pkg/server:default The normal repository is now updated to SRU4. Thanks to the ZFS snapshots, there is also a valid repository of Solaris 11 11/11 without the update located at /export/repo/sol11/.zfs/snapshot/fcs . If you like, you can also create another repository service for each update, running on a separate port. But now lets continue with the AI server. Just a little bit of reading in the dokumentation makes it clear that we will need to run a DHCP server for this. Since I already have one active (for my SunRay installation) and since it's a good idea to have these kinds of services separate anyway, I decided to create this in a Zone. So, let's create one first: # zfs create -o mountpoint=/export/install rpool/ai/install # zfs create -o mountpoint=/zones rpool/zones # zonecfg -z ai-server zonecfg:ai-server> create create: Using system default template 'SYSdefault' zonecfg:ai-server> set zonepath=/zones/ai-server zonecfg:ai-server> add dataset zonecfg:ai-server:dataset> set name=rpool/ai/install zonecfg:ai-server:dataset> set alias=install zonecfg:ai-server:dataset> end zonecfg:ai-server> commit zonecfg:ai-server> exit # zoneadm -z ai-server install # zoneadm -z ai-server boot ; zlogin -C ai-server Give it a hostname and IP address at first boot, and there's the Zone. For a publisher for Solaris packages, it will be bound to the "System Publisher" from the Global Zone. The /export/install filesystem, of course, is intended to be used by the AI server. Let's configure it now: #zlogin ai-server root@ai-server:~# pkg install install/installadm root@ai-server:~# installadm create-service -n x86-fcs -a i386 \ -s pkg://solaris/install-image/[email protected],5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2.1482 \ -d /export/install/fcs -i 192.168.2.20 -c 3 With that, the core AI server is already done. What happened here? First, I installed the AI server software. IPS makes that nice and easy. If necessary, it'll also pull in the required DHCP-Server and anything else that might be missing. Watch out for that DHCP server software. In Solaris 11, there are two different versions. There's the one you might know from Solaris 10 and earlier, and then there's a new one from ISC. The latter is the one we need for AI. The SMF service names of both are very similar. The "old" one is "svc:/network/dhcp-server:default". The ISC-server comes with several SMF-services. We at least need "svc:/network/dhcp/server:ipv4". The command "installadm create-service" creates the installation-service. It's called "x86-fcs", serves the "i386" architecture and gets its boot image from the repository of the system publisher, using version 5.11,5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2.1482, which is Solaris 11 11/11. (The option "-a i386" in this example is optional, since the installserver itself runs on a x86 machine.) The boot-environment for clients is created in /export/install/fcs and the DHCP-server is configured for 3 IP-addresses starting at 192.168.2.20. This configuration is stored in a very human readable form in /etc/inet/dhcpd4.conf. An AI-service for SPARC systems could be created in the very same way, using "-a sparc" as the architecture option. Now we would be ready to register and install the first client. It would be installed with the default "solaris-large-server" using the publisher "http://pkg.oracle.com/solaris/release" and would query it's configuration interactively at first boot. This makes it very clear that an AI-server is really only a boot-server. The true source of packets to install can be different. Since I don't like these defaults for my demo setup, I did some extra config work for my clients. The configuration of a client is controlled by manifests and profiles. The manifest controls which packets are installed and how the filesystems are layed out. In that, it's very much like the old "rules.ok" file in Jumpstart. Profiles contain additional configuration like root passwords, primary user account, IP addresses, keyboard layout etc. Hence, profiles are very similar to the old sysid.cfg file. The easiest way to get your hands on a manifest is to ask the AI server we just created to give us it's default one. Then modify that to our liking and give it back to the installserver to use: root@ai-server:~# mkdir -p /export/install/configs/manifests root@ai-server:~# cd /export/install/configs/manifests root@ai-server:~# installadm export -n x86-fcs -m orig_default \ -o orig_default.xml root@ai-server:~# cp orig_default.xml s11-fcs.small.local.xml root@ai-server:~# vi s11-fcs.small.local.xml root@ai-server:~# more s11-fcs.small.local.xml <!DOCTYPE auto_install SYSTEM "file:///usr/share/install/ai.dtd.1"> <auto_install> <ai_instance name="S11 Small fcs local"> <target> <logical> <zpool name="rpool" is_root="true"> <filesystem name="export" mountpoint="/export"/> <filesystem name="export/home"/> <be name="solaris"/> </zpool> </logical> </target> <software type="IPS"> <destination> <image>  <facet set="false">facet.locale.*</facet> <facet set="true">facet.locale.de</facet> <facet set="true">facet.locale.de_DE</facet> <facet set="true">facet.locale.en</facet> <facet set="true">facet.locale.en_US</facet> </image> </destination> <source> <publisher name="solaris"> <origin name="http://192.168.2.12/"/> </publisher> </source>  <software_data action="install"> <name>pkg:/[email protected],5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2.0</name> <name>pkg:/group/system/solaris-small-server</name> </software_data> </software> </ai_instance> </auto_install> root@ai-server:~# installadm create-manifest -n x86-fcs -d \ -f ./s11-fcs.small.local.xml root@ai-server:~# installadm list -m -n x86-fcs Manifest Status Criteria -------- ------ -------- S11 Small fcs local Default None orig_default Inactive None The major points in this new manifest are: Install "solaris-small-server" Install a few locales less than the default. I'm not that fluid in French or Japanese... Use my own package service as publisher, running on IP address 192.168.2.12 Install the initial release of Solaris 11: pkg:/[email protected],5.11-0.175.0.0.0.2.0 Using a similar approach, I'll create a default profile interactively and use it as a template for a few customized building blocks, each defining a part of the overall system configuration. The modular approach makes it easy to configure numerous clients later on: root@ai-server:~# mkdir -p /export/install/configs/profiles root@ai-server:~# cd /export/install/configs/profiles root@ai-server:~# sysconfig create-profile -o default.xml root@ai-server:~# cp default.xml general.xml; cp default.xml mars.xml root@ai-server:~# cp default.xml user.xml root@ai-server:~# vi general.xml mars.xml user.xml root@ai-server:~# more general.xml mars.xml user.xml :::::::::::::: general.xml :::::::::::::: <!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM "/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1"> <service_bundle type="profile" name="sysconfig"> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/timezone"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="timezone"> <propval type="astring" name="localtime" value="Europe/Berlin"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/environment"> <instance enabled="true" name="init"> <property_group type="application" name="environment"> <propval type="astring" name="LANG" value="C"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/keymap"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="system" name="keymap"> <propval type="astring" name="layout" value="US-English"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/console-login"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="ttymon"> <propval type="astring" name="terminal_type" value="vt100"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="network/physical"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="netcfg"> <propval type="astring" name="active_ncp" value="DefaultFixed"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/name-service/switch"> <property_group type="application" name="config"> <propval type="astring" name="default" value="files"/> <propval type="astring" name="host" value="files dns"/> <propval type="astring" name="printer" value="user files"/> </property_group> <instance enabled="true" name="default"/> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/name-service/cache"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"/> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="network/dns/client"> <property_group type="application" name="config"> <property type="net_address" name="nameserver"> <net_address_list> <value_node value="192.168.2.1"/> </net_address_list> </property> </property_group> <instance enabled="true" name="default"/> </service> </service_bundle> :::::::::::::: mars.xml :::::::::::::: <!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM "/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1"> <service_bundle type="profile" name="sysconfig"> <service version="1" type="service" name="network/install"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="install_ipv4_interface"> <propval type="astring" name="address_type" value="static"/> <propval type="net_address_v4" name="static_address" value="192.168.2.100/24"/> <propval type="astring" name="name" value="net0/v4"/> <propval type="net_address_v4" name="default_route" value="192.168.2.1"/> </property_group> <property_group type="application" name="install_ipv6_interface"> <propval type="astring" name="stateful" value="yes"/> <propval type="astring" name="stateless" value="yes"/> <propval type="astring" name="address_type" value="addrconf"/> <propval type="astring" name="name" value="net0/v6"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/identity"> <instance enabled="true" name="node"> <property_group type="application" name="config"> <propval type="astring" name="nodename" value="mars"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> </service_bundle> :::::::::::::: user.xml :::::::::::::: <!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM "/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1"> <service_bundle type="profile" name="sysconfig"> <service version="1" type="service" name="system/config-user"> <instance enabled="true" name="default"> <property_group type="application" name="root_account"> <propval type="astring" name="login" value="root"/> <propval type="astring" name="password" value="noIWillNotTellYouMyPasswordNotEvenEncrypted"/> <propval type="astring" name="type" value="role"/> </property_group> <property_group type="application" name="user_account"> <propval type="astring" name="login" value="stefan"/> <propval type="astring" name="password" value="noIWillNotTellYouMyPasswordNotEvenEncrypted"/> <propval type="astring" name="type" value="normal"/> <propval type="astring" name="description" value="Stefan Hinker"/> <propval type="count" name="uid" value="12345"/> <propval type="count" name="gid" value="10"/> <propval type="astring" name="shell" value="/usr/bin/bash"/> <propval type="astring" name="roles" value="root"/> <propval type="astring" name="profiles" value="System Administrator"/> <propval type="astring" name="sudoers" value="ALL=(ALL) ALL"/> </property_group> </instance> </service> </service_bundle> root@ai-server:~# installadm create-profile -n x86-fcs -f general.xml root@ai-server:~# installadm create-profile -n x86-fcs -f user.xml root@ai-server:~# installadm create-profile -n x86-fcs -f mars.xml \ -c ipv4=192.168.2.100 root@ai-server:~# installadm list -p Service Name Profile ------------ ------- x86-fcs general.xml mars.xml user.xml root@ai-server:~# installadm list -n x86-fcs -p Profile Criteria ------- -------- general.xml None mars.xml ipv4 = 192.168.2.100 user.xml None Here's the idea behind these files: "general.xml" contains settings valid for all my clients. Stuff like DNS servers, for example, which in my case will always be the same. "user.xml" only contains user definitions. That is, a root password and a primary user.Both of these profiles will be valid for all clients (for now). "mars.xml" defines network settings for an individual client. This profile is associated with an IP-Address. For this to work, I'll have to tweak the DHCP-settings in the next step: root@ai-server:~# installadm create-client -e 08:00:27:AA:3D:B1 -n x86-fcs root@ai-server:~# vi /etc/inet/dhcpd4.conf root@ai-server:~# tail -5 /etc/inet/dhcpd4.conf host 080027AA3DB1 { hardware ethernet 08:00:27:AA:3D:B1; fixed-address 192.168.2.100; filename "01080027AA3DB1"; } This completes the client preparations. I manually added the IP-Address for mars to /etc/inet/dhcpd4.conf. This is needed for the "mars.xml" profile. Disabling arbitrary DHCP-replies will shut up this DHCP server, making my life in a shared environment a lot more peaceful ;-)Now, I of course want this installation to be completely hands-off. For this to work, I'll need to modify the grub boot menu for this client slightly. You can find it in /etc/netboot. "installadm create-client" will create a new boot menu for every client, identified by the client's MAC address. The template for this can be found in a subdirectory with the name of the install service, /etc/netboot/x86-fcs in our case. If you don't want to change this manually for every client, modify that template to your liking instead. root@ai-server:~# cd /etc/netboot root@ai-server:~# cp menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1 menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1.org root@ai-server:~# vi menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1 root@ai-server:~# diff menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1 menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1.org 1,2c1,2 < default=1 < timeout=10 --- > default=0 > timeout=30 root@ai-server:~# more menu.lst.01080027AA3DB1 default=1 timeout=10 min_mem64=0 title Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Text Installer and command line kernel$ /x86-fcs/platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B install_media=htt p://$serverIP:5555//export/install/fcs,install_service=x86-fcs,install_svc_addre ss=$serverIP:5555 module$ /x86-fcs/platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive title Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Automated Install kernel$ /x86-fcs/platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B install=true,inst all_media=http://$serverIP:5555//export/install/fcs,install_service=x86-fcs,inst all_svc_address=$serverIP:5555,livemode=text module$ /x86-fcs/platform/i86pc/$ISADIR/boot_archive Now just boot the client off the network using PXE-boot. For my demo purposes, that's a client from VirtualBox, of course. That's all there's to it. And despite the fact that this blog entry is a little longer - that wasn't that hard now, was it?

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What Every Developer Should Know About MSI Components

- by Alois Kraus

Hopefully nothing. But if you have to do more than simple XCopy deployment and you need to support updates, upgrades and perhaps side by side scenarios there is no way around MSI. You can create Msi files with a Visual Studio Setup project which is severely limited or you can use the Windows Installer Toolset. I cannot talk about WIX with my German colleagues because WIX has a very special meaning. It is funny to always use the long name when I talk about deployment possibilities. Alternatively you can buy commercial tools which help you to author Msi files but I am not sure how good they are. Given enough pain with existing solutions you can also learn the MSI Apis and create your own packaging solution. If I were you I would use either a commercial visual tool when you do easy deployments or use the free Windows Installer Toolset. Once you know the WIX schema you can create well formed wix xml files easily with any editor. Then you can “compile” from the wxs files your Msi package. Recently I had the “pleasure” to get my hands dirty with C++ (again) and the MSI technology. Installation is a complex topic but after several month of digging into arcane MSI issues I can safely say that there should exist an easier way to install and update files as today. I am not alone with this statement as John Robbins (creator of the cool tool Paraffin) states: “.. It's a brittle and scary API in Windows …”. To help other people struggling with installation issues I present you the advice I (and others) found useful and what will happen if you ignore this advice. What is a MSI file? A MSI file is basically a database with tables which reference each other to control how your un/installation should work. The basic idea is that you declare via these tables what you want to install and MSI controls the how to get your stuff onto or off your machine. Your “stuff” consists usually of files, registry keys, shortcuts and environment variables. Therefore the most important tables are File, Registry, Environment and Shortcut table which define what will be un/installed. The key to master MSI is that every resource (file, registry key ,…) is associated with a MSI component. The actual payload consists of compressed files in the CAB format which can either be embedded into the MSI file or reside beside the MSI file or in a subdirectory below it. To examine MSI files you need Orca a free MSI editor provided by MS. There is also another free editor called Super Orca which does support diffs between MSI and it does not lock the MSI files. But since Orca comes with a shell extension I tend to use only Orca because it is so easy to right click on a MSI file and open it with this tool. How Do I Install It? Double click it. This does work for fresh installations as well as major upgrades. Updates need to be installed via the command line via msiexec /i <msi> REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vomus This tells the installer to reinstall all already installed features (new features will NOT be installed). The reinstallmode letters do force an overwrite of the old cached package in the %WINDIR%\Installer folder. All files, shortcuts and registry keys are redeployed if they are missing or need to be replaced with a newer version. When things did go really wrong and you want to overwrite everything unconditionally use REINSTALLMODE=vamus. How To Enable MSI Logs? You can download a MSI from Microsoft which installs some registry keys to enable full MSI logging. The log files can be found in your %TEMP% folder and are called MSIxxxx.log. Alternatively you can add to your msiexec command line the option msiexec …. /l*vx <LogFileName> Personally I find it rather strange that * does not mean full logging. To really get all logs I need to add v and x which is documented in the msiexec help but I still find this behavior unintuitive. What are MSI components? The whole MSI logic is bound to the concept of MSI components. Nearly every msi table has a Component column which binds an installable resource to a component. Below are the screenshots of the FeatureComponents and Component table of an example MSI. The Feature table defines basically the feature hierarchy. To find out what belongs to a feature you need to look at the FeatureComponents table where for each feature the components are listed which will be installed when a feature is installed. The MSI components are defined in the Component table. This table has as first column the component name and as second column the component id which is a GUID. All resources you want to install belong to a MSI component. Therefore nearly all MSI tables have a Component_ column which contains the component name. If you look e.g. a the File table you see that every file belongs to a component which is true for all other tables which install resources. The component table is the glue between all other tables which contain the resources you want to install. So far so easy. Why is MSI then so complex? Most MSI problems arise from the fact that you did violate a MSI component rule in one or the other way. When you install a feature the reference count for all components belonging to this feature will increase by one. If your component is installed by more than one feature it will get a higher refcount. When you uninstall a feature its refcount will drop by one. Interesting things happen if the component reference count reaches zero: Then all associated resources will be deleted. That looks like a reasonable thing and it is. What it makes complex are the strange component rules you have to follow. Below are some important component rules from the Tao of the Windows Installer … Rule 16: Follow Component Rules Components are a very important part of the Installer technology. They are the means whereby the Installer manages the resources that make up your application. The SDK provides the following guidelines for creating components in your package: Never create two components that install a resource under the same name and target location. If a resource must be duplicated in multiple components, change its name or target location in each component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Two components must not have the same key path file. This is a consequence of the previous rule. The key path value points to a particular file or folder belonging to the component that the installer uses to detect the component. If two components had the same key path file, the installer would be unable to distinguish which component is installed. Two components however may share a key path folder. Do not create a version of a component that is incompatible with all previous versions of the component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Do not create components containing resources that will need to be installed into more than one directory on the user’s system. The installer installs all of the resources in a component into the same directory. It is not possible to install some resources into subdirectories. Do not include more than one COM server per component. If a component contains a COM server, this must be the key path for the component. Do not specify more than one file per component as a target for the Start menu or a Desktop shortcut. … And these rules do not even talk about component ids, update packages and upgrades which you need to understand as well. Lets suppose you install two MSIs (MSI1 and MSI2) which have the same ComponentId but different component names. Both do install the same file. What will happen when you uninstall MSI2? Hm the file should stay there. But the component names are different. Yes and yes. But MSI uses not use the component name as key for the refcount. Instead the ComponentId column of the Component table which contains a GUID is used as identifier under which the refcount is stored. The components Comp1 and Comp2 are identical from the MSI perspective. After the installation of both MSIs the Component with the Id {100000….} has a refcount of two. After uninstallation of one MSI there is still a refcount of one which drops to zero just as expected when we uninstall the last msi. Then the file which was the same for both MSIs is deleted. You should remember that MSI keeps a refcount across MSIs for components with the same component id. MSI does manage components not the resources you did install. The resources associated with a component are then and only then deleted when the refcount of the component reaches zero. The dependencies between features, components and resources can be described as relations. m,k are numbers >= 1, n can be 0. Inside a MSI the following relations are valid Feature 1 –> n Components Component 1 –> m Features Component 1 –> k Resources These relations express that one feature can install several components and features can share components between them. Every (meaningful) component will install at least one resource which means that its name (primary key to stay in database speak) does occur in some other table in the Component column as value which installs some resource. Lets make it clear with an example. We want to install with the feature MainFeature some files a registry key and a shortcut. We can then create components Comp1..3 which are referenced by the resources defined in the corresponding tables. Feature Component Registry File Shortcuts MainFeature Comp1 RegistryKey1 MainFeature Comp2 File.txt MainFeature Comp3 File2.txt Shortcut to File2.txt It is illegal that the same resource is part of more than one component since this would break the refcount mechanism. Lets illustrate this: Feature ComponentId Resource Reference Count Feature1 {1000-…} File1.txt 1 Feature2 {2000-….} File1.txt 1 The installation part works well but what happens when you uninstall Feature2? Component {20000…} gets a refcount of zero where MSI deletes all resources belonging to this component. In this case File1.txt will be deleted. But Feature1 still has another component {10000…} with a refcount of one which means that the file was deleted too early. You just have ruined your installation. To fix it you then need to click on the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs to let MSI reinstall any missing registry keys, files or shortcuts. The vigilant reader might has noticed that there is more in the Component table. Beside its name and GUID it has also an installation directory, attributes and a KeyPath. The KeyPath is a reference to a file or registry key which is used to detect if the component is already installed. This becomes important when you repair or uninstall a component. To find out if the component is already installed MSI checks if the registry key or file referenced by the KeyPath property does exist. When it does not exist it assumes that it was either already uninstalled (can lead to problems during uninstall) or that it is already installed and all is fine. Why is this detail so important? Lets put all files into one component. The KeyPath should be then one of the files of your component to check if it was installed or not. When your installation becomes corrupt because a file was deleted you cannot repair it with the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs because MSI checks the component integrity via the Resource referenced by its KeyPath. As long as you did not delete the KeyPath file MSI thinks all resources with your component are installed and never executes any repair action. You get even more trouble when you try to remove files during an upgrade (you cannot remove files during an update) from your super component which contains all files. The only way out and therefore best practice is to assign for every resource you want to install an extra component. This ensures painless updatability and repairs and you have much less effort to remove specific files during an upgrade. In effect you get this best practice relation Feature 1 –> n Components Component 1 –> 1 Resources MSI Component Rules Rule 1 – One component per resource Every resource you want to install (file, registry key, value, environment value, shortcut, directory, …) must get its own component which does never change between versions as long as the install location is the same. Penalty If you add more than one resources to a component you will break the repair capability of MSI because the KeyPath is used to check if the component needs repair. MSI ComponentId Files MSI 1.0 {1000} File1-5 MSI 2.0 {2000} File2-5 You want to remove File1 in version 2.0 of your MSI. Since you want to keep the other files you create a new component and add them there. MSI will delete all files if the component refcount of {1000} drops to zero. The files you want to keep are added to the new component {2000}. Ok that does work if your upgrade does uninstall the old MSI first. This will cause the refcount of all previously installed components to reach zero which means that all files present in version 1.0 are deleted. But there is a faster way to perform your upgrade by first installing your new MSI and then remove the old one. If you choose this upgrade path then you will loose File1-5 after your upgrade and not only File1 as intended by your new component design. Rule 2 – Only add, never remove resources from a component If you did follow rule 1 you will not need Rule 2. You can add in a patch more resources to one component. That is ok. But you can never remove anything from it. There are tricky ways around that but I do not want to encourage bad component design. Penalty Lets assume you have 2 MSI files which install under the same component one file MSI1 MSI2 {1000} - ComponentId {1000} – ComponentId File1.txt File2.txt When you install and uninstall both MSIs you will end up with an installation where either File1 or File2 will be left. Why? It seems that MSI does not store the resources associated with each component in its internal database. Instead Windows will simply query the MSI that is currently uninstalled for all resources belonging to this component. Since it will find only one file and not two it will only uninstall one file. That is the main reason why you never can remove resources from a component! Rule 3 Never Remove A Component From an Update MSI. This is the same as if you change the GUID of a component by accident for your new update package. The resulting update package will not contain all components from the previously installed package. Penalty When you remove a component from a feature MSI will set the feature state during update to Advertised and log a warning message into its log file when you did enable MSI logging. SELMGR: ComponentId '{2DCEA1BA-3E27-E222-484C-D0D66AEA4F62}' is registered to feature 'xxxxxxx, but is not present in the Component table. Removal of components from a feature is not supported! MSI (c) (24:44) [07:53:13:436]: SELMGR: Removal of a component from a feature is not supported Advertised means that MSI treats all components of this feature as not installed. As a consequence during uninstall nothing will be removed since it is not installed! This is not only bad because uninstall does no longer work but this feature will also not get the required patches. All other features which have followed component versioning rules for update packages will be updated but the one faulty feature will not. This results in very hard to find bugs why an update was only partially successful. Things got better with Windows Installer 4.5 but you cannot rely on that nobody will use an older installer. It is a good idea to add to your update msiexec call MSIENFORCEUPGRADECOMPONENTRULES=1 which will abort the installation if you did violate this rule.

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Extending NerdDinner: Adding Geolocated Flair

- by Jon Galloway

NerdDinner is a website with the audacious goal of “Organizing the world’s nerds and helping them eat in packs.” Because nerds aren’t likely to socialize with others unless a website tells them to do it. Scott Hanselman showed off a lot of the cool features we’ve added to NerdDinner lately during his popular talk at MIX10, Beyond File | New Company: From Cheesy Sample to Social Platform. Did you miss it? Go ahead and watch it, I’ll wait. One of the features we wanted to add was flair. You know about flair, right? It’s a way to let folks who like your site show it off in their own site. For example, here’s my StackOverflow flair: Great! So how could we add some of this flair stuff to NerdDinner? What do we want to show? If we’re going to encourage our users to give up a bit of their beautiful website to show off a bit of ours, we need to think about what they’ll want to show. For instance, my StackOverflow flair is all about me, not StackOverflow. So how will this apply to NerdDinner? Since NerdDinner is all about organizing local dinners, in order for the flair to be useful it needs to make sense for the person viewing the web page. If someone visits from Egypt visits my blog, they should see information about NerdDinners in Egypt. That’s geolocation – localizing site content based on where the browser’s sitting, and it makes sense for flair as well as entire websites. So we’ll set up a simple little callout that prompts them to host a dinner in their area: Hopefully our flair works and there is a dinner near your viewers, so they’ll see another view which lists upcoming dinners near them: The Geolocation Part Generally website geolocation is done by mapping the requestor’s IP address to a geographic area. It’s not an exact science, but I’ve always found it to be pretty accurate. There are (at least) three ways to handle it: You pay somebody like MaxMind for a database (with regular updates) that sits on your server, and you use their API to do lookups. I used this on a pretty big project a few years ago and it worked well. You use HTML 5 Geolocation API or Google Gears or some other browser based solution. I think those are cool (I use Google Gears a lot), but they’re both in flux right now and I don’t think either has a wide enough of an install base yet to rely on them. You might want to, but I’ve heard you do all kinds of crazy stuff, and sometimes it gets you in trouble. I don’t mean talk out of line, but we all laugh behind your back a bit. But, hey, it’s up to you. It’s your flair or whatever. There are some free webservices out there that will take an IP address and give you location information. Easy, and works for everyone. That’s what we’re doing. I looked at a few different services and settled on IPInfoDB. It’s free, has a great API, and even returns JSON, which is handy for Javascript use. The IP query is pretty simple. We hit a URL like this: http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip=74.125.45.100&timezone=false … and we get an XML response back like this… <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Response> <Ip>74.125.45.100</Ip> <Status>OK</Status> <CountryCode>US</CountryCode> <CountryName>United States</CountryName> <RegionCode>06</RegionCode> <RegionName>California</RegionName> <City>Mountain View</City> <ZipPostalCode>94043</ZipPostalCode> <Latitude>37.4192</Latitude> <Longitude>-122.057</Longitude> </Response> So we’ll build some data transfer classes to hold the location information, like this: public class LocationInfo { public string Country { get; set; } public string RegionName { get; set; } public string City { get; set; } public string ZipPostalCode { get; set; } public LatLong Position { get; set; } } public class LatLong { public float Lat { get; set; } public float Long { get; set; } } And now hitting the service is pretty simple: public static LocationInfo HostIpToPlaceName(string ip) { string url = "http://ipinfodb.com/ip_query.php?ip={0}&timezone=false"; url = String.Format(url, ip); var result = XDocument.Load(url); var location = (from x in result.Descendants("Response") select new LocationInfo { City = (string)x.Element("City"), RegionName = (string)x.Element("RegionName"), Country = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), ZipPostalCode = (string)x.Element("CountryName"), Position = new LatLong { Lat = (float)x.Element("Latitude"), Long = (float)x.Element("Longitude") } }).First(); return location; } Getting The User’s IP Okay, but first we need the end user’s IP, and you’d think it would be as simple as reading the value from HttpContext: HttpContext.Current.Request.UserHostAddress But you’d be wrong. Sorry. UserHostAddress just wraps HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"], but that doesn’t get you the IP for users behind a proxy. That’s in another header, “HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR". So you can either hit a wrapper and then check a header, or just check two headers. I went for uniformity: string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; We’re almost set to wrap this up, but first let’s talk about our views. Yes, views, because we’ll have two. Selecting the View We wanted to make it easy for people to include the flair in their sites, so we looked around at how other people were doing this. The StackOverflow folks have a pretty good flair system, which allows you to include the flair in your site as either an IFRAME reference or a Javascript include. We’ll do both. We have a ServicesController to handle use of the site information outside of NerdDinner.com, so this fits in pretty well there. We’ll be displaying the same information for both HTML and Javascript flair, so we can use one Flair controller action which will return a different view depending on the requested format. Here’s our general flow for our controller action: Get the user’s IP Translate it to a location Grab the top three upcoming dinners that are near that location Select the view based on the format (defaulted to “html”) Return a FlairViewModel which contains the list of dinners and the location information public ActionResult Flair(string format = "html") { string SourceIP = string.IsNullOrEmpty( Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]) ? Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"] : Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR"]; var location = GeolocationService.HostIpToPlaceName(SourceIP); var dinners = dinnerRepository. FindByLocation(location.Position.Lat, location.Position.Long). OrderByDescending(p => p.EventDate).Take(3); // Select the view we'll return. // Using a switch because we'll add in JSON and other formats later. string view; switch (format.ToLower()) { case "javascript": view = "JavascriptFlair"; break; default: view = "Flair"; break; } return View( view, new FlairViewModel { Dinners = dinners.ToList(), LocationName = string.IsNullOrEmpty(location.City) ? "you" : String.Format("{0}, {1}", location.City, location.RegionName) } ); } Note: I’m not in love with the logic here, but it seems like overkill to extract the switch statement away when we’ll probably just have two or three views. What do you think? The HTML View The HTML version of the view is pretty simple – the only thing of any real interest here is the use of an extension method to truncate strings that are would cause the titles to wrap. public static string Truncate(this string s, int maxLength) { if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(s) || maxLength <= 0) return string.Empty; else if (s.Length > maxLength) return s.Substring(0, maxLength) + "..."; else return s; } So here’s how the HTML view ends up looking: <%@ Page Title="" Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<FlairViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>Nerd Dinner</title> <link href="/Content/Flair.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /> </head> <body> <div id="nd-wrapper"> <h2 id="nd-header">NerdDinner.com</h2> <div id="nd-outer"> <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> <div id="nd-bummer"> Looks like there's no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target="_blank" href="http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create">host one</a>?</div> <% } else { %> <h3> Dinners Near You</h3> <ul> <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> <li> <%: Html.ActionLink(String.Format("{0} with {1} on {2}", item.Title.Truncate(20), item.HostedBy, item.EventDate.ToShortDateString()), "Details", "Dinners", new { id = item.DinnerID }, new { target = "_blank" })%></li> <% } %> </ul> <% } %> <div id="nd-footer"> More dinners and fun at <a target="_blank" href="http://nrddnr.com">http://nrddnr.com</a></div> </div> </div> </body> </html> You’d include this in a page using an IFRAME, like this: <IFRAME height=230 marginHeight=0 src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair" frameBorder=0 width=160 marginWidth=0 scrolling=no></IFRAME> The Javascript view The Javascript flair is written so you can include it in a webpage with a simple script include, like this: <script type="text/javascript" src="http://nerddinner.com/services/flair?format=javascript"></script> The goal of this view is very similar to the HTML embed view, with a few exceptions: We’re creating a script element and adding it to the head of the document, which will then document.write out the content. Note that you have to consider if your users will actually have a <head> element in their documents, but for website flair use cases I think that’s a safe bet. Since the content is being added to the existing page rather than shown in an IFRAME, all links need to be absolute. That means we can’t use Html.ActionLink, since it generates relative routes. We need to escape everything since it’s being written out as strings. We need to set the content type to application/x-javascript. The easiest way to do that is to use the <%@ Page ContentType%> directive. <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<NerdDinner.Models.FlairViewModel>" ContentType="application/x-javascript" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Helpers" %> <%@ Import Namespace="NerdDinner.Models" %> document.write('<script>var link = document.createElement(\"link\");link.href = \"http://nerddinner.com/content/Flair.css\";link.rel = \"stylesheet\";link.type = \"text/css\";var head = document.getElementsByTagName(\"head\")[0];head.appendChild(link);</script>'); document.write('<div id=\"nd-wrapper\"><h2 id=\"nd-header\">NerdDinner.com</h2><div id=\"nd-outer\">'); <% if (Model.Dinners.Count == 0) { %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-bummer\">Looks like there\'s no Nerd Dinners near <%:Model.LocationName %> in the near future. Why not <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://www.nerddinner.com/Dinners/Create\">host one</a>?</div>'); <% } else { %> document.write('<h3> Dinners Near You</h3><ul>'); <% foreach (var item in Model.Dinners) { %> document.write('<li><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com/<%: item.DinnerID %>\"><%: item.Title.Truncate(20) %> with <%: item.HostedBy %> on <%: item.EventDate.ToShortDateString() %></a></li>'); <% } %> document.write('</ul>'); <% } %> document.write('<div id=\"nd-footer\"> More dinners and fun at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http://nrddnr.com\">http://nrddnr.com</a></div></div></div>'); Getting IP’s for Testing There are a variety of online services that will translate a location to an IP, which were handy for testing these out. I found http://www.itouchmap.com/latlong.html to be most useful, but I’m open to suggestions if you know of something better. Next steps I think the next step here is to minimize load – you know, in case people start actually using this flair. There are two places to think about – the NerdDinner.com servers, and the services we’re using for Geolocation. I usually think about caching as a first attack on server load, but that’s less helpful here since every user will have a different IP. Instead, I’d look at taking advantage of Asynchronous Controller Actions, a cool new feature in ASP.NET MVC 2. Async Actions let you call a potentially long-running webservice without tying up a thread on the server while waiting for the response. There’s some good info on that in the MSDN documentation, and Dino Esposito wrote a great article on Asynchronous ASP.NET Pages in the April 2010 issue of MSDN Magazine. But let’s think of the children, shall we? What about ipinfodb.com? Well, they don’t have specific daily limits, but they do throttle you if you put a lot of traffic on them. From their FAQ: We do not have a specific daily limit but queries that are at a rate faster than 2 per second will be put in "queue". If you stay below 2 queries/second everything will be normal. If you go over the limit, you will still get an answer for all queries but they will be slowed down to about 1 per second. This should not affect most users but for high volume websites, you can either use our IP database on your server or we can whitelist your IP for 5$/month (simply use the donate form and leave a comment with your server IP). Good programming practices such as not querying our API for all page views (you can store the data in a cookie or a database) will also help not reaching the limit. So the first step there is to save the geolocalization information in a time-limited cookie, which will allow us to look up the local dinners immediately without having to hit the geolocation service.

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An Honest look at SharePoint Web Services

- by juanlarios

INTRODUCTION If you are a SharePoint developer you know that there are two basic ways to develop against SharePoint. 1) The object Model 2) Web services. SharePoint object model has the advantage of being quite rich. Anything you can do through the SharePoint UI as an administrator or end user, you can do through the object model. In fact everything that is done through the UI is done through the object model behind the scenes. The major disadvantage to getting at SharePoint this way is that the code needs to run on the server. This means that all web parts, event receivers, features, etc… all of this is code that is deployed to the server. The second way to get to SharePoint is through the built in web services. There are many articles on how to manipulate web services, how to authenticate to them and interact with them. The basic idea is that a remote application or process can contact SharePoint through a web service. Lots has been written about how great these web services are. This article is written to document the limitations, some of the issues and frustrations with working with SharePoint built in web services. Ultimately, for the tasks I was given to , SharePoint built in web services did not suffice. My evaluation of SharePoint built in services was compared against creating my own WCF Services to do what I needed. The current project I'm working on right now involved several "integration points". A remote application, installed on a separate server was to contact SharePoint and perform an task or operation. So I decided to start up Visual Studio and built a DLL and basically have 2 layers of logic. An integration layer and a data layer. A good friend of mine pointed me to SOLID principles and referred me to some videos and tutorials about it. I decided to implement the methodology (although a lot of the principles are common sense and I already incorporated in my coding practices). I was to deliver this dll to the application team and they would simply call the methods exposed by this dll and voila! it would do some task or operation in SharePoint. SOLUTION My integration layer implemented an interface that defined some of the basic integration tasks that I was to put together. My data layer was about the same, it implemented an interface with some of the tasks that I was going to develop. This gave me the opportunity to develop different data layers, ultimately different ways to get at SharePoint if I needed to. This is a classic SOLID principle. In this case it proved to be quite helpful because I wrote one data layer completely implementing SharePoint built in Web Services and another implementing my own WCF Service that I wrote. I should mention there is another layer underneath the data layer. In referencing SharePoint or WCF services in my visual studio project I created a class for every web service call. So for example, if I used List.asx. I created a class called "DocumentRetreival" this class would do the grunt work to connect to the correct URL, It would perform the basic operation of contacting the service and so on. If I used a view.asmx, I implemented a class called "ViewRetrieval" with the same idea as the last class but it would now interact with all he operations in view.asmx. This gave my data layer the ability to perform multiple calls without really worrying about some of the grunt work each class performs. This again, is a classic SOLID principle. So, in order to compare them side by side we can look at both data layers and with is involved in each. Lets take a look at the "Create Project" task or operation. The integration point is described as , "dll is to provide a way to create a project in SharePoint". Projects , in this case are basically document libraries. I am to implement a way in which a remote application can create a document library in SharePoint. Easy enough right? Use the list.asmx Web service in SharePoint. So here we go! Lets take a look at the code. I added the List.asmx web service reference to my project and this is the class that contacts it: class DocumentRetrieval { private ListsSoapClient _service; d private bool _impersonation; public DocumentRetrieval(bool impersonation, string endpt) { _service = new ListsSoapClient(); this.SetEndPoint(string.Format("{0}/{1}", endpt, ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["List"])); _impersonation = impersonation; if (_impersonation) { _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.Password = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["password"]; _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.ClientCredential.UserName = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["username"]; _service.ClientCredentials.Windows.AllowedImpersonationLevel = System.Security.Principal.TokenImpersonationLevel.Impersonation; } private void SetEndPoint(string p) { _service.Endpoint.Address = new EndpointAddress(p); } /// <summary> /// Creates a document library with specific name and templateID /// </summary> /// <param name="listName">New list name</param> /// <param name="templateID">Template ID</param> /// <returns></returns> public XmlElement CreateLibrary(string listName, int templateID, ref ExceptionContract exContract) { XmlDocument sample = new XmlDocument(); XmlElement viewCol = sample.CreateElement("Empty"); try { _service.Open(); viewCol = _service.AddList(listName, "", templateID); } catch (Exception ex) { exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/CreateLibrary", ex.GetType(), "Connection Error", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error); }finally { _service.Close(); } return viewCol; } } There was a lot more in this class (that I am not including) because i was reusing the grunt work and making other operations with LIst.asmx, For example, updating content types, changing or configuring lists or document libraries. One of the first things I noticed about working with the built in services is that you are really at the mercy of what is available to you. Before creating a document library (Project) I wanted to expose a IsProjectExisting method. This way the integration or data layer could recognize if a library already exists. Well there is no service call or method available to do that check. So this is what I wrote: public bool DocLibExists(string listName, ref ExceptionContract exContract) { try { var allLists = _service.GetListCollection(); return allLists.ChildNodes.OfType<XmlElement>().ToList().Exists(x => x.Attributes["Title"].Value ==listName); } catch (Exception ex) { exContract = new ExceptionContract("DocumentRetrieval/GetList/GetListWSCall", ex.GetType(), "Unable to Retrieve List Collection", ex.StackTrace, ExceptionContract.ExceptionCode.error); } return false; } This really just gets an XMLElement with all the lists. It was then up to me to sift through the clutter and noise and see if Document library already existed. This took a little bit of getting used to. Now instead of working with code, you are working with XMLElement response format from web service. I wrote a LINQ query to go through and find if the attribute "Title" existed and had a value of the listname then it would return True, if not False. I didn't particularly like working this way. Dealing with XMLElement responses and then having to manipulate it to get at the exact data I was looking for. Once the check for the DocLibExists, was done, I would either create the document library or send back an error indicating the document library already existed. Now lets examine the code that actually creates the document library. It does what you are really after, it creates a document library. Notice how the template ID is really an integer. Every document library template in SharePoint has an ID associated with it. Document libraries, Image Library, Custom List, Project Tasks, etc… they all he a unique integer associated with it. Well, that's great but the client came back to me and gave me some specifics that each "project" or document library, should have. They specified they had 3 types of projects. Each project would have unique views, about 10 views for each project. Each Project specified unique configurations (auditing, versioning, content types, etc…) So what turned out to be a simple implementation of creating a document library as a repository for a project, turned out to be quite involved. The first thing I thought of was to create a template for document library. There are other ways you can do this too. Using the web Service call, you could configure views, versioning, even content types, etc… the only catch is, you have to be working quite extensively with CAML. I am not fond of CAML. I can do it and work with it, I just don't like doing it. It is quite touchy and at times it is quite tough to understand where errors were made with CAML statements. Working with Web Services and CAML proved to be quite annoying. The service call would return a generic error message that did not particularly point me to a CAML statement syntax error, or even a CAML error. I was not sure if it was a security , performance or code based issue. It was quite tough to work with. At times it was difficult to work with because of the way SharePoint handles metadata. There are "Names", "Display Name", and "StaticName" fields. It was quite tough to understand at times, which one to use. So it took a lot of trial and error. There are tools that can help with CAML generation. There is also now intellisense for CAML statements in Visual Studio that might help but ultimately I'm not fond of CAML with Web Services. So I decided on the template. So my plan was to create create a document library, configure it accordingly and then use The Template Builder that comes with the SharePoint SDK. This tool allows you to create site templates, list template etc… It is quite interesting because it does not generate an STP file, it actually generates an xml definition and a feature you can activate and make that template available on a site or site collection. The first issue I experienced with this is that one of the specifications to this template was that the "All Documents" view was to have 2 web parts on it. Well, it turns out that using the template builder , it did not include the web parts as part of the list template definition it generated. It backed up the settings, the views, the content types but not the custom web parts. I still decided to try this even without the web parts on the page. This new template defined a new Document library definition with a unique ID. The problem was that the service call accepts an int but it only has access to the built in library int definitions. Any new ones added or created will not be available to create. So this made it impossible for me to approach the problem this way. I should also mention that one of the nice features about SharePoint is the ability to create list templates, back them up and then create lists based on that template. It can all be done by end user administrators. These templates are quite unique because they are saved as an STP file and not an xml definition. I also went this route and tried to see if there was another service call where I could create a document library based no given template name. Nope! none. After some thinking I decide to implement a WCF service to do this creation for me. I was quite certain that the object model would allow me to create document libraries base on a template in which an ID was required and also templates saved as STP files. Now I don't want to bother with posting the code to contact WCF service because it's self explanatory, but I will post the code that I used to create a list with custom template. public ServiceResult CreateProject(string name, string templateName, string projectId) { string siteurl = SPContext.Current.Site.Url; Guid webguid = SPContext.Current.Web.ID; using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteurl)) { using (SPWeb rootweb = site.RootWeb) { SPListTemplateCollection temps = site.GetCustomListTemplates(rootweb); ProcessWeb(siteurl, webguid, web => Act_CreateProject(web, name, templateName, projectId, temps)); }//SpWeb }//SPSite return _globalResult; } private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) { var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName)); if (temp != null) { try { Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp); SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid]; _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success"); } catch (Exception ex) { _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString()); } } private void ProcessWeb(string siteurl, Guid webguid, Action<SPWeb> action) { using (SPSite sitecollection = new SPSite(siteurl)) { using (SPWeb web = sitecollection.AllWebs[webguid]) { action(web); } } } This code is actually some of the code I implemented for the service. there was a lot more I did on Project Creation which I will cover in my next blog post. I implemented an ACTION method to process the web. This allowed me to properly dispose the SPWEb and SPSite objects and not rewrite this code over and over again. So I implemented a WCF service to create projects for me, this allowed me to do a lot more than just create a document library with a template, it now gave me the flexibility to do just about anything the client wanted at project creation. Once this was implemented , the client came back to me and said, "we reference all our projects with ID's in our application. we want SharePoint to do the same". This has been something I have been doing for a little while now but I do hope that SharePoint 2010 can have more of an answer to this and address it properly. I have been adding metadata to SPWebs through property bag. I believe I have blogged about it before. This time it required metadata added to a document library. No problem!!! I also mentioned these web parts that were to go on the "All Documents" View. I took the opportunity to configure them to the appropriate settings. There were two settings that needed to be set on these web parts. One of them was a Project ID configured in the webpart properties. The following code enhances and replaces the "Act_CreateProject " method above: private void Act_CreateProject(SPWeb targetsite, string name, string templateName, string projectId, SPListTemplateCollection temps) { var temp = temps.Cast<SPListTemplate>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Name.Equals(templateName)); if (temp != null) { SPLimitedWebPartManager wpmgr = null; try { Guid listGuid = targetsite.Lists.Add(name, "", temp); SPList newList = targetsite.Lists[listGuid]; SPFolder rootFolder = newList.RootFolder; rootFolder.Properties.Add(KEY, projectId); rootFolder.Update(); if (rootFolder.ParentWeb != targetsite) rootFolder.ParentWeb.Dispose(); if (!templateName.Contains("Natural")) { SPView alldocumentsview = newList.Views.Cast<SPView>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.Title.Equals(ALLDOCUMENTS)); SPFile alldocfile = targetsite.GetFile(alldocumentsview.ServerRelativeUrl); wpmgr = alldocfile.GetLimitedWebPartManager(PersonalizationScope.Shared); ConfigureWebPart(wpmgr, projectId, CUSTOMWPNAME); alldocfile.Update(); } if (newList.ParentWeb != targetsite) newList.ParentWeb.Dispose(); _globalResult = new ServiceResult(true, "Success", "Success"); } catch (Exception ex) { _globalResult = new ServiceResult(false, (string.IsNullOrEmpty(ex.Message) ? "None" : ex.Message + " " + templateName), ex.StackTrace.ToString()); } finally { if (wpmgr != null) { wpmgr.Web.Dispose(); wpmgr.Dispose(); } } } } private void ConfigureWebPart(SPLimitedWebPartManager mgr, string prjId, string webpartname) { var wp = mgr.WebParts.Cast<System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart>().FirstOrDefault(x => x.DisplayTitle.Equals(webpartname)); if (wp != null) { (wp as ListRelationshipWebPart.ListRelationshipWebPart).ProjectID = prjId; mgr.SaveChanges(wp); } } This Shows you how I was able to set metadata on the document library. It has to be added to the RootFolder of the document library, Unfortunately, the SPList does not have a Property bag that I can add a key\value pair to. It has to be done on the root folder. Now everything in the integration will reference projects by ID's and will not care about names. My, "DocLibExists" will now need to be changed because a web service is not set up to look at property bags. I had to write another method on the Service to do the equivalent but with ID's instead of names. The second thing you will notice about the code is the use of the Webpartmanager. I have seen several examples online, and also read a lot about memory leaks, The above code does not produce memory leaks. The web part manager creates an SPWeb, so just dispose it like I did. CONCLUSION This is a long long post so I will stop here for now, I will continue with more comparisons and limitations in my next post. My conclusion for this example is that Web Services will do the trick if you can suffer through CAML and if you are doing some simple operations. For Everything else, there's WCF! **** fireI apologize for the disorganization of this post, I was on a bus on a 12 hour trip to IOWA while I wrote it, I was half asleep and half awake, hopefully it makes enough sense to someone.

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