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• Windows 8 Launch&ndash;Why OEM and Retailers Should STFU

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Microsoft has gotten a lot of flack for the Surface from OEM/hardware partners who create Windows-based devices and I’m sure, to an extent, retailers who normally stock and sell Windows-based devices. I mean we all know how this is supposed to work – Microsoft makes the OS, partners make the hardware, retailers sell the hardware. Now Microsoft is breaking the rules by not only offering their own hardware but selling them via online and through their Microsoft branded stores! The thought has been that Microsoft is trying to set a standard for the other hardware companies to reach for. Maybe. I hope, at some level, Microsoft may be covertly responding to frustrations associated with trusting the OEMs and Retailers to deliver on their part of the supply chain. I know as a consumer, I’m very frustrated with the Windows 8 launch. Aside from the Surface sales, there’s nothing happening at the retail level. Let me back up and explain. Over the weekend I visited a number of stores in hopes of trying out various Windows 8 devices. Out of three retailers (Staples, Best Buy, and Future Shop), not *one* met my expectations. Let me be honest with you Staples, I never really have high expectations from your computer department. If I need paper or pens, whatever, but computers – you’re not the top of my list for price or selection. Still, considering you flaunted Win 8 devices in your flyer I expected *something* – some sign of effort that you took the Windows 8 launch seriously. As I entered the 1910 Pembina Highway location in Winnipeg, there was nothing – no signage, no banners – nothing that would suggest Windows 8 had even launched. I made my way to the laptops. I had to play with each machine to determine which ones were running Windows 8. There wasn’t anything on the placards that made it obvious which were Windows 8 machines and which ones were Windows 7. Likewise, there was no easy way to identify the touch screen laptop (the HP model) from the others without physically touching the screen to verify. Horrible experience. In the same mall as the Staples I mentioned above, there’s a Future Shop. Surely they would be more on the ball. I walked in to the 1910 Pembina Highway location and immediately realized I would not get a better experience. Except for the sign by the front door mentioning Windows 8, there was *nothing* in the computer department pointing you to the Windows 8 devices. Like in Staples, the Win 8 laptops were mixed in with the Win 7 ones and there was nothing notable calling out which ones were running Win 8. I happened to hit up the St. James Street location today, thinking since its a busier store they must have more options. To their credit, they did have two staff members decked out in Windows 8 shirts and who were helping a customer understand Windows 8. But otherwise, there was nothing highlighting the Windows 8 devices and they were again mixed in with the rest of the Win 7 machines. Finally, we have the St. James Street Best Buy location here in Winnipeg. I’m sure Best Buy will have their act together. Nope, not even close. Same story as the others: minimal signage (there was a sign as you walked in with a link to this schedule of demo days), Windows 8 hardware mixed with the rest of the PC offerings, and no visible call-outs identifying which were Win 8 based. This meant that, like Future Shop and Staples, if you wanted to know which machine had Windows 8 you had to go and scrutinize each machine. Also, there was nothing identifying which ones were touch based and which were not. Just Another Day… To these retailers, it seemed that the Windows 8 launch was just another day, with another product to add to the showroom floor. Meanwhile, Apple has their dedicated areas *in all three stores*. It was dead simple to find where the Apple products were compared to the Windows 8 products. No wonder Microsoft is starting to push their own retail stores. No wonder Microsoft is trying to funnel orders through them instead of relying on these bloated retail big box stores who obviously can’t manage a product launch. It’s Not Just The Retailers… Remember when the Acer CEO, Founder, and President of Computer Global Operations all weighed in on how Microsoft releasing the Surface would have a “huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction”? Also remember the CEO stating “[making hardware] is not something you are good at so please think twice”? Well the launch day has come and gone, and so far Microsoft is the only one that delivered on having hardware available on the October 26th date. Oh sure, there are laptops running Windows 8 – but all in one desktop PCs? I’ve only seen one or two! And tablets are *non existent*, with some showing an early to late November availability on Best Buy’s website! So while the retailers could be doing more to make it easier to find Windows 8 devices, the manufacturers could help by *getting devices into stores*! That’s supposedly something that these companies are good at, according to the Acer CEO. So Here’s What the Retailers and Manufacturers Need To Do… Get Product Out The pivotal timeframe will be now to the end of November. We need to start seeing all these fantastic pieces of hardware ship – including the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro, the Acer Iconia, the Asus TAICHI 21, and the sexy Samsung Series 7 27” desktop. It’s not enough to see product announcements, we need to see actual devices. Make It Easy For Customers To Find Win8 Devices You want to make it easy to sell these things? Make it easy for people to find them! Have staff on hand that really know how these devices run and what can be done with them. Don’t just have a single demo day, have people who can demo it every day! Make It Easy to See the Features There’s touch screen desktops, touch screen laptops, tablets, non-touch laptops, etc. People need to easily find the features for each machine. If I’m looking for a touch-laptop, I shouldn’t need to sift through all the non-touch laptops to find them – at the least, I need to quickly be able to see which ones are touch. I feel silly even typing this because this should be retail 101 and I have no retail background (but I do have an extensive background as a customer). In Summary… Microsoft launching the Surface and selling them through their own channels isn’t slapping its OEM and retail partners in the face; its slapping them to wake the hell up and stop coasting through Windows launch events like they don’t matter. Unless I see some improvements from vendors and retailers in November, I may just hold onto my money for a Surface Pro even if I have to wait until early 2013. Your move OEM/Retailers. *Update – While my experience has been in Winnipeg, similar experiences have been voiced from colleagues in Calgary and Edmonton.

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• Disaster, or Migration?

  - by Rob Farley

  This post is in two parts – technical and personal. And I should point out that it’s prompted in part by this month’s T-SQL Tuesday, hosted by Allen Kinsel. First, the technical: I’ve had a few conversations with people recently about migration – moving a SQL Server database from one box to another (sometimes, but not primarily, involving an upgrade). One question that tends to come up is that of downtime. Obviously there will be some period of time between the old server being available and the new one. The way that most people seem to think of migration is this: Build a new server. Stop people from using the old server. Take a backup of the old server Restore it on the new server. Reconfigure the client applications (or alternatively, configure the new server to use the same address as the old) Make the new server online. There are other things involved, such as testing, of course. But this is essentially the process that people tell me they’re planning to follow. The bit that I want to look at today (as you’ve probably guessed from my title) is the “backup and restore” section. If a SQL database is using the Simple Recovery Model, then the only restore option is the last database backup. This backup could be full or differential. The transaction log never gets backed up in the Simple Recovery Model. Instead, it truncates regularly to stay small. One that’s using the Full Recovery Model (or Bulk-Logged) won’t truncate its log – the log must be backed up regularly. This provides the benefit of having a lot more option available for restores. It’s a requirement for most systems of High Availability, because if you’re making sure that a spare box is up-and-running, ready to take over, then you have to be interested in the logs that are happening on the current box, rather than truncating them all the time. A High Availability system such as Mirroring, Replication or Log Shipping will initialise the spare machine by restoring a full database backup (and maybe a differential backup if available), and then any subsequent log backups. Once the secondary copy is close, transactions can be applied to keep the two in sync. The main aspect of any High Availability system is to have a redundant system that is ready to take over. So the similarity for migration should be obvious. If you need to move a database from one box to another, then introducing a High Availability mechanism can help. By turning on the Full Recovery Model and then taking a backup (so that the now-interesting logs have some context), logs start being kept, and are therefore available for getting the new box ready (even if it’s an upgraded version). When the migration is ready to occur, a failover can be done, letting the new server take over the responsibility of the old, just as if a disaster had happened. Except that this is a planned failover, not a disaster at all. There’s a fine line between a disaster and a migration. Failovers can be useful in patching, upgrading, maintenance, and more. Hopefully, even an unexpected disaster can be seen as just another failover, and there can be an opportunity there – perhaps to get some work done on the principal server to increase robustness. And if I’ve just set up a High Availability system for even the simplest of databases, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. :) So now the personal: It’s been an interesting time recently... June has been somewhat odd. A court case with which I was involved got resolved (through mediation). I can’t go into details, but my lawyers tell me that I’m allowed to say how I feel about it. The answer is ‘lousy’. I don’t regret pursuing it as long as I did – but in the end I had to make a decision regarding the commerciality of letting it continue, and I’m going to look forward to the days when the kind of money I spent on my lawyers is small change. Mind you, if I had a similar situation with an employer, I’d do the same again, but that doesn’t really stop me feeling frustrated about it. The following day I had to fly to country Victoria to see my grandmother, who wasn’t expected to last the weekend. She’s still around a week later as I write this, but her 92-year-old body has basically given up on her. She’s been a Christian all her life, and is looking forward to eternity. We’ll all miss her though, and it’s hard to see my family grieving. Then on Tuesday, I was driving back to the airport with my family to come home, when something really bizarre happened. We were travelling down the freeway, just pulled out to go past a truck (farm-truck sized, not a semi-trailer), when a car-sized mass of metal fell off it. It was something like an industrial air-conditioner, but from where I was sitting, it was just a mass of spinning metal, like something out of a movie (one friend described it as “holidays by Michael Bay”). Somehow, and I’m really don’t know how, the part of it nearest us bounced high enough to clear the car, and there wasn’t even a scratch. We pulled over the check, and I was just thanking God that we’d changed lanes when we had, and that we remained unharmed. I had all kinds of thoughts about what could’ve happened if we’d had something that size land on the windscreen... All this has drilled home that while I feel that I haven’t provided as well for the family as I could’ve done (like by pursuing an expensive legal case), I shouldn’t even consider that I have proper control over things. I get to live life, and make decisions based on what I feel is right at the time. But I’m not going to get everything right, and there will be things that feel like disasters, some which could’ve been in my control and some which are very much beyond my control. The case feels like something I could’ve pursued differently, a disaster that could’ve been avoided in some way. Gran dying is lousy of course. An accident on the freeway would have been awful. I need to recognise that the worst disasters are ones that I can’t affect, and that I need to look at things in context – perhaps seeing everything that happens as a migration instead. Life is never the same from one day to the next. Every event has a before and an after – sometimes it’s clearly positive, sometimes it’s not. I remember good events in my life (such as my wedding), and bad (such as the loss of my father when I was ten, or the back injury I had eight years ago). I’m not suggesting that I know how to view everything from the “God works all things for good” perspective, but I am trying to look at last week as a migration of sorts. Those things are behind me now, and the future is in God’s hands. Hopefully I’ve learned things, and will be able to live accordingly. I’ve come through this time now, and even though I’ll miss Gran, I’ll see her again one day, and the future is bright.

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• Per-pixel displacement mapping GLSL

  - by Chris

  Im trying to implement a per-pixel displacement shader in GLSL. I read through several papers and "tutorials" I found and ended up with trying to implement the approach NVIDIA used in their Cascade Demo (http://www.slideshare.net/icastano/cascades-demo-secrets) starting at Slide 82. At the moment I am completly stuck with following problem: When I am far away the displacement seems to work. But as more I move closer to my surface, the texture gets bent in x-axis and somehow it looks like there is a little bent in general in one direction. EDIT: I added a video: click I added some screen to illustrate the problem: Well I tried lots of things already and I am starting to get a bit frustrated as my ideas run out. I added my full VS and FS code: VS: #version 400 layout(location = 0) in vec3 IN_VS_Position; layout(location = 1) in vec3 IN_VS_Normal; layout(location = 2) in vec2 IN_VS_Texcoord; layout(location = 3) in vec3 IN_VS_Tangent; layout(location = 4) in vec3 IN_VS_BiTangent; uniform vec3 uLightPos; uniform vec3 uCameraDirection; uniform mat4 uViewProjection; uniform mat4 uModel; uniform mat4 uView; uniform mat3 uNormalMatrix; out vec2 IN_FS_Texcoord; out vec3 IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent; out vec3 IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent; void main( void ) { IN_FS_Texcoord = IN_VS_Texcoord; vec4 posObject = uModel * vec4(IN_VS_Position, 1.0); vec3 normalObject = (uModel * vec4(IN_VS_Normal, 0.0)).xyz; vec3 tangentObject = (uModel * vec4(IN_VS_Tangent, 0.0)).xyz; //vec3 binormalObject = (uModel * vec4(IN_VS_BiTangent, 0.0)).xyz; vec3 binormalObject = normalize(cross(tangentObject, normalObject)); // uCameraDirection is the camera position, just bad named vec3 fvViewDirection = normalize( uCameraDirection - posObject.xyz); vec3 fvLightDirection = normalize( uLightPos.xyz - posObject.xyz ); IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent.x = dot( tangentObject, fvViewDirection ); IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent.y = dot( binormalObject, fvViewDirection ); IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent.z = dot( normalObject, fvViewDirection ); IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent.x = dot( tangentObject, fvLightDirection ); IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent.y = dot( binormalObject, fvLightDirection ); IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent.z = dot( normalObject, fvLightDirection ); gl_Position = (uViewProjection*uModel) * vec4(IN_VS_Position, 1.0); } The VS just builds the TBN matrix, from incoming normal, tangent and binormal in world space. Calculates the light and eye direction in worldspace. And finally transforms the light and eye direction into tangent space. FS: #version 400 // uniforms uniform Light { vec4 fvDiffuse; vec4 fvAmbient; vec4 fvSpecular; }; uniform Material { vec4 diffuse; vec4 ambient; vec4 specular; vec4 emissive; float fSpecularPower; float shininessStrength; }; uniform sampler2D colorSampler; uniform sampler2D normalMapSampler; uniform sampler2D heightMapSampler; in vec2 IN_FS_Texcoord; in vec3 IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent; in vec3 IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent; out vec4 color; vec2 TraceRay(in float height, in vec2 coords, in vec3 dir, in float mipmap){ vec2 NewCoords = coords; vec2 dUV = - dir.xy * height * 0.08; float SearchHeight = 1.0; float prev_hits = 0.0; float hit_h = 0.0; for(int i=0;i<10;i++){ SearchHeight -= 0.1; NewCoords += dUV; float CurrentHeight = textureLod(heightMapSampler,NewCoords.xy, mipmap).r; float first_hit = clamp((CurrentHeight - SearchHeight - prev_hits) * 499999.0,0.0,1.0); hit_h += first_hit * SearchHeight; prev_hits += first_hit; } NewCoords = coords + dUV * (1.0-hit_h) * 10.0f - dUV; vec2 Temp = NewCoords; SearchHeight = hit_h+0.1; float Start = SearchHeight; dUV *= 0.2; prev_hits = 0.0; hit_h = 0.0; for(int i=0;i<5;i++){ SearchHeight -= 0.02; NewCoords += dUV; float CurrentHeight = textureLod(heightMapSampler,NewCoords.xy, mipmap).r; float first_hit = clamp((CurrentHeight - SearchHeight - prev_hits) * 499999.0,0.0,1.0); hit_h += first_hit * SearchHeight; prev_hits += first_hit; } NewCoords = Temp + dUV * (Start - hit_h) * 50.0f; return NewCoords; } void main( void ) { vec3 fvLightDirection = normalize( IN_FS_LightDir_Tangent ); vec3 fvViewDirection = normalize( IN_FS_CameraDir_Tangent ); float mipmap = 0; vec2 NewCoord = TraceRay(0.1,IN_FS_Texcoord,fvViewDirection,mipmap); //vec2 ddx = dFdx(NewCoord); //vec2 ddy = dFdy(NewCoord); vec3 BumpMapNormal = textureLod(normalMapSampler, NewCoord.xy, mipmap).xyz; BumpMapNormal = normalize(2.0 * BumpMapNormal - vec3(1.0, 1.0, 1.0)); vec3 fvNormal = BumpMapNormal; float fNDotL = dot( fvNormal, fvLightDirection ); vec3 fvReflection = normalize( ( ( 2.0 * fvNormal ) * fNDotL ) - fvLightDirection ); float fRDotV = max( 0.0, dot( fvReflection, fvViewDirection ) ); vec4 fvBaseColor = textureLod( colorSampler, NewCoord.xy,mipmap); vec4 fvTotalAmbient = fvAmbient * fvBaseColor; vec4 fvTotalDiffuse = fvDiffuse * fNDotL * fvBaseColor; vec4 fvTotalSpecular = fvSpecular * ( pow( fRDotV, fSpecularPower ) ); color = ( fvTotalAmbient + (fvTotalDiffuse + fvTotalSpecular) ); } The FS implements the displacement technique in TraceRay method, while always using mipmap level 0. Most of the code is from NVIDIA sample and another paper I found on the web, so I guess there cannot be much wrong in here. At the end it uses the modified UV coords for getting the displaced normal from the normal map and the color from the color map. I looking forward for some ideas. Thanks in advance! Edit: Here is the code loading the heightmap: glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, mWidth, mHeight, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, mImageData); glGenerateMipmap(GL_TEXTURE_2D); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S, GL_REPEAT); //glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T, GL_REPEAT); Maybe something wrong in here?

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• Big data: An evening in the life of an actual buyer

  - by Jean-Pierre Dijcks

  Here I am, and this is an actual story of one of my evenings, trying to spend money with a company and ultimately failing. I just gave up and bought a service from another vendor, not the incumbent. Here is that story and how I think big data could actually fix this (and potentially prevent some of this from happening). In the end this story should illustrate how big data can benefit me (get me what I want without causing grief) and the company I am trying to buy something from. Note: Lots of details left out, I have no intention of being the annoyed blogger moaning about a specific company. What did I want to get? We watch TV, we have internet and we do have a land line. The land line is from a different vendor then the TV and the internet. I have decided that this makes no sense and I was going to get a bundle (no need to infer who this is, I just picked the generic bundle word as this is what I want to get) of all three services as this seems to save me money. I also want to not talk to people, I just want to click on a website when I feel like it and get it all sorted. I do think that is reality. I want to just do my shopping at 9.30pm while watching silly reruns on TV. Problem 1 - Bad links So, I'm an existing customer of the company I want to buy my bundle from. I go to the website, I click on offers. Turns out they are offers for new customers. After grumbling about how good they are, I click on offers for existing customers. Bummer, it goes to offers for new customers, so I click again on the link for offers for existing customers. No cigar... it just does not work. Big data solutions: 1) Do not show an existing customer the offers for new customers unless they are the same => This is only partially doable without login, but if a customer logs in the application should always know that this is an existing customer. But in general, imagine I do this from my home going through the internet service of this vendor to their domain... an instant filter should move me into the "existing customer route". 2) Flag dead or incorrect links => I've clicked the link for "existing customer offers" at least 3 times in under 5 seconds... Identifying patterns like this is easy in Hadoop and can very quickly make a list of potentially incorrect links. No need for realtime fixing, just the fact that this link can be pro-actively fixed across my entire web domain is a good thing. Preventative maintenance! Problem 2 - Purchase cannot be completed Apart from the fact that the browsing pattern to actually get to what I want is poorly designed, my purchase never gets past a specific point. In other words, I put something into my shopping cart and when I want to move on the application either crashes (with me going to an error page) or hangs or goes into something like chat. So I try again, and again and again. I think I tried this entire path (while being logged in!!) at least 10 times over the course of 20 minutes. I also clicked on the feedback button and, frustrated as I was, tried to explain this did not work... Big Data Solutions: 1) This web site does shopping cart analysis. I got an email next day stating I have things in my shopping cart, just click here to complete my purchase. After the above experience, this just added insult to my pain... 2) What should have happened, is a Hadoop job going over all logged in customers that are on the buy flow. It should flag anyone who is trying (multiple attempts from the same user to do the same thing), analyze the shopping card, the clicks to identify what the customers wants, his feedback provided (note: always own your own website feedback, never just farm this out!!) and in a short turn around time (30 minutes to 2 hours or so) email me with a link to complete my purchase. Not with a link to my shopping cart 12 hours later, but a link to actually achieve what I wanted... Why should this company go through the big data effort? I do believe this is relatively easy to do using our Oracle Event Processing and Big Data Appliance solutions combined. It is almost so simple (to my mind) that it makes no sense that this is not in place? But, now I am ranting... Why is this interesting? It is because of $$$$. After trying really hard, I mean I did this all in the evening, and again in the morning before going to work. I kept on failing, But I really wanted this to work... so an email that said, sorry, we noticed you tried to get a bundle (the log knows what I wanted, where I failed, so easy to generate), here is the link to click and complete your purchase. And here is 2 movies on us as an apology would have kept me as a customer, and got the additional $$$$ per month for the next couple of years. It would also lead to upsell on my phone package etc. Instead, I went to a completely different company, bought service from them. Lost money for company A, negative sentiment for company A and me telling this story at the water cooler so I'm influencing more people to think negatively about company A. All in all, a loss of easy money, a ding in sentiment and image where a relatively simple solution exists and can be in place on the software I describe routinely in this blog... For those who are coming to Openworld and maybe see value in solving the above, or are thinking of how to solve this, come visit us in Moscone North - Oracle Red Lounge or in the Engineered Systems Showcase.

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• Firefox 3.5.6 causes entire computer to freeze

  - by Anthony Aziz

  Here's the situation: Environment: Just installed a fresh copy of Win7 Pro 32-bit to NTFS partition on 750GB SATA drive Hardware: E8400 3GHz ASUS P5QL Pro 4GB DDR2 1066 RAM EVGA 9800 GTX+ Plenty of cooling, no problems with hardware before Data is stored on a separate partition, including My Documents No security software is yet installed No extensions installed yet Problem: While using Firefox, sometimes the entire computer will freeze/hang. I get no mouse or keyboard input, can't CTRL+ALT+DEL, no "not responding" indication, just a static image on my display. My drivers are all up to date as far as I'm aware (I just installed this copy of Windows last week). I first noticed this when trying to install Xmarks. I went to the Xmarks site and tried to install and it would freeze. I managed to get it installed (Safe mode and the Mozilla addon site worked), but when I go to configure it (log in, etc), the computer freezes. I don't think it's a matter of usage time or memory issues, because while testing, I browsed wallpaper galleries for about 30 minutes, sometimes as many as 12-15 tabs open at a time, without issue. Sometimes I won't even try to install Xmarks at it will hang. I can install (some) other extensions, the only one I've tried is download status bar (which works). What I've done to try to fix: Restarted (duh) Windows safe mode Completely remove Firefox and install it to a new directory, according to Mozilla's KB (I haven't tried the profile manager, though I assume this does the same thing, except perhaps more thoroughly) Some BIOS changes, including Power options, disabling oveclocking (it was a modest overclock on the CPU, which has run Win7 beta and RC for almost a year now) Memtest Used another Windows user profile, same tragic results I'm STUCK now, with no idea what to do. I'm using Chrome as my main browser at the moment, but that's not something I want to be stuck with. I like Firefox and want to use it. I'm going to try creating a new profile first. One thing I did notice: I started leaving task manager and performance monitor open when anticipating (but dreading) a freeze. firefox.exe had low CPU and low memory, but it looked like overall disk usage was seeing some spikes on the small graph Performance Monitor gives you. I saw on one blog post a fellow using XP moved his Local Settings directory from a separate drive to his main drive, and that solved it, but I don't think my AppData directory is on my D: drive, and that's on the same physical device anyways. Still, something that might be worth trying. I'd extremely appreciate any help. Thanks very much. I really don't want to reinstall Windows from scratch again :( Anthony Aziz

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• vagrant up command very slow on OS X Lion

  - by Andy Hume

  When I run vagrant up to provision a new VM on Lion it takes an extremely long time, during which the entire Mac is very laggy and unresponsive. The output is as follows, the key point being the "notice: Finished catalog run in 754.28 seconds" > vagrant up [default] Importing base box 'lucid64'... [default] The guest additions on this VM do not match the install version of VirtualBox! This may cause things such as forwarded ports, shared folders, and more to not work properly. If any of those things fail on this machine, please update the guest additions and repackage the box. Guest Additions Version: 4.1.0 VirtualBox Version: 4.1.6 [default] Matching MAC address for NAT networking... [default] Clearing any previously set forwarded ports... [default] Forwarding ports... [default] -- ssh: 22 => 2222 (adapter 1) [default] -- web: 80 => 4567 (adapter 1) [default] Creating shared folders metadata... [default] Running any VM customizations... [default] Booting VM... [default] Waiting for VM to boot. This can take a few minutes. [default] VM booted and ready for use! [default] Mounting shared folders... [default] -- v-root: /vagrant [default] -- v-data: /var/www [default] -- manifests: /tmp/vagrant-puppet/manifests [default] Running provisioner: Vagrant::Provisioners::Puppet... [default] Running Puppet with lucid64.pp... [default] stdin: is not a tty [default] notice: /Stage[main]/Lucid64/Exec[apt-update]/returns: executed successfully [default] [default] notice: /Stage[main]/Lucid64/Package[apache2]/ensure: ensure changed 'purged' to 'present' [default] [default] notice: /Stage[main]/Lucid64/File[/etc/motd]/ensure: defined content as '{md5}a25e31ba9b8489da9cd5751c447a1741' [default] [default] notice: Finished catalog run in 754.28 seconds [default] [default] err: /File[/var/lib/puppet/rrd]/ensure: change from absent to directory failed: Could not find group puppet [default] [default] err: Could not send report: Got 1 failure(s) while initializing: change from absent to directory failed: Could not find group puppet [default] [default] Running provisioner: Vagrant::Provisioners::Puppet... [default] Running Puppet with lucid64.pp... [default] stdin: is not a tty [default] notice: /Stage[main]/Lucid64/Exec[apt-update]/returns: executed successfully [default] [default] notice: Finished catalog run in 2.05 seconds [default] [default] err: /File[/var/lib/puppet/rrd]: Could not evaluate: Could not find group puppet [default] [default] err: Could not send report: Got 1 failure(s) while initializing: Could not evaluate: Could not find group puppet [default] [default] Running provisioner: Vagrant::Provisioners::Puppet... [default] Running Puppet with lucid64.pp... [default] stdin: is not a tty [default] notice: /Stage[main]/Lucid64/Exec[apt-update]/returns: executed successfully [default] [default] notice: Finished catalog run in 1.36 seconds [default] [default] err: /File[/var/lib/puppet/rrd]: Could not evaluate: Could not find group puppet [default] [default] err: Could not send report: Got 1 failure(s) while initializing: Could not evaluate: Could not find group puppet [default] >

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• Persistent Issues on small business network using Cisco 871W and Catalyst Express 500

  - by Ben Campbell

  Being the most qualified (read: still not qualified) to solve our persistant network issues, I've turned to serverfault for guidance. I've done some searching, reading related documentation on cisco.com and tried a bit of troubleshooting. Here is the config: 100mb synchronous connection from a business internet provider (tested multiple times at 100meg at the source) Cisco 871W wireless point & router is where the WAN connection starts (this serves all our wireless). The only wired connection in the 871W is the Catalyst switch listed below. Cisco Catalyst Express 500 (24TT) is where all the wired connections terminate. About 20 Windows workstations and servers (AD/Webservers only). Some services in EC2 including mail and other web servers/apps. I've been TOLD cabling internally should be gigabit-ready. Here are the problems: generally slow download rates from the internet to the desktop/laptop frequent "page cannot be displayed" errors in browsers-sometimes 3 or 4 reloads are necessary... often times CSS wont load or other content requiring the browser to connect to a different server. slow speed within the LAN from workstation to workstation copying files. I would expect extremely fast data transfer workstation to workstation / server to workstation in this simple network. Several things I need to admit: I'm not primarily a network guy. Funding is relatively low, I need to be the guy that finds the solution. I understand most of the terminology and most of the technology. Implementation is where I fail due to lack of experience. Getting to the point: I'm wondering whether experienced network admins think that our small network should be sufficiently served with our current hardware if configured properly... or if we should purchase new equipment and start fresh? If starting fresh is the plan, whatever that new equipment may be is a likely different question entirely. If I haven't provided enough information, I will happily do some troubleshooting and update with the results. I have experience using wireshark and some other tools. Please let me know what you think would be most helpful and thanks in advance. EDIT: I forgot to add that the Cisco applicance will not finish loading the SDM Express console. It hangs every time at the "populating modules... DHCP". It eventually crashes and closes. I've rebooted the hardware and this still happens.

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• How to shutdown VMware Fusion virtual machine on host shutdown

  - by Nikksno

  I have a Mac mini running Mavericks server. I installed the Atmail server + webmail vm [a linux centos distribution] in VMware Fusion Professional 6 with the VMware Tools addon. It works flawlessly. I've set it to start on boot and that works very reliably. However I've been looking for a way to also safely and gracefully shut it down whenever OS X shuts down for whatever reason. The Mac is connected to a UPS and configured to perform an automatic shutdown in case the battery starts running low so that's no additional problem. Now the first thing I did was to go into Fusion's prefs and select "Power off the vm" when closing it. However I noticed that for some arcane reason closing the vm window would actually forcibly power off the vm: so then I found this post that showed me how to change the default power options and I managed to have the vm cleanly shutdown when closing its window or quitting Fusion altogether. At this point I was hoping to have solved the problem but as it turns out upon invoking system shutdown OS X doesn't wait for the vm to shutdown and terminates Fusion before it has a chance to do so. At this point I started looking for a way to automate the process of shutting down the guest os via some advanced setting but had no luck in doing so. That's when I found a command to shut the vm down: vmrun and it worked. The only thing left was to find out a way to execute this script on os x shutdown and giving it a little time to power off completely. However this turned out to be a nightmare: I spent hours looking through several ways to do this with Startup Items, rc.shutdown, cron, launchd, etc... but none of them worked the way I had configured them. I have to say that I found very limited information on using launchd for a shutdown script execution and I know it's the latest thing in the OS X world so I'm hoping someone out there among you will be able to help me out with this. I still think this is an extremely basic feature to ask for and I was really surprised to find this little documentation on so many different aspects of this problem. Is Fusion too basic of an application for this? I really hope someone can help. Thank you very much in advance.

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• OpenBSD pf 'match in all scrub (no-df)' causes HTTPS to be unreachable on mobile network

  - by Frank ter V.

  First of all: excuse me for my poor usage of the English language. For several years I'm experiencing problems with the 'match in all scrub (no-df)' rule in pf. I can't find out what's happening here. I'll try to be clear and simple. The pf.conf has been extremely shortened for this forum posting. Here is my pf.conf: set skip on lo0 match in all scrub (no-df) block all block in quick from urpf-failed pass in on em0 proto tcp from any to 213.125.xxx.xxx port 80 synproxy state pass in on em0 proto tcp from any to 213.125.xxx.xxx port 443 synproxy state pass out on em0 from 213.125.xxx.xxx to any modulate state HTTP and HTTPS are working fine. Until the moment a customer in France (Wanadoo DSL) couldn't view HTTPS pages! I blamed his provider and did no investigation on that problem. But then... I bought an Android Samsung Galaxy SII (Vodafone) to monitor my servers. Hours after I walked out of the telephone store: no HTTPS-connections on my server! I thought my servers were down, drove back to the office very fast. But they were up. I discovered that disabling the rule match in all scrub (no-df) solves the problem. Android phone (Vodafone NL) and Wanadoo DSL FR are now OK on HTTPS. But now I don't have any scrubbing anymore. This is not what I want. Does anyone here understand what is going on? I don't. Enabling scrubbing causes HTTPS webpages not to be loaded on SOME ISP's, but not all. In systat, I strangely DO see a state created and packets received from those ISP's... Still confused. I'm using OpenBSD 5.1/amd64 and OpenBSD 5.0/i386. I have two ISP's at my office (one DSL and one cable). Affects both. This can be reproduced quite easily. I hope someone has experience with this problem. Greetings, Frank

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• Deleting windows.edb and unchecking Indexing service lead to hard drive file records swapping

  - by linni

  I followed the instructions listed here:http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/09/18/turn-off-and-disable-search-indexing-service-in-windows-xp/ to free up space on hard drive by deleting the windows.edb indexing file... I also stopped windows search service as mentioned in the comments following the article. In addition to unchecking the "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" check box on the properties dialog for the C:\ drive, I did the same for two usb connected hard drives (J:\ and I:\ ). I'm not sure why I did that, thought it might shrink the windows.edb file so I wouldn't have to delete it (which sounded a bit risky in my ears at the time). The file of course didn't shrink so I ended up deleting it and freeing up over 3 GB of space, yeehaw. However, as soon as I had done this I could not access the usb connected hard drives anymore. The error I got was "I:\photos is not accessible" "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" when I tried to open the photos directory on I:\ Here is where I enter the twilight zone... I try disconnecting I:\ usb hard drive. But XP shows me that instead J:\ drive has disconnected and I:\ is still there. So I disconnect both drives and restart the computer. I then connect one drive, but it lists up the contents of the other drive on root level. I tried connecting the drives vice versa and the same thing happens. I try taking one of the hard drives to another computer and when I connect it there it lists up not its own contents but the contents of the other hard drive and gives the same error as above when I try and access any of the folders (even folders on the root that have the same name as folders on the other drive (e.g. J:\photos and I:\photos)??? And no, this is not a me mixing up my drive letters. Computer Manager - Disk management shows the same result as explorer: The drive size is correct (one is 500GB, the other is 640GB) but the drive name is of the opposite drive, as long as the contents. Also, one drive was full of data and the other almost empty but they incorrectly show their free space status of the other drive. Somehow the usb drives seem to have switched file tables, file records, boot records or something, extremely weird! Even weirder, if I try and create a text file or folder on this drive, it works fine, accessing them, saving, whatever, all good, but accessing any other data on the drive gives me an error. Does anyone have a clue what is going on and more importantly, how I can restore the correct folder listings to access my family photos ??? cheers, linni

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• Profiles and using the local profile for a domain user

  - by Harry

  I’m having some trouble with profiles and would like to reach out for some help. I’ve tried to do some research to help myself along, but I’m not making much progress on my own. I’ve pretty much taken over the sys admin duties for my small lab, I don’t have much experience to justify it besides I’m the only with the time and dedication to go at it (The environment was in a state of disrepair). My network and domain I look over are extremely small by most standards, about 10 users at a time. They are pretty intensive activity on the network, and we do work with fairly large files. None of the network is online, which is nice at the moment because it allows me not to have another headache. On to my profile problem, I have set up roaming profiles for the users in the network. Now after a little research, I think I will be switching this to a hybrid of folder redirection and roaming profiles as this seems to best practice. I also don’t want the users having to wait for a long time if they have a bloated profile. Now I’ve finally got a build working using MDT. We have Mac Pros, and it wasn’t fun getting everything to play nice. The way I did this was by setting up a reference computer and installing all the software and tools that each user would need and editing the settings preferences to how we would need them. I think used MDT to do a sys prep and capture to create the image of my reference computer. Using the reference image I can push out my images to the rest of the desktops in my environment. The issue I’m having is when we join the computer to domain. The user can login and operate fine on the computer, but I’d like a more. When the user is logged on with their domain user name they lose a lot of the icons I had on my reference image, as well as the desktop background and some other miscellaneous settings. I would love to have the user log on using their domain user name and see the icons and desktop environment as I had it setup on the reference computer. I’m not sure if it is possible, or something simple that I’m missing, but any help would be greatly appreciated!

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• What are some of the best wireless routers for a price-conscious home power-user?

  - by Alain

  I'm extremely dissatisfied with the 'popular' choice for routers in homes and small offices. They are expensive (upwards of 60$), lack a great deal of useful configuration options, and seem to need to be restarted quite often. (Linksys comes to mind). I've been on the market for a good router lately, and slowly collecting a set of requirements I feel good routers should meet. Maximum number of TCP/IP connections. - This isn't something I see any routers advertise, but in terms of supporting torrent applications, I've been screwed by routers that support less than 20 here. From what I understand a fairly standard number is 200, but there are not so expensive routers that support thousands. Router configuration menu - Most have standard menu's that let you set up basic things like your wireless network encryption settings, uPnP, and maybe even DMZ (demilitarized zones). An absolute requirement for me, however, are routers with good enough firmware to support: Explicit Port forwarding Assigning static local ips to specific mac addresses, or at least Port forwarding by MAC address Port, IP and MAC filtering Dynamic DNS service for home users who want to set up a server but have a dynamic IP Traffic shaping (ideally) - giving priority to packets from certain machines or over certain ports. Strong wireless signal - If getting a reliable signal requires me to be so close to the router that I can connect an Ethernet cable, it's not good enough. As many Ethernet ports as possible. - Because I want to be able to switch from console gaming to PC gaming without visiting my router. So far, the best thing I've stumbled upon (in the bargain bin at staples) was a 20$ retail plus router. It was meant to be the cheapest alternative until I could find something better to purchase online, but I was actually blown away by the firmware capabilities. It supports defining reserved bandwidth for certain network traffic, dynamic DNS, reserving local IPs for specific MAC addresses, etc. At 2 am when my roommate is killing our Internet with their torrents, I can limit their bandwidth without outright blacklisting them. I have, however, met serious limitations when it comes to network traffic between local machines. It claims a 300Mbps connection, but I have trouble streaming videos from my PC to my console or other laptops wirelessly. It has a meltdown and needs to be reset once in a while (no more than a couple times a month), and it's got a 200 connection limit. There 4 Ethernet ports in the back but I'm pretty sure the first doesn't work. So some great answers to this question would be: Any metrics you use to compare routers, and requirements you have for new candidates. The best routers you've found for supporting home servers, file management systems, high volume torrent traffic, good price/feature ratio, etc. Good configuration advice (aside from 'use Ethernet whenever possible') Thanks for your feedback and experiences!

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• Troubleshooting an unstable internet connection

  - by Konrad Rudolph

  My MacBook Pro running OS X (10.9, but I had the same problem before) is connected to a Belkin router via WiFi and, using Virgin Media as the ISP, to the internet. The connection is extremely unstable – on some days, I get a ping timeout every few seconds. In addition, some domains seem to suffer general connectivity issues. For instance, I often find that while the youtube.com website loads, none of the videos (which are hosted on a separate domain) do. At other times, videos load but always fail to buffer, even though the actual connection speed is ok, even though I’ve disabled dash playback. Since I’m living in a rented room and the ISP contract isn’t actually mine I’ve got only limited possibilities of addressing the problem. In particular, I have no access to the router configuration and my non tech savvy landlady, while sympathetic, is not in a great hurry to hand the problem over to the ISP’s customer support. What’s more, I seem to be the only person in the house experiencing these problems – but I can imagine that this is simply because I’m the only one who’s using the internet continuously. I’m searching for specific tests that might be able to pinpoint – and ideally solve – the problem. So far all I’ve managed to do is establish that Virgin is routing my traffic in mysterious ways. Here’s an excerpt from traceroute google.co.uk. It’s worth mentioning that the host name doesn’t seem to matter a lot, the trace route is always the same. traceroute: Warning: google.co.uk has multiple addresses; using 62.254.36.148 traceroute to google.co.uk (62.254.36.148), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets 1 (192.168.2.1) 1.112 ms 1.300 ms 2.359 ms 2 10.100.32.1 (10.100.32.1) 11.926 ms 10.217 ms 24.987 ms 3 cmbg-core-1a-ae3-610.network.virginmedia.net (80.1.202.93) 28.809 ms * 66.653 ms 4 popl-bb-1b-ae16-0.network.virginmedia.net (212.43.163.141) 13.759 ms 126.504 ms 20.472 ms 5 nrth-bb-1b-et-010-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.175.57) 28.357 ms 16.398 ms 42.387 ms 6 nrth-bb-1c-ae1-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.174.110) 27.441 ms 15.622 ms 12.044 ms 7 lutn-icdn-1-ae0-0.network.virginmedia.net (62.253.175.82) 16.678 ms 28.463 ms 28.253 ms 8 * * * 9 * * * 10 * * * ^C If I let it, this goes on until the end of time. It never seems to reach a destination. Is this normal? A friend living in the same town who is also with Virgin Media has a more conventional traceroute output: 7 hops to google.co.uk, all of which send the ICMP TIME_EXCEEDED response. The obvious fix – rebooting the router – doesn’t seem to help. As far as I can tell, the WiFi connection is stable (I can always ping the router) so the problem is further downstream. I’ve tried using an alternative DNS before (OpenDNS) but if anything, this made things worse. In fact, it made all Google services nigh unreachable.

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• Deleting windows.edb and unchecking Indexing service lead to hard drive file records swapping

  - by linni

  I followed the instructions listed here:http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/09/18/turn-off-and-disable-search-indexing-service-in-windows-xp/ to free up space on hard drive by deleting the windows.edb indexing file... I also stopped windows search service as mentioned in the comments following the article. In addition to unchecking the "Allow Indexing Service to index this disk for fast file searching" check box on the properties dialog for the C:\ drive, I did the same for two usb connected hard drives (J:\ and I:\ ). I'm not sure why I did that, thought it might shrink the windows.edb file so I wouldn't have to delete it (which sounded a bit risky in my ears at the time). The file of course didn't shrink so I ended up deleting it and freeing up over 3 GB of space, yeehaw. However, as soon as I had done this I could not access the usb connected hard drives anymore. The error I got was "I:\photos is not accessible" "The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable" when I tried to open the photos directory on I:\ Here is where I enter the twilight zone... I try disconnecting I:\ usb hard drive. But XP shows me that instead J:\ drive has disconnected and I:\ is still there. So I disconnect both drives and restart the computer. I then connect one drive, but it lists up the contents of the other drive on root level. I tried connecting the drives vice versa and the same thing happens. I try taking one of the hard drives to another computer and when I connect it there it lists up not its own contents but the contents of the other hard drive and gives the same error as above when I try and access any of the folders (even folders on the root that have the same name as folders on the other drive (e.g. J:\photos and I:\photos)??? And no, this is not a me mixing up my drive letters. Computer Manager - Disk management shows the same result as explorer: The drive size is correct (one is 500GB, the other is 640GB) but the drive name is of the opposite drive, as long as the contents. Also, one drive was full of data and the other almost empty but they incorrectly show their free space status of the other drive. Somehow the usb drives seem to have switched file tables, file records, boot records or something, extremely weird! Even weirder, if I try and create a text file or folder on this drive, it works fine, accessing them, saving, whatever, all good, but accessing any other data on the drive gives me an error. Does anyone have a clue what is going on and more importantly, how I can restore the correct folder listings to access my family photos ??? cheers, linni

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• HOSTS ignored when disconnected [closed]

  - by Synetech

  Problem I’m seeing a strange and extremely frustrating problem. Any system that is not connect to the Internet (Windows 7 shows the no Internet access icon because it cannot constantly ping Microsoft’s servers) cannot even access locally hosted servers. Hypothesis The problem appears to be that the HOSTS file is not being used to resolve DNS entries when there are no active NICs. Tests / Reproduction You can reproduce it as so: Disconnect a system from the Internet (make sure all wired and wireless connections are disconnected). If necessary, add an entry to the HOSTS file (e.g., 127.0.0.1 foobar or 127.0.0.1 foobar.com) Open a command-prompt Type ping foobar or ping foobar.com Observations The screenshots below show a clear and demonstrative example. In the first snap, a laptop is connected to a router wirelessly. The HOSTS file has only three entries and they resolve just fine. In the second snap, the wireless radio is turned off, so the entries in the HOSTS file are ignored. Moreover, notice that pinging localhost still works even without any active NICs (as does 127.0.0.1), but it is using the IPv6 address (must be hard-coded). You can see the same results in Windows XP with no IPv6 installed, so it has nothing to do with IPv6. I tried pining what should have resolved to 127.0.0.1 while the desktop system (with no wireless NICs) was connected via its Ethernet adapter, then again after pulling the cable from the router and waiting a couple of seconds, then again after plugging the cable back in. The same thing happens if instead of pulling out the cable, the NIC is disabled through software (the [Disable] button in the NIC’s Status dialog or via Device Manager). Conclusions It looks as though the HOSTS file is only being read and used if there is an active NIC, otherwise it is being ignored. This makes some sense in that if there are no active network adapters, then presumably there will not be any network activity, and thus no need to resolve host names via the HOSTS file. This assumption is specious however because it precludes locally hosted virtual servers. The HOSTS file should be used regardless of external DNS server connectivity, otherwise you cannot use simple/consistent/testing-production names for locally hosted servers when not connected to the Internet (for example web servers; help servers for Visual Studio, 3dsmax, etc.; and so on). Question Does anyone know how to force Windows to use the HOSTS file even if there are no active NICs? Appendix Figure 1: While the wireless NIC is connected to the router (the cable-modem is in standby, so no external Internet connectivity). Figure 2: With the wireless radio turned off (the Ethernet port is not unconnected in both cases). Figure 3: Same results in XP with no IPv6

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• Skyrim: Heavy Performance Issues after a couple of location changes

  - by Derija

  Okay, I've tried different solutions: ENB Series, removing certain mods, checking my FPS Rate, monitoring my resources, .ini tweaks. It's all just fine, I don't see what I'm missing. A couple of days ago, I bought Skyrim. Before I bought the game, I admit I had a pirated copy because my girlfriend actually wanted to buy me the game as a present, then said she didn't have enough money. Sick of waiting, I decided to buy the game by myself. The ridiculous part is, it worked better cracked than it does now uncracked. As the title suggests, after entering and leaving houses a couple of times, my performance obviously drops extremely. My build is just fine, Intel i5 quad core processor, NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti from Gigabyte, actually stock-OC, but manually downclocked to usual settings using appropriate Gigabyte software. This fixed the CTD issues I had before with both Skyrim and BF3. I have 4GB RAM. A website about Game Tweaks suggested that my HDD may be too slow. A screenshot of a Windows Performance Index sample with the subscription "This is likely to cause issues" showed the HDD with a performance index of 5.9, the exact same mine has, so I was playing with the thought to purchase an SSD instead, load games onto it that really need it like Skyrim, and hope it'd do the trick. Unfortunately, SSDs are likewise expensive, compared to "normal" HDDs... I'm really getting desperate about it. My save is gone because the patches made it impossible to load saves of the unpatched version and I already saved more than 80 times despite being only level 8, just because every time I interact with a door leading me to another location I'm scared the game will drop again. I can't even play for 30 mins straight anymore, it's just no fun at all. I've researched for a couple of days before I decided to post my question here. Any help is appreciated, I don't want to regret having bought the game... Since it actually is the best game I've played possibly for ever. Sincerely. P.S.: I don't think it's necessary to say, but still, of course I'm playing on PC. P.P.S.: After monitoring both my PC resources including CPU usage and HDD usage as well as the GPU usage, I don't see any changes even after the said event. P.P.P.S.: Original question posted here where I've been advised to ask here.

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• CPU Lockup when loading folder of bookmarks in Firefox

  - by Gary M. Mugford

  I am running Firefox 3.6 on WinXPSP3 on a duo Core machine with 4G of memory. I am also running Avast! free anti-virus and ZoneAlarm free firewall, both latest versions. Within the last month, my service provider basically forced me to upgrade to a Docsis 3.0 compliant modem (offered me a deal I couldn't turn down). At that point, I also upgraded to FF3.6. Basically, I am not unhappy with many aspects of this switchover, EXCEPT, when I now load a folder of bookmarks (anywhere from 10 to 38) I get nothing like the load times I experienced a couple of months back. It's taking minutes rather than seconds. And the first bookmark in one of the folders, GMail, rarely loads before timing out. I have used the old trick of powering off the cable modem before my day's work. This used to fix 'load-lag' in the old days. I have switched from my ISP's DNS server to Google, OpenDNS and back. And nothing seems to work currently. It's not my DNS cache. That's been flushed and secondary computers also have the same issue when loading folders. I have watched the CPU usage and loading the folder will send VSMon (ZoneAlarm) usage over 40 percent, AVastSvc (Avast!) over 30 and Firefox will then push the needle to 100. There's a brief burst by SVCHost when the others falter in devouring cycles. Then everything subsides to single digits once the last tab is loaded. The only other nominal nastiness is VSMon ALWAYS hitting 50 percent when ANY program starts downloading content from the internet. If I shutdown ZoneAlarm (and VSMon with it), the same slow loading takes place, but this time System is running 50% plus, again driving the usage to 100 per cent. I have my doubts FF3.6 vs FF3.5 is an issue, since the other computers are still running 3.5 and suffer the same issue. Those computers are on, but inactive, most of the time, being backups. Obviously, when the CPU hits 100, I can't do much of anything in FireFox OR in other programs. Video play through WMPC or VLC is extremely choppy, although it doesn't seem to affect the audio. Any ideas what I can try next? Thanks, GM

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• Core i7 c1e and speedstepping - BSOD on shutdown

  - by DeaconDesperado

  I'm having an interesting problem with my recent Core i7 Digital Audio workstation build that I am curious to see if others have encountered. First, here are the specs on the machine. ASUS P6TD Deluxe Intel X58 Socket LGA1366 MB Intel Core i7-950 3.06Ghz 8M LGA1366 CPU CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 Western Digital Caviar Black WD5001AALS 500GB Plus a couple ASUS optical drives and a 750W Corsair PSU. Running Windows 7 x64. All this is connected to the nefarious Digi 002 firewire audio interface for use with Pro Tools. I following mostly the specs posted by many other I7 users in the digidesign community who pooled their collective knowledge in this thread. Now after completing my build, I fell victim to the "UD5 squeal" described at that forum thread. So taking the advice posted, I disabled c1e advanced halt state and Intel speed stepping (I would likely have done this anyway to maintain a stable clock, power consumption isn't really a relevant concern on this machine.) I enabled XMP to set the ram timings properly as well. What I am experiencing is a BSOD upon shutdown, but only immediately after windows fully exits and ends all processes. The error is a MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION 0x000000. The funny thing is that it is extremely intermitent and only occurs if the shutdown immediately followed a period of relative idleness. It does not a generate a minidump, I suspect because windows monitoring has terminated by the time this error occurs. No damage is evident and one can simply turn off manually and the system will act as though a proper shutdown had occurred. If anything it is a annoyance, I just want to be certain it is not affecting my long term stability. I have read that the i7 950 does not like DRAM voltages past 1.65, but that they are acceptable if they are within .5 of the BLCK setting. I have tried disabling XMP and setting all timings to auto and the problem still manifests in an identical way. It is suspect that the cpu idleness preceding shutdown is the determining factor, as both c1e and speedstepping are both settings intended to modify handling of this state. Any suggestions or prior experiences would be greatly appreciated. EDIT: The behavior very closely resembles what's described in this thread: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/12003-63-shut-problem-windows The benign nature of it of is identical. I can't seem to download the hotfix cited there however.

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• Malicious program changing my DNSs

  - by julio.alegria

  Some weeks ago I started having problems with my internet connection, it was extremely slow and suddently some websites (specifically gmail, facebook, youtube and twitter) started failing to connect, while the rest connect normally. Some days after, those same websites started showing me a message in portuguese: "Nova atualização disponível" whenever I tried to connect and a .exe file started downloading ("internet_update.exe" or something like that). That's when I freaked out! It was definitely a virus or something like that, but it was really weird because I never had a problem like that (I run Linux). So I turned on my old PC (running Windows XP) and it turned out it had the same problem! the same message was showed whenever I tried to connect one of those specific websites, while the rest loaded without problems. Even in my Android smarthphone the same message was showed. So it was obvious that the problem was not in a particular machine but in the router itself. So I started googling and I found some information, unfortunately I only found some in spanish, so I will make you a short summary: It is a new banking trojan developed specifically to infect and collect information from Brasilian banks. Apparently now it has expanded to Argentina and Peru. So how does it work? It spreads through social networks (videos, links, ...) and then it "takes control" of your internet connection by changing the values of your DNSs. More specifically, it changes the Primary DNS to one of this IPs: 108.170.13.38, 66.7.216.122 or 63.143.43.154 and the Secondary DNS to 8.8.8.8, this secondary DNS is actually the Google Public DNS, and it is configured this way so that your internet connection continue working properly and the user does not notice anything. The important part here is that because no download or install has been made in your machine, no antivirus will notice any change. After your DNSs have been changed, the trojan controls every single website you connect to and this way they steal your bank information. So after reading about this I accesed to my router and I restored my Primary and Secondary DNSs to their proper values, but one day after I had the same problem again. This is actually a 50% warning post - 50% help me! post. So, here comes the question: Is there any possible way to prevent my DNSs of being changed?

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• Trying to install Rmagick on Debian

  - by Janak

  One of things you need to do to get Rmagick installed apt-get install libmagick9-dev When I try that I get the following errors Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that the package is simply not installable and a bug report against that package should be filed. The following information may help to resolve the situation: The following packages have unmet dependencies: libmagick9-dev: Depends: libjpeg62-dev but it is not going to be installed Depends: libbz2-dev but it is not going to be installed Depends: libtiff4-dev but it is not going to be installed Depends: libwmf-dev (>= 0.2.7-1) but it is not going to be installed Depends: libz-dev Depends: libpng12-dev but it is not going to be installed Depends: libfreetype6-dev but it is not going to be installed Depends: libexif-dev but it is not going to be installed Depends: libdjvulibre-dev but it is not going to be installed Depends: librsvg2-dev but it is not going to be installed Depends: libgraphviz-dev but it is not going to be installed E: Broken packages I don't know what to do to fix this? EDIT 1: I tried sudo apt-get install librmagick-ruby and it worked fine but then I needed to install the fleximage gem gem1.8 install fleximage and I got the following error message Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing fleximage: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. /usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb checking for Ruby version >= 1.8.5... yes checking for cc... yes checking for Magick-config... no Can't install RMagick 2.12.2. Can't find Magick-config in /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin *** extconf.rb failed *** Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more details. You may need configuration options. Provided configuration options: --with-opt-dir --without-opt-dir --with-opt-include --without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include --with-opt-lib --without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib --with-make-prog --without-make-prog --srcdir=. --curdir --ruby=/usr/bin/ruby1.8 Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-2.12.2 for inspection. Results logged to /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/rmagick-2.12.2/ext/RMagick/gem_make.out

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• Is it safe to enable forced ASLR via EMET on Windows?

  - by D.W.

  I'd like to enable forced ASLR for all DLLs on Windows. Is this safe? Background: ASLR is an important security mechanism that helps defend against code injection attacks. DLLs can opt into ASLR, and most do, but some DLLs have not opted into ASLR. If a program loads even a single non-ASLRized DLL, then the program doesn't get the benefit/protection of ASLR. This is a problem, because there are a non-trivial number of DLLs that haven't opted into ASLR. For instance, it was recently revealed that Dropbox injects a DLL into a bunch of processes, and the Dropbox DLL doesn't have ASLR turned on, which negates any ASLR protection they otherwise would have had. Unfortunately, there are many other widely used DLLs that haven't opted into ASLR. This is bad for system security. Microsoft provides several ways to turn on ASLR for all DLLs, even ones that haven't opted into ASLR: On Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008, you can enable "Force ASLR" in the registry. On all Windows versions, you can use Microsoft's EMET tool and enable EMET's "Mandatory ASLR" option. These methods are possible because all DLLs are compiled as position-independent code and they can be relocated to a random location even if they haven't opted into ASLR. These options will ensure that ASLR is turned on, even if the developers of the DLL forgot to opt into ASLR. Thus, forcing on ASLR systemwide may help system security. In principle, turning on forced ASLR could potentially break a poorly-written DLL, so there is some risk of breakage. I'm interested in finding out just significant this risk is. I have the suspicion that this kind of breakage might be extremely rare. Here's what I've been able to find: Microsoft has done compatibility testing with several dozen widely used applications. The only one they found where Mandatory ASLR causes problems is Windows Media Player. All the other applications continue working fine. (See pp.39-41 of this document.) I've seen some anecdotal reports that enabling "Mandatory ASLR"/"Force ASLR" is fine and unlikely to cause problems. CERT reports that AMD and ATI video drivers used to crash if you enabled forced ASLR, but their latest drivers have now fixed this problem. They don't show any other drivers with this problem. A forum post from Microsoft shows no other applications with compatibility problems if ASLR is forced on, as of 2011. A user reports that borderlands.exe, a video game by Gearbox Software, crashes if you turn on mandatory ASLR. What else should I know? Is it relatively safe to turn on Force ASLR / Mandatory ASLR systemwide to harden the secuity of my system, or will I be in for a world of pain and broken applications? How significant is the risk of compatibility problems and broken applications?

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• Port forwarding using a BT Home Hub 2.0 (Supplied to new BT Infinity Customers in the UK)

  - by Jasarien

  I don't usually have trouble with port forwarding, I've been able to do it successfully on a number of different routers, including Linksys, Belkin, Netgear and Apple (Time Capsule / Airport Extreme). So I'm quite confused here. I had been using my Apple Time Capsule as my router for a few years now, with several port mappings all working fine. But it died recently, so I've had to resort to using the BT Home Hub 2.0 that was supplied with my BT Infinity broadband subscription. The forwarding interface for the Home Hub is simplified for the most part, allowing you to select an application or game and assign it to a particular computer on the network which you choose from a list that the Home Hub has 'discovered'. My Mac Pro has a manually assigned static IP 192.168.1.4 and my router is static at 192.168.1. I have chosen SSH from the list of applications and assigned it to my Mac Pro (the only computer in the list currently). The Home Hub also has a feature to keep a DNS service updated, and I have set it to keep my external IP address updated on my hostname. This is how I had it setup in the past with other routers and not had trouble before. I am able to ping my hostname (and external IP) from outside the network and get a response. But when I try to connect using SSH, the connection times out. The Home Hub also has "Firewall settings". The currently selected setting is: Default: Allow all outgoing connections and block all incoming traffic. Games and application sharing is allowed. But I've tried changing it to: Disabled: All traffic is allowed to pass through your BT Home Hub to your devices. Note: you’ll still need to use the games and application sharing feature to make sure that certain applications work properly. And the connection still times out... So frustrating. The OS X firewall on my Mac is disabled, so I don't think that's in the way. I have tried setting the port forwarding manually, instead of relying on the preset "SSH" option (incase it's not using the port I expect). So I set up my own "application" (as the Home Hub calls it) and forwarded external port 22 TCP to internal port 22 TCP to 192.168.1.4 - but that just gives the same result - unable to connect. Next, with the router's firewall disabled and OS X's firewall disabled, I ran the Shields Up test (https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2) and the result was that all my service ports (0 - 1055) are in 'Stealth' mode. I.e. nothing even exists at my IP as far as any outsider is concerned... Strange. The only thing that seems to work is setting my Mac Pro as the DMZ - which I don't want to do for obvious reasons. Any help with this would be extremely appreciated, thanks.

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• Plesk Postfix Mail Server 9.5.4 very heavy load, 1000s of processes

  - by Eugene van der Merwe

  Our Plesk Linux Ubuntu 64-bit mail server has extremely high load and we don't know how to isolate it. The load was okay will two weeks ago but in the last two weeks it's seriously deteriorated. The mail server has been running for years and we have had sporadic performance issues. Normally we reduce the load by turning off all SPAM checks until the problem is sorted (which sometimes resolves itself). Currently we have turned of real time block lists, SPF checking and we have attempted to turn off SpamAssassin. No matter what we do the SpamAssassin check box stays ticked in the GUI. Out of desperation we have done /etc/init.d/psa-spamassassin stop. For years we haven't been able to do SpamAssassin because it kills the server. We would like to use it but performance is more important for now. We cannot turn off Greylisting. The moment we turn off Greylisting our help desk is inandated with calls. Out of desperation we investigated truncating the Greylisting database which is now 2.5 GB big but we abandoned this after noticing turning of Greylisting doesn't improve the performance at all. We have no anti-virus. It's just more load and Dr. Web never really worked that well for us. But we'll try that if it will make a difference. We have implemented Postfix Anvil. This seems to have made the situation worse so we disabled it. We’re not sure if this is the case. Our current mail server is configured to forward all SMTP to a relay server. We did so to reduce the load. This helped a lot because outgoing queues are generally empty. We are running in an Expand configuration. The mail server has about 12 000 accounts of which maybe half are active. We have read through this document: http://www.postfix.org/STRESS_README.html but there are too many settings and we don’t know which ones to choose. Please assist urgently. We need advice on how to fix this problem before all our clients abandon is. The only clue we have is that there are 100s of these processes: 30 13205 1 0 13:18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/postfix-queue 127.0.0.1 10027 before-queue 30 13207 1 0 11:38 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/postfix-queue 127.0.0.1 10027 before-queue 30 13208 1 0 13:18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/postfix-queue 127.0.0.1 10026 before-remote 30 13209 1 0 11:38 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/postfix-queue 127.0.0.1 10026 before-remote 30 13213 1 0 13:18 ? 00:00:00 /usr/lib/plesk-9.0/postfix-queue 127.0.0.1 10027 before-queue

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• PHP hits 100% CPU and eats RAM at the same time Monday to Friday

  - by Daniel Samuels

  We run a learning platform for primary schools here in the UK and it's all been running extremely well. However at around 4PM Monday to Friday we see the same issue arise -- 1-2 PHP threads will spike to 100% CPU and gradually start eating up RAM until the server(s) fall over. 98%+ of our requests are HTTPS, these come into our Layer 7 load balancer which then decrypts the SSL data, adds the X-HTTP-Forwarded-For header and forwards the data onto an application server (we have 2 of those at the moment) on port 80. Our application servers have Varnish on port 80 which takes in the request from the load balancer and passes the request through to Nginx on port 81. Nginx then works out which 'vhost' it needs to use and passes any PHP processing through to PHP-CGI which is listening on a socket (managed through spawn-fcgi). There's an instance of Memcached running too, MySQL runs on a separate server / slave setup. Throughout the day the load will typically go no higher than 0.8 on either of the application servers, however at around 4PM our problem arises. I've managed to run strace on a few of the actual threads when they cause the problem and I always see the same thing: stat("/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644,st_size=3661, ...}) = 0 stat("/usr/share/zoneinfo/Europe/London", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644,st_size=3661, ...}) = 0 This is repeated infinitely and never stops until you SEGKILL the process or oomkiller kills it. There are no cron jobs scheduled to run at that time and I don't have any way of seeing exactly what Nginx request is associated with the PHP process which is running. We are running PHP 5.3.14 which we upgraded to from 5.3.8 last week to rule out the older version being the problem. This issue has been going on a few months now and we have no idea what is causing it. We deploy our software very frequently, so it's difficult to track down a specific release which may have started the problem - especially as we do not know the date of the first occurrence of this issue. Varnish is version 3.0.1, Nginx is 1.0.6 (which I understand is about a year old now), our servers are running CentOS release 5.7 (Final) they have Intel i3 540s at 3.07Ghz and 8GB of RAM. There's a discussion on the Debian mailing list about something very similar, you can find that here. Has anyone seen anything like this in the past, does anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Are there a way of linking an Nginx request directly to a PHP thread? Is there a better way of seeing what the PHP process is doing? (I've seen GDB mentioned, though I'll have to recompile PHP) Thanks!

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• Unable to burn Windows ISO from Fedora

  - by user331947

  First of all, English is not my native tongue, so apologies for any mistakes. My computer recently started prompting that it can't launch Windows successfully. So I just choose start Windows normally. Then, I found that the startup freezes at the Windows screen (before the login prompt). I have tried rebooting several times and get the same results. So I just gave up. After few days, I tried to boot up my laptop again. This time it got to the desktop, but it's extremely slow and the icons on my Desktop don't show up. I decided to format the Windows partition and reinstall a new one. (It is usually faster that way since I kept my 400GB+ data on aother partition and programs and the rest in the same partition as Windows). The thing is I get the Windows disc at the moment (Traveling aboard). But I have a Windows 7 disc image on my hard disk. So, I downloaded Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, made a Live USB, and then try to burn the image from Ubuntu. But the program just freezes and I don't know why. I tried several times and it's still the same. So I tried using Fedora instead, just to see if it will work. The Disk Image Writer report something like this. Error unmounting /dev/dm-0: Command-line `umount "/dev/dm-0"' exited with non-zero exit status 32: umount: /: target is busy (In some cases useful info about processes that use the device is found by lsof(8) or fuser(1).) (udisks-error-quark, 14) Also, I tried installing linux on the windows partition. The installation program freezes (both Ubuntu and Fedora). So, I thought that maybe something are wrong with my hard disk. I seek the solution on the internet and found that gparted can be used to format a partition. And it also froze at "Searching /dev/sda/ partition ...". I'm using Lenovo Y570. Spec below. http://www.notebookreview.com/notebookreview/lenovo-ideapad-y570-review-a-lenovo-bestseller/3/ Can anyone suggest a next step in diagnosing and fixing this problem? Thanks in advance.

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