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• Tools to Help Post Content On Your WordPress Blog

  - by Matthew Guay

  Now that you’ve got a nice blog, you want to do more with it and start posting content.  Here we look at some tools that will allow you to post directly to your WordPress blog. Writing a new blog post is easy with WordPress as we saw in our previous post about Starting your own WordPress blog.  The web editor gives you a lot of features and even lets you edit your post’s source code if you enjoy hacking HTML.  There are other tools that will allow you to post content, here we look at how you can post with dedicated apps, browser plugins, and even by email. Windows Live Writer Windows Live Writer (part of the Windows Live Essentials Suite) is a great app for posting content to your blog.  This free program for Microsoft lets you post content to a variety of blogging services, including Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, and of course WordPress.  You can write blog posts directly from its Word-like editor, complete with pictures and advanced formatting.  Even if you’re offline, you can still write posts and save them for when you’re online again. For more information about installing Live writer, check out our article on how to Install Windows Live Essentials In Windows 7. Once Live Writer is installed, open it to add your blog.  If you already had Live Writer installed and configured for a blog, you can add your new blog, too.  Just click your blog’s name in the top right corner, and select “Add blog account”. Select “Other blog service” to add your WordPress blog to Writer, and click Next.   Enter your blog’s web address, and your username and password.  Check Remember my password so you don’t have to enter it every time you write something. Writer will analyze your blog and setup your account. During the setup process it may ask to post a temporary post.  This will let you preview blog posts using your blog’s real theme, which is helpful, so click Yes. Finally, add your Blog’s name, and click Finish. You can now use the rich editor to write and add content to a new blog post.   Select the Preview tab to see how your post will look on your blog… Or, if you’re a HTML geek, select the Source tab to edit the code of your blog post. From the bottom of the window, you can choose categories, insert tags, and even schedule the post to publish on a different day.  Live Writer is fully integrated with WordPress; you’re not missing anything by using the desktop editor. If you want to edit a post you’ve already published, click the Open button and select the post.  You can chose and edit any post, including ones you published via the web interface or other editors. Add Multimedia Content to your Posts with Live Writer Back in the Edit tab, you can add pictures, videos and more from the sidebar.  Select what you want to insert. Pictures If you insert a picture, you can add many nice borders and designs to it. Or, you can even add artistic effects from the Effects tab in the sidebar. Photo Gallery If you want to post several pictures, say some of your vacation shots, then inserting a picture gallery may be the best option.  Select Insert Photo Gallery in the sidebar, and then choose the pictures you want in the gallery. Once the gallery is inserted, you can choose from several styles to showcase your pictures. When you post the blog, you will be asked to sign in with your Windows Live ID as the gallery pictures will be stored in the free Skydrive storage service. Your blog readers can see the preview of your pictures directly on your blog, and then can view each individual picture, download them, or see a slideshow online via the link. Video If you want to add a video to your blog post, select Video from the sidebar as above.  You can select a video that’s already online, or you can choose a new video from file and upload it via YouTube directly from Windows Live Writer.   Note that you will have to sign in with your YouTube account to upload videos to YouTube, so if you’re not logged in you’ll be prompted to do so when you click Insert. Geek Tip:  If you ever want to copy your Live Writer settings to another computer, check out our article on how to Backup Your Windows Live Writer Settings. Microsoft Office Word Word 2007 and 2010 also let you post content directly to your blog.  This is especially nice if you’ve already typed up a document and think it would be good on your Blog as well.  Check out our in-depth tutorial on posting blog posts via Word 2007 using Word 2007 as a blogging tool. This works in Word 2010 too, except the Office Orb has been replaced by the new Backstage view.  So, in Word 2010, to start a new blog post, click File \ New then select Blog post.  Proceed as you would in Word 2007 to add your blog settings and post the content you want. Or, if you’ve already written a document and want to post it, select File \ Share (or Save and Send in the final version of Word 2010), and then click Publish as Blog Post.  If you haven’t setup your blog account yet, set it up as shown in the Word 2007 article. Post Via Email Most of us use email daily, and already have our favorite email app or service.  Whether on your desktop or mobile phone, it’s easy to create rich emails and add content.  WordPress lets you generate a unique email address that you can use to easily post content and email to your blog.  Just compose your email with the subject as the title of your post, and send it to this unique address.  Your new post will be up in minutes. To active this feature, click the My Account button in the top menu bar in your WordPress.com account, and select My Blogs. Click the Enable button under Post by Email beside your blog’s name.   Now you’ll have a private email you can use to post to your blog.  Anything you send to this email will be posted as a new post.  If you think your email may be compromised, click Regenerate to get a new publishing email address. Any email program or webapp now is a blog post editor.  Feel free to use rich formatting or insert pictures; it all comes through great.  This is also a great way to post to your blog from your mobile device.  Whether you’re using webmail or a dedicated email client on your phone, you can now blog from anywhere.   Mobile Applications WordPress also offer dedicated applications for blogging directly from your mobile device.  You can write new posts, edit existing ones, and manage comments all from your Smartphone.  Currently they offer apps for iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.  Check them out at the link below. Conclusion Whether you want to write from your browser or email a post to your blog, WordPress is flexible enough to work right along with your preferences.  However you post, you can be sure that it will look professional and be easily accessible with your WordPress blog. Download Windows Live Writer Download WordPress apps for your mobile device Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Quick Tip: Set a Future Date for a Post in WordPressAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogFuture Date a Post in Windows Live WriterHow To Start Your Own Professional Blog with WordPressUsing Word 2007 as a Blogging Tool TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Acronis Online Backup DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows Fun with 47 charts and graphs Tomorrow is Mother’s Day Check the Average Speed of YouTube Videos You’ve Watched OutlookStatView Scans and Displays General Usage Statistics How to Add Exceptions to the Windows Firewall Office 2010 reviewed in depth by Ed Bott

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• Oracle Data Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study

  - by charlie.berger

  There is a complete and detailed Telco Churn case study "How to" Blog Series just posted by Ari Mozes, ODM Dev. Manager.  In it, Ari provides detailed guidance in how to leverage various strengths of Oracle Data Mining including the ability to: mine Star Schemas and join tables and views together to obtain a complete 360 degree view of a customer combine transactional data e.g. call record detail (CDR) data, etc. define complex data transformation, model build and model deploy analytical methodologies inside the Database  His blog is posted in a multi-part series.  Below are some opening excerpts for the first 3 blog entries.  This is an excellent resource for any novice to skilled data miner who wants to gain competitive advantage by mining their data inside the Oracle Database.  Many thanks Ari! Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (1 of 3) One of the strengths of Oracle Data Mining is the ability to mine star schemas with minimal effort.  Star schemas are commonly used in relational databases, and they often contain rich data with interesting patterns.  While dimension tables may contain interesting demographics, fact tables will often contain user behavior, such as phone usage or purchase patterns.  Both of these aspects - demographics and usage patterns - can provide insight into behavior.Churn is a critical problem in the telecommunications industry, and companies go to great lengths to reduce the churn of their customer base.  One case study1 describes a telecommunications scenario involving understanding, and identification of, churn, where the underlying data is present in a star schema.  That case study is a good example for demonstrating just how natural it is for Oracle Data Mining to analyze a star schema, so it will be used as the basis for this series of posts...... Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (2 of 3) This post will follow the transformation steps as described in the case study, but will use Oracle SQL as the means for preparing data.  Please see the previous post for background material, including links to the case study and to scripts that can be used to replicate the stages in these posts.1) Handling missing values for call data recordsThe CDR_T table records the number of phone minutes used by a customer per month and per call type (tariff).  For example, the table may contain one record corresponding to the number of peak (call type) minutes in January for a specific customer, and another record associated with international calls in March for the same customer.  This table is likely to be fairly dense (most type-month combinations for a given customer will be present) due to the coarse level of aggregation, but there may be some missing values.  Missing entries may occur for a number of reasons: the customer made no calls of a particular type in a particular month, the customer switched providers during the timeframe, or perhaps there is a data entry problem.  In the first situation, the correct interpretation of a missing entry would be to assume that the number of minutes for the type-month combination is zero.  In the other situations, it is not appropriate to assume zero, but rather derive some representative value to replace the missing entries.  The referenced case study takes the latter approach.  The data is segmented by customer and call type, and within a given customer-call type combination, an average number of minutes is computed and used as a replacement value.In SQL, we need to generate additional rows for the missing entries and populate those rows with appropriate values.  To generate the missing rows, Oracle's partition outer join feature is a perfect fit.  select cust_id, cdre.tariff, cdre.month, minsfrom cdr_t cdr partition by (cust_id) right outer join     (select distinct tariff, month from cdr_t) cdre     on (cdr.month = cdre.month and cdr.tariff = cdre.tariff);   ....... Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study (3 of 3) Now that the "difficult" work is complete - preparing the data - we can move to building a predictive model to help identify and understand churn.The case study suggests that separate models be built for different customer segments (high, medium, low, and very low value customer groups).  To reduce the data to a single segment, a filter can be applied: create or replace view churn_data_high asselect * from churn_prep where value_band = 'HIGH'; It is simple to take a quick look at the predictive aspects of the data on a univariate basis.  While this does not capture the more complex multi-variate effects as would occur with the full-blown data mining algorithms, it can give a quick feel as to the predictive aspects of the data as well as validate the data preparation steps.  Oracle Data Mining includes a predictive analytics package which enables quick analysis. begin  dbms_predictive_analytics.explain(   'churn_data_high','churn_m6','expl_churn_tab'); end; /select * from expl_churn_tab where rank <= 5 order by rank; ATTRIBUTE_NAME       ATTRIBUTE_SUBNAME EXPLANATORY_VALUE RANK-------------------- ----------------- ----------------- ----------LOS_BAND                                      .069167052          1MINS_PER_TARIFF_MON  PEAK-5                   .034881648          2REV_PER_MON          REV-5                    .034527798          3DROPPED_CALLS                                 .028110322          4MINS_PER_TARIFF_MON  PEAK-4                   .024698149          5From the above results, it is clear that some predictors do contain information to help identify churn (explanatory value > 0).  The strongest uni-variate predictor of churn appears to be the customer's (binned) length of service.  The second strongest churn indicator appears to be the number of peak minutes used in the most recent month.  The subname column contains the interior piece of the DM_NESTED_NUMERICALS column described in the previous post.  By using the object relational approach, many related predictors are included within a single top-level column. .....   NOTE:  These are just EXCERPTS.  Click here to start reading the Oracle Data Mining a Star Schema: Telco Churn Case Study from the beginning.    

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• How to get SQL Railroad Diagrams from MSDN BNF syntax notation.

  - by Phil Factor

  pre {margin-bottom:.0001pt; font-size:8.0pt; font-family:"Courier New"; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; } On SQL Server Books-On-Line, in the Transact-SQL Reference (database Engine), every SQL Statement has its syntax represented in  ‘Backus–Naur Form’ notation (BNF)  syntax. For a programmer in a hurry, this should be ideal because It is the only quick way to understand and appreciate all the permutations of the syntax. It is a great feature once you get your eye in. It isn’t the only way to get the information;  You can, of course, reverse-engineer an understanding of the syntax from the examples, but your understanding won’t be complete, and you’ll have wasted time doing it. BNF is a good start in representing the syntax:  Oracle and SQLite go one step further, and have proper railroad diagrams for their syntax, which is a far more accessible way of doing it. There are three problems with the BNF on MSDN. Firstly, it is isn’t a standard version of  BNF, but an ancient fork from EBNF, inherited from Sybase. Secondly, it is excruciatingly difficult to understand, and thirdly it has a number of syntactic and semantic errors. The page describing DML triggers, for example, currently has the absurd BNF error that makes it state that all statements in the body of the trigger must be separated by commas.  There are a few other detail problems too. Here is the offending syntax for a DML trigger, pasted from MSDN. Trigger on an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement to a table or view (DML Trigger) CREATE TRIGGER [ schema_name . ]trigger_name ON { table | view } [ WITH <dml_trigger_option> [ ,...n ] ] { FOR | AFTER | INSTEAD OF } { [ INSERT ] [ , ] [ UPDATE ] [ , ] [ DELETE ] } [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] AS { sql_statement [ ; ] [ ,...n ] | EXTERNAL NAME <method specifier [ ; ] > }   <dml_trigger_option> ::=     [ ENCRYPTION ]     [ EXECUTE AS Clause ]   <method_specifier> ::=  This should, of course, be /* Trigger on an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement to a table or view (DML Trigger) */ CREATE TRIGGER [ schema_name . ]trigger_name ON { table | view } [ WITH <dml_trigger_option> [ ,...n ] ] { FOR | AFTER | INSTEAD OF } { [ INSERT ] [ , ] [ UPDATE ] [ , ] [ DELETE ] } [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] AS { {sql_statement [ ; ]} [ ...n ] | EXTERNAL NAME <method_specifier> [ ; ] }   <dml_trigger_option> ::=     [ ENCRYPTION ]     [ EXECUTE AS CLAUSE ]   <method_specifier> ::=     assembly_name.class_name.method_name I’d love to tell Microsoft when I spot errors like this so they can correct them but I can’t. Obviously, there is a mechanism on MSDN to get errors corrected by using comments, but that doesn’t work for me (*Error occurred while saving your data.”), and when I report that the comment system doesn’t work to MSDN, I get no reply. I’ve been trying to create railroad diagrams for all the important SQL Server SQL statements, as good as you’d find for Oracle, and have so far published the CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE railroad diagrams based on the BNF. Although I’ve been aware of them, I’ve never realised until recently how many errors there are. Then, Colin Daley created a translator for the SQL Server dialect of  BNF which outputs standard EBNF notation used by the W3C. The example MSDN BNF for the trigger would be rendered as … /* Trigger on an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement to a table or view (DML Trigger) */ create_trigger ::= 'CREATE TRIGGER' ( schema_name '.' ) ? trigger_name 'ON' ( table | view ) ( 'WITH' dml_trigger_option ( ',' dml_trigger_option ) * ) ? ( 'FOR' | 'AFTER' | 'INSTEAD OF' ) ( ( 'INSERT' ) ? ( ',' ) ? ( 'UPDATE' ) ? ( ',' ) ? ( 'DELETE' ) ? ) ( 'NOT FOR REPLICATION' ) ? 'AS' ( ( sql_statement ( ';' ) ? ) + | 'EXTERNAL NAME' method_specifier ( ';' ) ? )   dml_trigger_option ::= ( 'ENCRYPTION' ) ? ( 'EXECUTE AS CLAUSE' ) ?   method_specifier ::= assembly_name '.' class_name '.' method_name Colin’s intention was to allow anyone to paste SQL Server’s BNF notation into his website-based parser, and from this generate classic railroad diagrams via Gunther Rademacher's Railroad Diagram Generator.  Colin's application does this for you: you're not aware that you are moving to a different site.  Because Colin's 'translator' it is a parser, it will pick up syntax errors. Once you’ve fixed the syntax errors, you will get the syntax in the form of a human-readable railroad diagram and, in this form, the semantic mistakes become flamingly obvious. Gunter’s Railroad Diagram Generator is brilliant. To be able, after correcting the MSDN dialect of BNF, to generate a standard EBNF, and from thence to create railroad diagrams for SQL Server’s syntax that are as good as Oracle’s, is a great boon, and many thanks to Colin for the idea. Here is the result of the W3C EBNF from Colin’s application then being run through the Railroad diagram generator. create_trigger: dml_trigger_option: method_specifier:   Now that’s much better, you’ll agree. This is pretty easy to understand, and at this point any error is immediately obvious. This should be seriously useful, and it is to me. However  there is that snag. The BNF is generally incorrect, and you can’t expect the average visitor to mess about with it. The answer is, of course, to correct the BNF on MSDN and maybe even add railroad diagrams for the syntax. Stop giggling! I agree it won’t happen. In the meantime, we need to collaboratively store and publish these corrected syntaxes ourselves as we do them. How? GitHub?  SQL Server Central?  Simple-Talk? What should those of us who use the system  do with our corrected EBNF so that anyone can use them without hassle?

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• JMX Based Monitoring - Part Four - Business App Server Monitoring

  - by Anthony Shorten

  In the last blog entry I talked about the Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 feature for monitoring and managing aspects of the Web Application Server using JMX. In this blog entry I am going to discuss a similar new feature that allows JMX to be used for management and monitoring the Oracle Utilities business application server component. This feature is primarily focussed on performance tracking of the product. In first release of Oracle Utilities Customer Care And Billing (V1.x I am talking about), we used to use Oracle Tuxedo as part of the architecture. In Oracle Utilities Application Framework V2.0 and above, we removed Tuxedo from the architecture. One of the features that some customers used within Tuxedo was the performance tracking ability. The idea was that you enabled performance logging on the individual Tuxedo servers and then used a utility named txrpt to produce a performance report. This report would list every service called, the number of times it was called and the average response time. When I worked a performance consultant, I used this report to identify badly performing services and also gauge the overall performance characteristics of a site. When Tuxedo was removed from the architecture this information was also lost. While you can get some information from access.log and some Mbeans supplied by the Web Application Server it was not at the same granularity as txrpt or as useful. I am happy to say we have not only reintroduced this facility in Oracle Utilities Application Framework but it is now accessible via JMX and also we have added more detail into the performance tracking. Most of this new design was working with customers around the world to make sure we introduced a new feature that not only satisfied their performance tracking needs but allowed for finer grained performance analysis. As with the Web Application Server, the Business Application Server JMX monitoring is enabled by specifying a JMX port number in RMI Port number for JMX Business and initial credentials in the JMX Enablement System User ID and JMX Enablement System Password configuration options. These options are available using the configureEnv[.sh] -a utility. These credentials are shared across the Web Application Server and Business Application Server for authorization purposes. Once this is information is supplied a number of configuration files are built (by the initialSetup[.sh] utility) to configure the facility: spl.properties - contains the JMX URL, the security configuration and the mbeans that are enabled. For example, on my demonstration machine: spl.runtime.management.rmi.port=6750 spl.runtime.management.connector.url.default=service:jmx:rmi:///jndi/rmi://localhost:6750/oracle/ouaf/ejbAppConnector jmx.remote.x.password.file=scripts/ouaf.jmx.password.file jmx.remote.x.access.file=scripts/ouaf.jmx.access.file ouaf.jmx.com.splwg.ejb.service.management.PerformanceStatistics=enabled ouaf.jmx.* files - contain the userid and password. The default configuration uses the JMX default configuration. You can use additional security features by altering the spl.properties file manually or using a custom template. For more security options see JMX Security for more details. Once it has been configured and the changes reflected in the product using the initialSetup[.sh] utility the JMX facility can be used. For illustrative purposes I will use jconsole but any JSR160 complaint browser or client can be used (with the appropriate configuration). Once you start jconsole (ensure that splenviron[.sh] is executed prior to execution to set the environment variables or for remote connection, ensure java is in your path and jconsole.jar in your classpath) you specify the URL in the spl.runtime.management.connnector.url.default entry. For example: You are then able to track performance of the product using the PerformanceStatistics Mbean. The attributes of the PerformanceStatistics Mbean are counts of each object type. This is where this facility differs from txrpt. The information that is collected includes the following: The Service Type is captured so you can filter the results in terms of the type of service. For maintenance type services you can even see the transaction type (ADD, CHANGE etc) so you can see the performance of updates against read transactions. The Minimum and Maximum are also collected to give you an idea of the spread of performance. The last call is recorded. The date, time and user of the last call are recorded to give you an idea of the timeliness of the data. The Mbean maintains a set of counters per Service Type to give you a summary of the types of transactions being executed. This gives you an overall picture of the types of transactions and volumes at your site. There are a number of interesting operations that can also be performed: reset - This resets the statistics back to zero. This is an important operation. For example, txrpt is restricted to collecting statistics per hour, which is ok for most people. But what if you wanted to be more granular? This operation allows to set the collection period to anything you wish. The statistics collected will represent values since the last restart or last reset. completeExecutionDump - This is the operation that produces a CSV in memory to allow extraction of the data. All the statistics are extracted (see the Server Administration Guide for a full list). This can be then loaded into a database, a tool or simply into your favourite spreadsheet for analysis. Here is an extract of an execution dump from my demonstration environment to give you an idea of the format: ServiceName, ServiceType, MinTime, MaxTime, Avg Time, # of Calls, Latest Time, Latest Date, Latest User ... CFLZLOUL, EXECUTE_LIST, 15.0, 64.0, 22.2, 10, 16.0, 2009-12-16::11-25-36-932, ASHORTEN CILBBLLP, READ, 106.0, 1184.0, 466.3333333333333, 6, 106.0, 2009-12-16::11-39-01-645, BOBAMA CILBBLLP, DELETE, 70.0, 146.0, 108.0, 2, 70.0, 2009-12-15::12-53-58-280, BPAYS CILBBLLP, ADD, 860.0, 4903.0, 2243.5, 8, 860.0, 2009-12-16::17-54-23-862, LELLISON CILBBLLP, CHANGE, 112.0, 3410.0, 815.1666666666666, 12, 112.0, 2009-12-16::11-40-01-103, ASHORTEN CILBCBAL, EXECUTE_LIST, 8.0, 84.0, 26.0, 22, 23.0, 2009-12-16::17-54-01-643, LJACKMAN InitializeUserInfoService, READ_SYSTEM, 49.0, 962.0, 70.83777777777777, 450, 63.0, 2010-02-25::11-21-21-667, ASHORTEN InitializeUserService, READ_SYSTEM, 130.0, 2835.0, 234.85777777777778, 450, 216.0, 2010-02-25::11-21-21-446, ASHORTEN MenuLoginService, READ_SYSTEM, 530.0, 1186.0, 703.3333333333334, 9, 530.0, 2009-12-16::16-39-31-172, ASHORTEN NavigationOptionDescriptionService, READ_SYSTEM, 2.0, 7.0, 4.0, 8, 2.0, 2009-12-21::09-46-46-892, ASHORTEN ... There are other operations and attributes available. Refer to the Server Administration Guide provided with your product to understand the full et of operations and attributes. This is one of the many features I am proud that we implemented as it allows flexible monitoring of the performance of the product.

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• Observations in Migrating from JavaFX Script to JavaFX 2.0

  - by user12608080

  Observations in Migrating from JavaFX Script to JavaFX 2.0 Introduction Having been available for a few years now, there is a decent body of work written for JavaFX using the JavaFX Script language. With the general availability announcement of JavaFX 2.0 Beta, the natural question arises about converting the legacy code over to the new JavaFX 2.0 platform. This article reflects on some of the observations encountered while porting source code over from JavaFX Script to the new JavaFX API paradigm. The Application The program chosen for migration is an implementation of the Sudoku game and serves as a reference application for the book JavaFX – Developing Rich Internet Applications. The design of the program can be divided into two major components: (1) A user interface (ideally suited for JavaFX design) and (2) the puzzle generator. For the context of this article, our primary interest lies in the user interface. The puzzle generator code was lifted from a sourceforge.net project and is written entirely in Java. Regardless which version of the UI we choose (JavaFX Script vs. JavaFX 2.0), no code changes were required for the puzzle generator code. The original user interface for the JavaFX Sudoku application was written exclusively in JavaFX Script, and as such is a suitable candidate to convert over to the new JavaFX 2.0 model. However, a few notable points are worth mentioning about this program. First off, it was written in the JavaFX 1.1 timeframe, where certain capabilities of the JavaFX framework were as of yet unavailable. Citing two examples, this program creates many of its own UI controls from scratch because the built-in controls were yet to be introduced. In addition, layout of graphical nodes is done in a very manual manner, again because much of the automatic layout capabilities were in flux at the time. It is worth considering that this program was written at a time when most of us were just coming up to speed on this technology. One would think that having the opportunity to recreate this application anew, it would look a lot different from the current version. Comparing the Size of the Source Code An attempt was made to convert each of the original UI JavaFX Script source files (suffixed with .fx) over to a Java counterpart. Due to language feature differences, there are a small number of source files which only exist in one version or the other. The table below summarizes the size of each of the source files. JavaFX Script source file Number of Lines Number of Character JavaFX 2.0 Java source file Number of Lines Number of Characters ArrowKey.java 6 72 Board.fx 221 6831 Board.java 205 6508 BoardNode.fx 446 16054 BoardNode.java 723 29356 ChooseNumberNode.fx 168 5267 ChooseNumberNode.java 302 10235 CloseButtonNode.fx 115 3408 CloseButton.java 99 2883 ParentWithKeyTraversal.java 111 3276 FunctionPtr.java 6 80 Globals.java 20 554 Grouping.fx 8 140 HowToPlayNode.fx 121 3632 HowToPlayNode.java 136 4849 IconButtonNode.fx 196 5748 IconButtonNode.java 183 5865 Main.fx 98 3466 Main.java 64 2118 SliderNode.fx 288 10349 SliderNode.java 350 13048 Space.fx 78 1696 Space.java 106 2095 SpaceNode.fx 227 6703 SpaceNode.java 220 6861 TraversalHelper.fx 111 3095 Total 2,077 79,127 2531 87,800 A few notes about this table are in order: The number of lines in each file was determined by running the Unix ‘wc –l’ command over each file. The number of characters in each file was determined by running the Unix ‘ls –l’ command over each file. The examination of the code could certainly be much more rigorous. No standard formatting was performed on these files.  All comments however were deleted. There was a certain expectation that the new Java version would require more lines of code than the original JavaFX script version. As evidenced by a count of the total number of lines, the Java version has about 22% more lines than its FX Script counterpart. Furthermore, there was an additional expectation that the Java version would be more verbose in terms of the total number of characters.  In fact the preceding data shows that on average the Java source files contain fewer characters per line than the FX files.  But that's not the whole story.  Upon further examination, the FX Script source files had a disproportionate number of blank characters.  Why?  Because of the nature of how one develops JavaFX Script code.  The object literal dominates FX Script code.  Its not uncommon to see object literals indented halfway across the page, consuming lots of meaningless space characters. RAM consumption Not the most scientific analysis, memory usage for the application was examined on a Windows Vista system by running the Windows Task Manager and viewing how much memory was being consumed by the Sudoku version in question. Roughly speaking, the FX script version, after startup, had a RAM footprint of about 90MB and remained pretty much the same size. The Java version started out at about 55MB and maintained that size throughout its execution. What About Binding? Arguably, the most striking observation about the conversion from JavaFX Script to JavaFX 2.0 concerned the need for data synchronization, or lack thereof. In JavaFX Script, the primary means to synchronize data is via the bind expression (using the “bind” keyword), and perhaps to a lesser extent it’s “on replace” cousin. The bind keyword does not exist in Java, so for JavaFX 2.0 a Data Binding API has been introduced as a replacement. To give a feel for the difference between the two versions of the Sudoku program, the table that follows indicates how many binds were required for each source file. For JavaFX Script files, this was ascertained by simply counting the number of occurrences of the bind keyword. As can be seen, binding had been used frequently in the JavaFX Script version (and does not take into consideration an additional half dozen or so “on replace” triggers). The JavaFX 2.0 program achieves the same functionality as the original JavaFX Script version, yet the equivalent of binding was only needed twice throughout the Java version of the source code. JavaFX Script source file Number of Binds JavaFX Next Java source file Number of “Binds” ArrowKey.java 0 Board.fx 1 Board.java 0 BoardNode.fx 7 BoardNode.java 0 ChooseNumberNode.fx 11 ChooseNumberNode.java 0 CloseButtonNode.fx 6 CloseButton.java 0 CustomNodeWithKeyTraversal.java 0 FunctionPtr.java 0 Globals.java 0 Grouping.fx 0 HowToPlayNode.fx 7 HowToPlayNode.java 0 IconButtonNode.fx 9 IconButtonNode.java 0 Main.fx 1 Main.java 0 Main_Mobile.fx 1 SliderNode.fx 6 SliderNode.java 1 Space.fx 0 Space.java 0 SpaceNode.fx 9 SpaceNode.java 1 TraversalHelper.fx 0 Total 58 2 Conclusions As the JavaFX 2.0 technology is so new, and experience with the platform is the same, it is possible and indeed probable that some of the observations noted in the preceding article may not apply across other attempts at migrating applications. That being said, this first experience indicates that the migrated Java code will likely be larger, though not extensively so, than the original Java FX Script source. Furthermore, although very important, it appears that the requirements for data synchronization via binding, may be significantly less with the new platform.

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• How to Easily Put a Windows PC into Kiosk Mode With Assigned Access

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Windows 8.1′s Assigned Access feature allows you to easily lock a Windows PC to a single application, such as a web browser. This feature makes it easy for anyone to configure Windows 8.1 devices as point-of-sale or other kiosk systems. In the past, setting up a Windows PC in kiosk mode involved much more work, requiring the use of third-party software, group policy, or Linux distributions designed around kiosk mode. Assigned Access is available on Windows 8.1 RT, Windows 8.1 Professional, and Windows 8.1 Enterprise. The standard edition of Windows 8.1 doesn’t support Assigned Access. Create a User Account for Assigned Access Rather than turn your entire computer into a locked-down kiosk system, Assigned Access allows you to create a separate user account that can only launch a single app — such as a web browser. To set this up, you must be logged into Windows as a user with administrator permissions. First, open the PC settings app — swipe in from the right or press Windows Key + C to open the charms bar, tap Settings, and tap Change PC settings. In the PC settings app, select Accounts and select Other accounts. Use the Add an account button to create a new Windows account. Select  the “Sign in without a Microsoft account” option and select Local account to create a local user account. You could also create a Microsoft account, but you may not want to do this if you just want a locked-down account with only browser access. If you need to install apps from the Windows Store to use in Assigned Access mode, you’ll have to set up a Microsoft account instead of a local account. A local account will still allow you access to the preinstalled apps, such as Internet Explorer. You may want to create a user account with a blank password. This would make it simple for anyone to access kiosk mode, even if the system becomes locked or needs to be rebooted. The account will be created as a standard user account with limited permissions. Leave it as a standard user account — don’t make it an administrator account. Set Up Assigned Access Once you’ve created an account, you’ll first need to sign into it. If you don’t, you’ll see a “This account has no apps” message when trying to enable Assigned Access. Go back to the welcome screen, log in to the new account you created, and allow Windows to go through the first-time account setup process. If you want to use a non-default app in kiosk mode, install it while logged in as that user account. Once you’re done, log out of the other account, log back in as your administrator account, and go back to the Other accounts screen. Click the Set up an account for assigned access option to continue. Select the user account you created and select the app you want to limit the account to. For a web-based kiosk, this can be a web browser such as the Modern version of Internet Explorer. Businesses can also create their own Modern apps and set them to run in kiosk mode in this way. Note that Microsoft’s documentation says “web browsers are not good choices for assigned access” because they require more permissions than average Modern (or “Windows Store”) apps. However, if you want to provide a kiosk for web-browsing, using Assigned Access is a much better option than using Guest Mode and offering up a full Windows desktop. When you’re done, restart your PC and log in as the Assigned Access account. Windows will automatically open the app you chose and won’t allow a user to leave that app. Standard Windows 8 features like the charms bar, app switcher, and Start screen won’t appear. Pressing the Windows key once will do nothing. To sign out of Assigned Access mode, press the Windows key five times — quickly — while signed in. You’ll be sent back to the standard login screen. The account will actually still be logged in and the app will remain running — this method just “locks” the screen and allows another user to log in. Automatically Log Into Assigned Access Whenever your Windows device boots, you can log into the Assigned Access account and turn it into a kiosk system. While this isn’t ideal for all kiosk systems, you may want the device to automatically launch the specific app when it boots without requiring any login process. To do so, you’ll just need to have Windows automatically log into the Assigned Access account when it boots. This option is hidden and not available in the standard Control Panel. You’ll need to use the hidden netplwiz Control Panel tool to set up automatic login on boot. If you didn’t create a password for the user account, leave the Password field empty while configuring this. Security Considerations If you’re using this feature to turn a Windows 8.1 system into a kiosk and leaving it open to the public, remember to consider security. Anyone could come up to the system, press the Windows key five times, and try to log into your standard administrator user account. Ensure the administrator user account has a strong password so people won’t be able to get past the kiosk system’s limitations and tamper with the system. Even Windows 8′s detractors have to admit that it’s an ideal system for a touch-screen kiosk device, running either a browser or another specific application. Assigned Access finally makes this easy to set up on Windows systems in the real world — no IT experience, third-party software, or Linux distributions necessary.     

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• C#: LINQ vs foreach - Round 1.

  - by James Michael Hare

  So I was reading Peter Kellner's blog entry on Resharper 5.0 and its LINQ refactoring and thought that was very cool.  But that raised a point I had always been curious about in my head -- which is a better choice: manual foreach loops or LINQ?    The answer is not really clear-cut.  There are two sides to any code cost arguments: performance and maintainability.  The first of these is obvious and quantifiable.  Given any two pieces of code that perform the same function, you can run them side-by-side and see which piece of code performs better.   Unfortunately, this is not always a good measure.  Well written assembly language outperforms well written C++ code, but you lose a lot in maintainability which creates a big techncial debt load that is hard to offset as the application ages.  In contrast, higher level constructs make the code more brief and easier to understand, hence reducing technical cost.   Now, obviously in this case we're not talking two separate languages, we're comparing doing something manually in the language versus using a higher-order set of IEnumerable extensions that are in the System.Linq library.   Well, before we discuss any further, let's look at some sample code and the numbers.  First, let's take a look at the for loop and the LINQ expression.  This is just a simple find comparison:       // find implemented via LINQ     public static bool FindViaLinq(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.Any(item => item == target);     }         // find implemented via standard iteration     public static bool FindViaIteration(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         foreach (var i in list)         {             if (i == target)             {                 return true;             }         }           return false;     }   Okay, looking at this from a maintainability point of view, the Linq expression is definitely more concise (8 lines down to 1) and is very readable in intention.  You don't have to actually analyze the behavior of the loop to determine what it's doing.   So let's take a look at performance metrics from 100,000 iterations of these methods on a List<int> of varying sizes filled with random data.  For this test, we fill a target array with 100,000 random integers and then run the exact same pseudo-random targets through both searches.                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     Any         10       26          0.00046             30.00%     Iteration   10       20          0.00023             -     Any         100      116         0.00201             18.37%     Iteration   100      98          0.00118             -     Any         1000     1058        0.01853             16.78%     Iteration   1000     906         0.01155             -     Any         10,000   10,383      0.18189             17.41%     Iteration   10,000   8843        0.11362             -     Any         100,000  104,004     1.8297              18.27%     Iteration   100,000  87,941      1.13163             -   The LINQ expression is running about 17% slower for average size collections and worse for smaller collections.  Presumably, this is due to the overhead of the state machine used to track the iterators for the yield returns in the LINQ expressions, which seems about right in a tight loop such as this.   So what about other LINQ expressions?  After all, Any() is one of the more trivial ones.  I decided to try the TakeWhile() algorithm using a Count() to get the position stopped like the sample Pete was using in his blog that Resharper refactored for him into LINQ:       // Linq form     public static int GetTargetPosition1(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         return list.TakeWhile(item => item != target).Count();     }       // traditionally iterative form     public static int GetTargetPosition2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;           foreach (var i in list)         {             if(i == target)             {                 break;             }               ++count;         }           return count;     }   Once again, the LINQ expression is much shorter, easier to read, and should be easier to maintain over time, reducing the cost of technical debt.  So I ran these through the same test data:                       List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method      Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile   10       41          0.00041             128%     Iteration   10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile   100      171         0.00171             88%     Iteration   100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile   1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Iteration   1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile   10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Iteration   10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile   100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Iteration   100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Wow!  I expected some overhead due to the state machines iterators produce, but 90% slower?  That seems a little heavy to me.  So then I thought, well, what if TakeWhile() is not the right tool for the job?  The problem is TakeWhile returns each item for processing using yield return, whereas our for-loop really doesn't care about the item beyond using it as a stop condition to evaluate. So what if that back and forth with the iterator state machine is the problem?  Well, we can quickly create an (albeit ugly) lambda that uses the Any() along with a count in a closure (if a LINQ guru knows a better way PLEASE let me know!), after all , this is more consistent with what we're trying to do, we're trying to find the first occurence of an item and halt once we find it, we just happen to be counting on the way.  This mostly matches Any().       // a new method that uses linq but evaluates the count in a closure.     public static int TakeWhileViaLinq2(IEnumerable<int> list, int target)     {         int count = 0;         list.Any(item =>             {                 if(item == target)                 {                     return true;                 }                   ++count;                 return false;             });         return count;     }     Now how does this one compare?                         List<T> On 100,000 Iterations     Method         Size     Total (ms)  Per Iteration (ms)  % Slower     TakeWhile      10       41          0.00041             128%     Any w/Closure  10       23          0.00023             28%     Iteration      10       18          0.00018             -     TakeWhile      100      171         0.00171             88%     Any w/Closure  100      116         0.00116             27%     Iteration      100      91          0.00091             -     TakeWhile      1000     1604        0.01604             94%     Any w/Closure  1000     1101        0.01101             33%     Iteration      1000     825         0.00825             -     TakeWhile      10,000   15765       0.15765             92%     Any w/Closure  10,000   10802       0.10802             32%     Iteration      10,000   8204        0.08204             -     TakeWhile      100,000  156950      1.5695              92%     Any w/Closure  100,000  108378      1.08378             33%     Iteration      100,000  81635       0.81635             -     Much better!  It seems that the overhead of TakeAny() returning each item and updating the state in the state machine is drastically reduced by using Any() since Any() iterates forward until it finds the value we're looking for -- for the task we're attempting to do.   So the lesson there is, make sure when you use a LINQ expression you're choosing the best expression for the job, because if you're doing more work than you really need, you'll have a slower algorithm.  But this is true of any choice of algorithm or collection in general.     Even with the Any() with the count in the closure it is still about 30% slower, but let's consider that angle carefully.  For a list of 100,000 items, it was the difference between 1.01 ms and 0.82 ms roughly in a List<T>.  That's really not that bad at all in the grand scheme of things.  Even running at 90% slower with TakeWhile(), for the vast majority of my projects, an extra millisecond to save potential errors in the long term and improve maintainability is a small price to pay.  And if your typical list is 1000 items or less we're talking only microseconds worth of difference.   It's like they say: 90% of your performance bottlenecks are in 2% of your code, so over-optimizing almost never pays off.  So personally, I'll take the LINQ expression wherever I can because they will be easier to read and maintain (thus reducing technical debt) and I can rely on Microsoft's development to have coded and unit tested those algorithm fully for me instead of relying on a developer to code the loop logic correctly.   If something's 90% slower, yes, it's worth keeping in mind, but it's really not until you start get magnitudes-of-order slower (10x, 100x, 1000x) that alarm bells should really go off.  And if I ever do need that last millisecond of performance?  Well then I'll optimize JUST THAT problem spot.  To me it's worth it for the readability, speed-to-market, and maintainability.

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• Using Node.js as an accelerator for WCF REST services

  - by Elton Stoneman

  Node.js is a server-side JavaScript platform "for easily building fast, scalable network applications". It's built on Google's V8 JavaScript engine and uses an (almost) entirely async event-driven processing model, running in a single thread. If you're new to Node and your reaction is "why would I want to run JavaScript on the server side?", this is the headline answer: in 150 lines of JavaScript you can build a Node.js app which works as an accelerator for WCF REST services*. It can double your messages-per-second throughput, halve your CPU workload and use one-fifth of the memory footprint, compared to the WCF services direct.   Well, it can if: 1) your WCF services are first-class HTTP citizens, honouring client cache ETag headers in request and response; 2) your services do a reasonable amount of work to build a response; 3) your data is read more often than it's written. In one of my projects I have a set of REST services in WCF which deal with data that only gets updated weekly, but which can be read hundreds of times an hour. The services issue ETags and will return a 304 if the client sends a request with the current ETag, which means in the most common scenario the client uses its local cached copy. But when the weekly update happens, then all the client caches are invalidated and they all need the same new data. Then the service will get hundreds of requests with old ETags, and they go through the full service stack to build the same response for each, taking up threads and processing time. Part of that processing means going off to a database on a separate cloud, which introduces more latency and downtime potential.   We can use ASP.NET output caching with WCF to solve the repeated processing problem, but the server will still be thread-bound on incoming requests, and to get the current ETags reliably needs a database call per request. The accelerator solves that by running as a proxy - all client calls come into the proxy, and the proxy routes calls to the underlying REST service. We could use Node as a straight passthrough proxy and expect some benefit, as the server would be less thread-bound, but we would still have one WCF and one database call per proxy call. But add some smart caching logic to the proxy, and share ETags between Node and WCF (so the proxy doesn't even need to call the servcie to get the current ETag), and the underlying service will only be invoked when data has changed, and then only once - all subsequent client requests will be served from the proxy cache.   I've built this as a sample up on GitHub: NodeWcfAccelerator on sixeyed.codegallery. Here's how the architecture looks:     The code is very simple. The Node proxy runs on port 8010 and all client requests target the proxy. If the client request has an ETag header then the proxy looks up the ETag in the tag cache to see if it is current - the sample uses memcached to share ETags between .NET and Node. If the ETag from the client matches the current server tag, the proxy sends a 304 response with an empty body to the client, telling it to use its own cached version of the data. If the ETag from the client is stale, the proxy looks for a local cached version of the response, checking for a file named after the current ETag. If that file exists, its contents are returned to the client as the body in a 200 response, which includes the current ETag in the header. If the proxy does not have a local cached file for the service response, it calls the service, and writes the WCF response to the local cache file, and to the body of a 200 response for the client. So the WCF service is only troubled if both client and proxy have stale (or no) caches.   The only (vaguely) clever bit in the sample is using the ETag cache, so the proxy can serve cached requests without any communication with the underlying service, which it does completely generically, so the proxy has no notion of what it is serving or what the services it proxies are doing. The relative path from the URL is used as the lookup key, so there's no shared key-generation logic between .NET and Node, and when WCF stores a tag it also stores the "read" URL against the ETag so it can be used for a reverse lookup, e.g:   Key Value /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3 "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" /WcfSampleService/PersonService.svc/rest/fetch/3    In Node we read the cache using the incoming URL path as the key and we know that "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6" is the current ETag; we look for a local cached response in /caches/28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6.body (and the corresponding .header file which contains the original service response headers, so the proxy response is exactly the same as the underlying service). When the data is updated, we need to invalidate the ETag cache – which is why we need the reverse lookup in the cache. In the WCF update service, we don't need to know the URL of the related read service - we fetch the entity from the database, do a reverse lookup on the tag cache using the old ETag to get the read URL, update the new ETag against the URL, store the new reverse lookup and delete the old one.   Running Apache Bench against the two endpoints gives the headline performance comparison. Making 1000 requests with concurrency of 100, and not sending any ETag headers in the requests, with the Node proxy I get 102 requests handled per second, average response time of 975 milliseconds with 90% of responses served within 850 milliseconds; going direct to WCF with the same parameters, I get 53 requests handled per second, mean response time of 1853 milliseconds, with 90% of response served within 3260 milliseconds. Informally monitoring server usage during the tests, Node maxed at 20% CPU and 20Mb memory; IIS maxed at 60% CPU and 100Mb memory.   Note that the sample WCF service does a database read and sleeps for 250 milliseconds to simulate a moderate processing load, so this is *not* a baseline Node-vs-WCF comparison, but for similar scenarios where the  service call is expensive but applicable to numerous clients for a long timespan, the performance boost from the accelerator is considerable.     * - actually, the accelerator will work nicely for any HTTP request, where the URL (path + querystring) uniquely identifies a resource. In the sample, there is an assumption that the ETag is a GUID wrapped in double-quotes (e.g. "28cd4796-76b8-451b-adfd-75cb50a50fa6") – which is the default for WCF services. I use that assumption to name the cache files uniquely, but it is a trivial change to adapt to other ETag formats.

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• In Case You Weren’t There: Blogwell NYC

  - by Mike Stiles

  0 0 1 1009 5755 Vitrue 47 13 6751 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Your roving reporter roved out to another one of Socialmedia.org’s fantastic Blogwell events, this time in NYC. As Central Park and incredible weather beckoned, some of the biggest brand names in the world gathered to talk about how they’re incorporating social into marketing and CRM, as well as extending social across their entire organizations internally. Below we present a collection of the live tweets from many of the key sessions GE @generalelectricJon Lombardo, Leader of Social Media COE How GE builds and extends emotional connections with consumers around health and reaps the benefits of increased brand equity in the process. GE has a social platform around Healthyimagination to create better health for people. If you and a friend are trying to get healthy together, you’ll do better. Health is inherently. Get health challenges via Facebook and share with friends to achieve goals together. They’re creating an emotional connection around the health context. You don’t influence people at large. Your sphere of real influence is around 5-10 people. They find relevant conversations about health on Twitter and engage sounding like a friend, not a brand. Why would people share on behalf of a brand? Because you tapped into an activity and emotion they’re already having. To create better habits in health, GE gave away inexpensive, relevant gifts related to their goals. Create the context, give the relevant gift, get social acknowledgment for giving it. What you get when you get acknowledgment for your engagement and gift is user generated microcontent. GE got 12,000 unique users engaged and 1400 organic posts with the healthy gift campaign. The Dow Chemical Company @DowChemicalAbby Klanecky, Director of Digital & Social Media Learn how Dow Chemical is finding, training, and empowering their scientists to be their storytellers in social media. There are 1m jobs coming open in science. Only 200k are qualified for them. Dow Chemical wanted to use social to attract and talk to scientists. Dow Chemical decided to use real scientists as their storytellers. Scientists are incredibly passionate, the key ingredient of a great storyteller. Step 1 was getting scientists to focus on a few platforms, blog, Twitter, LinkedIn. Dow Chemical social flow is Core Digital Team - #CMs – ambassadors – advocates. The scientists were trained in social etiquette via practice scenarios. It’s not just about sales. It’s about growing influence and the business. Dow Chemical trained about 100 scientists, 55 are active and there’s a waiting list for the next sessions. In person social training produced faster results and better participation. Sometimes you have to tell pieces of the story instead of selling your execs on the whole vision. Social Media Ethics Briefing: Staying Out of TroubleAndy Sernovitz, CEO @SocialMediaOrg How do we get people to share our message for us? We have to have their trust. The difference between being honest and being sleazy is disclosure. Disclosure does not hurt the effectiveness of your marketing. No one will get mad if you tell them up front you’re a paid spokesperson for a company. It’s a legal requirement by the FTC, it’s the law, to disclose if you’re being paid for an endorsement. Require disclosure and truthfulness in all your social media outreach. Don’t lie to people. Monitor the conversation and correct misstatements. Create social media policies and training programs. If you want to stay safe, never pay cash for social media. Money changes everything. As soon as you pay, it’s not social media, it’s advertising. Disclosure, to the feds, means clear, conspicuous, and understandable to the average reader. This phrase will keep you in the clear, “I work for ___ and this is my personal opinion.” Who are you? Were you paid? Are you giving an honest opinion based on a real experience? You as a brand are responsible for what an agency or employee or contactor does in your behalf. SocialMedia.org makes available a Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit. Socialmedia.org/disclosure. The point is to not ethically mess up and taint social media as happened to e-mail. Not only is the FTC cracking down, so is Google and Facebook. Visa @VisaNewsLucas Mast, Senior Business Leader, Global Corporate Social Media Visa built a mobile studio for the Olympics for execs and athletes. They wanted to do postcard style real time coverage of Visa’s Olympics sponsorships, and on a shoestring. Challenges included Olympic rules, difficulty getting interviews, time zone trouble, and resourcing. Another problem was they got bogged down with their own internal approval processes. Despite all the restrictions, they created and published a variety of and fair amount of content. They amassed 1000+ views of videos posted to the Visa Communication YouTube channel. Less corporate content yields more interest from media outlets and bloggers. They did real world video demos of how their products work in the field vs. an exec doing a demo in a studio. Don’t make exec interview videos dull and corporate. Keep answers short, shoot it in an interesting place, do takes until they’re comfortable and natural. Not everything will work. Not everything will get a retweet. But like the lottery, you can’t win if you don’t play. Promoting content is as important as creating it. McGraw-Hill Companies @McGrawHillCosPatrick Durando, Senior Director of Global New Media McGraw-Hill has 26,000 employees. McGraw-Hill created a social intranet called Buzz. Intranets create operational efficiency, help product dev, facilitate crowdsourcing, and breaks down geo silos. Intranets help with talent development, acquisition, retention. They replaced the corporate directory with their own version of LinkedIn. The company intranet has really cut down on the use of email. Long email threats become organized, permanent social discussions. The intranet is particularly useful in HR for researching and getting answers surrounding benefits and policies. Using a profile on your company intranet can establish and promote your internal professional brand. If you’re going to make an intranet, it has to look great, work great, and employees are going have to want to go there. You can’t order them to like it. 

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• Pet Peeves with the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace

  - by Bil Simser

  Have you ever noticed how something things just gnaw at your very being. This is the case with the WP7 marketplace, the Zune software, and the things that drive me batshit crazy with a side of fries. To go. I wanted to share. XBox Live is Not the Centre of the Universe Okay, it’s fine that the Zune software has an XBox live tag for games so can see them clearly but do we really need to have it shoved down our throats. On every click? Click on Games in the marketplace: The first thing that it defaults to on the filters on the right is XBox Live: Okay. Fine. However if you change it (say to Paid) then click onto a title when you come back from that title is the filter still set to Paid? No. It’s back to XBox Live again. Really? Give us a break. If you change to any filter on any other genre then click on the selected title, it doesn’t revert back to anything. It stays on the selection you picked. Let’s be fair here. The Games genre should behave just like every other one. If I pick Paid then when I come back to the list please remember that. Double Dipping On the subject of XBox Live titles, Microsoft (and developers who have an agreement with Microsoft to produce Live titles, which generally rules out indie game developers) is double dipping with regards to exposure of their titles. Here’s the Puzzle and Trivia Game section on the Marketplace for XBox Live titles: And here’s the same category filtered on Paid titles: See the problem? Two indie titles while the rest are XBox Live ones. So while XBL has it’s filter, they also get to showcase their wares in the Paid and Free filters as well. If you’re going to have an XBox Live filter then use it and stop pushing down indie titles until they’re off the screen (on some genres this is already the case). Free and Paid titles should be just that and not include XBox Live ones. If you’re really stoked that people can’t find the Free XBox Live titles vs. the paid ones, then create a Free XBox Live filter and a Paid XBox Live filter. I don’t think we would mind much. Whose Trial is it Anyways? You might notice apps in the marketplace with titles like “My Fart App Professional Lite” or “Silicon Lamb Spleen Builder Free”. When you submit and app to the marketplace it can either be free or paid. If it’s a paid app you also have the option to submit it with Trial capabilities. It’s up to you to decide what you offer in the trial version but trial versions can be purchased from within the app so after someone trys out your app (for free) and wants to unlock the Super Secret Obama Spy Ring Level, they can just go to the marketplace from your app (if you built that functionality in) and upgrade to the paid version. However it creates a rift of sorts when it comes to visibility. Some developers go the route of the paid app with a trial version, others decide to submit *two* apps instead of one. One app is the “Free” or “Lite” verions and the other is the paid version. Why go to the hassle of submitting two apps when you can just create a trial version in the same app? Again, visibility. There’s no way to tell Paid apps with Trial versions and ones without (it’s an option, you don’t have to provide trial versions, although I think it’s a good idea). However there is a way to see the Free apps from the Paid ones so some submit the two apps and have the Free version have links to buy the paid one (again through the Marketplace tasks in the API). What we as developers need for visibility is a new filter. Trial. That’s it. It would simply filter on Paid apps that have trial capabilities and surface up those apps just like the free ones. If Microsoft added this filter to the marketplace, it would eliminate the need for people to submit their “Free” and “Lite” versions and make it easier for the developer not to have to maintain two systems. I mean, is it really that hard? Can’t be any more difficult than the XBox Live Filter that’s already there. Location is Everything The last thing on my bucket list is about location. When I launch Zune I’m running in my native location setting, Canada. What’s great is that I navigate to the Travel Tools section where I have one of my apps and behold the splendour that I see: There are my apps in the number 1 and number 4 slot for top selling in that category. I show it to my wife to make up for the sleepless nights writing this stuff and we dance around and celebrate. Then I change my location on my operation system to United States and re-launch Zune. WTF? My flight app has slipped to the 10th spot (I’m only showing 4 across here out of the 7 in Zune) and my border check app that was #1 is now in the 32nd spot! End of celebration. Not only is relevance being looked at here, I value the comments people make on may apps as do most developers. I want to respond to them and show them that I’m listening. The next version of my border app will provide multiple camera angles. However when I’m running in my native Canada location, I only see two reviews. Changing over to United States I see fourteen! While there are tools out there to provide with you a unified view, I shouldn’t have to rely on them. My own Zune desktop software should allow me to see everything. I realize that some developers will submit an app and only target it for some locations and that’s their choice. However I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to see what apps are ahead of mine, or see people comments and ratings. Another proposal. Either unify the marketplace (i.e. when I’m looking at it show me everything combined) or let me choose a filter. I think the first option might be difficult as you’re trying to average out top selling apps across all markets and have to deal with some apps that have been omitted from some markets. Although I think you could come up with a set of use cases that would handle that, maybe that’s too much work. At the very least, let us developers view the markets in a drop down or something from within the Zune desktop. Having to shut down Zune, change our location, and re-launch Zune to see other perspectives is just too onerous. A Call to Action These are just one mans opinion. Do you agree? Disagree? Feel hungry for a bacon sandwich? Let everyone know via the comments below. Perhaps someone from Microsoft will be reading and take some of these ideas under advisement. Maybe not, but at least let’s get the word out that we really want to see some change. Egypt can do it, why not WP7 developers!

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• The Faces in the Crowdsourcing

  - by Applications User Experience

  By Jeff Sauro, Principal Usability Engineer, Oracle Imagine having access to a global workforce of hundreds of thousands of people who can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately. Distributing simple tasks not easily done by computers to the masses is called "crowdsourcing" and until recently was an interesting concept, but due to practical constraints wasn't used often. Enter Amazon.com. For five years, Amazon has hosted a service called Mechanical Turk, which provides an easy interface to the crowds. The service has almost half a million registered, global users performing a quarter of a million human intelligence tasks (HITs). HITs are submitted by individuals and companies in the U.S. and pay from $.01 for simple tasks (such as determining if a picture is offensive) to several dollars (for tasks like transcribing audio). What do we know about the people who toil away in this digital crowd? Can we rely on the work done in this anonymous marketplace? A rendering of the actual Mechanical Turk (from Wikipedia) Knowing who is behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is fitting, considering the history of the actual Mechanical Turk. In the late 1800's, a mechanical chess-playing machine awed crowds as it beat master chess players in what was thought to be a mechanical miracle. It turned out that the creator, Wolfgang von Kempelen, had a small person (also a chess master) hiding inside the machine operating the arms to provide the illusion of automation. The field of human computer interaction (HCI) is quite familiar with gathering user input and incorporating it into all stages of the design process. It makes sense then that Mechanical Turk was a popular discussion topic at the recent Computer Human Interaction usability conference sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery in Atlanta. It is already being used as a source for input on Web sites (for example, Feedbackarmy.com) and behavioral research studies. Two papers shed some light on the faces in this crowd. One paper tells us about the shifting demographics from mostly stay-at-home moms to young men in India. The second paper discusses the reliability and quality of work from the workers. Just who exactly would spend time doing tasks for pennies? In "Who are the crowdworkers?" University of California researchers Ross, Silberman, Zaldivar and Tomlinson conducted a survey of Mechanical Turk worker demographics and compared it to a similar survey done two years before. The initial survey reported workers consisting largely of young, well-educated women living in the U.S. with annual household incomes above $40,000. The more recent survey reveals a shift in demographics largely driven by an influx of workers from India. Indian workers went from 5% to over 30% of the crowd, and this block is largely male (two-thirds) with a higher average education than U.S. workers, and 64% report an annual income of less than $10,000 (keeping in mind $1 has a lot more purchasing power in India). This shifting demographic certainly has implications as language and culture can play critical roles in the outcome of HITs. Of course, the demographic data came from paying Turkers $.10 to fill out a survey, so there is some question about both a self-selection bias (characteristics which cause Turks to take this survey may be unrepresentative of the larger population), not to mention whether we can really trust the data we get from the crowd. Crowds can perform tasks or provide feedback on a design quickly and almost immediately for usability testing. (Photo attributed to victoriapeckham Flikr While having immediate access to a global workforce is nice, one major problem with Mechanical Turk is the incentive structure. Individuals and companies that deploy HITs want quality responses for a low price. Workers, on the other hand, want to complete the task and get paid as quickly as possible, so that they can get on to the next task. Since many HITs on Mechanical Turk are surveys, how valid and reliable are these results? How do we know whether workers are just rushing through the multiple-choice responses haphazardly answering? In "Are your participants gaming the system?" researchers at Carnegie Mellon (Downs, Holbrook, Sheng and Cranor) set up an experiment to find out what percentage of their workers were just in it for the money. The authors set up a 30-minute HIT (one of the more lengthy ones for Mechanical Turk) and offered a very high $4 to those who qualified and $.20 to those who did not. As part of the HIT, workers were asked to read an email and respond to two questions that determined whether workers were likely rushing through the HIT and not answering conscientiously. One question was simple and took little effort, while the second question required a bit more work to find the answer. Workers were led to believe other factors than these two questions were the qualifying aspect of the HIT. Of the 2000 participants, roughly 1200 (or 61%) answered both questions correctly. Eighty-eight percent answered the easy question correctly, and 64% answered the difficult question correctly. In other words, about 12% of the crowd were gaming the system, not paying enough attention to the question or making careless errors. Up to about 40% won't put in more than a modest effort to get paid for a HIT. Young men and those that considered themselves in the financial industry tended to be the most likely to try to game the system. There wasn't a breakdown by country, but given the demographic information from the first article, we could infer that many of these young men come from India, which makes language and other cultural differences a factor. These articles raise questions about the role of crowdsourcing as a means for getting quick user input at low cost. While compensating users for their time is nothing new, the incentive structure and anonymity of Mechanical Turk raises some interesting questions. How complex of a task can we ask of the crowd, and how much should these workers be paid? Can we rely on the information we get from these professional users, and if so, how can we best incorporate it into designing more usable products? Traditional usability testing will still play a central role in enterprise software. Crowdsourcing doesn't replace testing; instead, it makes certain parts of gathering user feedback easier. One can turn to the crowd for simple tasks that don't require specialized skills and get a lot of data fast. As more studies are conducted on Mechanical Turk, I suspect we will see crowdsourcing playing an increasing role in human computer interaction and enterprise computing. References: Downs, J. S., Holbrook, M. B., Sheng, S., and Cranor, L. F. 2010. Are your participants gaming the system?: screening mechanical turk workers. In Proceedings of the 28th international Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2399-2402. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753326.1753688 Ross, J., Irani, L., Silberman, M. S., Zaldivar, A., and Tomlinson, B. 2010. Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 2863-2872. Link: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1753873

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• Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion

  Communication with your environment is an essential part of everyone's life. And it doesn't matter whether you are actually living in a rural area in the middle of nowhere, within the pulsating heart of a big city, or in my case on a wonderful island in the Indian Ocean. The ability to exchange your thoughts, your experience and your worries with another person helps you to get different points of view and new ideas on how to resolve an issue you might be confronted with. Benefits of community work What happens to be common sense in your daily life, also applies to your work environment. Working in IT, or ICT as it is called in Mauritius, requires a lot of reading and learning. Not only during your lectures at the university but with your colleagues in a project assignment and hopefully with 'unknown' pals in the universe of online communities. At least I can say that I learned quite a lot from other developers code, their responses in various forums, their numerous blog articles, and while attending local user group meetings. When I started to work as a professional software developer (or engineer some may say) years ago I immediately checked the existence of communities on the programming language, the database technology and other vital information on software development in general. Luckily, it wasn't too difficult to find. My employer had a subscription of the monthly magazines and newsletters of a national organisation which also run the biggest forum in that area. Getting in touch with other developers and reading their common problems but also solutions was a huge benefit to my growth. Image courtesy of Michael Kappel (CC BY-NC 2.0) Active participation and regular contribution to this community gave me some nice advantages, too. Within three years I was listed as a conference speaker at the annual developer's conference and provided several sessions on different topics during consecutive years. Back in 2004, I took over the responsibility and management of the monthly meetings of a regional user group, and organised it for more than two years. Furthermore, I was invited to the newly-founded community program of Microsoft Germany (Community Leader/Insider Program - CLIP). My website on Active FoxPro Pages was nominated in the second batch of online communities. Due to my community work and providing advice to others, I had the honour to be awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - Visual Developer for Visual FoxPro in the years 2006 and 2007. It was a great experience to meet with other like-minded people and I'm really grateful for that. Just in case, more details are listed in my Curriculum Vitae. But this all changed when I moved to Mauritius... Cyber island Mauritius? During the first months in Mauritius I was way too busy to think about community activities at all. First of all, there was the new company that had to be set up, the new staff had to be trained and of course the communication work-flows and so on with the project managers back in Germany had to be sorted out, too. Second, I had to get a grip of my private matters like getting the basics for my new household or exploring the neighbourhood, and last but not least I needed a break from the hectic and intensive work prior to my departure. As soon as the sea literally calmed down, I started to have conversations with my colleagues about communities and user groups. Sadly, it turned out that there were none, or at least no one was aware of any at that time. Oh oh, what did I do? Anyway, having this kind of background and very positive experience with off-line and on-line activities I decided for myself that some day I'm going to found a community in Mauritius for all kind of IT/ICT-related fields. The main focus might be on software development but not on a certain technology or methodology. It was clear to me that it should be an open infrastructure and anyone is welcome to join, to experience, to share and to contribute if they would like to. That was the idea at that time... Ok, fast-forward to recent events. At the end of October 2012 I was invited to an event called Open Days organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands together with other local partners and resellers. There I got in touch with local Technical Evangelist Arnaud Meslier and we had a good conversation on communities during the breaks. Eventually, I left a good impression on him, as we are having chats on Facebook or Skype irregularly. Well, seeing that my personal and professional surroundings have been settled and running smooth, having that great exchange and contact with Microsoft IOI (again), and being really eager to re-animate my intentions from 2007, I recently founded a new community: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community - #MSCC It took me a while to settle down with the name but it was obvious that the community should not be attached to one single technology, like ie. .NET user group, Oracle developers, or Joomla friends (these are fictitious names). There are several other reasons why I came up with 'Craftsmanship' as the core topic of this community. The expression of 'engineering' didn't feel right with the fields covered. Software development in all kind of facets is a craft, and therefore demands a lot of practice but also guidance from more experienced developers. It also includes the process of designing, modelling and drafting the ideas. Has to deal with various types of tests and test methodologies, and of course should be focused on flexible and agile ways of acting. In order to meet and to excel a customer's request for a solution. Next, I was looking for an easy way to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments. Using all kind of social media platforms like Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing, etc. I was never really confident about their features of event handling. More by chance I stumbled upon Meetup.com and in combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I am looking forward to advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there will be a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians!

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• How to create a virtual network with Azure Connect

  - by Herve Roggero

  If you are trying to establish a virtual network between machines located in disparate networks, you can either use VPN, Virtual Network or Azure Connect. If you want to establish a connection between machines located in Windows Azure, you should consider using the Virtual Network service. If you want to establish a connection between local machines and Virtual Machines in Windows Azure, you may be able to use your existing VPN device (assuming you have one), as long as the device is supported by Microsoft. If the VPN device you are using isn’t supported, or if you are trying to create a virtual network between machines from disparate networks (such as machines located in another cloud provider), you can use Azure Connect. This blog post explains how Azure Connect can help you create virtual networks between multiple servers in the cloud, various servers in different cloud environments, and on-premise. Note: Azure Connect is currently in Technical Preview. About Azure Connect Let’s do a quick review of Azure Connect. This technology implements an IPSec tunnel from machines to to a relay service located in the Microsoft cloud (Azure). So in essence, Azure Connect doesn’t provide a point-to-point connection between machines; the network communication is tunneled through the relay service. The relay service in turn offers a mechanism to enforce basic communication rules that you define through Groups. We will review this later. You could network two or more VMs in the Azure cloud (although you should consider using a Virtual Network if you go this route), or servers in the Azure cloud and other machines in the Amazon cloud for example, or even two or more on-premise servers located in different locations for which a direct network connection is not an option. You can place any number of machines in your topology. Azure Connect gives you great flexibility on how you want to build your virtual network across various environments. So Azure Connect makes sense when you want to: Connect machines located in different cloud providers Connect on-premise machines running in different locations Connect Azure VMs with on-premise (if you do not have a VPN device, or if your device is not supported) Connect Azure Roles (Worker Roles, Web Roles) with on-premise servers or in other cloud providers The diagram below shows you a high level network topology that involves machines in the Windows Azure cloud, other cloud providers and on-premise. You should note that the only required component in this diagram is the Relay itself. The other machines are optional (although your network is useful only if you have two or more machines involved). Relay agents are currently available in three geographic areas: US, Europe and Asia. You can change which region you want to use in the Windows Azure management portal. High Level Network Topology With Azure Connect Azure Connect Agent Azure Connect establishes a virtual network and creates virtual adapters on your machines; these virtual adapters communicate through the Relay using IPSec. This is achieved by installing an agent (the Azure Connect Agent) on all the machines you want in your network topology. However, you do not need to install the agent on Worker Roles and Web Roles; that’s because the agent is already installed for you. Any other machine, including Virtual Machines in Windows Azure, needs the agent installed.  To install the agent, simply go to your Windows Azure portal (http://windows.azure.com) and click on Networks on the bottom left panel. You will see a list of subscriptions under Connect. If you select a subscription, you will be able to click on the Install Local Endpoint icon on top. Clicking on this icon will begin the download and installation process for the agent. Activating Roles for Azure Connect As previously mentioned, you do not need to install the Azure Connect Agent on Worker Roles and Web Roles because it is already loaded. However, you do need to activate them if you want the roles to participate in your network topology. To do this, you will need to click on the Get Activation Token icon. The activation token must then be copied and placed in the configuration file of your roles. For more information on how to perform this step, visit MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg432964.aspx. Firewall Rules Note that specific firewall rules must exist to allow the agent to communicate through the Relay. You will need to allow TCP 443 and ICMPv6. For additional information, please visit MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433061.aspx. CA Certificates You can optionally require agents to sign their activation request with the Relay using a trusted certificate issued by a Certificate Authority (CA). Click on Activation Options to learn more. Groups To create your network topology you must first create a group. A group represents a logical container of endpoints (or machines) that can communicate through the Relay. You can create multiple groups allowing you to manage network communication differently. For example you could create a DEVELOPMENT group and a PRODUCTION group. To add an endpoint you must first install an agent that will create a virtual adapter on the machine on which it is installed (as discussed in the previous section). Once you have created a group and installed the agents, the machines will appear in the Windows Azure management portal and you can start assigning machines to groups. The next figure shows you that I created a group called LocalGroup and assigned two machines (both on-premise) to that group. Groups and Computers in Azure Connect As I mentioned previously you can allow these machines to establish a network connection. To do this, you must enable the Interconnected option in the group. The following diagram shows you the definition of the group. In this topology I chose to include local machines only, but I could also add worker roles and web roles in the Azure Roles section (you must first activate your roles, as discussed previously). You could also add other Groups, allowing you to manage inter-group communication. Defining a Group in Azure Connect Testing the Connection Now that my agents have been installed on my two machines, the group defined and the Interconnected option checked, I can test the connection between my machines. The next screenshot shows you that I sent a PING request to DEVLAP02 from DEVDSK02. The PING request was successful. Note however that the time is in the hundreds of milliseconds on average. That is to be expected because the machines are connecting through the Relay located in the cloud. Going through the Relay introduces an extra hop in the communication chain, so if your systems rely on high performance, you may want to conduct some basic performance tests. Sending a PING Request Through The Relay Conclusion As you can see, creating a network topology between machines using the Azure Connect service is simple. It took me less than five minutes to create the above configuration, including the time it took to install the Azure Connect agents on the two machines. The flexibility of Azure Connect allows you to create a virtual network between disparate environments, as long as your operating systems are supported by the agent. For more information on Azure Connect, visit the MSDN website at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg432997.aspx. About Herve Roggero Herve Roggero, Windows Azure MVP, is the founder of Blue Syntax Consulting, a company specialized in cloud computing products and services. Herve's experience includes software development, architecture, database administration and senior management with both global corporations and startup companies. Herve holds multiple certifications, including an MCDBA, MCSE, MCSD. He also holds a Master's degree in Business Administration from Indiana University. Herve is the co-author of "PRO SQL Azure" from Apress and runs the Azure Florida Association (on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4177626). For more information on Blue Syntax Consulting, visit www.bluesyntax.net. Special Thanks I would like thank those that helped me figure out how Azure Connect works: Marcel Meijer - http://blogs.msmvps.com/marcelmeijer/ Michael Wood - Http://www.mvwood.com Glenn Block - http://www.codebetter.com/glennblock Yves Goeleven - http://cloudshaper.wordpress.com/ Sandrino Di Mattia - http://fabriccontroller.net/ Mike Martin - http://techmike2kx.wordpress.com

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• NUMA-aware placement of communication variables

  - by Dave

  For classic NUMA-aware programming I'm typically most concerned about simple cold, capacity and compulsory misses and whether we can satisfy the miss by locally connected memory or whether we have to pull the line from its home node over the coherent interconnect -- we'd like to minimize channel contention and conserve interconnect bandwidth. That is, for this style of programming we're quite aware of where memory is homed relative to the threads that will be accessing it. Ideally, a page is collocated on the node with the thread that's expected to most frequently access the page, as simple misses on the page can be satisfied without resorting to transferring the line over the interconnect. The default "first touch" NUMA page placement policy tends to work reasonable well in this regard. When a virtual page is first accessed, the operating system will attempt to provision and map that virtual page to a physical page allocated from the node where the accessing thread is running. It's worth noting that the node-level memory interleaving granularity is usually a multiple of the page size, so we can say that a given page P resides on some node N. That is, the memory underlying a page resides on just one node. But when thinking about accesses to heavily-written communication variables we normally consider what caches the lines underlying such variables might be resident in, and in what states. We want to minimize coherence misses and cache probe activity and interconnect traffic in general. I don't usually give much thought to the location of the home NUMA node underlying such highly shared variables. On a SPARC T5440, for instance, which consists of 4 T2+ processors connected by a central coherence hub, the home node and placement of heavily accessed communication variables has very little impact on performance. The variables are frequently accessed so likely in M-state in some cache, and the location of the home node is of little consequence because a requester can use cache-to-cache transfers to get the line. Or at least that's what I thought. Recently, though, I was exploring a simple shared memory point-to-point communication model where a client writes a request into a request mailbox and then busy-waits on a response variable. It's a simple example of delegation based on message passing. The server polls the request mailbox, and having fetched a new request value, performs some operation and then writes a reply value into the response variable. As noted above, on a T5440 performance is insensitive to the placement of the communication variables -- the request and response mailbox words. But on a Sun/Oracle X4800 I noticed that was not the case and that NUMA placement of the communication variables was actually quite important. For background an X4800 system consists of 8 Intel X7560 Xeons . Each package (socket) has 8 cores with 2 contexts per core, so the system is 8x8x2. Each package is also a NUMA node and has locally attached memory. Every package has 3 point-to-point QPI links for cache coherence, and the system is configured with a twisted ladder "mobius" topology. The cache coherence fabric is glueless -- there's not central arbiter or coherence hub. The maximum distance between any two nodes is just 2 hops over the QPI links. For any given node, 3 other nodes are 1 hop distant and the remaining 4 nodes are 2 hops distant. Using a single request (client) thread and a single response (server) thread, a benchmark harness explored all permutations of NUMA placement for the two threads and the two communication variables, measuring the average round-trip-time and throughput rate between the client and server. In this benchmark the server simply acts as a simple transponder, writing the request value plus 1 back into the reply field, so there's no particular computation phase and we're only measuring communication overheads. In addition to varying the placement of communication variables over pairs of nodes, we also explored variations where both variables were placed on one page (and thus on one node) -- either on the same cache line or different cache lines -- while varying the node where the variables reside along with the placement of the threads. The key observation was that if the client and server threads were on different nodes, then the best placement of variables was to have the request variable (written by the client and read by the server) reside on the same node as the client thread, and to place the response variable (written by the server and read by the client) on the same node as the server. That is, if you have a variable that's to be written by one thread and read by another, it should be homed with the writer thread. For our simple client-server model that means using split request and response communication variables with unidirectional message flow on a given page. This can yield up to twice the throughput of less favorable placement strategies. Our X4800 uses the QPI 1.0 protocol with source-based snooping. Briefly, when node A needs to probe a cache line it fires off snoop requests to all the nodes in the system. Those recipients then forward their response not to the original requester, but to the home node H of the cache line. H waits for and collects the responses, adjudicates and resolves conflicts and ensures memory-model ordering, and then sends a definitive reply back to the original requester A. If some node B needed to transfer the line to A, it will do so by cache-to-cache transfer and let H know about the disposition of the cache line. A needs to wait for the authoritative response from H. So if a thread on node A wants to write a value to be read by a thread on node B, the latency is dependent on the distances between A, B, and H. We observe the best performance when the written-to variable is co-homed with the writer A. That is, we want H and A to be the same node, as the writer doesn't need the home to respond over the QPI link, as the writer and the home reside on the very same node. With architecturally informed placement of communication variables we eliminate at least one QPI hop from the critical path. Newer Intel processors use the QPI 1.1 coherence protocol with home-based snooping. As noted above, under source-snooping a requester broadcasts snoop requests to all nodes. Those nodes send their response to the home node of the location, which provides memory ordering, reconciles conflicts, etc., and then posts a definitive reply to the requester. In home-based snooping the snoop probe goes directly to the home node and are not broadcast. The home node can consult snoop filters -- if present -- and send out requests to retrieve the line if necessary. The 3rd party owner of the line, if any, can respond either to the home or the original requester (or even to both) according to the protocol policies. There are myriad variations that have been implemented, and unfortunately vendor terminology doesn't always agree between vendors or with the academic taxonomy papers. The key is that home-snooping enables the use of a snoop filter to reduce interconnect traffic. And while home-snooping might have a longer critical path (latency) than source-based snooping, it also may require fewer messages and less overall bandwidth. It'll be interesting to reprise these experiments on a platform with home-based snooping. While collecting data I also noticed that there are placement concerns even in the seemingly trivial case when both threads and both variables reside on a single node. Internally, the cores on each X7560 package are connected by an internal ring. (Actually there are multiple contra-rotating rings). And the last-level on-chip cache (LLC) is partitioned in banks or slices, which with each slice being associated with a core on the ring topology. A hardware hash function associates each physical address with a specific home bank. Thus we face distance and topology concerns even for intra-package communications, although the latencies are not nearly the magnitude we see inter-package. I've not seen such communication distance artifacts on the T2+, where the cache banks are connected to the cores via a high-speed crossbar instead of a ring -- communication latencies seem more regular.

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• Oracle SOA Suite - Highlighted Travel and Transportation Customer References

  - by Bruce Tierney

  0 0 1 1137 6483 - 54 15 7605 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Next in this series on industry-specific highlights of Oracle SOA Suite customers is the Travel and Transportation industry.  If you are in the travel or transportation industry, take a look at how these Oracle SOA Suite integration customers have addressed common business requirements to enable better customer service, lower costs, and deliver new business services. For example, All Nippon Airways (ANA) has significantly lowered management costs associated with their hybrid on-premise/cloud ticketing system deployments for domestic and international flights. Their lead-time for changes or new applications has been greatly reduced compared to their old mainframe-based systems, enabling ANA to rapidly develop new services in response to changing market needs. Another example is Schneider National, a leading provider of truckload logistics, and how they have integrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management and customers applications using Oracle SOA Suite. Schneider National has 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances over five SOA clusters.  Take a deeper look into any of these case studies, videos, and Oracle Magazine articles that closely align with your industry:  Customers fly and airline succeeds with an IT transformation. Company:  All Nippon Airways  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on January 06, 2014 Any successful business must ensure ongoing customer satisfaction, respond to increased competition, and minimize costs. Running a successful airline in today’s economic climate requires all of those things, as well a... Openmatics Revolutionizes Fleet Management with Standards-Based Vehicle Telematics Platform New Company:  Openmatics s.r.o.  Customer Snapshot   |   Automotive   |   Published on May 20, 2014 Openmatics uses Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle Application Development Framework as a foundation for Openmatics, a vehicle telematics service for next-generation fleet management. It integrated its own app shop wi... Future Proof: To keep pace with mobile, social, and location-based services, smart technologists are using middleware to innovate Company:  SFpark  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Professional Services   |   Published on August 01, 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware is at the heart of a recently completed and very ambitious project to change how people handle the challenge of finding a parking space in San Francisco, California. “Parking is a universal is... Globalia Corporación Empresarial Accelerates Hotel Bookings, Boosts Sales by 40% with In-Memory Data Grid Solution Company:  Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 29, 2013 Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. deployed Oracle Coherence to reengineer the group’s core system for hotel bookings, now serving booking requests involving 80 hotels within an average response time of 100 millise... Choice Hotels Uses Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite to Modernize Global IT Architecture Company:  Choice Hotels  Press Release   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on August 07, 2012 Choice Hotels International, one of the largest and most successful hotel franchises in the world, has implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite. Sascar Consolidates Fleet Management Infrastructure and Accelerates Customers’ Data Access Company:  Sascar  Customer Case Study   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 07, 2014 Description – Sascar used Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g to consolidate fleet management and perform real-time vehicle tracking 4x faster. Directorate General of Civil Aviation Streamlines Key Aviation Applications Access, Improves Productivity and Reduces Maintenance Costs Company:  Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC)  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on May 24, 2013 With Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) provided its 12,500 employees a virtual office environment that integrates team workspaces, business applications, and e-mails within a n... Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry Company:  Schneider National, Inc.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 26, 2013 Schneider National, Inc. deployed Oracle applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle development tools as the foundation for its next-generation IT environment, which is driving new levels of efficiency, profit... DGAC Cuts Subscription Costs with Oracle Company:  DGAC  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on October 31, 2012 Using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Exalogic, DGAC reduces the cost of subscriptions to newsletters and provide to its 12,500 employees a collaborative workspace portal. Asiana Airlines Builds PIP System with Oracle Solutions Company:  Asiana Airlines  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on July 26, 2012 With Oracle Exalogic and the Oracle SOA Suite, Asiana Airlines builds a passenger service integrated platform providing various services such as integration between its interface and internal systems and a data wareho... Choice Hotels Reduces Time to Market with Oracle WebCenter Company:  Choice Hotels  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 11, 2014 Using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle SOA standardization, Choice Hotels consolidated multiple platforms, reduced IT dependency and realized tremendous benefits in total cost of ownership and faster time to market support... An Interview with Schneider National's Judy Lemke Company:  Schneider National  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on December 17, 2013 Judy Lemke talks with Mark Sunday about the challenges Schneider National faced and how they overcame them through a companywide transformational change. For more details on these case studies, you can use this pre-filtered search on “Travel and Transportation” / “Middleware” / “Service Oriented Architecture” or browse on your own at www.oracle.com/customers

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• Conducting Effective Web Meetings

  - by BuckWoody

  There are several forms of corporate communication. From immediate, rich communications like phones and IM messaging to historical transactions like e-mail, there are a lot of ways to get information to one or more people. From time to time, it's even useful to have a meeting. (This is where a witty picture of a guy sleeping in a meeting goes. I won't bother actually putting one here; you're already envisioning it in your mind) Most meetings are pointless, and a complete waste of time. This is the fault, completely and solely, of the organizer. It's because he or she hasn't thought things through enough to think about alternate forms of information passing. Here's the criteria for a good meeting - whether in-person or over the web: 100% of the content of a meeting should require the participation of 100% of the attendees for 100% of the time It doesn't get any simpler than that. If it doesn't meet that criteria, then don't invite that person to that meeting. If you're just conveying information and no one has the need for immediate interaction with that information (like telling you something that modifies the message), then send an e-mail. If you're a manager, and you need to get status from lots of people, pick up the phone.If you need a quick answer, use IM. I once had a high-level manager that called frequent meetings. His real need was status updates on various processes, so 50 of us would sit in a room while he asked each one of us questions. He believed this larger meeting helped us "cross pollinate ideas". In fact, it was a complete waste of time for most everyone, except in the one or two moments that they interacted with him. So I wrote some code for a Palm Pilot (which was a kind of SmartPhone but with no phone and no real graphics, but this was in the days when we had just discovered fire and the wheel, although the order of those things is still in debate) that took an average of the salaries of the people in the room (I guessed at it) and ran a timer which multiplied the number of people against the salaries. I left that running in plain sight for him, and when he asked about it, I explained how much the meetings were really costing the company. We had far fewer meetings after. Meetings are now web-enabled. I believe that's largely a good thing, since it saves on travel time and allows more people to participate, but I think the rule above still holds. And in fact, there are some other rules that you should follow to have a great meeting - and fewer of them. Be Clear About the Goal This is important in any meeting, but all of us have probably gotten an invite with a web link and an ambiguous title. Then you get to the meeting, and it's a 500-level deep-dive on something everyone expects you to know. This is unfair to the "expert" and to the participants. I always tell people that invite me to a meeting that I will be as detailed as I can - but the more detail they can tell me about the questions, the more detailed I can be in my responses. Granted, there are times when you don't know what you don't know, but the more you can say about the topic the better. There's another point here - and it's that you should have a clearly defined "win" for the meeting. When the meeting is over, and everyone goes back to work, what were you expecting them to do with the information? Have that clearly defined in your head, and in the meeting invite. Understand the Technology There are several web-meeting clients out there. I use them all, since I meet with clients all over the world. They all work differently - so I take a few moments and read up on the different clients and find out how I can use the tools properly. I do this with the technology I use for everything else, and it's important to understand it if the meeting is to be a success. If you're running the meeting, know the tools. I don't care if you like the tools or not, learn them anyway. Don't waste everyone else's time just because you're too bitter/snarky/lazy to spend a few minutes reading. Check your phone or mic. Check your video size. Install (and learn to use)  ZoomIT (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897434.aspx). Format your slides or screen or output correctly. Learn to use the voting features of the meeting software, and especially it's whiteboard features. Figure out how multiple monitors work. Try a quick meeting with someone to test all this. Do this *before* you invite lots of other people to your meeting.   Use a WebCam I'm not a pretty man. I have a face fit for radio. But after attending a meeting with clients where one Microsoft person used a webcam and another did not, I'm convinced that people pay more attention when a face is involved. There are tons of studies around this, or you can take my word for it, but toss a shirt on over those pajamas and turn the webcam on. Set Up Early Whether you're attending or leading the meeting, don't wait to sign on to the meeting at the time when it starts. I can almost plan that a 10:00 meeting will actually start at 10:10 because the participants/leader is just now installing the web client for the meeting at 10:00. Sign on early, go on mute, and then wait for everyone to arrive. Mute When Not Talking No one wants to hear your screaming offspring / yappy dog / other cubicle conversations / car wind noise (are you driving in a desert storm or something?) while the person leading the meeting is trying to talk. I use the Lync software from Microsoft for my meetings, and I mute everyone by default, and then tell them to un-mute to talk to the group. Share Collateral If you have a PowerPoint deck, mail it out in case you have a tech failure. If you have a document, share it as an attachment to the meeting. Don't make people ask you for the information - that's why you're there to begin with. Even better, send it out early. "But", you say, "then no one will come to the meeting if they have the deck first!" Uhm, then don't have a meeting. Send out the deck and a quick e-mail and let everyone get on with their productive day. Set Actions At the Meeting A meeting should have some sort of outcome (see point one). That means there are actions to take, a follow up, or some deliverable. Otherwise, it's an e-mail. At the meeting, decide who will do what, when things are needed, and so on. And avoid, if at all possible, setting up another meeting, unless absolutely necessary. So there you have it. Whether it's on-premises or on the web, meetings are a necessary evil, and should be treated that way. Like politicians, you should have as few of them as are necessary to keep the roads paved and public libraries open.

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• Converting linear colors to SRGB shows banding in FFmpeg

  - by user1863947

  When I convert an EXR file sequence with x264 using FFmpeg and convert the colorspace from linear to SRGB (with gamma 0.45454545) I get some heavy banding issues (most visible on a dark gradient). Here is the ffmpeg command I use: C:/ffmpeg.exe -y -i C:/seq_v001.%04d.exr -vf lutrgb=r=gammaval(0.45454545):g=gammaval(0.45454545):b=gammaval(0.45454545) -vcodec libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -preset slow -crf 18 -r 25 C:/out.mov Here is the output: ffmpeg version N-47062-g26c531c Copyright (c) 2000-2012 the FFmpeg developers built on Nov 25 2012 12:25:21 with gcc 4.7.2 (GCC) configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --disable-pthreads --enable-runtime-cpudetect --enable-avisynth --enable-bzlib --enable-frei0r --enable-libass --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libfreetype --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libnut --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libopus --enable-librtmp --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libutvideo --enable-libvo-aacenc --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-libvorbis --enable-libvpx --enable-libx264 --enable-libxavs --enable-libxvid --enable-zlib libavutil 52. 9.100 / 52. 9.100 libavcodec 54. 77.100 / 54. 77.100 libavformat 54. 37.100 / 54. 37.100 libavdevice 54. 3.100 / 54. 3.100 libavfilter 3. 23.102 / 3. 23.102 libswscale 2. 1.102 / 2. 1.102 libswresample 0. 17.101 / 0. 17.101 libpostproc 52. 2.100 / 52. 2.100 Input #0, image2, from 'C:/seq_v001.%04d.exr': Duration: 00:00:09.60, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A Stream #0:0: Video: exr, rgb48le, 960x540 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 25 fps, 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 25 tbc [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] using SAR=1/1 [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] using cpu capabilities: MMX2 SSE2Fast SSSE3 FastShuffle SSE4.2 [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] profile High, level 3.1 [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] 264 - core 128 r2216 198a7ea - H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec - Copyleft 2003-2012 - http://www.videolan.org/x264.html - options: cabac=1 ref=5 deblock=1:0:0 analyse=0x3:0x113 me=umh subme=8 psy=1 psy_rd=1.00:0.00 mixed_ref=1 me_range=16 chroma_me=1 trellis=1 8x8dct=1 cqm=0 deadzone=21,11 fast_pskip=1 chroma_qp_offset=-2 threads=18 lookahead_threads=3 sliced_threads=0 nr=0 decimate=1 interlaced=0 bluray_compat=0 constrained_intra=0 bframes=3 b_pyramid=2 b_adapt=2 b_bias=0 direct=3 weightb=1 open_gop=0 weightp=2 keyint=250 keyint_min=25 scenecut=40 intra_refresh=0 rc_lookahead=50 rc=crf mbtree=1 crf=18.0 qcomp=0.60 qpmin=0 qpmax=69 qpstep=4 ip_ratio=1.40 aq=1:1.00 Output #0, mov, to 'C:/out.mov': Metadata: encoder : Lavf54.37.100 Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuv420p, 960x540 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], q=-1--1, 12800 tbn, 25 tbc Stream mapping: Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (exr -> libx264) Press [q] to stop, [?] for help [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 16 fps=0.0 q=0.0 size= 0kB time=00:00:00.00 bitrate= 0.0kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 34 fps= 33 q=0.0 size= 0kB time=00:00:00.00 bitrate= 0.0kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 52 fps= 34 q=0.0 size= 0kB time=00:00:00.00 bitrate= 0.0kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 68 fps= 34 q=0.0 size= 0kB time=00:00:00.00 bitrate= 0.0kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 85 fps= 33 q=23.0 size= 47kB time=00:00:00.44 bitrate= 867.5kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 104 fps= 34 q=23.0 size= 94kB time=00:00:01.20 bitrate= 640.3kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 121 fps= 34 q=23.0 size= 133kB time=00:00:01.88 bitrate= 577.8kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 139 fps= 34 q=23.0 size= 172kB time=00:00:02.60 bitrate= 543.4kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 157 fps= 34 q=23.0 size= 213kB time=00:00:03.32 bitrate= 525.6kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 175 fps= 34 q=23.0 size= 254kB time=00:00:04.04 bitrate= 516.0kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 193 fps= 35 q=23.0 size= 287kB time=00:00:04.76 bitrate= 494.6kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 211 fps= 35 q=23.0 size= 332kB time=00:00:05.48 bitrate= 496.4kbits/s Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa660] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaaa0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffaf00] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb340] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffb7a0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffbbe0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffc040] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff8c40] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff90c0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9520] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9960] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dff9dc0] Found more than one compression attribute [exr @ 000000000dffa200] Found more than one compression attribute frame= 228 fps= 34 q=23.0 size= 421kB time=00:00:06.16 bitrate= 559.8kbits/s frame= 240 fps= 32 q=-1.0 Lsize= 708kB time=00:00:09.52 bitrate= 609.3kbits/s video:705kB audio:0kB subtitle:0 global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.505636% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] frame I:2 Avg QP:15.07 size: 18186 [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] frame P:73 Avg QP:16.51 size: 3719 [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] frame B:165 Avg QP:18.38 size: 2502 [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] consecutive B-frames: 2.5% 3.3% 42.5% 51.7% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] mb I I16..4: 46.2% 33.3% 20.4% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] mb P I16..4: 6.8% 2.0% 0.6% P16..4: 29.4% 10.5% 4.6% 0.0% 0.0% skip:46.1% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] mb B I16..4: 1.8% 0.7% 0.2% B16..8: 40.9% 6.5% 0.3% direct: 1.2% skip:48.5% L0:52.0% L1:47.5% BI: 0.5% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] 8x8 transform intra:24.7% inter:81.3% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] direct mvs spatial:93.3% temporal:6.7% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] coded y,uvDC,uvAC intra: 10.7% 31.4% 24.9% inter: 2.3% 9.0% 2.9% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] i16 v,h,dc,p: 83% 11% 6% 1% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] i8 v,h,dc,ddl,ddr,vr,hd,vl,hu: 9% 9% 52% 6% 4% 4% 5% 5% 5% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] i4 v,h,dc,ddl,ddr,vr,hd,vl,hu: 22% 11% 44% 5% 4% 3% 3% 4% 3% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] i8c dc,h,v,p: 69% 15% 15% 2% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] Weighted P-Frames: Y:0.0% UV:0.0% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] ref P L0: 48.9% 0.1% 16.8% 17.0% 11.3% 5.8% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] ref B L0: 57.7% 21.9% 13.9% 6.4% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] ref B L1: 82.4% 17.6% [libx264 @ 0000000004d11540] kb/s:600.61 For me it looks like it converts the video first and afterwards applies the gamma correction on 8-bit clipped video. Does someone have an idea?

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• There seems to be some 'lingering' SSH connections on my server. How do I fix it?

  - by mike

  [root@server mike]# w 14:43:35 up 83 days, 1:25, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE JCPU PCPU WHAT mike pts/1 dsl-IP.w 14:43 0.00s 0.01s 0.03s sshd: mike [priv] [root@server mike]# ps aux | grep ssh root 1350 0.0 0.1 5276 1044 ? Ss Aug27 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd root 14328 0.0 0.2 8020 2580 ? Ss 12:49 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14332 0.0 0.1 8020 1532 ? S 12:49 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14333 0.0 0.1 4696 1444 ? Ss 12:49 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14344 0.0 0.2 8020 2580 ? Ss 12:59 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14347 0.0 0.1 8168 1564 ? S 13:00 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14348 0.0 0.1 4700 1504 ? Ss 13:00 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14351 0.0 0.2 8020 2580 ? Ss 13:04 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14355 0.0 0.1 8168 1560 ? S 13:04 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14356 0.0 0.1 4696 1472 ? Ss 13:04 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14373 0.0 0.2 8020 2584 ? Ss 13:15 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14377 0.0 0.1 8168 1560 ? S 13:15 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14378 0.0 0.1 4704 1500 ? Ss 13:15 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14385 0.0 0.2 8020 2584 ? Ss 13:28 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14389 0.0 0.1 8168 1592 ? S 13:28 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14390 0.0 0.1 4696 1508 ? Ss 13:28 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14392 0.0 0.2 8020 2588 ? Ss 13:30 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14396 0.0 0.1 8168 1604 ? S 13:30 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14397 0.0 0.1 4696 1492 ? Ss 13:30 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14402 0.0 0.2 8020 2584 ? Ss 13:33 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14406 0.0 0.1 8020 1536 ? S 13:33 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14407 0.0 0.1 4696 1460 ? Ss 13:33 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14428 0.0 0.2 8020 2584 ? Ss 13:45 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14432 0.0 0.1 8168 1580 ? S 13:45 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14433 0.0 0.1 4704 1512 ? Ss 13:45 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14439 0.0 0.2 8020 2580 ? Ss 13:53 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14443 0.0 0.1 8020 1532 ? S 13:53 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14444 0.0 0.1 4696 1448 ? Ss 13:53 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14480 0.0 0.2 8020 2584 ? Ss 14:11 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14484 0.0 0.1 8168 1588 ? S 14:11 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14485 0.0 0.1 4704 1492 ? Ss 14:11 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14487 0.0 0.2 8020 2580 ? Ss 14:12 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14490 0.0 0.1 8020 1552 ? S 14:12 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14492 0.0 0.1 4696 1472 ? Ss 14:12 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14510 0.0 0.2 8020 2584 ? Ss 14:35 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14514 0.0 0.1 8168 1568 ? S 14:35 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14515 0.0 0.1 4700 1492 ? Ss 14:35 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14517 0.0 0.2 8020 2580 ? Ss 14:37 0:00 sshd: dave [priv] dave 14521 0.0 0.1 8020 1548 ? S 14:38 0:00 sshd: dave@notty dave 14522 0.0 0.1 4696 1464 ? Ss 14:38 0:00 /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server root 14538 0.0 0.2 8020 2620 ? Ss 14:43 0:00 sshd: mike [priv] mike 14542 0.0 0.1 8020 1560 ? S 14:43 0:00 sshd: mike@pts/1 root 14554 0.0 0.0 1720 560 pts/1 S+ 14:43 0:00 grep ssh As you can see above, I, mike, am logged into SSH executing commands. This is shown from the w command. However, there's an odd amount of SSH related processes currently running. I figured dave's sftp session might not show up in the output of w for whatever reason but that doesn't explain all the running processes... What's wrong? :/

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• Need help trouble shooting high CPU usage by PHP-fpm

  - by user432506

  There is a problem that is driving me crazy. After the day I tried to fix the CPU usage problem of my VPS, the CPU load has grown from 60% to 150%, and I have no idea what causes the problem. Please help me. I had installed a copy of mediawiki on a Linode 1024. The wiki is running on Niginx + PHP-fpm + MySql. The wiki doesn't have much traffic, only around 4000 requests/day, mostly from Google and Bing bots. It had been using around 60% (of total 400% on the Linode) of the CPU before. I thought it was a bit high, so two day ago, I was trying to fix the problem (not knowing what was waiting for me). I did nothing but added a new empty line to wiki's configure file, which would change the modified time of the configure file, and then all the cached page files would be set invalidated. I had done that before, and that would cause high CPU usage, but normally it would take only hours to let things back to normal again. Not this time, my CPU usage has been around 150% for more than two days. It is php-fpm using most of CPU reassures. Using 100% of three cores is not rare. I hadn't seen that before. There are other sites on the Linode, but it should be the wiki. Because if I offline the wiki, CPU usage will drop back to around 40% soon. The day I also duplicated php-fpm.conf, and opened it, but didn't changed it. I have no idea what I did wrong. I here ask for help to save myself from being crazy!!! It is php-fpm. Is there a way to find out what is it doing? I mean like which scripts are related and what function codes are running? top: top - 06:34:33 up 10 days, 4:23, 2 users, load average: 1.10, 1.24, 1.37 Tasks: 76 total, 4 running, 72 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 61.1%us, 3.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 32.8%id, 2.9%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.1%st Mem: 1028684k total, 945192k used, 83492k free, 89580k buffers Swap: 524284k total, 18084k used, 506200k free, 530380k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 26721 www-data 20 0 208m 54m 34m R 99 5.4 0:09.07 /opt/php5/sbin/php-fpm --fpm-config /opt/php5/etc/php-fpm.conf 26592 www-data 20 0 207m 45m 26m R 91 4.5 0:12.77 /opt/php5/sbin/php-fpm --fpm-config /opt/php5/etc/php-fpm.conf 26706 www-data 20 0 196m 43m 34m S 47 4.3 0:15.19 /opt/php5/sbin/php-fpm --fpm-config /opt/php5/etc/php-fpm.conf 26583 www-data 20 0 197m 45m 35m S 33 4.5 0:19.08 /opt/php5/sbin/php-fpm --fpm-config /opt/php5/etc/php-fpm.conf 26787 www-data 20 0 206m 36m 18m R 25 3.7 0:00.41 /opt/php5/sbin/php-fpm --fpm-config /opt/php5/etc/php-fpm.conf 26661 www-data 20 0 207m 46m 26m S 13 4.6 0:19.87 /opt/php5/sbin/php-fpm --fpm-config /opt/php5/etc/php-fpm.conf 1971 mysql 20 0 155m 57m 3952 S 8 5.7 383:57.81 /usr/sbin/mysqld 242 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 1 0.0 0:51.36 [kworker/3:1] 5711 root 20 0 139m 95m 580 S 1 9.5 0:41.30 /usr/local/bin/memcached -d -u root -m 128 -p 11211 19463 root 20 0 190m 3984 1284 S 1 0.4 0:02.66 /opt/php5/sbin/php-fpm --fpm-config /opt/php5/etc/php-fpm.conf 29100 www-data 20 0 10928 5540 820 S 1 0.5 4:49.05 nginx: worker process vmstat 30 procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu---- r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 0 0 16912 81456 90784 554172 0 0 4 6 3 2 11 1 87 1 0 0 16912 78036 91000 555356 0 0 38 34 1397 375 12 1 87 0 4 0 16912 31776 91528 557508 0 0 78 42 3197 487 45 1 52 1 1 0 16912 83356 91768 558576 0 0 35 56 2608 449 32 1 67 1 1 0 16912 81548 92040 559720 0 0 41 31 1243 432 8 1 91 1 2 0 16912 53056 92332 562744 0 0 105 33 2013 581 17 1 81 1 2 0 16912 73236 92552 564844 0 0 68 36 1968 615 16 1 82 1 0 0 16912 91612 92904 566676 0 0 69 35 1845 692 13 1 85 1 1 0 16912 71248 93180 568428 0 0 58 33 1952 604 15 1 82 1 1 0 16868 55952 93516 572660 1 0 144 42 1801 637 12 1 86 1 2 0 16868 48324 94416 577844 0 0 189 66 2058 702 17 1 80 2 1 0 16928 58644 94592 578184 0 2 160 49 2578 723 25 1 70 3 5 0 16928 22600 94980 580568 0 0 89 32 1496 361 13 0 85 1 0 0 16988 49256 94500 576396 0 2 41 37 1601 426 14 1 85 0 5 0 18084 24336 86032 502748 0 37 83 68 2989 562 42 1 56 0 1 0 18084 123604 86376 506996 0 0 118 41 2201 573 22 1 76 1 2 0 18084 126984 86752 508876 0 0 64 53 1620 490 13 1 85 1 2 0 18084 103104 87148 510768 0 0 71 37 2757 602 33 1 64 1

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• Deleting multiple objects in a AWS S3 bucket with s3curl.pl?

  - by user183394

  I have been trying to use the AWS "official" command line tool s3curl.pl to test out the recently announced multi-object delete. Here is what I have done: First, I tested out the s3curl.pl with a set of credentials without a hitch: $ s3curl.pl --id=s3 -- http://testbucket-0.s3.amazonaws.com/|xmllint --format - % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 884 0 884 0 0 4399 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 5703 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <ListBucketResult xmlns="http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/"> <Name>testbucket-0</Name> <Prefix/> <Marker/> <MaxKeys>1000</MaxKeys> <IsTruncated>false</IsTruncated> <Contents> <Key>file_1</Key> <LastModified>2012-03-22T17:08:17.000Z</LastModified> <ETag>"ee0e521a76524034aaa5b331842a8b4e"</ETag> <Size>400000</Size> <Owner> <ID>e6d81ea69572270e58d3814ab674df8c8f1fd5d502669633a4951bdd5185f7f4</ID> <DisplayName>zackp</DisplayName> </Owner> <StorageClass>STANDARD</StorageClass> </Contents> <Contents> <Key>file_2</Key> <LastModified>2012-03-22T17:08:19.000Z</LastModified> <ETag>"6b32cbf8219a59690a9f69ba6ff3f590"</ETag> <Size>600000</Size> <Owner> <ID>e6d81ea69572270e58d3814ab674df8c8f1fd5d502669633a4951bdd5185f7f4</ID> <DisplayName>zackp</DisplayName> </Owner> <StorageClass>STANDARD</StorageClass> </Contents> </ListBucketResult> Then, I following the s3curl.pl's usage instructions: s3curl.pl --help Usage /usr/local/bin/s3curl.pl --id friendly-name (or AWSAccessKeyId) [options] -- [curl-options] [URL] options: --key SecretAccessKey id/key are AWSAcessKeyId and Secret (unsafe) --contentType text/plain set content-type header --acl public-read use a 'canned' ACL (x-amz-acl header) --contentMd5 content_md5 add x-amz-content-md5 header --put <filename> PUT request (from the provided local file) --post [<filename>] POST request (optional local file) --copySrc bucket/key Copy from this source key --createBucket [<region>] create-bucket with optional location constraint --head HEAD request --debug enable debug logging common curl options: -H 'x-amz-acl: public-read' another way of using canned ACLs -v verbose logging Then, I tried the following, and always got back error. I would appreciated it very much if someone could point out where I made a mistake? $ s3curl.pl --id=s3 --post multi_delete.xml -- http://testbucket-0.s3.amazonaws.com/?delete <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Error><Code>SignatureDoesNotMatch</Code><Message>The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your key and signing method.</Message><StringToSignBytes>50 4f 53 54 0a 0a 0a 54 68 75 2c 20 30 35 20 41 70 72 20 32 30 31 32 20 30 30 3a 35 30 3a 30 38 20 2b 30 30 30 30 0a 2f 7a 65 74 74 61 72 2d 74 2f 3f 64 65 6c 65 74 65</StringToSignBytes><RequestId>707FBE0EB4A571A8</RequestId><HostId>mP3ZwlPTcRqARQZd6gU4UvBrxGBNIVa0VVe5p0rqGmq5hM65RprwcG/qcXe+pmDT</HostId><SignatureProvided>edkNGuugiSFe0ku4eGzkh8kYgHw=</SignatureProvided><StringToSign>POST Thu, 05 Apr 2012 00:50:08 +0000 The file multi_delete.xml contains the following: cat multi_delete.xml <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <Delete> <Quiet>true</Quiet> <Object> <Key>file_1</Key> <VersionId> </VersionId>> </Object> <Object> <Key>file_2</Key> <VersionId> </VersionId> </Object> </Delete> Thanks for any help! --Zack

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• How to correctly use DERIVE or COUNTER in munin plugins

  - by Johan

  I'm using munin to monitor my server. I've been able to write plugins for it, but only if the graph type is GAUGE. When I try COUNTER or DERIVE, no data is logged or graphed. The plugin i'm currently stuck on is for monitoring bandwidth usage, and is as follows: /etc/munin/plugins/bandwidth2 #!/bin/sh if [ "$1" = "config" ]; then echo 'graph_title Bandwidth Usage 2' echo 'graph_vlabel Bandwidth' echo 'graph_scale no' echo 'graph_category network' echo 'graph_info Bandwidth usage.' echo 'used.label Used' echo 'used.info Bandwidth used so far this month.' echo 'used.type DERIVE' echo 'used.min 0' echo 'remain.label Remaining' echo 'remain.info Bandwidth remaining this month.' echo 'remain.type DERIVE' echo 'remain.min 0' exit 0 fi cat /var/log/zen.log The contents of /var/log/zen.log are: used.value 61.3251953125 remain.value 20.0146484375 And the resulting database is: <!-- Round Robin Database Dump --><rrd> <version> 0003 </version> <step> 300 </step> <!-- Seconds --> <lastupdate> 1269936605 </lastupdate> <!-- 2010-03-30 09:10:05 BST --> <ds> <name> 42 </name> <type> DERIVE </type> <minimal_heartbeat> 600 </minimal_heartbeat> <min> 0.0000000000e+00 </min> <max> NaN </max> <!-- PDP Status --> <last_ds> 61.3251953125 </last_ds> <value> NaN </value> <unknown_sec> 5 </unknown_sec> </ds> <!-- Round Robin Archives --> <rra> <cf> AVERAGE </cf> <pdp_per_row> 1 </pdp_per_row> <!-- 300 seconds --> <params> <xff> 5.0000000000e-01 </xff> </params> <cdp_prep> <ds> <primary_value> NaN </primary_value> <secondary_value> NaN </secondary_value> <value> NaN </value> <unknown_datapoints> 0 </unknown_datapoints> </ds> </cdp_prep> <database> <!-- 2010-03-28 09:15:00 BST / 1269764100 --> <row><v> NaN </v></row> <!-- 2010-03-28 09:20:00 BST / 1269764400 --> <row><v> NaN </v></row> <!-- 2010-03-28 09:25:00 BST / 1269764700 --> <row><v> NaN </v></row> <snip> The value for last_ds is correct, it just doesn't seem to make it into the actual database. If I change DERIVE to GAUGE, it works as expected. munin-run bandwidth2 outputs the contents of /var/log/zen.log I've been all over the (sparse) docs for munin plugins, and can't find my mistake. Modifying an existing plugin didn't work for me either.

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• Server Memory with Magento

  - by Mohamed Elgharabawy

  I have a cloud server with the following specifications: 2vCPUs 4G RAM 160GB Disk Space Network 400Mb/s System Image: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS I am only running Magento CE 1.7.0.2 on this server. Nothing else. Usually, the server has a loading time of 4-5 seconds. Recently, this has dropped to over 30 seconds and sometimes the server just goes away and I get HTTP error reports to my email stating that HTTP requests took more than 20000ms. Running top command and sorting them returns the following: top - 15:29:07 up 3:40, 1 user, load average: 28.59, 25.95, 22.91 Tasks: 112 total, 30 running, 82 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 90.2%us, 9.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.2%st PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 31901 www-data 20 0 360m 71m 5840 R 7 1.8 1:39.51 apache2 32084 www-data 20 0 362m 72m 5548 R 7 1.8 1:31.56 apache2 32089 www-data 20 0 348m 59m 5660 R 7 1.5 1:41.74 apache2 32295 www-data 20 0 343m 54m 5532 R 7 1.4 2:00.78 apache2 32303 www-data 20 0 354m 65m 5260 R 7 1.6 1:38.76 apache2 32304 www-data 20 0 346m 56m 5544 R 7 1.4 1:41.26 apache2 32305 www-data 20 0 348m 59m 5640 R 7 1.5 1:50.11 apache2 32291 www-data 20 0 358m 69m 5256 R 6 1.7 1:44.26 apache2 32517 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5532 R 6 1.4 1:45.56 apache2 30473 www-data 20 0 355m 66m 5680 R 6 1.7 2:00.05 apache2 32093 www-data 20 0 352m 63m 5848 R 6 1.6 1:53.23 apache2 32302 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5512 R 6 1.4 1:55.87 apache2 32433 www-data 20 0 346m 57m 5500 S 6 1.4 1:31.58 apache2 32638 www-data 20 0 354m 65m 5508 R 6 1.6 1:36.59 apache2 32230 www-data 20 0 347m 57m 5524 R 6 1.4 1:33.96 apache2 32231 www-data 20 0 355m 66m 5512 R 6 1.7 1:37.47 apache2 32233 www-data 20 0 354m 64m 6032 R 6 1.6 1:59.74 apache2 32300 www-data 20 0 355m 66m 5672 R 6 1.7 1:43.76 apache2 32510 www-data 20 0 347m 58m 5512 R 6 1.5 1:42.54 apache2 32521 www-data 20 0 348m 59m 5508 R 6 1.5 1:47.99 apache2 32639 www-data 20 0 344m 55m 5512 R 6 1.4 1:34.25 apache2 32083 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5696 R 5 1.4 1:59.42 apache2 32085 www-data 20 0 347m 58m 5692 R 5 1.5 1:42.29 apache2 32293 www-data 20 0 353m 64m 5676 R 5 1.6 1:52.73 apache2 32301 www-data 20 0 348m 59m 5564 R 5 1.5 1:49.63 apache2 32528 www-data 20 0 351m 62m 5520 R 5 1.6 1:36.11 apache2 31523 mysql 20 0 3460m 576m 8288 S 5 14.4 2:06.91 mysqld 32002 www-data 20 0 345m 55m 5512 R 5 1.4 2:01.88 apache2 32080 www-data 20 0 357m 68m 5512 S 5 1.7 1:31.30 apache2 32163 www-data 20 0 347m 58m 5512 S 5 1.5 1:58.68 apache2 32509 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5504 R 5 1.4 1:49.54 apache2 32306 www-data 20 0 358m 68m 5504 S 4 1.7 1:53.29 apache2 32165 www-data 20 0 344m 55m 5524 S 4 1.4 1:40.71 apache2 32640 www-data 20 0 345m 56m 5528 R 4 1.4 1:36.49 apache2 31888 www-data 20 0 359m 70m 5664 R 4 1.8 1:57.07 apache2 32511 www-data 20 0 357m 67m 5512 S 3 1.7 1:47.00 apache2 32054 www-data 20 0 357m 68m 5660 S 2 1.7 1:53.10 apache2 1 root 20 0 24452 2276 1232 S 0 0.1 0:01.58 init Moreover, running free -m returns the following: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4003 3919 83 0 118 901 -/+ buffers/cache: 2899 1103 Swap: 0 0 0 To investigate this further, I have installed apache buddy, it recommeneded that I need to reduce the maxclient connections. Which I did. I also installed MysqlTuner and it suggests that I need to set my innodb_buffer_pool_size to = 3.0G. However, I cannot do that, since the whole memory is 4G. Here is the output from apache buddy: ### GENERAL REPORT ### Settings considered for this report: Your server's physical RAM: 4003MB Apache's MaxClients directive: 40 Apache MPM Model: prefork Largest Apache process (by memory): 73.77MB [ OK ] Your MaxClients setting is within an acceptable range. Max potential memory usage: 2950.8 MB Percentage of RAM allocated to Apache 73.72 % And this is the output of MySQLTuner: -------- Performance Metrics ------------------------------------------------- [--] Up for: 47m 22s (675K q [237.552 qps], 12K conn, TX: 1B, RX: 300M) [--] Reads / Writes: 45% / 55% [--] Total buffers: 2.1G global + 2.7M per thread (151 max threads) [OK] Maximum possible memory usage: 2.5G (64% of installed RAM) [OK] Slow queries: 0% (0/675K) [OK] Highest usage of available connections: 26% (40/151) [OK] Key buffer size / total MyISAM indexes: 36.0M/18.7M [OK] Key buffer hit rate: 100.0% (245K cached / 105 reads) [OK] Query cache efficiency: 92.5% (500K cached / 541K selects) [!!] Query cache prunes per day: 302886 [OK] Sorts requiring temporary tables: 0% (1 temp sorts / 15K sorts) [!!] Joins performed without indexes: 12135 [OK] Temporary tables created on disk: 25% (8K on disk / 32K total) [OK] Thread cache hit rate: 90% (1K created / 12K connections) [!!] Table cache hit rate: 17% (400 open / 2K opened) [OK] Open file limit used: 12% (123/1K) [OK] Table locks acquired immediately: 100% (196K immediate / 196K locks) [!!] InnoDB buffer pool / data size: 2.0G/3.5G [OK] InnoDB log waits: 0 -------- Recommendations ----------------------------------------------------- General recommendations: Run OPTIMIZE TABLE to defragment tables for better performance MySQL started within last 24 hours - recommendations may be inaccurate Enable the slow query log to troubleshoot bad queries Adjust your join queries to always utilize indexes Increase table_cache gradually to avoid file descriptor limits Read this before increasing table_cache over 64: http://bit.ly/1mi7c4C Variables to adjust: query_cache_size ( 64M) join_buffer_size ( 128.0K, or always use indexes with joins) table_cache ( 400) innodb_buffer_pool_size (= 3G) Last but not least, the server still has more than 60% of free disk space. Now, based on the above, I have few questions: Are these numbers normal? Do they make sense? Do I need to upgrade the server? If I don't need to upgrade and my configuration is not correct, how do I optimize it?

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• Can someone explain the "use-cases" for the default munin graphs?

  - by exhuma

  When installing munin, it activates a default set of plugins (at least on ubuntu). Alternatively, you can simply run munin-node-configure to figure out which plugins are supported on your system. Most of these plugins plot straight-forward data. My question is not to explain the nature of the data (well... maybe for some) but what is it that you look for in these graphs? It is easy to install munin and see fancy graphs. But having the graphs and not being able to "read" them renders them totally useless. I am going to list standard plugins which are enabled by default on my system. So it's going to be a long list. For completeness, I am also going to list plugins which I think to understand and give a short explanation as to what I think it's used for. Pleas correct if I am wrong with any of them. So let me split this questions in three parts: Plugins where I don't even understand the data Plugins where I understand the data but don't know what I should look out for Plugins which I think to understand Plugins where I don't even understand the data These may contain questions that are not necessarily aimed at munin alone. Not understanding the data usually mean a gap in fundamental knowledge on operating systems/hardware.... ;) Feel free to respond with a "giyf" answer. These are plugins where I can only guess what's going on... I hardly want to look at these "guessing"... Disk IOs per device (IOs/second)What's an IO. I know it stands for input/output. But that's as far as it goes. Disk latency per device (Average IO wait)Not a clue what an "IO wait" is... IO Service TimeThis one is a huge mess, and it's near impossible to see something in the graph at all. Plugins where I understand the data but don't know what I should look out for IOStat (blocks/second read/written)I assume, the thing to look out for in here are spikes? Which would mean that the device is in heavy use? Available entropy (bytes)I assume that this is important for random number generation? Why would I graph this? So far the value has always been near constant. VMStat (running/I/O sleep processes)What's the difference between this one and the "processes" graph? Both show running/sleeping processes, whereas the "Processes" graph seems to have more details. Disk throughput per device (bytes/second read/written) What's thedifference between this one and the "IOStat" graph? inode table usageWhat should I look for in this graph? Plugins which I think to understand I'll be guessing some things here... correct me if I am wrong. Disk usage in percent (percent)How much disk space is used/remaining. As this is approaching 100%, you should consider cleaning up or extend the partition. This is extremely important for the root partition. Firewall Throughput (packets/second)The number of packets passing through the firewall. If this is spiking for a longer period of time, it could be a sign of a DOS attack (or we are simply recieving a large file). It can also give you an idea about your firewall performance. If it's levelling out and you need more "power" you should consider load balancing. If it's levelling out and see a correlation with your CPU load, it could also mean that your hardware is not fast enough. Correlations with disk usage could point to excessive LOG targets in you FW config. eth0 errors (packets in/out)Network errors. If this value is increasing, it could be a sign of faulty hardware. eth0 traffic (bits/second in/out)Raw network traffic. This should correlate with Firewall throughput. number of threadsAn ever-increasing value might point to a process not properly closing threads. Investigate! processesBreakdown of active processes (including sleeping). A quick spike in here might point to a fork-bomb. A slowly, but ever-increasing value might point to an application spawning sub-processes but not properly closing them. Investigate using ps faux. process priorityThis shows the distribution of process priorities. Having only high-priority processes is not of much use. Consider de-prioritizing some. cpu usageFairly straight-forward. If this is spiking, you may have an attack going on, or a process is hogging the CPU. Idf it's slowly increasing and approaching max in normal operations, you should consider upgrading your hardware (or load-balancing). file table usageNumber of actively open files. If this is reaching max, you may have a process opening, but not properly releasing files. load averageShows an summarized value for the system load. Should correlate with CPU usage. Increasing values can come from a number of sources. Look for correlations with other graphs. memory usageA graphical representation of you memory. As long as you have a lot of unused+cache+buffers you are fine. swap in/outShows the activity on your swap partition. This should always be 0. If you see activity on this, you should add more memory to your machine!

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• Why is the latency on one LVM volume consistently higher?

  - by David Schmitt

  I've got a server with LVM over RAID1. One of the volumes has a consistently higher IO latency (as measured by the diskstats_latency munin plugin) than the other volumes from the same group. As you can see, the dark orange /root volume has consistently high IO latency. Actually ten times the average latency of the physical devices. It also has the highest Min and Max values. My main concern are not the peaks, which occur under high load, but the constant load on (semi-)idle. The server is running Debian Squeeze with the VServer kernel and has four VServer containers and one KVM guest. I'm looking for ways to fix - or at least understand - this situation. Here're some parts of the system configuration: root@kvmhost2:~# df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/system--host-root 19G 3.8G 14G 22% / tmpfs 16G 0 16G 0% /lib/init/rw udev 16G 224K 16G 1% /dev tmpfs 16G 0 16G 0% /dev/shm /dev/md0 942M 37M 858M 5% /boot /dev/mapper/system--host-isos 28G 19G 8.1G 70% /srv/isos /dev/mapper/system--host-vs_a 30G 23G 6.0G 79% /var/lib/vservers/a /dev/mapper/system--host-vs_b 5.0G 594M 4.1G 13% /var/lib/vservers/b /dev/mapper/system--host-vs_c 5.0G 555M 4.2G 12% /var/lib/vservers/c /dev/loop0 4.4G 4.4G 0 100% /media/debian-6.0.0-amd64-DVD-1 /dev/loop1 4.4G 4.4G 0 100% /media/debian-6.0.0-i386-DVD-1 /dev/mapper/system--host-vs_d 74G 55G 16G 78% /var/lib/vservers/d root@kvmhost2:~# cat /proc/mounts rootfs / rootfs rw 0 0 none /sys sysfs rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 none /proc proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime 0 0 none /dev devtmpfs rw,relatime,size=16500836k,nr_inodes=4125209,mode=755 0 0 none /dev/pts devpts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000 0 0 /dev/mapper/system--host-root / ext3 rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered 0 0 tmpfs /lib/init/rw tmpfs rw,nosuid,relatime,mode=755 0 0 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime 0 0 fusectl /sys/fs/fuse/connections fusectl rw,relatime 0 0 /dev/md0 /boot ext3 rw,sync,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0 /dev/mapper/system--host-isos /srv/isos ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0 /dev/mapper/system--host-vs_a /var/lib/vservers/a ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0 /dev/mapper/system--host-vs_b /var/lib/vservers/b ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0 /dev/mapper/system--host-vs_c /var/lib/vservers/c ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0 /dev/loop0 /media/debian-6.0.0-amd64-DVD-1 iso9660 ro,relatime 0 0 /dev/loop1 /media/debian-6.0.0-i386-DVD-1 iso9660 ro,relatime 0 0 /dev/mapper/system--host-vs_d /var/lib/vservers/d ext3 rw,relatime,errors=continue,data=ordered 0 0 root@kvmhost2:~# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] md1 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdb2[1] 975779968 blocks [2/2] [UU] md0 : active raid1 sda1[0] sdb1[1] 979840 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> root@kvmhost2:~# iostat -x Linux 2.6.32-5-vserver-amd64 (kvmhost2) 06/28/2012 _x86_64_ (8 CPU) avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 3.09 0.14 2.92 1.51 0.00 92.35 Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util sda 23.25 161.12 7.46 37.90 855.27 1596.62 54.05 0.13 2.80 1.76 8.00 sdb 22.82 161.36 7.36 37.66 850.29 1596.62 54.35 0.54 12.01 1.80 8.09 md0 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.14 0.02 38.44 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 md1 0.00 0.00 53.55 198.16 768.01 1585.25 9.35 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 dm-0 0.00 0.00 0.48 20.21 16.70 161.71 8.62 0.26 12.72 0.77 1.60 dm-1 0.00 0.00 3.62 10.03 28.94 80.21 8.00 0.19 13.68 1.59 2.17 dm-2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 9.17 0.00 9.64 6.42 0.00 dm-3 0.00 0.00 6.73 0.41 53.87 3.28 8.00 0.02 3.44 0.12 0.09 dm-4 0.00 0.00 17.45 18.18 139.57 145.47 8.00 0.42 11.81 0.76 2.69 dm-5 0.00 0.00 2.50 46.38 120.50 371.07 10.06 0.69 14.20 0.46 2.26 dm-6 0.00 0.00 0.02 0.10 0.67 0.81 12.53 0.01 75.53 18.58 0.22 dm-7 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 7.99 0.00 11.24 9.45 0.00 dm-8 0.00 0.00 22.69 102.76 407.25 822.09 9.80 0.97 7.71 0.39 4.95 dm-9 0.00 0.00 0.06 0.08 0.50 0.62 8.00 0.07 481.23 11.72 0.16 root@kvmhost2:~# ls -l /dev/mapper/ total 0 crw------- 1 root root 10, 59 May 11 11:19 control lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 5 15:08 system--host-kvm1 -> ../dm-4 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 5 15:08 system--host-kvm2 -> ../dm-3 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 5 15:06 system--host-isos -> ../dm-2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 May 11 11:19 system--host-root -> ../dm-0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 5 15:06 system--host-swap -> ../dm-9 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 5 15:06 system--host-vs_d -> ../dm-8 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 5 15:06 system--host-vs_b -> ../dm-6 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 5 15:06 system--host-vs_c -> ../dm-7 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 5 15:06 system--host-vs_a -> ../dm-5 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Jun 5 15:08 system--host-kvm3 -> ../dm-1 root@kvmhost2:~#

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• FreeBSD high load loopback interface

  - by user1740915

  I have a problem with a FreeBSD server. There is a FreeBSD 9.0 amd64, two network cards em1 (internet), em0 (local network) configured firewall ipfw, natd, squid (not transparent), the server acts as a gateway for access to the Internet. Next problem: upload via squid is very low. At this moment I see next: natd, dhcpd load the cpu at that time when uploading through squid and there are a lot of traffic through the loopback interface. ipfw show output 0100 655389684 36707144666 allow ip from any to any via lo0 00200 0 0 deny ip from any to 127.0.0.0/8 00300 0 0 deny ip from 127.0.0.0/8 to any 00400 0 0 deny ip from any to ::1 00500 0 0 deny ip from ::1 to any 00600 4 292 allow ipv6-icmp from :: to ff02::/16 00700 0 0 allow ipv6-icmp from fe80::/10 to fe80::/10 00800 1 76 allow ipv6-icmp from fe80::/10 to ff02::/16 00900 0 0 allow ipv6-icmp from any to any ip6 icmp6types 1 01000 0 0 allow ipv6-icmp from any to any ip6 icmp6types 2,135,136 01100 1615 76160 deny ip from 192.168.1.1 to any in via em1 01200 0 0 deny ip from 199.69.99.11 to any in via em0 01300 46652 3705426 deny ip from any to 172.16.0.0/12 via em1 01400 3936404 345618870 deny ip from any to 192.168.0.0/16 via em1 01500 4 336 deny ip from any to 0.0.0.0/8 via em1 01600 4129 387621 deny ip from any to 169.254.0.0/16 via em1 01700 0 0 deny ip from any to 192.0.2.0/24 via em1 01800 917566 33777571 deny ip from any to 224.0.0.0/4 via em1 01900 147872 22029252 deny ip from any to 240.0.0.0/4 via em1 02000 1132194739 1190981955947 divert 8668 ip4 from any to any via em1 02100 3 248 deny ip from 172.16.0.0/12 to any via em1 02200 35925 2281289 deny ip from 192.168.0.0/16 to any via em1 02300 1808 122494 deny ip from 0.0.0.0/8 to any via em1 02400 3 174 deny ip from 169.254.0.0/16 to any via em1 02500 0 0 deny ip from 192.0.2.0/24 to any via em1 02600 0 0 deny ip from 224.0.0.0/4 to any via em1 02700 0 0 deny ip from 240.0.0.0/4 to any via em1 02800 960156249 1095316736582 allow tcp from any to any established 02900 64236062 8243196577 allow ip from any to any frag 03000 34 1756 allow tcp from any to me dst-port 25 setup 03100 193 11580 allow tcp from any to me dst-port 53 setup 03200 63 4222 allow udp from any to me dst-port 53 03300 64 8350 allow udp from me 53 to any 03400 417 24140 allow tcp from any to me dst-port 80 setup 03500 211 10472 allow ip from any to me dst-port 3389 setup 05300 77 4488 allow ip from any to me dst-port 1723 setup 05400 3 156 allow ip from any to me dst-port 8443 setup 05500 9882 590596 allow tcp from any to me dst-port 22 setup 05600 1 60 allow ip from any to me dst-port 2000 setup 05700 0 0 allow ip from any to me dst-port 2201 setup 07400 4241779 216690096 deny log logamount 1000 ip4 from any to any in via em1 setup proto tcp 07500 21135656 1048824936 allow tcp from any to any setup 07600 474447 35298081 allow udp from me to any dst-port 53 keep-state 07700 532 40612 allow udp from me to any dst-port 123 keep-state 65535 1990638432 1122305322718 allow ip from any to any systat -ifstat when uploading via squid Load Average ||| Interface Traffic Peak Total tun0 in 79.507 KB/s 232.479 KB/s 42.314 GB out 2.022 MB/s 2.424 MB/s 59.662 GB lo0 in 4.450 MB/s 4.450 MB/s 43.723 GB out 4.450 MB/s 4.450 MB/s 43.723 GB em1 in 2.629 MB/s 2.982 MB/s 464.533 GB out 2.493 MB/s 2.875 MB/s 484.673 GB em0 in 240.458 KB/s 296.941 KB/s 442.368 GB out 512.508 KB/s 850.857 KB/s 416.122 GB top output PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME WCPU COMMAND 66885 root 1 92 0 26672K 2784K CPU3 3 528:43 65.48% natd 9160 dhcpd 1 45 0 31032K 9280K CPU1 1 7:40 32.96% dhcpd 66455 root 1 20 0 18344K 2856K select 1 119:27 1.37% openvpn 16043 squid 1 20 0 44404K 17884K kqread 2 0:22 0.29% squid squid.conf cat /usr/local/etc/squid/squid.conf # # Recommended minimum configuration: # acl manager proto cache_object acl localhost src 127.0.0.1/32 ::1 acl to_localhost dst 127.0.0.0/8 0.0.0.0/32 ::1 # Example rule allowing access from your local networks. # Adapt to list your (internal) IP networks from where browsing # should be allowed acl localnet src 10.0.0.0/8 # RFC1918 possible internal network acl localnet src 172.16.0.0/12 # RFC1918 possible internal network acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16 # RFC1918 possible internal network acl localnet src fc00::/7 # RFC 4193 local private network range acl localnet src fe80::/10 # RFC 4291 link-local (directly plugged) machines acl SSL_ports port 443 acl Safe_ports port 80 # http acl Safe_ports port 21 # ftp acl Safe_ports port 443 # https acl Safe_ports port 70 # gopher acl Safe_ports port 210 # wais acl Safe_ports port 1025-65535 # unregistered ports acl Safe_ports port 280 # http-mgmt acl Safe_ports port 488 # gss-http acl Safe_ports port 591 # filemaker acl Safe_ports port 777 # multiling http acl CONNECT method CONNECT # # Recommended minimum Access Permission configuration: # # Only allow cachemgr access from localhost http_access allow manager localhost http_access deny manager # Deny requests to certain unsafe ports http_access deny !Safe_ports # Deny CONNECT to other than secure SSL ports http_access deny CONNECT !SSL_ports # We strongly recommend the following be uncommented to protect innocent # web applications running on the proxy server who think the only # one who can access services on "localhost" is a local user http_access deny to_localhost # # INSERT YOUR OWN RULE(S) HERE TO ALLOW ACCESS FROM YOUR CLIENTS # # Example rule allowing access from your local networks. # Adapt localnet in the ACL section to list your (internal) IP networks # from where browsing should be allowed http_access allow localnet http_access allow localhost # And finally deny all other access to this proxy http_access deny all # Squid normally listens to port 3128 http_port 192.168.1.1:3128 # Uncomment and adjust the following to add a disk cache directory. #cache_dir ufs /var/squid/cache 100 16 256 # Leave coredumps in the first cache dir coredump_dir /var/squid/cache I understand that the traffic passes through the SQUID several times. But can not find why.

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