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  • Mail Server using Postfix

    - by unknown (google)
    I have currently set up my web application on Amazon EC2 server. As a well known fact sending email from EC2 has a problem. As a cheap and long lasting solution instead of using "authsmtp" is it possible to rent a server and use it as a Mail Server? I am currently looking for cheap hosting which will give me root access so that it can be configured and used as a relayhost. I am curently using Postfix as MTA. Has any one implemented this before? I am curious about its feasibility of this solution. I guess common requirements are: 1: Dedicated IP which is not black listed. 2: Open relay( open to my Server only) Any Tips for Header configurations to keep the mails out of spam folder. This is like exactly cloning authsmtp for personal use. Any suggestions for other Mail Server software instead of Postfix? Another problem is Reverse DNS for this server. Should PTR entry be present if a server is used as a relayhost?

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  • How to avoid en.voyages-sncf.com redirecting to uk.voyages-sncf.com?

    - by Mark Smith
    OK, so en.voyages-sncf.com is French Railways' English language website with full functionality for train booking in France - it sells iDTGV, offers seating options etc. uk.voyages-sncf.com is their UK subsidiary, with reduced functionality, no seat options, no iDTGV etc. Previously, I have been able to select 'Other countries (EUR)' top right and go from the uk version to the en version, or just type in the direct url 'en.voyages-sncf.com and go there. Now, they seem to have implemented an automatic redirect so whenever I enter 'en.voyages-sncf.com' on my UK-based PC or indeed try to select 'Other countries (EUR)' it automatically bumps me to uk.voyages-sncf.com, which I don't want. I can't get onto en.voyages-sncf at all. So, short of using a heavyweight solution like using a non-UK proxy server or downloading the TOR browser, is there any simple solution? Like telling my browser to go to en.voyages-sncf, go directly to en.voyages-sncf and no other site, do not pass go, do not collect £200, do not go anywhere else, ignore all redirects and do what you're told by ME, not by those Machiavellian so-and-sos?

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  • Allied Telesis router: IP filtering for the LOCAL interface

    - by syneticon-dj
    Given an Allied Telesis router with an AlliedWare OS (2.9.1) I would like to disable access to all management services of the router except for a number of subnets (or alternatively have what is a "management VLAN" with other manufacturers' switch and router models). What I have tried so far: creating a new VLAN and an appropriate IP interface, setting the LOCAL IP into this subnet, creating an IP filter for the IP interface and specifying my exclusion subnets: it simply does not work as intended as I can access the LOCAL IP set from any of the other VLAN interfaces - the traffic is apparently not going through my defined filter set at all creating a new IP filter set and binding it to the LOCAL IP interface: this seems not to affect any kind of traffic at all, the counters for the filter set remain at zero packets setting the Remote Security Officer Level IP address range: this only restricts the ability for a user with the Security Officer privilege level to log in from any but the specified address ranges / subnets. Unfortunately, it does not prevent service availability (and thus DoS capacity) or the ability to log in as a less privileged user (e.g. a "manager") calling technical support: unfortunately no solution so far What I have not tried: creating a filter set for each and every IP interface defined on the router and excluding access to the router's management IP: I would like to reduce the overhead induced by IP filters as the router already is CPU-constrained at times. Setting up filters for every IP interface would mean that each and every traffic packet would have to pass the filters, thus consuming CPU cycles. If by any means possible, I would like to find a different solution.

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  • Expire Files In A Folder: Delete Files After x Days

    - by Brett G
    I'm looking to make a "Drop Folder" in a windows shared drive that is accessible to everyone. I'd like files to be deleted automagically if they sit in the folder for more than X days. However, it seems like all methods I've found to do this, use the last modified date, last access time, or creation date of a file. I'm trying to make this a folder that a user can drop files in to share with somebody. If someone copies or moves files into here, I'd like the clock to start ticking at this point. However, the last modified date and creation date of a file will not be updated unless someone actually modifies the file. The last access time is updated too frequently... it seems that just opening a directory in windows explorer will update the last access time. Anyone know of a solution to this? I'm thinking that cataloging the hash of files on a daily basis and then expiring files based on hashes older than a certain date might be a solution.... but taking hashes of files can be time consuming. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! Note: I've already looked at quite a lot of answers on here... looked into File Server Resource Monitor, powershell scripts, batch scripts, etc. They still use the last access time, last modified time or creation time... which, as described, do not fit the above needs.

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  • RSS "Newspaper" / Google Reader replacement

    - by Sean D
    With the impending demise of Google Reader I've been looking at ways to replace it. I've decided that what might be cool is to get an email every morning, with all the updates from the last twenty-four hours, maybe in the style of a newspaper. That's not a very original idea, since sites like http://fivefilters.org/pdf-newspaper/ and http://feedjournal.com/ already do this, but they both have various drawbacks. In particular both require a single feed, will just take the last n items, and clicking around on their website. The Pro option for feedjournal seems almost like it would do the job, but the project seems to be dead, and there's no way to buy it. Before I hack together something crazy I'd like to know if there's a better solution to my problem. In short: I want to replace Google Reader with a daily pdf email, how should I do this? edit: I didn't award the bounty because nobody solved the problem (not that I'm assuming it has a solution). Answers like "well for the way I do things this wouldn't work" aren't actually helpful, even if they are well-meaning.

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  • Laptop + External Monitor: Possible to Scale Mouse-crossover Position?

    - by Brian Lacy
    I have a laptop with a 16" screen @ 1366x768 resolution, and a 24" external monitor at 1920x1200 resolution. I'm extending the Windows 7 desktop onto the other screen. The 24" is the secondary monitor, and is positioned so the bottom of that screen lines up with the bottom of the 16" screen. Currently, if I move the mouse to the top portion of the 24" screen, then move left, the mouse will stop at the edge of the 24" screen until I move it down far enough to get into the range of the 16" screen. So that's all pretty standard; but I'm wondering if there's any software out there that will allow me to "scale" the mouse-crossover position, such that if I'm at the TOP of the 24" screen and move left, the mouse will cross to the TOP of the 16" screen, whereas if I'm at the BOTTOM of the 24" screen, crossing over will position the mouse at the BOTTOM of the 16" screen. So then, if the mouse cursor is on the 24" screen at (x,y) position (10,600), and I move 20 pixels left, the mouse is now on the 16" screen at position (1356,384). Anyone know of such a solution?? Note: I also use Ubuntu, so if there's a solution to this for X, but not Windows, I'd be interested in that also.

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  • Diff bios - corrupt video driver

    - by sfonck
    Hi, I'm using an Dell M90 Precision Laptop which has a NVidia Quadro FX 2500M graphics card and is running Windows XP. Laptop has been running fine - but a few weeks ago screen went 'white' - restarted computer- bios and startup screens show weird green dots and stripes, normal startup only shows a black screen... only VGA mode works to display something. I've been trying to remove and reinstall the correct drivers downloaded from Dell's website - no solution. I gave up and reinstalled XP - everything was working perfect again. 2 weeks later - again the white screen - tried everything again (flashin new bios also - nothing works) Reinstalled XP - everyhting was working again, so I made a DriveSnapShot of the partition. Today - again the 'white screen'. Ok, no problem ...I was thinking all I needed to do was to restore the DriveSnapShot backup... Few minutes later the backup is restored ... but guess what: video driver does not work correctly... As the DriveSnapShot restored the complete partition, as it was at the time everything was working perfectly, this would mean my driver problems are due to 'settings' in the bios or on the graphics-card itself + these 'settings' can get overridden by doing a new XP-install.... I'm out of options, can somebody help me to find a solution for this problem: Is there some way to backup and restore a bios after seeing some problems? Is there some way to know what is causing this problem like a bios diff utility? Thanks!

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  • Using multiple USB webcams in Linux

    - by rachelderp
    Running more than one USB webcam in Debian/Linux results in the the following error: libv4l2: error turning on stream: No space left on device VIDIOC_STREAMON: No space left on device What initially seemed to be a programming issue in OpenCV turned into a quest for a mysterious hardware/software problem after the same errors were produced by running cheese and xawtv. Apparently it's caused by webcams requesting all the available bandwidth on the USB host controller. With that in mind I decided to run wireshark and capinfos to see just how much bandwidth a single camera used. 4 megabits per second at 320x240 14 megabits per second at 640x480 32 megabits per second at 1920x1080 Interesting! That might explain why two cameras at 320x240 work but any higher resolution fails. It's as if my USB controller is only operating at USB 1 speeds, yet lsusb shows both webcams belonging to a device which supposedly supports 480 megabits per second. One solution proposed forcing the webcams to calculate their bandwidth usage instead of requesting their maximum by running the following commands: sudo rmmod uvcvideo sudo modprobe uvcvideo quirks=128 Unfortunately that made no difference, so I decided to try another solution. A post on StackOverflow suggested telling my webcams to use a lower FPS or compressed video format like MJPEG, but after running v4lctl list it doesn't appear either of my webcams support changing their video mode. And that's where I'm stuck. Why would two webcams operating well below the maximum speed of USB 2 would produce this error? ps: It's not a disk space issue, df displays no change when the webcams are started. pps: If it makes a difference, here's the output of lsusb

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  • How to make my Ubuntu an internet gateway for my Android phone

    - by yacine
    I want to use the internet of my school on my Android, the problem is they have a Squid proxy, and many applications on my phone don't use the proxy at all. The obvious solution is to install a transparent proxy on my Android to force all applications to connect through it. The problem is that I need to root the phone to make it work, and I don't want to do it because it's not really my phone and rooting is a little risky- Another solution, which is safer, is to make my computer run as a gateway, so I put my Ubuntu IP in the gateway parameter of the phone. I'm running a small proxy on my ubuntu (cntlm), so I redirect the Android traffic to it. I did it with "iptables" as follows: iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -s 10.0.1.118 -p tcp -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8888 iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -s 10.0.1.118 -p udp -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8888 10.0.1.118 is the IP of the phone, 8888 is the port of cntlm (proxy on my PC). Now, on the phone: When I enter www.google.com on the navigator I get nothing (web site not found, error message of Firefox). But, when I enter http://74.125.143.101 (IP of Google) I get an error message from the school proxy (so it worked in some way – my PC redirected the traffic of the phone to the Squid proxy). The error message is : The requested URL could not be retrieved while trying to process the request get / http/1.1 host 74.125.143.101 user-Agent ... ... I think the problem is in the "GET" header,it should be GET 74.125.143.101 HTTP/1.1. But I don't understand what's happening, and I'm a certified CCNA.

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  • Windows 7 delayed file delete

    - by GregoryM
    I'm stuck with a pretty rare problem that happens on Windows 7 OS only. Every time I'm deleting the file with *.exe extension through explorer, the file doesn't get deleted immediately. I'm forced to wait for around one-two minutes before the system will delete the file. The main problem is that I cannot develop in such situation, because every time I build my solution, the old executable gets 'deleted', but is still there. So the new one cannot be created by Visual Studio. This problem breaks the Steam update progress and a few other installers functionality too. Fresh installed Win7 doesn't have this kind of trouble, so I guess this must be some bad registry entries or some services. Browsing the internet for solutions I found only this: http://www.sevenforums.com/software/72091-several-minute-delay-when-deleting-any-exe-file.html. But the solution the author found is not working (change the userName :)). Is there any ideas how to find what causes this to happen? BTW: when I place the file into Trash bin, no delay occurs. When I delete file with Total Commander - no delay too. Tech details: Windows 7 x64 Ultimate.

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  • Better urls for this internal web server?

    - by sprugman
    I've got a server that I have admin access to, but don't fully manage. (I think it's a virtual machine, but I'm not 100% sure. It's running Apache on Windows Server 2003.) I share the ip with another user, so my sites all have to use the :8080 port. This is kind of ugly. Also, AFAIK, the only access I have is through an ip address. (I'm inside a corporate firewall and don't think I have access to a DNS server or anything.) I've adjusted my hosts file so I don't have to use the ip address on my local machine, but that's not a very generic solution. Are there any options to 1) get rid of the port requirement 2) be able to use a name (maybe a machine name) instead of the ip address in a generic way? (I'm not really a network admin -- I'm a developer managing this machine. The IT folks who really manage it are a few people away from me and tough to get to do anything, so I'm looking for a light-weight solution if possible.)

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  • SSO to multiple websites from Sharepoint website

    - by Aico
    We have an intranet based on Sharepoint 2010. In this intranet we have several links to other webservers within the same Active Directory, for example a link to our Outlook Web Access site on our Exchange 2010 environment. We have three different setups which visit this Sharepoint environment and the other webservers: Windows 7 clients that are a member of the Active Directory Home pc's that connect through a SSL VPN appliance Standalone thin clients (Windows 7 embedded) within the corporate network The goal is to let people only sign in once. In the first group this isn't a problem because the AD Integrated Authentication works fine and the Windows logon is passed on to Sharepoint and the other webservers. The second group is also working fine because of the LDAP integration that the SSL VPN appliance uses. The third group is however experiencing issues. They need to enter their credentials everytime they click a link to another webserver. They first need to enter credentials for accessing the Sharepoint environment. When clicking the link for their webmail they have to re-enter their credentials, and so on. Can someone tell me what the best solution would be to also get SSO working fine for the third group? Some extra information: We also have a Forefront TMG server in our environment. I read somewhere that Forefront might be part of a solution for this problem, but not sure how. Maybe someone here can help me? Look forward to some help. Best regards, Aico

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  • Multiple SSL certificates on one server

    - by Kyle O'Brien
    We're hosting two websites on our fairly tiny but dedicated production server. Both website require SSL authentication. So, we have virtualhosts set up for both of them. They both reference their own domain.key, domain.crt and domain.intermediate.crt files. Each CSR and certificate file for each site was setup using its own unique information and nothing is shared between them (other than the server itself) However, which ever site's symbolic link (set up in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled) is reference first, is the site who's certificate is referenced even if we're visiting the second site. So for example, assume our companies are Cadbury and Nestle. We set up both sites with their own certificates but we create Cadbury's symbolic link in apache's site-enabled folder first and then Nestle's. You can visit Nestle perfectly fine but if you check the certificate installation, it reference's Cadbury's certificate. We're hosting these websites on a dedicated Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS server. Both certificates are provided by Thawte.com. I came across a few potential solutions with no degree of success. I'm hoping someone else has a decent solution? Thanks Edit: The only other solution that seems to have provided success to some people is using SNI with Apache. However, the setups here didn't seem to coincide with our setup at all.

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  • Exchange 2007 Backup - For a newbie

    - by mew3900
    I am trying to setup an exchange 2007 backup solution. After doing a lot of reading, Microsoft have decided in server 2008 unless you are willing to spend a great deal on a 3rd party solution you are pretty stuck! Essentially what I have been asked to do is perform an off-line file backup of our current exchange server and replicate this onto a new 2nd server. The reasoning behind this is that we need to upgrade our current installation of exchange 2007 to SP2 so that the exchange plug-in for windows server backup will be available to us. From this I can then actually take an exchange aware backup weekly and take it off site. Ideally then also we can migrate to this new server and keep the old one as a fail over. Is there a way I can copy across the files required onto a second server, although I doubt very much it is that simple. I may be barking up completely the wrong tree, however I have very limited knowledge with Exchange and any help and advice on how I would resolve this would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance

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  • Incoming traffic while on public network

    - by zvikico
    I'm developing a web app and I need to be able to get incoming traffic from 3rd party services I use. This is a classic webhooks situation: I send a request with a return address and receive the response (via HTTP) some time later to the given address. The simple solution would be to provide my external IP address and forward the incoming traffic from the router to my machine. However, I'm working in a large office and I cannot control the router configuration. I'm looking for a different way to achieve that. I do have servers online. I can have a daemon running on one of those servers, which will handle the incoming traffic. I can run a parallel daemon on my machine, which will keep an open connection with the remote daemon (over ssh preferred) and when an inbound traffic is received by the remote, it will send it to the local, which will send it to the correct port on my machine, as if it was received in the natural way. Is there any ready-made solution for that? PS. I'm on OS X and my server is Ubuntu. Thanks, zvikico

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  • What is a good replacement for StumbleUpon's Share feature?

    - by Mofoo
    I've been using Firefox + StumbleUpon's Share feature with my friends for years now. It is a perfect way of sharing links directly with your friends. You first need to be Following each other and then on the SU toolbar, you can "Share" with your list of friends. You can even include a personal message. The friend will receive a notification with # of pending shares in their toolbar (bold & red). They click the stumble button and it will navigate to the site plus show a yellow bar with your message. I literally use it daily. But then Chrome came along and beat the tar out of Firefox (and other browsers) in terms of usability and performance. But it doesn't (and never will according to Google) allow toolbars. StumbleUpon's solution in Chrome is a fake toolbar (html) that gets injected into the page you're viewing. It's buggy and performance is low. Overall it's not an acceptable solution. I'm looking for a replacement with something that is just as easy to send/receive links. I was thinking of Twitter DM's and using a bookmarklet, but I wanted to survey the collective for other options Thanks in advance for your input!

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  • Page pool memory

    - by legiwei
    I'm currently using Windows XP SP3 32 bit, using C2D E6320 with 2GB RAM. When I am playing Starcraft 2, I encounter an error where it says my system is running low on page pool memory. Starcraft graphic settings suggested a high settings for me. I do not think it has to do with my GC but with my RAM. I then made a search to try to rectify the problem. Apparently, it's something to do with my virtual memory. I then proceed to try to the suggested solution which is to temper the registry and limit the page pool memory to 384MB. However, having done so, I still could not achieved it. I've seen screenshot settings of windows XP with 2GB having 384MB of page pool memory. My default settings puts it at 195MB whereas when I try to increase the pool limit, it can only go to a max of 229MB. I tried increasing my RAM capacity to 3GB but the pool limit still remains. I like to know how to increase my page pool memory. I've tried searching for solution but to no avail other than the one that I've mentioned above (which didn't solve my problem completely).

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  • How to block access to addresses outside network (internet)

    - by devnull
    I have a homeserver, that is now connected to the internet with an own network device (ath0 - 192.168.1.x). It also has one more network interface (eth0 - 192.168.0.x). Soon I will get a second internet line that will be connected the second network. The server then has both networks with different internet lines available, but i only want it to connect to the internet on the old ath0 interface - not the new eth0 (192.168.0.x). Background of that constellation is that the new line has a volume-limit in traffic - the old hasn't and i need the new line for all mobile devices and laptops. The devices should be able to use the new network to connect to the internet and the server. The homeserver is a debian 6 with iptables and some already written rules for it. I need now a rule to block all outgoing internet access on the eth0 interface - i guess it could be something with --target != 192.168.0.0 but i did not succeed in finding the proper solution. Edit: found the solution: iptables -A OUTPUT -o eth0 -d 192.168.0.0/24 -m state --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT With that setting, all traffic that uses the eth0 interface is only allowed if the destination is inside the network 192.168.0.x - all other traffic is denied .

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  • Monitoring Between EC2 Regions

    - by ABrown
    I'm working on a small EC2 project that involves a handful of servers in two different regions (US East and EU West). My first task is to implement a Nagios monitoring solution. Monitoring within a region is simple - I just use the private domain names/IPs, but I'm a little unsure of the best way to handle monitoring the second region without setting up a second Nagios install. The environment is fairly static, so I'm not going to be scripting the configuration with the EC2 tools just yet. As I see it, I have two options. Two Nagios installations (which is over-kill for the small number of servers I'm dealing with). Pros: I don't have to alter the group permissions nor do I have to pay for the traffic, redundancy in the monitoring solution - I could monitor the Nagios servers. Cons: two installations to deal with and I'd need to run another server instance. Have the single installation monitor both regions. Pros: one installation to deal with. Cons: slightly reduced security - security group will have to have NRPE (5666) opened for one source IP and also paying for a small amount of bandwidth at the Internet rate for data transfer between the regions. I guess my question is - how have others handled this problem and what are your recommendations? Thanks!

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  • Windows 7 delayed file delete

    - by GregoryM
    I'm stuck with a pretty rare problem that happens on Windows 7 OS only. Every time I'm deleting the file with *.exe extension through explorer, the file doesn't get deleted immediately. I'm forced to wait for around one-two minutes before the system will delete the file. The main problem is that I cannot develop in such situation, because every time I build my solution, the old executable gets 'deleted', but is still there. So the new one cannot be created by Visual Studio. This problem breaks the Steam update progress and a few other installers functionality too. Fresh installed Win7 doesn't have this kind of trouble, so I guess this must be some bad registry entries or some services. Browsing the internet for solutions I found only this: http://www.sevenforums.com/software/72091-several-minute-delay-when-deleting-any-exe-file.html. But the solution the author found is not working (change the userName :)). Is there any ideas how to find what causes this to happen? BTW: when I place the file into Trash bin, no delay occurs. When I delete file with Total Commander - no delay too. Tech details: Windows 7 x64 Ultimate. UPD: maybe some shadow copying or system restore services (though I have the system restore turned off) block the files? Can't even guess...

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  • Image Management System with Different Levels of Access

    - by Jason
    I work in the graphics department for a real estate brokerage, and we deal with a lot of photos. Agents take the photos, upload them to me, I touch up and standardize the photos, then I add them to an in-house server for future use by the graphics dept. I'd like to make the "sanitized" photo files available to the agents to use when they want, but I don't want the agents poking around the graphics department's files (things get misplaced, renamed and messed up in a hurry). What would be perfect is if we could create a read-only "mirror" (correct term?) of that server that could be accessed by the agents as needed, but which wouldn't feed back into our "sanitized" file system. Edit: I'm looking for an automatic solution... manually posting the files to two separate locations seems like an inelegant solution when working digitally. Edit: I'm trying to avoid any access barriers to the public (dirty) file system (however it's finally implemented). There are 40-50 real estate agents who need to access these files, half of whom can't reliably download an email attachment.

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  • USB Drive that simultaneously connects to more than one computer

    - by user2499
    Background: I have a portable USB drive that I use to make sure I have access to common files whenever at home, work, travel etc for cases when I may not have Internet/Network access of any kind. There are some cases when I have to work simultaneously on a laptop and a desktop computer, and for those cases I usually have to unplug this USB hard drive and move it between the two. Question: dual-computer USB drive? Is there a USB-based solution that would enable me to use this portable drive between two computers simultaneously? If there is not a USB-based solution, does anyone have alternative suggestions, consistent with the underlying rationale? Rationale: Sometimes I have to work on a desktop computer with locked-down networking capabilities (such as at the local photocopy shop) and it can be difficult to get a network configuration that allows dual-computer access without breaking things, or accidentally making my USB drive visible to the entire network. Basically what I need is a very simply LAN that is guaranteed to work regardless of the rules or constraints set by the network administrator for wherever I happen to be at the time. See also: http://superuser.com/questions/99274/how-to-connect-two-computers-with-usb

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  • Duplicate monitor on highest resolution in Windows 7

    - by AlexanderMP
    I have a monitor with a native resolution of 2560x1440, connected through display port. I also have an AV Receiver connected to the video card via HDMI, to have surround sound in games. All using Radeon HD 5670 (will upgrade soon to HD 7850). The problem is that my computer detects the receiver as a separate monitor, with the highest available resolution of 1920x1080. I have 3 options: Disconnect the second display. But then the sound (digital audio output through video card) also disappears. Duplicate displays. But then my primary monitor resolution is reduced to a maximum of just 1920x1080, that being the maximum of the second monitor. Extend desktop. This is the solution I picked so far, it being the least evil. The problems I face in this situations are 2: I have a blank part of the desktop where I sometimes lose my mouse pointer, so I made the extension small, 640x480, and placed it in a corner; when I turn off the main display, all windows resize to 640x480. In Kubuntu I had the option to duplicate the displays, while keeping the higher resolution. Which was great. I tried overriding using the Win7 netbook hack, but it's not available on non-netbooks. Is there a similar solution for this problem in Windows 7?

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  • Using LINQ Distinct: With an Example on ASP.NET MVC SelectListItem

    - by Joe Mayo
    One of the things that might be surprising in the LINQ Distinct standard query operator is that it doesn’t automatically work properly on custom classes. There are reasons for this, which I’ll explain shortly. The example I’ll use in this post focuses on pulling a unique list of names to load into a drop-down list. I’ll explain the sample application, show you typical first shot at Distinct, explain why it won’t work as you expect, and then demonstrate a solution to make Distinct work with any custom class. The technologies I’m using are  LINQ to Twitter, LINQ to Objects, Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC 2, and Visual Studio 2010. The function of the example program is to show a list of people that I follow.  In Twitter API vernacular, these people are called “Friends”; though I’ve never met most of them in real life. This is part of the ubiquitous language of social networking, and Twitter in particular, so you’ll see my objects named accordingly. Where Distinct comes into play is because I want to have a drop-down list with the names of the friends appearing in the list. Some friends are quite verbose, which means I can’t just extract names from each tweet and populate the drop-down; otherwise, I would end up with many duplicate names. Therefore, Distinct is the appropriate operator to eliminate the extra entries from my friends who tend to be enthusiastic tweeters. The sample doesn’t do anything with the drop-down list and I leave that up to imagination for what it’s practical purpose could be; perhaps a filter for the list if I only want to see a certain person’s tweets or maybe a quick list that I plan to combine with a TextBox and Button to reply to a friend. When the program runs, you’ll need to authenticate with Twitter, because I’m using OAuth (DotNetOpenAuth), for authentication, and then you’ll see the drop-down list of names above the grid with the most recent tweets from friends. Here’s what the application looks like when it runs: As you can see, there is a drop-down list above the grid. The drop-down list is where most of the focus of this article will be. There is some description of the code before we talk about the Distinct operator, but we’ll get there soon. This is an ASP.NET MVC2 application, written with VS 2010. Here’s the View that produces this screen: <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<TwitterFriendsViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="DistinctSelectList.Models" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">     Home Page </asp:Content><asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">     <fieldset>         <legend>Twitter Friends</legend>         <div>             <%= Html.DropDownListFor(                     twendVM => twendVM.FriendNames,                     Model.FriendNames,                     "<All Friends>") %>         </div>         <div>             <% Html.Telerik().Grid<TweetViewModel>(Model.Tweets)                    .Name("TwitterFriendsGrid")                    .Columns(cols =>                     {                         cols.Template(col =>                             { %>                                 <img src="<%= col.ImageUrl %>"                                      alt="<%= col.ScreenName %>" />                         <% });                         cols.Bound(col => col.ScreenName);                         cols.Bound(col => col.Tweet);                     })                    .Render(); %>         </div>     </fieldset> </asp:Content> As shown above, the Grid is from Telerik’s Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. The first column is a template that renders the user’s Avatar from a URL provided by the Twitter query. Both the Grid and DropDownListFor display properties that are collections from a TwitterFriendsViewModel class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// For finding friend info on screen /// public class TwitterFriendsViewModel { /// /// Display names of friends in drop-down list /// public List FriendNames { get; set; } /// /// Display tweets in grid /// public List Tweets { get; set; } } } I created the TwitterFreindsViewModel. The two Lists are what the View consumes to populate the DropDownListFor and Grid. Notice that FriendNames is a List of SelectListItem, which is an MVC class. Another custom class I created is the TweetViewModel (the type of the Tweets List), shown below: namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// Info on friend tweets /// public class TweetViewModel { /// /// User's avatar /// public string ImageUrl { get; set; } /// /// User's Twitter name /// public string ScreenName { get; set; } /// /// Text containing user's tweet /// public string Tweet { get; set; } } } The initial Twitter query returns much more information than we need for our purposes and this a special class for displaying info in the View.  Now you know about the View and how it’s constructed. Let’s look at the controller next. The controller for this demo performs authentication, data retrieval, data manipulation, and view selection. I’ll skip the description of the authentication because it’s a normal part of using OAuth with LINQ to Twitter. Instead, we’ll drill down and focus on the Distinct operator. However, I’ll show you the entire controller, below,  so that you can see how it all fits together: using System.Linq; using System.Web.Mvc; using DistinctSelectList.Models; using LinqToTwitter; namespace DistinctSelectList.Controllers { [HandleError] public class HomeController : Controller { private MvcOAuthAuthorization auth; private TwitterContext twitterCtx; /// /// Display a list of friends current tweets /// /// public ActionResult Index() { auth = new MvcOAuthAuthorization(InMemoryTokenManager.Instance, InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken); string accessToken = auth.CompleteAuthorize(); if (accessToken != null) { InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken = accessToken; } if (auth.CachedCredentialsAvailable) { auth.SignOn(); } else { return auth.BeginAuthorize(); } twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth); var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); var twendsVM = new TwitterFriendsViewModel { Tweets = friendTweets, FriendNames = friendNames }; return View(twendsVM); } public ActionResult About() { return View(); } } } The important part of the listing above are the LINQ to Twitter queries for friendTweets and friendNames. Both of these results are used in the subsequent population of the twendsVM instance that is passed to the view. Let’s dissect these two statements for clarification and focus on what is happening with Distinct. The query for friendTweets gets a list of the 20 most recent tweets (as specified by the Twitter API for friend queries) and performs a projection into the custom TweetViewModel class, repeated below for your convenience: var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); The LINQ to Twitter query above simplifies what we need to work with in the View and the reduces the amount of information we have to look at in subsequent queries. Given the friendTweets above, the next query performs another projection into an MVC SelectListItem, which is required for binding to the DropDownList.  This brings us to the focus of this blog post, writing a correct query that uses the Distinct operator. The query below uses LINQ to Objects, querying the friendTweets collection to get friendNames: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); The above implementation of Distinct seems normal, but it is deceptively incorrect. After running the query above, by executing the application, you’ll notice that the drop-down list contains many duplicates.  This will send you back to the code scratching your head, but there’s a reason why this happens. To understand the problem, we must examine how Distinct works in LINQ to Objects. Distinct has two overloads: one without parameters, as shown above, and another that takes a parameter of type IEqualityComparer<T>.  In the case above, no parameters, Distinct will call EqualityComparer<T>.Default behind the scenes to make comparisons as it iterates through the list. You don’t have problems with the built-in types, such as string, int, DateTime, etc, because they all implement IEquatable<T>. However, many .NET Framework classes, such as SelectListItem, don’t implement IEquatable<T>. So, what happens is that EqualityComparer<T>.Default results in a call to Object.Equals, which performs reference equality on reference type objects.  You don’t have this problem with value types because the default implementation of Object.Equals is bitwise equality. However, most of your projections that use Distinct are on classes, just like the SelectListItem used in this demo application. So, the reason why Distinct didn’t produce the results we wanted was because we used a type that doesn’t define its own equality and Distinct used the default reference equality. This resulted in all objects being included in the results because they are all separate instances in memory with unique references. As you might have guessed, the solution to the problem is to use the second overload of Distinct that accepts an IEqualityComparer<T> instance. If you were projecting into your own custom type, you could make that type implement IEqualityComparer<T>, but SelectListItem belongs to the .NET Framework Class Library.  Therefore, the solution is to create a custom type to implement IEqualityComparer<T>, as in the SelectListItemComparer class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { public class SelectListItemComparer : EqualityComparer { public override bool Equals(SelectListItem x, SelectListItem y) { return x.Value.Equals(y.Value); } public override int GetHashCode(SelectListItem obj) { return obj.Value.GetHashCode(); } } } The SelectListItemComparer class above doesn’t implement IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, but rather derives from EqualityComparer<SelectListItem>. Microsoft recommends this approach for consistency with the behavior of generic collection classes. However, if your custom type already derives from a base class, go ahead and implement IEqualityComparer<T>, which will still work. EqualityComparer is an abstract class, that implements IEqualityComparer<T> with Equals and GetHashCode abstract methods. For the purposes of this application, the SelectListItem.Value property is sufficient to determine if two items are equal.   Since SelectListItem.Value is type string, the code delegates equality to the string class. The code also delegates the GetHashCode operation to the string class.You might have other criteria in your own object and would need to define what it means for your object to be equal. Now that we have an IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, let’s fix the problem. The code below modifies the query where we want distinct values: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct(new SelectListItemComparer()) .ToList(); Notice how the code above passes a new instance of SelectListItemComparer as the parameter to the Distinct operator. Now, when you run the application, the drop-down list will behave as you expect, showing only a unique set of names. In addition to Distinct, other LINQ Standard Query Operators have overloads that accept IEqualityComparer<T>’s, You can use the same techniques as shown here, with SelectListItemComparer, with those other operators as well. Now you know how to resolve problems with getting Distinct to work properly and also have a way to fix problems with other operators that require equality comparisons. @JoeMayo

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  • Upload File to Windows Azure Blob in Chunks through ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript and HTML5

    - by Shaun
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/07/01/upload-file-to-windows-azure-blob-in-chunks-through-asp.net.aspxMany people are using Windows Azure Blob Storage to store their data in the cloud. Blob storage provides 99.9% availability with easy-to-use API through .NET SDK and HTTP REST. For example, we can store JavaScript files, images, documents in blob storage when we are building an ASP.NET web application on a Web Role in Windows Azure. Or we can store our VHD files in blob and mount it as a hard drive in our cloud service. If you are familiar with Windows Azure, you should know that there are two kinds of blob: page blob and block blob. The page blob is optimized for random read and write, which is very useful when you need to store VHD files. The block blob is optimized for sequential/chunk read and write, which has more common usage. Since we can upload block blob in blocks through BlockBlob.PutBlock, and them commit them as a whole blob with invoking the BlockBlob.PutBlockList, it is very powerful to upload large files, as we can upload blocks in parallel, and provide pause-resume feature. There are many documents, articles and blog posts described on how to upload a block blob. Most of them are focus on the server side, which means when you had received a big file, stream or binaries, how to upload them into blob storage in blocks through .NET SDK.  But the problem is, how can we upload these large files from client side, for example, a browser. This questioned to me when I was working with a Chinese customer to help them build a network disk production on top of azure. The end users upload their files from the web portal, and then the files will be stored in blob storage from the Web Role. My goal is to find the best way to transform the file from client (end user’s machine) to the server (Web Role) through browser. In this post I will demonstrate and describe what I had done, to upload large file in chunks with high speed, and save them as blocks into Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Traditional Upload, Works with Limitation The simplest way to implement this requirement is to create a web page with a form that contains a file input element and a submit button. 1: @using (Html.BeginForm("About", "Index", FormMethod.Post, new { enctype = "multipart/form-data" })) 2: { 3: <input type="file" name="file" /> 4: <input type="submit" value="upload" /> 5: } And then in the backend controller, we retrieve the whole content of this file and upload it in to the blob storage through .NET SDK. We can split the file in blocks and upload them in parallel and commit. The code had been well blogged in the community. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ActionResult About(HttpPostedFileBase file) 3: { 4: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 5: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 6: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(file.FileName); 7: var blockDataList = new Dictionary<string, byte[]>(); 8: using (var stream = file.InputStream) 9: { 10: var blockSizeInKB = 1024; 11: var offset = 0; 12: var index = 0; 13: while (offset < stream.Length) 14: { 15: var readLength = Math.Min(1024 * blockSizeInKB, (int)stream.Length - offset); 16: var blockData = new byte[readLength]; 17: offset += stream.Read(blockData, 0, readLength); 18: blockDataList.Add(Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)), blockData); 19:  20: index++; 21: } 22: } 23:  24: Parallel.ForEach(blockDataList, (bi) => 25: { 26: blob.PutBlock(bi.Key, new MemoryStream(bi.Value), null); 27: }); 28: blob.PutBlockList(blockDataList.Select(b => b.Key).ToArray()); 29:  30: return RedirectToAction("About"); 31: } This works perfect if we selected an image, a music or a small video to upload. But if I selected a large file, let’s say a 6GB HD-movie, after upload for about few minutes the page will be shown as below and the upload will be terminated. In ASP.NET there is a limitation of request length and the maximized request length is defined in the web.config file. It’s a number which less than about 4GB. So if we want to upload a really big file, we cannot simply implement in this way. Also, in Windows Azure, a cloud service network load balancer will terminate the connection if exceed the timeout period. From my test the timeout looks like 2 - 3 minutes. Hence, when we need to upload a large file we cannot just use the basic HTML elements. Besides the limitation mentioned above, the simple HTML file upload cannot provide rich upload experience such as chunk upload, pause and pause-resume. So we need to find a better way to upload large file from the client to the server.   Upload in Chunks through HTML5 and JavaScript In order to break those limitation mentioned above we will try to upload the large file in chunks. This takes some benefit to us such as - No request size limitation: Since we upload in chunks, we can define the request size for each chunks regardless how big the entire file is. - No timeout problem: The size of chunks are controlled by us, which means we should be able to make sure request for each chunk upload will not exceed the timeout period of both ASP.NET and Windows Azure load balancer. It was a big challenge to upload big file in chunks until we have HTML5. There are some new features and improvements introduced in HTML5 and we will use them to implement our solution.   In HTML5, the File interface had been improved with a new method called “slice”. It can be used to read part of the file by specifying the start byte index and the end byte index. For example if the entire file was 1024 bytes, file.slice(512, 768) will read the part of this file from the 512nd byte to 768th byte, and return a new object of interface called "Blob”, which you can treat as an array of bytes. In fact,  a Blob object represents a file-like object of immutable, raw data. The File interface is based on Blob, inheriting blob functionality and expanding it to support files on the user's system. For more information about the Blob please refer here. File and Blob is very useful to implement the chunk upload. We will use File interface to represent the file the user selected from the browser and then use File.slice to read the file in chunks in the size we wanted. For example, if we wanted to upload a 10MB file with 512KB chunks, then we can read it in 512KB blobs by using File.slice in a loop.   Assuming we have a web page as below. User can select a file, an input box to specify the block size in KB and a button to start upload. 1: <div> 2: <input type="file" id="upload_files" name="files[]" /><br /> 3: Block Size: <input type="number" id="block_size" value="512" name="block_size" />KB<br /> 4: <input type="button" id="upload_button_blob" name="upload" value="upload (blob)" /> 5: </div> Then we can have the JavaScript function to upload the file in chunks when user clicked the button. 1: <script type="text/javascript"> 1: 2: $(function () { 3: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 4: }); 5: });</script> Firstly we need to ensure the client browser supports the interfaces we are going to use. Just try to invoke the File, Blob and FormData from the “window” object. If any of them is “undefined” the condition result will be “false” which means your browser doesn’t support these premium feature and it’s time for you to get your browser updated. FormData is another new feature we are going to use in the future. It could generate a temporary form for us. We will use this interface to create a form with chunk and associated metadata when invoked the service through ajax. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 4: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 5: } 6: else { 7: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 8: return; 9: } 10: }); Each browser supports these interfaces by their own implementation and currently the Blob, File and File.slice are supported by Chrome 21, FireFox 13, IE 10, Opera 12 and Safari 5.1 or higher. After that we worked on the files the user selected one by one since in HTML5, user can select multiple files in one file input box. 1: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 2: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 3: var file = files[i]; 4: var fileSize = file.size; 5: var fileName = file.name; 6: } Next, we calculated the start index and end index for each chunks based on the size the user specified from the browser. We put them into an array with the file name and the index, which will be used when we upload chunks into Windows Azure Blob Storage as blocks since we need to specify the target blob name and the block index. At the same time we will store the list of all indexes into another variant which will be used to commit blocks into blob in Azure Storage once all chunks had been uploaded successfully. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10:  11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 14: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 15: var blocks = []; 16: var offset = 0; 17: var index = 0; 18: var list = ""; 19: while (offset < fileSize) { 20: var start = offset; 21: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 22:  23: blocks.push({ 24: name: fileName, 25: index: index, 26: start: start, 27: end: end 28: }); 29: list += index + ","; 30:  31: offset = end; 32: index++; 33: } 34: } 35: }); Now we have all chunks’ information ready. The next step should be upload them one by one to the server side, and at the server side when received a chunk it will upload as a block into Blob Storage, and finally commit them with the index list through BlockBlobClient.PutBlockList. But since all these invokes are ajax calling, which means not synchronized call. So we need to introduce a new JavaScript library to help us coordinate the asynchronize operation, which named “async.js”. You can download this JavaScript library here, and you can find the document here. I will not explain this library too much in this post. We will put all procedures we want to execute as a function array, and pass into the proper function defined in async.js to let it help us to control the execution sequence, in series or in parallel. Hence we will define an array and put the function for chunk upload into this array. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4:  5: // start to upload each files in chunks 6: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 7: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 8: var file = files[i]; 9: var fileSize = file.size; 10: var fileName = file.name; 11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: ... ... 14:  15: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 16: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 17: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 18: }); 19: }); 20: } 21: }); 22: }); As you can see, I used File.slice method to read each chunks based on the start and end byte index we calculated previously, and constructed a temporary HTML form with the file name, chunk index and chunk data through another new feature in HTML5 named FormData. Then post this form to the backend server through jQuery.ajax. This is the key part of our solution. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 15: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 16: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 17: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 18: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 19: var fd = new FormData(); 20: fd.append("name", block.name); 21: fd.append("index", block.index); 22: fd.append("file", blob); 23: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 24: $.ajax({ 25: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 26: data: fd, 27: processData: false, 28: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 29: type: "POST", 30: success: function (result) { 31: if (!result.success) { 32: alert(result.error); 33: } 34: callback(null, block.index); 35: } 36: }); 37: }); 38: }); 39: } 40: }); Then we will invoke these functions one by one by using the async.js. And once all functions had been executed successfully I invoked another ajax call to the backend service to commit all these chunks (blocks) as the blob in Windows Azure Storage. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); That’s all in the client side. The outline of our logic would be - Calculate the start and end byte index for each chunks based on the block size. - Defined the functions of reading the chunk form file and upload the content to the backend service through ajax. - Execute the functions defined in previous step with “async.js”. - Commit the chunks by invoking the backend service in Windows Azure Storage finally.   Save Chunks as Blocks into Blob Storage In above we finished the client size JavaScript code. It uploaded the file in chunks to the backend service which we are going to implement in this step. We will use ASP.NET MVC as our backend service, and it will receive the chunks, upload into Windows Azure Bob Storage in blocks, then finally commit as one blob. As in the client side we uploaded chunks by invoking the ajax call to the URL "/Home/UploadInFormData", I created a new action under the Index controller and it only accepts HTTP POST request. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: } 8: catch (Exception e) 9: { 10: error = e.ToString(); 11: } 12:  13: return new JsonResult() 14: { 15: Data = new 16: { 17: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 18: error = error 19: } 20: }; 21: } Then I retrieved the file name, index and the chunk content from the Request.Form object, which was passed from our client side. And then, used the Windows Azure SDK to create a blob container (in this case we will use the container named “test”.) and create a blob reference with the blob name (same as the file name). Then uploaded the chunk as a block of this blob with the index, since in Blob Storage each block must have an index (ID) associated with so that finally we can put all blocks as one blob by specifying their block ID list. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 9: var file = Request.Files[0]; 10: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 11:  12: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 13: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 14: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 15: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 16: } 17: catch (Exception e) 18: { 19: error = e.ToString(); 20: } 21:  22: return new JsonResult() 23: { 24: Data = new 25: { 26: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 27: error = error 28: } 29: }; 30: } Next, I created another action to commit the blocks into blob once all chunks had been uploaded. Similarly, I retrieved the blob name from the Request.Form. I also retrieved the chunks ID list, which is the block ID list from the Request.Form in a string format, split them as a list, then invoked the BlockBlob.PutBlockList method. After that our blob will be shown in the container and ready to be download. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult Commit() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 9: var ids = list 10: .Split(',') 11: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 12: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 13: .ToArray(); 14:  15: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 16: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 17: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 18: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 19: } 20: catch (Exception e) 21: { 22: error = e.ToString(); 23: } 24:  25: return new JsonResult() 26: { 27: Data = new 28: { 29: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 30: error = error 31: } 32: }; 33: } Now we finished all code we need. The whole process of uploading would be like this below. Below is the full client side JavaScript code. 1: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/Scripts/async.js"></script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: $(function () { 4: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 5: // assert the browser support html5 6: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 7: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 8: } 9: else { 10: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 11: return; 12: } 13:  14: // start to upload each files in chunks 15: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 16: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 17: var file = files[i]; 18: var fileSize = file.size; 19: var fileName = file.name; 20:  21: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 22: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 23: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 24: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 25: var blocks = []; 26: var offset = 0; 27: var index = 0; 28: var list = ""; 29: while (offset < fileSize) { 30: var start = offset; 31: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 32:  33: blocks.push({ 34: name: fileName, 35: index: index, 36: start: start, 37: end: end 38: }); 39: list += index + ","; 40:  41: offset = end; 42: index++; 43: } 44:  45: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 46: var putBlocks = []; 47: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 48: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 49: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 50: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 51: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 52: var fd = new FormData(); 53: fd.append("name", block.name); 54: fd.append("index", block.index); 55: fd.append("file", blob); 56: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 57: $.ajax({ 58: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 59: data: fd, 60: processData: false, 61: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 62: type: "POST", 63: success: function (result) { 64: if (!result.success) { 65: alert(result.error); 66: } 67: callback(null, block.index); 68: } 69: }); 70: }); 71: }); 72:  73: // invoke the functions one by one 74: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 75: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 76: var data = { 77: name: fileName, 78: list: list 79: }; 80: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 81: if (!result.success) { 82: alert(result.error); 83: } 84: else { 85: alert("done!"); 86: } 87: }); 88: }); 89: } 90: }); 91: }); 92: </script> And below is the full ASP.NET MVC controller code. 1: public class HomeController : Controller 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _account; 4: private CloudBlobClient _client; 5:  6: public HomeController() 7: : base() 8: { 9: _account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("DataConnectionString")); 10: _client = _account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 11: } 12:  13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application."; 16:  17: return View(); 18: } 19:  20: [HttpPost] 21: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 22: { 23: var error = string.Empty; 24: try 25: { 26: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 27: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 28: var file = Request.Files[0]; 29: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 30:  31: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 32: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 33: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 34: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 35: } 36: catch (Exception e) 37: { 38: error = e.ToString(); 39: } 40:  41: return new JsonResult() 42: { 43: Data = new 44: { 45: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 46: error = error 47: } 48: }; 49: } 50:  51: [HttpPost] 52: public JsonResult Commit() 53: { 54: var error = string.Empty; 55: try 56: { 57: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 58: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 59: var ids = list 60: .Split(',') 61: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 62: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 63: .ToArray(); 64:  65: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 66: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 67: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 68: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 69: } 70: catch (Exception e) 71: { 72: error = e.ToString(); 73: } 74:  75: return new JsonResult() 76: { 77: Data = new 78: { 79: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 80: error = error 81: } 82: }; 83: } 84: } And if we selected a file from the browser we will see our application will upload chunks in the size we specified to the server through ajax call in background, and then commit all chunks in one blob. Then we can find the blob in our Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Optimized by Parallel Upload In previous example we just uploaded our file in chunks. This solved the problem that ASP.NET MVC request content size limitation as well as the Windows Azure load balancer timeout. But it might introduce the performance problem since we uploaded chunks in sequence. In order to improve the upload performance we could modify our client side code a bit to make the upload operation invoked in parallel. The good news is that, “async.js” library provides the parallel execution function. If you remembered the code we invoke the service to upload chunks, it utilized “async.series” which means all functions will be executed in sequence. Now we will change this code to “async.parallel”. This will invoke all functions in parallel. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallel(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); In this way all chunks will be uploaded to the server side at the same time to maximize the bandwidth usage. This should work if the file was not very large and the chunk size was not very small. But for large file this might introduce another problem that too many ajax calls are sent to the server at the same time. So the best solution should be, upload the chunks in parallel with maximum concurrency limitation. The code below specified the concurrency limitation to 4, which means at the most only 4 ajax calls could be invoked at the same time. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallelLimit(putBlocks, 4, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: });   Summary In this post we discussed how to upload files in chunks to the backend service and then upload them into Windows Azure Blob Storage in blocks. We focused on the frontend side and leverage three new feature introduced in HTML 5 which are - File.slice: Read part of the file by specifying the start and end byte index. - Blob: File-like interface which contains the part of the file content. - FormData: Temporary form element that we can pass the chunk alone with some metadata to the backend service. Then we discussed the performance consideration of chunk uploading. Sequence upload cannot provide maximized upload speed, but the unlimited parallel upload might crash the browser and server if too many chunks. So we finally came up with the solution to upload chunks in parallel with the concurrency limitation. We also demonstrated how to utilize “async.js” JavaScript library to help us control the asynchronize call and the parallel limitation.   Regarding the chunk size and the parallel limitation value there is no “best” value. You need to test vary composition and find out the best one for your particular scenario. It depends on the local bandwidth, client machine cores and the server side (Windows Azure Cloud Service Virtual Machine) cores, memory and bandwidth. Below is one of my performance test result. The client machine was Windows 8 IE 10 with 4 cores. I was using Microsoft Cooperation Network. The web site was hosted on Windows Azure China North data center (in Beijing) with one small web role (1.7GB 1 core CPU, 1.75GB memory with 100Mbps bandwidth). The test cases were - Chunk size: 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, 4MB. - Upload Mode: Sequence, parallel (unlimited), parallel with limit (4 threads, 8 threads). - Chunk Format: base64 string, binaries. - Target file: 100MB. - Each case was tested 3 times. Below is the test result chart. Some thoughts, but not guidance or best practice: - Parallel gets better performance than series. - No significant performance improvement between parallel 4 threads and 8 threads. - Transform with binaries provides better performance than base64. - In all cases, chunk size in 1MB - 2MB gets better performance.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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