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Plan your SharePoint 2010 Content Type Hub carefully

- by Wayne

Currently setting up a new environment on SharePoint 2010 (which was made available for download yesterday if anyone missed that :-). One of the new features of SharePoint 2010 is to set up a Content Type Hub (which is a part of the Metadata Service Application), which is a hub for all Content Types that other Site Collections can subscribe to. That is you only need to manage your content types in one location. Setting up the Content Type Hub is not that difficult but you must make it very careful to avoid a lot of work and troubleshooting. Here is a short tutorial with a few tips and tricks to make it easy for you to get started. Determine location of Content Type Hub First of all you need to decide in which Site Collection to place your Content Type Hub; in the root site collection or a specific one. I think using a specific Site Collection that only acts as a Content Type Hub is the best way, there are no best practice as of now. So I create a new Site Collection, at for instance http://server/sites/CTH/. The top-level site of this site collection should be for instance a Team Site. You cannot use Blank Site by default, which would have been the best option IMHO, since that site does not have the Taxonomy feature stapled upon it (check the TaxonomyFeatureStapler feature for which site templates that can be used). Configure Managed Metadata Service Application Next you need to create your Managed Metadata Service Application or configure the existing one, Central Administration > Application Management > Manage Service Applications. Select the Managed Metadata service application and click Properties if you already have created it. In the bottom of the dialog window when you are creating the service application or when you are editing the properties is a section to fill in the Content Type Hub. In this text box fill in the URL of the Content Type Hub. It is essential that you have decided where your Content Type Hub will reside, since once this is set you cannot change it. The only way to change it is to rebuild the whole managed metadata service application! Also make sure that you enter the URL correctly. I did copy and paste the URL once and got the /default.aspx in the URL which funked the whole service up. Make sure that you only use the URL to the Site Collection of the hub. Now you have to set up so that other Site Collections can consume the content types from the hub. This is done by selecting the connection for the managed metadata service application and clicking properties. A new dialog window opens and there you need to click the Consumes content types from the Content Type Gallery at nnnn. Now you are free to syndicate your Content Types from the Hub. Publish Content Types To publish a Content Type from the hub you need to go to Site Settings > Content Types and select the content type that you would like to publish. Then select Manage publishing for this content type. This takes you to a page from where you can Publish, Unpublish or Republish the content type. Once the content type is published it can take up to an hour for the subscribing Site Collections to get it. This is controlled by the Content Type Subscriber job that is scheduled to run once an hour. To speed up your publishing just go to Central Administration > Monitoring > Review Job Definitions > Content Type Subscriber and click Run now and you content type is very soon available for use. Published Content Type status You can check the status of the content type publishing in your destination site collections by selecting Site Settings > Content Type Publishing. From here you can force a refresh of all subscribed content types, see which ones that are subscribed and finally check the publishing error log. This error log is very useful for detecting errors during the publishing. For instance if you use any features such as ratings, metadata, document ids in your content type hub and your destination site collection does not have those features available this will be reported here.

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NTFS Issues in Windows 7 and 2008 R2 - 'Is it a Bug?'

- by renewieldraaijer

I have been using the various versions of the Microsoft Windows product line since NT4 and I really thought I knew the ins and outs about the NTFS filesystem by now. There were always a few rules of thumb to understand what happens if you move data around. These rules were: "If you copy data, the copied data will inherit the permissions of the location it is being copied to. The same goes for moving data between disk partitions. Only when you move data within the same partition, the permissions are kept." Recently I was asked to assist in troubleshooting some NTFS related issues. This forced me to have another good look at this theory. To my surprise I found out that this theory does not completely stand anymore. Apparently some things have changed since the release of Windows Vista / Windows 2008. Since the release of these Operating Systems, a move within the same disk partition results in the data inheriting the permissions of the location it is being copied into. A major change in the NTFS filesystem you would think! Not quite! The above only counts when the move operation is being performed by using Windows Explorer. A move by using the 'move' command from within a cmd prompt for example, retains the NTFS permissions, just like before in Windows XP and older systems. Conclusion: The Windows Explorer is responsible for changing the ACL's of the moved data. This is a remarkable change, but if you follow this theory, the resulting ACL after a move operation is still predictable. We could say that since Windows Vista and Windows 2008, a new rule set applies: "If you copy data, the copied data will inherit the permissions of the location it is being copied to. Same goes for moving data between disk partitions and within disk partitions. Only when you move data within the same partition by using something else than the Windows Explorer, the permissions are kept." The above behavior should be unchanged in Windows 7 / Windows 2008 R2, compared to Windows Vista / 2008. But somehow the NTFS permissions are not so predictable in Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. Moving data within the same disk partition the one time results in the permissions being kept and the next time results in inherited permissions from the destination location. I will try to demonstrate this in a few examples: Example 1 (Incorrect behavior): Consider two folders, 'Folder A' and 'Folder B' with the following permissions configured. Now we create the test file 'test file 1.txt' in 'Folder A' and afterwards move this file to 'Folder B' using Windows Explorer. According to the new theory, the file should inherit the permissions of 'Folder B' and therefore 'Group B' should appear in the ACL of 'test file 1.txt'. In the screenshot below the resulting permissions are displayed. The permissions from the originating location are kept, while the permissions of 'Folder B' should be inherited. Example 2 (Correct behavior): Again, consider the same two folders. This time we make a small modification to the ACL of 'Folder A'. We add 'Group C' to the ACL and again we create a file in 'Folder A' which we name 'test file 2.txt'. Next, we move 'test file 2.txt' to 'Folder B'. Again, we check the permissions of 'test file 2.txt' at the target location. We can now see that the permissions are inherited. This is what should be happening, and can be considered 'correct behavior' for Windows Vista / 2008 / 7 / 2008 R2. It remains uncertain why this behavior is so inconsistent. At this time, this is under investigation with Microsoft Support. The investigation has been going for the last two weeks and it is beginning to look like there is no rational reason for this, other than a bug in the Windows Explorer in Windows 7 and 2008 R2. As soon as there is any certainty on this, I will note it here in this blog. The examples above are harmless tests, by using my own laptop. If you would create the same set of folders and groups, and configure exactly the same permissions, you will see exactly the same behavior. Be sure to use Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2. Initially the problem arose at a customer site where move operations on data on the fileserver by users would result in unpredictable results. This resulted in the wrong set of people having àccess permissions on data that they should not have permissions to. Off course this is something we want to prevent at all costs. I have also done several tests with move operations by using the move command in a cmd prompt. This way the behavior is always consistent. The inconsistent behavior is only exposed when using the Windows Explorer to initiate the move operation, and only when using Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 systems. It is evident that this behavior changes when the ACL of a folder has been changed, for example by adding an extra entry. The reason for this remains uncertain though. To be continued…. A dutch version of this post can be found at: http://blogs.platani.nl/?p=612

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Retrieve Performance Data from SOA Infrastructure Database

- by fip

My earlier blog posting shows how to enable, retrieve and interpret BPEL engine performance statistics to aid performance troubleshooting. The strength of BPEL engine statistics at EM is its break down per request. But there are some limitations with the BPEL performance statistics mentioned in that blog posting: The statistics were stored in memory instead of being persisted. To avoid memory overflow, the data are stored to a buffer with limited size. When the statistic entries exceed the limitation, old data will be flushed out to give ways to new statistics. Therefore it can only keep the last X number of entries of data. The statistics 5 hour ago may not be there anymore. The BPEL engine performance statistics only includes latencies. It does not provide throughputs. Fortunately, Oracle SOA Suite runs with the SOA Infrastructure database and a lot of performance data are naturally persisted there. It is at a more coarse grain than the in-memory BPEL Statistics, but it does have its own strengths as it is persisted. Here I would like offer examples of some basic SQL queries you can run against the infrastructure database of Oracle SOA Suite 11G to acquire the performance statistics for a given period of time. You can run it immediately after you modify the date range to match your actual system. 1. Asynchronous/one-way messages incoming rates The following query will show number of messages sent to one-way/async BPEL processes during a given time period, organized by process names and states select composite_name composite, state, count(*) Count from dlv_message where receive_date >= to_timestamp('2012-10-24 21:00:00','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') and receive_date <= to_timestamp('2012-10-24 21:59:59','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') group by composite_name, state order by Count; 2. Throughput of BPEL process instances The following query shows the number of synchronous and asynchronous process instances created during a given time period. It list instances of all states, including the unfinished and faulted ones. The results will include all composites cross all SOA partitions select state, count(*) Count, composite_name composite, component_name,componenttype from cube_instance where creation_date >= to_timestamp('2012-10-24 21:00:00','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') and creation_date <= to_timestamp('2012-10-24 21:59:59','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') group by composite_name, component_name, componenttype order by count(*) desc; 3. Throughput and latencies of BPEL process instances This query is augmented on the previous one, providing more comprehensive information. It gives not only throughput but also the maximum, minimum and average elapse time BPEL process instances. select composite_name Composite, component_name Process, componenttype, state, count(*) Count, trunc(Max(extract(day from (modify_date-creation_date))*24*60*60 + extract(hour from (modify_date-creation_date))*60*60 + extract(minute from (modify_date-creation_date))*60 + extract(second from (modify_date-creation_date))),4) MaxTime, trunc(Min(extract(day from (modify_date-creation_date))*24*60*60 + extract(hour from (modify_date-creation_date))*60*60 + extract(minute from (modify_date-creation_date))*60 + extract(second from (modify_date-creation_date))),4) MinTime, trunc(AVG(extract(day from (modify_date-creation_date))*24*60*60 + extract(hour from (modify_date-creation_date))*60*60 + extract(minute from (modify_date-creation_date))*60 + extract(second from (modify_date-creation_date))),4) AvgTime from cube_instance where creation_date >= to_timestamp('2012-10-24 21:00:00','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') and creation_date <= to_timestamp('2012-10-24 21:59:59','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') group by composite_name, component_name, componenttype, state order by count(*) desc; 4. Combine all together Now let's combine all of these 3 queries together, and parameterize the start and end time stamps to make the script a bit more robust. The following script will prompt for the start and end time before querying against the database: accept startTime prompt 'Enter start time (YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS)' accept endTime prompt 'Enter end time (YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS)' Prompt "==== Rejected Messages ===="; REM 2012-10-24 21:00:00 REM 2012-10-24 21:59:59 select count(*), composite_dn from rejected_message where created_time >= to_timestamp('&&StartTime','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') and created_time <= to_timestamp('&&EndTime','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') group by composite_dn; Prompt " "; Prompt "==== Throughput of one-way/asynchronous messages ===="; select state, count(*) Count, composite_name composite from dlv_message where receive_date >= to_timestamp('&StartTime','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') and receive_date <= to_timestamp('&EndTime','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') group by composite_name, state order by Count; Prompt " "; Prompt "==== Throughput and latency of BPEL process instances ====" select state, count(*) Count, trunc(Max(extract(day from (modify_date-creation_date))*24*60*60 + extract(hour from (modify_date-creation_date))*60*60 + extract(minute from (modify_date-creation_date))*60 + extract(second from (modify_date-creation_date))),4) MaxTime, trunc(Min(extract(day from (modify_date-creation_date))*24*60*60 + extract(hour from (modify_date-creation_date))*60*60 + extract(minute from (modify_date-creation_date))*60 + extract(second from (modify_date-creation_date))),4) MinTime, trunc(AVG(extract(day from (modify_date-creation_date))*24*60*60 + extract(hour from (modify_date-creation_date))*60*60 + extract(minute from (modify_date-creation_date))*60 + extract(second from (modify_date-creation_date))),4) AvgTime, composite_name Composite, component_name Process, componenttype from cube_instance where creation_date >= to_timestamp('&StartTime','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') and creation_date <= to_timestamp('&EndTime','YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS') group by composite_name, component_name, componenttype, state order by count(*) desc;

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Trash Destination Adapter

The Trash Destination and this article came from early experiences of using SSIS and community feedback at the time. When developing a package it is very useful to have a destination adapter that does nothing but consume rows with no setup requirement. You often want run a package part way through development, or just add a path so you can set a Data Viewer. There are stock tasks that can be used, but with the Trash Destination all columns are treated as selected automatically (usage type of read-only), so the pipeline knows they are required. It is also obvious that this is for development or diagnostic purposes, and is clearly not a part of the functional design of the package. It is also ideal for just playing around and exploring concepts in SSIS, and is often used in conjunction with the Data Generator Source. Using these two components it is easy to setup a test of an expression in the Derived Column Transformation for example. The Data Generator Source provides some dummy data, and the Trash Destination allows you to anchor the output path and set a Data Viewer to examine the results. It can also be used when performance tuning packages. It is a consistent and known quantity that has no external influences, so it is ideal as a destination when breaking the data flow into sections to isolate a bottleneck. The adapter is really simple to use and requires no setup. Simply drop it onto the pipeline designer and use it to terminate your data flow path. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Finally, for 2005/2008, you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Trash Destination transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations. Downloads The Trash Destination is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Trash Destination for SQL Server 2005 Trash Destination for SQL Server 2008 Trash Destination for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.34 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.33 - SQL Server 2008 release. Includes support for upgrade of 2005 packages. RTM compatible, previously February 2008 CTP. (4 Mar 2008) Version 2.0.0.31 - SQL Server 2008 November 2007 CTP. (14 Feb 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.0.2.18 - SQL Server 2005 RTM Refresh. SP1 Compatibility Testing. (12 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.1.1 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 15 June CTP. Minor enhancements over v1.0.1.0. (11 Jun 2005) Version 1.0.1.0 - SQL Server 2005 IDW 14 April CTP. First Public Release. (30 May 2005) Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed. ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. The full error message is shown below for reference: TITLE: Microsoft Visual Studio ------------------------------ The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed. ------------------------------ ADDITIONAL INFORMATION: The data flow object "Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination.Trash, Konesans.Dts.Pipeline.TrashDestination, Version=1.0.1.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b8351fe7752642cc" is not installed correctly on this computer. (Microsoft.DataTransformationServices.Design) For 2005/2008, once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component? This is not necessary for SQL Server 2012 as the new SSIS toolbox automatically detects components. If you are still having issues then contact us, but please provide as much detail as possible about error, as well as which version of the the task you are using and details of the SSIS tools installed.

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Why is my external USB hard drive sometimes completely inaccessible?

- by Eliah Kagan

I have an external USB hard drive, consisting of an 1 TB SATA drive in a Rosewill RX35-AT-SU SLV Aluminum 3.5" Silver USB 2.0 External Enclosure, plugged into my SONY VAIO VGN-NS310F laptop. It is plugged directly into the computer (not through a hub). The drive inside the enclosure is a 7200 rpm Western Digital, but I don't remember the exact model. I can remove the drive from the enclosure (again), if people think it's necessary to know that detail. The drive is formatted ext4. I mount it dynamically with udisks on my Lubuntu 11.10 system, usually automatically via PCManFM. (I have had Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine, and experienced all this same behavior with that too.) Every once in a while--once or twice a day--it becomes inaccessible, and difficult to unmount. Attempting to unmount it with sudo umount ... gives an error message saying the drive is in use and suggesting fuser and lsof to find out what is using it. Killing processes found to be using the drive with fuser and lsof is sometimes sufficient to let me unmount it, but usually isn't. Once the drive is unmounted or the machine is rebooted, the drive will not mount. Plugging in the drive and turning it on registers nothing on the computer. dmesg is unchanged. The drive's access light usually blinks vigorously, as though the drive is being accessed constantly. Then eventually, after I keep the drive off for a while (half an hour), I am able to mount it again. While the drive doesn't work on this machine for a while, it will work immediately on another machine running the same version of Ubuntu. Sometimes bringing it back over from the other machine seems to "fix" it. Sometimes it doesn't. The drive doesn't always stop being accessible while mounted, before becoming unmountable. Sometimes it works fine, I turn off the computer, I turn the computer back on, and I cannot mount the drive. Currently this is the only drive with which I have this problem, but I've had problems that I think are the same as this, with different drives, on different Ubuntu machines. This laptop has another external USB drive plugged into it regularly, which doesn't have this problem. Unplugging that drive before plugging in the "problem" drive doesn't fix the problem. I've opened the drive up and made sure the connections were tight in the past, and that didn't seem to help (any more than waiting the same amount of time that it took to open and close the drive, before attempting to remount it). Does anyone have any ideas about what could be causing this, what troubleshooting steps I should perform, and/or how I could fix this problem altogether? Update: I tried replacing the USB data cable (from the enclosure to the laptop), as Merlin suggested. I should've tried that long ago, since it fits the symptoms perfectly (the drive works on another machine, which would make sense because the cable would be bent at a different angle, possibly completing a circuit of frayed wires). Unfortunately, though, this did not help--I have the same problem with the new cable. I'll try to provide additional detailed information about the drive inside the enclosure, next time I'm able to get the drive working. (At the moment I don't have another machine available to attach it.) Major Update (28 June 2012) The drive seems to have deteriorated considerably. I think this is so, because I've attached it to another machine and gotten lots of errors about invalid characters, when copying files from it. I am less interested in recovering data from the drive than I am in figuring out what is wrong with it. I specifically want to figure out if the problem is the drive or the enclosure. Now, when I plug the drive into the original machine where I was having the problems, it still doesn't appear (including with sudo fdisk -l), but it is recognized by the kernel and messages are added to dmesg. Most of the message consist of errors like this, repeated many times: [ 7.707593] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Unhandled sense code [ 7.707599] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Result: hostbyte=invalid driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE [ 7.707606] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Sense Key : Medium Error [current] [ 7.707614] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] Add. Sense: Unrecovered read error [ 7.707621] sd 5:0:0:0: [sdc] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 08 00 [ 7.707636] end_request: critical target error, dev sdc, sector 0 [ 7.707641] Buffer I/O error on device sdc, logical block 0 Here are all the lines from dmesg starting with when the drive is recognized. Please note that: I'm back to running Lubuntu 12.04 on this machine (and perhaps that's a factor in better error messages). Now that the drive has been plugged into another machine and back into this one, and also now that this machine is back to running 12.04, the drive's access light doesn't blink as I had described. Looking at the drive, it would appear as though it is working normally, with low or no access. This behavior (the errors) occurs when rebooting the machine with the drive plugged in, and also when manually plugging in the drive. A few of the messages are about /dev/sdb. That drive is working fine. The bad drive is /dev/sdc. I just didn't want to edit anything out from the middle.

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The Case of the Extra Page: Rendering Reporting Services as PDF

- by smisner

I had to troubleshoot a problem with a mysterious extra page appearing in a PDF this week. My first thought was that it was likely to caused by one of the most common problems that people encounter when developing reports that eventually get rendered as PDF is getting blank pages inserted into the PDF document. The cause of the blank pages is usually related to sizing. You can learn more at Understanding Pagination in Reporting Services in Books Online. When designing a report, you have to be really careful with the layout of items in the body. As you move items around, the body will expand to accommodate the space you're using and you might eventually tighten everything back up again, but the body doesn't automatically collapse. One of my favorite things to do in Reporting Services 2005 - which I dubbed the "vacu-pack" method - was to just erase the size property of the Body and let it auto-calculate the new size, squeezing out all the extra space. Alas, that method no longer works beginning with Reporting Services 2008. Even when you make sure the body size is as small as possible (with no unnecessary extra space along the top, bottom, left, or right side of the body), it's important to calculate the body size plus header plus footer plus the margins and ensure that the calculated height and width do not exceed the report's height and width (shown as the page in the illustration above). This won't matter if users always render reports online, but they'll get extra pages in a PDF document if the report's height and width are smaller than the calculate space. Beginning the Investigation In the situation that I was troubleshooting, I checked the properties: Item Property Value Body Height 6.25in Width 10.5in Page Header Height 1in Page Footer Height 0.25in Report Left Margin 0.1in Right Margin 0.1in Top Margin 0.05in Bottom Margin 0.05in Page Size - Height 8.5in Page Size - Width 11in So I calculated the total width using Body Width + Left Margin + Right Margin and came up with a value of 10.7 inches. And then I calculated the total height using Body Height + Page Header Height + Page Footer Height + Top Margin + Bottom Margin and got 7.6 inches. Well, page sizing couldn't be the reason for the extra page in my report because 10.7 inches is smaller than the report's width of 11 inches and 7.6 inches is smaller than the report's height of 8.5 inches. I had to look elsewhere to find the culprit. Conducting the Third Degree My next thought was to focus on the rendering size of the items in the report. I've adapted my problem to use the Adventure Works database. At the top of the report are two charts, and then below each chart is a rectangle that contains a table. In the real-life scenario, there were some graphics present as a background for the tables which fit within the rectangles that were about 3 inches high so the visual space of the rectangles matched the visual space of the charts - also about 3 inches high. But there was also a huge amount of white space at the bottom of the page, and as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, a second page which was blank except for the footer that appeared at the bottom. Placing a textbox beneath the rectangles to see if they would appear on the first page resulted the textbox's appearance on the second page. For some reason, the rectangles wanted a buffer zone beneath them. What's going on? Taking the Suspect into Custody My next step was to see what was really going on with the rectangle. The graphic appeared to be correctly sized, but the behavior in the report indicated the rectangle was growing. So I added a border to the rectangle to see what it was doing. When I added borders, I could see that the size of each rectangle was growing to accommodate the table it contains. The rectangle on the right is slightly larger than the one on the left because the table on the right contains an extra row. The rectangle is trying to preserve the whitespace that appears in the layout, as shown below. Closing the Case Now that I knew what the problem was, what could I do about it? Because of the graphic in the rectangle (not shown), I couldn't eliminate the use of the rectangles and just show the tables. But fortunately, there is a report property that comes to the rescue: ConsumeContainerWhitespace (accessible only in the Properties window). I set the value of this property to True. Problem solved. Now the rectangles remain fixed at the configured size and don't grow vertically to preserve the whitespace. Case closed.

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ORACLE RIGHTNOW DYNAMIC AGENT DESKTOP CLOUD SERVICE - Putting the Dynamite into Dynamic Agent Desktop

- by Andreea Vaduva

Untitled Document There’s a mountain of evidence to prove that a great contact centre experience results in happy, profitable and loyal customers. The very best Contact Centres are those with high first contact resolution, customer satisfaction and agent productivity. But how many companies really believe they are the best? And how many believe that they can be? We know that with the right tools, companies can aspire to greatness – and achieve it. Core to this is ensuring their agents have the best tools that give them the right information at the right time, so they can focus on the customer and provide a personalised, professional and efficient service. Today there are multiple channels through which customers can communicate with you; phone, web, chat, social to name a few but regardless of how they communicate, customers expect a seamless, quality experience. Most contact centre agents need to switch between lots of different systems to locate the right information. This hampers their productivity, frustrates both the agent and the customer and increases call handling times. With this in mind, Oracle RightNow has designed and refined a suite of add-ins to optimize the Agent Desktop. Each is designed to simplify and adapt the agent experience for any given situation and unify the customer experience across your media channels. Let’s take a brief look at some of the most useful tools available and see how they make a difference. Contextual Workspaces: The screen where agents do their job. Agents don’t want to be slowed down by busy screens, scrolling through endless tabs or links to find what they’re looking for. They want quick, accurate and easy. Contextual Workspaces are fully configurable and through workspace rules apply if, then, else logic to display only the information the agent needs for the issue at hand . Assigned at the Profile level, different levels of agent, from a novice to the most experienced, get a screen that is relevant to their role and responsibilities and ensures their job is done quickly and efficiently the first time round. Agent Scripting: Sometimes, agents need to deliver difficult or sensitive messages while maximising the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell. After all, contact centres are now increasingly viewed as revenue generators. Containing sophisticated branching logic, scripting helps agents to capture the right level of information and guides the agent step by step, ensuring no mistakes, inconsistencies or missed opportunities. Guided Assistance: This is typically used to solve common troubleshooting issues, displaying a series of question and answer sets in a decision-tree structure. This means agents avoid having to bookmark favourites or rely on written notes. Agents find particular value in these guides - to quickly craft chat and email responses. What’s more, by publishing guides in answers on support pages customers, can resolve issues themselves, without needing to contact your agents. And b ecause it can also accelerate agent ramp-up time, it ensures that even novice agents can solve customer problems like an expert. Desktop Workflow: Take a step back and look at the full customer interaction of your agents. It probably spans multiple systems and multiple tasks. With Desktop Workflows you control the design workflows that span the full customer interaction from start to finish. As sequences of decisions and actions, workflows are unique in that they can create or modify different records and provide automation behind the scenes. This means your agents can save time and provide better quality of service by having the tools they need and the relevant information as required. And doing this boosts satisfaction among your customers, your agents and you – so win, win, win! I have highlighted above some of the tools which can be used to optimise the desktop; however, this is by no means an exhaustive list. In approaching your design, it’s important to understand why and how your customers contact you in the first place. Once you have this list of “whys” and “hows”, you can design effective policies and procedures to handle each category of problem, and then implement the right agent desktop user interface to support them. This will avoid duplication and wasted effort. Five Top Tips to take away: Start by working out “why” and “how” customers are contacting you. Implement a clean and relevant agent desktop to support your agents. If your workspaces are getting complicated consider using Desktop Workflow to streamline the interaction. Enhance your Knowledgebase with Guides. Agents can access them proactively and can be published on your web pages for customers to help themselves. Script any complex, critical or sensitive interactions to ensure consistency and accuracy. Desktop optimization is an ongoing process so continue to monitor and incorporate feedback from your agents and your customers to keep your Contact Centre successful. Want to learn more? Having attending the 3-day Oracle RightNow Customer Service Administration class your next step is to attend the Oracle RightNow Customer Portal Design and 2-day Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration class. Here you’ll learn not only how to leverage the Agent Desktop tools but also how to optimise your self-service pages to enhance your customers’ web experience. Useful resources: Review the Best Practice Guide Review the tune-up guide About the Author: Angela Chandler joined Oracle University as a Senior Instructor through the RightNow Customer Experience Acquisition. Her other areas of expertise include Business Intelligence and Knowledge Management. She currently delivers the following Oracle RightNow courses in the classroom and as a Live Virtual Class: RightNow Customer Service Administration (3 days) RightNow Customer Portal Design and Dynamic Agent Desktop Administration (2 days) RightNow Analytics (2 days) Rightnow Chat Cloud Service Administration (2 days)

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Monitoring your WCF Web Apis with AppFabric

- by cibrax

The other day, Ron Jacobs made public a template in the Visual Studio Gallery for enabling monitoring capabilities to any existing WCF Http service hosted in Windows AppFabric. I thought it would be a cool idea to reuse some of that for doing the same thing on the new WCF Web Http stack. Windows AppFabric provides a dashboard that you can use to dig into some metrics about the services usage, such as number of calls, errors or information about different events during a service call. Those events not only include information about the WCF pipeline, but also custom events that any developer can inject and make sense for troubleshooting issues. This monitoring capabilities can be enabled on any specific IIS virtual directory by using the AppFabric configuration tool or adding the following configuration sections to your existing web app, <system.serviceModel> <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true" /> <diagnostics etwProviderId="3e99c707-3503-4f33-a62d-2289dfa40d41"> <endToEndTracing propagateActivity="true" messageFlowTracing="true" /> </diagnostics> <behaviors> <serviceBehaviors> <behavior name=""> <etwTracking profileName="EndToEndMonitoring Tracking Profile" /> </behavior> </serviceBehaviors> </behaviors> </system.serviceModel> <microsoft.applicationServer> <monitoring> <default enabled="true" connectionStringName="ApplicationServerMonitoringConnectionString" monitoringLevel="EndToEndMonitoring" /> </monitoring> </microsoft.applicationServer> Bad news is that none of the configuration above can be easily set on code by using the new configuration model for WCF Web stack. A good thing is that you easily disable it in the configuration when you no longer need it, and also uses ETW, a general-purpose and high-speed tracing facility provided by the operating system (it’s part of the windows kernel). By adding that configuration section, AppFabric will start monitoring your service automatically and providing some basic event information about the service calls. You need some custom code for injecting custom events in the monitoring data. What I did here is to copy and refactor the “WCFUserEventProvider” class provided as sample in the Ron’s template to make it more TDD friendly when using IoC. I created a simple interface “ILogger” that any service (or resource) can use to inject custom events or monitoring information in the AppFabric database. public interface ILogger { bool WriteError(string name, string format, params object[] args); bool WriteWarning(string name, string format, params object[] args); bool WriteInformation(string name, string format, params object[] args); } The “WCFUserEventProvider” class implements this interface by making possible to send the events to the AppFabric monitoring database. The service or resource implementation can receive an “ILogger” as part of the constructor. [ServiceContract] [Export] public class OrderResource { IOrderRepository repository; ILogger logger; [ImportingConstructor] public OrderResource(IOrderRepository repository, ILogger logger) { this.repository = repository; this.logger = logger; } [WebGet(UriTemplate = "{id}")] public Order Get(string id, HttpResponseMessage response) { var order = this.repository.All.FirstOrDefault(o => o.OrderId == int.Parse(id, CultureInfo.InvariantCulture)); if (order == null) { response.StatusCode = HttpStatusCode.NotFound; response.Content = new StringContent("Order not found"); } this.logger.WriteInformation("Order Requested", "Order Id {0}", id); return order; } } The example above uses “MEF” as IoC for injecting a repository and the logger implementation into the service. You can also see how the logger is used to write an information event in the monitoring database. The following image illustrates how the custom event is injected and the information becomes available for any user in the dashboard. An issue that you might run into and I hope the WCF and AppFabric teams fixed soon is that any WCF service that uses friendly URLs with ASP.NET routing does not get listed as a available service in the WCF services tab in the AppFabric console. The complete example is available to download from here.

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PASS Summit 2011 – Part III

- by Tara Kizer

Well we’re about a month past PASS Summit 2011, and yet I haven’t finished blogging my notes! Between work and home life, I haven’t been able to come up for air in a bit. Now on to my notes… On Thursday of the PASS Summit 2011, I attended Klaus Aschenbrenner’s (blog|twitter) “Advanced SQL Server 2008 Troubleshooting”, Joe Webb’s (blog|twitter) “SQL Server Locking & Blocking Made Simple”, Kalen Delaney’s (blog|twitter) “What Happened? Exploring the Plan Cache”, and Paul Randal’s (blog|twitter) “More DBA Mythbusters”. I think my head grew two times in size from the Thursday sessions. Just WOW! I took a ton of notes in Klaus' session. He took a deep dive into how to troubleshoot performance problems. Here is how he goes about solving a performance problem: Start by checking the wait stats DMV System health Memory issues I/O issues I normally start with blocking and then hit the wait stats. Here’s the wait stat query (Paul Randal’s) that I use when working on a performance problem. He highlighted a few waits to be aware of such as WRITELOG (indicates IO subsystem problem), SOS_SCHEDULER_YIELD (indicates CPU problem), and PAGEIOLATCH_XX (indicates an IO subsystem problem or a buffer pool problem). Regarding memory issues, Klaus recommended that as a bare minimum, one should set the “max server memory (MB)” in sp_configure to 2GB or 10% reserved for the OS (whichever comes first). This is just a starting point though! Regarding I/O issues, Klaus talked about disk partition alignment, which can improve SQL I/O performance by up to 100%. You should use 64kb for NTFS cluster, and it’s automatic in Windows 2008 R2. Joe’s locking and blocking presentation was a good session to really clear up the fog in my mind about locking. One takeaway that I had no idea could be done was that you can set a timeout in T-SQL code view LOCK_TIMEOUT. If you do this via the application, you should trap error 1222. Kalen’s session went into execution plans. The minimum size of a plan is 24k. This adds up fast especially if you have a lot of plans that don’t get reused much. You can use sys.dm_exec_cached_plans to check how often a plan is being reused by checking the usecounts column. She said that we can use DBCC FLUSHPROCINDB to clear out the stored procedure cache for a specific database. I didn’t know we had this available, so this was great to hear. This will be less intrusive when an emergency comes up where I’ve needed to run DBCC FREEPROCCACHE. Kalen said one should enable “optimize for ad hoc workloads” if you have an adhoc loc. This stores only a 300-byte stub of the first plan, and if it gets run again, it’ll store the whole thing. This helps with plan cache bloat. I have a lot of systems that use prepared statements, and Kalen says we simulate those calls by using sp_executesql. Cool! Paul did a series of posts last year to debunk various myths and misconceptions around SQL Server. He continues to debunk things via “DBA Mythbusters”. You can get a PDF of a bunch of these here. One of the myths he went over is the number of tempdb data files that you should have. Back in 2000, the recommendation was to have as many tempdb data files as there are CPU cores on your server. This no longer holds true due to the numerous cores we have on our servers. Paul says you should start out with 1/4 to 1/2 the number of cores and work your way up from there. BUT! Paul likes what Bob Ward (twitter) says on this topic: 8 or less cores –> set number of files equal to the number of cores Greater than 8 cores –> start with 8 files and increase in blocks of 4 One common myth out there is to set your MAXDOP to 1 for an OLTP workload with high CXPACKET waits. Instead of that, dig deeper first. Look for missing indexes, out-of-date statistics, increase the “cost threshold for parallelism” setting, and perhaps set MAXDOP at the query level. Paul stressed that you should not plan a backup strategy but instead plan a restore strategy. What are your recoverability requirements? Once you know that, now plan out your backups. As Paul always does, he talked about DBCC CHECKDB. He said how fabulous it is. I didn’t want to interrupt the presentation, so after his session had ended, I asked Paul about the need to run DBCC CHECKDB on your mirror systems. You could have data corruption occur at the mirror and not at the principal server. If you aren’t checking for data corruption on your mirror systems, you could be failing over to a corrupt database in the case of a disaster or even a planned failover. You can’t run DBCC CHECKDB against the mirrored database, but you can run it against a snapshot off the mirrored database.

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Create a Smoother Period Close

- by Get Proactive Customer Adoption Team

Untitled Document Do You Use Oracle E-Business Suite Products Involved in Accounting Period Closes? We understand that closing the periods in your system at the end of an accounting period enables your company to make the right business decisions. We also know this requires prior preparation, good procedures, and quality data. To help you meet that need, Oracle E-Business Suite’s proactive support team developed the Period Close Advisor to help your organization conduct a smooth period close for its Oracle E-Business Suite 12 products. The Period Close Advisor is composed of logical steps you can follow, aligned by the business requirement flow. It will help with an orderly close of the product sub-ledgers before posting to the General Ledger. It combines recommendations and industry best practices with tips from subject matter experts for troubleshooting. You will find patches needed and references to assist you during each phase. Get to know the E-Business Suite Period Close Advisor The Period Close Advisor does more than help the users of Oracle E-Business Suite products close their period. You can use it before and throughout the period to stay on track. Proactively it assists you as you set up your company’s period close process. During the period, it helps evaluate your system’s readiness for initiating the period close procedures and prepare the system for a smooth period close experience. The Period Close Advisor gets you to answers when you have questions and gives you the latest news from us on Oracle E-Business Suite’s period close. The Period Close Advisor is the right place to start. How to Use the E-Business Suite Period Close The Period Close Advisor graphically guides you through your period close. The tabs show you the products (also called applications or sub-ledgers) covered, and the product order required for the processing to handle any dependencies between the products. Users of all the products it covers can benefit from the information it contains. Structure of the Period Close Advisor Clicking on a tab gives you the details for that particular step in the process. This includes an overview, showing how the products fit into the overall period close process, and step-by-step information on each phase needed to complete the period close for the tab. You will also find multimedia training and related resources you can access if you need more information. Once you click on any of the phases, you see guidance for that phase. This can include: Tips from the subject-matter experts—here are examples from a Cash Management specialist: “For organizations with high transaction volumes bank statements should be loaded and reconciled on a daily basis.” “The automatic reconciliation process can be set up to create miscellaneous transactions automatically.” References to useful Knowledge Base documents: Information Centers for the products and features FAQs on functionality Known Issues and patches with both the errors and their solutions How-to documents that explain in detail how to use a feature or complete a process White papers that give overview of a feature, list setup required to use the feature, etc. Links to diagnosticsthat help debug issues you may find in a process Additional information and alerts about a process or reports that can help you prevent issues from surfacing This excerpt from the “Process Transaction” phase for the Receivables product lists documents you’ll find helpful. How to Get Started with the Period Close Advisor The Period Close Advisor is a great resource that can be used both as a proactive tool (while setting up your period end procedures) and as the first document to refer to when you encounter an issue during the period close procedures! As mentioned earlier, the order of the product tabs in the Period Close Advisor gives you the recommended order of closing. The first thing to do is to ensure that you are following the prescribed order for closing the period, if you are using more than one sub-ledger. Next, review the information shared in the Evaluate and Prepare and Process Transactions phases. Make sure that you are following the recommended best practices; you have applied the recommended patches, etc. The Reconcile phase gives you the recommended steps to follow for reconciling a sub-ledger with the General Ledger. Ensure that your reconciliation procedure aligns with those steps. At any stage during the period close processing, if you encounter an issue, you can revisit the Period Close Advisor. Choose the product you have an issue with and then select the phase you are in. You will be able to review information that can help you find a solution to the issue you are facing. Stay Informed Oracle updates the Period Close Advisor as we learn of new issues and information. Bookmark the Oracle E-Business Suite Period Close Advisor [ID 335.1] and keep coming back to it for the latest information on period close

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Row Count Plus Transformation

As the name suggests we have taken the current Row Count Transform that is provided by Microsoft in the Integration Services toolbox and we have recreated the functionality and extended upon it. There are two things about the current version that we thought could do with cleaning up Lack of a custom UI You have to type the variable name yourself In the Row Count Plus Transformation we solve these issues for you. Another thing we thought was missing is the ability to calculate the time taken between components in the pipeline. An example usage would be that you want to know how many rows flowed between Component A and Component B and how long it took. Again we have solved this issue. Credit must go to Erik Veerman of Solid Quality Learning for the idea behind noting the duration. We were looking at one of his packages and saw that he was doing something very similar but he was using a Script Component as a transformation. Our philosophy is that if you have to write or Copy and Paste the same piece of code more than once then you should be thinking about a custom component and here it is. The Row Count Plus Transformation populates variables with the values returned from; Counting the rows that have flowed through the path Returning the time in seconds between when it first saw a row come down this path and when it saw the final row. It is possible to leave both these boxes blank and the component will still work. All input columns are passed through the transformation unaltered, you are not permitted to change or add to the inputs or outputs of this component. Optionally you can set the component to fire an event, which happens during the PostExecute phase of the execution. This can be useful to improve visibility of this information, such that it is captured in package logging, or can be used to drive workflow in the case of an error event. Properties Property Data Type Description OutputRowCountVariable String The name of the variable into which the amount of row read will be passed (Optional). OutputDurationVariable String The name of the variable into which the duration in seconds will be passed. (Optional). EventType RowCountPlusTransform.EventType The type of event to fire during post execute, included in which are the row count and duration values. RowCountPlusTransform.EventType Enumeration Name Value Description None 0 Do not fire any event. Information 1 Fire an Information event. Warning 2 Fire a Warning event. Error 3 Fire an Error event. Installation The component is provided as an MSI file which you can download and run to install it. This simply places the files on disk in the correct locations and also installs the assemblies in the Global Assembly Cache as per Microsoft’s recommendations. You may need to restart the SQL Server Integration Services service, as this caches information about what components are installed, as well as restarting any open instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. For 2005/2008 Only - Finally you will have to add the transformation to the Visual Studio toolbox manually. Right-click the toolbox, and select Choose Items.... Select the SSIS Data Flow Items tab, and then check the Row Count Plus Transformation in the Choose Toolbox Items window. This process has been described in detail in the related FAQ entry for How do I install a task or transform component? We recommend you follow best practice and apply the current Microsoft SQL Server Service pack to your SQL Server servers and workstations, and this component requires a minimum of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1. Downloads The Row Number Transformation is available for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 (includes R2) and SQL Server 2012. Please choose the version to match your SQL Server version, or you can install multiple versions and use them side by side if you have more than one version of SQL Server installed. Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2005 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2008 Row Count Plus Transformation for SQL Server 2012 Version History SQL Server 2012 Version 3.0.0.6 - SQL Server 2012 release. Includes upgrade support for both 2005 and 2008 packages to 2012. (5 Jun 2012) SQL Server 2008 Version 2.0.0.5 - SQL Server 2008 release. (15 Oct 2008) SQL Server 2005 Version 1.1.0.43 - Bug fix for duration. For long running processes the duration second count may have been incorrect. (8 Sep 2006) Version 1.1.0.42 - SP1 Compatibility Testing. Added the ability to raise an event with the count and duration data for easier logging or workflow. (18 Jun 2006) Version 1.0.0.1 - SQL Server 2005 RTM. Made available as general public release. (20 Mar 2006) Screenshot Troubleshooting Make sure you have downloaded the version that matches your version of SQL Server. We offer separate downloads for SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2012. If you get an error when you try and use the component along the lines of The component could not be added to the Data Flow task. Please verify that this component is properly installed. ... The data flow object "Konesans ..." is not installed correctly on this computer, this usually indicates that the internal cache of SSIS components needs to be updated. This is held by the SSIS service, so you need restart the the SQL Server Integration Services service. You can do this from the Services applet in Control Panel or Administrative Tools in Windows. You can also restart the computer if you prefer. You may also need to restart any current instances of Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) / Visual Studio that you may be using to build your SSIS packages. Once installation is complete you need to manually add the task to the toolbox before you will see it and to be able add it to packages - How do I install a task or transform component?

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To Bit or Not To Bit

- by Johnm

'Twas a long day of troubleshooting and firefighting and now, with most of the office vacant, you face a blank scripting window to create a new table in his database. Many questions circle your mind like dirty water gurgling down the bathtub drain: "How normalized should this table be?", "Should I use an identity column?", "NVarchar or Varchar?", "Should this column be NULLABLE?", "I wonder what apple blue cheese bacon cheesecake tastes like?" Well, there are times when the mind goes it's own direction. A Bit About Bit At some point during your table creation efforts you will encounter the decision of whether to use the bit data type for a column. The bit data type is an integer data type that recognizes only the values of 1, 0 and NULL as valid. This data type is often utilized to store yes/no or true/false values. An example of its use would be a column called [IsGasoline] which would be intended to contain the value of 1 if the row's subject (a car) had a gasoline engine and a 0 if the subject did not have a gasoline engine. The bit data type can even be found in some of the system tables of SQL Server. For example, the sysssispackages table in the msdb database which contains SQL Server Integration Services Package information for the packages stored in SQL Server. This table contains a column called [IsEncrypted]. A value of 1 indicates that the package has been encrypted while the value of 0 indicates that it is not. I have learned that the most effective way to disperse the crowd that surrounds the office coffee machine is to engage into SQL Server debates. The bit data type has been one of the most reoccurring, as well as the most enjoyable, of these topics. It contains a practical side and a philosophical side. Practical Consideration This data type certainly has its place and is a valuable option for database design; but it is often used in situations where the answer is really not a pure true/false response. In addition, true/false values are not very informative or scalable. Let's use the previously noted [IsGasoline] column for illustration. While on the surface it appears to be a rather simple question when evaluating a car: "Does the car have a gasoline engine?" If the person entering data is entering a row for a Jeep Liberty, the response would be a 1 since it has a gasoline engine. If the person is entering data is entering a row for a Chevrolet Volt, the response would be a 0 since it is an electric engine. What happens when a person is entering a row for the gasoline/electric hybrid Toyota Prius? Would one person's conclusion be consistent with another person's conclusion? The argument could be made that the current intent for the database is to be used only for pure gasoline and pure electric engines; but this is where the scalability issue comes into play. With the use of a bit data type a database modification and data conversion would be required if the business decided to take on hybrid engines. Whereas, alternatively, if the int data type were used as a foreign key to a reference table containing the engine type options, the change to include the hybrid option would only require an entry into the reference table. Philosophical Consideration Since the bit data type is often used for true/false or yes/no data (also called Boolean) it presents a philosophical conundrum of what to do about the allowance of the NULL value. The inclusion of NULL in a true/false or yes/no response simply violates the logical principle of bivalence which states that "every proposition is either true or false". If NULL is not true, then it must be false. The mathematical laws of Boolean logic support this concept by stating that the only valid values of this scenario are 1 and 0. There is another way to look at this conundrum: NULL is also considered to be the absence of a response. In other words, it is the equivalent to "undecided". Anyone who watches the news can tell you that polls always include an "undecided" option. This could be considered a valid option in the world of yes/no/dunno. Through out all of these considerations I have discovered one absolute certainty: When you have found a person, or group of persons, who are willing to entertain a philosophical debate of the bit data type, you have found some true friends.

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Database Owner Conundrum

- by Johnm

Have you ever restored a database from a production environment on Server A into a development environment on Server B and had some items, such as Service Broker, mysteriously cease functioning? You might want to consider reviewing the database owner property of the database. The Scenario Recently, I was developing some messaging functionality that utilized the Service Broker feature of SQL Server in a development environment. Within the instance of the development environment resided two databases: One was a restored version of a production database that we will call "RestoreDB". The second database was a brand new database that has yet to exist in the production environment that we will call "DevDB". The goal is to setup a communication path between RestoreDB and DevDB that will later be implemented into the production database. After implementing all of the Service Broker objects that are required to communicate within a database as well as between two databases on the same instance I found myself a bit confounded. My testing was showing that the communication was successful when it was occurring internally within DevDB; but the communication between RestoreDB and DevDB did not appear to be working. Profiler to the rescue After carefully reviewing my code for any misspellings, missing commas or any other minor items that might be a syntactical cause of failure, I decided to launch Profiler to aid in the troubleshooting. After simulating the cross database messaging, I noticed the following error appearing in Profiler: An exception occurred while enqueueing a message in the target queue. Error: 33009, State: 2. The database owner SID recorded in the master database differs from the database owner SID recorded in database '[Database Name Here]'. You should correct this situation by resetting the owner of database '[Database Name Here]' using the ALTER AUTHORIZATION statement. Now, this error message is a helpful one. Not only does it identify the issue in plain language, it also provides a potential solution. An execution of the following query that utilizes the catalog view sys.transmission_queue revealed the same error message for each communication attempt: SELECT * FROM sys.transmission_queue; Seeing the situation as a learning opportunity I dove a bit deeper. Reviewing the database properties The owner of a specific database can be easily viewed by right-clicking the database in SQL Server Management Studio and selecting the "properties" option. The owner is listed on the "General" page of the properties screen. In my scenario, the database in the production server was created by Frank the DBA; therefore his server login appeared as the owner: "ServerName\Frank". While this is interesting information, it certainly doesn't tell me much in regard to the SID (security identifier) and its existence, or lack thereof, in the master database as the error suggested. I pulled together the following query to gather more interesting information: SELECT a.name , a.owner_sid , b.sid , b.name , b.type_desc FROM master.sys.databases a LEFT OUTER JOIN master.sys.server_principals b ON a.owner_sid = b.sid WHERE a.name not in ('master','tempdb','model','msdb'); This query also helped identify how many other user databases in the instance were experiencing the same issue. In this scenario, I saw that there were no matching SIDs in server_principals to the owner SID for my database. What login should be used as the database owner instead of Frank's? The system stored procedure sp_helplogins will provide a list of the valid logins that can be used. Here is an example of its use, revealing all available logins: EXEC sp_helplogins; Fixing a hole The error message stated that the recommended solution was to execute the ALTER AUTHORIZATION statement. The full statement for this scenario would appear as follows: ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON DATABASE:: [Database Name Here] TO [Login Name]; Another option is to execute the following statement using the sp_changedbowner system stored procedure; but please keep in mind that this stored procedure has been deprecated and will likely disappear in future versions of SQL Server: EXEC dbo.sp_changedbowner @loginname = [Login Name]; .And They Lived Happily Ever After Upon changing the database owner to an existing login and simulating the inner and cross database messaging the errors have ceased. More importantly, all messages sent through this feature now successfully complete their journey. I have added the ownership change to my restoration script for the development environment.

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Second Day of Data Integration Track at OpenWorld 2012

- by Doug Reid

0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Our second day at OpenWorld and the Data Integration Team was very active with customer meetings, product updates, product demonstrations, sessions, plus much more. If the volume of traffic by our demo pods is any indicator, this is a record year for attendance at OpenWorld. The DIS team have had tremendous number of people stop by our demo pods to learn about the latest product releases or to speak to one of our product managers. For Oracle GoldenGate, there has been a great deal of interest in Integrated Capture and the Oracle GoldenGate Monitor plug-in for Enterprise Manager. Our customer panels this year have been very well attended and on Tuesday we held the “Real World Operational Reporting with Oracle GoldenGate Customer Panel”. On this panel this year we had Michael Wells from Raymond James, Joy Mathew and Venki Govindarajan from Comcast, and Serkan Karatas from Turk Telekom. Our panelists have a great mix of experiences and all are passionate about using Oracle Data Integration products to solve very complex use cases. Each panelist was given a ten minute to overview their use of our product, followed by a barrage of questions from the audience. Michael Wells spoke about using Oracle GoldenGate for heterogeneous real time replication from HP (Tandem) NonStop to SQL Server and emphasized the need for using standard naming conventions for when customers configure GoldenGate, as the practices is immensely helpful when debugging a problem. Joy Mathew and Venkat Govindarajan from Comcast described how they have used GoldenGate for over a decade and their experiences of using the product for replicating data from HP nonstop to Terdata. Serkan Karatas from Turk Telekom dove into using Oracle GoldenGate and the value of archiving data in extremely large databases, which in Turk Telekoms case resulted in a 1 month ROI for the entire project. Thanks again to our panelist and audience participants for making the session interactive and informative. For Wednesday we have a number of sessions available to attendees plus two hands-on labs, which I have listed below. If you are unable to attend our hands-on lab for Oracle GoldenGate Veridata, it is available online at youtube.com. Sessions 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Best Practices for High Availability with Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Exadata -Moscone South - 102 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Customer Perspectives: Oracle Data Integrator -Marriott Marquis - Golden Gate C3 Oracle GoldenGate Case Study: Real-Time Operational Reporting Deployment at Oracle -Moscone West - 2003 Data Preparation and Ongoing Governance with the Oracle Enterprise Data Quality Platform -Moscone West - 3000 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM Best Practices for Conflict Detection and Resolution in Oracle GoldenGate for Active/Active -Moscone West - 3000 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM Tuning and Troubleshooting Oracle GoldenGate on Oracle Database -Moscone South - 102 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Hands-on Labs 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM Introduction to Oracle GoldenGate Veridata Marriott Marquis - Salon 1/2 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM Oracle Data Integrator and Oracle SOA Suite: Hands-on Lab -Marriott Marquis - Salon 1/2 If you are at OpenWorld please join us in these sessions. For a full review of data integration track at OpenWorld please see our Focus-On Document.

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OpenGL 3 and the Radeon HD 4850x2

- by rotard

A while ago, I picked up a copy of the OpenGL SuperBible fifth edition and slowly and painfully started teaching myself OpenGL the 3.3 way, after having been used to the 1.0 way from school way back when. Making things more challenging, I am primarily a .NET developer, so I was working in Mono with the OpenTK OpenGL wrapper. On my laptop, I put together a program that let the user walk around a simple landscape using a couple shaders that implemented per-vertex coloring and lighting and texture mapping. Everything was working brilliantly until I ran the same program on my desktop. Disaster! Nothing would render! I have chopped my program down to the point where the camera sits near the origin, pointing at the origin, and renders a square (technically, a triangle fan). The quad renders perfectly on my laptop, coloring, lighting, texturing and all, but the desktop renders a small distorted non-square quadrilateral that is colored incorrectly, not affected by the lights, and not textured. I suspect the graphics card is at fault, because I get the same result whether I am booted into Ubuntu 10.10 or Win XP. I did find that if I pare the vertex shader down to ONLY outputting the positional data and the fragment shader to ONLY outputting a solid color (white) the quad renders correctly. But as SOON as I start passing in color data (whether or not I use it in the fragment shader) the output from the vertex shader is distorted again. The shaders follow. I left the pre-existing code in, but commented out so you can get an idea what I was trying to do. I'm a noob at glsl so the code could probably be a lot better. My laptop is an old lenovo T61p with a Centrino (Core 2) Duo and an nVidia Quadro graphics card running Ubuntu 10.10 My desktop has an i7 with a Radeon HD 4850 x2 (single card, dual GPU) from Saphire dual booting into Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows XP. The problem occurs in both XP and Ubuntu. Can anyone see something wrong that I am missing? What is "special" about my HD 4850x2? string vertexShaderSource = @" #version 330 precision highp float; uniform mat4 projection_matrix; uniform mat4 modelview_matrix; //uniform mat4 normal_matrix; //uniform mat4 cmv_matrix; //Camera modelview. Light sources are transformed by this matrix. //uniform vec3 ambient_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_color; //uniform vec3 diffuse_direction; in vec4 in_position; in vec4 in_color; //in vec3 in_normal; //in vec3 in_tex_coords; out vec4 varyingColor; //out vec3 varyingTexCoords; void main(void) { //Get surface normal in eye coordinates //vec4 vEyeNormal = normal_matrix * vec4(in_normal, 0); //Get vertex position in eye coordinates //vec4 vPosition4 = modelview_matrix * vec4(in_position, 0); //vec3 vPosition3 = vPosition4.xyz / vPosition4.w; //Get vector to light source in eye coordinates //vec3 lightVecNormalized = normalize(diffuse_direction); //vec3 vLightDir = normalize((cmv_matrix * vec4(lightVecNormalized, 0)).xyz); //Dot product gives us diffuse intensity //float diff = max(0.0, dot(vEyeNormal.xyz, vLightDir.xyz)); //Multiply intensity by diffuse color, force alpha to 1.0 //varyingColor.xyz = in_color * diff * diffuse_color.xyz; varyingColor = in_color; //varyingTexCoords = in_tex_coords; gl_Position = projection_matrix * modelview_matrix * in_position; }"; string fragmentShaderSource = @" #version 330 //#extension GL_EXT_gpu_shader4 : enable precision highp float; //uniform sampler2DArray colorMap; //in vec4 varyingColor; //in vec3 varyingTexCoords; out vec4 out_frag_color; void main(void) { out_frag_color = vec4(1,1,1,1); //out_frag_color = varyingColor; //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, varyingTexCoords.st); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture(colorMap, vec3(varyingTexCoords.st, 0)); //out_frag_color = vec4(varyingColor, 1) * texture2DArray(colorMap, varyingTexCoords); }"; Note that in this code the color data is accepted but not actually used. The geometry is outputted the same (wrong) whether the fragment shader uses varyingColor or not. Only if I comment out the line varyingColor = in_color; does the geometry output correctly. Originally the shaders took in vec3 inputs, I only modified them to take vec4s while troubleshooting.

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What Counts for a DBA: Humility

- by drsql

In football (the American sort, naturally,) there are a select group of players who really hope to never have their names called during the game. They are members of the offensive line, and their job is to protect other players so they can deliver the ball to the goal to score points. When you do hear their name called, it is usually because they made a mistake and the player that they were supposed to protect ended up flat on his back admiring the clouds in the sky instead of advancing towards the goal to scoring point. Even on the rare occasion their name is called for a good reason, it is usually because they were making up for a teammate who had made a mistake and they covered up for them. The role of offensive lineman is a very good analogy for the role of the admin DBA. As a DBA, you are called on to be barely visible and rarely heard, protecting the company data assets tenaciously, even though the enemies to our craft surround us on all sides:. Developers: Cries of ‘foul!’ often ensue when the DBA says that they want data integrity to be stringently enforced and that documentation is needed so they can support systems, mostly because every error occurrence in the enterprise will be initially blamed on the database and fall to the DBA to troubleshoot. Insisting too loudly may bring those cries of ‘foul’ that somewhat remind you of when your 2 year old daughter didn't want to go to bed. The result of this petulance is that the next "enemy" gets involved. Managers: The concerns that motivate DBAs to argue will not excite the kind of manager who gets his technical knowledge from a glossy magazine filled with buzzwords, charts, and pretty pictures. However, the other programmers in the organization will tickle the buzzword void with a stream of new-sounding ideas and technologies constantly, along with warnings that if we did care about data integrity and document things, the budget would explode! In contrast, the arguments for integrity of data and supportability tend to be about as exciting as watching grass grow, and far too many manager types seem to prefer to smoke it than watch it. Packaged Applications: The DBA is rarely given a chance to review a new application that is being demonstrated for the enterprise, and rarer still is the DBA that gets a veto of an application because the database it uses has clearly been created by an architect that won't read a data modeling book because he is already married. More often than not this leads to hours of work for the DBA trying to performance-tune a database with a menagerie of rules that must be followed to stay within the application support agreement, such as no changing indexes on a third party schema even though there are 10 billion rows instead of the 10 thousand when the system was last optimized. Hardware Failures: Physical disks, networking devices, memory, and backup devices all come with a measure known as ‘mean time before failure’ and it is never listed in centuries or eons. More like years, and the term ‘mean’ indicates that half of the devices are expected to fail before that, which by my calendar means any hour of any day that it wants to fail it will. But the DBA sucks it up and does the task at hand with a humility that makes them nearly invisible to all but the most observant person in the organization. The best DBAs I know are so proactive in their relentless pursuit of perfection that they detect many of the bugs (which they seldom caused) in the system well before they become a problem. In the end the DBA gets noticed for one of same two reasons as the offensive lineman. You make a mistake, like dropping a critical production database that had never been backed up; or when a system crashes for any reason whatsoever and they are on the spot with troubleshooting and system restoration plans that have been well thought out, tested, and tested again. Not because there is any glory in it, but because it is what they do. Note: The characteristics of the professions referred to in this blog are meant to be overstated stereotypes for humorous effect, and even some DBAs aren't quite this perfect. If you are reading this far and haven’t hand written a 10 page flaming comment about how you are a _______ and you aren’t like this, that is awesome. Not every situation applies to everyone, but if you have never worked with a bad packaged app, a magazine trained manager, programmers that aren’t team players, or hardware that occasionally failed, relax and go have a unicorn sandwich before you wake up.

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GRUB is not Booting Correctly

- by msknapp

I have a PC with three hard disks. Windows 7 is installed on the first, Ubuntu 14.04 is installed on the third. After I re-booted, it went straight to Windows 7. So I tried explicitly telling my PC to boot using the third hard disk, but that just takes me to the grub rescue prompt. I followed Scott Severence's instructions here to try and recover. Essentially, I updated grub, reinstalled grub, and then updated it again. After re-booting, absolutely nothing had changed. So instead I tried using the boot-repair tool. In the past it had failed for me, saying that I had programs running and it could not unmount drives, when I was running nothing. I never figured out how to solve that problem, but it went away when I bought another hard drive and used that for my Ubuntu installation, I don't know why. In any case, I ran the boot-repair tool and this time it said it was successful. First time for everything right? I re-booted, only to be taken straight to the grub rescue prompt. So I changed my BIOS settings to use the third hard disk for boot start up. That is the same hard drive where I have Ubuntu and grub installed, and the same one that the grub-repair tool told me to use. It still took me straight to the grub rescue prompt. So I went from not being able to boot Ubuntu, to not being able to boot either OS installed on my system. Thanks boot-repair! Boot repair gave me this URL for future troubleshooting: http://paste.ubuntu.com/8131669 When I try to boot from the third hard disk, this is my console: Loading Operating System ... error: attempt to read or write outside of disk 'hd0'. Entering rescue mode... grub rescue> grub rescue> set cmdpath=(hd0) prefix=(hd0,gpt2)/boot/grub root=hd0,gpt2 grub rescue> ls (hd0) (hd0,gpt3) (hd0,gpt2) (hd0,gpt1) (hd1) (hd2) (hd2,gpt2) (hd2,gpt1) (hd3) Those values look correct to me. I have also experimented with changing some of those values, but 'insmod normal' always throws the same error. Somebody please tell me how to fix this. I have tried everything, reinstalling grub, and running boot-repair. =========================== Update: I think the problem might be that the ubuntu installer did not partition my hard disk correctly. I booted from live USB and then launched gparted and looked at how it partitioned things. This is what gparted says: Partition, File System, Size, Used, Unused, Flags /dev/sda1 (!), unknown, 1.00 MiB, ---, ---, bios_grub /dev/sda2, ext4, 2.71 TiB, 47.30 GiB, 2.67 TiB, /dev/sda3, linux-swap, 16.00 GiB, 0.00 B, 16.00 GiB, So that first line looks problematic. It is supposed to be the /boot partition. However, it was given only 1 MiB? I am assuming that MiB is actually supposed to mean megabyte, no idea why that 'i' is there. It also says the file system is unknown. I read the answer by andrew here, and he says he had to do a custom install, explicitly configuring the boot partition. So I think that maybe Ubuntu's installer has a bug in it, where it does not set up the boot partition correctly if you are not installing on the first hard disk in your computer. I am going to try reinstalling with a custom partition scheme. I read elsewhere (askubuntu won't let me post another link) that I don't even need a /boot partition any more. So instead of following Andrew's instructions ver batim, I'm first going to try having just two partitions: one for /, and another for my 16GB swap space. Both as primary partitions. The first will be formatted as ext4. If that doesn't work, I may try again using /boot. ======================== So I did my custom install with no /boot partition, and it did not work. When I rebooted, I had an error message saying that some address did not exist. So for the hundredth time, I booted from the live USB, and ran boot-repair. Now I get this message GPT detected. Please create a BIOS-Boot partition (>1MB, unformatted filesystem, bios_grub flag). This can be performed via tools such as Gparted. Then try again. I feel like I'm running in circles and nobody will help me.

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Common reasons for the ‘Sys is undefined’ error in ASP.NET Ajax applications

In this blog I will try to summarize the most common reasons for getting the famous 'Sys is undefined' error when running an Ajax enabled web site or application (there are almost one milion results on Google for that phrase). Where does it come from? In every Ajax web pages source you will see a code like this: <script type="text/javascript"> //<![CDATA[ Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager._initialize('ScriptManager1', document.getElementById('form1')); Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance()._updateControls([], [], [], 90); //]]> </script> This is the initialization script of the ScriptManager. So, if for some reason the Sys namespace is not available when the code executes you get the Sys is undefined error. Here are the most common reasons and solutions for that problem: 1. The error occurs when you have added a control from RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX, but your application is not configured to use ASP.NET AJAX. For example, in VS 2005 you created a new Blank Site instead of a new Ajax-Enabled Web Site and the Sys is undefined message pops up. To fix it you need to follow the steps described at Configuring ASP.NET Ajax article (check the topic called Adding ASP.NET AJAX Configuration Elements to an Existing Web Site) or simply create the Ajax-Enabled Web Site. You can also check my other blog post on the matter: Visual Studio 2008: Where is the new ASP.NET Ajax-Enabled Web Site template? 2. Authentication - as the website denies access to all pages to unauthorized users, access to the Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd handler is unauthorized (this is the default handler of RadScriptManager). This causes the handler to serve the content of the login page instead of the combined scripts, hence the error. To solve it - add a <location> section to the application configuration file to allow access to Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd to all users, like: <configuration> ... <location path="Telerik.Web.UI.WebResource.axd"> <system.web> <authorization> <allow users="*"/> </authorization> </system.web> </location> ... </configuration> Note that the access to the standard ScriptResource.axd and WebResource.axd is automatically allowed for all users (authenticated and unauthenticated), so if you use the ScriptManager instead of RadScriptManager - you will not face this problem. The authentication problem does not manifest when you disable script combining or use the CDN. Adding the above configuration section will make it work with RadScriptManagers combined script. 3. The IE6 browser fails to load the compressed script. The problem does not appear in any other browser. There is a well known bug in the older versions of IE6 which lose the first 2,048 bytes of data that are sent back from a Web server that uses HTTP compression. Latest versions of RadScriptManager does not compress the output at all if the client is IE6, but in the previous versions you need to manually disable the output compression to prevent the error. So, if you get the Sys is undefined error in IE6 - update to the latest version of RadControls or simply disable the output compression. 4. Requests to the *.axd files returns Error Code 404 - Not Found. This could be fixed easily: Check in the IIS management console that the .axd extension (the default HTTP handler extension) is allowed: Also check if the Verify if file exists checkbox is unchecked (click on the Edit button appearing in the previous screenshot to check). More information can be found in our troubleshooting article and from the ASP.NET QA team blog post 5. The virtual directory in IIS is not marked as Web Application. Converting it to Web Application should fix the problem. 6. Check for the <xhtmlConformance mode="Legacy"/> option in your web.config and remove it. It would be rather rare to become a victim of this exact case, but still have it in mind. Scott Guthrie describes it in more details In the above points I mentioned several times the terms web resources, javascript output, compressed script. If you want to find out more about these please see the Web Resources Demystified series of my friend and colleague Atanas Korchev I hope that one of the above solutions will help you get rid of the Sys is undefined error. Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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How to fix Ubuntu 12.04.3 boot to black screen full of errors in white text, after upgrading on dell inspiron 1501

- by Ibuntu

I am running a Dell Inspiron 1501 I use Linux only. No Microsoft or Apple operating systems (or really anything closed-source). I've only been using Linux for a little over a year but I'm starting to gain a comfortable level of familiarity with the system and terminology. I've been having some issues with Quantel Quetzal and Raring Ringtail, especially with older hardware, so I opted to install Ubuntu 12.04.3 Precise Pangolin on the Inspiron 1501. I checked my MD5 sum after downloading my ISO and all was good. I have in fact used this iso/dvd to install Precise Pangolin successfully on a few other systems (some of which are even older than this laptop). Install goes fine. The wireless card doesn't work out of the box but this is a known issue which is fairly easy to fix. So, first thing I did was open up a terminal and run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade which, part way through, crashed (I assume lightdm and possibly X) and took me to a black screen filled with white lines of text that were either errors or just the ouputs of commands. The reason I say that is because I was unable to gleam any useful information from the output on the screen. I did take a picture however and will post a link. After that, every time I boot the system it goes right to that black screen posting all the error messages or output in white text. I never get a purple Ubuntu splash, so from what I can tell after reading this wiki article: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/BlankScreen That means that after the kernel is selected, it is unable to correctly implement the settings it needs. If the purple splash never shows, the frame buffer was never set correctly right? This leads me to believe that it could be a kernel issue? The wiki suggested to try and pinpoint the issue by rolling back kernels until I find one that works. Is this my best option? I think I'm going to give it a try anyways and will let everyone know if I am able to solve the issue this way. I have since done a few reinstalls and some trouble-shooting including a couple hours scouring the net for anyone with any kind of similar issue. Most of the issues I could find involved getting a black screen after login and none of them said anything about any information output on this black screen. My reinstalls have taught me that there is no issue updating, but as soon as I run sudo apt-get upgrade my system goes to the black screen and every time I boot it up it does the same thing. The only way to fix is by reinstall. I never get any ability to log in. After a hard power off to the laptop (because I cannot use ctrl+alt+del to reboot) when it boots again it goes to the grub boot menu and I can select between regular boot, recovery mode and the two memtest options. I never tried the memtest options but the other two both lead to the same black screen. Some people having a black/blank screen issue claim to have fixed it by using 12.10 or 13.04 but I believe they were having a different issue where they got a black/blank screen after logging in. I think I will still give these images a try, but mostly figured I would just wait another day or two for 13.10. Other things I figured I would try from the following three articles: After logging in, there's a black screen and my cursor, nothing else! in Ubuntu 12.10 Black Screen on Login After Upgrading to 12.04 I can't get to the login screen include opening a terminal using ctrl+alt+f1 and trying a variety of reseting unity, x settings, lightdm (or switching to gdm); but I doubt this will work or that I will even be able to access a terminal. I'm pretty sure the whole system is stuck after it loads the last line on the black screen. I will try these things and post more information when I have. Hopefully someone has an idea in the meantime and I will keep checking back trying to find a solution. Thank you. Here are 3 different pictures of the error message. I had to take with my phone: http://ubuntuone.com/album/0TBBkxmVajJIQQtoN9mVdN

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Adventures in Windows 8: Solving activation errors

- by Laurent Bugnion

Note: I tagged this article with “MVVM” because I got a few support requests for MVVM Light regarding this exact issue. In fact it is a Windows 8 issue and has nothing to do with MVVM Light per se… Sometimes when you work on a Windows 8 app, you will get a very annoying issue when starting the app. In that case, the app doesn’t not even start past the Splash screen. Putting a breakpoint in App.xaml.cs doesn’t help because the app doesn’t even reach that point! So what exactly is happening? Well when a Windows 8 app starts, the system is performing a few check first. One of the checks, for instance, is to see if an app with the same package ID is already available. The package ID is a unique value set in the package manifest. In the Solution Explorer, double click on Package.appxmanifest. This opens the manifest in a special editor Click on the Packaging tab See the GUID under Package Name. This is the unique ID I am talking about. If there is a conflict (i.e. if an app is already installed with the exact same ID), Windows will warm the user that the app is already installed. However when you are in the process of developing an app, you install and uninstall the same app many many times (every time that you start in Visual Studio), and sometimes some issues arise, for instance failing to uninstall the app before starting the new instance of the same app. First step if you get such an error When the application fails to start past the splash screen, the first step is to identify what kind of error happened. In my experience the “already installed” is by far the most frequent (in fact I never had another such error), but it can be something else. An annoying thing is that the popup that shows the error is usually started below the Windows 8 app, and so you don’t even see it! This is especially true if you run this in the Simulator. In that case, do the following: Press on the Simulator’s home button, then press on the Desktop tile on the Start menu. The error popup should be shown on the desktop. If your applications runs on the Local machine, you also do the same and press the Windows button, and then from the Start menu press the Desktop tile. Deployment error in Studio Sometimes the same error causes Visual Studio to fail launching the application at all with a deployment error. This is a better case, because at least it is clear that there is an issue. In that case, write down the code that is shown in the Error window (for instance 0x80073D05 in the example below). Once you have the error code, go to the “Troubleshooting packaging, deployment, and query of Windows Store apps” page and look up the code in question. In my case, the error was “ERROR_DELETING_EXISTING_APPLICATIONDATA_STORE_FAILED”, “An error occurred while deleting the package's previously existing application data.” Solving the “ERROR_DELETING_EXISTING_APPLICATIONDATA_STORE_FAILED” issue Update: Before trying the below, you can also try the simple steps: Exit Visual Studio Go to the Start menu Locate your app’s tile. It should be visible in the Start menu directly, towards the far end on the right. Right click the tile and select Uninstall from the App Bar. Restart Visual Studio and try again. Sometimes it helps. If it doesn’t, then try the following: In order to solve the case where Windows, for any reason, fails to delete the existing application before starting the new instance, follow the steps: Open the Package.appxmanifest in Visual Studio Open the Packaging tab. Change the Package name. For tests you can just try to change the last character of the GUID, though I would recommend creating a brand new GUID. Press Start Type GUID Start the GUID Generator application Select Registry Format Press Copy. Paste the new GUID in place of the Package Name in Visual Studio Important: don’t forget to remove the curly brackets at the beginning and at the end of the newly pasted GUID. Then you just have to cross your fingers and start the application again… If it works, celebrate. if it doesn’t work… well at this point I am not sure so good luck with that ;) Happy coding, Laurent Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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R12.0 Cash Management Consolidated Patch Collection (CPC) And R12.1 Cash Management Recommended Patch Collection (RPC)

- by user793553

If you have Oracle E-Business Suite's Cash Management (CE) application installed, you'll want to be sure to install the latest CPC (Consolidated Patch Collection) if you are using a R12.0 version of the apps, or the latest RPC (Recommended Patch Collection) for the R12.1 version of the apps. These collections give you all the fixes currently available for known issues in the specified versions of the application, including all of the latest Root Cause Analysis Fixes (RCAs)! What is an "RPC" (for R12.1 users)? Since the release of 12.1, a number of recommended patches for Oracle Cash Management have been made available as standalone patches to help address important business process issues. Adoption of these patches was highly recommended at the time, but not always implemented, so to further facilitate adoption of these patches, Oracle consolidated them into product-specific Recommended Patch Collections (RPCs) - a collection of recommended patches. They were created by Oracle Development with the following goals in mind: Stability: To address data integrity issues that have been identified by Oracle Development and Oracle Software Support as having the potential to interfere with the normal completion of important business processes (such as, period close, etc.). Root Cause Fixes (RCAs): To make available root cause fixes for known data integrity issues. Compact: To keep the file footprint as small as possible to help facilitate the install process and minimize testing. Granular: To compile the collection of patches based on functional areas, allowing a customer to apply multiple RPCs at once, or in phases (based on individual needs and goals). Where to start ALL R12 Cash Management users (R12.0 and R12.1 users) should start with the following Note on My Oracle Support (MOS): Doc ID 1367845.1: R12: Cash Management Recommended Patch Collections It's a great place for important implementation information about both sets of critical patch collections! For R12.1x users R12.1 users should also take a look at the documents below for even more information about the RPC for the R12.1.x versions of the Cash Management application, and other related available RPCs: Note Number Title 1489997.1 Master Troubleshooting Guide for CE: Reconciliation & Clearing [VIDEO] 954704.1 EBS: R12.1 Oracle Financials Recommended Patch Collections (RPCs) 1316506.1 R12: Oracle CE: Upgrading from R11i to R12.1: Latest Recommended Patches Patch Wizard Utility While a patch may contain several hundred files, the impact on your system may actually be minimal. Patches contain hard prerequisites that are intended to make a patch work on a very low code baseline. The Patch Wizard Utility will give you a detailed analysis of the patch’s impact on your instance BEFORE it’s applied, so you’ll know exactly what to expect from the application. Please refer to Doc ID 976188.1 for more information on this important utility

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Configuring Cisco 877W router from scratch for DHCP, WiFi, ADSL2+, NAT

- by David M Williams

Hi all, I apologise if this is a BIG question but I am quite lost with the Cisco IOS. I know what I want to achieve just not how to do it :( I have a Cisco 877W router with 4 FastEthernet interfaces, 1 ATM interface and 1 802.11 Radio. I want to set it up for a small network and am trying to construct a configuration below. I was using Google to try and flesh it out but I think I need help and guidance from actual experts! If it helps, output from show ver says Cisco IOS software, C870 software (C870-ADVSECURITYK9-M), version 12.4(4)T7, release software (fc1) ROM: System bootstrap, version 12.3(8r)YI4, release software Here's what I have so far, which hopefully outlines clearly enough what I am wanting to do. The bits in angle brackets are placeholders (eg the secret password). ! ! Set router hostname ! hostname Shazam ! ! Set usernames and passwords ! username david privilege 15 secret 0 <PASSWORD> enable secret <SECRETPASSWORD> ! ! Configure SSH and telnet access ! line vty 0 4 privilege level 15 login local transport input telnet ssh ! ! Local logging ! logging buffered 51200 warning ! ! Set date and time for NSW, Australia (GMT +10h) ! ! ! Set router IP address to 192.168.1.1 on FastEthernet0 port ! interface FastEthernet0 ip address 192.168.1.1 255.255.255.0 no shut ip nat inside ! ! Forward any unknown DNS requests to Google ! ip dns server ip name-server 8.8.8.8 ip name-server 8.8.4.4 ! ! Set up DHCP ! DHCP pool covers 192.168.1.100 - .199 ! Set gateway and DNS server to be the router, ie 192.168.1.1 ! service dhcp ip routing ip dhcp excluded-address 192.168.1.1 192.168.1.99 ip dhcp excluded-address 192.168.1.200 192.168.1.255 ip dhcp pool <DHCPPOOLNAME> network 192.168.1.0 255.255.255.0 default-router 192.168.1.1 dns-server 192.168.1.1 lease 7 ! ! DHCP reservations ! ! Assign IP address 192.168.1.105 to MAC address 00-21-5D-2F-58-04 ! ! Configure ADSL2 connection details ! interface atm dsl operating-mode adsl2+ ! ! Set up NAT rules ! ! Forward port 35394 to 192.168.1.105 ! ! Set up WiFi ! ! SSID visible, WPA2 security, Pre-shared key I'm hoping most of this is boiler-plate stuff to you guys. I'm keen to not just get a working script but to actually understand it also. Unfortunately, I'm finding the Cisco reference material online very complex. Thank you!

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Debian, 6rd tunnel, and connection troubles

- by Chris B

Long story short I am having issues with IPv6 using a 6rd tunnel with my ISP, charter business. They offer a 6rd tunnel that I think I have properly set up, but the server doesn’t reply to every ipv6 request. When the server has the network interfaces idle with no traffic for about 10 minutes, then IPv6 stops accepting inbound connections. to re-allow it, I must go into the server, and make it do a outbound ipv6 connection (normally a ping) to start it back up. Whats weird though i that if I run iptraf when its not working, it still shows a inbound ipv6 packet… the server is just not replying, and I can’t figure out why. Also, if I try to access my server over IPv6 from a house about 1 mile away on the same ISP, it is never able to connect. it always times out, but again the iptraf shows a ipv6 inbound packet. Again, it just does not reply. To test if my server is accessible through IPv6 I always have to use my vzw 4g phone (they use IPv6) or ipv6proxy dot net. Here is all of the configuration information my ISP gives on there tunnel server: 6rd Prefix = 2602:100::/32 Border Relay Address = 68.114.165.1 6rd prefix length = 32 IPv4 mask length = 0 Here is my /etc/network/interfaces for ipv6 (used x's to block real addresses) auto charterv6 iface charterv6 inet6 v4tunnel address 2602:100:189f:xxxx::1 netmask 32 ttl 64 gateway ::68.114.165.1 endpoint 68.114.165.1 local 24.159.218.xxx up ip link set mtu 1280 dev charterv6 here is my iptables config filter :INPUT DROP [0:0] :fail2ban-ssh – [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :FORWARD DROP [0:0] :hold – [0:0] -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 22 -j fail2ban-ssh -A INPUT -m state —state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport -j ACCEPT —dports 80,443,25,465,110,995,143,993,587,465,22 -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 10000 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 5900:5910 -j ACCEPT -A fail2ban-ssh -j RETURN -A INPUT -p icmp -j ACCEPT COMMIT and last here is my ip6tables firewall config filter :INPUT DROP [1653:339023] :FORWARD DROP [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [60141:13757903] :hold – [0:0] -A INPUT -m state —state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m multiport —dports 80,443,25,465,110,995,143,993,587,465,22 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 10000 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp —dport 5900:5910 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p ipv6-icmp -j ACCEPT COMMIT So Summary: 1.iptraf always shows IPv6 traffic, so its always making it to the server 2.server stops replying on ipv6 after no traffic for awhile (10 minutesish) until a outbound connection is made, then the process repeats. 3.server is NEVER accessable vi same ISP (yet iptraf still shows ipv6 request) Notes: When I try to access it from the same ISP from across town, even with iptables and ip6tables allowing ALL inbound traffic, this is what iptraf shows. IPv6 (92 bytes) from 97.92.18.xxx to 24.159.218.xxx on eth0 ICMP dest unrch (port) (120 bytes) from 24.159.218.xxx to 97.92.18.xxx on eth1 its strange, like its trying to forward to LAN? (eth1 is LAN, eth0 is WAN) even with the IPv6 address being set in the hosts file to the servers domain name. With iptables set up normally with the above configurations it only says this: IPv6 (100 bytes) from 97.92.18.xxx to 24.159.218.xxx on eth0 Im REALLY stuck on this, and any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

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PPPTP VPN from Ubuntu cannot connect

- by Andrea Polci

I'm trying to configure under Linux (Kubuntu 9.10) a VPN I already use from Windows. I installed the network-manager-pptp package and added the vpn under Network Manager. These are the parameter under "advanced" button: Authentication Methods: PAP, CHAP, MSCHAP, SMCHAP2, EAP (I tried also with MSCHAP and MSCHAP2 only) Use MPPE Encryption: yes Crypto: Any Use stateful encryption: no Compression: Allow BSD compression: yes Allow Deflate compression: yes Allow TCP header compression: yes Send PPP echo packets: no When I try to connnect it doesn't work and this is what I get in the system log: 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> Starting VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp'... 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp' started (org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp), PID 4931 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN service 'org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.pptp' just appeared, activating connections 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] Plugin /usr/lib/pppd/2.4.5//nm-pptp-pppd-plugin.so loaded. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin state changed: 3 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] pppd 2.4.5 started by root, uid 0 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN connection 'MYVPN' (Connect) reply received. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices added (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0) 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena NetworkManager SCPlugin-Ifupdown: device added (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0): no ifupdown configuration found. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] Using interface ppp0 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pppd[4932] Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/2 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4934] nm-pptp-service-4931 log[main:pptp.c:314]: The synchronous pptp option is NOT activated 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 7 'Outgoing-Call-Request' 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:858]: Received Outgoing Call Reply. 2010-04-08 13:53:47 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:897]: Outgoing call established (call ID 1, peer's call ID 14800). 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] CHAP authentication succeeded 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] CHAP authentication succeeded 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] LCP terminated by peer 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:929]: Call disconnect notification received (call id 14800) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_disp:pptp_ctrl.c:788]: Received Stop Control Connection Request. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 4 'Stop-Control-Connection-Reply' 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[callmgr_main:pptp_callmgr.c:258]: Closing connection (shutdown) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 12 'Call-Clear-Request' 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[callmgr_main:pptp_callmgr.c:258]: Closing connection (shutdown) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[ctrlp_rep:pptp_ctrl.c:251]: Sent control packet type is 12 'Call-Clear-Request' 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pptp[4927] nm-pptp-service-4918 log[call_callback:pptp_callmgr.c:79]: Closing connection (call state) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] Modem hangup 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] Connection terminated. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin failed: 1 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager SCPlugin-Ifupdown: devices removed (path: /sys/devices/virtual/net/ppp0, iface: ppp0) 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena pppd[4932] Exit. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin failed: 1 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin state changed: 6 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> VPN plugin state change reason: 0 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <WARN> connection_state_changed(): Could not process the request because no VPN connection was active. 2010-04-08 13:53:48 pcelena NetworkManager <info> Policy set 'Auto eth0' (eth0) as default for routing and DNS. 2010-04-08 13:54:01 pcelena NetworkManager <debug> [1270727641.001390] ensure_killed(): waiting for vpn service pid 4931 to exit 2010-04-08 13:54:01 pcelena NetworkManager <debug> [1270727641.001479] ensure_killed(): vpn service pid 4931 cleaned up Does anyone has suggestion on what can be the problem and how to make it work?

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Does likewise-open > version 5.4 contain CIFS support?

- by Ben Andken

I'm trying to get the CIFS server working in likewise-open. I've found this set of instructions and everything seems to work until I try to connect ([url]http://www.likewise.com/resources/documentation_library/manuals/cifs/likewise-cifs-smb-file-server-guide.html#id2765992):[/url] 1.6. Build and Configure a Standalone Likewise-CIFS Server This section demonstrates how to build and configure a standalone instance of Likewise-CIFS from the command line. The following procedure assumes that you want to set up Likewise-CIFS on a Linux server to share files with Windows computers in a network without Active Directory. This procedure also assumes you know how to build Linux applications from their source code and then install them. Download Likewise-CIFS from its open source git location: $ git clone git://git.likewiseopen.org/ Download, build, and install the following tools. The tools listed are known to work, but earlier or later versions might work as well. Also, instead of downloading the tools, you might be able to install them on your platform with apt-get or some other means. http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.65.tar.gz http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.9.6.tar.gz http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.2.6a.tar.gz http://pkgconfig.freedesktop.org/releases/pkg-config-0.23.tar.gz gcc --version 3.x or greater Build Likewise-CIFS: $ cd likewise-open $ build/mkcomp --debug all Install Likewise-CIFS: $ sudo su $ cd staging/install-root $ tar cf - . | (cd / && tar xvf -) Make sure Samba is not running: $ /etc/init.d/smb stop Make sure SELinux is either disabled or set to permissive. Make sure the ports required by Likewise are open. For a list of ports that Likewise uses, see the Likewise Open Installation and Administration Guide. Configure Likewise Open: $ /etc/init.d/lwsmd start $ for i in /etc/likewise/*.reg; do /opt/likewise/bin/lwregshell upgrade $i; done $ /etc/init.d/lwsmd stop $ /etc/init.d/lwsmd start $ /opt/likewise/bin/lwsm start srvsvc $ /opt/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli configure --enable nsswitch Add a user account to the local Likewise provider database. In the following example, substitute the account name that you want for newuser. $ /opt/likewise/bin/lw-add-user --home /home/newuser --shell /bin/bash newuser Successfully added user newuser Enable the user and set the password: $ /opt/likewise/bin/lw-mod-user --enable-user --set-password newuser New Password: ********** Successfully modified user newuser Look up new user's identity as follows. Substitute the value from the command hostname -s for the hostname. Keep in mind that Likewise truncates a hostname longer than 15 characters to the first 15 characters of the string. % id hostname\\newuser uid=2000(HOSTNAME\newuser) gid=1800(HOSTNAME\Likewise Users) groups=1800(HOSTNAME\Likewise Users) context=system_u:system_r:unconfined_t:s0 Make a CIFS directory for the user: mkdir /lwcifs/newuser chown 2000:1800 /lwcifs/newuser From a Windows computer, map the Likewise-CIFS drive share: Computer->Map Network Drive... Folder: \\IP_hostname\c$ Click "Finish" Username: hostname\newuser Password: user_password The last step fails when I try to connect. I've tried with Windows XP Pro and Windows 7 Pro. The rest of the directions only appear to work for version 5.4 (the one that shipped with 10.04). For 12.04, version 6.1 is the only one available and it doesn't appear to have the srvsvc module mentioned in these instructions. Is CIFS support dropped in the 6.1 version of likewise-open?

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