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• SQL SERVER – Windows File/Folder and Share Permissions – Notes from the Field #029

  - by Pinal Dave

  [Note from Pinal]: This is a 29th episode of Notes from the Field series. Security is the task which we should give it to the experts. If there is a small overlook or misstep, there are good chances that security of the organization is compromised. This is very true, but there are always devils’s advocates who believe everyone should know the security. As a DBA and Administrator, I often see people not taking interest in the Windows Security hiding behind the reason of not expert of Windows Server. We all often miss the important mission statement for the success of any organization – Teamwork. In this blog post Brian tells the story in very interesting lucid language. Read On! In this episode of the Notes from the Field series database expert Brian Kelley explains a very crucial issue DBAs and Developer faces on their production server. Linchpin People are database coaches and wellness experts for a data driven world. Read the experience of Brian in his own words. When I talk security among database professionals, I find that most have at least a working knowledge of how to apply security within a database. When I talk with DBAs in particular, I find that most have at least a working knowledge of security at the server level if we’re speaking of SQL Server. One area I see continually that is weak is in the area of Windows file/folder (NTFS) and share permissions. The typical response is, “I’m a database developer and the Windows system administrator is responsible for that.” That may very well be true – the system administrator may have the primary responsibility and accountability for file/folder and share security for the server. However, if you’re involved in the typical activities surrounding databases and moving data around, you should know these permissions, too. Otherwise, you could be setting yourself up where someone is able to get to data he or she shouldn’t, or you could be opening the door where human error puts bad data in your production system. File/Folder Permission Basics: I wrote about file/folder permissions a few years ago to give the basic permissions that are most often seen. Here’s what you must know as a minimum at the file/folder level: Read - Allows you to read the contents of the file or folder. Having read permissions allows you to copy the file or folder. Write  – Again, as the name implies, it allows you to write to the file or folder. This doesn’t include the ability to delete, however, nothing stops a person with this access from writing an empty file. Delete - Allows the file/folder to be deleted. If you overwrite files, you may need this permission. Modify - Allows read, write, and delete. Full Control - Same as modify + the ability to assign permissions. File/Folder permissions aggregate, unless there is a DENY (where it trumps, just like within SQL Server), meaning if a person is in one group that gives Read and antoher group that gives Write, that person has both Read and Write permissions. As you might expect me to say, always apply the Principle of Least Privilege. This likely means that any additional permission you might add does not need Full Control. Share Permission Basics: At the share level, here are the permissions. Read - Allows you to read the contents on the share. Change - Allows you to read, write, and delete contents on the share. Full control - Change + the ability to modify permissions. Like with file/folder permissions, these permissions aggregate, and DENY trumps. So What Access Does a Person / Process Have? Figuring out what someone or some process has depends on how the location is being accessed: Access comes through the share (\\ServerName\Share) – a combination of permissions is considered. Access is through a drive letter (C:\, E:\, S:\, etc.) – only the file/folder permissions are considered. The only complicated one here is access through the share. Here’s what Windows does: Figures out what the aggregated permissions are at the file/folder level. Figures out what the aggregated permissions are at the share level. Takes the most restrictive of the two sets of permissions. You can test this by granting Full Control over a folder (this is likely already in place for the Users local group) and then setting up a share. Give only Read access through the share, and that includes to Administrators (if you’re creating a share, likely you have membership in the Administrators group). Try to read a file through the share. Now try to modify it. The most restrictive permission is the Share level permissions. It’s set to only allow Read. Therefore, if you come through the share, it’s the most restrictive. Does This Knowledge Really Help Me? In my experience, it does. I’ve seen cases where sensitive files were accessible by every authenticated user through a share. Auditors, as you might expect, have a real problem with that. I’ve also seen cases where files to be imported as part of the nightly processing were overwritten by files intended from development. And I’ve seen cases where a process can’t get to the files it needs for a process because someone changed the permissions. If you know file/folder and share permissions, you can spot and correct these types of security flaws. Given that there are a lot of database professionals that don’t understand these permissions, if you know it, you set yourself apart. And if you’re able to help on critical processes, you begin to set yourself up as a linchpin (link to .pdf) for your organization. If you want to get started with performance tuning and database security with the help of experts, read more over at Fix Your SQL Server. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: Notes from the Field, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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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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• Why We Should Learn to Stop Worrying and Love Millennials

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Christine Mellon Much is said and written about the new generations of employees entering our workforce, as though they are a strange specimen, a mysterious life form to be “figured out,” accommodated and engaged – at a safe distance, of course.  At its worst, this talk takes a critical and disapproving tone, with baby boomer employees adamantly refusing to validate this new breed of worker, let alone determine how to help them succeed and achieve their potential.   The irony of our baby-boomer resentments and suspicions is that they belie the fact that we created the very vision that younger employees are striving to achieve.  From our frustrations with empty careers that did not fulfill us, from our opposition to “the man,” from our sharp memories of our parents’ toiling for 30 years just for the right to retire, from the simple desire not to live our lives in a state of invisibility, came the seeds of hope for something better. One characteristic of Millennial workers that grew from these seeds is the desire to experience as much as possible.  They are the “Experiential Employee”, with a passion for growing in diverse ways and expanding personal and professional horizons.  Rather than rooting themselves in a single company for a career, or even in a single career path, these employees are committed to building a broad portfolio of experiences and capabilities that will enable them to make a difference and to leave a mark of significance in the world.  How much richer is the organization that nurtures and leverages this inclination?  Our curmudgeonly ways must be surrendered and our focus redirected toward building the next generation of talent ecosystems, if we are to optimize what future generations have to offer.   Accelerating Professional Development In spite of our Boomer grumblings about Millennials’ “unrealistic” expectations, the truth is that we have a well-matched set of circumstances.  We have executives-in-waiting who want to learn quickly and a concurrent, urgent need to ramp up their development time, based on anticipated high levels of retirement in the next 10+ years.  Since we need to rapidly skill up these heirs to the corporate kingdom, isn’t it a fortunate coincidence that they are hungry to learn, develop and move fluidly throughout our organizations??  So our challenge now is to efficiently operationalize the wisdom we have acquired about effective learning and development.   We have already evolved from classroom-based models to diverse instructional methods.  The next step is to find the best approaches to help younger employees learn quickly and apply new learnings in an impactful way.   Creating temporary or even permanent functional partnerships among Millennial employees is one way to maximize outcomes.  This might take the form of 2 or more employees owning aspects of what once fell under a single role.  While one might argue this would mean duplication of resources, it could be a short term cost while employees come up to speed.  And the potential benefits would be numerous:  leveraging and validating the inherent sense of community of new generations, creating cross-functional skills with broad applicability, yielding additional perspectives and approaches to traditional work outcomes, and accelerating the performance curve for incumbents through Cooperative Learning (Johnson, D. and Johnson R., 1989, 1999).  This well-researched teaching strategy, where students support each other in the absorption and application of new information, has been shown to deliver faster, more efficient learning, and greater retention. Alternately, perhaps short term contracts with exiting retirees, or former retirees, to help facilitate the development of following generations may have merit.  Again, a short term cost, certainly.  However, the gains realized in shortening the learning curve, and strengthening engagement are substantial and lasting. Ultimately, there needs to be creative thinking applied for each organization on how to accelerate the capabilities of our future leaders in unique ways that mesh with current culture. The manner in which performance is evaluated must finally shift as well.  Employees will need to be assessed on how well they have developed key skills and capabilities vs. end-to-end mastery of functional positions they have no interest in keeping for an entire career. As we become more comfortable in placing greater and greater weight on competencies vs. tasks, we will realize increased organizational agility via this new generation of workers, which will be further enhanced by their natural flexibility and appetite for change. Revisiting Succession  For many years, organizations have failed to deliver desired succession planning outcomes.  According to CEB’s 2013 research, only 28% of current leaders were pre-identified in a succession plan. These disappointing results, along with the entrance of the experiential, Millennial employee into the workforce, may just provide the needed impetus for HR to reinvent succession processes.   We have recognized that the best professional development efforts are not always linear, and the time has come to fully adopt this philosophy in regard to succession as well.  Paths to specific organizational roles will not look the same for newer generations who seek out unique learning opportunities, without consideration of a singular career destination.  Rather than charting particular jobs as precursors for key positions, the experiences and skills behind what makes an incumbent successful must become essential in succession mapping.  And the multitude of ways in which those experiences and skills may be acquired must be factored into the process, along with the individual employee’s level of learning agility. While this may seem daunting, it is necessary and long overdue.  We have talked about the criticality of competency-based succession, however, we have not lived up to our own rhetoric.  Many Boomers have experienced the same frustration in our careers; knowing we are capable of shining in a particular role, but being denied the opportunity due to how our career history lined up, on paper, with documented job requirements.  These requirements usually emphasized past jobs/titles and specific tasks, versus capabilities, drive and willingness (let alone determination) to learn new things.  How satisfying would it be for us to leave a legacy where such narrow thinking no longer applies and potential is amplified? Realizing Diversity Another bloom from the seeds we Boomers have tried to plant over the past decades is a completely evolved view of diversity.  Millennial employees assume a diverse workforce, and are startled by anything less.  Their social tolerance, nurtured by wide and diverse networks, is unprecedented.  College graduates expect a similar landscape in the “real world” to what they experienced throughout their lives.  They appreciate and seek out divergent points of view and experiences without needing any persuasion.  The face of our U.S. workforce will likely see dramatic change as Millennials apply their fresh take on hiring and building strong teams, with an inherent sense of inclusion.  This wonderful aspect of the Millennial wave should be celebrated and strongly encouraged, as it is the fulfillment of our own aspirations. Future Perfect The Experiential Employee is operating more as a free agent than a long term player, and their commitment will essentially last as long as meaningful organizational culture and personal/professional opportunities keep their interest.  As Boomers, we have laid the foundation for this new, spirited employment attitude, and we should take pride in knowing that.  Generations to come will challenge organizations to excel in how they identify, manage and nurture talent. Let’s support and revel in the future that we’ve helped invent, rather than lament what we think has been lost.  After all, the future is always connected to the past.  And as so eloquently phrased by Antoine Lavoisier, French nobleman, chemist and politico:  “Nothing is Lost, Nothing is Created, and Everything is Transformed.” Christine has over 25 years of diverse HR experience.  She has held HR consulting and corporate roles, including CHRO positions for Echostar in Denver, a 6,000+ employee global engineering firm, and Aepona, a startup software firm, successfully acquired by Intel. Christine is a resource to Oracle clients, to assist in Human Capital Management strategy development and implementation, compensation practices, talent development initiatives, employee engagement, global HR management, and integrated HR systems and processes that support the full employee lifecycle. 

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• SQL Sentry First Impressions

  - by AjarnMark

  After struggling to defend my SQL Servers from a political attack recently, I realized that I needed better tools to back me up, and SQL Sentry is the leading candidate. A couple of weeks ago, seemingly from out of nowhere, complaints from the business users started coming in that one of the core internal applications was running dramatically slower than normal, and fingers were being pointed at the SQL Server.  Unfortunately, we don’t have a production DBA whose entire job is to monitor and maintain our SQL Servers.  The responsibility falls to me to do the best I can, investing only a small portion of my time, because there are so many other responsibilities to take care of, and our industry is still deep in recession.  I inherited these SQL Servers and have made significant improvements in process and procedure, but I had not yet made the time to take real baseline measurements or keep a really close eye on the performance.  Like many DBAs, I wrote several of my own tools and used the “built-in tools” like Profiler, PerfMon, and sp_who2 (did I mention most of our instances are SQL Server 2000?).  These have all served me well for in-the-moment troubleshooting and maintenance, but they really fell down on the job when I was called upon to “prove” that SQL Server performance was acceptable and more importantly had not degraded recently (i.e. historical comparisons).  I really didn’t have anything from a historical comparison perspective, but I was able to show that current performance was acceptable, and deflect attention back onto other components (which in fact turned out to be the real culprit). That experience dramatically illustrated the need for better monitoring tools.  Coincidentally, I had been talking recently to my boss about the mini nightmare of monitoring several critical and interdependent overnight jobs that operate on separate instances of SQL Server.  Among other tools, I had been using Idera’s SQL Job Manager which is a free tool and did a nice job of showing me job schedules and histories in a nice calendar view.  This worked fairly well, and for the money (did I mention it was free?) it couldn’t be beat.  But it is based on the stored job history in MSDB, and there were other performance problems that we ran into when we started changing the settings for how much job history to retain, in order to be able to look back a month or more in the calendar view.  Another coincidence (if you believe in such things) was that when we had some of those performance challenges, I posted a couple of questions to the #sqlhelp hashtag on Twitter and Greg Gonzalez (@SQLSensei) suggested I check out SQL Sentry’s Event Manager.  At the time, I just thought he worked there, but later found out that he founded the company.  When I took a quick look at the features & benefits, the one that really jumped out at me is Chaining and Queueing which sounded like it would really help with our “interdependent jobs on different servers” issue. I know that is a lot of background story and coincidences, but hopefully you have stuck with me so far, and now we have arrived at the point where last week I downloaded and installed the 30-day trial of the SQL Sentry Power Suite, which is Event Manager plus Performance Advisor.  And I must say that I really like what I see so far.  Here are a few highlights: Great Support.  I had two issues getting the trial setup and monitoring a handful of our servers.  One of which was entirely my fault (missed a security setting in SQL 2008) and the other was mostly my fault (late change to some config settings that were apparently cached and did not get refreshed properly).  In both cases, the support staff at SQL Sentry were very responsive and rather quickly figured out what the cause and fix was for each of them.  This left me with a great impression of the company.  Kudos to them! Chaining and Queueing.  While I have not yet activated this feature, I am very excited about the possibilities.  We have jobs on three different instances of SQL Server that have to be run in a certain order, and each has to finish before the next can successfully begin, and I believe this feature will ensure just that.  It has been a real pain in the backside when one of those jobs runs just a little too long and does not finish before the job on another instance starts, thus triggering a chain reaction of either outright job failures, or worse, successful completion of completely invalid processing. Calendar View.  I really, really like the Event Manager calendar view where I can see all jobs and events across all instances and identify potential resource contention as well as windows of opportunity for maintenance activity.  Very well done, and based on Event Manager’s own database of accumulated historical information rather than querying the source instances every time. Performance Advisor Dashboard History View.  This view let’s me quickly select a date and time range and it displays graphs of key SQL Server and Windows metrics.  This is exactly the thing I needed to answer the “has performance changed recently” question at the beginning of this post. Reporting Services Subscription Jobs with Report Name.  This was a big and VERY pleasant surprise.  If you have ever looked at the list of SQL Server jobs that SQL Server Reporting Services creates when you make a Subscription, you will notice that they all have some sort of GUID as the name of the job.  This is really ugly, and really annoying because when you are just looking at the SQL Agent and Job Activity Monitor, if you see that Job X failed, you really do not have any indication in the name or the properties of the Job itself, as to what Report that was for.  But with SQL Sentry Event Manager you do.  The Jobs list in the Navigator pane in SQL Sentry, amazingly, displays the name of the Report that the Subscription Job is for.  And when you open it to see more details, it shows you the full Reporting Services path to that Report, so you can immediately track it down in the Report Manager in case you want to identify/notify the owner or edit the Subscription information.  I did not expect this at all, but I sure do like it.  HOORAY! That is just my first impressions from using the tools for a few days.  And I haven’t even gotten into how it showed me where I was completely mistaken about one aspect of my SQL Server disk configurations.  I’ll share that lesson in another blog entry.  But I have to say it again, the combination of Event Manager and Performance Advisor working together have really made me a fan.

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• Learnings from trying to write better software: Loud errors from the very start

  - by theo.spears

  Microsoft made a very small number of backwards incompatible changes between .NET 1.1 and 2.0, because they wanted to make it as easy and safe as possible to port applications to the new runtime. (Here’s a list.) However, one thing they did change was what happens when a background thread fails with an unhanded exception - in .NET 1.1 nothing happened, the thread terminated, and the application continued oblivious. Try the same trick in .NET 2.0 and the entire application, including all threads, will rudely terminate. There are three reasons for this. Firstly if a background thread has crashed, it may have left the entire application in an inconsistent state, in a way that will affect other threads. It’s better to terminate the entire application than continue and have the application perform actions based on a broken state, for example take customer orders, or write corrupt files to disk.  Secondly, during software development, it is far better for errors to be loud and obtrusive. Even if you have unit tests and integration tests (and you should), a key part of ensuring software works properly is to actually try using it, both through systematic testing and through the casual use all software gets by its developers during use. Subtle errors are easy to miss if you are not actually doing real work using the application, loud errors are obvious. Thirdly, and most importantly, even if catching and swallowing exceptions indiscriminately doesn't cause any problems in your application, the presence of unexpected exceptions shows you do not fully understand the behavior of your code. The currently released version of your application may be absolutely correct. However, because your mental model of the behavior is wrong, any future change you make to the program could and probably will introduce critical errors.  This applies to more than just exceptions causing threads to exit, any unexpected state should make the application blow up in an un-ignorable way. The worst thing you can do is silently swallow errors and continue. And let's be clear, writing to a log file does not count as blowing up in an un-ignorable way.  This is all simple as long as the call stack only contains your code, but when your functions start to be called by third party or .NET framework code, it's surprisingly easy for exceptions to start vanishing. Let's look at two examples.   1. Windows forms drag drop events  Usually if you throw an exception from a winforms event handler it will bring up the "application has crashed" dialog with abort and continue options. This is a good default behavior - the error is big and loud, but it is possible for the user to ignore the error and hopefully save their data, if somehow this bug makes it past testing. However drag and drop are different - throw an exception from one of these and it will just be silently swallowed with no explanation.  By the way, it's not just drag and drop events. Timer events do it too.  You can research how exceptions are treated in different handlers and code appropriately, but the safest and most user friendly approach is to always catch exceptions in your event handlers and show your own error message. I'll talk about one good approach to handling these exceptions at the end of this post.   2. SSMS integration for SQL Tab Magic  A while back wrote an SSMS add-in called SQL Tab Magic (learn more about the process here). It works by listening to certain SSMS events and remembering what documents are opened and closed. I deployed it internally and it was used for a few months by a number of people without problems, so I was reasonably confident in its quality. Before releasing I made a few cleanups, including introducing error reporting. Bam. A few days later I was looking at over 1,000 error reports in my inbox. In turns out I wasn't handling table designers properly. The exceptions were there, but again SSMS was helpfully swallowing them all for me, so I was blissfully unaware. Had I made my errors loud from the start, I would have noticed these issues long before and fixed them.   Handling exceptions  Now you are systematically catching exceptions throughout your application, you need to do something with them. I've tried 3 options: log them, alert the user, and automatically send them home.  There are a few good options for logging in .NET. The most widespread is Apache log4net, which provides a very capable and configurable logging framework. There is also NLog which has a compatible interface, with a greater emphasis on fluent rather than XML configuration.  Alerting the user serves two purposes. Firstly it means they understand their action has failed to they don't just assume it worked (Silent file copy failure is a problem if you then delete the originals) or that they should keep waiting for a background task to complete. Secondly, it means the users can report the bug to your support team, and then you can fix it. This means the message you show the user should contain the information you need as a developer to identify and fix it. And the user will probably just send you a screenshot of the dialog, so it shouldn't be hidden by scroll bars.  This leads us to the third option, automatically sending error reports home. By automatic I mean with minimal effort on the part of the user, rather than doing it silently behind their backs. The advantage of this is you can send back far more detailed and precise information than you can expect a user to include in an email, and by making it easier to report errors, you make it more likely users will do so.  We do this using a great tool called SmartAssembly (full disclosure: this is a product made by Red Gate). It captures complete stack traces including the values of all local variables and then allows the user to send all this information back with a single click. We also capture log files to help understand what lead up to the error. We then use the free SmartAssembly Sync for Jira to dedupe these reports and raise them as bugs in our bug tracking system.  The combined effect of loud errors during development and then automatic error reporting once software is deployed allows us to find and fix more bugs, correct misunderstandings on how our software works, and overall is a key piece in delivering higher quality software. However it is no substitute for having motivated cunning testers in the building - and we're looking to hire more of those too.   If you found this post interesting you should follow me on twitter.  

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• Building an Infrastructure Cloud with Oracle VM for x86 + Enterprise Manager 12c

  - by Richard Rotter

  Cloud Computing? Everyone is talking about Cloud these days. Everyone is explaining how the cloud will help you to bring your service up and running very fast, secure and with little effort. You can find these kinds of presentations at almost every event around the globe. But what is really behind all this stuff? Is it really so simple? And the answer is: Yes it is! With the Oracle SW Stack it is! In this post, I will try to bring this down to earth, demonstrating how easy it could be to build a cloud infrastructure with Oracle's solution for cloud computing.But let me cover some basics first: How fast can you build a cloud?How elastic is your cloud so you can provide new services on demand? How much effort does it take to monitor and operate your Cloud Infrastructure in order to meet your SLAs?How easy is it to chargeback for your services provided? These are the critical success factors of Cloud Computing. And Oracle has an answer to all those questions. By using Oracle VM for X86 in combination with Enterprise Manager 12c you can build and control your cloud environment very fast and easy. What are the fundamental building blocks for your cloud? Oracle Cloud Building Blocks #1 Hardware Surprise, surprise. Even the cloud needs to run somewhere, hence you will need hardware. This HW normally consists of servers, storage and networking. But Oracles goes beyond that. There are Optimized Solutions available for your cloud infrastructure. This is a cookbook to build your HW cloud platform. For example, building your cloud infrastructure with blades and our network infrastructure will reduce complexity in your datacenter (Blades with switch network modules, splitter cables to reduce the amount of cables, TOR (Top Of the Rack) switches which are building the interface to your infrastructure environment. Reducing complexity even in the cabling will help you to manage your environment more efficient and with less risk. Of course, our engineered systems fit into the cloud perfectly too. Although they are considered as a PaaS themselves, having the database SW (for Exadata) and the application development environment (for Exalogic) already deployed on them, in general they are ideal systems to enable you building your own cloud and PaaS infrastructure. #2 Virtualization The next missing link in the cloud setup is virtualization. For me personally, it's one of the most hidden "secret", that oracle can provide you with a complete virtualization stack in terms of a hypervisor on both architectures: X86 and Sparc CPUs. There is Oracle VM for X86 and Oracle VM for Sparc available at no additional  license costs if your are running this virtualization stack on top of Oracle HW (and with Oracle Premier Support for HW). This completes the virtualization portfolio together with Solaris Zones introduced already with Solaris 10 a few years ago. Let me explain how Oracle VM for X86 works: Oracle VM for x86 consists of two main parts: - The Oracle VM Server: Oracle VM Server is installed on bare metal and it is the hypervisor which is able to run virtual machines. It has a very small footprint. The ISO-Image of Oracle VM Server is only 200MB large. It is very small but efficient. You can install a OVM-Server in less than 5 mins by booting the Server with the ISO-Image assigned and providing the necessary configuration parameters (like installing an Linux distribution). After the installation, the OVM-Server is ready to use. That's all. - The Oracle VM-Manager: OVM-Manager is the central management tool where you can control your OVM-Servers. OVM-Manager provides the graphical user interface, which is an Application Development Framework (ADF) application, with a familiar web-browser based interface, to manage Oracle VM Servers, virtual machines, and resources. The Oracle VM Manager has the following capabilities: Create virtual machines Create server pools Power on and off virtual machines Manage networks and storage Import virtual machines, ISO files, and templates Manage high availability of Oracle VM Servers, server pools, and virtual machines Perform live migration of virtual machines I want to highlight one of the goodies which you can use if you are running Oracle VM for X86: Preconfigured, downloadable Virtual Machine Templates form edelivery With these templates, you can download completely preconfigured Virtual Machines in your environment, boot them up, configure them at first time boot and use it. There are templates for almost all Oracle SW and Applications (like Fusion Middleware, Database, Siebel, etc.) available. #3) Cloud Management The management of your cloud infrastructure is key. This is a day-to-day job. Acquiring HW, installing a virtualization layer on top of it is done just at the beginning and if you want to expand your infrastructure. But managing your cloud, keeping it up and running, deploying new services, changing your chargeback model, etc, these are the daily jobs. These jobs must be simple, secure and easy to manage. The Enterprise Manager 12c Cloud provides this functionality from one management cockpit. Enterprise Manager 12c uses Oracle VM Manager to control OVM Serverpools. Once you registered your OVM-Managers in Enterprise Manager, then you are able to setup your cloud infrastructure and manage everything from Enterprise Manager. What you need to do in EM12c is: ">Register your OVM Manager in Enterprise ManagerAfter Registering your OVM Manager, all the functionality of Oracle VM for X86 is also available in Enterprise Manager. Enterprise Manager works as a "Manger" of the Manager. You can register as many OVM-Managers you want and control your complete virtualization environment Create Roles and Users for your Self Service Portal in Enterprise ManagerWith this step you allow users to logon on the Enterprise Manager Self Service Portal. Users can request Virtual Machines in this portal. Setup the Cloud InfrastructureSetup the Quotas for your self service users. How many VMs can they request? How much of your resources ( cpu, memory, storage, network, etc. etc.)? Which SW components (templates, assemblys) can your self service users request? In this step, you basically set up the complete cloud infrastructure. Setup ChargebackOnce your cloud is set up, you need to configure your chargeback mechanism. The Enterprise Manager collects the resources metrics, which are used in a very deep level. Almost all collected Metrics could be used in the chargeback module. You can define chargeback plans based on configurations (charge for the amount of cpu, memory, storage is assigned to a machine, or for a specific OS which is installed) or chargeback on resource consumption (% of cpu used, storage used, etc). Or you can also define a combination of configuration and consumption chargeback plans. The chargeback module is very flexible. Here is a overview of the workflow how to handle infrastructure cloud in EM: Summary As you can see, setting up an Infrastructure Cloud Service with Oracle VM for X86 and Enterprise Manager 12c is really simple. I personally configured a complete cloud environment with three X86 servers and a small JBOD san box in less than 3 hours. There is no magic in it, it is all straightforward. Of course, you have to have some experience with Oracle VM and Enterprise Manager. Experience in setting up Linux environments helps as well. I plan to publish a technical cookbook in the next few weeks. I hope you found this post useful and will see you again here on our blog. Any hints, comments are welcome!

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• first install for windows eight.....da beta

  - by raysmithequip

  The W8 preview is now installed and I am enjoying it.  I remember the learning curve of my first unix machine back in the eighties, this ain't that.It is normal for me to do the first os install with a keyboard and low end monitor...you never know what you'll encounter out in the field.  The OS took like a fish to water.  I used a low end INTEL motherboard dp55w I gathered on the cheap, an 1157 i5 from the used bin a pair of 6 gig ddr3 sticks, a rosewell 550 watt power supply a cheap used twenty buck sub 200g wd sata drive, a half working dvd burner and an asus fanless nvidia vid card, not a great one but Sub 50.00 on newey eggey...I did have to hunt the ms forums for a key and of course to activate the thing, if dos would of needed this outmoded ritual, we would still be on cpm and osborne would be a household name, of course little do people know that this ritual was common as far back as the seventies on att unix installs....not, but it was possible, I used to joke about when I ran a bbs, what hell would of been wrought had dos 3.2 machines been required to dial into my bbs to send fido mail to ms and wait for an acknowledgement.  All in all the thing was pushing a seven on the ms richter scale, not including the vid card, sadly it came in at just a tad over three....I wanted to evaluate it for a possible replacement on critical machines that in the past went down due to a vid card fan failure....you have no idea what a customer thinks when you show them a failed vid card fan..."you mean that little plastic piece of junk caused all this!!??!!!"...yea man.  Some production machines don't need any sort of vid, I will at least keep it on the maybe list for those, MTBF is a very important factor, some big box stores should put percentage of failure rate within 24 month estimates on the outside of the carton for sure.  And a warning that the power supplies are already at their limit.  Let's face it, today even 550w can be iffy.A few neat eye candy improvements over the earlier windows is nice, the metro screen is nice, anyone who has used a newer phone recently will intuitively drag their fingers across the screen....lot of good that was with no mouse or touch screen though.  Lucky me, I have been using windows since day one, I still have a copy of win 2.0 (and every other version) for no good reason.  Still the old ix collection of disks is much larger, recompiling any kernal is another silly ritual, same machine, different day, same recompile...argh. Rh is my all time fav, mandrake was always missing something, like it rewrote the init file or something, novell is ok as long as you stay on the beaten path and of course ubuntu normally recompiles with the same errors consistantly....makes life easy that way....no errors on windows eight, just a screen that did not match the installed hardware, natuarally I alt tabbed right out of it, then hit the flag key to find the start menu....no start button. I miss the start button already. Keyboard cowboy funnin and I was browsing the harddrive, nothing stunning there, I like that, means I can find stuff. Only I can't find what I want, the start button....the start menu is that first screen for touch tablets. No biggie for useruser, that is where they will want to be, I can see that. Admins won't want to be there, it is easy enough to get the control panel a bazzilion other ways though, just not the start button. (see a pattern here?). Personally, from the keyboard I find it fun to hit the carets along the location bar at the top of the explorer screen with tabs and arrows and choose SHOW ALL CONTROL PANEL ITEMS, or thereabouts. Bottom line, I love seven and I'll love eight even more!...very happy I did not have to follow the normal rule of thumb (a customer watching me build a system and asking questions said "oh I get it, so every piece you put in there is basically a hundred bucks, right?)...ok, sure, pretty much, more or less, well, ya dude.  It will be WAY past october till I get a real touch screen but I did pick up a pair of cheap tatungs so I can try the NEW main start screen, I parse a lot of folders and have a vision of how a pair of touch screens will be easier than landing a rover on mars.  Ok.  fine, they are way smallish, and I don't expect multitouch to work but we are talking a few percent of a new 21 inch viewsonic touch screen.  Will this OS be a game changer?  I don't know.  Bottom line with all the pads and droids in the world, it is more of a catch up move at first glance.  Not something ms is used to.  An app store?  I can see ms's motivation, the others have it.  I gather there will not be gadgets there, go ahead and see what ms did  to the once populated gadget page...go ahead, google gadgets and take a gander, used to hundreds of gadgets, they are already gone.  They replaced gadgets?  sort of, I'll drop that, it's a bit of a sore point for me.  More of interest was what happened when I downloaded stuff off codeplex and some other normal programs that I like, like orbitron, top o' my list!!...cardware it is...anyways, click on the exe, get a screen, normal for windows, this one indicated that I was not running a normal windows program and had a button for  exit the install, naw, I hit details, a hidden run program anyways came into view....great, my path to the normal windows has detected a program tha.....yea ok, acl is on, fine, moving along I got orbitron installed in record time and was tracking the iss on the newest Microsoft OS, beta of course, felt like the first time I setup bsd all those year ago...FUN!!...I suppose I gotta start to think about budgeting for the real os when it comes out in october, by then I should have a rasberry pi and be done with fedora remixed.  Of course that sounds like fun too!!  I would use this OS on a tablet or phone.  I don't like the idea of being hearded to an app store, don't like that on anything, we are americans and want real choices not marketed hype, lest you are younger with opm (other peoples money).   This os would be neat on a zune, but I suspect the zune is a gonner, I am rooting for microsoft, after all their default password is not admin anymore, nor alpine,  it's blank. Others force a password, my first fawn password was so long I could not even log into it with the password in front of me, who the heck uses %$# anyways, and if I was writing a brute force attack what the heck kinda impasse is that anyways at .00001 microseconds of a code execution cycle (just a non qualified number, not a real clock speed)....AI is where it will be before too long, MS is on that path, perhaps soon someone will sit down and write an app for the kinect that watches your eyes while you scan the new main start screen, clicking on the big E icon when you blink.....boy is that going to be fun!!!! sure. Blink,dammit,blink,dammit...... OPM no doubt.I like windows eight, we are moving forwards, better keep a close eye on ubuntu.  The real clinch comes when open source becomes paid source......don't blink, I already see plenty of very expensive 'ix apps, some even in app stores already.  more to come.......

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• Unlocking Productivity

  - by Michael Snow

  Unlocking Productivity in Life Sciences with Consolidated Content Management by Joe Golemba, Vice President, Product Management, Oracle WebCenter As life sciences organizations look to become more operationally efficient, the ability to effectively leverage information is a competitive advantage. Whether data mining at the drug discovery phase or prepping the sales team before a product launch, content management can play a key role in developing, organizing, and disseminating vital information. The goal of content management is relatively straightforward: put the information that people need where they can find it. A number of issues can complicate this; information sits in many different systems, each of those systems has its own security, and the information in those systems exists in many different formats. Identifying and extracting pertinent information from mountains of farflung data is no simple job, but the alternative—wasted effort or even regulatory compliance issues—is worse. An integrated information architecture can enable health sciences organizations to make better decisions, accelerate clinical operations, and be more competitive. Unstructured data matters Often when we think of drug development data, we think of structured data that fits neatly into one or more research databases. But structured data is often directly supported by unstructured data such as experimental protocols, reaction conditions, lot numbers, run times, analyses, and research notes. As life sciences companies seek integrated views of data, they are typically finding diverse islands of data that seemingly have no relationship to other data in the organization. Information like sales reports or call center reports can be locked into siloed systems, and unavailable to the discovery process. Additionally, in the increasingly networked clinical environment, Web pages, instant messages, videos, scientific imaging, sales and marketing data, collaborative workspaces, and predictive modeling data are likely to be present within an organization, and each source potentially possesses information that can help to better inform specific efforts. Historically, content management solutions that had 21CFR Part 11 capabilities—electronic records and signatures—were focused mainly on content-enabling manufacturing-related processes. Today, life sciences companies have many standalone repositories, requiring different skills, service level agreements, and vendor support costs to manage them. With the amount of content doubling every three to six months, companies have recognized the need to manage unstructured content from the beginning, in order to increase employee productivity and operational efficiency. Using scalable and secure enterprise content management (ECM) solutions, organizations can better manage their unstructured content. These solutions can also be integrated with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or research systems, making content available immediately, in the context of the application and within the flow of the employee’s typical business activity. Administrative safeguards—such as content de-duplication—can also be applied within ECM systems, so documents are never recreated, eliminating redundant efforts, ensuring one source of truth, and maintaining content standards in the organization. Putting it in context Consolidating structured and unstructured information in a single system can greatly simplify access to relevant information when it is needed through contextual search. Using contextual filters, results can include therapeutic area, position in the value chain, semantic commonalities, technology-specific factors, specific researchers involved, or potential business impact. The use of taxonomies is essential to organizing information and enabling contextual searches. Taxonomy solutions are composed of a hierarchical tree that defines the relationship between different life science terms. When overlaid with additional indexing related to research and/or business processes, it becomes possible to effectively narrow down the amount of data that is returned during searches, as well as prioritize results based on specific criteria and/or prior search history. Thus, search results are more accurate and relevant to an employee’s day-to-day work. For example, a search for the word "tissue" by a lab researcher would return significantly different results than a search for the same word performed by someone in procurement. Of course, diverse data repositories, combined with the immense amounts of data present in an organization, necessitate that the data elements be regularly indexed and cached beforehand to enable reasonable search response times. In its simplest form, indexing of a single, consolidated data warehouse can be expected to be a relatively straightforward effort. However, organizations require the ability to index multiple data repositories, enabling a single search to reference multiple data sources and provide an integrated results listing. Security and compliance Beyond yielding efficiencies and supporting new insight, an enterprise search environment can support important security considerations as well as compliance initiatives. For example, the systems enable organizations to retain the relevance and the security of the indexed systems, so users can only see the results to which they are granted access. This is especially important as life sciences companies are working in an increasingly networked environment and need to provide secure, role-based access to information across multiple partners. Although not officially required by the 21 CFR Part 11 regulation, the U.S. Food and Drug Administraiton has begun to extend the type of content considered when performing relevant audits and discoveries. Having an ECM infrastructure that provides centralized management of all content enterprise-wide—with the ability to consistently apply records and retention policies along with the appropriate controls, validations, audit trails, and electronic signatures—is becoming increasingly critical for life sciences companies. Making the move Creating an enterprise-wide ECM environment requires moving large amounts of content into a single enterprise repository, a daunting and risk-laden initiative. The first key is to focus on data taxonomy, allowing content to be mapped across systems. The second is to take advantage new tools which can dramatically speed and reduce the cost of the data migration process through automation. Additional content need not be frozen while it is migrated, enabling productivity throughout the process. The ability to effectively leverage information into success has been gaining importance in the life sciences industry for years. The rapid adoption of enterprise content management, both in operational processes as well as in scientific management, are clear indicators that the companies are looking to use all available data to be better informed, improve decision making, minimize risk, and increase time to market, to maintain profitability and be more competitive. As more and more varieties and sources of information are brought under the strategic management umbrella, the ability to divine knowledge from the vast pool of information is increasingly difficult. Simple search engines and basic content management are increasingly unable to effectively extract the right information from the mountains of data available. By bringing these tools into context and integrating them with business processes and applications, we can effectively focus on the right decisions that make our organizations more profitable. More Information Oracle will be exhibiting at DIA 2012 in Philadelphia on June 25-27. Stop by our booth Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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-qformat:yes; 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:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} (#2825) to learn more about the advantages of a centralized ECM strategy and see the Oracle WebCenter Content solution, our 21 CFR Part 11 compliant content management platform.

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• Solaris 11 SRU / Update relationship explained, and blackout period on delivery of new bug fixes eliminated

  - by user12244672

  Relationship between SRUs and Update releases As you may know, Support Repository Updates (SRUs) for Oracle Solaris 11 are released monthly and are available to customers with an appropriate support contract.  SRUs primarily deliver bug fixes.  They may also deliver low risk feature enhancements. Solaris Update are typically released once or twice a year, containing support for new hardware, new software feature enhancements, and all bug fixes available at the time the Update content was finalized.  They also contain a significant number of new bug fixes, for issues found internally in Oracle and complex customer bug fixes which  require significant "soak" time to ensure their efficacy prior to release. Changes to SRU and Update Naming Conventions We're changing the naming convention of Update releases from a date based format such as Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 to a simpler "dot" version numbering, e.g. Oracle Solaris 11.1. Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 (i.e. the initial Oracle Solaris 11 release) may be referred to as 11.0. SRUs will simply be named as "dot.dot" releases, e.g. Oracle Solaris 11.1.1, for SRU1 after Oracle Solaris 11.1. Many Oracle products and infrastructure tools such as BugDB and MOS are tailored towards this "dot.dot" style of release naming, so these name changes align Oracle Solaris with these conventions. No Blackout Periods on Bug Fix Releases The Oracle Solaris 11 release process has been enhanced to eliminate blackout periods on the delivery of new bug fixes to customers. Previously, Oracle Solaris Updates were a superset of all preceding bug fix deliveries.  This made for a very simple update message - that which releases later is always a superset of that which was delivered previously. However, it had a downside.  Once the contents of an Update release were frozen prior to release, the release of new bug fixes for customer issues was also frozen to maintain the Update's superset relationship. Since the amount of change allowed into the final internal builds of an Update release is reduced to mitigate risk, this throttling back also impacted the release of new bug fixes to customers. This meant that there was effectively a 6 to 9 week hiatus on the release of new bug fixes prior to the release of each Update.  That wasn't good for customers awaiting critical bug fixes. We've eliminated this hiatus on the delivery of new bug fixes in Oracle Solaris 11 by allowing new bug fixes to continue to be released in SRUs even after the contents of the next Update release have been frozen. The release of SRUs will remain contiguous, with the first SRU released after the Update release effectively being a superset of both the the Update release and all preceding SRUs*.  That is, later SRUs are supersets of the content of previous SRUs. Therefore, the progression path from the final SRUs prior to the Update release is to the first SRU after the Update release, rather than to the Update release itself. The timeline / logical sequence of releases can be shown as follows: Updates: 11.0                                                11.1                               11.2     etc.                  \                                                         \                                    \ SRUs:       11.0.1, 11.0.2,...,11.0.12, 11.0.13, 11.1.1, 11.1.2,...,11.1.x, 11.2.1, etc. For example, for systems with Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 SRU12.4 or later installed, the recommended update path is to Oracle Solaris 11.1.1 (i.e. SRU1 after Solaris 11.1) or later rather than to the Solaris 11.1 release itself.  This will ensure no bug fixes are "lost" during the update. If for any reason you do wish to update from SRU12.4 or later to the 11.1 release itself - for example to update a test system - the instructions to do so are in the SRU12.4 README, https://updates.oracle.com/Orion/Services/download?type=readme&aru=15564533 For systems with Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 SRU11.4 or earlier installed, customers can update to either the 11.1 release or any 11.1 SRU as both will be supersets of their current version. Please do read the README of the SRU you are updating to, as it will contain important installation instructions which will save you time and effort. *Nerdy details: SRUs only contain the latest change delta relative to the Update on which they are based.  Their dependencies will, however, effectively pull in the Update content.  Customers maintaining a local Repo (e.g. behind their firewall), need to add both the 11.1 content and the relevant SRU content to their Repo, to enable the SRU's dependencies to be resolved.  Both will be available from the standard Support Repo and from MOS.  This is no different to existing SRUs for Oracle Solaris 11.0, whereby you may often get away with using just the SRU content to update, but the original 11.0 content may be needed in the Repo to resolve dependencies.

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• Lenovo V570 CPU fan running constantly, CPU core 1 running over 90%!

  - by Rabbit2190

  I have seen that a lot of people are having this same issue. I am running a Lenovo V570 i5 4 core, 6 gigs of ram, and am running 11.10 Onieric Ocelot. On my system monitor graph it shows CPU at 20%, when I open the monitor it shows core #1 at around 90%, the other cores fluctuate at or below 5-12% if even. Now this seems like a really terrible balance of power between the cores, especially with so much stress on one core only, when these things are designed to work with 4 cores and not at such high temps. My current readings say 64 degrees Celsius, this does not seem normal for any cpu, and I am seriously considering, working on my windows7 partition until I see a real solution to this issue or upgrading to 12.04 right away when it comes out... I have seen countless things saying it has something to do with the Kernel, the kernel on mine is the same as when I upgraded, I really do not like messing with it, as when I had 11.04, I did tinker with it due to the freeze issues I was having, and that just made worse issues. I like this version 11.10 and would like to keep it for a while, but without the fear that my core is going to fry! So any help would be much appreciated! I did try changing a couple things in ACPI, and restarting this did not help, and here I am. I tried one thing prior to that that was listed under a different computer brand, but it would not do a make on the file. I really need help with this, I rely on this computer for a lot of things, and love this OS! Please help so I do not need to resort to my Microsoft partition! PLEASE! Here is the fwts cpufrequ- output: rabbit@rabbit-Lenovo-V570:~$ sudo fwts cpufreq - 00001 fwts Results generated by fwts: Version V0.23.25 (Thu Oct 6 15 00002 fwts :12:31 BST 2011). 00003 fwts 00004 fwts Some of this work - Copyright (c) 1999 - 2010, Intel Corp. 00005 fwts All rights reserved. 00006 fwts Some of this work - Copyright (c) 2010 - 2011, Canonical. 00007 fwts 00008 fwts This test run on 02/04/12 at 17:23:22 on host Linux 00009 fwts rabbit-Lenovo-V570 3.0.0-17-generic-pae #30-Ubuntu SMP Thu 00010 fwts Mar 8 17:53:35 UTC 2012 i686. 00011 fwts 00012 fwts Running tests: cpufreq. 00014 cpufreq CPU frequency scaling tests (takes ~1-2 mins). 00015 cpufreq --------------------------------------------------------- 00016 cpufreq Test 1 of 1: CPU P-State Checks. 00017 cpufreq For each processor in the system, this test steps through 00018 cpufreq the various frequency states (P-states) that the BIOS 00019 cpufreq advertises for the processor. For each processor/frequency 00020 cpufreq combination, a quick performance value is measured. The 00021 cpufreq test then validates that: 00022 cpufreq 1) Each processor has the same number of frequency states 00023 cpufreq 2) Higher advertised frequencies have a higher performance 00024 cpufreq 3) No duplicate frequency values are reported by the BIOS 00025 cpufreq 4) Is BIOS wrongly doing Sw_All P-state coordination across cores 00026 cpufreq 5) Is BIOS wrongly doing Sw_Any P-state coordination across cores 00027 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00028 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00029 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 100.0 % 00030 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.7 % 00031 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.2 % 00032 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.5 % 00033 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.2 % 00034 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.6 % 00035 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.8 % 00036 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.5 % 00037 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.6 % 00038 cpufreq 9 CPU frequency steps supported 00039 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00040 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00041 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 97.7 % 00042 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.7 % 00043 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.6 % 00044 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 63.3 % 00045 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.7 % 00046 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.7 % 00047 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.7 % 00048 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.5 % 00049 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.5 % 00050 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00051 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00052 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 97.7 % 00053 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 84.4 % 00054 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.6 % 00055 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.6 % 00056 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.9 % 00057 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.7 % 00058 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.7 % 00059 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.7 % 00060 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.8 % 00061 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00062 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00063 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 100.0 % 00064 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.6 % 00065 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 67.8 % 00066 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 61.4 % 00067 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.9 % 00068 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.3 % 00069 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00070 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.3 % 00071 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.4 % 00072 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00073 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00074 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.2 % 00075 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.5 % 00076 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 69.3 % 00077 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.7 % 00078 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 55.0 % 00079 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 47.4 % 00080 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00081 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.0 % 00082 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.2 % 00083 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00084 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00085 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.5 % 00086 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.6 % 00087 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 68.1 % 00088 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 61.7 % 00089 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.9 % 00090 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.0 % 00091 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00092 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00093 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.8 % 00094 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00095 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00096 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.4 % 00097 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.6 % 00098 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 68.8 % 00099 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 60.5 % 00100 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.4 % 00101 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.8 % 00102 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00103 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00104 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 26.4 % 00105 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00106 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00107 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 95.3 % 00108 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 82.5 % 00109 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 65.5 % 00110 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 62.8 % 00111 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.8 % 00112 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.0 % 00113 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.2 % 00114 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00115 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.3 % 00116 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00117 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00118 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 96.3 % 00119 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 83.4 % 00120 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 68.3 % 00121 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 61.9 % 00122 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 54.9 % 00123 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 48.0 % 00124 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 41.1 % 00125 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 34.2 % 00126 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 27.3 % 00127 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00128 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00129 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 100.0 % 00130 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 77.9 % 00131 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 64.6 % 00132 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 54.0 % 00133 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 51.7 % 00134 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 45.2 % 00135 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.0 % 00136 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 33.1 % 00137 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 25.5 % 00138 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00139 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00140 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 93.4 % 00141 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 75.7 % 00142 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 64.5 % 00143 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 59.1 % 00144 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 51.4 % 00145 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 45.9 % 00146 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.3 % 00147 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.7 % 00148 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 25.8 % 00149 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00150 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00151 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 92.1 % 00152 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 78.1 % 00153 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 65.7 % 00154 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 58.6 % 00155 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.5 % 00156 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 45.7 % 00157 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.3 % 00158 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.7 % 00159 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 24.3 % 00160 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00161 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00162 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 88.9 % 00163 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 79.8 % 00164 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 58.4 % 00165 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 52.6 % 00166 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 46.9 % 00167 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 41.0 % 00168 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 35.1 % 00169 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 29.1 % 00170 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 22.9 % 00171 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00172 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00173 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 92.8 % 00174 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 80.1 % 00175 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 66.2 % 00176 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 59.5 % 00177 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.9 % 00178 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 46.2 % 00179 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.5 % 00180 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.9 % 00181 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 26.3 % 00182 cpufreq Frequency | Speed 00183 cpufreq -----------+--------- 00184 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 92.9 % 00185 cpufreq 2.45 Ghz | 79.5 % 00186 cpufreq 2.05 Ghz | 66.2 % 00187 cpufreq 1.85 Ghz | 59.6 % 00188 cpufreq 1.65 Ghz | 52.9 % 00189 cpufreq 1400 Mhz | 46.7 % 00190 cpufreq 1200 Mhz | 39.6 % 00191 cpufreq 1000 Mhz | 32.9 % 00192 cpufreq 800 Mhz | 26.3 % 00193 cpufreq FAILED [MEDIUM] CPUFreqCPUsSetToSW_ANY: Test 1, Processors 00194 cpufreq are set to SW_ANY. 00195 cpufreq FAILED [MEDIUM] CPUFreqSW_ANY: Test 1, Firmware not 00196 cpufreq implementing hardware coordination cleanly. Firmware using 00197 cpufreq SW_ANY instead?. 00198 cpufreq 00199 cpufreq ========================================================= 00200 cpufreq 0 passed, 2 failed, 0 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 00201 cpufreq info only. 00202 cpufreq ========================================================= 00204 summary 00205 summary 0 passed, 2 failed, 0 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 00206 summary info only. 00207 summary 00208 summary Test Failure Summary 00209 summary ==================== 00210 summary 00211 summary Critical failures: NONE 00212 summary 00213 summary High failures: NONE 00214 summary 00215 summary Medium failures: 2 00216 summary cpufreq test, at 1 log line: 193 00217 summary "Processors are set to SW_ANY." 00218 summary cpufreq test, at 1 log line: 195 00219 summary "Firmware not implementing hardware coordination cleanly. Firmware using SW_ANY instead?." 00220 summary 00221 summary Low failures: NONE 00222 summary 00223 summary Other failures: NONE 00224 summary 00225 summary Test |Pass |Fail |Abort|Warn |Skip |Info | 00226 summary ---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 00227 summary cpufreq | | 2| | | | | 00228 summary ---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ 00229 summary Total: | 0| 2| 0| 0| 0| 0| 00230 summary ---------------+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+ rabbit@rabbit-Lenovo-V570:~$

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• 7 Good Reasons to Upgrade E-Business Suite to the cloud

  - by Lisa Schwartz

  v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} As promised here is blog Part 2: Why Upgrade to Oracle E-Business Suite 12 in the cloud? 7 Good Reasons to Upgrade to E-Business Suite 12 in the Cloud: 1)   Take advantage of new and improved features: from global sub-ledger accounting to mobile access for supply chain management to built-in extensions for information search and discovery. If you haven’t checked out the latest features yet, there are over 1000 EBS 12 enhancements. 2) Plan now to address any ongoing Oracle Support considerations and regulatory compliance requirements. EBS Release 11 support is ending soon. Based upon that information alone, you should have an EBS upgrade strategy and planning well underway. 3) Customizations got you worried? Expedite your next Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade – have Oracle identify all customizations, reduce un-needed customizations (EBS 12 has built-in many of your customizations) and during the upgrade keep all necessary customizations to run your business. 4) Migrating EBS to the cloud allows parallel migration and testing. Therefore no extra hardware purchases for the testing and upgrade. Business disruption is minimized. And, by moving to the cloud, this provides for smoother future upgrades that are based on your own timeline. 5) Oracle Experts will upgrade and run your EBS applications for you in the cloud. Free your IT resources to develop new services and work on projects that are critical to business innovation and competitiveness. Your IT resources will not be inundated with upgrade tasks!      6) Reallocate precious IT dollars to other projects, eliminate CapEx costs. 7) Oracle minimizes business risk by having enterprise class cloud services under stringent SLAs designed to run your business applications for you such as: a. Enterprise grade infrastructure b. World-class security and identity management c. Best practices in regulatory compliance: from classified federal gov’t standards, to healthcare HIPPA standards to meeting Financial Services requirements (PCI DSS) Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} 7 Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Next Step: To help you upgrade and get to the cloud in the shortest period of  time, Oracle has a program called Oracle Upgrade Factory for Oracle E-Business Suite 12. It offers a unique approach, seamlessly bundling Managed Cloud Services and Oracle Consulting Services together for an entire Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade and migration to a managed private  cloud. Read the Oracle Upgrade Factory Solution Brief here. Normal 0 false false false false EN-US X-NONE 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-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• Orchestrating the Virtual Enterprise

  - by John Murphy

  During the American Industrial Revolution, the Ford Motor Company did it all. It turned raw materials into a showroom full of Model Ts. It owned a steel mill, a glass factory, and an automobile assembly line. The company was both self-sufficient and innovative and went on to become one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Nowadays, it's unusual for any business to follow this vertical integration model because its much harder to be best in class across such a wide a range of capabilities and services. Instead, businesses focus on their core competencies and outsource other business functions to specialized suppliers. They exchange vertical integration for collaboration. When done well, all parties benefit from this arrangement and the collaboration leads to the creation of an agile, lean and successful "virtual enterprise." Case in point: For Sun hardware, Oracle outsources most of its manufacturing and all of its logistics to third parties. These are vital activities, but ones where Oracle doesn't have a core competency, so we shift them to business partners who do. Within our enterprise, we always retain the core functions of product development, support, and most of the sales function, because that's what constitutes our core value to our customers. This is a perfect example of a virtual enterprise.  What are the implications of this? It means that we must exchange direct internal control for indirect external collaboration. This fundamentally changes the relative importance of different business processes, the boundaries of security and information sharing, and the relationship of the supply chain systems to the ERP. The challenge is that the systems required to support this virtual paradigm are still mired in "island enterprise" thinking. But help is at hand. Developments such as the Web, social networks, collaboration, and rules-based orchestration offer great potential to fundamentally re-architect supply chain systems to better support the virtual enterprise.  Supply Chain Management Systems in a Virtual Enterprise Historically enterprise software was constructed to automate the ERP - and then the supply chain systems extended the ERP. They were joined at the hip. In virtual enterprises, the supply chain system needs to be ERP agnostic, sitting above each of the ERPs that are distributed across the virtual enterprise - most of which are operating in other businesses. This is vital so that the supply chain system can manage the flow of material and the related information through the multiple enterprises. It has to have strong collaboration tools. It needs to be highly flexible. Users need to be able to see information that's coming from multiple sources and be able to react and respond to events across those sources.  Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO) is a perfect example of a supply chain system designed to operate in this virtual way. DOO embraces the idea that a company's fulfillment challenge is a distributed, multi-enterprise problem. It enables users to manage the process and the trading partners in a uniform way and deliver a consistent user experience while operating over a heterogeneous, virtual enterprise. This is a fundamental shift at the core of managing supply chains. It forces virtual enterprises to think architecturally about how best to construct their supply chain systems.  Case in point, almost everyone has ordered from Amazon.com at one time or another. Our orders are as likely to be fulfilled by third parties as they are by Amazon itself. To deliver the order promptly and efficiently, Amazon has to send it to the right fulfillment location and know the availability in that location. It needs to be able to track status of the fulfillment and deal with exceptions. As a virtual enterprise, Amazon's operations, using thousands of trading partners, requires a very different approach to fulfillment than the traditional 'take an order and ship it from your own warehouse' model. Amazon had no choice but to develop a complex, expensive and custom solution to tackle this problem as there used to be no product solution available. Now, other companies who want to follow similar models have a better off-the-shelf choice -- Oracle Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO).  Consider how another of our customers is using our distributed orchestration solution. This major airplane manufacturer has a highly complex business and interacts regularly with the U.S. Government and major airlines. It sits in the middle of an intricate supply chain and needed to improve visibility across its many different entities. Oracle Fusion DOO gives the company an orchestration mechanism so it could improve quality, speed, flexibility, and consistency without requiring an organ transplant of these highly complex legacy systems. Many retailers face the challenge of dealing with brick and mortar, Web, and reseller channels. They all need to be knitted together into a virtual enterprise experience that is consistent for their customers. When a large U.K. grocer with a strong brick and mortar retail operation added an online business, they turned to Oracle Fusion DOO to bring these entities together. Disturbing the Peace with Acquisitions Quite often a company's ERP system is disrupted when it acquires a new company. An acquisition can inject a new set of processes and systems -- or even introduce an entirely new business like Sun's hardware did at Oracle. This challenge has been a driver for some of our DOO customers. A large power management company is using Oracle Fusion DOO to provide the flexibility to rapidly integrate additional products and services into its central fulfillment operation. The Flip Side of Fulfillment Meanwhile, we haven't ignored similar challenges on the supply side of the equation. Specifically, how to manage complex supply in a flexible way when there are multiple trading parties involved? How to manage the supply to suppliers? How to manage critical components that need to merge in a tier two or tier three supply chain? By investing in supply orchestration solutions for the virtual enterprise, we plan to give users better visibility into their network of suppliers to help them drive down costs. We also think this technology and full orchestration process can be applied to the financial side of organizations. An example is transactions that flow through complex internal structures to minimize tax exposure. We can help companies manage those transactions effectively by thinking about the internal organization as a virtual enterprise and bringing the same solution set to this internal challenge.  The Clear Front Runner No other company is investing in solving the virtual enterprise supply chain issues like Oracle is. Oracle is in a unique position to become the gold standard in this market space. We have the infrastructure of Oracle technology. We already have an Oracle Fusion DOO application which embraces the best of what's required in this area. And we're absolutely committed to extending our Fusion solution to other use cases and delivering even more business value.

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• Real tortoises keep it slow and steady. How about the backups?

  - by Maria Zakourdaev

    … Four tortoises were playing in the backyard when they decided they needed hibiscus flower snacks. They pooled their money and sent the smallest tortoise out to fetch the snacks. Two days passed and there was no sign of the tortoise. "You know, she is taking a lot of time", said one of the tortoises. A little voice from just out side the fence said, "If you are going to talk that way about me I won't go." Is it too much to request from the quite expensive 3rd party backup tool to be a way faster than the SQL server native backup? Or at least save a respectable amount of storage by producing a really smaller backup files?  By saying “really smaller”, I mean at least getting a file in half size. After Googling the internet in an attempt to understand what other “sql people” are using for database backups, I see that most people are using one of three tools which are the main players in SQL backup area:  LiteSpeed by Quest SQL Backup by Red Gate SQL Safe by Idera The feedbacks about those tools are truly emotional and happy. However, while reading the forums and blogs I have wondered, is it possible that many are accustomed to using the above tools since SQL 2000 and 2005.  This can easily be understood due to the fact that a 300GB database backup for instance, using regular a SQL 2005 backup statement would have run for about 3 hours and have produced ~150GB file (depending on the content, of course).  Then you take a 3rd party tool which performs the same backup in 30 minutes resulting in a 30GB file leaving you speechless, you run to management persuading them to buy it due to the fact that it is definitely worth the price. In addition to the increased speed and disk space savings you would also get backup file encryption and virtual restore -  features that are still missing from the SQL server. But in case you, as well as me, don’t need these additional features and only want a tool that performs a full backup MUCH faster AND produces a far smaller backup file (like the gain you observed back in SQL 2005 days) you will be quite disappointed. SQL Server backup compression feature has totally changed the market picture. Medium size database. Take a look at the table below, check out how my SQL server 2008 R2 compares to other tools when backing up a 300GB database. It appears that when talking about the backup speed, SQL 2008 R2 compresses and performs backup in similar overall times as all three other tools. 3rd party tools maximum compression level takes twice longer. Backup file gain is not that impressive, except the highest compression levels but the price that you pay is very high cpu load and much longer time. Only SQL Safe by Idera was quite fast with it’s maximum compression level but most of the run time have used 95% cpu on the server. Note that I have used two types of destination storage, SATA 11 disks and FC 53 disks and, obviously, on faster storage have got my backup ready in half time. Looking at the above results, should we spend money, bother with another layer of complexity and software middle-man for the medium sized databases? I’m definitely not going to do so.  Very large database As a next phase of this benchmark, I have moved to a 6 terabyte database which was actually my main backup target. Note, how multiple files usage enables the SQL Server backup operation to use parallel I/O and remarkably increases it’s speed, especially when the backup device is heavily striped. SQL Server supports a maximum of 64 backup devices for a single backup operation but the most speed is gained when using one file per CPU, in the case above 8 files for a 2 Quad CPU server. The impact of additional files is minimal.  However, SQLsafe doesn’t show any speed improvement between 4 files and 8 files. Of course, with such huge databases every half percent of the compression transforms into the noticeable numbers. Saving almost 470GB of space may turn the backup tool into quite valuable purchase. Still, the backup speed and high CPU are the variables that should be taken into the consideration. As for us, the backup speed is more critical than the storage and we cannot allow a production server to sustain 95% cpu for such a long time. Bottomline, 3rd party backup tool developers, we are waiting for some breakthrough release. There are a few unanswered questions, like the restore speed comparison between different tools and the impact of multiple backup files on restore operation. Stay tuned for the next benchmarks.    Benchmark server: SQL Server 2008 R2 sp1 2 Quad CPU Database location: NetApp FC 15K Aggregate 53 discs Backup statements: No matter how good that UI is, we need to run the backup tasks from inside of SQL Server Agent to make sure they are covered by our monitoring systems. I have used extended stored procedures (command line execution also is an option, I haven’t noticed any impact on the backup performance). SQL backup LiteSpeed SQL Backup SQL safe backup database <DBNAME> to disk= '\\<networkpath>\par1.bak' , disk= '\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', disk= '\\<networkpath>\par3.bak' with format, compression EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_backup_database @database = N'<DBName>', @backupname= N'<DBName> full backup', @desc = N'Test', @compressionlevel=8, @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par1.bak', @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', @filename= N'\\<networkpath>\par3.bak', @init = 1 EXECUTE master.dbo.sqlbackup '-SQL "BACKUP DATABASE <DBNAME> TO DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par1.sqb'', DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par2.sqb'', DISK= ''\\<networkpath>\par3.sqb'' WITH DISKRETRYINTERVAL = 30, DISKRETRYCOUNT = 10, COMPRESSION = 4, INIT"' EXECUTE master.dbo.xp_ss_backup @database = 'UCMSDB', @filename = '\\<networkpath>\par1.bak', @backuptype = 'Full', @compressionlevel = 4, @backupfile = '\\<networkpath>\par2.bak', @backupfile = '\\<networkpath>\par3.bak' If you still insist on using 3rd party tools for the backups in your production environment with maximum compression level, you will definitely need to consider limiting cpu usage which will increase the backup operation time even more: RedGate : use THREADPRIORITY option ( values 0 – 6 ) LiteSpeed : use  @throttle ( percentage, like 70%) SQL safe :  the only thing I have found was @Threads option.   Yours, Maria

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• Why people don't patch and upgrade?!?

  - by Mike Dietrich

  Discussing the topic "Why Upgrade" or "Why not Upgrade" is not always fun. Actually the arguments repeat from customer to customer. Typically we hear things such as: A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugs A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new features which lead to risk and require application verification  Patching means risk Patching changes the execution plans Patching requires too much testing Patching is too much work for our DBAs Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay out And to be very honest sometimes it's hard for me to stay calm in such discussions. Let's discuss some of these points a bit more in detail. A PSU or Patch Set introduces new bugsWell, yes, that is true as no software containing more than some lines of code is bug free. This applies to Oracle's code as well as too any application or operating system code. But first of all, does that mean you never patch your OS because the patch may introduce new flaws? And second, what is the point of saying "it introduces new bugs"? Does that mean you will never get rid of the mean issues we know about and we fixed already? Scroll down from MOS Note:161818.1 to the patch release you are on, no matter if it's 10.2.0.4 or 11.2.0.3 and check for the Known Issues And Alerts.Will you take responsibility to know about all these issues and refuse to upgrade to 11.2.0.4? I won't. A new PSU or Patch Set introduces new featuresOk, we can discuss that. Offering new functionality within a database patch set is a dubious thing. It has advantages such as in 11.2.0.4 where we backported Database Redaction to. But this is something you will only use once you have an Advanced Security license. I interpret that statement I've heard quite often from customers in a different way: People don't want to get surprises such as new behaviour. This certainly gives everybody a hard time. And we've had many examples in the past (SESSION_CACHED_CURSROS in 10.2.0.4,  _DATAFILE_WRITE_ERRORS_CRASH_INSTANCE in 11.2.0.2 and others) where those things weren't documented, not even in the README. Thanks to many friends out there I learned about those as well. So new behaviour is the topic people consider as risky - not really new features. And just to point this out: A PSU never brings in new features or new behaviour by definition! Patching means riskDoes it really mean risk? Yes, there were issues in the past (and sometimes in the present as well) where a patch didn't get installed correctly. But personally I consider it way more risky to not patch. Keep that in mind: The day Oracle publishes an PSU (or CPU) containing security fixes all the great security experts out there go public with their findings as well. So from that day on even my grandma can find out about those issues and try to attack somebody. Now a lot of people say: "My database does not face the internet." And I will answer: "The enemy is sitting already behind your firewalls. And knows potentially about these things." My statement: Not patching introduces way more risk to your environment than patching. Seriously! Patching changes the execution plansDo they really? I agree - there's a very small risk for this happening with Patch Sets. But not with PSUs or CPUs as they contain no optimizer fixes changing behaviour (but they may contain fixes curing wrong-query-result-bugs). But what's the point of a changing execution plan? In Oracle Database 11g it is so simple to be prepared. SQL Plan Management is a free EE feature - so once that occurs you'll put the plan into the Plan Baseline. Basta! Yes, you wouldn't like to get such surprises? Than please use the SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) from Real Application Testing and you'll detect that easily upfront in minutes. And not to forget this, a plan change can also be very positive!Yes, there's a little risk with a database patchset - and we have many possibilites to detect this before patching. Patching requires too much testingWell, does it really? I have seen in the past 12 years how people test. There are very different efforts and approaches on this. I have seen people spending a hell of money on licenses or on project team staffing. And I have seen people sailing blindly without any tests just going the John-Wayne-approach.Proper tools will allow you to test easily without too much efforts. See the paragraph above. We have used Real Application Testing in so many customer projects reducing the amount of work spend on testing by over 50%. But apart from that at some point you will have to stop testing. If you don't you'll get lost and you'll burn money. There's no 100% guaranty. You will have to deal with a little risk as reaching the final 5% of certainty will cost you the same as it did cost to reach 95%. And doing this will lead to abnormal long product cycles that you'll run behind forever. And this will cost even more money. Patching is too much work for our DBAsPatching is a lot of work. I agree. And it's no fun work. It's boring, annoying. You don't learn much from that. That's why you should try to automate this task. Use the Database's Lifecycle Management Pack. And don't cry about the fact that it costs money. Yes it does. But it will ease the process and you'll save a lot of costs as you don't waste your valuable time with patching. Or use Oracle Database 12c Oracle Multitenant and patch either by unplug/plug or patch an entire container database with all PDBs with one patch in one task. We have customer reference cases proofing it saved them 75% of time, effort and cost since they've used Lifecycle Management Pack. So why don't you use it? Patching costs a lot of money and doesn't pay outWell, see my statements in the paragraph above. And it pays out as flying with a database with 100 known critical flaws in it which are already fixed by Oracle (such as in the Oct 2013 PSU for Oracle Database 12c) will cost ways more in case of failure or even data loss. Bet with me? Let me finally ask you some questions. What cell phone are you using and which OS does it run? Do you have an iPhone 5 and did you upgrade already to iOS 7.0.3? I've just encountered on mine that the alarm (which I rely on when traveling) has gotten now a dependency on the physical switch "sound on/off". If it is switched to "off" physically the alarm rings "silently". What a wonderful example of a behaviour change coming in with a patch set. Will this push you to stay with iOS5 or iOS6? No, because those have security flaws which won't be fixed anymore. What browser are you surfing with? Do you use Mozilla 3.6? Well, congratulations to all the hackers. It will be easy for them to attack you and harm your system. I'd guess you have the auto updater on.  Same for Google Chrome, Safari, IE. Right? -Mike The T.htmtableborders, .htmtableborders td, .htmtableborders th {border : 1px dashed lightgrey ! important;} html, body { border: 0px; } body { background-color: #ffffff; } img, hr { cursor: default }

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• Best Practices - which domain types should be used to run applications

  - by jsavit

  This post is one of a series of "best practices" notes for Oracle VM Server for SPARC (formerly named Logical Domains) One question that frequently comes up is "which types of domain should I use to run applications?" There used to be a simple answer in most cases: "only run applications in guest domains", but enhancements to T-series servers, Oracle VM Server for SPARC and the advent of SPARC SuperCluster have made this question more interesting and worth qualifying differently. This article reviews the relevant concepts and provides suggestions on where to deploy applications in a logical domains environment. Review: division of labor and types of domain Oracle VM Server for SPARC offloads many functions from the hypervisor to domains (also called virtual machines). This is a modern alternative to using a "thick" hypervisor that provides all virtualization functions, as in traditional VM designs, This permits a simpler hypervisor design, which enhances reliability, and security. It also reduces single points of failure by assigning responsibilities to multiple system components, which further improves reliability and security. In this architecture, management and I/O functionality are provided within domains. Oracle VM Server for SPARC does this by defining the following types of domain, each with their own roles: Control domain - management control point for the server, used to configure domains and manage resources. It is the first domain to boot on a power-up, is an I/O domain, and is usually a service domain as well. I/O domain - has been assigned physical I/O devices: a PCIe root complex, a PCI device, or a SR-IOV (single-root I/O Virtualization) function. It has native performance and functionality for the devices it owns, unmediated by any virtualization layer. Service domain - provides virtual network and disk devices to guest domains. Guest domain - a domain whose devices are all virtual rather than physical: virtual network and disk devices provided by one or more service domains. In common practice, this is where applications are run. Typical deployment A service domain is generally also an I/O domain: otherwise it wouldn't have access to physical device "backends" to offer to its clients. Similarly, an I/O domain is also typically a service domain in order to leverage the available PCI busses. Control domains must be I/O domains, because they boot up first on the server and require physical I/O. It's typical for the control domain to also be a service domain too so it doesn't "waste" the I/O resources it uses. A simple configuration consists of a control domain, which is also the one I/O and service domain, and some number of guest domains using virtual I/O. In production, customers typically use multiple domains with I/O and service roles to eliminate single points of failure: guest domains have virtual disk and virtual devices provisioned from more than one service domain, so failure of a service domain or I/O path or device doesn't result in an application outage. This is also used for "rolling upgrades" in which service domains are upgraded one at a time while their guests continue to operate without disruption. (It should be noted that resiliency to I/O device failures can also be provided by the single control domain, using multi-path I/O) In this type of deployment, control, I/O, and service domains are used for virtualization infrastructure, while applications run in guest domains. Changing application deployment patterns The above model has been widely and successfully used, but more configuration options are available now. Servers got bigger than the original T2000 class machines with 2 I/O busses, so there is more I/O capacity that can be used for applications. Increased T-series server capacity made it attractive to run more vertical applications, such as databases, with higher resource requirements than the "light" applications originally seen. This made it attractive to run applications in I/O domains so they could get bare-metal native I/O performance. This is leveraged by the SPARC SuperCluster engineered system, announced a year ago at Oracle OpenWorld. In SPARC SuperCluster, I/O domains are used for high performance applications, with native I/O performance for disk and network and optimized access to the Infiniband fabric. Another technical enhancement is the introduction of Direct I/O (DIO) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), which make it possible to give domains direct connections and native I/O performance for selected I/O devices. A domain with either a DIO or SR-IOV device is an I/O domain. In summary: not all I/O domains own PCI complexes, and there are increasingly more I/O domains that are not service domains. They use their I/O connectivity for performance for their own applications. However, there are some limitations and considerations: at this time, a domain using physical I/O cannot be live-migrated to another server. There is also a need to plan for security and introducing unneeded dependencies: if an I/O domain is also a service domain providing virtual I/O go guests, it has the ability to affect the correct operation of its client guest domains. This is even more relevant for the control domain. where the ldm has to be protected from unauthorized (or even mistaken) use that would affect other domains. As a general rule, running applications in the service domain or the control domain should be avoided. To recap: Guest domains with virtual I/O still provide the greatest operational flexibility, including features like live migration. I/O domains can be used for applications with high performance requirements. This is used to great effect in SPARC SuperCluster and in general T4 deployments. Direct I/O (DIO) and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) make this more attractive by giving direct I/O access to more domains. Service domains should in general not be used for applications, because compromised security in the domain, or an outage, can affect other domains that depend on it. This concern can be mitigated by providing guests' their virtual I/O from more than one service domain, so an interruption of service in the service domain does not cause an application outage. The control domain should in general not be used to run applications, for the same reason. SPARC SuperCluster use the control domain for applications, but it is an exception: it's not a general purpose environment; it's an engineered system with specifically configured applications and optimization for optimal performance. These are recommended "best practices" based on conversations with a number of Oracle architects. Keep in mind that "one size does not fit all", so you should evaluate these practices in the context of your own requirements. Summary Higher capacity T-series servers have made it more attractive to use them for applications with high resource requirements. New deployment models permit native I/O performance for demanding applications by running them in I/O domains with direct access to their devices. This is leveraged in SPARC SuperCluster, and can be leveraged in T-series servers to provision high-performance applications running in domains. Carefully planned, this can be used to provide higher performance for critical applications.

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• SQL Server Developer Tools &ndash; Codename Juneau vs. Red-Gate SQL Source Control

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  So how do the new SQL Server Developer Tools (previously code-named Juneau) stack up against SQL Source Control?  Read on to find out. At the PASS Community Summit a couple of weeks ago, it was announced that the previously code-named Juneau software would be released under the name of SQL Server Developer Tools with the release of SQL Server 2012.  This replacement for Database Projects in Visual Studio (also known in a former life as Data Dude) has some great new features.  I won’t attempt to describe them all here, but I will applaud Microsoft for making major improvements.  One of my favorite changes is the way database elements are broken down.  Previously every little thing was in its own file.  For example, indexes were each in their own file.  I always hated that.  Now, SSDT uses a pattern similar to Red-Gate’s and puts the indexes and keys into the same file as the overall table definition. Of course there are really cool features to keep your database model in sync with the actual source scripts, and the rename refactoring feature is now touted as being more than just a search and replace, but rather a “semantic-aware” search and replace.  Funny, it reminds me of SQL Prompt’s Smart Rename feature.  But I’m not writing this just to criticize Microsoft and argue that they are late to the party with this feature set.  Instead, I do see it as a viable alternative for folks who want all of their source code to be version controlled, but there are a couple of key trade-offs that you need to know about when you choose which tool set to use. First, the basics Both tool sets integrate with a wide variety of source control systems including the most popular: Subversion, GIT, Vault, and Team Foundation Server.  Both tools have integrated functionality to produce objects to upgrade your target database when you are ready (DACPACs in SSDT, integration with SQL Compare for SQL Source Control).  If you regularly live in Visual Studio or the Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) then SSDT will likely be comfortable for you.  Like BIDS, SSDT is a Visual Studio Project Type that comes with SQL Server, and if you don’t already have Visual Studio installed, it will install the shell for you.  If you already have Visual Studio 2010 installed, then it will just add this as an available project type.  On the other hand, if you regularly live in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) then you will really enjoy the SQL Source Control integration from within SSMS.  Both tool sets store their database model in script files.  In SSDT, these are on your file system like other source files; in SQL Source Control, these are stored in the folder structure in your source control system, and you can always GET them to your file system if you want to browse them directly. For me, the key differentiating factors are 1) a single, unified check-in, and 2) migration scripts.  How you value those two features will likely make your decision for you. Unified Check-In If you do a continuous-integration (CI) style of development that triggers an automated build with unit testing on every check-in of source code, and you use Visual Studio for the rest of your development, then you will want to really consider SSDT.  Because it is just another project in Visual Studio, it can be added to your existing Solution, and you can then do a complete, or unified single check-in of all changes whether they are application or database changes.  This is simply not possible with SQL Source Control because it is in a different development tool (SSMS instead of Visual Studio) and there is no way to do one unified check-in between the two.  You CAN do really fast back-to-back check-ins, but there is the possibility that the automated build that is triggered from the first check-in will cause your unit tests to fail and the CI tool to report that you broke the build.  Of course, the automated build that is triggered from the second check-in which contains the “other half” of your changes should pass and so the amount of time that the build was broken may be very, very short, but if that is very, very important to you, then SQL Source Control just won’t work; you’ll have to use SSDT. Refactoring and Migrations If you work on a mature system, or on a not-so-mature but also not-so-well-designed system, where you want to refactor the database schema as you go along, but you can’t have data suddenly disappearing from your target system, then you’ll probably want to go with SQL Source Control.  As I wrote previously, there are a number of changes which you can make to your database that the comparison tools (both from Microsoft and Red Gate) simply cannot handle without the possibility (or probability) of data loss.  Currently, SSDT only offers you the ability to inject PRE and POST custom deployment scripts.  There is no way to insert your own script in the middle to override the default behavior of the tool.  In version 3.0 of SQL Source Control (Early Access version now available) you have that ability to create your own custom migration script to take the place of the commands that the tool would have done, and ensure the preservation of your data.  Or, even if the default tool behavior would have worked, but you simply know a better way then you can take control and do things your way instead of theirs. You Decide In the environment I work in, our automated builds are not triggered off of check-ins, but off of the clock (currently once per night) and so there is no point at which the automated build and unit tests will be triggered without having both sides of the development effort already checked-in.  Therefore having a unified check-in, while handy, is not critical for us.  As for migration scripts, these are critically important to us.  We do a lot of new development on systems that have already been in production for years, and it is not uncommon for us to need to do a refactoring of the database.  Because of the maturity of the existing system, that often involves data migrations or other additional SQL tasks that the comparison tools just can’t detect on their own.  Therefore, the ability to create a custom migration script to override the tool’s default behavior is very important to us.  And so, you can see why we will continue to use Red Gate SQL Source Control for the foreseeable future.

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• To SYNC or not to SYNC – Part 3

  - by AshishRay

  I can't believe it has been almost a year since my last blog post. I know, that's an absolute no-no in the blogosphere. And I know that "I have been busy" is not a good excuse. So - without trying to come up with an excuse - let me state this - my apologies for taking such a long time to write the next Part. Without further ado, here goes. This is Part 3 of a multi-part blog article where we are discussing various aspects of setting up Data Guard synchronous redo transport (SYNC). In Part 1 of this article, I debunked the myth that Data Guard SYNC is similar to a two-phase commit operation. In Part 2, I discussed the various ways that network latency may or may not impact a Data Guard SYNC configuration. In this article, I will talk in details regarding why Data Guard SYNC is a good thing. I will also talk about distance implications for setting up such a configuration. So, Why Good? Why is Data Guard SYNC a good thing? Because, at the end of the day, this gives you the assurance of zero data loss - it doesn’t matter what outage may befall your primary system. Befall! Boy, that sounds theatrical. But seriously - think about this - it minimizes your data risks. That’s a big deal. Whether you have an outage due to bad disks, faulty hardware components, hardware / software bugs, physical data corruptions, power failures, lightning that takes out significant part of your data center, fire that melts your assets, water leakage from the cooling system, human errors such as accidental deletion of online redo log files - it doesn’t matter - you can have that “Om - peace” look on your face and then you can failover to the standby system, without losing a single bit of data in your Oracle database. You will be a hero, as shown in this not so imaginary conversation: IT Manager: Well, what’s the status? You: John is doing the trace analysis on the storage array. IT Manager: So? How long is that gonna take? You: Well, he is stuck, waiting for a response from <insert your not-so-favorite storage vendor here>. IT Manager: So, no root cause yet? You: I told you, he is stuck. We have escalated with their Support, but you know how long these things take. IT Manager: Darn it - the site is down! You: Not really … IT Manager: What do you mean? You: John is stuck, but Sreeni has already done a failover to the Data Guard standby. IT Manager: Whoa, whoa - wait! Failover means we lost some data, why did you do this without letting the Business group know? You: We didn’t lose any data. Remember, we had set up Data Guard with SYNC? So now, any problems on the production – we just failover. No data loss, and we are up and running in minutes. The Business guys don’t need to know. IT Manager: Wow! Are we great or what!! You: I guess … Ok, so you get it - SYNC is good. But as my dear friend Larry Carpenter says, “TANSTAAFL”, or "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch". Yes, of course - investing in Data Guard SYNC means that you have to invest in a low-latency network, you have to monitor your applications and database especially in peak load conditions, and you cannot under-provision your standby systems. But all these are good and necessary things, if you are supporting mission-critical apps that are supposed to be running 24x7. The peace of mind that this investment will give you is priceless, especially if you are serious about HA. How Far Can We Go? Someone may say at this point - well, I can’t use Data Guard SYNC over my coast-to-coast deployment. Most likely - true. So how far can you go? Well, we have customers who have deployed Data Guard SYNC over 300+ miles! Does this mean that you can also deploy over similar distances? Duh - no! I am going to say something here that most IT managers don’t like to hear - “It depends!” It depends on your application design, application response time / throughput requirements, network topology, etc. However, because of the optimal way we do SYNC, customers have been able to stretch Data Guard SYNC deployments over longer distances compared to traditional, storage-centric ways of doing this. The MAA Database 10.2 best practices paper Data Guard Redo Transport & Network Configuration, and Oracle Database 11.2 High Availability Best Practices Manual talk about some of these SYNC-related metrics. For example, a test deployment of Data Guard SYNC over 330 miles with 10ms latency showed an impact less than 5% for a busy OLTP application. Even if you can’t deploy Data Guard SYNC over your WAN distance, or if you already have an ASYNC standby located 1000-s of miles away, here’s another nifty way to boost your HA. Have a local standby, configured SYNC. How local is “local”? Again - it depends. One customer runs a local SYNC standby across the campus. Another customer runs it across 15 miles in another data center. Both of these customers are running Data Guard SYNC as their HA standard. If a localized outage affects their primary system, no problem! They have all the data available on the standby, to which they can failover. Very fast. In seconds. Wait - did I say “seconds”? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. But you have to wait till the next blog article to find out more. I assure you tho’ that this time you won’t have to wait for another year for this.

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• Alcatel-Lucent: Enterprise 2.0: The Top 5 Things I would Do Over

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  Happy Monday! Does anyone else feel as if the weekend went entirely too quickly? At least for those of us in the United States, we have the 4th of July Holiday next week to look forward to This week on the blog, we are going to focus on "WebCenter by Example" and highlight best practices from customers and partners. I recently came across this article and I think this is a great example of how we can learn from one another when it comes to social collaboration adoption. Do you agree with Jem? What things or best practices have you learned in your organizations?  By Jem Janik, Enterprise community manager, Alcatel-Lucent  Not so long ago, Engage, the Alcatel-Lucent employee social network and collaboration platform, celebrated its third birthday. With more than 25,000 members actively interacting each month, Engage has been a big enough success that it’s been the subject of external articles, and often those of us who helped launch it will go out and speak about what aspects contributed to that success. Hindsight is still 20/20 and what it takes to successfully launch an enterprise 2.0 community is fairly well-known now.  Today I want to tell you what I suspect you really want to know about.  As the enterprise community manager for Engage, after three years in, what are the top 5 things I wish we (and I mostly mean me) could do over? #5 Define your analytics solution from the start There is so much to do when you launch a community and initially growing it without complete chaos is quite a task.  It doesn’t take too long to get to a point where you want to focus your continued efforts in growing company collaboration.  Do people truly talk across regional boundaries or have we shifted siloed conversations to a new platform.  Is there one organization that doesn’t interact with another? If you are lucky you’ll have someone in your community team well versed in the world of databases and SQL queries, but it takes time to figure out what backend analytics data actually means. Professional support can be expensive and it may be hard to justify later as it typically has the community manager as the only main customer.  Figure out what you think you’ll want to know and how to get it early on. The sooner the better even if it doesn’t seem that critical at the time. #4 Lobbies guide you to the right places One piece of feedback that comes up more and more as we keep growing Engage is it’s hard to find stuff, or new people are not sure where to start. Something we’re doing now is defining some general topic areas of interest to be like “lobbies” into the platform and some common hashtags to go with them. I liken this to walking into a large medical or professional building for the first time.  There are hundreds of offices, and you look to a sign in the lobby to get guided to the right place for you.  We’re building that sign for members now, but again we missed the boat as the majority of the company has had their initial Engage experience. #3 Clean up, clean up, clean up Knowledge work and folksonomies are messy! The day we opened the doors to Engage I would have said we should keep everything ever created in Engage with an argument that it was a window into our collective knowledge so nothing should go.  Well, 6000+ groups and 200,000+ pieces of content later, I’ve changed my mind.  As previously mentioned, with too much “stuff” the system can be overwhelming to new members and it makes it harder to get what you’re looking for.   Do we need that help document about a tool we no longer have? NO!  Do we need that group that had 1 document and 2 discussions in the last two years? NO! Should we only have one group about a given topic instead of 4?  YES! Last fall, Engage defined a cleanup process for groups not used for a long time.  We also formed a volunteer cleaning army who are extra eyes on the hunt for “stuff” that should be updated, merged, or deleted.  It’s better late than never, but in line with what’s becoming a theme I wish these efforts had started earlier. #2 Communications & local community management One of the most important aspects of my job is to make sure people who should be talking to each other are actually doing it.  Connecting people to the other people they should know, the groups they should join, a piece of content that shouldn’t be missed.   I have worked both inside and outside of communications teams, and they are the best informed people in your company.  They know when something big is coming, how it impacts employees, how it fits with strategy, who else knows more, etc.  Having communications professionals who are power users can help scale up community management because they are already so well connected.  They also need to have the platform skills to pay attention without suffering email overload, how to grab someone’s attention, etc.  I wish I’d had figured this out much earlier.  If I had I would have groomed more communications colleagues into advocates and power members right at the start. #1 Grooming advocates vs. natural advocates I’ve just alluded to this above already. The very best advocates are those who naturally embrace your platform and automatically start to see new ways to work within it.  Those advocates seem to come out of the woodwork naturally since some of them are early adopters.  Not surprisingly, our best advocates today are those same people who were willing to come kick the tires when the community was completely empty.  Unfortunately, we didn’t get a global spread of those natural advocates.  I did ask around when we first launched for other people who might be good candidates, but didn’t push too hard as there were so many other things to get ready.  That was a mistake.  If I could get a redo I would have formally asked for people to be assigned where there were gaps and groomed them into an advocate.  Today as we find new advocates to fill the gaps, people are hesitant as the initial set has three years of practice are ahead of the curve power members; it definitely would have been easier earlier on. As fairly early adopters to corporate scale enterprise collaboration, there hasn’t been a roadmap to follow as we’ve grown Engage, which is part of the fun! It’s clear a lot of issues are more easily tackled the earlier you identify and begin to correct them, and I’ve identified the main five I wish I could redo.  In the spirit of collaboration, I hope someone else learns from my mistakes! View the original article by Jem here. 

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• ndd on Solaris 10

  - by user12620111

  This is mostly a repost of LaoTsao's Weblog with some tweaks. Last time that I tried to cut & paste directly off of his page, some of the XML was messed up. I run this from my MacBook. It should also work from your windows laptop if you use cygwin. ================If not already present, create a ssh key on you laptop================ # ssh-keygen -t rsa ================ Enable passwordless ssh from my laptop. Need to type in the root password for the remote machines. Then, I no longer need to type in the password when I ssh or scp from my laptop to servers. ================ #!/usr/bin/env bash for server in `cat servers.txt` do   echo root@$server   cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh root@$server "cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys" done ================ servers.txt ================ testhost1testhost2 ================ etc_system_addins ================ set rpcmod:clnt_max_conns=8 set zfs:zfs_arc_max=0x1000000000 set nfs:nfs3_bsize=131072 set nfs:nfs4_bsize=131072 ================ ndd-nettune.txt ================ #!/sbin/sh # # ident   "@(#)ndd-nettune.xml    1.0     01/08/06 SMI" . /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh . /lib/svc/share/net_include.sh # Make sure that the libraries essential to this stage of booting  can be found. LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH echo "Performing Directory Server Tuning..." >> /tmp/smf.out # # Standard SuperCluster Tunables # /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_max_buf 2097152 /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_xmit_hiwat 1048576 /usr/sbin/ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_recv_hiwat 1048576 # Reset the library path now that we are past the critical stage unset LD_LIBRARY_PATH ================ ndd-nettune.xml ================ <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE service_bundle SYSTEM "/usr/share/lib/xml/dtd/service_bundle.dtd.1"> <!-- ident "@(#)ndd-nettune.xml 1.0 04/09/21 SMI" --> <service_bundle type='manifest' name='SUNWcsr:ndd'>   <service name='network/ndd-nettune' type='service' version='1'>     <create_default_instance enabled='true' />     <single_instance />     <dependency name='fs-minimal' type='service' grouping='require_all' restart_on='none'>       <service_fmri value='svc:/system/filesystem/minimal' />     </dependency>     <dependency name='loopback-network' grouping='require_any' restart_on='none' type='service'>       <service_fmri value='svc:/network/loopback' />     </dependency>     <dependency name='physical-network' grouping='optional_all' restart_on='none' type='service'>       <service_fmri value='svc:/network/physical' />     </dependency>     <exec_method type='method' name='start' exec='/lib/svc/method/ndd-nettune' timeout_seconds='3' > </exec_method>     <exec_method type='method' name='stop'  exec=':true'                       timeout_seconds='3' > </exec_method>     <property_group name='startd' type='framework'>       <propval name='duration' type='astring' value='transient' />     </property_group>     <stability value='Unstable' />     <template>       <common_name>     <loctext xml:lang='C'> ndd network tuning </loctext>       </common_name>       <documentation>     <manpage title='ndd' section='1M' manpath='/usr/share/man' />       </documentation>     </template>   </service> </service_bundle> ================ system_tuning.sh ================ #!/usr/bin/env bash for server in `cat servers.txt` do   cat etc_system_addins | ssh root@$server "cat >> /etc/system"   scp ndd-nettune.xml root@${server}:/var/svc/manifest/site/ndd-nettune.xml   scp ndd-nettune.txt root@${server}:/lib/svc/method/ndd-nettune   ssh root@$server chmod +x /lib/svc/method/ndd-nettune   ssh root@$server svccfg validate /var/svc/manifest/site/ndd-nettune.xml   ssh root@$server svccfg import /var/svc/manifest/site/ndd-nettune.xml done

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• RHEL - blocked FC remote port time out: saving binding

  - by Dev G

  My Server went into a faulty state since the database could not write on the partition. I found out that the partition went into Read Only mode. Finally to fix it, I had to do a hard reboot. Linux 2.6.18-164.el5PAE #1 SMP Tue Aug 18 15:59:11 EDT 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux /var/log/messages Oct 31 00:56:45 ota3g1 Had[17275]: VCS ERROR V-16-1-10214 Concurrency Violation:CurrentCount increased above 1 for failover group sg_network Oct 31 00:57:05 ota3g1 Had[17275]: VCS CRITICAL V-16-1-50086 CPU usage on ota3g1.mtsallstream.com is 100% Oct 31 01:01:47 ota3g1 Had[17275]: VCS ERROR V-16-1-10214 Concurrency Violation:CurrentCount increased above 1 for failover group sg_network Oct 31 01:06:50 ota3g1 Had[17275]: VCS ERROR V-16-1-10214 Concurrency Violation:CurrentCount increased above 1 for failover group sg_network Oct 31 01:11:52 ota3g1 Had[17275]: VCS ERROR V-16-1-10214 Concurrency Violation:CurrentCount increased above 1 for failover group sg_network Oct 31 01:12:10 ota3g1 kernel: lpfc 0000:29:00.1: 1:1305 Link Down Event x2 received Data: x2 x20 x80000 x0 x0 Oct 31 01:12:10 ota3g1 kernel: lpfc 0000:29:00.1: 1:1303 Link Up Event x3 received Data: x3 x1 x10 x1 x0 x0 0 Oct 31 01:12:12 ota3g1 kernel: lpfc 0000:29:00.1: 1:1305 Link Down Event x4 received Data: x4 x20 x80000 x0 x0 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: rport-8:0-0: blocked FC remote port time out: saving binding Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: lpfc 0000:29:00.1: 1:(0):0203 Devloss timeout on WWPN 20:25:00:a0:b8:74:f5:65 NPort x0000e4 Data: x0 x7 x0 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 38617577 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 283532153 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 90825 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: Aborting journal on device dm-16. Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 868841 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: Aborting journal on device dm-10. Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 37759889 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 283349449 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: printk: 6 messages suppressed. Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: Aborting journal on device dm-12. Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device dm-12) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device dm-16, logical block 1545 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on dm-16 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 12745 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device dm-10, logical block 1545 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device dm-16) in ext3_reserve_inode_write: Journal has aborted Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on dm-10 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 37749121 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device dm-12, logical block 0 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on dm-12 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device dm-12) in ext3_dirty_inode: Journal has aborted Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 37757897 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device dm-12, logical block 1097 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on dm-12 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 283337089 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device dm-16, logical block 0 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on dm-16 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: EXT3-fs error (device dm-16) in ext3_dirty_inode: Journal has aborted Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 37749121 Oct 31 01:12:40 ota3g1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device dm-12, logical block 0 Oct 31 01:12:41 ota3g1 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on dm-12 Oct 31 01:12:41 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 Oct 31 01:12:41 ota3g1 kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sdi, sector 283337089 Oct 31 01:12:41 ota3g1 kernel: Buffer I/O error on device dm-16, logical block 0 Oct 31 01:12:41 ota3g1 kernel: lost page write due to I/O error on dm-16 Oct 31 01:12:41 ota3g1 kernel: sd 8:0:0:4: SCSI error: return code = 0x00010000 df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/cciss-root 4.9G 730M 3.9G 16% / /dev/mapper/cciss-home 9.7G 1.2G 8.1G 13% /home /dev/mapper/cciss-var 9.7G 494M 8.8G 6% /var /dev/mapper/cciss-usr 15G 2.6G 12G 19% /usr /dev/mapper/cciss-tmp 3.9G 153M 3.6G 5% /tmp /dev/sda1 996M 43M 902M 5% /boot tmpfs 5.9G 0 5.9G 0% /dev/shm /dev/mapper/cciss-product 25G 16G 7.4G 68% /product /dev/mapper/cciss-opt 20G 4.5G 14G 25% /opt /dev/mapper/dg_db1-vol_db1_system 18G 2.2G 15G 14% /database/OTADB/sys /dev/mapper/dg_db1-vol_db1_undo 18G 5.8G 12G 35% /database/OTADB/undo /dev/mapper/dg_db1-vol_db1_redo 8.9G 4.3G 4.2G 51% /database/OTADB/redo /dev/mapper/dg_db1-vol_db1_sgbd 8.9G 654M 7.8G 8% /database/OTADB/admin /dev/mapper/dg_db1-vol_db1_arch 98G 24G 69G 26% /database/OTADB/arch /dev/mapper/dg_db1-vol_db1_indexes 240G 14G 214G 6% /database/OTADB/index /dev/mapper/dg_db1-vol_db1_data 275G 47G 215G 18% /database/OTADB/data /dev/mapper/dg_dbrman-vol_db_rman 8.9G 351M 8.1G 5% /database/RMAN /dev/mapper/dg_app1-vol_app1 151G 113G 31G 79% /files/ota /etc/fstab /dev/cciss/root / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/cciss/home /home ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/cciss/var /var ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/cciss/usr /usr ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/cciss/tmp /tmp ext3 defaults 1 2 LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2 tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0 devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0 sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0 proc /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/cciss/swap swap swap defaults 0 0 /dev/cciss/product /product ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/cciss/opt /opt ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/dg_db1/vol_db1_system /database/OTADB/sys ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/dg_db1/vol_db1_undo /database/OTADB/undo ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/dg_db1/vol_db1_redo /database/OTADB/redo ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/dg_db1/vol_db1_sgbd /database/OTADB/admin ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/dg_db1/vol_db1_arch /database/OTADB/arch ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/dg_db1/vol_db1_indexes /database/OTADB/index ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/dg_db1/vol_db1_data /database/OTADB/data ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/dg_dbrman/vol_db_rman /database/RMAN ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/dg_app1/vol_app1 /files/ota ext3 defaults 1 2 Thanks for all the help.

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• "power limit notification" clobbering on 12G Dell servers with RHEL6

  - by Andrew B

  Server: Poweredge r620 OS: RHEL 6.4 Kernel: 2.6.32-358.18.1.el6.x86_64 I'm experiencing application alarms in my production environment. Critical CPU hungry processes are being starved of resources and causing a processing backlog. The problem is happening on all the 12th Generation Dell servers (r620s) in a recently deployed cluster. As near as I can tell, instances of this happening are matching up to peak CPU utilization, accompanied by massive amounts of "power limit notification" spam in dmesg. An excerpt of one of these events: Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU12: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU0: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU6: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU14: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU18: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU2: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU4: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU16: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU0: Package power limit notification (total events = 11) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU6: Package power limit notification (total events = 13) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU14: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU18: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU20: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU8: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU2: Package power limit notification (total events = 12) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU10: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU22: Core power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU4: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU16: Package power limit notification (total events = 13) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU20: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU8: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU10: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU22: Package power limit notification (total events = 14) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU15: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU3: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU1: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU5: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU17: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU13: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU15: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU3: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU1: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU5: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU7: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU19: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU17: Package power limit notification (total events = 377) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU9: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU21: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU23: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU11: Core power limit notification (total events = 369) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU13: Package power limit notification (total events = 376) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU7: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU19: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU9: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU21: Package power limit notification (total events = 375) Nov 7 10:15:15 someserver [.crit] CPU23: Package power limit notification (total events = 374) A little Google Fu reveals that this is typically associated with the CPU running hot, or voltage regulation kicking in. I don't think that's what is happening though. Temperature sensors for all servers in the cluster are running fine, Power Cap Policy is disabled in the iDRAC, and my System Profile is set to "Performance" on all of these servers: # omreport chassis biossetup | grep -A10 'System Profile' System Profile Settings ------------------------------------------ System Profile : Performance CPU Power Management : Maximum Performance Memory Frequency : Maximum Performance Turbo Boost : Enabled C1E : Disabled C States : Disabled Monitor/Mwait : Enabled Memory Patrol Scrub : Standard Memory Refresh Rate : 1x Memory Operating Voltage : Auto Collaborative CPU Performance Control : Disabled A Dell mailing list post describes the symptoms almost perfectly. Dell suggested that the author try using the Performance profile, but that didn't help. He ended up applying some settings in Dell's guide for configuring a server for low latency environments and one of those settings (or a combination thereof) seems to have fixed the problem. Kernel.org bug #36182 notes that power-limit interrupt debugging was enabled by default, which is causing performance degradation in scenarios where CPU voltage regulation is kicking in. A RHN KB article (RHN login required) mentions a problem impacting PE r620 and r720 servers not running the Performance profile, and recommends an update to a kernel released two weeks ago. ...Except we are running the Performance profile... Everything I can find online is running me in circles here. What's the heck is going on?

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• Hyper-V File Server Clustering - at my wit’s end

  - by René Kåbis

  I am at my wit’s end with File Server clustering under Hyper-V. I am hoping that someone might be able to help me figure out this Gordian Knot of a technology that seems to have dead ends (like forcing cluster VMs to use iSCSI drives where normally-attached VHDX drives could suffice) where logic and reason would normally provide a logical solution. My hardware: I will be running three servers (in the end), but right now everything is taking place on one server. One of the secondary servers will exist purely as a witness/quorum, and another slightly more powerful one will be acting as an emergency backup (with additional storage, just not redundant) to hold the secondary AD VM and the other halves of a set of clustered VMs: the SQL VM and the file system VM. Please note, these each are the depreciated nodes of a cluster, the main nodes will be on the most powerful first machine. My heavy lifter is a machine that also contains all of the truly redundant storage on the network. If this gives anyone the heebie-geebies, too bad. It has a 6TB (usable) RAID-10 array, and will (in the end) hold the primary nodes of both aforementioned clusters, but is right now holding all VMs. This is, right now: DC01, DC02, SQL01, SQL02, FS01 & FS02. Eventually, I will be adding additional VMs to handle Exchange, Sharepoint and Lync, but only to this main server (the secondary server won't be able to handle more than three or four VMs, so why burden it? The AD, SQL & FS VMs are the most critical for the business). If anyone is now saying, “wait, what about a SAN or a NAS for the file servers?”, well too bad. What exists on the main machine is what I have to deal with. I followed these instructions, but I seem to be unable to get things to work. In order to make the file server truly redundant, I cannot trust any one machine to hold the only data store on the network. Therefore, I have created a set of iSCSI drives on the VM-host of the main machine, and attached one to each file server VM. The end result is that I want my FS01 to sit on the heavy lifter, along with its iSCSI “drive”, and FS02 will sit on the secondary machine with its own iSCSI “drive” there as well. That is, neither iSCSI drive will end up sitting on the same machine as the other. As such, the clustered FS will utterly duplicate the contents of the iSCSI drives between each other, so that if one physical machine (or the FS VM) goes toes-up, the other has got a full copy of the data on its own iSCSI drive. My problem occurs when I try to apply the file server role within the failover cluster manager. Actually, it is even before that -- it occurs when adding the disks. Since I have added each disk preferentially to a specific VM (by limiting the initiator by DNS hostname, and by adding two-way CHAP authentication), this forces each VM to be in control of its own iSCSI disk. However, when I try to add the disks to the Disks section of Storage within Failover Cluster Manager, the entire process fails for a random disk of the pair. That is, one will get online, but the other will remain offline because it does not have the correct “owner node”. I mean, really -- WTF? Of course it doesn’t have the right owner node, both drives are showing the same node name!! I cannot seem to have one drive show up with one node name as owner, and the other drive show up with the other node name as owner. And because both drives are not “online”, I cannot create a pool to apply to a cluster role. Talk about getting stuck between a rock and a hard place! I’ve got more to add, but my work is closing for the day and I have to wrap things up. I will try to add more tomorrow morning when I get in. My main objective is to have a file server VM on each machine, the storage on each machine, but a transparent failover in case one physical machine fails. Essentially, a failover FS that doesn’t care which machine fails -- the storage contents are replicated equally on each machine. Am I even heading in the right direction?

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• IIS7 FTP Setup - An error occured during the authentication process. 530 End Login failed

  - by robmzd

  I'm having a problem very similar to IIS 7.5 FTP IIS Manager Users Login Fail (530) on Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard. I have created an FTP site and IIS Manager user but am having trouble logging in. I could really do with getting this working with the IIS Manager user rather than by creating a new system user since I'm fairly restricted with those accounts. Here is the output when connecting locally through command prompt: C:\Windows\system32>ftp localhost Connected to MYSERVER. 220 Microsoft FTP Service User (MYSERVER:(none)): MyFtpLogin 331 Password required for MyFtpLogin. Password: *** 530-User cannot log in. Win32 error: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. Error details: An error occured during the authentication process. 530 End Login failed. I have followed the guide to configure ftp with iis manager authentication in iis 7 and Adding FTP Publishing to a Web Site in IIS 7 Things I have done and checked: The FTP Service is installed (along with FTP Extensibility). Local Service and Network Service have been given access to the site folder Permission has been given to the config files Granted read/write permissions to the FTP Root folder The Management Service is installed and running Enable remote connections is ticked with 'Windows credentials or IIS manager credentials' selected The IIS Manager User has been added to the server (root connection in the IIS connections branch) The new FTP site has been added IIS Manager Authentication has been added to the FTP authentication providers The IIS Manager user has been added to the IIS Manager Permissions list for the site Added Read/Write permissions for the user in the FTP Authorization Rules Here's a section of the applicationHost config file associated with the FTP site <site name="MySite" id="8"> <application path="/" applicationPool="MyAppPool"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="D:\Websites\MySite" /> </application> <bindings> <binding protocol="http" bindingInformation="*:80:www.mydomain.co.uk" /> <binding protocol="ftp" bindingInformation="*:21:www.mydomain.co.uk" /> </bindings> <ftpServer> <security> <ssl controlChannelPolicy="SslAllow" dataChannelPolicy="SslAllow" /> <authentication> <basicAuthentication enabled="true" /> <customAuthentication> <providers> <add name="IisManagerAuth" enabled="true" /> </providers> </customAuthentication> </authentication> </security> </ftpServer> </site> ... <location path="MySite"> <system.ftpServer> <security> <authorization> <add accessType="Allow" users="MyFtpLogin" permissions="Read, Write" /> </authorization> </security> </system.ftpServer> </location> If I connect to the Site (not FTP) from my local IIS Manager using the same IIS Manager account details then it connects fine, I can browse files and change settings as I would locally (though I don't seem to have an option to upload files). Trying to connect via FTP though either through the browser or FileZilla etc... gives me: Status: Resolving address of www.mydomain.co.uk Status: Connecting to 123.456.12.123:21... Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message... Response: 220 Microsoft FTP Service Command: USER MyFtpLogin Response: 331 Password required for MyFtpLogin. Command: PASS ********* Response: 530 User cannot log in. Error: Critical error Error: Could not connect to server I have tried collecting etw traces for ftp sessions, in the logs I get a FailBasicLogon followed by a FailCustomLogon, but no other info: FailBasicLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | ErrorCode=0x8007052E StartCustomLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | LogonProvider=IisManagerAuth StartCallProvider SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | provider=IisManagerAuth EndCallProvider SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} EndCustomLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} FailCustomLogon SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | ErrorCode=0x8007052E FailFtpCommand SessionId={cad26a97-225d-45ba-ab1f-f6acd9046e55} | ReturnValue=0x8007052E | SubStatus=ERROR_DURING_AUTHENTICATION In the normal FTP logs I just get: 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 ControlChannelOpened - - 0 0 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 USER MyFtpLogin 331 0 0 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 PASS *** 530 1326 41 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - 2012-10-23 16:13:11 123.456.12.123 - 123.456.12.123 21 ControlChannelClosed - - 0 0 e2d4e935-fb31-4f2c-af79-78d75d47c18e - If anyone has any ideas than I would be very grateful to hear them. Many thanks.

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• snmptt not translating traps, even with translate_log_trap_oid=1

  - by mbrownnyc

  I am having some trouble configuring snmptt to properly translate snmp traps. The following is a problem: /etc/snmp/snmptt.conf reflects: EVENT fgFmTrapIfChange .1.3.6.1.4.1.12356.101.6.0.1004 "Status Events" Critical FORMAT $* EXEC /usr/local/nagios/libexec/eventhandlers/submit_check_result $r "snmp_traps" 2 "$O: $+*" "$*" SDESC Trap is sent to the managing FortiManager if an interface IP is changed Variables: 1: fnSysSerial 2: ifName 3: fgManIfIp 4: fgManIfMask EDESC when a trap is received, /var/log/messages reflects: Sep 6 12:07:32 SNMPMANAGERHOST snmptrapd[15385]: 2012-09-06 12:07:32 <UNKNOWN> [UDP: [192.168.100.2]:162->[192.168.100.31]]: #012.1.3.6.1.2.1.1.3.0 = Timeticks: (707253943) 81 days, 20:35:39.43 #011.1.3.6.1.6.3.1.1.4.1.0 = OID: .1.3.6.1.4.1.12356.101.6.0.1004 #011.1.3.6.1.4.1.12356.100.1.1.1.0 = STRING: FGTNNNNNNNNN #011.1.3.6.1.2.1.31.1.1.1.1.10 = STRING: internal4 #011.1.3.6.1.4.1.12356.101.6.2.1.0 = IpAddress: 192.168.65.100 #011.1.3.6.1.4.1.12356.101.6.2.2.0 = IpAddress: 255.255.255.0 Sep 6 12:07:37 SNMPMANAGERHOST icinga: EXTERNAL COMMAND: PROCESS_SERVICE_CHECK_RESULT; 192.168.100.2; snmp_traps; 2; enterprises.12356.101.6.0.1004: enterprises.12356.100.1.1.1.0:FGTNNNNNNNNN ifName.10:internal4 enterprises.12356.101.6.2.1.0:192.168.65.100 enterprises.12356.101.6.2.2.0:255.255.255.0 Since the icinga entry reflects the EXEC, it's obvious there is no translations occurring by snmptt. I have verified that translate_log_trap_oid and net_snmp_perl_enable is enabled in snmptt.ini When using --debug=1 to start snmptt, I see the following in the --debugfile: ********** Net-SNMP version 5.05 Perl module enabled ********** The main NET-SNMP version is reported as NET-SNMP version: 5.5. What else can be done to verify that snmptt is configured properly to translate traps? I have run snmptt-net-snmp-test to verify whatever net-snmp-perl version I have installed properly supports translations. The output indicates it does. /root/snmptt_1.3/snmptt-net-snmp-test --best_guess=2 SNMPTT Net-SNMP Test v1.0 (c) 2003 Alex Burger http://snmptt.sourceforge.net MIBS:RFC1213-MIB best_guess: 2 Testing translateObj ******************** Testing: .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1, long_names=disabled, include_module=disabled Test passed. Result: sysDescr Testing: .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1, long_names=disabled, include_module=enabled Test passed. Result: RFC1213-MIB::sysDescr Testing: .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1, long_names=enabled, include_module=disabled Test passed. Result: .iso.org.dod.internet.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysDescr Testing: .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1, long_names=enabled, include_module=enabled Test passed. Result: RFC1213-MIB::.iso.org.dod.internet.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysDescr Testing: sysDescr, long_names=disabled, include_module=disabled Test passed. Result: .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1 Testing: RFC1213-MIB::sysDescr, long_names=disabled, include_module=disabled Test passed. Result: .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1 Testing: system.sysDescr, long_names=disabled, include_module=disabled Test passed. Result: .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1 Testing: RFC1213-MIB::system.sysDescr, long_names=disabled, include_module=disabled Test passed. Result: .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1 Testing: .iso.org.dod.internet.mgmt.mib-2.system.sysDescr, long_names=disabled, include_module=disabled Test passed. Result: .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1 Testing getType *************** Testing: .1.3.6.1.2.1.4.1 Test passed. Result: INTEGER Testing: ipForwarding Test passed. Result: INTEGER Testing Description ******************* Test passed. Result: ------------------------------------------------- The indication of whether this entity is acting as an IP gateway in respect to the forwarding of datagrams received by, but not addressed to, this entity. IP gateways forward datagrams. IP hosts do not (except those source-routed via the host). Note that for some managed nodes, this object may take on only a subset of the values possible. Accordingly, it is appropriate for an agent to return a `badValue' response if a management station attempts to change this object to an inappropriate value. ------------------------------------------------- I have manually gone through the MIB with the definition that's not resolving, and verified that it is properly linking back to the proper resolved definition. It is: FORTINET-FORTIGATE-MIB.txt contains: fgFmTrapIfChange NOTIFICATION-TYPE OBJECTS { fnSysSerial, ifName, fgManIfIp, fgManIfMask } STATUS current DESCRIPTION "Trap is sent to the managing FortiManager if an interface IP is changed" ::= { fgFmTrapPrefix 1004 } fgFmTrapPrefix OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { fgMgmt 0 } fgMgmt OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { fnFortiGateMib 6 } fnFortiGateMib ::= { fortinet 101 } IMPORTS FnBoolState, FnIndex, fnAdminEntry, fnSysSerial, fortinet FROM FORTINET-CORE-MIB fortinet MODULE-IDENTITY ::= { enterprises 12356 } LOOKS GOOD!!!!! 1.3.6.1.4.1.12356.101.6.0.1004 I've exhausted all the documentation and even posted fruitlessly in the snmptt-users mailing list. I can not prove it is the MIB. Why would snmptt fail to translate traps? Thanks, Matt

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• Application Event Log keeps getting corrupted

  - by yakatz

  I recently asked about repairing a corrupt event log, because it seemed to be a one-off event. The event log has since exhibited the same behavior 3 times. We have been trying to find patterns, but so far we have found nothing. The server runs several ASP.NET applications and three scheduled tasks written in .NET. The last modified date of the event log once happened to be the same time as one of the scheduled tasks, but the others have not been. Any suggestions of where to look next or a way we can get any information out of a corrupt evtx file? The server is running critical e-commerce applications, so we want to keep the number of restarts required to a minimum. Edit: I ran DUMPEL and got very strange results. 1/9/2012 4:14:05 PM 1 100 1000 Application Error N/A SERVERNAME Faulting application name: w3wp.exe, version: 7.5.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7a5f8 Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7ba58 Exception code: 0xc0000374 Fault offset: 0x000ce653 Faulting process id: 0x1070 Faulting application start time: 0x01cccf1386d30991 Faulting application path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\inetsrv\w3wp.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll Report Id: dbf4f691-3b06-11e1-9025-005056a602e6 1/9/2012 4:14:07 PM 4 0 1001 Windows Error Reporting N/A SERVERNAME Fault bucket , type 0 Event Name: APPCRASH Response: Not available Cab Id: 0 Problem signature: P1: w3wp.exe P2: 7.5.7601.17514 P3: 4ce7a5f8 P4: StackHash_79d9 P5: 6.1.7601.17514 P6: 4ce7ba58 P7: c0000374 P8: 000ce653 P9: P10: Attached files: C:\Windows\Temp\WER975.tmp.appcompat.txt C:\Windows\Temp\WERA03.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml C:\Windows\Temp\WERA13.tmp.hdmp C:\Windows\Temp\WERD21.tmp.mdmp These files may be available here: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_w3wp.exe_cd7d09dfc84119d82a2ac6a789038bd5661acfb_cab_128f0e67 Analysis symbol: Rechecking for solution: 0 Report Id: dbf4f691-3b06-11e1-9025-005056a602e6 Report Status: 4 1/9/2012 4:14:07 PM 4 0 1001 Windows Error Reporting N/A SERVERNAME Fault bucket , type 0 Event Name: APPCRASH Response: Not available Cab Id: 0 Problem signature: P1: w3wp.exe P2: 7.5.7601.17514 P3: 4ce7a5f8 P4: StackHash_79d9 P5: 6.1.7601.17514 P6: 4ce7ba58 P7: c0000374 P8: 000ce653 P9: P10: Attached files: C:\Windows\Temp\WER975.tmp.appcompat.txt C:\Windows\Temp\WERA03.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml C:\Windows\Temp\WERA13.tmp.hdmp C:\Windows\Temp\WERD21.tmp.mdmp These files may be available here: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_w3wp.exe_cd7d09dfc84119d82a2ac6a789038bd5661acfb_cab_128f0e67 Analysis symbol: Rechecking for solution: 0 Report Id: dbf4f691-3b06-11e1-9025-005056a602e6 Report Status: 0 1/9/2012 4:14:12 PM 1 100 1000 Application Error N/A SERVERNAME Faulting application name: w3wp.exe, version: 7.5.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7a5f8 Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7ba58 Exception code: 0xc0000374 Fault offset: 0x000ce653 Faulting process id: 0x16ac Faulting application start time: 0x01cccf139f475c0c Faulting application path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\inetsrv\w3wp.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll Report Id: e03bae70-3b06-11e1-9025-005056a602e6 1/9/2012 4:14:16 PM 4 0 1001 Windows Error Reporting N/A SERVERNAME Fault bucket , type 0 Event Name: APPCRASH Response: Not available Cab Id: 0 Problem signature: P1: w3wp.exe P2: 7.5.7601.17514 P3: 4ce7a5f8 P4: StackHash_9c6c P5: 6.1.7601.17514 P6: 4ce7ba58 P7: c0000374 P8: 000ce653 P9: P10: Attached files: C:\Windows\Temp\WER2579.tmp.appcompat.txt C:\Windows\Temp\WER25F7.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml C:\Windows\Temp\WER25F8.tmp.hdmp C:\Windows\Temp\WER28F6.tmp.mdmp These files may be available here: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_w3wp.exe_c49a67649524ad11b64bbf809211bc5ba742a3d6_cab_0b63321b Analysis symbol: Rechecking for solution: 0 Report Id: e03bae70-3b06-11e1-9025-005056a602e6 Report Status: 4 1/9/2012 4:14:16 PM 4 0 1001 Windows Error Reporting N/A SERVERNAME Fault bucket , type 0 Event Name: APPCRASH Response: Not available Cab Id: 0 Problem signature: P1: w3wp.exe P2: 7.5.7601.17514 P3: 4ce7a5f8 P4: StackHash_9c6c P5: 6.1.7601.17514 P6: 4ce7ba58 P7: c0000374 P8: 000ce653 P9: P10: Attached files: C:\Windows\Temp\WER2579.tmp.appcompat.txt C:\Windows\Temp\WER25F7.tmp.WERInternalMetadata.xml C:\Windows\Temp\WER25F8.tmp.hdmp C:\Windows\Temp\WER28F6.tmp.mdmp These files may be available here: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_w3wp.exe_c49a67649524ad11b64bbf809211bc5ba742a3d6_cab_0b63321b Analysis symbol: Rechecking for solution: 0 Report Id: e03bae70-3b06-11e1-9025-005056a602e6 Report Status: 0 1/9/2012 4:14:21 PM 1 100 1000 Application Error N/A SERVERNAME Faulting application name: w3wp.exe, version: 7.5.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7a5f8 Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 6.1.7601.17514, time stamp: 0x4ce7ba58 Exception code: 0xc0000374 Fault offset: 0x000ce653 Faulting process id: 0x17f8 Faulting application start time: 0x01cccf13a4ba5126 Faulting application path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\inetsrv\w3wp.exe Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\ntdll.dll Report Id: e57a0a85-3b06-11e1-9025-005056a602e6 1/9/2012 4:14:21 PM 4 0 1001 Windows Error Reporting N/A SERVERNAME Fault bucket , type 0 Event Name: APPCRASH Response: Not available Cab Id: 0 Problem signature: P1: w3wp.exe P2: 7.5.7601.17514 P3: 4ce7a5f8 P4: StackHash_9c6c P5: 6.1.7601.17514 P6: 4ce7ba58 P7: c0000374 P8: 000ce653 P9: P10: Attached files: These files may be available here: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_w3wp.exe_c49a67649524ad11b64bbf809211bc5ba742a3d6_1cfb4872 Analysis symbol: Rechecking for solution: 0 Report Id: e57a0a85-3b06-11e1-9025-005056a602e6 Report Status: 4 1/9/2012 4:14:21 PM 4 0 1001 Windows Error Reporting N/A SERVERNAME Fault bucket , type 0 Event Name: APPCRASH Response: Not available Cab Id: 0 Problem signature: P1: w3wp.exe P2: 7.5.7601.17514 P3: 4ce7a5f8 P4: StackHash_9c6c P5: 6.1.7601.17514 P6: 4ce7ba58 P7: c0000374 P8: 000ce653 P9: P10: Attached files: These files may be available here: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\WER\ReportQueue\AppCrash_w3wp.exe_c49a67649524ad11b64bbf809211bc5ba742a3d6_1cfb4872 Analysis symbol: Rechecking for solution: 0 Report Id: e57a0a85-3b06-11e1-9025-005056a602e6 Report Status: 0 None of the files referenced actually exist (not even in WER ReportArchive). These should not be the only events mentioned. The log file has been cleared twice since January 9, so those events should not even be listed at all.

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