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• Better approach to archiving large amounts of original video footage using optical media (DVD/Blu-ra

  - by Rob

  This question is to share my experience as well as ask for suggestions for better methods. Along with 2 friends, I completed the making of a short documentary film in 2006. Clip is at: http://www.youtube.com/mediamotioninvision The film was edited in Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 on Windows XP. More details and screenshot here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/smilingrobbie/1350235514/ ( note this is not intended to be a plug, we've moved on from this initial learning curve project ;) ) The film is in 4:3 standard definition 720x576 PAL format. As well as retaining the final 30minute film, I wanted to keep all original files that assembled together to make the film. The footage was 83.5Gb So I archived them to over 20 4.7Gb DVD recordables in the original .avi format (i.e. data DVD-ROM format, NOT DVD-Video Mpeg2) Some .avi DV video files were larger than 4.7Gb so I used 7-zip to split them ( here is a guide as to how to do that: http://www.linglom.com/2008/10/12/how-to-split-a-large-file-using-7-zip/ ) To recombine them, a dos shell command like this would do that: copy /b file.avi.* file.avi would do the job, where .* is a wild card to include all the split parts e.g. 001, 002...00n assuming they are all in the same directory path folder. file.avi is the recombined file identical to the original. Later on, I bought a LG BE06 LU10 USB 2.0 Super-multi Blu-ray burner and archived the footage to 2 (two) x 50Gb BD-R DL discs. Again in the original format, written as files to a BD-R in the BD-R BD-ROM UDF format readable by PC/Mac etc, NOT Blu-ray video/film format. This seems to be a good solution for me, because: the archive is in a robust, reasonably permanent, non-volatile medium, i.e. DVD recordable / Blu-ray (debates about stability of optical media organic chemical dye compounds/substrates aside) the format of the archive is accessible by open source tools or just plain Windows Explorer and it's not in a proprietary format I just thought I'd ask folks for their experience on better methods, if such exist.

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• PDU management interface has low availability - product flaw or isolated issue

  - by DeanB

  Our colocation provider has supplied us with APC AP7932 switched 0U PDUs as part of several cabinets they provide us. We have had a lot of trouble with the network management aspect of these PDUs, which I'll describe below. We are moving to cage space in the same datacenter, and plan to provide our own PDUs, so I'd like to determine which enterprise-grade PDUs have been reliable performers from a remote management perspective. Our colo-provided PDUs are configured to support management via an SSL web UI and via telnet. We updated the firmware on all of them to the current version as of NOV2011. They respond to pings reliably, and we have no reason to suspect a network layer issue. However, we experience frequent hangs, timeouts, disconnects, and general unavailability from the embedded management host in all of the PDUs. We occasionally have to restart the microcontroller on the PDU to recover from what appears to be an occasional hard fault. The outlets stay powered (thankfully), but the management aspect is so unreliable that it has become an ops liability - we can't be confident that we could get into the PDU to power cycle a host if we needed to. We have 3 PDUs that all exhibit identical behavior. There are many manufacturers of enterprise-grade 0U switched PDUs, all with comparable features. If I looked at the datasheet for our current PDUs, they would appear to be a good fit -- only with the benefit of suffering through using them do we know to avoid them. I'd like to avoid picking a PDU that looks fine on paper, but has similar reliability issues. What has been others' experience with switched PDUs? Is this level of flakiness normal?

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• Running Debian as guest operating system on a Hyper-V VM

  - by kce

  Hello. Layer-9 considerations are prompting a migration from Citrix XenServer to Hyper-V as our shop's virtualization platform of choice. This will require me to migrate our existing virtual machines from XenServer to Hyper-V. A hand full of these VMs are running Debian. Unfortunately, Debian does not seem to be on the list of approved/supported guest operating systems. In fact it seems that running Debian as a guest operating system of is rather difficult, although apparently not impossible. I have two interrelated questions: Does anyone have any experience running a Debian guest on Hyper-V? Is it one of those things where it just will not work at all or is more along the lines of "it will probably work fine, but we won't support it". Any experience here, positive or negative, would be helpful. How much of a bad idea is it to deviate from Hyper-V's list of supported guest operating systems? Again, is it either basically asking for Bad Things (TM) to happen or is just another instance of "it will probably work fine, but we won't support it"? Or is it somewhere in the middle? Thank you.

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• Looking for a recommendation on measuring a high availability app that is using a CDN.

  - by T Reddy

  I work for a Fortune 500 company that struggles with accurately measuring performance and availability for high availability applications (i.e., apps that are up 99.5% with 5 seconds page to page navigation). We factor in both scheduled and unscheduled downtime to determine this availability number. However, we recently added a CDN into the mix, which kind of complicates our metrics a bit. The CDN now handles about 75% of our traffic, while sending the remainder to our own servers. We attempt to measure what we call a "true user experience" (i.e., our testing scripts emulate a typical user clicking through the application.) These monitoring scripts sit outside of our network, which means we're hitting the CDN about 75% of the time. Management has decided that we take the worst case scenario to measure availability. So if our origin servers are having problems, but yet the CDN is serving content just fine, we still take a hit on availability. The same is true the other way around. My thought is that as long as the "user experience" is successful, we should not unnecessarily punish ourselves. After all, a CDN is there to improve performance and availability! I'm just wondering if anyone has any knowledge of how other Fortune 500 companies calculate their availability numbers? I look at apple.com, for instance, of a storefront that uses a CDN that never seems to be down (unless there is about to be a major product announcement.) It would be great to have some hard, factual data because I don't believe that we need to unnecessarily hurt ourselves on these metrics. We are making business decisions based on these numbers. I can say, however, given that these metrics are visible to management, issues get addressed and resolved pretty fast (read: we cut through the red-tape pretty quick.) Unfortunately, as a developer, I don't want management to think that the application is up or down because some external factor (i.e., CDN) is influencing the numbers. Thoughts? (I mistakenly posted this question on StackOverflow, sorry in advance for the cross-post)

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• Using virtualization infrastructure for J2EE application distribution- viable alternative?

  - by Dan

  Our company builds custom J2EE web solutions. At the moment, we use standard J2EE distribution mechanisms (ear/war archives). Application servers are generally administered by our clients' IT departments and since we do not have complete control over the environment, a lot of entropy can be introduced into the solution. For example: latest app. server patch not applied conflicting third party libraries inside the app. server root server runtime and tuning parameters not configured (for example, number of connections in database pool) We are looking into using virtualization infrastructure for J2EE application distribution. Instead of sending the ear/war archive, we’d send image with application server node and our application preinstalled. Some of the benefits are same as using with using virtualization infrastructure in general, namely better use of hardware resources. For us, it reduces the entropy of hosting infrastructure - distributing VM should be less affected by hosting environment. So far, the downside I see can be in application server licenses, here they will have to use dedicated servers for our solution, but this is generally already done that way. Also, there is a complexity with maintaining virtualization infrastructure, but this is often something IT departments have more experience with than with administering and fine-tuning J2EE solutions. Anyone has experience with this model? What are the downsides? Will we not just replace one type of complexity with other?

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• Does this exist: a standardized way of documenting a file-system structure

  - by eegg

  At work, I'm in charge of maintaining the organization of a whole lot of varied data on a standard file-system. Part of this is coming up with sensible classification (by similarity, need, read/write access, etc), but the bigger part is actually documenting it: what documents/files/media should go where, what should not be in this directory, "for something slightly different, see ../../other-dir", etc. At the moment, I've documented this using a plaintext file filing.txt in every directory I want to document. If someone is unsure what's meant to be in any directory, they read that file. This works alright, but it seems odd that I have this primitive custom solution to a problem that any maintainer of a non-trivial directory structure must experience. Every company I've known of, for example, has some kind of shared file-system where agreed terminology for categorization is important. In my experience, people just have to learn what's what by trial-and-error and experimentation. So allow me to propose a better solution, and hopefully you can tell me if it exists. Any directory on any filesystem can have a hidden plaintext file named .filing. Its contents are descriptive human language. It uses some markup like Markdown, with little more than bold, italic, and (relative) hyperlinks to other directories. Now a suitably-enabled file browser will check for a file named .filing whenever it displays a directory. If it exists, its contents are parsed and displayed in an unobtrusive pane near the directory-path widget. Any links therein can be clicked, and the user will be taken to the target directory of that link. I think that the effort of implementing such a standard would pay back many times over in usability gains. We would have, say, plugins for Nautilus, Konqueror, etc.. It could be used to display directory information in the standard file lists served by webservers. And so on. So, question: does such a thing exist? If not, why not? Do people think it's a worthwhile idea?

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• Did chkdsk make it harder to restore files?

  - by neyl

  My friend asked me to try and fix his loaded Sansa Clip + which wasn't playing. After opening it in MSC mode I discovered that the Music directory was empty and total of all files was only a few MB. However Disk properties showed me that it was 7Gb full. I then ran Tools - Error Checking and Windows dutifully informed me that disk was corrupt and I should run again Allowing Windows to Fix Errors. I did that and it told me everything was fixed and that all files were placed in FOUND.000 Dir. FOUND.000 was about 7.5 GB with FILE0000-1546 . CHK. (I am aware of methods like ChkBack to scan and convert to mp3 etc BUT Original filenames and structure needed!) Now I started getting worried that I made things worse! I have plenty of experience with Data Recovery Programs - Recuva, Restore My Files etc. and I was anyhow planning to use them to scan the drive. But NOW after CHKDSK "fixed" the drive maybe it modified critical FAT information vital for data recovery. So I run these programs and 0!!!. No trace of files! I tried a ton of Recovery Programs with same results TILL EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard found all files and I purchased program for $55! My Question In your opinion - did running CHKDSK with automatic fixing of errors make matters worse (i.e. many data recovery progs. didn't find a trace and they would have done if not for chkdsk) or was the filesystem too corrupt anyhow for regular File Recovery Progs.? If I would be a Professional - would I be responsible for running CHKDSK - automatic Fixing. Do you know of a better Data Recovery Program than EaseUs Data Recovery wizard - According to my experience I haven't found better!? Thanks

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• Correct use of SMTP "Sender" header?

  - by Eric Rath

  Our web application sends email messages to people when someone posts new content. Both sender and recipient have opted into receiving email messages from our application. When preparing such a message, we set the following SMTP headers: FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected] SENDER: [email protected] We chose to use the author's email address in the FROM header in an attempt to provide the best experience for the recipient; when they see the message in their mail client, the author is clear. To avoid the appearance of spoofing, we added the SENDER header (with our own company email address) to make it clear that we sent the message on the author's behalf. After reading RFCs 822 and 2822, this seems to be an intended use of the sender header. Most receiving mail servers seem to handle this well; the email message is delivered normally (assuming the recipient mailbox exists, is not over quota, etc). However, when sending a message FROM an address in a domain TO an address in the same domain, some receiving domains reject the messages with a response like: 571 incorrect IP - psmtp (in reply to RCPT TO command) I think this means the receiving server only saw that the FROM header address was in its own domain, and that the message originated from a server it didn't consider authorized to send messages for that domain. In other words, the receiving server ignored the SENDER header. We have a workaround in place: the webapp keeps a list of such domains that seem to ignore the SENDER header, and when the FROM and TO headers are both in such a domain, it sets the FROM header to our own email address instead. But this list requires maintenance. Is there a better way to achieve the desired experience? We'd like to be a "good citizen" of the net, and all parties involved -- senders and recipients -- want to participate and receive these messages. One alternative is to always use our company email address in the FROM header, and prepend the author's name/address to the subject, but this seems a little clumsy.

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• What is the best cloud technology to use for MongoDB/GridFS database servers

  - by Nerian

  We are going to launch a service that will require between 1 and 2 GB for file storage per paid user. I am going to use GridFS for storing files. GridFS is a module for MongoDB that allows to store large files in de database. I am pondering the different options for storing the database. But since I am unexperienced at deployment and it is my first time with Mongodb I need your experience. Criteria: I want to spend my time developing my core business, that is, my own application. I am a Ruby on Rails developer. I do not like to mess with server configuration. Hence, I would like a fully managed hosting solution. But I would like to know about any other option, if you think it is worth it. It should be able to scale. Cloud style. Pay as you go. The lower the price, the better. So far I known of these services: https://mongohq.com/pricing https://mongomachine.com/pricing https://mongolab.com/about/pricing/ http://cloudcontrol.com/add-ons/mongodb/ And they seem to be OK for common needs, that is no file storage. But I am going to use GridFS, so the size matters. These services seems to scale, in price, quite poorly. MongoHQ: The larger plan max storage is 20 GB. Seems like a very little storage, for GridFS. MongoMachine: Flat price, 2.5$ per GB. I didn't found the limit. Seems like a good price, comparing the others. MongoLab: 3.984 GB max, which I don't think I will hit, so perfect. 8$ per GB, quite costly. CloudControl: The larger plan is 20 Gb. The custom service starts at 250€ plus some unspecified charge per GB. What is your experience with these services? Any downtimes? Other possibilities? Edit: Added meaning of GridFS

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• What Media Extender / Centre Set up should I use?

  - by Bryn Hird

  I have installed cat6 throughout the house which I use for telephony and network. In my cellar I have a NAS Server, gigabit switch and I want to install a Media Centre to stream my video's, music, photo's and live TV (coax from the aerial to the cellar) over the cat6. Yeah I know I can get stuff on the internet but shared experience of watching TV as a family as it happens is a big plus for live TV. I'm aiming for 1080p. I want different users to be able to watch different channels. Max users = 4. I've played a little with Windows Media Centre, works fine with live TV. Likewise I have XBMC up and running with live TV. The issue I have is what do I put near the TV. I'd like a consistent user interface (grandma and the the other technophobes in the house are continually pestering me on how to use different TVs, change channel, inputs etc.) so a key part of this for me is to make the user experience the same and simple i.e. no keyboards / PCs hanging around the TV. I've just bought a Linksys DMA 2200 to test the Windows Media Centre, but obviously off eBay as they're a dying breed. And with Windows Media Centre removed from Microsoft plans such devices will get rarer. And as for 1080p, think I can forget it with that set up. I have tested XBOX 360, also works but ditto on Microsoft plans for WMC. I was thinking of a WD Live TV to test the XMBC setup. Now to the question. Any advice on Media Centre / Extender setups that will do the job as above and have some degree of futureproofing (building my own with my Raspberry PI is a last resort). I'd like to understand the standards involved in the futureproofing if anyone knows (DNLA, RVU etc.).

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• Is reliability reputation of mechanical keyboards overblown?

  - by Rarst

  A while back I worked up to finally buying mechanical keyboard (~$100 range, "black" switches) and was initially quite content with purchase. However just outside first year (read it - as soon as warranty expired) it started to develop repeat issues (press once, get chain of letter repeated) on multiple keys. It doesn't react to generic cleaning (up to compressed air) and searching Internet shows noticeable amount of people with similar-to-identical issues, spanning years. This makes me severely hesitant to buy another mechanical keyboard, considering: every other keyboard I ever owned, including ultra-cheap crap managed to last longer than that typing experience is nice, but not lifechanging-fan-forever nice for me my choice of mechanical keyboards is severely limited not many brands represented in local market and primarily crazy looking gamer models russian (not to mention russian and ukrainian if possible) layout excludes international ordering price tag for a meek year of use I got our of it is plain demoralizing It is obvious mechanical keyboards have their fans, but shopping around for "best fit" or getting into multiple hundreds price tags is probably not something I am highly interested in. Considering my constraints and bad experience with reliability, is it practical for me to sink more money into buying mechanical keyboard(s) again? In other words - manufacturers are beaming about how crazy reliable mechanical keyboards are. Are active long time users of such keyboards confidently of same opinion?

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• Tools required for a Web Development Project..

  - by RBA

  Hi, I wanted to design a project in linux which could contain programming languages(C, perl, PHP, HTML, XML etc) basically a web based project. Why i have chosen to build on Linux is because it is Open Source, and lot many things can be automated through scripting languages, which in windows i don't know. So, i have installed linux on a virtual machine(Host-Windows 2007 & Guest Linux CentOS), CentOS(command line interface). Since i am a beginner, so I want to know what all tools can be used to facilitate and ease my development process. Some which i know are listed below, and request you to please share your experience on this. 1) Using Putty so that can access the Linux machine from anywhere within the network. 2) Since i want to develop on Linux, but want to use windows as developing platform. So have downloaded Eclipse Editor (C/PHP) on windows. But want to know how can i access linux files from here?? 3) Installed Samba, and still trying to figure out how can i access linux files remotely on Windows. 4) Please share your experience, as how can i ease my development process. and what all tools i can use..?? Please let me know if you need any other clarification..

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• Terminal emulation has stopped working. Garbage escape chars

  - by oligofren

  To enable me to do some remote administration of our servers I started using a terminal emulation program called TouchTerm Pro on my iPhone. While not the smoothest experience, it has allowed me to leave my computer behind when going out of town, which makes the slightly painful experience worthwhile. As of late, the app unfortunately no longer works. Pressing up and down keys after logging on via ssh gives me garbage like ^[[A and ^[[B. Combinations with Ctrl - like you can see in the video - no longer works either. Writing full command lines and executing by the enter key works though. Being able to search my bash history was the difference between a usable app and endless frustration, so getting it to work is essential. The app has (of course) met its end of life, not getting updated anymore. I am not quite sure, which side (client or server) that has to be "fixed"/hacked to make the control sequences work again. But is there something I can do to make it work as intended? You can see a video of TouchTerm in operation here.

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• OpenVPN-based VPN server on same system it's "protecting": feasible?

  - by Johnny Utahh

  Scenario: hosted machine (typically a VPS) serving wiki, svn, git, forums, email lists (eg: GNU mailman), Bugzilla (etc) privately to < 20 people. People not on team not allowed access. Seeking VPN-restricted access to said server. Have good user experience with OpenVPN-based servers/clients, but have yet to server-admin such systems. Otherwise, experienced Linux sysadmin. Target system: Ubuntu, probably 12.04. Seeking to put an OpenVPN process on above server to "protect" all the above-mentioned services, enabling only OpenVPN-authorized clients/processes to access above services. (Can easily acquire additional IP address(es) as needed for this setup.) Option: if absolutely needed, can employ an additional, dedicated, "VPN server" VPS simply to be my VPN server "front end." But prefer to have all server processes (VPN server plus other server apps) all running on same machine, if possible. Will consider further if dedicated-VPN-machine setup enables 1. easier installation/administration, 2. better/easier end-user experience, and/or 3. makes system significantly more secure. Any of above feasible? The main intention: create a VPN from purely-hosted resources, and not spend all the effort to make a non-VPN, secure site--which typically means "SSL wrapping" + all the continual webserver-application-update management. Let the VPN server deal with access security, and spend list time pushing said security "down" in the other apps/Apache.

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• Diagnose remote desktop freezes in Windows 7 when no BSOD?

  - by Paul Smith

  Okay, I'm getting no joy from Asus or Microsoft on this, so hoping for some clues on how to narrow down the cause. I have very frequent OS freezes, always & only when running Remote Destkop Client (mstsc) in Windows 7 x64. I never have a bluescreen, and there is never a minidump. The display & input just freezes -- no keyboard, no mouse, and sound will just continue the last wavelength if any. So far, I can't find a way to trap the hang given that there's no bluescreen; advanced startup & recovery settings for system failure are "Write an event" checked, "Automatically restart" checked, and "Kernel memory dump". I've updated to the lasted BIOS, and tried a few different graphics drivers, both generic & ATI. I've also tried disabling Aero, and everything about the remote desktop experience (incrementally unchecked every box in the mstsc - options - experience tab), even disabled/unplugged external monitor to make sure it wasn't a dual-monitor issue. My specs are: Asus G73jh notebook 8GB RAM ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5800 Series graphics (recently tried driver versions 8.791.0.0, 8.801.0.0) American Megatrends G73jh.211 BIOS (7/27/2010) Windows 7 Home Premium x64 Windows Memory Diagnostic passed all of the following at least 3 times with no errors: MATS+ INVC LRAND Stride6 WMATS+ WINVC This notebook is better than most at removing heat (laudable vent design), so I'm not inclined to suspect thermal causes (especially since running 1080p video for hours has never caused a freeze, but mstsc does, reliably, within 5 minutes to an hour). This did seem to start happening after a Windows Update, but I've since reverted every patch applied since a week before the first occurrence, with no joy. (And I'd only had the PC for a couple weeks before that, so it could have been chance + less actual time spent remoting at the beginning.) I'm at my wits end, and I bought this laptop primarily as a remote terminal client (go figure, right?) Any ideas on how to identify the cause of this? Thanks!

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• Choosing gateway router/firewall for small datacenter network [closed]

  - by rvs

  I'm choosing a gateway router/firewall for small internal network for medium-sized web service. Currently there are 5 servers in internal network, up to 50 http(s) requests/second, up to 1000 simultaneous connections, uplink is 100 Mbit. So, network is relatively small and not very busy and we don't like to buy some pricey monster like cisco or jupiper for this site. Instead we'd like to buy two affordable devices (one for spare), which can handle our workload now and some time in future (it might be up to 2x more in 1 year). I had some experience with Sonicwall NSA, but it seems to be too complex for this site (we don't need most of its features) and even too pricey when buying two of them. So, after some research I've come up with following options: Netgear Prosecure UTM Series (probably UTM25) Zyxel ZyWall Series (USG100 or USG200) Sonicwall TZ 210 Is this a good idea? All of the above seems to be more office products, not datacenter ones. Or we should stick with Sonicwall NSA? Does anyone have any hands-on experience with this models? Maybe some other advices? Thanks.

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• Correct use of SMTP "Sender" header?

  - by Eric Rath

  Our web application sends email messages to people when someone posts new content. Both sender and recipient have opted into receiving email messages from our application. When preparing such a message, we set the following SMTP headers: FROM: [email protected] TO: [email protected] SENDER: [email protected] We chose to use the author's email address in the FROM header in an attempt to provide the best experience for the recipient; when they see the message in their mail client, the author is clear. To avoid the appearance of spoofing, we added the SENDER header (with our own company email address) to make it clear that we sent the message on the author's behalf. After reading RFCs 822 and 2822, this seems to be an intended use of the sender header. Most receiving mail servers seem to handle this well; the email message is delivered normally (assuming the recipient mailbox exists, is not over quota, etc). However, when sending a message FROM an address in a domain TO an address in the same domain, some receiving domains reject the messages with a response like: 571 incorrect IP - psmtp (in reply to RCPT TO command) I think this means the receiving server only saw that the FROM header address was in its own domain, and that the message originated from a server it didn't consider authorized to send messages for that domain. In other words, the receiving server ignored the SENDER header. We have a workaround in place: the webapp keeps a list of such domains that seem to ignore the SENDER header, and when the FROM and TO headers are both in such a domain, it sets the FROM header to our own email address instead. But this list requires maintenance. Is there a better way to achieve the desired experience? We'd like to be a "good citizen" of the net, and all parties involved -- senders and recipients -- want to participate and receive these messages. One alternative is to always use our company email address in the FROM header, and prepend the author's name/address to the subject, but this seems a little clumsy.

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• Should I use nginx exclusively, or have it as a proxy to Tomcat (performance related)?

  - by Kevin

  I've planned to create a website that'll be pretty heavy on dynamic content, and want to know what would be the wisest choice for part of my webstack. Right now I'm trying to decide whether I should develop upon nginx, using PHP to deliver the dynamic content, or use nginx as a proxy to Tomcat and use servlets to deliver the dynamic content. I have a good amount of experience with Java, JSP, and servlets, so that's a plus right off the bat. Also, since it is a compiled language, it will execute faster than PHP (it is implied here that Java is around 37x faster than PHP) , and will create the web pages faster. I have no experience with PHP, however i'm under the impression that it is easy to pick up. It's slower than Java, but since the client will only be communicating with nginx, I'm thinking that serving the dynamically created web pages to the client will be faster this way. Considering these things, i'd like to know: Are my assumptions correct? Where does the bottleneck occur: creating pages or serving them back to the client? Will proxying Tomcat with nginx give me any of nginx performance benefits if I'm going to be using Tomcat to generate the dynamic content (keeping in mind my site is going to be heavy in this aspect)? I don't mind learning PHP if, in the end, its going to give me the best performance. I just want to know what would be the best choice from that standpoint.

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• MongoDB and GrifFS. What are the best storage options in the range of 1 TB?

  - by Nerian

  We are going to launch a service that will require between 1 and 2 GB for file storage per paid user. I am going to use GridFS for storing files. I am pondering the different options for storing the database. But since I am unexperienced at deployment and it is my first time with Mongodb I need your experience. Criteria: I want to spend my time developing my core business, that is, my own application. I am a Ruby on Rails developer. I do not like to mess with server configuration. Hence, I would like a fully managed hosting solution. But I would like to know about any other option, if you think it is worth it. It should be able to scale. Cloud style. Pay as you go. The lower the price, the better. So far I known of these services: https://mongohq.com/pricing https://mongomachine.com/pricing https://mongolab.com/about/pricing/ http://cloudcontrol.com/add-ons/mongodb/ And they seem to be OK for common needs, that is no file storage. But I am going to use GridFS, so the size matters. These services seems to scale, in price, quite poorly. MongoHQ: The larger plan max storage is 20 GB. Seems like a very little storage, for GridFS. MongoMachine: Flat price, 2.5$ per GB. I didn't found the limit. Seems like a good price, comparing the others. MongoLab: 3.984 GB max, which I don't think I will hit, so perfect. 8$ per GB, quite costly. CloudControl: The larger plan is 20 Gb. The custom service starts at 250€ plus some unspecified charge per GB. What is your experience with these services? Any downtimes? Other possibilities?

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• Deployment and monitoring tools for java/tomcat/linux environment

  - by Ran

  I'm a developer for many years, but don't have tons of experience in ops, so apology if this is a newbe question. In my company we run a web service written in Java mainly based on a Tomcat web server. We have two datacenters with about 10 hosts each. Hosts are of several types: Dababase, Tomcats, some offline java processes, memcached servers. All hosts are Linux CentOS Up until now, when releasing a new version to production we've been using a set of inhouse shell script that copy jars/wars and restart the tomcats. The company has gotten bigger so it has become more and more difficult operating all this and taking code from development, through QA, staging and to production. A typical release many times involves human errors that cost us precious uptime. Sometimes we need to revert to last known good and this isn't easy to say the least... We're looking for a tool, a framework, a solution that would provide the following: Supports the given list of technology (java, tomcat, linux etc) Provides easy deployment through different stages, including QA and production Provides configuration management. E.g. setting server properties (what's the connection URL of each host etc), server.xml or context configuration etc Monitoring. If we can get monitoring in the same package, that'll be nice. If not, then yet another tool we can use to monitor our servers. Preferably, open source with tons of documentation ;) Can anyone share their experience? Suggest a few tools? Thanks!

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• How should an experienced Windows SysAdmin learn Linux? [closed]

  - by Systemspoet

  I have a new hire starting in a few weeks who is an experienced Windows SysAdmin. I think he's fairly senior on the Windows side, with a pretty deep AD understanding and experience with Exchange 2007, 2010, and exchange migrations. He's done a little PowerShell but I suspect more of the "run this command to do this" variety then "write a script to do this" sort. However, we are a mixed shop and (he knows this) I expect him to become a reasonably competent Linux SysAdmin over time. I'm looking for good starting points to bring him along. I have over ten years of Linux/UNIX experience, so it all sort of seems intuitive to me, but I've been thinking about the toolkit you actually need to be productive in the Linux CLI world. Just to be able to use the machines at all, off the top of my head... vi Basic CLI stuff -- move around, rename files, copy files, tar, gzip, changing passwords, finding relevant manpages, keep track of where you are, find things in your history, etc, etc. More advanced things that I take for granted but are actually pretty hard -- doing things with 'find', extracting relevant text via 'awk' and/or 'cut', knowing when to use 'grep' and when to use 'grep -e' or 'egrep'. Distribution specific stuff... compiling software, rpm, yum, apt-get, you name it. This all seems pretty basic to me, but when I think back to 1995 when I was first learning my way, some of those things took me years to master. So my question is -- where should I send him to pick up those skills? I'm not just thinking of classes, but rather also websites and books? Where do you all suggest as a starting point for picking up Linux skills?

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• How to configure SVN server for my own project

  - by user1729952

  I work with a team on an Android project using Eclipse IDE, we need to use a version control and we need to access the repo remotely, I have no experience using or installing servers, a little experience using SVN on Windows, but I still have problems connecting to it remotely. I need to use no-ip.com to change my IP, however; I failed to make VisualSVN server to work with no-ip. What options do I have? The best thing is to get it work with Windows if not, I have another computer that is running Ubuntu 12.4.1, I have installed apache2svn on it trying to get it work, the svn is installed, I went through tutorials to configure accessing protocols, but I can't figure out how to access it remotely from another computer? Can someone tell me the steps I need to get this job done and I can do my search for each step? (Please explain each step as some keywords or phrases I may not be familiar with) EDIT: Also worth noting, that my company has a website hosted on a remote server, can we use it as a repo? and how? It's running Linux

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• Win7 taskbar freezes on startup for about 1-2 mins

  - by Mike

  Running Win7 64-bit for about 4 months now. Never had this problem, didn't install anything new recently. When I boot up I can't do anything in the taskbar, it's frozen for about 1-2 minutes then everything is normal. I can right click on my desktop and move my mouse around. This randomly just started happening a couple days ago after a reboot. I have a 3.2ghz quad, SSD, 4 gig ram, etc. and it usually starts up quickly. After some troubleshooting (including running antivirus and Anti-Malware), it doesn't appear to be software related, but appears to be services related. I can boot up in safe mode and safe mode with networking just fine. I can also boot up normally with all my regular software loading at startup, BUT with all my services turned off. Now the odd part. When I run msconfig to disable all the services at startup and go through ticking them on 5-10 at a time or so and booting up it seems to be somewhat random. Ticking everything on from "Application Experience" halfway down to about "Quality Windows Audio Video Experience" and I can boot without the 1-2 min. freeze. Then I start ticking the stuff below that from a couple of Remote Accesses to Smart Card and Task Scheduler, etc. But the weird part is sometimes it will freeze sometimes it won't. I can't narrow it down. Then if it freezes, I'll boot up in safe mode and turn the ones I just turned on back off and I'll reboot normally but it will freeze again. Which makes no sense because that configuration just worked without freezing just before. I got frustrated enough that I backed up and wiped my hard drive (formatted and everything) and reinstalled Win7 but when I booted up, the freeze happened again. Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

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• Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

  - by ScottGu

  This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure.  These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps.  Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites.  This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them.  You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM).  You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address.  SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with).  Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites.  This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases.  See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode).  This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary.  Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here.  Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing).  Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services.  Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications.  Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it.  These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require.  In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services.  The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium.  Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs.  You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here):   You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly.  With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable.  Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale.  Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site.  I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances.  The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below.  If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use).  If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running  in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application.  You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected:   Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set.  If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red.  Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users.  Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test:   This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today.  If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• VS 2012 Code Review &ndash; Before Check In OR After Check In?

  - by Tarun Arora

  “Is Code Review Important and Effective?” There is a consensus across the industry that code review is an effective and practical way to collar code inconsistency and possible defects early in the software development life cycle. Among others some of the advantages of code reviews are, Bugs are found faster Forces developers to write readable code (code that can be read without explanation or introduction!) Optimization methods/tricks/productive programs spread faster Programmers as specialists "evolve" faster It's fun “Code review is systematic examination (often known as peer review) of computer source code. It is intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers' skills. Reviews are done in various forms such as pair programming, informal walkthroughs, and formal inspections.” Wikipedia No where does the definition mention whether its better to review code before the code has been committed to version control or after the commit has been performed. No matter which side you favour, Visual Studio 2012 allows you to request for a code review both before check in and also request for a review after check in. Let’s weigh the pros and cons of the approaches independently. Code Review Before Check In or Code Review After Check In? Approach 1 – Code Review before Check in Developer completes the code and feels the code quality is appropriate for check in to TFS. The developer raises a code review request to have a second pair of eyes validate if the code abides to the recommended best practices, will not result in any defects due to common coding mistakes and whether any optimizations can be made to improve the code quality.                                             Image 1 – code review before check in Pros Everything that gets committed to source control is reviewed. Minimizes the chances of smelly code making its way into the code base. Decreases the cost of fixing bugs, remember, the earlier you find them, the lesser the pain in fixing them. Cons Development Code Freeze – Since the changes aren’t in the source control yet. Further development can only be done off-line. The changes have not been through a CI build, hard to say whether the code abides to all build quality standards. Inconsistent! Cumbersome to track the actual code review process.  Not every change to the code base is worth reviewing, a lot of effort is invested for very little gain. Approach 2 – Code Review after Check in Developer checks in, random code reviews are performed on the checked in code.                                                      Image 2 – Code review after check in Pros The code has already passed the CI build and run through any code analysis plug ins you may have running on the build server. Instruct the developer to ensure ZERO fx cop, style cop and static code analysis before check in. Code is cleaner and smell free even before the code review. No Offline development, developers can continue to develop against the source control. Cons Bad code can easily make its way into the code base. Since the review take place much later in the cycle, the cost of fixing issues can prove to be much higher. Approach 3 – Hybrid Approach The community advocates a more hybrid approach, a blend of tooling and human accountability quotient.                                                               Image 3 – Hybrid Approach 1. Code review high impact check ins. It is not possible to review everything, by setting up code review check in policies you can end up slowing your team. More over, the code that you are reviewing before check in hasn't even been through a green CI build either. 2. Tooling. Let the tooling work for you. By running static analysis, fx cop, style cop and other plug ins on the build agent, you can identify the real issues that in my opinion can't possibly be identified using human reviews. Configure the tooling to report back top 10 issues every day. Mandate the manual code review of individuals who keep making it to this list of shame more often. 3. During Merge. I would prefer eliminating some of the other code issues during merge from Main branch to the release branch. In a scrum project this is still easier because cheery picking the merges is a possibility and the size of code being reviewed is still limited. Let the tooling work for you, if some one breaks the CI build often, put them on a gated check in build course until you see improvement. If some one appears on the top 10 list of shame generated via the build then ensure that all their code is reviewed till you see improvement. At the end of the day, the goal is to ensure that the code being delivered is top quality. By enforcing a code review before any check in, you force the developer to work offline or stay put till the review is complete. What do the experts say? So I asked a few expects what they thought of “Code Review quality gate before Checking in code?" Terje Sandstrom | Microsoft ALM MVP You mean a review quality gate BEFORE checking in code????? That would mean a lot of code staying either local or in shelvesets, and not even been through a CI build, and a green CI build being the main criteria for going further, f.e. to the review state. I would not like code laying around with no checkin’s. Having a requirement that code is checked in small pieces, 4-8 hours work max, and AT LEAST daily checkins, a manual code review comes second down the lane. I would expect review quality gates to happen before merging back to main, or before merging to release.  But that would all be on checked-in code.  Branching is absolutely one way to ease the pain.   Another way we are using is automatic quality builds, running metrics, coverage, static code analysis.  Unfortunately it takes some time, would be great to be on CI’s – but…., so it’s done scheduled every night. Based on this we get, among other stuff,  top 10 lists of suspicious code, which is then subjected to reviews.  If a person seems to be very popular on these top 10 lists, we subject every check in from that person to a review for a period. That normally helps.   None of the clients I have can afford to have every checkin reviewed, so we need to find ways around it. I don’t disagree with the nicety of having all the code reviewed, but I find it hard to find those resources in today’s enterprises. David V. Corbin | Visual Studio ALM Ranger I tend to agree with both sides. I hate having code that is not checked in, but at the same time hate having “bad” code in the repository. I have found that branching is one approach to solving this dilemma. Code is checked into the private/feature branch before the review, but is not merged over to the “official” branch until after the review. I advocate both, depending on circumstance (especially team dynamics)   - The “pre-checkin” is usually for elements that may impact the project as a whole. Think of it as another “gate” along with passing unit tests. - The “post-checkin” may very well not be at the changeset level, but correlates to a review at the “user story” level.   Again, this depends on team dynamics in play…. Robert MacLean | Microsoft ALM MVP I do not think there is no right answer for the industry as a whole. In short the question is why do you do reviews? Your question implies risk mitigation, so in low risk areas you can get away with it after check in while in high risk you need to do it before check in. An example is those new to a team or juniors need it much earlier (maybe that is before checkin, maybe that is soon after) than seniors who have shipped twenty sprints on the team. Abhimanyu Singhal | Visual Studio ALM Ranger Depends on per scenario basis. We recommend post check-in reviews when: 1. We don't want to block other checks and processes on manual code reviews. Manual reviews take time, and some pieces may not require manual reviews at all. 2. We need to trace all changes and track history. 3. We have a code promotion strategy/process in place. For risk mitigation, post checkin code can be promoted to Accepted branches. Or can be rejected. Pre Checkin Reviews are used when 1. There is a high risk factor associated 2. Reviewers are generally (most of times) have immediate availability. 3. Team does not have strict tracking needs. Simply speaking, no single process fits all scenarios. You need to select what works best for your team/project. Thomas Schissler | Visual Studio ALM Ranger This is an interesting discussion, I’m right now discussing details about executing code reviews with my teams. I see and understand the aspects you brought in, but there is another side as well, I’d like to point out. 1.) If you do reviews per check in this is not very practical as a hard rule because this will disturb the flow of the team very often or it will lead to reduce the checkin frequency of the devs which I would not accept. 2.) If you do later reviews, for example if you review PBIs, it is not easy to find out which code you should review. Either you review all changesets associate with the PBI, but then you might review code which has been changed with a later checkin and the dev maybe has already fixed the issue. Or you review the diff of the latest changeset of the PBI with the first but then you might also review changes of other PBIs. Jakob Leander | Sr. Director, Avanade In my experience, manual code review: 1. Does not get done and at the very least does not get redone after changes (regardless of intentions at start of project) 2. When a project actually do it, they often do not do it right away = errors pile up 3. Requires a lot of time discussing/defining the standard and for the team to learn it However code review is very important since e.g. even small memory leaks in a high volume web solution have big consequences In the last years I have advocated following approach for code review - Architects up front do “at least one best practice example” of each type of component and tell the team. Copy from this one. This should include error handling, logging, security etc. - Dev lead on project continuously browse code to validate that the best practices are used. Especially that patterns etc. are not broken. You can do this formally after each sprint/iteration if you want. Once this is validated it is unlikely to “go bad” even during later code changes Agree with customer to rely on static code analysis from Visual Studio as the one and only coding standard. This has HUUGE benefits - You can easily tweak to reach the level you desire together with customer - It is easy to measure for both developers/management - It is 100% consistent across code base - It gets validated all the time so you never end up getting hammered by a customer review in the end - It is easy to tell the developer that you do not want code back unless it has zero errors = minimize communication You need to track this at least during nightly builds and make sure team sees total # issues. Do not allow #issues it to grow uncontrolled. On the project I run I require code analysis to have run on code before checkin (checkin rule). This means -  You have to have clean compile (or CA wont run) so this is extra benefit = very few broken builds - You can change a few of the rules to compile as errors instead of warnings. I often do this for “missing dispose” issues which you REALLY do not want in your app Tip: Place your custom CA rules files as part of solution. That  way it works when you do branching etc. (path to CA file is relative in VS) Some may argue that CA is not as good as manual inspection. But since manual inspection in reality suffers from the 3 issues in start it is IMO a MUCH better (and much cheaper) approach from helicopter perspective Tirthankar Dutta | Director, Avanade I think code review should be run both before and after check ins. There are some code metrics that are meant to be run on the entire codebase … Also, especially on multi-site projects, one should strive to architect in a way that lets men manage the framework while boys write the repetitive code… scales very well with the need to review less by containment and imposing architectural restrictions to emphasise the design. Bruno Capuano | Microsoft ALM MVP For code reviews (means peer reviews) in distributed team I use http://www.vsanywhere.com/default.aspx  David Jobling | Global Sr. Director, Avanade Peer review is the only way to scale and its a great practice for all in the team to learn to perform and accept. In my experience you soon learn who's code to watch more than others and tune the attention. Mikkel Toudal Kristiansen | Manager, Avanade If you have several branches in your code base, you will need to merge often. This requires manual merging, when a file has been changed in both branches. It offers a good opportunity to actually review to changed code. So my advice is: Merging between branches should be done as often as possible, it should be done by a senior developer, and he/she should perform a full code review of the code being merged. As for detecting architectural smells and code smells creeping into the code base, one really good third party tools exist: Ndepend (http://www.ndepend.com/, for static code analysis of the current state of the code base). You could also consider adding StyleCop to the solution. Jesse Houwing | Visual Studio ALM Ranger I gave a presentation on this subject on the TechDays conference in NL last year. See my presentation and slides here (talk in Dutch, but English presentation): http://blog.jessehouwing.nl/2012/03/did-you-miss-my-techdaysnl-talk-on-code.html  I’d like to add a few more points: - Before/After checking is mostly a trust issue. If you have a team that does diligent peer reviews and regularly talk/sit together or peer review, there’s no need to enforce a before-checkin policy. The peer peer-programming and regular feedback during development can take care of most of the review requirements as long as the team isn’t under stress. - Under stress, enforce pre-checkin reviews, it might sound strange, if you’re already under time or budgetary constraints, but it is under such conditions most real issues start to be created or pile up. - Use tools to catch most common errors, Code Analysis/FxCop was already mentioned. HP Fortify, Resharper, Coderush etc can help you there. There are also a lot of 3rd party rules you can add to Code Analysis. I’ve written a few myself (http://fccopcontrib.codeplex.com) and various teams from Microsoft have added their own rules (MSOCAF for SharePoint, WSSF for WCF). For common errors that keep cropping up, see if you can define a rule. It’s much easier. But more importantly make sure you have a good help page explaining *WHY* it's wrong. If you have small feature or developer branches/shelvesets, you might want to review pre-merge. It’s still better to do peer reviews and peer programming, but the most important thing is that bad quality code doesn’t make it into the important branch. So my philosophy: - Use tooling as much as possible. - Make sure the team understands the tooling and the importance of the things it flags. It’s too easy to just click suppress all to ignore the warnings. - Under stress, tighten process, it’s under stress that the problems of late reviews will really surface - Most importantly if you do reviews do them as early as possible, but never later than needed. In other words, pre-checkin/post checking doesn’t really matter, as long as the review is done before the code is released. It’ll just be much more expensive to fix any review outcomes the later you find them. --- I would love to hear what you think!

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