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• The Winds of Change are a Blowin&rsquo;

  - by Ajarn Mark Caldwell

  For six years I have been an avid and outspoken fan and paying customer of SourceGear products…from Vault to Dragnet to Fortress and on to Vault Professional, but that is all changing now.  Not the fan part, but the paying customer part.  I’m still a huge fan.  I think that SourceGear does a great job with their product and support has been fantastic when needed (which is not very often).  I think that Eric Sink has done a fine job building a quality company and products, and I appreciate his contributions to the tech community through this blogging and books.  I still think their products are high quality and do a fantastic job of what they do.  But there’s the rub…what they do is no longer enough for me. As I have rebuilt our development team over the last couple of years, and we have begun to investigate Scrum and Kanban, I realize that I need more visibility into the progress of the team.  I need better project management tools, and this is where Vault Professional lags behind several other tools.  Granted, in the latest release (Vault 6.0) they added a nice time tracking feature, but I want more.  (Note, I did contact SourceGear about my quest for more, but apparently, the rest of their customer base has not been clamoring for this and so they have not built it.  Granted, I wasn’t clamoring for it either until just recently, but unfortunately for SourceGear, I want it now and don’t want to wait for them to build it into their system.) Ironically, it was SourceGear themselves who started to turn me on to the possibilities of other tools.  They built a limited integration with Axosoft OnTime which I read about several times on their support site (I used to regularly read and occasionally comment on their Support Forum).  I decided to check out OnTime and was very impressed with the tool for work item tracking and project management (not to mention their great Scrum Master in 10 Minutes video).  I fell in love with the capabilities of OnTime.  Unfortunately, the integration with Vault for source control management was, as I mentioned, limited.  I could have forfeited the integration between work items and source code, but there is too much benefit to linking check-ins to work items for me to give that up.  So then I did what was previously unthinkable for me, I considered switching not just the work tracking tool, but also the source code management tool.  This was really stepping outside my comfort zone because source code is Gold, and not to be trifled with.  When you find a good weapon to protect your gold, stick with it. I looked at Git and Tortoise SVN, but the integration methods for those was pretty rough compared to what I was used to.  The recommended tool from Axosoft’s point of view appeared to be RocketSVN, but I really wasn’t sure I wanted to go the “flavor of Subversion” route.  Then I started thinking about that other tool I liked back when I first chose to go with Vault, but couldn’t afford:  Team Foundation Server.  And what do you know…Microsoft has not only radically improved it over that version from back in 2006, but they also came to their senses about how it should be licensed, and it is much more affordable now.  So I started looking into the latest capabilities in the 2012 version, and I fell in love all over again. I really went deep on checking out the tools.  I watched numerous webcasts from Microsoft partners, went to a beta preview on Microsoft’s campus, and watched a lot of Channel 9 videos on the new ALM features (oooh…shiny).  Frankly, I was very impressed with the capabilities of the newest version, and figured this was probably our direction.  As an interesting twist of fate, one of my employees crossed paths with an ALM Consultant from Northwest Cadence, a local Microsoft Partner, and one of the companies that produced several of the webcasts that I had been watching.  So I gave Bryon a call and started grilling him to see if he really knew anything or was just another guy who couldn’t find a job so he called himself a consultant.  It turns out Bryon actually knows a lot, especially in an area that was becoming a frustration point for us: Branching strategies and automated builds (that’s probably a whole separate blog entry).  As we talked, Bryon suggested we look into doing a DTDPS (Developer Tools Deployment Planning Services) session with his company.  This is a service that can be paid for by Microsoft Enterprise Agreement planning services credits or SA training benefits, and, again, coincidentally, we had several that were just about to expire, so I put them to good use. The DTDPS sessions were great; and Bryon, Rick, and the rest of the folks at Northwest Cadence have been a pleasure to work with.  We have just purchased a new server for our TFS rollout and are planning the steps and options right now.  This is still a big project ahead of us to not only install and configure TFS, but also to load all of our source code (many different systems, not just one program) and transition to the new way of life with TFS, but I am convinced that it is the right move for my team at this point in time.  We need the new capabilities that are in alignment with Scrum and Kanban methodologies in order to more efficiently manage all the different projects that we have going on at one time. I would still wholeheartedly endorse SourceGear’s products and Axosoft’s OnTime for those whose needs are met by those tools, but for me and my team, I think that TFS is the right fit, and I am looking forward to the change.

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• Unit testing is… well, flawed.

  - by Dewald Galjaard

  Hey someone had to say it. I clearly recall my first IT job. I was appointed Systems Co-coordinator for a leading South African retailer at store level. Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely nothing wrong with an honest day’s labor and in fact I highly recommend it, however I’m obliged to refer to the designation cautiously; in reality all I had to do was monitor in-store prices and two UNIX front line controllers. If anything went wrong – I only had to phone it in… Luckily that wasn’t all I did. My duties extended to some other interesting annual occurrence – stock take. Despite a bit more curious affair, it was still a tedious process that took weeks of preparation and several nights to complete.  Then also I remember that no matter how elaborate our planning was, the entire exercise would be rendered useless if we couldn’t get the basics right – that being the act of counting. Sounds simple right? We’ll with a store which could potentially carry over tens of thousands of different items… we’ll let’s just say I believe that’s when I first became a coffee addict. In those days the act of counting stock was a very humble process. Nothing like we have today. A staff member would be assigned a bin or shelve filled with items he or she had to sort then count. Thereafter they had to record their findings on a complementary piece of paper. Every night I would manage several teams. Each team was divided into two groups - counters and auditors. Both groups had the same task, only auditors followed shortly on the heels of the counters, recounting stock levels, making sure the original count correspond to their findings. It was a simple yet hugely responsible orchestration of people and thankfully there was one fundamental and golden rule I could always abide by to ensure things run smoothly – No-one was allowed to audit their own work. Nope, not even on nights when I didn’t have enough staff available. This meant I too at times had to get up there and get counting, or have the audit stand over until the next evening. The reason for this was obvious - late at night and with so much to do we were prone to make some mistakes, then on the recount, without a fresh set of eyes, you were likely to repeat the offence. Now years later this rule or guideline still holds true as we develop software (as far removed as software development from counting stock may be). For some reason it is a fundamental guideline we’re simply ignorant of. We write our code, we write our tests and thus commit the same horrendous offence. Yes, the procedure of writing unit tests as practiced in most development houses today – is flawed. Most if not all of the tests we write today exercise application logic – our logic. They are based on the way we believe an application or method should/may/will behave or function. As we write our tests, our unit tests mirror our best understanding of the inner workings of our application code. Unfortunately these tests will therefore also include (or be unaware of) any imperfections and errors on our part. If your logic is flawed as you write your initial code, chances are, without a fresh set of eyes, you will commit the same error second time around too. Not even experience seems to be a suitable solution. It certainly helps to have deeper insight, but is that really the answer we should be looking for? Is that really failsafe? What about code review? Code review is certainly an answer. You could have one developer coding away and another (or team) making sure the logic is sound. The practice however has its obvious drawbacks. Firstly and mainly it is resource intensive and from what I’ve seen in most development houses, given heavy deadlines, this guideline is seldom adhered to. Hardly ever do we have the resources, money or time readily available. So what other options are out there? A quest to find some solution revealed a project by Microsoft Research called PEX. PEX is a framework which creates several test scenarios for each method or class you write, automatically. Think of it as your own personal auditor. Within a few clicks the framework will auto generate several unit tests for a given class or method and save them to a single project. PEX help to audit your work. It lends a fresh set of eyes to any project you’re working on and best of all; it is cost effective and fast. Check them out at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/ In upcoming posts we’ll dive deeper into how it works and how it can help you.   Certainly there are more similar frameworks out there and I would love to hear from you. Please share your experiences and insights.

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• PASS Summit 2010 Recap

  - by AjarnMark

  Last week I attended my eighth PASS Summit in nine years, and every year it is a fantastic event!  I was fortunate my first year to have a contact (Bill Graziano (blog | Twitter) from SQLTeam) that I was expecting to meet, and who got me started on a good track of making new contacts.  Each year I have made a few more, and renewed friendships from years past.  Many of the attendees agree that the pure networking opportunities are one of the best benefits of attending the Summit.  And there’s a lot of great technical stuff, too, some of the things that stick out for me this year include… Pre-Con Monday: PowerShell with Allen White (blog | Twitter).  This was the first time that I attended a pre-con.  For those not familiar with the concept, the regular sessions for the conference are 75-90 minutes long.  For an extra fee, you can attend a full-day session on a single topic during a pre- or post-conference training day.  I had been meaning for several months to dive in and learn PowerShell, but just never seemed to find (or make) the time for it, so when I saw this was one of the all-day sessions, and I was planning to be there on Monday anyway, I decided to go for it.  And it was well worth it!  I definitely came out of there with a good foundation to build my own PowerShell scripts, plus several sample scripts that he showed which already cover the first four or five things I was planning to do with PowerShell anyway.  This looks like the right tool for me to build an automated version of our software deployment process, which right now contains many repeated steps.  Thanks Allen! Service Broker with Denny Cherry (blog | Twitter).  I remembered reading Denny’s blog post on Using Service Broker instead of Replication, and ever since then I have been thinking about using this to populate a new reporting-focused Data Repository that we will be building in the near future.  When I saw he was doing this session, I thought it would be great to get more information and be able to ask the author questions.  When I brought this idea back to my boss, he really liked it, as we had previously been discussing doing nightly data loads, with an option to manually trigger a mid-day load if up-to-the-minute data was needed for something.  If we go the Service Broker route, we can keep the Repository current in near real-time.  Hooray! DBA Mythbusters with Paul Randal (blog | Twitter).  Even though I read every one of the posts in Paul’s blog series of the same name, I had to go see the legend in person.  It was great, and I still learned something new! How to Conduct Effective Meetings with Joe Webb (blog | Twitter).  I always like to sit in on a session that Joe does.  I met Joe several years ago when both he and Bill Graziano were on the PASS Board of Directors together, and we have kept in touch.  Joe is very well-spoken and has great experience with both SQL Server and business.  And we could certainly use some pointers at my work (probably yours, too) on making our meetings more effective and to run on-time.  Of course, now that I’m the Chapter Leader for the Professional Development virtual chapter, I also had to sit in on this ProfDev session and recruit Joe to do a presentation or two for the chapter next year. Query Optimization with David DeWitt.  Anyone who has seen Dr. David DeWitt present the 3rd keynote at a PASS Summit over the last three years knows what a great time it is to sit and listen to him make some really complicated and advanced topic easy to understand (although it still makes your head hurt).  It still amazes me that the simple two-table join query from pubs that he used in his example can possibly have 22 million possible physical query plans.  Ouch! Exhibit Hall:  This year I spent more serious time in the exhibit hall than any year past.  I have talked my boss into making a significant (for us) investment in monitoring tools next year, and this was a great opportunity to talk with all the big-hitters.  Readers of mine may recall that I fell in love with the SQL Sentry Power Suite several months ago and wrote a blog entry about it just from the trial version.  Well as things turned out, short-term budget priorities shifted, and we weren’t able to make the purchase then.  I have it in the budget for next year, but since I was going to the Summit, my boss wanted me to look at the other options to see if this was really the one that we wanted.  I spent a couple of hours talking with representatives from Red-Gate, Idera, Confio, and Quest about their offerings, and giving them each the same 3 scenarios that I wanted to be able to accomplish based on the questions and issues that arise in our company.  It was interesting to discover the different approaches or “world view” that each vendor takes to the subject of performance monitoring and troubleshooting.  I may write a separate article that goes into this in more depth, but the product that best aligned with our point of view, and met the current needs we have is still the SQL Sentry Power Suite.  I’m not saying that the others are bad or wrong or anything like that, just that the way they tackled the issue did not align as well with our particular needs as does SQL Sentry’s product.  And that was something I learned too, when you go shopping for these products, you really need to know what you want to get from them.  It’s best if you have a few example scenarios from work that you can use to test out how well each tool fits your particular needs. Overall, another GREAT event.  I can’t wait to get the DVDs so I can sit in on a bunch of other sessions that I couldn’t get to because I was in one of the ones above.  And I can hardly wait until next year!

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• Puppet: Making Windows Awesome Since 2011

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

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

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• Upcoming User Group Events in 2011

  - by john.orourke(at)oracle.com

  At a recent customer event, someone asked me if Oracle had any plans to re-create the Hyperion Solutions Conference.  Unfortunately the answer is no.  With so many different product lines it would be challenging and costly for Oracle to run separate user conferences for every product line, and it would create too many events for customers with multiple products to attend.  So Oracle Open World is the company's main event for showcasing what's new and what's coming across all product lines.  If customers find Oracle OpenWorld too overwhelming or if the timing is bad, there are a number of other conferences, which are run by Oracle user groups and include a number of sessions focused on Oracle Hyperion EPM and BI products.  Here's a sneak preview of what's coming up for conferences in 2011 where you can network with other Hyperion users and learn what's new and what's coming in our products. Alliance 2011:  This conference is run by the Oracle Higher Education User Group (HEUG).  It's being held March 27 - 30th in lovely Denver, Colorado.  (a great location and time for skiers!)  This event is targeted at customers in Higher Education and Public Sector organizations and is expecting to draw over 3,500 attendees.  There will be a number of sessions focusing on Oracle Hyperion EPM and BI products in the Budgeting track, as well as the Reporting & BI track.  This includes product-focused sessions delivered by Oracle and partners, as well as case studies delivered by customers.  Here's a link to the registration page where you can get more information: http://www.heug.org/p/cm/ld/fid=255 Collaborate 2011:  This conference is run by three different user groups;  OAUG, IOUG and Quest.  It's being held April 10 - 14th in sunny Orlando, Florida.  (yes, sunshine and warmth!)  This event is targeted to customers with Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Hyperion, Primavera and other products and is expected to draw over 5,000 attendees.  You'll find a number of sessions focused on Oracle Hyperion EPM and BI products in the BI/Data Warehousing/EPM track.  This includes product-focused sessions delivered by Oracle, our partners, and customers as well as a number of customer case studies.  There will also be an exhibit area with a number of demo pods focused on EPM and BI products.  Here's a link to the conference web site where you can get more information: http://collaborate.oaug.org/ Also, please note that the OAUG has a Hyperion SIG that runs focused EPM/Hyperion events throughout the year.  Here's a link to their web site where you can get more information: http://hyperionsig.oaug.org/ Kscope 2011:  Formerly the Kaleidoscope conference, this one is run by the Oracle Developer Tools User Group (ODTUG).  This conference is being held June 26 - 30th in Long Beach, CA. (surf's up!)  Historically, this event has focused on Oracle Development tools, but over the past few years the EPM and BI content has grown with over 100 sessions planned this year.  So this event is becoming a great venue for existing Hyperion customers to learn about the latest developments with Oracle Essbase, Hyperion Planning, Hyperion Financial Management, Oracle BI and other products.   You'll also find hands-on workshops, product demonstrations as well as EPM and BI Symposiums run by Oracle Development staff.  Here's a link to the web site where you can get more details.  http://www.kscope11.com/biepm UKOUG Conference Series:  EPM and Hyperion 2011:  For Hyperion customers in the UK, the UKOUG has a Hyperion SIG that runs a focused conference for EPM and Hyperion products.  The 2011 event is planned for June in London.  Here's a link to the web site for this event where you can get more information: http://hyperion.ukoug.org/default.asp?p=8461 In addition to these conferences, you can also find Oracle EPM and BI content at regional user group meetings globally as well as Marketing events run by Oracle.  Check the events page at www.oracle.com for the details on upcoming Marketing and regional User Group events.  So while Oracle will not be trying to replicate the Hyperion Solutions conference, the good news is that there are a number of other events available where customers can find out what's new and what's coming with Oracle EPM and BI products.  And these events are running at different times of the year in different locations - so you can pick the event that makes the most sense for your company from a timing and location standpoint. I'll be delivering a number of sessions at the Alliance and Collaborate conferences and hope to see many of our loyal customers and partners at these events.  And there's always Oracle OpenWorld coming up in October, for which the planning has already started.  I look forward to seeing you in 2011.

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• Stepping outside Visual Studio IDE [Part 1 of 2] with Eclipse

  - by mbcrump

  “If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress." – Barack Obama In my quest to become a better programmer, I’ve decided to start the process of learning Java. I will be primary using the Eclipse Language IDE. I will not bore you with the history just what is needed for a .NET developer to get up and running. I will provide links, screenshots and a few brief code tutorials. Links to documentation. The Official Eclipse FAQ’s Links to binaries. Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers the Galileo Package (based on Eclipse 3.5 SR2)  Sun Developer Network – Java Eclipse officially recommends Java version 5 (also known as 1.5), although many Eclipse users use the newer version 6 (1.6). That's it, nothing more is required except to compile and run java. Installation Unzip the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers and double click the file named Eclipse.exe. You will probably want to create a link for it on your desktop. Once, it’s installed and launched you will have to select a workspace. Just accept the defaults and you will see the following: Lets go ahead and write a simple program. To write a "Hello World" program follow these steps: Start Eclipse. Create a new Java Project: File->New->Project. Select "Java" in the category list. Select "Java Project" in the project list. Click "Next". Enter a project name into the Project name field, for example, "HW Project". Click "Finish" Allow it to open the Java perspective Create a new Java class: Click the "Create a Java Class" button in the toolbar. (This is the icon below "Run" and "Window" with a tooltip that says "New Java Class.") Enter "HW" into the Name field. Click the checkbox indicating that you would like Eclipse to create a "public static void main(String[] args)" method. Click "Finish". A Java editor for HW.java will open. In the main method enter the following line.      System.out.println("This is my first java program and btw Hello World"); Save using ctrl-s. This automatically compiles HW.java. Click the "Run" button in the toolbar (looks like a VCR play button). You will be prompted to create a Launch configuration. Select "Java Application" and click "New". Click "Run" to run the Hello World program. The console will open and display "This is my first java program and btw Hello World". You now have your first java program, lets go ahead and make an applet. Since you already have the HW.java open, click inside the window and remove all code. Now copy/paste the following code snippet. Java Code Snippet for an applet. 1: import java.applet.Applet; 2: import java.awt.Graphics; 3: import java.awt.Color; 4:  5: @SuppressWarnings("serial") 6: public class HelloWorld extends Applet{ 7:  8: String text = "I'm a simple applet"; 9:  10: public void init() { 11: text = "I'm a simple applet"; 12: setBackground(Color.GREEN); 13: } 14:  15: public void start() { 16: System.out.println("starting..."); 17: } 18:  19: public void stop() { 20: System.out.println("stopping..."); 21: } 22:  23: public void destroy() { 24: System.out.println("preparing to unload..."); 25: } 26:  27: public void paint(Graphics g){ 28: System.out.println("Paint"); 29: g.setColor(Color.blue); 30: g.drawRect(0, 0, 31: getSize().width -1, 32: getSize().height -1); 33: g.setColor(Color.black); 34: g.drawString(text, 15, 25); 35: } 36: } The Eclipse IDE should look like Click "Run" to run the Hello World applet. Now, lets test our new java applet. So, navigate over to your workspace for example: “C:\Users\mbcrump\workspace\HW Project\bin” and you should see 2 files. HW.class java.policy.applet Create a HTML page with the following code: 1: <HTML> 2: <BODY> 3: <APPLET CODE=HW.class WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=100> 4: </APPLET> 5: </BODY> 6: </HTML> Open, the HTML page in Firefox or IE and you will see your applet running.  I hope this brief look at the Eclipse IDE helps someone get acquainted with Java Development. Even if your full time gig is with .NET, it will not hurt to have another language in your tool belt. As always, I welcome any suggestions or comments.

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• Clouds, Clouds, Clouds Everywhere, Not a Drop of Rain!

  - by sxkumar

  At the recently concluded Oracle OpenWorld 2012, the center of discussion was clearly Cloud. Over the five action packed days, I got to meet a large number of customers and most of them had serious interest in all things cloud.  Public Cloud - particularly the Oracle Cloud - clearly got a lot of attention and interest. I think the use cases and the value proposition for public cloud is pretty straight forward. However, when it comes to private cloud, there were some interesting revelations.  Well, I shouldn’t really call them revelations since they are pretty consistent with what I have heard from customers at other conferences as well as during 1:1 interactions. While the interest in enterprise private cloud remains to be very high, only a handful of enterprises have truly embarked on a journey to create what the purists would call true private cloud - with capabilities such as self-service and chargeback/show back. For a large majority, today's reality is simply consolidation and virtualization - and they are quite far off from creating an agile, self-service and transparent IT infrastructure which is what the enterprise cloud is all about.  Even a handful of those who have actually implemented a close-to-real enterprise private cloud have taken an infrastructure centric approach and are seeing only limited business upside. Quite a few were frank enough to admit that chargeback and self-service isn’t something that they see an immediate need for.  This is in quite contrast to the picture being painted by all those surveys out there that show a large number of enterprises having already implemented an enterprise private cloud.  On the face of it, this seems quite contrary to the observations outlined above. So what exactly is the reality? Well, the reality is that there is undoubtedly a huge amount of interest among enterprises about transforming their legacy IT environment - which is often seen as too rigid, too fragmented, and ultimately too expensive - to something more agile, transparent and business-focused. At the same time however, there is a great deal of confusion among CIOs and architects about how to get there. This isn't very surprising given all the buzz and hype surrounding cloud computing. Every IT vendor claims to have the most unique solution and there isn't a single IT product out there that does not have a cloud angle to it. Add to this the chatter on the blogosphere, it will get even a sane mind spinning.  Consequently, most  enterprises are still struggling to fully understand the concept and value of enterprise private cloud.  Even among those who have chosen to move forward relatively early, quite a few have made their decisions more based on vendor influence/preferences rather than what their businesses actually need.  Clearly, there is a disconnect between the promise of the enterprise private cloud and the current adoption trends.  So what is the way forward?  I certainly do not claim to have all the answers. But here is a perspective that many cloud practitioners have found useful and thus worth sharing. To take a step back, the fundamental premise of the enterprise private cloud is IT transformation. It is the quest to create a more agile, transparent and efficient IT infrastructure that is driven more by business needs rather than constrained by operational and procedural inefficiencies. It is the new way of delivering and consuming IT services - where the IT organizations operate more like enablers of  strategic services rather than just being the gatekeepers of IT resources. In an enterprise private cloud environment, IT organizations are expected to empower the end users via self-service access/control and provide the business stakeholders a transparent view of how the resources are being used, what’s the cost of delivering a given service, how well are the customers being served, etc.  But the most important thing to note here is the enterprise private cloud is not just an IT project, rather it is a business initiative to create an IT setup that is more aligned with the needs of today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just remember how the business users have been at the forefront of public cloud adoption within enterprises and private cloud is no exception.   Such a broad-based transformation makes cloud more than a technology initiative. It requires people (organizational) and process changes as well, and these changes are as critical as is the choice of right tools and technology. In my next blog,  I will share how essential it is for enterprise cloud technology to go hand-in hand with process re-engineering and organization changes to unlock true value of  enterprise cloud. I am sharing a short video from my session "Managing your private Cloud" at Oracle OpenWorld 2012. More videos from this session will be posted at the recently introduced Zero to Cloud resource page. Many other experts of Oracle enterprise private cloud solution will join me on this blog "Zero to Cloud"  and share best practices , deployment tips and information on how to plan, build, deploy, monitor, manage , meter and optimize the enterprise private cloud. We look forward to your feedback, suggestions and having an engaging conversion with you on this blog.

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• NHibernate: No persister error

  - by Mike

  Hello, In my quest to further my knowledge, I'm trying to get get NHibernate running. I have the following structure to my solution Core Class Library Project Infrastructure Class Library Project MVC Application Project Test Project In my Core project I have created the following entity: using System; namespace Core.Domain.Model { public class Category { public virtual Guid Id { get; set; } public virtual string Name { get; set; } } } In my Infrastructure Project I have the following mapping: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <hibernate-mapping xmlns="urn:nhibernate-mapping-2.2" namespace="Core.Domain.Model" assembly="Core"> <class name="Category" table="Categories" dynamic-update="true"> <cache usage="read-write"/> <id name="Id" column="Id" type="Guid"> <generator class="guid"/> </id> <property name="Name" length="100"/> </class> </hibernate-mapping> With the following config file: <hibernate-configuration xmlns="urn:nhibernate-configuration-2.2"> <session-factory> <property name="connection.driver_class">NHibernate.Driver.SqlClientDriver</property> <property name="connection.connection_string">server=xxxx;database=xxxx;Integrated Security=true;</property> <property name="show_sql">true</property> <property name="dialect">NHibernate.Dialect.MsSql2008Dialect</property> <property name="cache.use_query_cache">false</property> <property name="adonet.batch_size">100</property> <property name="proxyfactory.factory_class">NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle.ProxyFactoryFactory, NHibernate.ByteCode.Castle</property> <mapping assembly="Infrastructure" /> </session-factory> </hibernate-configuration> In my test project, I have the following Test [TestMethod] [DeploymentItem("hibernate.cfg.xml")] public void CanCreateCategory() { IRepository<Category> repo = new CategoryRepository(); Category category = new Category(); category.Name = "ASP.NET"; repo.Save(category); } I get the following error when I try to run the test: Test method Volunteer.Tests.CategoryTests.CanCreateCategory threw exception: NHibernate.MappingException: No persister for: Core.Domain.Model.Category. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I do have the cfg build action set to embedded resource. Thanks!

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• Any tool(s) for knowing the layout (segments) of running process in Windows?

  - by claws

  I've always been curious about How exactly the process looks in memory? What are the different segments(parts) in it? How exactly will be the program (on the disk) & process (in the memory) are related? My previous question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1966920/more-info-on-memory-layout-of-an-executable-program-process In my quest, I finally found a answer. I found this excellent article that cleared most of my queries: http://www.linuxforums.org/articles/understanding-elf-using-readelf-and-objdump_125.html In the above article, author shows how to get different segments of the process (LINUX) & he compares it with its corresponding ELF file. I'm quoting this section here: Courious to see the real layout of process segment? We can use /proc//maps file to reveal it. is the PID of the process we want to observe. Before we move on, we have a small problem here. Our test program runs so fast that it ends before we can even dump the related /proc entry. I use gdb to solve this. You can use another trick such as inserting sleep() before it calls return(). In a console (or a terminal emulator such as xterm) do: $ gdb test (gdb) b main Breakpoint 1 at 0x8048376 (gdb) r Breakpoint 1, 0x08048376 in main () Hold right here, open another console and find out the PID of program "test". If you want the quick way, type: $ cat /proc/`pgrep test`/maps You will see an output like below (you might get different output): [1] 0039d000-003b2000 r-xp 00000000 16:41 1080084 /lib/ld-2.3.3.so [2] 003b2000-003b3000 r--p 00014000 16:41 1080084 /lib/ld-2.3.3.so [3] 003b3000-003b4000 rw-p 00015000 16:41 1080084 /lib/ld-2.3.3.so [4] 003b6000-004cb000 r-xp 00000000 16:41 1080085 /lib/tls/libc-2.3.3.so [5] 004cb000-004cd000 r--p 00115000 16:41 1080085 /lib/tls/libc-2.3.3.so [6] 004cd000-004cf000 rw-p 00117000 16:41 1080085 /lib/tls/libc-2.3.3.so [7] 004cf000-004d1000 rw-p 004cf000 00:00 0 [8] 08048000-08049000 r-xp 00000000 16:06 66970 /tmp/test [9] 08049000-0804a000 rw-p 00000000 16:06 66970 /tmp/test [10] b7fec000-b7fed000 rw-p b7fec000 00:00 0 [11] bffeb000-c0000000 rw-p bffeb000 00:00 0 [12] ffffe000-fffff000 ---p 00000000 00:00 0 Note: I add number on each line as reference. Back to gdb, type: (gdb) q So, in total, we see 12 segment (also known as Virtual Memory Area--VMA). But I want to know about Windows Process & PE file format. Any tool(s) for getting the layout (segments) of running process in Windows? Any other good resources for learning more on this subject? EDIT: Are there any good articles which shows the mapping between PE file sections & VA segments?

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• How does the rsync algorithm correctly identify repeating blocks?

  - by Kai

  I'm on a personal quest to learn how the rsync algorithm works. After some reading and thinking, I've come up with a situation where I think the algorithm fails. I'm trying to figure out how this is resolved in an actual implementation. Consider this example, where A is the receiver and B is the sender. A = abcde1234512345fghij B = abcde12345fghij As you can see, the only change is that 12345 has been removed. Now, to make this example interesting, let's choose a block size of 5 bytes (chars). Hashing the values on the sender's side using the weak checksum gives the following values list. abcde|12345|fghij abcde -> 495 12345 -> 255 fghij -> 520 values = [495, 255, 520] Next we check to see if any hash values differ in A. If there's a matching block we can skip to the end of that block for the next check. If there's a non-matching block then we've found a difference. I'll step through this process. Hash the first block. Does this hash exist in the values list? abcde -> 495 (yes, so skip) Hash the second block. Does this hash exist in the values list? 12345 -> 255 (yes, so skip) Hash the third block. Does this hash exist in the values list? 12345 -> 255 (yes, so skip) Hash the fourth block. Does this hash exist in the values list? fghij -> 520 (yes, so skip) No more data, we're done. Since every hash was found in the values list, we conclude that A and B are the same. Which, in my humble opinion, isn't true. It seems to me this will happen whenever there is more than one block that share the same hash. What am I missing?

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• generated service mock: everything but RhinoMocks fails?

  - by hko

  I have the "quest" to search for the next Mocking Framework for my company, and basically it's down to NSubstitute (simplest syntax, but no strict mocks), FakeItEasy(best reviews, Roy Osherove bonus, and slightly better lib support than NSubstitute), Moq (best "other libs support", biggest featureset, downside: mock.Object). We definitely want to move on from RhinoMocks, e.g. because of the unusefull interactiontest error messages (it should tell me what the parameter was instead, when a verification fails). So I was pretty surprised the other day (that was yesterday) when I found out RhinoMocks could do a thing where every other mock framework fails at: Mocking an autogenerated SomethingService (a typical VS autogenerated service with a default construtor in a partial class). Please don't argue about the design.. I intend to write lightweight integration tests (and some unit tests), and I can't mess around with the service, the product is installed on too many customers system. See this code: // here the NSubstitute and FakeItEasy equivalents throw an exception.. see below TicketStoreService fakeTicketStoreService = MockRepository.GenerateMock<TicketStoreService>(); fakeTicketStoreService.Expect(service => service.DoSomething(Arg.Is(new Guid())).Return(new Guid()); fakeTicketStoreService.DoSomething(Arg.Is(new Guid())); fakeTicketStoreService.VerifyAllExpectations(); Note that DoSomething is a non-virtual methodcall in an autogenerated class. So it shouldn't work, according to common knowledge. But it does. Problem is that it's the only (non commercial) framework that can do this: Rhino.Mocks works, and verification works too FakeItEasy says it doesn't find a default constructor (probably just wrong exception message): No default constructor was found on the type SomeNamespace.TicketStoreService Moq gives something sane and understandable: Invalid setup on a non-virtual (overridable in VB) member: service=> service.DoSomething Nsubstitute gives a message System.NotSupportedException: Cannot serialize member System.ComponentModel.Component.Site of type System.ComponentModel.ISite because it is an interface. I'm really wondering what's going on here with the frameworks, except Moq. The "fancy new" frameworks seem to have an initial perf hit too, probably preparing some Type cache and serializing stuff, whilst RhinoMocks somehow manages to create a very "slim" mock without recursion. I have to admit I didn't like RhinoMocks very well, but here it shines.. unfortunately. So, is there a way to get that to work with newer (non-commercial!) mocking frameworks, or somehow get a sane error message out of Rhino.Mocks? And why can Rhino.Mocks achieve this, when clearly every Mocking framework states it can only work with virtual methods when given a concrete class? Let's not derail the discussion by talking about alternative approaches like Extract&Override or runtime-proxy Mocking frameworks like JustMock/TypeMock/Moles or the new Fakes framework, I know these, but that would be less ideal solutions, for reasons beyond this topic. Any help appreciated..

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• Hierarchy inheritance

  - by reito

  I had faced the problem. In my C++ hierarchy tree I have two branches for entities of difference nature, but same behavior - same interface. I created such hierarchy trees (first in image below). And now I want to work with Item or Base classes independetly of their nature (first or second). Then I create one abstract branch for this use. My mind build (second in image below). But it not working. Working scheme seems (third in image below). It's bad logic, I think... Do anybody have some ideas about such hierarchy inheritance? How make it more logical? More simple for understanding? Image Sorry for my english - russian internet didn't help:) Update: You ask me to be more explicit, and I will be. In my project (plugins for Adobe Framemaker) I need to work with dialogs and GUI controls. In some places I working with WinAPI controls, and some other places with FDK (internal Framemaker) controls, but I want to work throw same interface. I can't use one base class and inherite others from it, because all needed controls - is a hierarchy tree (not one class). So I have one hierarchy tree for WinAPI controls, one for FDK and one abstract tree to use anyone control. For example, there is an Edit control (WinEdit and FdkEdit realization), a Button control (WinButton and FdkButton realization) and base entity - Control (WinControl and FdkControl realization). For now I can link my classes in realization trees (Win and Fdk) with inheritence between each of them (WinControl is base class for WinButton and WinEdit; FdkControl is base class for FdkButton and FdkEdit). And I can link to abstract classes (Control is base class for WinControl and FdkControl; Edit is base class for WinEdit and FdkEdit; Button is base class for WinButton and FdkButton). But I can't link my abstract tree - compiler swears. In fact I have two hierarchy trees, that I want to inherite from another one. Update: I have done this quest! :) I used the virtual inheritence and get such scheme (http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/7782/99614779.png). Abstract tree has only absolute abstract methods. All inheritence in abstract tree are virtual. Link from realization tree to abstract are virtual. On image shown only one realization tree for simplicity. Thanks for help!

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• Custom fail2ban Filter

  - by Michael Robinson

  In my quest to block excessive failed phpMyAdmin login attempts with fail2ban, I've created a script that logs said failed attempts to a file: /var/log/phpmyadmin_auth.log Custom log The format of the /var/log/phpmyadmin_auth.log file is: phpMyadmin login failed with username: root; ip: 192.168.1.50; url: http://somedomain.com/phpmyadmin/index.php phpMyadmin login failed with username: ; ip: 192.168.1.50; url: http://192.168.1.48/phpmyadmin/index.php Custom filter [Definition] # Count all bans in the logfile failregex = phpMyadmin login failed with username: .*; ip: <HOST>; phpMyAdmin jail [phpmyadmin] enabled = true port = http,https filter = phpmyadmin action = sendmail-whois[name=HTTP] logpath = /var/log/phpmyadmin_auth.log maxretry = 6 The fail2ban log contains: 2012-10-04 10:52:22,756 fail2ban.server : INFO Stopping all jails 2012-10-04 10:52:23,091 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh-iptables' stopped 2012-10-04 10:52:23,866 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'fail2ban' stopped 2012-10-04 10:52:23,994 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh' stopped 2012-10-04 10:52:23,994 fail2ban.server : INFO Exiting Fail2ban 2012-10-04 10:52:24,253 fail2ban.server : INFO Changed logging target to /var/log/fail2ban.log for Fail2ban v0.8.6 2012-10-04 10:52:24,253 fail2ban.jail : INFO Creating new jail 'ssh' 2012-10-04 10:52:24,253 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh' uses poller 2012-10-04 10:52:24,260 fail2ban.filter : INFO Added logfile = /var/log/auth.log 2012-10-04 10:52:24,260 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set maxRetry = 6 2012-10-04 10:52:24,261 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set findtime = 600 2012-10-04 10:52:24,261 fail2ban.actions: INFO Set banTime = 600 2012-10-04 10:52:24,279 fail2ban.jail : INFO Creating new jail 'ssh-iptables' 2012-10-04 10:52:24,279 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh-iptables' uses poller 2012-10-04 10:52:24,279 fail2ban.filter : INFO Added logfile = /var/log/auth.log 2012-10-04 10:52:24,280 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set maxRetry = 5 2012-10-04 10:52:24,280 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set findtime = 600 2012-10-04 10:52:24,280 fail2ban.actions: INFO Set banTime = 600 2012-10-04 10:52:24,287 fail2ban.jail : INFO Creating new jail 'fail2ban' 2012-10-04 10:52:24,287 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'fail2ban' uses poller 2012-10-04 10:52:24,287 fail2ban.filter : INFO Added logfile = /var/log/fail2ban.log 2012-10-04 10:52:24,287 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set maxRetry = 3 2012-10-04 10:52:24,288 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set findtime = 604800 2012-10-04 10:52:24,288 fail2ban.actions: INFO Set banTime = 604800 2012-10-04 10:52:24,292 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh' started 2012-10-04 10:52:24,293 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh-iptables' started 2012-10-04 10:52:24,297 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'fail2ban' started When I issue: sudo service fail2ban restart fail2ban emails me to say ssh has restarted, but I receive no such email about my phpmyadmin jail. Repeated failed logins to phpMyAdmin does not cause an email to be sent. Have I missed some critical setup? Is my filter's regular expression wrong? Update: added changes from default installation Starting with a clean fail2ban installation: cp /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf /etc/fail2ban/jail.local Change email address to my own, action to: action = %(action_mwl)s Append the following to jail.local [phpmyadmin] enabled = true port = http,https filter = phpmyadmin action = sendmail-whois[name=HTTP] logpath = /var/log/phpmyadmin_auth.log maxretry = 4 Add the following to /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/phpmyadmin.conf # phpmyadmin configuration file # # Author: Michael Robinson # [Definition] # Option: failregex # Notes.: regex to match the password failures messages in the logfile. The # host must be matched by a group named "host". The tag "<HOST>" can # be used for standard IP/hostname matching and is only an alias for # (?:::f{4,6}:)?(?P<host>\S+) # Values: TEXT # # Count all bans in the logfile failregex = phpMyadmin login failed with username: .*; ip: <HOST>; # Option: ignoreregex # Notes.: regex to ignore. If this regex matches, the line is ignored. # Values: TEXT # # Ignore our own bans, to keep our counts exact. # In your config, name your jail 'fail2ban', or change this line! ignoreregex = Restart fail2ban sudo service fail2ban restart PS: I like eggs

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• Custom fail2ban Filter for phpMyadmin bruteforce attempts

  - by Michael Robinson

  In my quest to block excessive failed phpMyAdmin login attempts with fail2ban, I've created a script that logs said failed attempts to a file: /var/log/phpmyadmin_auth.log Custom log The format of the /var/log/phpmyadmin_auth.log file is: phpMyadmin login failed with username: root; ip: 192.168.1.50; url: http://somedomain.com/phpmyadmin/index.php phpMyadmin login failed with username: ; ip: 192.168.1.50; url: http://192.168.1.48/phpmyadmin/index.php Custom filter [Definition] # Count all bans in the logfile failregex = phpMyadmin login failed with username: .*; ip: <HOST>; phpMyAdmin jail [phpmyadmin] enabled = true port = http,https filter = phpmyadmin action = sendmail-whois[name=HTTP] logpath = /var/log/phpmyadmin_auth.log maxretry = 6 The fail2ban log contains: 2012-10-04 10:52:22,756 fail2ban.server : INFO Stopping all jails 2012-10-04 10:52:23,091 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh-iptables' stopped 2012-10-04 10:52:23,866 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'fail2ban' stopped 2012-10-04 10:52:23,994 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh' stopped 2012-10-04 10:52:23,994 fail2ban.server : INFO Exiting Fail2ban 2012-10-04 10:52:24,253 fail2ban.server : INFO Changed logging target to /var/log/fail2ban.log for Fail2ban v0.8.6 2012-10-04 10:52:24,253 fail2ban.jail : INFO Creating new jail 'ssh' 2012-10-04 10:52:24,253 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh' uses poller 2012-10-04 10:52:24,260 fail2ban.filter : INFO Added logfile = /var/log/auth.log 2012-10-04 10:52:24,260 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set maxRetry = 6 2012-10-04 10:52:24,261 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set findtime = 600 2012-10-04 10:52:24,261 fail2ban.actions: INFO Set banTime = 600 2012-10-04 10:52:24,279 fail2ban.jail : INFO Creating new jail 'ssh-iptables' 2012-10-04 10:52:24,279 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh-iptables' uses poller 2012-10-04 10:52:24,279 fail2ban.filter : INFO Added logfile = /var/log/auth.log 2012-10-04 10:52:24,280 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set maxRetry = 5 2012-10-04 10:52:24,280 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set findtime = 600 2012-10-04 10:52:24,280 fail2ban.actions: INFO Set banTime = 600 2012-10-04 10:52:24,287 fail2ban.jail : INFO Creating new jail 'fail2ban' 2012-10-04 10:52:24,287 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'fail2ban' uses poller 2012-10-04 10:52:24,287 fail2ban.filter : INFO Added logfile = /var/log/fail2ban.log 2012-10-04 10:52:24,287 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set maxRetry = 3 2012-10-04 10:52:24,288 fail2ban.filter : INFO Set findtime = 604800 2012-10-04 10:52:24,288 fail2ban.actions: INFO Set banTime = 604800 2012-10-04 10:52:24,292 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh' started 2012-10-04 10:52:24,293 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'ssh-iptables' started 2012-10-04 10:52:24,297 fail2ban.jail : INFO Jail 'fail2ban' started When I issue: sudo service fail2ban restart fail2ban emails me to say ssh has restarted, but I receive no such email about my phpmyadmin jail. Repeated failed logins to phpMyAdmin does not cause an email to be sent. Have I missed some critical setup? Is my filter's regular expression wrong? Update: added changes from default installation Starting with a clean fail2ban installation: cp /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf /etc/fail2ban/jail.local Change email address to my own, action to: action = %(action_mwl)s Append the following to jail.local [phpmyadmin] enabled = true port = http,https filter = phpmyadmin action = sendmail-whois[name=HTTP] logpath = /var/log/phpmyadmin_auth.log maxretry = 4 Add the following to /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/phpmyadmin.conf # phpmyadmin configuration file # # Author: Michael Robinson # [Definition] # Option: failregex # Notes.: regex to match the password failures messages in the logfile. The # host must be matched by a group named "host". The tag "<HOST>" can # be used for standard IP/hostname matching and is only an alias for # (?:::f{4,6}:)?(?P<host>\S+) # Values: TEXT # # Count all bans in the logfile failregex = phpMyadmin login failed with username: .*; ip: <HOST>; # Option: ignoreregex # Notes.: regex to ignore. If this regex matches, the line is ignored. # Values: TEXT # # Ignore our own bans, to keep our counts exact. # In your config, name your jail 'fail2ban', or change this line! ignoreregex = Restart fail2ban sudo service fail2ban restart PS: I like eggs

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• XenServer Converting HVM to Paravirtualised

  - by Karl Kloppenborg

  Recently I have been tasked with the daunting process of converting a setup of HVM enabled VMs (running on Citrix XenServer 5.6.0) into PV (paravirtualised) containers. The constraints of the project was that: The operating system must be functionally identical after the migration. minimal modification to the operating system (with exception of kernel / drive mapping) I also was allowed to change the bootloader(ie, grub) in what ever way I see fit. However, I have attempted this, I will firstly like to show you my steps I took. This at the moment is CentOS5.5 specific: Steps: yum install kernel-xen This installed: 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen edited: /boot/grub/menu.lst changed my specs to match: title CentOS (2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen) root (hd0,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 console=xvc0 initrd /initrd-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen.img Then I changed my xenserver parameters to match: xe vm-param-set uuid=[vm uuid] PV-bootloader-args="--kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen --ramdisk /initrd-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen.img" xe vm-param-set uuid=[vm uuid] HVM-boot-policy="" xe vm-param-set uuid=[vm uuid] PV-bootloader=pygrub xe vbd-param-set uuid==[Virtual Block Device/VBD uuid] bootable=true Some things to note, I am running a VolGroup LVM ;) Anyways, after all these steps (which aren't much!) I boot the VM and it boots initial kernel just fine, however I am presented with this error: Boot Screen: device-mapper: dm-raid45: initialized v0.2594l Waiting for driver initialization. Scanning and configuring dmraid supported devices Scanning logical volumes Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while... Activating logical volumes Volume group "VolGroup00" not found Creating root device. Mounting root filesystem. mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root' Setting up other filesystems. Setting up new root fs setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory Switching to new root and running init. unmounting old /dev unmounting old /proc unmounting old /sys switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory Now my hints are that it cannot detect / because of the fact that when you change from HVM mode to PV it does something (not that obvious) When you make a SR (storage) on a HVM, you get it mounted to the guest os as /dev/hda. However in PV mode, this presents itself as /dev/xvda... Could this be the answer? and if so, how the heck to I implement it?? Update: So I have gotten a bit further in my quest, as it now detects the LVM's... To do this, I required to recompile the xen-kernel initrd image. Command: mkinitrd -v --builtin=xen_vbd --preload=xenblk initrd-2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen.img 2.6.18-194.32.1.el5xen Now when I boot I get this: Boot Screen: Loading dm-raid45.ko module device-mapper: dm-raid45: initialized v0.2594l Scanning and configuring dmraid supported devices Scanning logical volumes Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while... Found volume group "VolGroup00" using metadata type lvm2 Activating logical volumes 3 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00" now active Creating root device. Mounting root filesystem. mount: error mounting /dev/root on /sysroot as ext3: Device or resource busy Setting up other filesystems. Setting up new root fs setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory no fstab.sys, mounting internal defaults setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory Switching to new root and running init. unmounting old /dev unmounting old /proc unmounting old /sys switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

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• /usr/bin/sshd isn't linked against PAM on one of my systems. What is wrong and how can I fix it?

  - by marc.riera

  Hi, I'm using AD as my user account server with ldap. Most of the servers run with UsePam yes except this one, it has lack of pam support on sshd. root@linserv9:~# ldd /usr/sbin/sshd linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fff621fe000) libutil.so.1 => /lib/libutil.so.1 (0x00007fd759d0b000) libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x00007fd759af4000) libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1 (0x00007fd7598db000) libcrypto.so.0.9.8 => /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 (0x00007fd75955b000) libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x00007fd759323000) libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007fd758fc1000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fd758dbd000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fd759f0e000) I have this packages installed root@linserv9:~# dpkg -l|grep -E 'pam|ssh' ii denyhosts 2.6-2.1 an utility to help sys admins thwart ssh hac ii libpam-modules 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Pluggable Authentication Modules for PAM ii libpam-runtime 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Runtime support for the PAM library ii libpam-ssh 1.91.0-9.2 enable SSO behavior for ssh and pam ii libpam0g 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Pluggable Authentication Modules library ii libpam0g-dev 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Development files for PAM ii openssh-blacklist 0.1-1ubuntu0.8.04.1 list of blacklisted OpenSSH RSA and DSA keys ii openssh-client 1:4.7p1-8ubuntu1.2 secure shell client, an rlogin/rsh/rcp repla ii openssh-server 1:4.7p1-8ubuntu1.2 secure shell server, an rshd replacement ii quest-openssh 5.2p1_q13-1 Secure shell root@linserv9:~# What I'm doing wrong? thanks. Edit: root@linserv9:~# cat /etc/pam.d/sshd # PAM configuration for the Secure Shell service # Read environment variables from /etc/environment and # /etc/security/pam_env.conf. auth required pam_env.so # [1] # In Debian 4.0 (etch), locale-related environment variables were moved to # /etc/default/locale, so read that as well. auth required pam_env.so envfile=/etc/default/locale # Standard Un*x authentication. @include common-auth # Disallow non-root logins when /etc/nologin exists. account required pam_nologin.so # Uncomment and edit /etc/security/access.conf if you need to set complex # access limits that are hard to express in sshd_config. # account required pam_access.so # Standard Un*x authorization. @include common-account # Standard Un*x session setup and teardown. @include common-session # Print the message of the day upon successful login. session optional pam_motd.so # [1] # Print the status of the user's mailbox upon successful login. session optional pam_mail.so standard noenv # [1] # Set up user limits from /etc/security/limits.conf. session required pam_limits.so # Set up SELinux capabilities (need modified pam) # session required pam_selinux.so multiple # Standard Un*x password updating. @include common-password Edit2: UsePAM yes fails With this configuration ssh fails to start : root@linserv9:/home/admmarc# cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config |grep -vE "^[ \t]*$|^#" Port 22 Protocol 2 ListenAddress 0.0.0.0 RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes UsePAM yes Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/sftp-server root@linserv9:/home/admmarc# The error it gives is as follows root@linserv9:/home/admmarc# /etc/init.d/ssh start * Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server sshd /etc/ssh/sshd_config: line 75: Bad configuration option: UsePAM /etc/ssh/sshd_config: terminating, 1 bad configuration options ...fail! root@linserv9:/home/admmarc#

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• Week in Geek: 4chan Falls Victim to DDoS Attack Edition

  - by Asian Angel

  This week we learned how to tweak the low battery action on a Windows 7 laptop, access an eBook collection anywhere in the world, “extend iPad battery life, batch resize photos, & sync massive music collections”, went on a reign of destruction with Snow Crusher, and had fun decorating our desktops with abstract icon collections. Photo by pasukaru76. Random Geek Links We have included extra news article goodness to help you catch up on any developments that you may have missed during the holiday break this past week. Note: The three 27C3 articles listed here represent three different presentations at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress hacker conference. 4chan victim of DDoS as FBI investigates role in PayPal attack Users of 4chan may have gotten a taste of their own medicine after the site was knocked offline by a DDoS attack from an unknown origin early Thursday morning. Report: FBI seizes server in probe of WikiLeaks attacks The FBI has seized a server in Texas as part of its hunt for the groups behind the pro-WikiLeaks denial-of-service attacks launched in December against PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and others. Mozilla exposes older user-account database Mozilla has disabled 44,000 older user accounts for its Firefox add-ons site after a security researcher found part of a database of the account information on a publicly available server. Data breach affects 4.9 million Honda customers Japanese automaker Honda has put some 2.2 million customers in the United States on a security breach alert after a database containing information on the owners and their cars was hacked. Chinese Trojan discovered in Android games An Android-based Trojan called “Geinimi” has been discovered in the wild and the Trojan is capable of sending personal information to remote servers and exhibits botnet-like behavior. 27C3 presentation claims many mobiles vulnerable to SMS attacks According to security experts, an ‘SMS of death’ threatens to disable many current Sony Ericsson, Samsung, Motorola, Micromax and LG mobiles. 27C3: GSM cell phones even easier to tap Security researchers have demonstrated how open source software on a number of revamped, entry-level cell phones can decrypt and record mobile phone calls in the GSM network. 27C3: danger lurks in PDF documents Security researcher Julia Wolf has pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe’s PDF standard. Critical update for WordPress A critical update has been made available for WordPress in the form of version 3.0.4. The update fixes a security bug in WordPress’s KSES library. McAfee Labs Predicts Geolocation, Mobile Devices and Apple Will Top the List of Targets for Emerging Threats in 2011 The list comprises 2010’s most buzzed about platforms and services, including Google’s Android, Apple’s iPhone, foursquare, Google TV and the Mac OS X platform, which are all expected to become major targets for cybercriminals. McAfee Labs also predicts that politically motivated attacks will be on the rise. Windows Phone 7 piracy materializes with FreeMarketplace A proof-of-concept application, FreeMarketplace, that allows any Windows Phone 7 application to be downloaded and installed free of charge has been developed. Empty email accounts, and some bad buzz for Hotmail In the past few days, a number of Hotmail users have been complaining about a rather disconcerting issue: their Hotmail accounts, some up to 10 years old, appear completely empty.  No emails, no folders, nothing, just what appears to be a new account. Reports: Nintendo warns of 3DS risk for kids Nintendo has reportedly issued a warning that the 3DS, its eagerly awaited glasses-free 3D portable gaming device, should not be used by children under 6 when the gadget is in 3D-viewing mode. Google eyes ‘cloaking’ as next antispam target Google plans to take a closer look at the practice of “cloaking,” or presenting one look to a Googlebot crawling one’s site while presenting another look to users. Facebook, Twitter stock trading drawing SEC eye? The high degree of investor interest in shares of hot Silicon Valley companies that aren’t yet publicly traded–like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zynga–may be leading to scrutiny from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Random TinyHacker Links Photo by jcraveiro. Exciting Software Set for Release in 2011 A few bloggers from great websites such as How-To Geek, Guiding Tech and 7 Tutorials took the time to sit down and talk about their software wishes for 2011. Take the time to read it and share… Wikileaks Infopr0n An infographic detailing the quest to plug WikiLeaks. The New York Times Guide to Mobile Apps A growing collection of all mobile app coverage by the New York Times as well as lists of favorite apps from Times writers. 7,000,000,000 (Video) A fascinating look at the world’s population via National Geographic Magazine. Super User Questions Check out the great answers to these hot questions from Super User. How to use a Personal computer as a Linux web server for development purposes? How to link processing power of old computers together? Free virtualization tool for testing suspicious files? Why do some actions not work with Remote Desktop? What is the simplest way to send a large batch of pictures to a distant friend or colleague? How-To Geek Weekly Article Recap Had a busy week and need to get caught up on your HTG reading? Then sit back and relax while enjoying these hot posts full of how-to roundup goodness. The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 How to Search Just the Site You’re Viewing Using Google Search Ask the Readers: Backing Your Files Up – Local Storage versus the Cloud One Year Ago on How-To Geek Need more how-to geekiness for your weekend? Then look through this great batch of articles from one year ago that focus on dual-booting and O.S. installation goodness. Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Vista Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with XP How To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7 Dual Boot Your Pre-Installed Windows 7 Computer with Ubuntu Easily Install Ubuntu Linux with Windows Using the Wubi Installer The Geek Note We hope that you and your families have had a terrific holiday break as everyone prepares to return to work and school this week. Remember to keep those great tips coming in to us at [email protected]! Photo by pjbeardsley. Latest Features How-To Geek ETC The 20 Best How-To Geek Linux Articles of 2010 The 50 Best How-To Geek Windows Articles of 2010 The 20 Best How-To Geek Explainer Topics for 2010 How to Disable Caps Lock Key in Windows 7 or Vista How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Tune Pop Enhances Android Music Notifications Another Busy Night in Gotham City Wallpaper Classic Super Mario Brothers Theme for Chrome and Iron Experimental Firefox Builds Put Tabs on the Title Bar (Available for Download) Android Trojan Found in the Wild Chaos, Panic, and Disorder Wallpaper

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• Windows Azure VMs - New "Stopped" VM Options Provide Cost-effective Flexibility for On-Demand Workloads

  - by KeithMayer

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/KeithMayer/archive/2013/06/22/windows-azure-vms---new-stopped-vm-options-provide-cost-effective.aspxDidn’t make it to TechEd this year? Don’t worry!  This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros.  Today’s article focuses on a new, much-heralded enhancement to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to make it more cost-effective for spinning VMs up and down on-demand on the Windows Azure cloud platform. NEW! VMs that are shutdown from the Windows Azure Management Portal will no longer continue to accumulate compute charges while stopped! Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future.  And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges. In this article, I'll provide more details on the scenarios that this enhancement best fits, and I'll also review the new options and considerations that we now have for performing safe shutdowns of Windows Azure VMs. Which scenarios does the new enhancement best fit? Being able to easily shutdown VMs from the Windows Azure Management Portal without continued compute charges is a great enhancement for certain cloud use cases, such as: On-demand dev/test/lab environments - Freely start and stop lab VMs so that they are only accumulating compute charges when being actively used.  "Bursting" load-balanced web applications - Provision a number of load-balanced VMs, but keep the minimum number of VMs running to support "normal" loads. Easily start-up the remaining VMs only when needed to support peak loads. Disaster Recovery - Start-up "cold" VMs when needed to recover from disaster scenarios. BUT ... there is a consideration to keep in mind when using the Windows Azure Management Portal to shutdown VMs: although performing a VM shutdown via the Windows Azure Management Portal causes that VM to no longer accumulate compute charges, it also deallocates the VM from fabric resources to which it was previously assigned.  These fabric resources include compute resources such as virtual CPU cores and memory, as well as network resources, such as IP addresses.  This means that when the VM is later started after being shutdown from the portal, the VM could be assigned a different IP address or placed on a different compute node within the fabric. In some cases, you may want to shutdown VMs using the old approach, where fabric resource assignments are maintained while the VM is in a shutdown state.  Specifically, you may wish to do this when temporarily shutting down or restarting a "7x24" VM as part of a maintenance activity.  Good news - you can still revert back to the old VM shutdown behavior when necessary by using the alternate VM shutdown approaches listed below.  Let's walk through each approach for performing a VM Shutdown action on Windows Azure so that we can understand the benefits and considerations of each... How many ways can I shutdown a VM? In Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, there's three general ways that can be used to safely shutdown VMs: Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM Stop VM via Windows PowerShell using Windows Azure PowerShell Module Although each of these options performs a safe shutdown of the guest operation system and the VM itself, each option handles the VM shutdown end state differently. Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal When clicking the Shutdown button at the bottom of the Virtual Machines page in the Windows Azure Management Portal, the VM is safely shutdown and "deallocated" from fabric resources.  Shutdown button on Virtual Machines page in Windows Azure Management Portal  When the shutdown process completes, the VM will be shown on the Virtual Machines page with a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status as shown in the figure below. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped (Deallocated)" Status "Deallocated" means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address ( called "Dynamic IPs" or "DIPs" in Windows Azure ) the next time it is started.  TIP: If you are leveraging this shutdown option and consistency of DIPs is important to applications running inside your VMs, you should consider using virtual networks with your VMs.  Virtual networks permit you to assign a specific IP Address Space for use with VMs that are assigned to that virtual network.  As long as you start VMs in the same order in which they were originally provisioned, each VM should be reassigned the same DIP that it was previously using. What about consistency of External IP Addresses? Great question! External IP addresses ( called "Virtual IPs" or "VIPs" in Windows Azure ) are associated with the cloud service in which one or more Windows Azure VMs are running.  As long as at least 1 VM inside a cloud service remains in a "Running" state, the VIP assigned to a cloud service will be preserved.  If all VMs inside a cloud service are in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status, then the cloud service may receive a different VIP when VMs are next restarted. TIP: If consistency of VIPs is important for the cloud services in which you are running VMs, consider keeping one VM inside each cloud service in the alternate VM shutdown state listed below to preserve the VIP associated with the cloud service. Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM When performing a Guest OS shutdown or restart ( ie., a shutdown or restart operation initiated from the Guest OS running inside the VM ), the VM configuration will not be deallocated from fabric resources. In the figure below, the VM has been shutdown from within the Guest OS and is shown with a "Stopped" VM status rather than the "Stopped ( Deallocated )" VM status that was shown in the previous figure. Note that it may require a few minutes for the Windows Azure Management Portal to reflect that the VM is in a "Stopped" state in this scenario, because we are performing an OS shutdown inside the VM rather than through an Azure management endpoint. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped" Status VMs shown in a "Stopped" status will continue to accumulate compute charges, because fabric resources are still being reserved for these VMs.  However, this also means that DIPs and VIPs are preserved for VMs in this state, so you don't have to worry about VMs and cloud services getting different IP addresses when they are started in the future. Stop VM via Windows PowerShell In the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module, a new -StayProvisioned parameter has been added to the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet. This new parameter provides the flexibility to choose the VM configuration end result when stopping VMs using PowerShell: When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet without the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped and deallocated; that is, the VM will be left in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status just like the end result when a VM Shutdown operation is performed via the Windows Azure Management Portal.  When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet with the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped but fabric resource reservations will be preserved; that is the VM will be left in a "Stopped" status just like the end result when performing a Guest OS shutdown operation. So, with PowerShell, you can choose how Windows Azure should handle VM configuration and fabric resource reservations when stopping VMs on a case-by-case basis. TIP: It's important to note that the -StayProvisioned parameter is only available in the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module.  So, if you've previously downloaded this module, be sure to download and install the latest version to get this new functionality. Want to Learn More about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services? To learn more about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, be sure to check-out these additional FREE resources: Become our next "Early Expert"! Complete the Early Experts "Cloud Quest" and build a multi-VM lab network in the cloud for FREE!  Build some cool scenarios! Check out our list of over 20+ Step-by-Step Lab Guides based on key scenarios that IT Pros are implementing on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services TODAY!  Looking forward to seeing you in the Cloud! - Keith Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012 Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines Want to Get Certified? Join our Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Study Group

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• Why Fusion Middleware matters to Oracle Applications and Fusion Applications customers?

  - by Harish Gaur

  Did you miss this general session on Monday morning presented by Amit Zavery, VP of Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Management? There will be a recording made available shortly and in the meanwhile, here is a recap. Amit presented 5 strategies customers can leverage today to extend their applications. Figure 1: 5 Oracle Fusion Middleware strategies to extend Oracle Applications & Oracle Fusion Apps 1. Engage Everyone – Provide intuitive and social experience for application users using Oracle WebCenter 2. Extend Enterprise – Extend Oracle Applications to mobile devices using Oracle ADF Mobile 3. Orchestrate Processes – Automate key organization processes across on-premise & cloud applications using Oracle BPM Suite & Oracle SOA Suite 4. Secure the core – Provide single sign-on and self-service provisioning across multiple apps using Oracle Identity Management 5. Optimize Performance – Leverage Exalogic stack to consolidate multiple instance and improve performance of Oracle Applications Session included 3 demonstrations to illustrate these strategies. 1. First demo highlighted significance of mobile applications for unlocking existing investment in Applications such as EBS. Using a native iPhone application interacting with e-Business Suite, demo showed how expense approval can be mobile enabled with enhanced visibility using BI dashboards. 2. Second demo showed how you can extend a banking process in Siebel and Oracle Policy Automation with Oracle BPM Suite.Process starts in Siebel with a customer requesting a loan, and then jumps to OPA for loan recommendations and decision making and loan processing with approvals in handled in BPM Suite. Once approvals are completed Siebel is updated to complete the process. 3. Final demo showcased FMW components inside Fusion Applications, specifically WebCenter. Boeing, Underwriter Laboratories and Electronic Arts joined this quest and discussed 3 different approaches of leveraging Fusion Middleware stack to maximize their investment in Oracle Applications and/or Fusion Applications technology. Let’s briefly review what these customers shared during the session: 1. Extend Fusion Applications We know that Oracle Fusion Middleware is the underlying technology infrastructure for Oracle Fusion Applications. Architecturally, Oracle Fusion Apps leverages several components of Oracle Fusion Middleware from Oracle WebCenter for rich collaborative interface, Oracle SOA Suite & Oracle BPM Suite for orchestrating key underlying processes to Oracle BIEE for dash boarding and analytics. Boeing talked about how they are using Oracle BPM Suite 11g, a key component of Oracle Fusion Middleware with Oracle Fusion Apps to transform their supply chain. Tim Murnin, Director of Supply Chain talked about Boeing’s 5 year supply chain transformation journey. Boeing’s Integrated and Information Management division began with automation of critical RFQ process using Oracle BPM Suite. This 1st phase resulted in 38% reduction in labor costs for RFP. As a next step in this effort, Boeing is now creating a platform to enable electronic Order Management. Fusion Apps are playing a significant role in this phase. Boeing has gone live with Oracle Fusion Product Hub and efforts are underway with Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO). So, where does Oracle BPM Suite 11g fit in this equation? Let me explain. Business processes within Fusion Apps are designed using 2 standards: Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). These processes can be easily configured using declarative set of tools. Boeing leverages Oracle BPM Suite 11g (which supports BPMN 2.0) and Oracle SOA Suite (which supports BPEL) to “extend” these applications. Traditionally, customizations are done within an app using native technologies. But, instead of making process changes within Fusion Apps, Boeing has taken an approach of building “extensions” layer on top of the application. Fig 2: Boeing’s use of Oracle BPM Suite to orchestrate key supply chain processes across Fusion Apps 2. Maximize Oracle Applications investment Fusion Middleware appeals not only to Fusion Apps customers, but is also leveraged by Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards customers significantly. Using Oracle BPM Suite and Oracle SOA Suite is the recommended extension strategy for Oracle Fusion Apps and Oracle Applications Unlimited customers. Electronic Arts, E-Business Suite customer, spoke about their strategy to transform their order-to-cash process using Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Foundation Packs and Oracle BAM. Udesh Naicker, Sr Director of IT at Elecronic Arts (EA), discussed how growth of social and digital gaming had started to put tremendous pressure on EA’s existing IT infrastructure. He discussed the challenge with millions of micro-transactions coming from several sources – Microsoft Xbox, Paypal, several service providers. EA found Order-2-Cash processes stretched to their limits. They lacked visibility into these transactions across the entire value chain. EA began by consolidating their E-Business Suite R11 instances into single E-Business Suite R12. EA needed to cater to a variety of service requirements, connectivity methods, file formats, and information latency. Their integration strategy was tactical, i.e., using file uploads, TIBCO, SQL scripts. After consolidating E-Business suite, EA standardized their integration approach with Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle AIA Foundation Pack. Oracle SOA Suite is the platform used to extend E-Business Suite R12 and standardize 60+ interfaces across several heterogeneous systems including PeopleSoft, Demantra, SF.com, Workday, and Managed EDI services spanning on-premise, hosted and cloud applications. EA believes that Oracle SOA Suite 11g based extension strategy has helped significantly in the followings ways: - It helped them keep customizations out of E-Business Suite, thereby keeping EBS R12 vanilla and upgrade safe - Developers are now proficient in technology which is also leveraged by Fusion Apps. This has helped them prepare for adoption of Fusion Apps in the future Fig 3: Using Oracle SOA Suite & Oracle e-Business Suite, Electronic Arts built new platform for order processing 3. Consolidate apps and improve scalability Exalogic is an optimal platform for customers to consolidate their application deployments and enhance performance. Underwriter Laboratories talked about their strategy to run their mission critical applications including e-Business Suite on Exalogic. Christian Anschuetz, CIO of Underwriter Laboratories (UL) shared how UL is on a growth path - $1B to $2.5B in 5 years- and planning a significant business transformation from a not-for-profit to a for-profit business. To support this growth, UL is planning to simplify its IT environment and the deployment complexity associated with ERP applications and technology it runs on. Their current applications were deployed on variety of hardware platforms and lacked comprehensive disaster recovery architecture. UL embarked on a mission to deploy E-Business Suite on Exalogic. UL’s solution is unique because it is one of the first to deploy a large number of Oracle applications and related Fusion Middleware technologies (SOA, BI, Analytical Applications AIA Foundation Pack and AIA EBS to Siebel UCM prebuilt integration) on the combined Exalogic and Exadata environment. UL is planning to move to a virtualized architecture toward the end of 2012 to securely host external facing applications like iStore Fig 4: Underwrites Labs deployed e-Business Suite on Exalogic to achieve performance gains Key takeaways are: - Fusion Middleware platform is certified with major Oracle Applications Unlimited offerings. Fusion Middleware is the underlying technological infrastructure for Fusion Apps - Customers choose Oracle Fusion Middleware to extend their applications (Apps Unlimited or Fusion Apps) to keep applications upgrade safe and prepare for Fusion Apps - Exalogic is an optimum platform to consolidate applications deployments and enhance performance

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• Why Fusion Middleware matters to Oracle Applications and Fusion Applications customers?

  - by Harish Gaur

  Did you miss this general session on Monday morning presented by Amit Zavery, VP of Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Management? There will be a recording made available shortly and in the meanwhile, here is a recap. Amit presented 5 strategies customers can leverage today to extend their applications. Figure 1: 5 Oracle Fusion Middleware strategies to extend Oracle Applications & Oracle Fusion Apps 1. Engage Everyone – Provide intuitive and social experience for application users using Oracle WebCenter 2. Extend Enterprise – Extend Oracle Applications to mobile devices using Oracle ADF Mobile 3. Orchestrate Processes – Automate key organization processes across on-premise & cloud applications using Oracle BPM Suite & Oracle SOA Suite 4. Secure the core – Provide single sign-on and self-service provisioning across multiple apps using Oracle Identity Management 5. Optimize Performance – Leverage Exalogic stack to consolidate multiple instance and improve performance of Oracle Applications Session included 3 demonstrations to illustrate these strategies. 1. First demo highlighted significance of mobile applications for unlocking existing investment in Applications such as EBS. Using a native iPhone application interacting with e-Business Suite, demo showed how expense approval can be mobile enabled with enhanced visibility using BI dashboards. 2. Second demo showed how you can extend a banking process in Siebel and Oracle Policy Automation with Oracle BPM Suite.Process starts in Siebel with a customer requesting a loan, and then jumps to OPA for loan recommendations and decision making and loan processing with approvals in handled in BPM Suite. Once approvals are completed Siebel is updated to complete the process. 3. Final demo showcased FMW components inside Fusion Applications, specifically WebCenter. Boeing, Underwriter Laboratories and Electronic Arts joined this quest and discussed 3 different approaches of leveraging Fusion Middleware stack to maximize their investment in Oracle Applications and/or Fusion Applications technology. Let’s briefly review what these customers shared during the session: 1. Extend Fusion Applications We know that Oracle Fusion Middleware is the underlying technology infrastructure for Oracle Fusion Applications. Architecturally, Oracle Fusion Apps leverages several components of Oracle Fusion Middleware from Oracle WebCenter for rich collaborative interface, Oracle SOA Suite & Oracle BPM Suite for orchestrating key underlying processes to Oracle BIEE for dash boarding and analytics. Boeing talked about how they are using Oracle BPM Suite 11g, a key component of Oracle Fusion Middleware with Oracle Fusion Apps to transform their supply chain. Tim Murnin, Director of Supply Chain talked about Boeing’s 5 year supply chain transformation journey. Boeing’s Integrated and Information Management division began with automation of critical RFQ process using Oracle BPM Suite. This 1st phase resulted in 38% reduction in labor costs for RFP. As a next step in this effort, Boeing is now creating a platform to enable electronic Order Management. Fusion Apps are playing a significant role in this phase. Boeing has gone live with Oracle Fusion Product Hub and efforts are underway with Oracle Fusion Distributed Order Orchestration (DOO). So, where does Oracle BPM Suite 11g fit in this equation? Let me explain. Business processes within Fusion Apps are designed using 2 standards: Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). These processes can be easily configured using declarative set of tools. Boeing leverages Oracle BPM Suite 11g (which supports BPMN 2.0) and Oracle SOA Suite (which supports BPEL) to “extend” these applications. Traditionally, customizations are done within an app using native technologies. But, instead of making process changes within Fusion Apps, Boeing has taken an approach of building “extensions” layer on top of the application. Fig 2: Boeing’s use of Oracle BPM Suite to orchestrate key supply chain processes across Fusion Apps 2. Maximize Oracle Applications investment Fusion Middleware appeals not only to Fusion Apps customers, but is also leveraged by Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards customers significantly. Using Oracle BPM Suite and Oracle SOA Suite is the recommended extension strategy for Oracle Fusion Apps and Oracle Applications Unlimited customers. Electronic Arts, E-Business Suite customer, spoke about their strategy to transform their order-to-cash process using Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Foundation Packs and Oracle BAM. Udesh Naicker, Sr Director of IT at Elecronic Arts (EA), discussed how growth of social and digital gaming had started to put tremendous pressure on EA’s existing IT infrastructure. He discussed the challenge with millions of micro-transactions coming from several sources – Microsoft Xbox, Paypal, several service providers. EA found Order-2-Cash processes stretched to their limits. They lacked visibility into these transactions across the entire value chain. EA began by consolidating their E-Business Suite R11 instances into single E-Business Suite R12. EA needed to cater to a variety of service requirements, connectivity methods, file formats, and information latency. Their integration strategy was tactical, i.e., using file uploads, TIBCO, SQL scripts. After consolidating E-Business suite, EA standardized their integration approach with Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle AIA Foundation Pack. Oracle SOA Suite is the platform used to extend E-Business Suite R12 and standardize 60+ interfaces across several heterogeneous systems including PeopleSoft, Demantra, SF.com, Workday, and Managed EDI services spanning on-premise, hosted and cloud applications. EA believes that Oracle SOA Suite 11g based extension strategy has helped significantly in the followings ways: - It helped them keep customizations out of E-Business Suite, thereby keeping EBS R12 vanilla and upgrade safe - Developers are now proficient in technology which is also leveraged by Fusion Apps. This has helped them prepare for adoption of Fusion Apps in the future Fig 3: Using Oracle SOA Suite & Oracle e-Business Suite, Electronic Arts built new platform for order processing 3. Consolidate apps and improve scalability Exalogic is an optimal platform for customers to consolidate their application deployments and enhance performance. Underwriter Laboratories talked about their strategy to run their mission critical applications including e-Business Suite on Exalogic. Christian Anschuetz, CIO of Underwriter Laboratories (UL) shared how UL is on a growth path - $1B to $2.5B in 5 years- and planning a significant business transformation from a not-for-profit to a for-profit business. To support this growth, UL is planning to simplify its IT environment and the deployment complexity associated with ERP applications and technology it runs on. Their current applications were deployed on variety of hardware platforms and lacked comprehensive disaster recovery architecture. UL embarked on a mission to deploy E-Business Suite on Exalogic. UL’s solution is unique because it is one of the first to deploy a large number of Oracle applications and related Fusion Middleware technologies (SOA, BI, Analytical Applications AIA Foundation Pack and AIA EBS to Siebel UCM prebuilt integration) on the combined Exalogic and Exadata environment. UL is planning to move to a virtualized architecture toward the end of 2012 to securely host external facing applications like iStore Fig 4: Underwrites Labs deployed e-Business Suite on Exalogic to achieve performance gains Key takeaways are: - Fusion Middleware platform is certified with major Oracle Applications Unlimited offerings. Fusion Middleware is the underlying technological infrastructure for Fusion Apps - Customers choose Oracle Fusion Middleware to extend their applications (Apps Unlimited or Fusion Apps) to keep applications upgrade safe and prepare for Fusion Apps - Exalogic is an optimum platform to consolidate applications deployments and enhance performance TAGS: Fusion Apps, Exalogic, BPM Suite, SOA Suite, e-Business Suite Integration

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• Agile Like Jazz

  - by Jeff Certain

  (I’ve been sitting on this for a week or so now, thinking that it needed to be tightened up a bit to make it less rambling. Since that’s clearly not going to happen, reader beware!) I had the privilege of spending around 90 minutes last night sitting and listening to Sonny Rollins play a concert at the Disney Center in LA. If you don’t know who Sonny Rollins is, I don’t know how to explain the experience; if you know who he is, I don’t need to. Suffice it to say that he has been recording professionally for over 50 years, and helped create an entire genre of music. A true master by any definition. One of the most intriguing aspects of a concert like this, however, is watching the master step aside and let the rest of the musicians play. Not just play their parts, but really play… letting them take over the spotlight, to strut their stuff, to soak up enthusiastic applause from the crowd. Maybe a lot of it has to do with the fact that Sonny Rollins has been doing this for more than a half-century. Maybe it has something to do with a kind of patience you learn when you’re on the far side of 80 – and the man can still blow a mean sax for 90 minutes without stopping! Maybe it has to do with the fact that he was out there for the love of the music and the love of the show, not because he had anything to prove to anyone and, I like to think, not for the money. Perhaps it had more to do with the fact that, when you’re at that level of mastery, the other musicians are going to be good. Really good. Whatever the reasons, there was a incredible freedom on that stage – the ability to improvise, for each musician to showcase their own specialization and skills, and them come back to the common theme, back to being on the same page, as it were. All this took place in the same venue that is home to the L.A. Phil. Somehow, I can’t ever see the same kind of free-wheeling improvisation happening in that context. And, since I’m a geek, I started thinking about agility. Rollins has put together a quintet that reflects his own particular style and past. No upright bass or piano for Rollins – drums, bongos, electric guitar and bass guitar along with his sax. It’s not about the mix of instruments. Other trios, quartets, and sextets use different mixes of instruments. New Orleans jazz tends towards trombones instead of sax; some prefer cornet or trumpet. But no matter what the choice of instruments, size matters. Team sizes are something I’ve been thinking about for a while. We’re on a quest to rethink how our teams are organized. They just feel too big, too unwieldy. In fact, they really don’t feel like teams at all. Most of the time, they feel more like collections or people who happen to report to the same manager. I attribute this to a couple factors. One is over-specialization; we have a tendency to have people work in silos. Although the teams are product-focused, within them our developers are both generalists and specialists. On the one hand, we expect them to be able to build an entire vertical slice of the application; on the other hand, each developer tends to be responsible for the vertical slice. As a result, developers often work on their own piece of the puzzle, in isolation. This sort of feels like working on a jigsaw in a group – each person taking a set of colors and piecing them together to reveal a portion of the overall picture. But what inevitably happens when you go to meld all those pieces together? Inevitably, you have some sections that are too big to move easily. These sections end up falling apart under their own weight as you try to move them. Not only that, but there are other challenges – figuring out where that section fits, and how to tie it into the rest of the puzzle. Often, this is when you find a few pieces need to be added – these pieces are “glue,” if you will. The other issue that arises is due to the overhead of maintaining communications in a team. My mother, who worked in IT for around 30 years, once told me that 20% per team member is a good rule of thumb for maintaining communication. While this is a rule of thumb, it seems to imply that any team over about 6 people is going to become less agile simple because of the communications burden. Teams of ten or twelve seem like they fall into the philharmonic organizational model. Complicated pieces of music requiring dozens of players to all be on the same page requires a much different model than the jazz quintet. There’s much less room for improvisation, originality or freedom. (There are probably orchestral musicians who will take exception to this characterization; I’m calling it like I see it from the cheap seats.) And, there’s one guy up front who is running the show, whose job is to keep all of those dozens of players on the same page, to facilitate communications. Somehow, the orchestral model doesn’t feel much like a self-organizing team, either. The first violin may be the best violinist in the orchestra, but they don’t get to perform free-wheeling solos. I’ve never heard of an orchestra getting together for a jam session. But I have heard of teams that organize their work based on the developers available, rather than organizing the developers based on the work required. I have heard of teams where desired functionality is deferred – or worse yet, schedules are missed – because one critical person doesn’t have any bandwidth available. I’ve heard of teams where people simply don’t have the big picture, because there is too much communication overhead for everyone to be aware of everything that is happening on a project. I once heard Paul Rayner say something to the effect of “you have a process that is perfectly designed to give you exactly the results you have.” Given a choice, I want a process that’s much more like jazz than orchestral music. I want a process that doesn’t burden me with lots of forms and checkboxes and stuff. Give me the simplest, most lightweight process that will work – and a smaller team of the best developers I can find. This seems like the kind of process that will get the kind of result I want to be part of.

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• Developing a Cost Model for Cloud Applications

  - by BuckWoody

  Note - please pay attention to the date of this post. As much as I attempt to make the information below accurate, the nature of distributed computing means that components, units and pricing will change over time. The definitive costs for Microsoft Windows Azure and SQL Azure are located here, and are more accurate than anything you will see in this post: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/  When writing software that is run on a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering like Windows Azure / SQL Azure, one of the questions you must answer is how much the system will cost. I will not discuss the comparisons between on-premise costs (which are nigh impossible to calculate accurately) versus cloud costs, but instead focus on creating a general model for estimating costs for a given application. You should be aware that there are (at this writing) two billing mechanisms for Windows and SQL Azure: “Pay-as-you-go” or consumption, and “Subscription” or commitment. Conceptually, you can consider the former a pay-as-you-go cell phone plan, where you pay by the unit used (at a slightly higher rate) and the latter as a standard cell phone plan where you commit to a contract and thus pay lower rates. In this post I’ll stick with the pay-as-you-go mechanism for simplicity, which should be the maximum cost you would pay. From there you may be able to get a lower cost if you use the other mechanism. In any case, the model you create should hold. Developing a good cost model is essential. As a developer or architect, you’ll most certainly be asked how much something will cost, and you need to have a reliable way to estimate that. Businesses and Organizations have been used to paying for servers, software licenses, and other infrastructure as an up-front cost, and power, people to the systems and so on as an ongoing (and sometimes not factored) cost. When presented with a new paradigm like distributed computing, they may not understand the true cost/value proposition, and that’s where the architect and developer can guide the conversation to make a choice based on features of the application versus the true costs. The two big buckets of use-types for these applications are customer-based and steady-state. In the customer-based use type, each successful use of the program results in a sale or income for your organization. Perhaps you’ve written an application that provides the spot-price of foo, and your customer pays for the use of that application. In that case, once you’ve estimated your cost for a successful traversal of the application, you can build that into the price you charge the user. It’s a standard restaurant model, where the price of the meal is determined by the cost of making it, plus any profit you can make. In the second use-type, the application will be used by a more-or-less constant number of processes or users and no direct revenue is attached to the system. A typical example is a customer-tracking system used by the employees within your company. In this case, the cost model is often created “in reverse” - meaning that you pilot the application, monitor the use (and costs) and that cost is held steady. This is where the comparison with an on-premise system becomes necessary, even though it is more difficult to estimate those on-premise true costs. For instance, do you know exactly how much cost the air conditioning is because you have a team of system administrators? This may sound trivial, but that, along with the insurance for the building, the wiring, and every other part of the system is in fact a cost to the business. There are three primary methods that I’ve been successful with in estimating the cost. None are perfect, all are demand-driven. The general process is to lay out a matrix of: components units cost per unit and then multiply that times the usage of the system, based on which components you use in the program. That sounds a bit simplistic, but using those metrics in a calculation becomes more detailed. In all of the methods that follow, you need to know your application. The components for a PaaS include computing instances, storage, transactions, bandwidth and in the case of SQL Azure, database size. In most cases, architects start with the first model and progress through the other methods to gain accuracy. Simple Estimation The simplest way to calculate costs is to architect the application (even UML or on-paper, no coding involved) and then estimate which of the components you’ll use, and how much of each will be used. Microsoft provides two tools to do this - one is a simple slider-application located here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/pricing-calculator/  The other is a tool you download to create an “Return on Investment” (ROI) spreadsheet, which has the advantage of leading you through various questions to estimate what you plan to use, located here: https://roianalyst.alinean.com/msft/AutoLogin.do?d=176318219048082115  You can also just create a spreadsheet yourself with a structure like this: Program Element Azure Component Unit of Measure Cost Per Unit Estimated Use of Component Total Cost Per Component Cumulative Cost               Of course, the consideration with this model is that it is difficult to predict a system that is not running or hasn’t even been developed. Which brings us to the next model type. Measure and Project A more accurate model is to actually write the code for the application, using the Software Development Kit (SDK) which can run entirely disconnected from Azure. The code should be instrumented to estimate the use of the application components, logging to a local file on the development system. A series of unit and integration tests should be run, which will create load on the test system. You can use standard development concepts to track this usage, and even use Windows Performance Monitor counters. The best place to start with this method is to use the Windows Azure Diagnostics subsystem in your code, which you can read more about here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sumitm/archive/2009/11/18/introducing-windows-azure-diagnostics.aspx This set of API’s greatly simplifies tracking the application, and in fact you can use this information for more than just a cost model. After you have the tracking logs, you can plug the numbers into ay of the tools above, which should give a representative cost or in some cases a unit cost. The consideration with this model is that the SDK fabric is not a one-to-one comparison with performance on the actual Windows Azure fabric. Those differences are usually smaller, but they do need to be considered. Also, you may not be able to accurately predict the load on the system, which might lead to an architectural change, which changes the model. This leads us to the next, most accurate method for a cost model. Sample and Estimate Using standard statistical and other predictive math, once the application is deployed you will get a bill each month from Microsoft for your Azure usage. The bill is quite detailed, and you can export the data from it to do analysis, and using methods like regression and so on project out into the future what the costs will be. I normally advise that the architect also extrapolate a unit cost from those metrics as well. This is the information that should be reported back to the executives that pay the bills: the past cost, future projected costs, and unit cost “per click” or “per transaction”, as your case warrants. The challenge here is in the model itself - statistical methods are not foolproof, and the larger the sample (in this case I recommend the entire population, not a smaller sample) is key. References and Tools Articles: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/patrick_butler_monterde/archive/2010/02/10/windows-azure-billing-overview.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/gg213848.aspx http://blog.codingoutloud.com/2011/06/05/azure-faq-how-much-will-it-cost-me-to-run-my-application-on-windows-azure/ http://blogs.msdn.com/b/johnalioto/archive/2010/08/25/10054193.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/iupdateable/archive/2010/02/08/qampa-how-can-i-calculate-the-tco-and-roi-when.aspx   Other Tools: http://cloud-assessment.com/ http://communities.quest.com/community/cloud_tools

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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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• Cross-platform, human-readable, du on root partition that truly ignores other filesystems

  - by nice_line

  I hate this so much: Linux builtsowell 2.6.18-274.7.1.el5 #1 SMP Mon Oct 17 11:57:14 EDT 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux df -kh Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/mpath0p2 8.8G 8.7G 90M 99% / /dev/mapper/mpath0p6 2.0G 37M 1.9G 2% /tmp /dev/mapper/mpath0p3 5.9G 670M 4.9G 12% /var /dev/mapper/mpath0p1 494M 86M 384M 19% /boot /dev/mapper/mpath0p7 7.3G 187M 6.7G 3% /home tmpfs 48G 6.2G 42G 14% /dev/shm /dev/mapper/o10g.bin 25G 7.4G 17G 32% /app/SIP/logs /dev/mapper/o11g.bin 25G 11G 14G 43% /o11g tmpfs 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /dev/vx lunmonster1q:/vol/oradb_backup/epmxs1q1 686G 507G 180G 74% /rpmqa/backup lunmonster1q:/vol/oradb_redo/bisxs1q1 4.0G 1.6G 2.5G 38% /bisxs1q/rdoctl1 lunmonster1q:/vol/oradb_backup/bisxs1q1 686G 507G 180G 74% /bisxs1q/backup lunmonster1q:/vol/oradb_exp/bisxs1q1 2.0T 1.1T 984G 52% /bisxs1q/exp lunmonster2q:/vol/oradb_home/bisxs1q1 10G 174M 9.9G 2% /bisxs1q/home lunmonster2q:/vol/oradb_data/bisxs1q1 52G 5.2G 47G 10% /bisxs1q/oradata lunmonster1q:/vol/oradb_redo/bisxs1q2 4.0G 1.6G 2.5G 38% /bisxs1q/rdoctl2 ip-address1:/vol/oradb_home/cspxs1q1 10G 184M 9.9G 2% /cspxs1q/home ip-address2:/vol/oradb_backup/cspxs1q1 674G 314G 360G 47% /cspxs1q/backup ip-address2:/vol/oradb_redo/cspxs1q1 4.0G 1.5G 2.6G 37% /cspxs1q/rdoctl1 ip-address2:/vol/oradb_exp/cspxs1q1 4.1T 1.5T 2.6T 37% /cspxs1q/exp ip-address2:/vol/oradb_redo/cspxs1q2 4.0G 1.5G 2.6G 37% /cspxs1q/rdoctl2 ip-address1:/vol/oradb_data/cspxs1q1 160G 23G 138G 15% /cspxs1q/oradata lunmonster1q:/vol/oradb_exp/epmxs1q1 2.0T 1.1T 984G 52% /epmxs1q/exp lunmonster2q:/vol/oradb_home/epmxs1q1 10G 80M 10G 1% /epmxs1q/home lunmonster2q:/vol/oradb_data/epmxs1q1 330G 249G 82G 76% /epmxs1q/oradata lunmonster1q:/vol/oradb_redo/epmxs1q2 5.0G 609M 4.5G 12% /epmxs1q/rdoctl2 lunmonster1q:/vol/oradb_redo/epmxs1q1 5.0G 609M 4.5G 12% /epmxs1q/rdoctl1 /dev/vx/dsk/slaxs1q/slaxs1q-vol1 183G 17G 157G 10% /slaxs1q/backup /dev/vx/dsk/slaxs1q/slaxs1q-vol4 173G 58G 106G 36% /slaxs1q/oradata /dev/vx/dsk/slaxs1q/slaxs1q-vol5 75G 952M 71G 2% /slaxs1q/exp /dev/vx/dsk/slaxs1q/slaxs1q-vol2 9.8G 381M 8.9G 5% /slaxs1q/home /dev/vx/dsk/slaxs1q/slaxs1q-vol6 4.0G 1.6G 2.2G 42% /slaxs1q/rdoctl1 /dev/vx/dsk/slaxs1q/slaxs1q-vol3 4.0G 1.6G 2.2G 42% /slaxs1q/rdoctl2 /dev/mapper/appoem 30G 1.3G 27G 5% /app/em Yet, I equally, if not quite a bit more, also hate this: SunOS solarious 5.10 Generic_147440-19 sun4u sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on kiddie001Q_rpool/ROOT/s10s_u8wos_08a 8G 7.7G 1.3G 96% / /devices 0K 0K 0K 0% /devices ctfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/contract proc 0K 0K 0K 0% /proc mnttab 0K 0K 0K 0% /etc/mnttab swap 15G 1.8M 15G 1% /etc/svc/volatile objfs 0K 0K 0K 0% /system/object sharefs 0K 0K 0K 0% /etc/dfs/sharetab fd 0K 0K 0K 0% /dev/fd kiddie001Q_rpool/ROOT/s10s_u8wos_08a/var 31G 8.3G 6.6G 56% /var swap 512M 4.6M 507M 1% /tmp swap 15G 88K 15G 1% /var/run swap 15G 0K 15G 0% /dev/vx/dmp swap 15G 0K 15G 0% /dev/vx/rdmp /dev/dsk/c3t4d4s0 3 20G 279G 41G 88% /fs_storage /dev/vx/dsk/oracle/ora10g-vol1 292G 214G 73G 75% /o10g /dev/vx/dsk/oec/oec-vol1 64G 33G 31G 52% /oec/runway /dev/vx/dsk/oracle/ora9i-vol1 64G 33G 31G 59% /o9i /dev/vx/dsk/home 23G 18G 4.7G 80% /export/home /dev/vx/dsk/dbwork/dbwork-vol1 292G 214G 73G 92% /db03/wk01 /dev/vx/dsk/oradg/ebusredovol 2.0G 475M 1.5G 24% /u21 /dev/vx/dsk/oradg/ebusbckupvol 200G 32G 166G 17% /u31 /dev/vx/dsk/oradg/ebuscrtlvol 2.0G 475M 1.5G 24% /u20 kiddie001Q_rpool 31G 97K 6.6G 1% /kiddie001Q_rpool monsterfiler002q:/vol/ebiz_patches_nfs/NSA0304 203G 173G 29G 86% /oracle/patches /dev/odm 0K 0K 0K 0% /dev/odm The people with the authority don't rotate logs or delete packages after install in my environment. Standards, remediation, cohesion...all fancy foreign words to me. ============== How am I supposed to deal with / filesystem full issues across multiple platforms that have a devastating number of mounts? On Red Hat el5, du -x apparently avoids traversal into other filesystems. While this may be so, it does not appear to do anything if run from the / directory. On Solaris 10, the equivalent flag is du -d, which apparently packs no surprises, allowing Sun to uphold its legacy of inconvenience effortlessly. (I'm hoping I've just been doing it wrong.) I offer up for sacrifice my Frankenstein's monster. Tell me how ugly it is. Tell me I should download forbidden 3rd party software. Tell me I should perform unauthorized coreutils updates, piecemeal, across 2000 systems, with no single sign-on, no authorized keys, and no network update capability. Then, please help me make this bastard better: pwd / du * | egrep -v "$(echo $(df | awk '{print $1 "\n" $5 "\n" $6}' | \ cut -d\/ -f2-5 | egrep -v "[0-9]|^$|Filesystem|Use|Available|Mounted|blocks|vol|swap")| \ sed 's/ /\|/g')" | egrep -v "proc|sys|media|selinux|dev|platform|system|tmp|tmpfs|mnt|kernel" | \ cut -d\/ -f1-2 | sort -k2 -k1,1nr | uniq -f1 | sort -k1,1n | cut -f2 | xargs du -shx | \ egrep "G|[5-9][0-9]M|[1-9][0-9][0-9]M" My biggest failure and regret is that it still requires a single character edit for Solaris: pwd / du * | egrep -v "$(echo $(df | awk '{print $1 "\n" $5 "\n" $6}' | \ cut -d\/ -f2-5 | egrep -v "[0-9]|^$|Filesystem|Use|Available|Mounted|blocks|vol|swap")| \ sed 's/ /\|/g')" | egrep -v "proc|sys|media|selinux|dev|platform|system|tmp|tmpfs|mnt|kernel" | \ cut -d\/ -f1-2 | sort -k2 -k1,1nr | uniq -f1 | sort -k1,1n | cut -f2 | xargs du -shd | \ egrep "G|[5-9][0-9]M|[1-9][0-9][0-9]M" This will exclude all non / filesystems in a du search from the / directory by basically munging an egrepped df from a second pipe-delimited egrep regex subshell exclusion that is naturally further excluded upon by a third egrep in what I would like to refer to as "the whale." The munge-fest frantically escalates into some xargs du recycling where -x/-d is actually useful, and a final, gratuitous egrep spits out a list of directories that almost feels like an accomplishment: Linux: 54M etc/gconf 61M opt/quest 77M opt 118M usr/ ##===\ 149M etc 154M root 303M lib/modules 313M usr/java ##====\ 331M lib 357M usr/lib64 ##=====\ 433M usr/lib ##========\ 1.1G usr/share ##=======\ 3.2G usr/local ##========\ 5.4G usr ##<=============Ascending order to parent 94M app/SIP ##<==\ 94M app ##<=======Were reported as 7gb and then corrected by second du with -x. Solaris: 63M etc 490M bb 570M root/cores.ric.20100415 1.7G oec/archive 1.1G root/packages 2.2G root 1.7G oec Guess what? It's really slow. Edit: Are there any bash one-liner heroes out there than can turn my bloated abomination into divine intervention, or at least something resembling gingerly copypasta?

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• dynamically drawing polylines on googlemaps using php/mysql

  - by arc

  Hi. I am new to the googlemaps API. I have written a small app for my mobile phone that periodically updates its location to an SQL databse. I would like to display this information on a googlemap in my browser. Ideally i'd like to then poll the database periodically and if any new co-ords have arrived, add them to the line. Best way of describing it is this; http://tiny.cc/HEIa0 In a quest to get to there, i've started on the documents on google and been modifying them to try and acheive what I want. It doesn't work - and i don't know enough to know why. I would love some advice as to why, and any pointers towards my ultimate goal would be very much welcomed. Google Maps AJAX + MySQL/PHP Example <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ function load() { if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) { var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map")); map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl()); map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl()); map.setCenter(new GLatLng(47.614495, -122.341861), 13); GDownloadUrl("phpsqlajax_genxml.php", function(data) { var xml = GXml.parse(data); var line = []; var markers = xml.documentElement.getElementsByTagName("points"); for (var i = 0; i < points.length; i++) { var point = points.item(i); var lat = point.getAttribute("lat"); var lng = point.getAttribute("lng"); var latlng = new GLatLng(lat, lng); line.push(latlng); if (point.firstChild) { var station = point.firstChild.nodeValue; var marker = createMarker(latlng, station); map.addOverlay(marker); } } var polyline = new GPolyline(line, "#ff0000", 3, 1); map.addOverlay(polyline); }); } //]]> My php file is generating the following XML; <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <points> <point lng="-122.340141" lat="47.608940"/> <point lng="-122.344391" lat="47.613590"/> <point lng="-122.356445" lat="47.624561"/> <point lng="-122.337654" lat="47.606365"/> <point lng="-122.345673" lat="47.612823"/> <point lng="-122.340363" lat="47.605961"/> <point lng="-122.345467" lat="47.613976"/> <point lng="-122.326584" lat="47.617214"/> <point lng="-122.342834" lat="47.610126"/> </points> I have successfully worked through this; http://code.google.com/apis/maps/articles/phpsqlajax.html before attempting to customise the code. Any pointers? Where am I go wrong?

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