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Cross-browser incompatibility, how to put the button "????????????????" back into the big box?

- by Steven

If you visit http://www.tenxian.com/jp/common/signup.php? with Firefox, you will find that the button "????????????????" is out of the box; if you access this web page with IE, then there is no problem. How to fix this problem(put "????????????????" back into the box in Firefox)?

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SQL SERVER – Securing TRUNCATE Permissions in SQL Server

- by pinaldave

Download the Script of this article from here. On December 11, 2010, Vinod Kumar, a Databases & BI technology evangelist from Microsoft Corporation, graced Ahmedabad by spending some time with the Community during the Community Tech Days (CTD) event. As he was running through a few demos, Vinod asked the audience one of the most fundamental and common interview questions – “What is the difference between a DELETE and TRUNCATE?“ Ahmedabad SQL Server User Group Expert Nakul Vachhrajani has come up with excellent solutions of the same. I must congratulate Nakul for this excellent solution and as a encouragement to User Group member, I am publishing the same article over here. Nakul Vachhrajani is a Software Specialist and systems development professional with Patni Computer Systems Limited. He has functional experience spanning legacy code deprecation, system design, documentation, development, implementation, testing, maintenance and support of complex systems, providing business intelligence solutions, database administration, performance tuning, optimization, product management, release engineering, process definition and implementation. He has comprehensive grasp on Database Administration, Development and Implementation with MS SQL Server and C, C++, Visual C++/C#. He has about 6 years of total experience in information technology. Nakul is an member of the Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Groups, and actively contributes to the community by actively participating in multiple forums and websites like SQLAuthority.com, BeyondRelational.com, SQLServerCentral.com and many others. Please note: The opinions expressed herein are Nakul own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. All data from everywhere here on Earth go through a series of four distinct operations, identified by the words: CREATE, READ, UPDATE and DELETE, or simply, CRUD. Putting in Microsoft SQL Server terms, is the process goes like this: INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE and DELETE/TRUNCATE. Quite a few interesting responses were received and evaluated live during the session. To summarize them, the most important similarity that came out was that both DELETE and TRUNCATE participate in transactions. The major differences (not all) that came out of the exercise were: DELETE: DELETE supports a WHERE clause DELETE removes rows from a table, row-by-row Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it acquires a row-level lock Depending upon the recovery model of the database, DELETE is a fully-logged operation. Because DELETE moves row-by-row, it can fire off triggers TRUNCATE: TRUNCATE does not support a WHERE clause TRUNCATE works by directly removing the individual data pages of a table TRUNCATE directly occupies a table-level lock. (Because a lock is acquired, and because TRUNCATE can also participate in a transaction, it has to be a logged operation) TRUNCATE is, therefore, a minimally-logged operation; again, this depends upon the recovery model of the database Triggers are not fired when TRUNCATE is used (because individual row deletions are not logged) Finally, Vinod popped the big homework question that must be critically analyzed: “We know that we can restrict a DELETE operation to a particular user, but how can we restrict the TRUNCATE operation to a particular user?” After returning home and having a nice cup of coffee, I noticed that my gray cells immediately started to work. Below was the result of my research. As what is always said, the devil is in the details. Upon looking at the Permissions section for the TRUNCATE statement in Books On Line, the following jumps right out: “The minimum permission required is ALTER on table_name. TRUNCATE TABLE permissions default to the table owner, members of the sysadmin fixed server role, and the db_owner and db_ddladmin fixed database roles, and are not transferable. However, you can incorporate the TRUNCATE TABLE statement within a module, such as a stored procedure, and grant appropriate permissions to the module using the EXECUTE AS clause.“ Now, what does this mean? Unlike DELETE, one cannot directly assign permissions to a user/set of users allowing or revoking TRUNCATE rights. However, there is a way to circumvent this. It is important to recall that in Microsoft SQL Server, database engine security surrounds the concept of a “securable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). urable”, which is any object like a table, stored procedure, trigger, etc. Rights are assigned to a principal on a securable. Refer to the image below (taken from the SQL Server Books On Line). SETTING UP THE ENVIRONMENT – (01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. By the end of this demo, one will be able to do all the CRUD operations, except the TRUNCATE, and the other will only be able to execute the TRUNCATE. All you will need for this test is any edition of SQL Server 2008. (With minor changes, these scripts can be made to work with SQL 2005.) We begin by creating the following: 1. A test database 2. Two database roles: associated logins and users 3. Switch over to the test database and create a test table. Then, add some data into it. I am using row constructors, which is new to SQL 2008. Creating the modules that will be used to enforce permissions 1. We have already created one of the modules that we will be assigning permissions to. That module is the table: TruncatePermissionsTest 2. We will now create two stored procedures; one is for the DELETE operation and the other for the TRUNCATE operation. Please note that for all practical purposes, the end result is the same – all data from the table TruncatePermissionsTest is removed Assigning the permissions Now comes the most important part of the demonstration – assigning permissions. A permissions matrix can be worked out as under: To apply the security rights, we use the GRANT and DENY clauses, as under: That’s it! We are now ready for our big test! THE TEST (01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql) Script Provided at the end of the article. I will now need two separate SSMS connections, one with the login AllowedTruncate and the other with the login RestrictedTruncate. Running the test is simple; all that’s required is to run through the script – 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql. What I will demonstrate here via screen-shots is the behavior of SQL Server when logged in as the AllowedTruncate user. There are a few other combinations than what are highlighted here. I will leave the reader the right to explore the behavior of the RestrictedTruncate user and these additional scenarios, as a form of self-study. 1. Testing SELECT permissions 2. Testing TRUNCATE permissions (Remember, “deny by default”?) 3. Trying to circumvent security by trying to TRUNCATE the table using the stored procedure Hence, we have now proved that a user can indeed be assigned permissions to specifically assign TRUNCATE permissions. I also hope that the above has sparked curiosity towards putting some security around the probably “destructive” operations of DELETE and TRUNCATE. I would like to wish each and every one of the readers a very happy and secure time with Microsoft SQL Server. (Please find the scripts – 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql and 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql that have been used in this demonstration. Please note that these scripts contain purely test-level code only. These scripts must not, at any cost, be used in the reader’s production environments). 01A_Truncate Table Permissions.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use : 1. Run through, step-by-step through the sequence till Step 08 to create a test database 2. Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows, one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and the other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Come back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications : December 13, 2010 - NAV - Updated to add a security matrix and improve code readability when applying security December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 01: Create a new test database CREATE DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 02: Add roles and users to demonstrate the security of the Truncate operation -- 2a. Create the new roles CREATE ROLE AllowedTruncateRole; GO CREATE ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole; GO -- 2b. Create new logins CREATE LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO CREATE LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH PASSWORD = 'truncate@2010', CHECK_POLICY = ON GO -- 2c. Create new Users using the roles and logins created aboave CREATE USER TruncateUser FOR LOGIN AllowedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO CREATE USER NoTruncateUser FOR LOGIN RestrictedTruncate WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo GO -- 2d. Add the newly created login to the newly created role sp_addrolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_addrolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO -- Step 03: Change over to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 04: Create a test table within the test databse CREATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest (Id INT IDENTITY(1,1), Name NVARCHAR(50)) GO -- Step 05: Populate the required data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Delhi'), (N'Mumbai'), (N'Ahmedabad') GO -- Step 06: Encapsulate the DELETE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_DeleteMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS DELETE FROM TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 07: Encapsulate the TRUNCATE within another module CREATE PROCEDURE proc_TruncateMyTable WITH EXECUTE AS SELF AS TRUNCATE TABLE TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- Step 08: Apply Security /* *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** =================================================================================== Object | Permissions | Login | | AllowedTruncate | RestrictedTruncate | |User:NoTruncateUser| User:TruncateUser =================================================================================== TruncatePermissionsTest | SELECT, | GRANT | (Default) | INSERT, | | | UPDATE, | | | DELETE | | -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- TruncatePermissionsTest | ALTER | DENY | (Default) -------------------------+-------------+----*/----------------+----------------------- proc_DeleteMyTable | EXECUTE | GRANT | DENY -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- proc_TruncateMyTable | EXECUTE | DENY | GRANT -------------------------+-------------+-------------------+----------------------- *****************************SECURITY MATRIX*************************************** */ /* Table: TruncatePermissionsTest*/ GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY ALTER ON TruncateTestDB..TruncatePermissionsTest TO NoTruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_DeleteMyTable*/ GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_DeleteMyTable TO TruncateUser GO /* Procedure: proc_TruncateMyTable*/ DENY EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO NoTruncateUser GO GRANT EXECUTE ON TruncateTestDB..proc_TruncateMyTable TO TruncateUser GO -- Step 09: Test --Switch over to the "Truncate Table Test Queries.sql" and execute it step-by-step in two different SSMS windows: -- 1. one where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and -- 2. the other as 'AllowedTruncate' -- Step 10: Cleanup sp_droprolemember 'AllowedTruncateRole','TruncateUser' GO sp_droprolemember 'RestrictedTruncateRole','NoTruncateUser' GO DROP USER TruncateUser GO DROP USER NoTruncateUser GO DROP LOGIN AllowedTruncate GO DROP LOGIN RestrictedTruncate GO DROP ROLE AllowedTruncateRole GO DROP ROLE RestrictedTruncateRole GO USE MASTER GO DROP DATABASE TruncateTestDB GO 01B_Truncate Table Test Queries.sql /* ***************************************************************************************************************** Developed By : Nakul Vachhrajani Functionality : This demo is focused on how to allow only TRUNCATE permissions to a particular user How to Use : 1. Switch over to this from "Truncate Table Permissions.sql", Step #09 2. Execute this step-by-step in two different SSMS windows a. One where you have logged in as 'RestrictedTruncate', and b. The other as 'AllowedTruncate' 3. Return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" 4. Execute Step 10 to cleanup! Modifications : December 12, 2010 - NAV - Created ***************************************************************************************************************** */ -- Step 09A: Switch to the test database USE TruncateTestDB GO -- Step 09B: Ensure that we have valid data SELECT * FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The SELECT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09C: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table without using the stored procedure TRUNCATE TABLE TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur) -- Msg 1088, Level 16, State 7, Line 2 -- Cannot find the object "TruncatePermissionsTest" because it does not exist or you do not have permissions. -- Step 09D:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'London'), (N'Paris'), (N'Berlin') GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 1 -- The INSERT permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09E: Attempt to Truncate Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_TruncateMyTable GO -- (Expected: Will execute successfully with 'AllowedTruncate' user, will error out as under with 'RestrictedTruncate') -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_TruncateMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_TruncateMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09F:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Madrid'), (N'Rome'), (N'Athens') GO --Step 09G: Attempt to Delete Data from the table without using the stored procedure DELETE FROM TruncatePermissionsTest GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Line 2 -- The DELETE permission was denied on the object 'TruncatePermissionsTest', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. -- Step 09H:Regenerate Test Data INSERT INTO TruncatePermissionsTest VALUES (N'Spain'), (N'Italy'), (N'Greece') GO --Step 09I: Attempt to Delete Data from the table using the stored procedure EXEC proc_DeleteMyTable GO -- (Expected: Following error will occur if logged in as "AllowedTruncate") -- Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure proc_DeleteMyTable, Line 1 -- The EXECUTE permission was denied on the object 'proc_DeleteMyTable', database 'TruncateTestDB', schema 'dbo'. --Step 09J: Close this SSMS window and return back to "Truncate Table Permissions.sql" Thank you Nakul to take up the challenge and prove that Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar SQL Server User Group has talent to solve difficult problems. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Best Practices, Pinal Dave, Readers Contribution, Readers Question, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Security, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

- by ScottGu

Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure. Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview). Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account. This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it). The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service. You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal. Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it. This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog. You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects. We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them). You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data. We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs. You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud. You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog. For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery. You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog. For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level. So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites. This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier). Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications. Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy. Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer. Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure. The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio. For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template. When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property. When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser. This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio. You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance. To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end. Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting. You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!). Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center. Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions. They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services. Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support. It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services. This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services. I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it. Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks). Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings. This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass). Enabling this is now really easy. To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal. This will create a dialog like below. I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository. We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account. Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to. Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories. This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services. Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure. You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services. We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy. Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI. If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal. You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase. For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever: Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site. We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app. We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager. You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent. Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go. We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it. We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal. Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it. The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this. Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code. The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages. You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more). The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these. This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications. Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic. The multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure. This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total. To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview. Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit. For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS. Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Download a .asp / .asx video file (Ubuntu)

- by Adam Matan

Hi, My local TV station offers streaming video of recorded documentaries, using a XML-like file with a.asx extension. Is there a way (preferably Ubuntu CLI) to download the file? Thanks, Adam PS - the file contents: <asx version="3.0">  <param name="encoding" value="utf-8" /> <title>CastUP: V0109-msheni-Hayim_Hefer-120510 </title> <MOREINFO HREF = "" /> <PARAM NAME="Prebuffer" VALUE="true" /> <entry> <ref href="http://s3awm.castup.net/server12/31/176/17607833-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> <ref href="http://s0dwm.castup.net/server12/31/176/17607833-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> <ref href="http://s0ewm.castup.net/server12/31/176/17607833-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> <ref href="http://s0fwm.castup.net/server12/31/176/17607833-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> <ref href="http://s0gwm.castup.net/server12/31/176/17607833-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> <PARAM NAME="CanSkipBack" VALUE="No"/> <PARAM NAME="CanSkipForward" VALUE="No"/> <PARAM NAME="CanSeek" VALUE="No"/> <title>mondial_2010 </title> <PARAM NAME="Prebuffer" VALUE="true" /> <PARAM NAME="CastUP_Content_Config" VALUE="" /> </entry> <entry> <PARAM NAME="EntryType" VALUE="Content" /> <param name="encoding" value="utf-8" /> <PARAM NAME="CastUP_AssociatedURL" VALUE="" /> <PARAM NAME="CastUP_Content_Config" VALUE="" /> <PARAM NAME="CastUP_Content_ClipMediaID" VALUE="5382858" /> <author>iba</author> <title>CastUP: V0109-msheni-Hayim_Hefer-120510 </title> <PARAM NAME="Prebuffer" VALUE="true" /> <ref href="mms://s3awm.castup.net/server12/31/174/17482045-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> <ref href="mms://s0dwm.castup.net/server12/31/174/17482045-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> <ref href="mms://s0ewm.castup.net/server12/31/174/17482045-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> <ref href="mms://s0fwm.castup.net/server12/31/174/17482045-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> <ref href="mms://s0gwm.castup.net/server12/31/174/17482045-61.wmv?ct=IL&rg=BZ&aid=31&ts=0&cu=91A297E2-5359-416A-912B-2D9BC106E491" /> </entry> </asx>

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Nginx + PHP - No input file specified for 1 server block. Other server block works fine

- by F21

I am running Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 with nginx 1.2.6. PHP is PHP-FPM 5.4.9. This is the relevant part of my nginx.conf: http { include mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; sendfile on; keepalive_timeout 65; server { server_name testapp.com; root /www/app/www/; index index.php index.html index.htm; location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; } } server { listen 80 default_server; root /www index index.html index.php; location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_intercept_errors on; fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include fastcgi_params; } } } Relevant bits from php-fpm.conf: ; Chroot to this directory at the start. This value must be defined as an ; absolute path. When this value is not set, chroot is not used. ; Note: you can prefix with '$prefix' to chroot to the pool prefix or one ; of its subdirectories. If the pool prefix is not set, the global prefix ; will be used instead. ; Note: chrooting is a great security feature and should be used whenever ; possible. However, all PHP paths will be relative to the chroot ; (error_log, sessions.save_path, ...). ; Default Value: not set ;chroot = ; Chdir to this directory at the start. ; Note: relative path can be used. ; Default Value: current directory or / when chroot chdir = /www In my hosts file, I redirect 2 domains: testapp.com and test.com to 127.0.0.1. My web files are all stored in /www. From the above settings, if I visit test.com/phpinfo.php and test.com/app/www, everything works as expected and I get output from PHP. However, if I visit testapp.com, I get the dreaded No input file specified. error. So, at this point, I pull out the log files and have a look: 2012/12/19 16:00:53 [error] 12183#0: *17 FastCGI sent in stderr: "Unable to open primary script: /www/app/www/index.php (No such file or directory)" while reading response header from upstream, client: 127.0.0.1, server: testapp.com, request: "GET / HTTP/1.1", upstream: "fastcgi://127.0.0.1:9000", host: "testapp.com" This baffles me because I have checked again and again and /www/app/www/index.php definitely exists! This is also validated by the fact that test.com/app/www/index.php works which means the file exists and the permissions are correct. Why is this happening and what are the root causes of things breaking for just the testapp.com v-host? Just an update to my investigation: I have commented out chroot and chdir in php-fpm.conf to narrow down the problem If I remove the location ~ \.php$ block for testapp.com, then nginx will send me a bin file which contains the PHP code. This means that on nginx's side, things are fine. The problem is that something must be mangling the file paths when passing it to PHP-FPM. Having said that, it is quite strange that the default_server v-host works fine because its root is /www, where as things just won't work for the testapp.com v-host because the root is /www/app/www.

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MySQL Memory usage

- by Rob Stevenson-Leggett

Our MySQL server seems to be using a lot of memory. I've tried looking for slow queries and queries with no index and have halved the peak CPU usage and Apache memory usage but the MySQL memory stays constantly at 2.2GB (~51% of available memory on the server). Here's the graph from Plesk. Running top in the SSH window shows the same figures. Does anyone have any ideas on why the memory usage is constant like this and not peaks and troughs with usage of the app? Here's the output of the MySQL Tuning Primer script: -- MYSQL PERFORMANCE TUNING PRIMER -- - By: Matthew Montgomery - MySQL Version 5.0.77-log x86_64 Uptime = 1 days 14 hrs 4 min 21 sec Avg. qps = 22 Total Questions = 3059456 Threads Connected = 13 Warning: Server has not been running for at least 48hrs. It may not be safe to use these recommendations To find out more information on how each of these runtime variables effects performance visit: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/server-system-variables.html Visit http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/advisors.html for info about MySQL's Enterprise Monitoring and Advisory Service SLOW QUERIES The slow query log is enabled. Current long_query_time = 1 sec. You have 6 out of 3059477 that take longer than 1 sec. to complete Your long_query_time seems to be fine BINARY UPDATE LOG The binary update log is NOT enabled. You will not be able to do point in time recovery See http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/point-in-time-recovery.html WORKER THREADS Current thread_cache_size = 0 Current threads_cached = 0 Current threads_per_sec = 2 Historic threads_per_sec = 0 Threads created per/sec are overrunning threads cached You should raise thread_cache_size MAX CONNECTIONS Current max_connections = 100 Current threads_connected = 14 Historic max_used_connections = 20 The number of used connections is 20% of the configured maximum. Your max_connections variable seems to be fine. INNODB STATUS Current InnoDB index space = 6 M Current InnoDB data space = 18 M Current InnoDB buffer pool free = 0 % Current innodb_buffer_pool_size = 8 M Depending on how much space your innodb indexes take up it may be safe to increase this value to up to 2 / 3 of total system memory MEMORY USAGE Max Memory Ever Allocated : 2.07 G Configured Max Per-thread Buffers : 274 M Configured Max Global Buffers : 2.01 G Configured Max Memory Limit : 2.28 G Physical Memory : 3.84 G Max memory limit seem to be within acceptable norms KEY BUFFER Current MyISAM index space = 4 M Current key_buffer_size = 7 M Key cache miss rate is 1 : 40 Key buffer free ratio = 81 % Your key_buffer_size seems to be fine QUERY CACHE Query cache is supported but not enabled Perhaps you should set the query_cache_size SORT OPERATIONS Current sort_buffer_size = 2 M Current read_rnd_buffer_size = 256 K Sort buffer seems to be fine JOINS Current join_buffer_size = 132.00 K You have had 16 queries where a join could not use an index properly You should enable "log-queries-not-using-indexes" Then look for non indexed joins in the slow query log. If you are unable to optimize your queries you may want to increase your join_buffer_size to accommodate larger joins in one pass. Note! This script will still suggest raising the join_buffer_size when ANY joins not using indexes are found. OPEN FILES LIMIT Current open_files_limit = 1024 files The open_files_limit should typically be set to at least 2x-3x that of table_cache if you have heavy MyISAM usage. Your open_files_limit value seems to be fine TABLE CACHE Current table_cache value = 64 tables You have a total of 426 tables You have 64 open tables. Current table_cache hit rate is 1% , while 100% of your table cache is in use You should probably increase your table_cache TEMP TABLES Current max_heap_table_size = 16 M Current tmp_table_size = 32 M Of 15134 temp tables, 9% were created on disk Effective in-memory tmp_table_size is limited to max_heap_table_size. Created disk tmp tables ratio seems fine TABLE SCANS Current read_buffer_size = 128 K Current table scan ratio = 2915 : 1 read_buffer_size seems to be fine TABLE LOCKING Current Lock Wait ratio = 1 : 142213 Your table locking seems to be fine The app is a facebook game with about 50-100 concurrent users. Thanks, Rob

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Email forwarding from my domain to gmail - FAIL

- by pitosalas

[There are numerous similar questions on ServerFault but I couldn't find one that was exactly on point] Background: I use Gmail for my email client. My email is [email protected]. However the email that people communicate to me with is [email protected]. I run the server that hosts www.example.com and other domains, at ServerBeach. Up to yesterday, I had SENDMAIL painlessly just forward emails to [email protected] to [email protected] and everything was fine, for several years in fact. Suddenly my email stopped working - that is, my gmail account stopped receiving emails via the forward from my server. Looking into it I found a bunch of emails sitting on my server with content like this: ... while talking to gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.: RCPT To: <<< 450-4.2.1 The user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that <<< 450-4.2.1 prevents additional messages from being delivered. Please resend your <<< 450-4.2.1 message at a later time. If the user is able to receive mail at that <<< 450-4.2.1 time, your message will be delivered. For more information, please <<< 450 4.2.1 visit xxxxxx://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6592 u15si37138086qco.76 [email protected]... Deferred: 450-4.2.1 The user you are trying to contact is receiving mail at a rate that DATA <<< 550-5.7.1 [64.34.168.137 1] Our system has detected an unusual rate of <<< 550-5.7.1 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our <<< 550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been blocked. <<< 550-5.7.1 Please visit xxxxx://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review <<< 550 5.7.1 our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. u15si37138086qco.76 554 5.0.0 Service unavailable ... while talking to alt1.gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com.: From what I've been researching, I think somehow someone has/is hijacking my domain name or something and this somehow has caused gmail's servers to notice and cut me off. But I don't know really what's going on nor do I see whatever emails might be involved. I've read stuff on zoneedit.com that sounds like they might have a solution in their service for what I am trying to do. I also read a lot about admining DNS and SENDMAIL and tried various things, but nothing works. Can you tell from my description what is going on that caused GMail's server to stop accepting email from my server and is there a way to stop it? What is the 'correct' way to configure things so that emails to [email protected] behave as if they were sent to [email protected]? Thanks so much!

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JBoss https on port other than 8080 not working

- by MilindaD

We have a server with two JBoss instances where one runs on 8080, the other on 8081. We need to have HTTPS enabled for the 8081 server, firstly we tried enabling https on the 8080 port instance by generating the keystore and editing the server.xml and it successfully worked. However when we tried the same thing for 8081 it did not, note that we removed https for the 8080 server first before enabling it for 8081. This is what was used for both server.xml for 8080 and 8081. The only difference was that the port was changed from 8080 to 8081 when trying to enable https for 8081 port instance. What am I doing wrong and what needs to be changed? NOTE : When I meant enabled for 8080 I meant when you visit https:// URL:8484 you will actually be visiting the 8080 port instance. However when ssl is enabled for 8081 and I visit https:// URL:8484 I get that the web page is unavailable. COMMENTLESS VERSION <Server> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" /> <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" /> <Service name="jboss.web">  <Connector port="8080" address="${jboss.bind.address}" maxThreads="350" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" emptySessionPath="true" protocol="HTTP/1.1" enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100" connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" compression="on" ompressableMimeType="text/html,text/css,text/javascript,application/json,text/xml,text/plain,application/x-javascript,application/javascript"/> <Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true" maxThreads="150" scheme="https" secure="true" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" address="${jboss.bind.address}" keystoreFile="${jboss.server.home.dir}/conf/supun1.keystore" keystorePass="aaaaaa" truststoreFile="${jboss.server.home.dir}/conf/supun1.keystore" truststorePass="aaaaaa" />  <Connector port="8009" address="${jboss.bind.address}" protocol="AJP/1.3" emptySessionPath="true" enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" /> <Engine name="jboss.web" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="khms1"> <Realm className="org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.JBossSecurityMgrRealm" certificatePrincipal="org.jboss.security.auth.certs.SubjectDNMapping" allRolesMode="authOnly" /> <Host name="localhost" autoDeploy="false" deployOnStartup="false" deployXML="false" configClass="org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.config.JBossContextConfig" > <Valve className="org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.sso.ClusteredSingleSignOn" /> <Valve className="org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.jca.CachedConnectionValve" cachedConnectionManagerObjectName="jboss.jca:service=CachedConnectionManager" transactionManagerObjectName="jboss:service=TransactionManager" /> </Host> </Engine> </Service> </Server> WITH COMMENTS VERSION <Server>  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.AprLifecycleListener" SSLEngine="on" />  <Listener className="org.apache.catalina.core.JasperListener" />  <Service name="jboss.web">  <Connector port="8080" address="${jboss.bind.address}" maxThreads="350" maxHttpHeaderSize="8192" emptySessionPath="true" protocol="HTTP/1.1" enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" acceptCount="100" connectionTimeout="20000" disableUploadTimeout="true" compression="on" ompressableMimeType="text/html,text/css,text/javascript,application/json,text/xml,text/plain,application/x-javascript,application/javascript"/>   <Connector port="8443" protocol="HTTP/1.1" SSLEnabled="true" maxThreads="150" scheme="https" secure="true" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS" address="${jboss.bind.address}" keystoreFile="${jboss.server.home.dir}/conf/supun1.keystore" keystorePass="aaaaaa" truststoreFile="${jboss.server.home.dir}/conf/supun1.keystore" truststorePass="aaaaaa" />  <Connector port="8009" address="${jboss.bind.address}" protocol="AJP/1.3" emptySessionPath="true" enableLookups="false" redirectPort="8443" /> <Engine name="jboss.web" defaultHost="localhost" jvmRoute="khms1">  <Realm className="org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.JBossSecurityMgrRealm" certificatePrincipal="org.jboss.security.auth.certs.SubjectDNMapping" allRolesMode="authOnly" />  <Host name="localhost" autoDeploy="false" deployOnStartup="false" deployXML="false" configClass="org.jboss.web.tomcat.security.config.JBossContextConfig" >        <Valve className="org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.sso.ClusteredSingleSignOn" />  <Valve className="org.jboss.web.tomcat.service.jca.CachedConnectionValve" cachedConnectionManagerObjectName="jboss.jca:service=CachedConnectionManager" transactionManagerObjectName="jboss:service=TransactionManager" /> </Host> </Engine> </Service> </Server>

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Introducing Oracle VM Server for SPARC

- by Honglin Su

As you are watching Oracle's Virtualization Strategy Webcast and exploring the great virtualization offerings of Oracle VM product line, I'd like to introduce Oracle VM Server for SPARC -- highly efficient, enterprise-class virtualization solution for Sun SPARC Enterprise Systems with Chip Multithreading (CMT) technology. Oracle VM Server for SPARC, previously called Sun Logical Domains, leverages the built-in SPARC hypervisor to subdivide supported platforms' resources (CPUs, memory, network, and storage) by creating partitions called logical (or virtual) domains. Each logical domain can run an independent operating system. Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides the flexibility to deploy multiple Oracle Solaris operating systems simultaneously on a single platform. Oracle VM Server also allows you to create up to 128 virtual servers on one system to take advantage of the massive thread scale offered by the CMT architecture. Oracle VM Server for SPARC integrates both the industry-leading CMT capability of the UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T2 Plus processors and the Oracle Solaris operating system. This combination helps to increase flexibility, isolate workload processing, and improve the potential for maximum server utilization. Oracle VM Server for SPARC delivers the following: Leading Price/Performance - The low-overhead architecture provides scalable performance under increasing workloads without additional license cost. This enables you to meet the most aggressive price/performance requirement Advanced RAS - Each logical domain is an entirely independent virtual machine with its own OS. It supports virtual disk mutipathing and failover as well as faster network failover with link-based IP multipathing (IPMP) support. Moreover, it's fully integrated with Solaris FMA (Fault Management Architecture), which enables predictive self healing. CPU Dynamic Resource Management (DRM) - Enable your resource management policy and domain workload to trigger the automatic addition and removal of CPUs. This ability helps you to better align with your IT and business priorities. Enhanced Domain Migrations - Perform domain migrations interactively and non-interactively to bring more flexibility to the management of your virtualized environment. Improve active domain migration performance by compressing memory transfers and taking advantage of cryptographic acceleration hardware. These methods provide faster migration for load balancing, power saving, and planned maintenance. Dynamic Crypto Control - Dynamically add and remove cryptographic units (aka MAU) to and from active domains. Also, migrate active domains that have cryptographic units. Physical-to-virtual (P2V) Conversion - Quickly convert an existing SPARC server running the Oracle Solaris 8, 9 or 10 OS into a virtualized Oracle Solaris 10 image. Use this image to facilitate OS migration into the virtualized environment. Virtual I/O Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR) - Add and remove virtual I/O services and devices without needing to reboot the system. CPU Power Management - Implement power saving by disabling each core on a Sun UltraSPARC T2 or T2 Plus processor that has all of its CPU threads idle. Advanced Network Configuration - Configure the following network features to obtain more flexible network configurations, higher performance, and scalability: Jumbo frames, VLANs, virtual switches for link aggregations, and network interface unit (NIU) hybrid I/O. Official Certification Based On Real-World Testing - Use Oracle VM Server for SPARC with the most sophisticated enterprise workloads under real-world conditions, including Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). Affordable, Full-Stack Enterprise Class Support - Obtain worldwide support from Oracle for the entire virtualization environment and workloads together. The support covers hardware, firmware, OS, virtualization, and the software stack. SPARC Server Virtualization Oracle offers a full portfolio of virtualization solutions to address your needs. SPARC is the leading platform to have the hard partitioning capability that provides the physical isolation needed to run independent operating systems. Many customers have already used Oracle Solaris Containers for application isolation. Oracle VM Server for SPARC provides another important feature with OS isolation. This gives you the flexibility to deploy multiple operating systems simultaneously on a single Sun SPARC T-Series server with finer granularity for computing resources. For SPARC CMT processors, the natural level of granularity is an execution thread, not a time-sliced microsecond of execution resources. Each CPU thread can be treated as an independent virtual processor. The scheduler is naturally built into the CPU for lower overhead and higher performance. Your organizations can couple Oracle Solaris Containers and Oracle VM Server for SPARC with the breakthrough space and energy savings afforded by Sun SPARC Enterprise systems with CMT technology to deliver a more agile, responsive, and low-cost environment. Management with Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center The Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Virtualization Management Pack provides full lifecycle management of virtual guests, including Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Containers. It helps you streamline operations and reduce downtime. Together, the Virtualization Management Pack and the Ops Center Provisioning and Patch Automation Pack provide an end-to-end management solution for physical and virtual systems through a single web-based console. This solution automates the lifecycle management of physical and virtual systems and is the most effective systems management solution for Oracle's Sun infrastructure. Ease of Deployment with Configuration Assistant The Oracle VM Server for SPARC Configuration Assistant can help you easily create logical domains. After gathering the configuration data, the Configuration Assistant determines the best way to create a deployment to suit your requirements. The Configuration Assistant is available as both a graphical user interface (GUI) and terminal-based tool. Oracle Solaris Cluster HA Support The Oracle Solaris Cluster HA for Oracle VM Server for SPARC data service provides a mechanism for orderly startup and shutdown, fault monitoring and automatic failover of the Oracle VM Server guest domain service. In addition, applications that run on a logical domain, as well as its resources and dependencies can be controlled and managed independently. These are managed as if they were running in a classical Solaris Cluster hardware node. Supported Systems Oracle VM Server for SPARC is supported on all Sun SPARC Enterprise Systems with CMT technology. UltraSPARC T2 Plus Systems · Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 Server · Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 Server · Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server · Sun Netra T5440 Server · Sun Blade T6340 Server Module · Sun Netra T6340 Server Module UltraSPARC T2 Systems · Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 Server · Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 Server · Sun Netra T5220 Server · Sun Blade T6320 Server Module · Sun Netra CP3260 ATCA Blade Server Note that UltraSPARC T1 systems are supported on earlier versions of the software.Sun SPARC Enterprise Systems with CMT technology come with the right to use (RTU) of Oracle VM Server, and the software is pre-installed. If you have the systems under warranty or with support, you can download the software and system firmware as well as their updates. Oracle Premier Support for Systems provides fully-integrated support for your server hardware, firmware, OS, and virtualization software. Visit oracle.com/support for information about Oracle's support offerings for Sun systems. For more information about Oracle's virtualization offerings, visit oracle.com/virtualization.

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C# in Depth, Third Edition by Jon Skeet, Manning Publications Co. Book Review

- by Compudicted

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/Compudicted/archive/2013/10/24/c-in-depth-third-edition-by-jon-skeet-manning-publications.aspx I started reading this ebook on September 28, 2013, the same day it was sent my way by Manning Publications Co. for review while it still being fresh off the press. So 1st thing – thanks to Manning for this opportunity and a free copy of this must have on every C# developer’s desk book! Several hours ago I finished reading this book (well, except a for a large portion of its quite lengthy appendix). I jumped writing this review right away while still being full of emotions and impressions from reading it thoroughly and running code examples. Before I go any further I would like say that I used to program on various platforms using various languages starting with the Mainframe and ending on Windows, and I gradually shifted toward dealing with databases more than anything, however it happened with me to program in C# 1 a lot when it was first released and then some C# 2 with a big leap in between to C# 5. So my perception and experience reading this book may differ from yours. Also what I want to tell is somewhat funny that back then, knowing some Java and seeing C# 1 released, initially made me drawing a parallel that it is a copycat language, how wrong was I… Interestingly, Jon programs in Java full time, but how little it was mentioned in the book! So more on the book: Be informed, this is not a typical “Recipes”, “Cookbook” or any set of ready solutions, it is rather targeting mature, advanced developers who do not only know how to use a number of features, but are willing to understand how the language is operating “under the hood”. I must state immediately, at the same time I am glad the author did not go into the murky depths of the MSIL, so this is a very welcome decision on covering a modern language as C# for me, thank you Jon! Frankly, not all was that rosy regarding the tone and structure of the book, especially the the first half or so filled me with several negative and positive emotions overpowering each other. To expand more on that, some statements in the book appeared to be bias to me, or filled with pre-justice, it started to look like it had some PR-sole in it, but thankfully this was all gone toward the end of the 1st third of the book. Specifically, the mention on the C# language popularity, Java is the #1 language as per https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/pypl/PyPL-PopularitY-of-Programming-Language (many other sources put C at the top which I highly doubt), also many interesting functional languages as Clojure and Groovy appeared and gained huge traction which run on top of Java/JVM whereas C# does not enjoy such a situation. If we want to discuss the popularity in general and say how fast a developer can find a new job that pays well it would be indeed the very Java, C++ or PHP, never C#. Or that phrase on language preference as a personal issue? We choose where to work or we are chosen because of a technology used at a given software shop, not vice versa. The book though it technically very accurate with valid code, concise examples, but I wish the author would give more concrete, real-life examples on where each feature should be used, not how. Another point to realize before you get the book is that it is almost a live book which started to be written when even C# 3 wasn’t around so a lot of ground is covered (nearly half of the book) on the pre-C# 3 feature releases so if you already have a solid background in the previous releases and do not plan to upgrade, perhaps half of the book can be skipped, otherwise this book is surely highly recommended. Alas, for me it was a hard read, most of it. It was not boring (well, only may be two times), it was just hard to grasp some concepts, but do not get me wrong, it did made me pause, on several occasions, and made me read and re-read a page or two. At times I even wondered if I have any IQ at all (LOL). Be prepared to read A LOT on generics, not that they are widely used in the field (I happen to work as a consultant and went thru a lot of code at many places) I can tell my impression is the developers today in best case program using examples found at OpenStack.com. Also unlike the Java world where having the most recent version is nearly mandated by the OSS most companies on the Microsoft platform almost never tempted to upgrade the .Net version very soon and very often. As a side note, I was glad to see code recently that included a nullable variable (myvariable? notation) and this made me smile, besides, I recommended that person this book to expand her knowledge. The good things about this book is that Jon maintains an active forum, prepared code snippets and even a small program (Snippy) that is happy to run the sample code saving you from writing any plumbing code. A tad now on the C# language itself – it sure enjoyed a wonderful road toward perfection and a very high adoption, especially for ASP development. But to me all the recent features that made this statically typed language more dynamic look strange. Don’t we have F#? Which supposed to be the dynamic language? Why do we need to have a hybrid language? Now the developers live their lives in dualism of the static and dynamic variables! And LINQ to SQL, it is covered in depth, but wasn’t it supposed to be dropped? Also it seems that very little is being added, and at a slower pace, e.g. Roslyn will come in late 2014 perhaps, and will be probably the only main feature. Again, it is quite hard to read this book as various chapters, C# versions mentioned every so often only if I only could remember what was covered exactly where! So the fact it has so many jumps/links back and forth I recommend the ebook format to make the navigations easier to perform and I do recommend using software that allows bookmarking, also make sure you have access to plenty of coffee and pizza (hey, you probably know this joke – who a programmer is) ! In terms of closing, if you stuck at C# 1 or 2 level, it is time to embrace the power of C# 5! Finally, to compliment Manning, this book unlike from any other publisher so far, was the only one as well readable (put it formatted) on my tablet as in Adobe Reader on a laptop.

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top Tweets SOA Partner Community – September 2012

- by JuergenKress

Send your tweets @soacommunity #soacommunity and follow us at http://twitter.com/soacommunity OracleBlogs ?Oracle SOA Suite for healthcare integration Dashboard http://ow.ly/1mcJvp SOA Community ?Lost in Translation – Common Mistakes Interpreting Patterns – Mark Simpson, Griffiths-Waite @ SOA, Cloud & Service… ServiceTechSymposium Matthias Zieger, Accenture just added to the agenda to co-present: "Service Modeling & BPM Business Value Patterns" http://ow.ly/ddu7A ServiceTechSymposium ?Newly updated session title and abstract: "Big Data and its impact on SOA", by Demed L'Her, Oracle. http://ow.ly/diOq2 Deepak Arora ?To PaaS or SaaS - the latest discussions with customers using SOA Suite - what are your thoughts #soa #soacommunity SOA Community top Tweets SOA Partner Community July 2012 - are you one of them? If yes please rt! https://soacommunity.wordpress.com/2012/08/28/top-tweets-soa-partner-community-august-2012/ … #soacommunity Sandor Nieuwenhuijs Checkout the BeNeLux Architectural Networking Event during Oracle Open World - meet your peers and the experts http://www.ddg-servicecenter.com/networkmanager/oow/architect/default.aspx … SOA Community ?top Tweets SOA Partner Community – August 2012 http://wp.me/p10C8u-uf SOA Community ?Follow SOA Community on facebook http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity SOA Community ?New Service to promote Your SOA & BPM events at http://oracle.com/events for SOA & BPM Specialized Partners Only! #soacommunity #opn #oracle Jan van Zoggel ?Hotel check, flight check, overview of sessions to visit check http://jvzoggel.wordpress.com/2012/08/27/soa-cloud-servicetech-symposium/ … I'm ready for SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium SOA Community SOA & BPM Specialized Partners Only! New Service to Promote Your SOA & BPM Events at http://oracle.com/events http://wp.me/p10C8u-sH SOA Community Call for content for the next community newsletter. Do you want to publish your success & best practice? Send it @soacommunity #soacommunity SOA Community SOA Adoption in the Brazilian Ministry of Health - Case Study by Ricardo Puttini, University of Brasilia @ SOA, Cloud & Service… Jan van Zoggel ?Just registered for the 5th International SOA, Cloud & Service Technology Symposium in London. Looking forward to it. http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/ OTNArchBeat ?Want to prepare for Oracle SOA Specialization? @t_winterberg offers a suggestion. http://pub.vitrue.com/5Hqu OTNArchBeat ?Oracle BPM enable BAM | @deltalounge http://pub.vitrue.com/BCwj SOA Community Presentations & Training material OFM Summer Camps & Impressions & Feedback http://wp.me/p10C8u-sF Emiel Paasschens Nice! Pdf document on how to use a #Oracle #SOA Suite Domain Value Map (DVM) in the OSB: http://bit.ly/RzyS9w #yam OracleBlogs ?Using Cloud OER to Find Fusion Applications On-Premise Service Concrete WSDL URL http://ow.ly/1m4lz7 demed ?Free VIP pass for @techsymp if you are in London Sep. 24-25. Be the first one to retweet this and I'll DM you details! http://www.servicetechsymposium.com/speaker_bios.php?id=demed_lher … Jan van Zoggel blogpost: Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Oracle Coherence caching http://jvzoggel.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/osb-duplicate-message-with-coherence/ … OTNArchBeat ?Oracle Service Bus duplicate message check using Coherence | @jvzoggel http://pub.vitrue.com/ckY8 Oracle UPK & Tutor Synaptis and Oracle Present: Leveraging UPK Throughout the Project Lifecycle: Leveraging UPK throughout the Proj... http://bit.ly/OS2Rbg Rolando Carrasco ?New entry @ oracleradio http://bit.ly/SEvwwS @soacommunity @oracleace How to identify duplicated messages on Oracle SOA SUITE? SOA Community ?Business Driven Development (BDD) Demo Now Available! http://wp.me/p10C8u-sf OTNArchBeat ?Installing Oracle SOA Suite10g on Oracle Enterprise Linux | @lonnekedikmans http://pub.vitrue.com/BEyD OTNArchBeat ?Best practices for Oracle real-time data integration | Frank Ohlhorst http://pub.vitrue.com/1fH1 ServiceTechSymposium ?New OTN podcast featuring speakers Thomas Erl, Tim Hall and Demed L’Her just published. Tune into 1st 3 parts here: http://ow.ly/d1RRn OTNArchBeat ?SOA, Cloud, and Service Technologies - Part 4 of 4 - Best selling SOA author Thomas Erl talks about the latest title... http://ow.ly/1m0txY SOA Community Win a free conference pass for the SOA, Cloud + Service Technology Symposium – become a soacommunity facebook fan!… Lonneke Dikmans VENNSTER BLOG: Installing Oracle SOA Suite10g on Oracle Enterpris... http://blog.vennster.nl/2012/08/installing-oracle-soa-suite-10g-on.html?spref=tw … PeterPaul vande Beek published a blog on exporting Oracle #BPM metrics to a #DWH http://www.deltalounge.net/wpress/2012/08/export-oracle-bpm-metrics-to-a-data-warehouse/ … #soacommunity SOA Community ?Do you follow us on facebook http://www.facebook.com/soacommunity #soacommunity C2B2 Consulting ?Cloud-based Enterprise Architecture by Steve Millidge, C2B2 Consulting @ SOA, Cloud & Service … http://wp.me/p10C8u-sv via @soacommunity Gertjan van het Hof Storing SCA Metadata in the Oracle Metadata Services Repository http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/soa/fonnegra-storing-sca-metadata-1715004.html?msgid=3-6903117805 … arjankramer ?Encrypted OSB Service account passwords http://dlvr.it/20hbNV Richard van Tilborg BPM the Battle http://lnkd.in/yFAJaW OTNArchBeat Using Cloud OER to Find Fusion Applications On-Premise Service Concrete WSDL URL | @RahejaRajesh http://pub.vitrue.com/YDCD SOA Proactive ?Webcast: Introduction to SOA Human Workflow, 8/23, 10 AM EDT. Register @ http://bit.ly/Nx77sY Lucas Jellema ?Programmatically admnistration of OSB using JXM & MBeans. Interesting example is given in https://blogs.oracle.com/ateamsoab2b/entry/automatic_disabling_proxy_service_when … orclateamsoa ?A-Team Blog #ateam: Automatically Disable Proxy Service to avoid overloading OSB http://ow.ly/1lXGKV Atul_Kumar ?Oracle Enterprise Gateway – OEG 11gR1 (11.1.1.*) for beginners http://goo.gl/fb/EJboE Estafet Limited Advanced SOA Boot camp @soacommunity in Munich was excellent.@wlscommunity Learnt a lot and liked the format. SOA Community Oracle Fusion Applications Design Patterns Now Available For Developers by Ultan O'Broin http://wp.me/p10C8u-sd SOA & BPM Partner Community For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Blog Twitter LinkedIn Mix Forum Technorati Tags: SOA Community twitter,SOA Community,Oracle SOA,Oracle BPM,BPM Community,OPN,Jürgen Kress

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MSCC: Scripting - Administrator's toolbox of magic...

Finally, we made it to have our April meetup - in May. The most obvious explanation is the increased amount of open source and IT activities that either the MSCC, the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM), or the University of Mauritius Student's Computer Club is organising. It's absolutely incredible to see the recent hype of events here on the island. And I'm loving it! Unfortunately, we also had to deal with arranging for a location this time. It was kind of an odyssey as my requests (and phone calls) haven't been answered, even though I tried it several times - well, kind of disappointing and I have to look into that for future gatherings. In my opinion, it is essential that two parameters of a community meeting are fixed as early as possible: Location, and Date and time You can't just change one or both on the very last minute. Well, this time we had to do it due to unforeseen reasons, and I apologise to any MSCC member which couldn't make it to our April meetup. Okay, lesson learned but now back to the actual meetup report ... Shortly after the meeting I placed the following statement as my first impression: "Spontaneous and improvised :) No, seriously, Ish and Dan had well prepared presentations on shell scripting, mainly focused towards Bourne Again Shell (bash), and the pros and cons of scripting versus actually writing something in a decent programming language. I thought that I could cut myself out of the equation but the demand for information about PowerShell was higher than expected..." Well, it turned out that the interest in Windows PowerShell was high, as I even got a couple of questions on it via social media networks during the evening. I also like to mention that the number of attendees went back to what I would call a "standard" number of participation. This time there were 12 craftsmen, but again a good number of First Timers. Reactions of other attendees Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Enjoyed the bash and powershell (linux / windows) presentations ..." -- Nadim on event comments "He [Daniel] also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code." -- Ish on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting Glad to see a couple of first time attendees, especially students from the university itself. Some details on the presentations MSCC: First time visit at the University of Mauritius - Phase II Engineering Tower, room 2.9 Gimme some love ... bash and other shells Ish gave a great introduction into shell scripting as he spoke about existing shell environments and a little bit about their history. Furthermore, he talked about various built-in commands, the use of coreutils, the ability to daisy-chain multiple commands using pipes, the importance of the standard I/O streams and their file descriptors in advanced scripting techniques. Combined with a couple of sample statements in the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 14.04 machine it was a solid presentation. Have a closer look at his slides - published on his blog on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting. Oddities of scripting After the brief introduction into bash it was Daniel's turn to highlight a good number of oddities when working with shell scripts. First of all, it should be clear that scripting is not supposed for any kind of implementations in terms of software but simply to automate administrative procedures and to simplify routine jobs on a system. One of the cool oddities that he mentioned is that everything (!) in a shell is represented by strings; there are no other types like integer, float, date-time, etc. that you'd like to use in a full-fledged programming language. Let's have a look at his sample: more to come... What's the output? As a conclusion, Daniel suggests that shell scripting should be limited but not restricted to automatic repetitive command stacks and batch jobs, startup wrapper for applications in order to set up the execution environment, and other not too sophisticated jobs. But as soon as it might involve a little bit more logic or you might rely on performance it's better to write an application in Ruby, Python, or Perl (among others of course). This is also enables the possibility to test your code properly. MSCC: Ish talking about Bourne Again Shell (bash) and shell scripting to automate regular tasks MSCC: Daniel gives an overview about the pros and cons of shell scripting versus programming MSCC: PowerShell as your scripting solution on Windows operating systems The path of the Enlightened is long ... and tough. Honestly, even though PowerShell was mentioned without any further details on the meetup's agenda, I didn't expect that there would be demand to give a presentation on Microsoft PowerShell after all. I already took this topic out of the announcement but the audience wanted to have some information. Okay, then let's see what I could do - improvised style. While my machine booted and got hooked up to the projector, I started to talk about the beginnings of PowerShell from back in 2006, and its predecessors MS DOS and Command Prompt. A throwback in history... always good for young people. As usual, Microsoft didn't get it at that time. Instead of listening to their client's needs and demands they ignored the feasibility to administrate Windows server farms without any UI tools. PowerShell is actually a result of this, and seeing that shell scripting is a common, reliable and fast way in an administrator's toolbox for decades, Microsoft had to adapt from their Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to a broader approach. It's not like shell scripting was something new; it is in daily use by alternative operating systems like AIX, HP UX, Solaris, and last but not least Linux. Most interestingly, Microsoft is very good at renovating existing architectures, and over the years PowerShell not only replaced their own combination of Command Prompt and Scripting Hosts (VBScript and CScript) but really turned into a challenging competitor on the market. The shell is easy to extend with cmdlets, and open to other Microsoft products like SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Third-party software applications. Similar to MMC PowerShell also offers the ability to administer other machine remotely - only without a graphical user interface and therefore it's easier to automate and schedule regular tasks. Following is a sample of a PowerShell script file (extension .ps1): $strComputer = "." $colItems = get-wmiobject -class Win32_BIOS -namespace root\CIMV2 -comp $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {write-host "BIOS Characteristics: " $objItem.BiosCharacteristicswrite-host "BIOS Version: " $objItem.BIOSVersionwrite-host "Build Number: " $objItem.BuildNumberwrite-host "Caption: " $objItem.Captionwrite-host "Code Set: " $objItem.CodeSetwrite-host "Current Language: " $objItem.CurrentLanguagewrite-host "Description: " $objItem.Descriptionwrite-host "Identification Code: " $objItem.IdentificationCodewrite-host "Installable Languages: " $objItem.InstallableLanguageswrite-host "Installation Date: " $objItem.InstallDatewrite-host "Language Edition: " $objItem.LanguageEditionwrite-host "List Of Languages: " $objItem.ListOfLanguageswrite-host "Manufacturer: " $objItem.Manufacturerwrite-host "Name: " $objItem.Namewrite-host "Other Target Operating System: " $objItem.OtherTargetOSwrite-host "Primary BIOS: " $objItem.PrimaryBIOSwrite-host "Release Date: " $objItem.ReleaseDatewrite-host "Serial Number: " $objItem.SerialNumberwrite-host "SMBIOS BIOS Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSBIOSVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Major Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMajorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Minor Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMinorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Present: " $objItem.SMBIOSPresentwrite-host "Software Element ID: " $objItem.SoftwareElementIDwrite-host "Software Element State: " $objItem.SoftwareElementStatewrite-host "Status: " $objItem.Statuswrite-host "Target Operating System: " $objItem.TargetOperatingSystemwrite-host "Version: " $objItem.Versionwrite-host} Which gives you information about your BIOS and Windows OS. Then change the computer name to another one on your network (NetBIOS based) and run the script again. There lots of samples and tutorials at the Microsoft Script Center, and I would advise you to pay a visit over there if you are more interested in PowerShell. The Script Center provides the download links, too. Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Hacking Defence (14. May 2014) WebCup Maurice (7. & 8. June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! My resume of the day Spontaneous and improvised :) The new location at the University of Mauritius turned out very well, there is plenty of space, and it could be a good choice for future meetings. Especially, having the ability to get more and more students into our IT community sounds like a great opportunity. Later during the day, I got some promising mails from Nadim regarding future sessions at the local branch of the Middlesex University. Well, we will see in the future... But for now this will be on hold until approximately October when students resume their regular studies. Anyway, it was a good experience at the university, and thanks again to the UoM Student's Computer Club that made the necessary arrangements for the MSCC!

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Why It Is So Important to Know Your Customer

- by Christie Flanagan

Over the years, I endured enough delayed flights, air turbulence and misadventures in airport security clearance to watch my expectations for the air travel experience fall to abysmally low levels. The extent of my loyalty to any one carrier had more to do with the proximity of the airport parking garage to their particular gate than to any effort on the airline’s part to actually earn and retain my business. That all changed one day when I found myself at the airport hoping to catch a return flight home a few hours earlier than expected, using an airline I had flown with for the first time just that week. When you travel regularly for business, being able to catch a return flight home that’s even an hour or two earlier than originally scheduled is a big deal. It can mean the difference between having a normal evening with your family and having to sneak in like a cat burglar after everyone is fast asleep. And so I found myself on this particular day hoping to catch an earlier flight home. I approached the gate agent and was told that I could go on standby for their next flight out. Then I asked how much it was going to cost to change the flight, knowing full well that I wouldn’t get reimbursed by my company for any change fees. “Oh, there’s no charge to fly on standby,” the gate agent told me. I made a funny look. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This airline was going to let my fly on standby, at no additional charge, even though I was a new customer with no status or points. It had been years since I’d seen an airline pass up a short term revenue generating opportunity in favor of a long term loyalty generating one. At that moment, this particular airline gained my loyal business. Since then, this airline has had the opportunity to learn a lot about me. They know where I live, where I fly from, where I usually fly to, and where I like to sit on the plane. In general, I’ve found their customer service to be quite good whether at the airport, via call center and even through social channels. They email me occasionally, and when they do, they demonstrate that they know me by promoting deals for flights from where I live to places that I’d be interested in visiting. And that’s part of why I’m always so puzzled when I visit their website.Does this company with the great service, customer friendly policies, and clean planes demonstrate that they know me at all when I visit their website? The answer is no. Even when I log in using my loyalty program credentials, it’s pretty obvious that they’re presenting the same old home page and same old offers to every single one of their site visitors. I mean, those promotional offers that they’re featuring so prominently -- they’re for flights that originate thousands of miles from where I live! There’s no way I’d ever book one of those flights and I’m sure I’m not the only one of their customers to feel that way.My reason for recounting this story is not to pick on the one customer experience flaw I've noticed with this particular airline, in fact, they do so many things right that I’ll continue to fly with them. But I did want to illustrate just how glaringly obvious it is to customers today when a touch point they have with a brand is impersonal, unconnected and out of sync. As someone who’s spent a number of years in the web experience management and online marketing space, it particularly peeves me when that out of sync touch point is a brand’s website, perhaps because I know how important it is to make a customer’s online experience relevant and how many powerful tools are available for making a relevant experience a reality. The fact is, delivering a one-size-fits-all online customer experience is no longer acceptable or particularly effective in today’s world. Today’s savvy customers expect you to know who they are and to understand their preferences, behavior and relationship with your brand. Not only do they expect you to know about them, but they also expect you to demonstrate this knowledge across all of their touch points with your brand in a consistent and compelling fashion, whether it be on your traditional website, your mobile web presence or through various social channels.Delivering the kind of personalized online experiences that customers want can have tremendous business benefits. This is not just about generating feelings of goodwill and higher customer satisfaction ratings either. More relevant and personalized online experiences boost the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives and the statistics prove this out. Personalized web experiences can help increase online conversion rates by 70% -- that’s a huge number.1 And more than three quarters of consumers indicate that they’ve made additional online purchases based on personalized product recommendations.2Now if only this airline would get on board with delivering a more personalized online customer experience. I’d certainly be happier and more likely to spring for one of their promotional offers. And by targeting relevant offers on their home page to appropriate segments of their site visitors, I bet they’d be happier and generating additional revenue too. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* 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-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} ***** If you're interested in hearing more perspectives on the benefits of demonstrating that you know your customers by delivering a more personalized experience, check out this white paper on creating a successful and meaningful customer experience on the web. Also catch the video below on the business value of CX in attracting new customers featuring Oracle's VP of Customer Experience Strategy, Brian Curran. 1 Search Engine Watch 2 Marketing Charts

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How to create a simple adf dashboard application with EJB 3.0

- by Rodrigues, Raphael

In this month's Oracle Magazine, Frank Nimphius wrote a very good article about an Oracle ADF Faces dashboard application to support persistent user personalization. You can read this entire article clicking here. The idea in this article is to extend the dashboard application. My idea here is to create a similar dashboard application, but instead ADF BC model layer, I'm intending to use EJB3.0. There are just a one small trick here and I'll show you. I'm using the HR usual oracle schema. The steps are: 1. Create a ADF Fusion Application with EJB as a layer model 2. Generate the entities from table (I'm using Department and Employees only) 3. Create a new Session Bean. I called it: HRSessionEJB 4. Create a new method like that: public List getAllDepartmentsHavingEmployees(){ JpaEntityManager jpaEntityManager = (JpaEntityManager)em.getDelegate(); Query query = jpaEntityManager.createNamedQuery("Departments.allDepartmentsHavingEmployees"); JavaBeanResult.setQueryResultClass(query, AggregatedDepartment.class); return query.getResultList(); } 5. In the Departments entity, create a new native query annotation: @Entity @NamedQueries( { @NamedQuery(name = "Departments.findAll", query = "select o from Departments o") }) @NamedNativeQueries({ @NamedNativeQuery(name="Departments.allDepartmentsHavingEmployees", query = "select e.department_id, d.department_name , sum(e.salary), avg(e.salary) , max(e.salary), min(e.salary) from departments d , employees e where d.department_id = e.department_id group by e.department_id, d.department_name")}) public class Departments implements Serializable {...} 6. Create a new POJO called AggregatedDepartment: package oramag.sample.dashboard.model; import java.io.Serializable; import java.math.BigDecimal; public class AggregatedDepartment implements Serializable{ @SuppressWarnings("compatibility:5167698678781240729") private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L; private BigDecimal departmentId; private String departmentName; private BigDecimal sum; private BigDecimal avg; private BigDecimal max; private BigDecimal min; public AggregatedDepartment() { super(); } public AggregatedDepartment(BigDecimal departmentId, String departmentName, BigDecimal sum, BigDecimal avg, BigDecimal max, BigDecimal min) { super(); this.departmentId = departmentId; this.departmentName = departmentName; this.sum = sum; this.avg = avg; this.max = max; this.min = min; } public void setDepartmentId(BigDecimal departmentId) { this.departmentId = departmentId; } public BigDecimal getDepartmentId() { return departmentId; } public void setDepartmentName(String departmentName) { this.departmentName = departmentName; } public String getDepartmentName() { return departmentName; } public void setSum(BigDecimal sum) { this.sum = sum; } public BigDecimal getSum() { return sum; } public void setAvg(BigDecimal avg) { this.avg = avg; } public BigDecimal getAvg() { return avg; } public void setMax(BigDecimal max) { this.max = max; } public BigDecimal getMax() { return max; } public void setMin(BigDecimal min) { this.min = min; } public BigDecimal getMin() { return min; } } 7. Create the util java class called JavaBeanResult. The function of this class is to configure a native SQL query to return POJOs in a single line of code using the utility class. Credits: http://onpersistence.blogspot.com.br/2010/07/eclipselink-jpa-native-constructor.html package oramag.sample.dashboard.model.util; /******************************************************************************* * Copyright (c) 2010 Oracle. All rights reserved. * This program and the accompanying materials are made available under the * terms of the Eclipse Public License v1.0 and Eclipse Distribution License v. 1.0 * which accompanies this distribution. * The Eclipse Public License is available at http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html * and the Eclipse Distribution License is available at * http://www.eclipse.org/org/documents/edl-v10.php. * * @author shsmith ******************************************************************************/ import java.lang.reflect.Constructor; import java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.List; import javax.persistence.Query; import org.eclipse.persistence.exceptions.ConversionException; import org.eclipse.persistence.internal.helper.ConversionManager; import org.eclipse.persistence.internal.sessions.AbstractRecord; import org.eclipse.persistence.internal.sessions.AbstractSession; import org.eclipse.persistence.jpa.JpaHelper; import org.eclipse.persistence.queries.DatabaseQuery; import org.eclipse.persistence.queries.QueryRedirector; import org.eclipse.persistence.sessions.Record; import org.eclipse.persistence.sessions.Session; /*** * This class is a simple query redirector that intercepts the result of a * native query and builds an instance of the specified JavaBean class from each * result row. The order of the selected columns musts match the JavaBean class * constructor arguments order. * * To configure a JavaBeanResult on a native SQL query use: * JavaBeanResult.setQueryResultClass(query, SomeBeanClass.class); * where query is either a JPA SQL Query or native EclipseLink DatabaseQuery. * * @author shsmith * */ public final class JavaBeanResult implements QueryRedirector { private static final long serialVersionUID = 3025874987115503731L; protected Class resultClass; public static void setQueryResultClass(Query query, Class resultClass) { JavaBeanResult javaBeanResult = new JavaBeanResult(resultClass); DatabaseQuery databaseQuery = JpaHelper.getDatabaseQuery(query); databaseQuery.setRedirector(javaBeanResult); } public static void setQueryResultClass(DatabaseQuery query, Class resultClass) { JavaBeanResult javaBeanResult = new JavaBeanResult(resultClass); query.setRedirector(javaBeanResult); } protected JavaBeanResult(Class resultClass) { this.resultClass = resultClass; } @SuppressWarnings("unchecked") public Object invokeQuery(DatabaseQuery query, Record arguments, Session session) { List results = new ArrayList(); try { Constructor[] constructors = resultClass.getDeclaredConstructors(); Constructor javaBeanClassConstructor = null; // (Constructor) resultClass.getDeclaredConstructors()[0]; Class[] constructorParameterTypes = null; // javaBeanClassConstructor.getParameterTypes(); List rows = (List) query.execute( (AbstractSession) session, (AbstractRecord) arguments); for (Object[] columns : rows) { boolean found = false; for (Constructor constructor : constructors) { javaBeanClassConstructor = constructor; constructorParameterTypes = javaBeanClassConstructor.getParameterTypes(); if (columns.length == constructorParameterTypes.length) { found = true; break; } // if (columns.length != constructorParameterTypes.length) { // throw new ColumnParameterNumberMismatchException( // resultClass); // } } if (!found) throw new ColumnParameterNumberMismatchException( resultClass); Object[] constructorArgs = new Object[constructorParameterTypes.length]; for (int j = 0; j < columns.length; j++) { Object columnValue = columns[j]; Class parameterType = constructorParameterTypes[j]; // convert the column value to the correct type--if possible constructorArgs[j] = ConversionManager.getDefaultManager() .convertObject(columnValue, parameterType); } results.add(javaBeanClassConstructor.newInstance(constructorArgs)); } } catch (ConversionException e) { throw new ColumnParameterMismatchException(e); } catch (IllegalArgumentException e) { throw new ColumnParameterMismatchException(e); } catch (InstantiationException e) { throw new ColumnParameterMismatchException(e); } catch (IllegalAccessException e) { throw new ColumnParameterMismatchException(e); } catch (InvocationTargetException e) { throw new ColumnParameterMismatchException(e); } return results; } public final class ColumnParameterMismatchException extends RuntimeException { private static final long serialVersionUID = 4752000720859502868L; public ColumnParameterMismatchException(Throwable t) { super( "Exception while processing query results-ensure column order matches constructor parameter order", t); } } public final class ColumnParameterNumberMismatchException extends RuntimeException { private static final long serialVersionUID = 1776794744797667755L; public ColumnParameterNumberMismatchException(Class clazz) { super( "Number of selected columns does not match number of constructor arguments for: " + clazz.getName()); } } } 8. Create the DataControl and a jsf or jspx page 9. Drag allDepartmentsHavingEmployees from DataControl and drop in your page 10. Choose Graph > Type: Bar (Normal) > any layout 11. In the wizard screen, Bars label, adds: sum, avg, max, min. In the X Axis label, adds: departmentName, and click in OK button 12. Run the page, the result is showed below: You can download the workspace here . It was using the latest jdeveloper version 11.1.2.2.

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Windows Azure Myths

- by BuckWoody

Windows Azure is part of the Microsoft "stack" - the suite of software and services we offer. Because we have so many products in almost every part of technology, it's hard to know everything about all parts of what we do - even for those of us who work here. So it's no surprise that some folks are not as familiar with Windows and SQL Azure as they are, say Windows Server or XBox. As I chat with folks about a solution for a business or organization need, I put Windows Azure into the mix. I always start off with "What do you already know about Windows Azure?" so that I don't bore folks with information they already have. I some cases they've checked out the product ahead of time and have specific questions, in others they aren't as familiar, and in still others there is a fair amount of mis-information. Sometimes that's because of a marketing failure, sometimes it's hearsay, and somtetimes it's active misinformation. I thought I might lay out a few of these misconceptions. As always - do your fact-checking! Never take anyone's word alone (including mine) as gospel. Make sure you educate yourself on your options. Your company or your clients depend on you to have the right information on IT, so make sure you live up to that. Myth 1: Nobody uses Windows Azure It's true that we don't give out numbers on the amount of clients on Windows and SQL Azure. But lots of folks are here - companies you may have heard of like Boeing, NASA, Fujitsu, The City of London, Nuedesic, and many others. I deal with firms small and large that use Windows Azure for mission-critical applications, sometimes totally on Windows and/or SQL Azure, sometimes in conjunction with an on-premises system, sometimes for only a specific component in Windows Azure like storage. The interesting thing is that many sites you visit have a Windows Azure component, or are running on Windows Azure. They just don't announce it. Just like the other cloud providers, the companies have asked to be completely branded themselves - they don't want you to be aware or care that they are on Windows Azure. Sometimes that's for security, other times it's for different reasons. It's just like the web sites you visit. For the most part, they don't advertise which OS or Web Server they use. It really just shouldn't matter. The point is that they just use what works to solve a given problem. Check out a few public case studies here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/case-studies/ Myth 2: It's only for Microsoft stuff - can't use Open Source This is the one I face the most, and am the most dismayed by. We work just fine with many open source products, including Java, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Python, Hadoop, and many other languages and applications. You can quickly deploy a Wordpress, Umbraco and other "kits". We have software development kits (SDK's) for iPhones, iPads, Android, Windows phones and more. We have an SDK to work with FaceBook and other social networks. In short, we play well with others. More on the languages and runtimes we support here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/overview/ More on the SDK's here: http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/05/windows-azure-toolkit-for-ios/, http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/08/windows-azure-toolkits-for-devices-now-with-android/, http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com/ Myth 3: Microsoft expects me to switch everything to "the cloud" No, we don't. That would be disasterous, unless the only things you run in your company uses works perfectly in Azure. Use Windows Azure - or any cloud for that matter - where it works. Whenever I talk to companies, I focus on two things: Something that is broken and needs to be re-architected Something you want to do that is new If something is broken, and you need new tools to scale, extend, add capacity dynamically and so on, then you can consider using Windows or SQL Azure. It can help solve problems that you have, or it may include a component you don't want to write or architect yourself. Sometimes you want to do something new, like extend your company's offerings to mobile phones, to the web, or to a social network. More info on where it works here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Myth 4: I have to write code to use Windows and SQL Azure If Windows Azure is a PaaS - a Platform as a Service - then don't you have to write code to use it? Nope. Windows and SQL Azure are made up of various components. Some of those components allow you to write and deploy code (like Compute) and others don't. We have lots of customers using Windows Azure storage as a backup, to securely share files instead of using DropBox, to distribute videos or code or firmware, and more. Others use our High Performance Computing (HPC) offering to rent a supercomputer when they need one. You can even throw workloads at that using Excel! In addition there are lots of other components in Windows Azure you can use, from the Windows Azure Media Services to others. More here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/saas/ Myth 5: Windows Azure is just another form of "vendor lock-in" Windows Azure uses .NET, OSS languages and standard interfaces for the code. Sure, you're not going to take the code line-for-line and run it on a mainframe, but it's standard code that you write, and can port to something else. And the data is yours - you can bring it back whever you want. It's either in text or binary form, that you have complete control over. There are no licenses - you can "pay as you go", and when you're done, you can leave the service and take all your code, data and IP with you. So go out there, read up, try it. Use it where it works. And don't believe everything you hear - sometimes the Internet doesn't get it all correct. :)

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Windows Azure Myths

- by BuckWoody

Windows Azure is part of the Microsoft "stack" - the suite of software and services we offer. Because we have so many products in almost every part of technology, it's hard to know everything about all parts of what we do - even for those of us who work here. So it's no surprise that some folks are not as familiar with Windows and SQL Azure as they are, say Windows Server or XBox. As I chat with folks about a solution for a business or organization need, I put Windows Azure into the mix. I always start off with "What do you already know about Windows Azure?" so that I don't bore folks with information they already have. I some cases they've checked out the product ahead of time and have specific questions, in others they aren't as familiar, and in still others there is a fair amount of mis-information. Sometimes that's because of a marketing failure, sometimes it's hearsay, and somtetimes it's active misinformation. I thought I might lay out a few of these misconceptions. As always - do your fact-checking! Never take anyone's word alone (including mine) as gospel. Make sure you educate yourself on your options. Your company or your clients depend on you to have the right information on IT, so make sure you live up to that. Myth 1: Nobody uses Windows Azure It's true that we don't give out numbers on the amount of clients on Windows and SQL Azure. But lots of folks are here - companies you may have heard of like Boeing, NASA, Fujitsu, The City of London, Nuedesic, and many others. I deal with firms small and large that use Windows Azure for mission-critical applications, sometimes totally on Windows and/or SQL Azure, sometimes in conjunction with an on-premises system, sometimes for only a specific component in Windows Azure like storage. The interesting thing is that many sites you visit have a Windows Azure component, or are running on Windows Azure. They just don't announce it. Just like the other cloud providers, the companies have asked to be completely branded themselves - they don't want you to be aware or care that they are on Windows Azure. Sometimes that's for security, other times it's for different reasons. It's just like the web sites you visit. For the most part, they don't advertise which OS or Web Server they use. It really just shouldn't matter. The point is that they just use what works to solve a given problem. Check out a few public case studies here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/case-studies/ Myth 2: It's only for Microsoft stuff - can't use Open Source This is the one I face the most, and am the most dismayed by. We work just fine with many open source products, including Java, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, Python, Hadoop, and many other languages and applications. You can quickly deploy a Wordpress, Umbraco and other "kits". We have software development kits (SDK's) for iPhones, iPads, Android, Windows phones and more. We have an SDK to work with FaceBook and other social networks. In short, we play well with others. More on the languages and runtimes we support here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/overview/ More on the SDK's here: http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/05/windows-azure-toolkit-for-ios/, http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/08/windows-azure-toolkits-for-devices-now-with-android/, http://azuretoolkit.codeplex.com/ Myth 3: Microsoft expects me to switch everything to "the cloud" No, we don't. That would be disasterous, unless the only things you run in your company uses works perfectly in Azure. Use Windows Azure - or any cloud for that matter - where it works. Whenever I talk to companies, I focus on two things: Something that is broken and needs to be re-architected Something you want to do that is new If something is broken, and you need new tools to scale, extend, add capacity dynamically and so on, then you can consider using Windows or SQL Azure. It can help solve problems that you have, or it may include a component you don't want to write or architect yourself. Sometimes you want to do something new, like extend your company's offerings to mobile phones, to the web, or to a social network. More info on where it works here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/buckwoody/archive/2011/01/18/windows-azure-and-sql-azure-use-cases.aspx Myth 4: I have to write code to use Windows and SQL Azure If Windows Azure is a PaaS - a Platform as a Service - then don't you have to write code to use it? Nope. Windows and SQL Azure are made up of various components. Some of those components allow you to write and deploy code (like Compute) and others don't. We have lots of customers using Windows Azure storage as a backup, to securely share files instead of using DropBox, to distribute videos or code or firmware, and more. Others use our High Performance Computing (HPC) offering to rent a supercomputer when they need one. You can even throw workloads at that using Excel! In addition there are lots of other components in Windows Azure you can use, from the Windows Azure Media Services to others. More here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/home/scenarios/saas/ Myth 5: Windows Azure is just another form of "vendor lock-in" Windows Azure uses .NET, OSS languages and standard interfaces for the code. Sure, you're not going to take the code line-for-line and run it on a mainframe, but it's standard code that you write, and can port to something else. And the data is yours - you can bring it back whever you want. It's either in text or binary form, that you have complete control over. There are no licenses - you can "pay as you go", and when you're done, you can leave the service and take all your code, data and IP with you. So go out there, read up, try it. Use it where it works. And don't believe everything you hear - sometimes the Internet doesn't get it all correct. :)

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New ways for backup, recovery and restore of Essbase Block Storage databases – part 2 by Bernhard Kinkel

- by Alexandra Georgescu

After discussing in the first part of this article new options in Essbase for the general backup and restore, this second part will deal with the also rather new feature of Transaction Logging and Replay, which was released in version 11.1, enhancing existing restore options. Tip: Transaction logging and replay cannot be used for aggregate storage databases. Please refer to the Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1). Even if backups are done on a regular, frequent base, subsequent data entries, loads or calculations would not be reflected in a restored database. Activating Transaction Logging could fill that gap and provides you with an option to capture these post-backup transactions for later replay. The following table shows, which are the transactions that could be logged when Transaction Logging is enabled: In order to activate its usage, corresponding statements could be added to the Essbase.cfg file, using the TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION command. The complete syntax reads: TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION [ appname [ dbname]] LOGLOCATION NATIVE ?ENABLE | DISABLE Where appname and dbname are optional parameters giving you the chance in combination with the ENABLE or DISABLE command to set Transaction Logging for certain applications or databases or to exclude them from being logged. If only an appname is specified, the setting applies to all databases in that particular application. If appname and dbname are not defined, all applications and databases would be covered. LOGLOCATION specifies the directory to which the log is written, e.g. D:\temp\trlogs. This directory must already exist or needs to be created before using it for log information being written to it. NATIVE is a reserved keyword that shouldn’t be changed. The following example shows how to first enable logging on a more general level for all databases in the application Sample, followed by a disabling statement on a more granular level for only the Basic database in application Sample, hence excluding it from being logged. TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE ENABLE TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION Sample Basic Hyperion/trlog/Sample NATIVE DISABLE Tip: After applying changes to the configuration file you must restart the Essbase server in order to initialize the settings. A maybe required replay of logged transactions after restoring a database can be done only by administrators. The following options are available: In Administration Services selecting Replay Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: Here you can select to replay transactions logged after the last replay request was originally executed or after the time of the last restored backup (whichever occurred later) or transactions logged after a specified time. Or you can replay transactions selectively based on a range of sequence IDs, which can be accessed using Display Transactions on the right-click menu on the database: These sequence ID s (0, 1, 2 … 7 in the screenshot below) are assigned to each logged transaction, indicating the order in which the transaction was performed. This helps to ensure the integrity of the restored data after a replay, as the replay of transactions is enforced in the same order in which they were originally performed. So for example a calculation originally run after a data load cannot be replayed before having replayed the data load first. After a transaction is replayed, you can replay only transactions with a greater sequence ID. For example, replaying the transaction with sequence ID of 4 includes all preceding transactions, while afterwards you can only replay transactions with a sequence ID of 5 or greater. Tip: After restoring a database from a backup you should always completely replay all logged transactions, which were executed after the backup, before executing new transactions. But not only the transaction information itself needs to be logged and stored in a specified directory as described above. During transaction logging, Essbase also creates archive copies of data load and rules files in the following default directory: ARBORPATH/app/appname/dbname/Replay These files are then used during the replay of a logged transaction. By default Essbase archives only data load and rules files for client data loads, but in order to specify the type of data to archive when logging transactions you can use the command TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE as an additional entry in the Essbase.cfg file. The syntax for the statement is: TRANSACTIONLOGDATALOADARCHIVE [appname [dbname]] [OPTION] While to the [appname [dbname]] argument the same applies like before for TRANSACTIONLOGLOCATION, the valid values for the OPTION argument are the following: Make the respective setting for which files copies should be logged, considering from which location transactions are usually taking place. Selecting the NONE option prevents Essbase from saving the respective files and the data load cannot be replayed. In this case you must first manually load the data before you can replay the transactions. Tip: If you use server or SQL data and the data and rules files are not archived in the Replay directory (for example, you did not use the SERVER or SERVER_CLIENT option), Essbase replays the data that is actually in the data source at the moment of the replay, which may or may not be the data that was originally loaded. You can find more detailed information in the following documents: Oracle Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management System Backup and Recovery Guide (rel. 11.1.2.1) Oracle Essbase Online Documentation (rel. 11.1.2.1)) Enterprise Performance Management System Documentation (including previous releases) Or on the Oracle Technology Network. If you are also interested in other new features and smart enhancements in Essbase or Hyperion Planning stay tuned for coming articles or check our training courses and web presentations. You can find general information about offerings for the Essbase and Planning curriculum or other Oracle-Hyperion products here; (please make sure to select your country/region at the top of this page) or in the OU Learning paths section, where Planning, Essbase and other Hyperion products can be found under the Fusion Middleware heading (again, please select the right country/region). Or drop me a note directly: [email protected]. About the Author: Bernhard Kinkel started working for Hyperion Solutions as a Presales Consultant and Consultant in 1998 and moved to Hyperion Education Services in 1999. He joined Oracle University in 2007 where he is a Principal Education Consultant. Based on these many years of working with Hyperion products he has detailed product knowledge across several versions. He delivers both classroom and live virtual courses. His areas of expertise are Oracle/Hyperion Essbase, Oracle Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Web Analysis. Disclaimer: All methods and features mentioned in this article must be considered and tested carefully related to your environment, processes and requirements. As guidance please always refer to the available software documentation. This article does not recommend or advise any explicit action or change, hence the author cannot be held responsible for any consequences due to the use or implementation of these features.

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More Fun with C# Iterators and Generators

- by James Michael Hare

In my last post, I talked quite a bit about iterators and how they can be really powerful tools for filtering a list of items down to a subset of items. This had both pros and cons over returning a full collection, which, in summary, were: Pros: If traversal is only partial, does not have to visit rest of collection. If evaluation method is costly, only incurs that cost on elements visited. Adds little to no garbage collection pressure. Cons: Very slight performance impact if you know caller will always consume all items in collection. And as we saw in the last post, that con for the cost was very, very small and only really became evident on very tight loops consuming very large lists completely. One of the key items to note, though, is the garbage! In the traditional (return a new collection) method, if you have a 1,000,000 element collection, and wish to transform or filter it in some way, you have to allocate space for that copy of the collection. That is, say you have a collection of 1,000,000 items and you want to double every item in the collection. Well, that means you have to allocate a collection to hold those 1,000,000 items to return, which is a lot especially if you are just going to use it once and toss it. Iterators, though, don't have this problem. Each time you visit the node, it would return the doubled value of the node (in this example) and not allocate a second collection of 1,000,000 doubled items. Do you see the distinction? In both cases, we're consuming 1,000,000 items. But in one case we pass back each doubled item which is just an int (for example's sake) on the stack and in the other case, we allocate a list containing 1,000,000 items which then must be garbage collected. So iterators in C# are pretty cool, eh? Well, here's one more thing a C# iterator can do that a traditional "return a new collection" transformation can't! It can return **unbounded** collections! I know, I know, that smells a lot like an infinite loop, eh? Yes and no. Basically, you're relying on the caller to put the bounds on the list, and as long as the caller doesn't you keep going. Consider this example: public static class Fibonacci { // returns the infinite fibonacci sequence public static IEnumerable<int> Sequence() { int iteration = 0; int first = 1; int second = 1; int current = 0; while (true) { if (iteration++ < 2) { current = 1; } else { current = first + second; second = first; first = current; } yield return current; } } } Whoa, you say! Yes, that's an infinite loop! What the heck is going on there? Yes, that was intentional. Would it be better to have a fibonacci sequence that returns only a specific number of items? Perhaps, but that wouldn't give you the power to defer the execution to the caller. The beauty of this function is it is as infinite as the sequence itself! The fibonacci sequence is unbounded, and so is this method. It will continue to return fibonacci numbers for as long as you ask for them. Now that's not something you can do with a traditional method that would return a collection of ints representing each number. In that case you would eventually run out of memory as you got to higher and higher numbers. This method, though, never runs out of memory. Now, that said, you do have to know when you use it that it is an infinite collection and bound it appropriately. Fortunately, Linq provides a lot of these extension methods for you! Let's say you only want the first 10 fibonacci numbers: foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().Take(10)) { Console.WriteLine(fib); } Or let's say you only want the fibonacci numbers that are less than 100: foreach(var fib in Fibonacci.Sequence().TakeWhile(f => f < 100)) { Console.WriteLine(fib); } So, you see, one of the nice things about iterators is their power to work with virtually any size (even infinite) collections without adding the garbage collection overhead of making new collections. You can also do fun things like this to make a more "fluent" interface for for loops: // A set of integer generator extension methods public static class IntExtensions { // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this. public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start) { // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going // to infinity for as long as values are pulled. for (var i = start; ; ++i) { yield return i; } } // Begins counting to infinity by the given step value, use To() to public static IEnumerable<int> Every(this int start, int byEvery) { // deliberately avoiding condition because keeps going // to infinity for as long as values are pulled. for (var i = start; ; i += byEvery) { yield return i; } } // Begins counting to inifity, use To() to range this. public static IEnumerable<int> To(this int start, int end) { for (var i = start; i <= end; ++i) { yield return i; } } // Ranges the count by specifying the upper range of the count. public static IEnumerable<int> To(this IEnumerable<int> collection, int end) { return collection.TakeWhile(item => item <= end); } } Note that there are two versions of each method. One that starts with an int and one that starts with an IEnumerable<int>. This is to allow more power in chaining from either an existing collection or from an int. This lets you do things like: // count from 1 to 30 foreach(var i in 1.To(30)) { Console.WriteLine(i); } // count from 1 to 10 by 2s foreach(var i in 0.Every(2).To(10)) { Console.WriteLine(i); } // or, if you want an infinite sequence counting by 5s until something inside breaks you out... foreach(var i in 0.Every(5)) { if (someCondition) { break; } ... } Yes, those are kinda play functions and not particularly useful, but they show some of the power of generators and extension methods to form a fluid interface. So what do you think? What are some of your favorite generators and iterators?

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Given an XML which contains a representation of a graph, how to apply it DFS algorithm? [on hold]

- by winston smith

Given the followin XML which is a directed graph: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?> <!DOCTYPE graph PUBLIC "-//FC//DTD red//EN" "../dtd/graph.dtd"> <graph direct="1"> <vertex label="V0"/> <vertex label="V1"/> <vertex label="V2"/> <vertex label="V3"/> <vertex label="V4"/> <vertex label="V5"/> <edge source="V0" target="V1" weight="1"/> <edge source="V0" target="V4" weight="1"/> <edge source="V5" target="V2" weight="1"/> <edge source="V5" target="V4" weight="1"/> <edge source="V1" target="V2" weight="1"/> <edge source="V1" target="V3" weight="1"/> <edge source="V1" target="V4" weight="1"/> <edge source="V2" target="V3" weight="1"/> </graph> With this classes i parsed the graph and give it an adjacency list representation: import java.io.IOException; import java.util.HashSet; import java.util.LinkedList; import java.util.Collection; import java.util.Iterator; import java.util.logging.Level; import java.util.logging.Logger; import practica3.util.Disc; public class ParsingXML { public static void main(String[] args) { try { // TODO code application logic here Collection<Vertex> sources = new HashSet<Vertex>(); LinkedList<String> lines = Disc.readFile("xml/directed.xml"); for (String lin : lines) { int i = Disc.find(lin, "source=\""); String data = ""; if (i > 0 && i < lin.length()) { while (lin.charAt(i + 1) != '"') { data += lin.charAt(i + 1); i++; } Vertex v = new Vertex(); v.setName(data); v.setAdy(new HashSet<Vertex>()); sources.add(v); } } Iterator it = sources.iterator(); while (it.hasNext()) { Vertex ver = (Vertex) it.next(); Collection<Vertex> adyacencias = ver.getAdy(); LinkedList<String> ls = Disc.readFile("xml/graphs.xml"); for (String lin : ls) { int i = Disc.find(lin, "target=\""); String data = ""; if (lin.contains("source=\""+ver.getName())) { Vertex v = new Vertex(); if (i > 0 && i < lin.length()) { while (lin.charAt(i + 1) != '"') { data += lin.charAt(i + 1); i++; } v.setName(data); } i = Disc.find(lin, "weight=\""); data = ""; if (i > 0 && i < lin.length()) { while (lin.charAt(i + 1) != '"') { data += lin.charAt(i + 1); i++; } v.setWeight(Integer.parseInt(data)); } if (v.getName() != null) { adyacencias.add(v); } } } } for (Vertex vert : sources) { System.out.println(vert); System.out.println("adyacencias: " + vert.getAdy()); } } catch (IOException ex) { Logger.getLogger(ParsingXML.class.getName()).log(Level.SEVERE, null, ex); } } } This is another class: import java.util.Collection; import java.util.Objects; public class Vertex { private String name; private int weight; private Collection ady; public Collection getAdy() { return ady; } public void setAdy(Collection adyacencias) { this.ady = adyacencias; } public String getName() { return name; } public void setName(String nombre) { this.name = nombre; } public int getWeight() { return weight; } public void setWeight(int weight) { this.weight = weight; } @Override public int hashCode() { int hash = 7; hash = 43 * hash + Objects.hashCode(this.name); hash = 43 * hash + this.weight; return hash; } @Override public boolean equals(Object obj) { if (obj == null) { return false; } if (getClass() != obj.getClass()) { return false; } final Vertex other = (Vertex) obj; if (!Objects.equals(this.name, other.name)) { return false; } if (this.weight != other.weight) { return false; } return true; } @Override public String toString() { return "Vertice{" + "name=" + name + ", weight=" + weight + '}'; } } And finally: /** * * @author user */ /* -*-jde-*- */ /* <Disc.java> Contains the main argument*/ import java.io.*; import java.util.LinkedList; /** * Lectura y escritura de archivos en listas de cadenas * Ideal para el uso de las clases para gráficas. * * @author Peralta Santa Anna Victor Miguel * @since Julio 2011 */ public class Disc { /** * Metodo para lectura de un archivo * * @param fileName archivo que se va a leer * @return El archivo en representacion de lista de cadenas */ public static LinkedList<String> readFile(String fileName) throws IOException { BufferedReader file = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(fileName)); LinkedList<String> textlist = new LinkedList<String>(); while (file.ready()) { textlist.add(file.readLine().trim()); } file.close(); /* for(String linea:textlist){ if(linea.contains("source")){ //String generado = linea.replaceAll("<\\w+\\s+\"", ""); //System.out.println(generado); } }*/ return textlist; }//readFile public static int find(String linea,String palabra){ int i,j; boolean found = false; for(i=0,j=0;i<linea.length();i++){ if(linea.charAt(i)==palabra.charAt(j)){ j++; if(j==palabra.length()){ found = true; return i; } }else{ continue; } } if(!found){ i= -1; } return i; } /** * Metodo para la escritura de un archivo * * @param fileName archivo que se va a escribir * @param tofile la lista de cadenas que quedaran en el archivo * @param append el bit que dira si se anexa el contenido o se empieza de cero */ public static void writeFile(String fileName, LinkedList<String> tofile, boolean append) throws IOException { FileWriter file = new FileWriter(fileName, append); for (int i = 0; i < tofile.size(); i++) { file.write(tofile.get(i) + "\n"); } file.close(); }//writeFile /** * Metodo para escritura de un archivo * @param msg archivo que se va a escribir * @param tofile la cadena que quedaran en el archivo * @param append el bit que dira si se anexa el contenido o se empieza de cero */ public static void writeFile(String msg, String tofile, boolean append) throws IOException { FileWriter file = new FileWriter(msg, append); file.write(tofile); file.close(); }//writeFile }// I'm stuck on what can be the best way to given an adjacency list representation of the graph how to apply it Depth-first search algorithm. Any idea of how to aproach to complete the task?

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BRE (Business Rules Engine) Data Services is out...!!!

- by Vishal

A few months ago we at Tellago had open sourced the BizTalk Data Services. We were meanwhile working on other artifacts which comes along with BizTalk Server like the “Business Rules Engine”. We are happy to announce the first version of BRE Data Services. BRE Data Services is a same concept which we covered through BTS Data Services, providing a RESTFul OData – based API to interact with the Business Rules Engine via HTTP using ATOM Publishing Protocol or JSON as the encoding mechanism. In the first version release, we mainly focused on the browsing, querying and searching BRE artifacts via a RESTFul interface. Also along with that we provide the functionality to execute Business Rules by inserting the Facts for policies via the IUpdatable implementation of WCF Data Services. The BRE Data Services API provides a lightweight interface for managing Business Rules Engine artifacts such as Policies, Rules, Vocabularies, Conditions, Actions, Facts etc. The following are some examples which details some of the available features in the current version of the API. Basic Querying: Querying BRE Policies http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies Querying BRE Rules http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules Querying BRE Vocabularies http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Vocabularies Navigation: The BRE Data Services API also leverages WCF Data Services to enable navigation across related different BRE objects. Querying a specific Policy http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies(‘PolicyName’) Querying a specific Rule http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules(‘RuleName’) Querying all Rules under a Policy http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies('PolicyName')/Rules Querying all Facts under a Policy http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Policies('PolicyName')/Facts Querying all Actions for a specific Rule http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules('RuleName')/Actions Querying all Conditions for a specific Rule http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Rules('RuleName')/Actions Querying a specific Vocabulary: http://localhost/BREDataServices/BREMananagementService.svc/Vocabularies('VocabName') Implementation: With the BRE Data Services, we also provide the functionality of executing a particular policy via HTTP. There are couple of ways you can do that though the API. Ø First is though Service Operations feature of WCF Data Services in which you can execute the Facts by passing them in the URL itself. This is a very simple implementations of the executing the policies due to the limitations & restrictions (only primitive types of input parameters which can be passed) currently of the Service Operations of the WCF Data Services. Below is a code sample. Below is a traced Request/Response message. Ø Second is through the IUpdatable Interface of WCF Data Services. In this method, you can first query the rule which you want to execute and then inserts Facts for that particular Rules and finally when you perform the SaveChanges() call for the IUpdatable Interface API, it executes the policy with the facts which you inserted at runtime. Below is a sample of client side code. Due to the limitations of current version of WCF Data Services where there is no way you can return back the updates happening on the service side back to the client via the SaveChanges() method. Here we are executing the rule passing a serialized XML as Facts and there is no changes made to any data where we can query back to fetch the changes. This is overcome though the first way to executing the policies which is by executing it as a Service Operation call. This actually generates a AtomPub message shown as below: POST /Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost/BREMananagementService.svc/$batch HTTP/1.1 User-Agent: Microsoft ADO.NET Data Services DataServiceVersion: 1.0;NetFx MaxDataServiceVersion: 2.0;NetFx Accept: application/atom+xml,application/xml Accept-Charset: UTF-8 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=batch_6b9a5ced-5ecb-4585-940a-9d5e704c28c7 Host: localhost:8080 Content-Length: 1481 Expect: 100-continue --batch_6b9a5ced-5ecb-4585-940a-9d5e704c28c7 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary=changeset_184a8c59-a714-4ba9-bb3d-889a88fe24bf --changeset_184a8c59-a714-4ba9-bb3d-889a88fe24bf Content-Type: application/http Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary MERGE http://localhost:8080/Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost/BREMananagementService.svc/Facts('TestPolicy') HTTP/1.1 Content-ID: 4 Content-Type: application/atom+xml;type=entry Content-Length: 927 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes"?> <entry xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" font-size: x-small"http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"> <category scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" term="Tellago.BRE.REST.Resources.Fact" /> <title /> <author> <name /> </author> <updated>2011-01-31T20:09:15.0023982Z</updated> <id>http://localhost:8080/Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost/BREMananagementService.svc/Facts('TestPolicy')</id> <content type="application/xml"> <m:properties> <d:FactInstance><ns0:LoanStatus xmlns:ns0="http://tellago.com"><Age>10</Age><Status>true</Status></ns0:LoanStatus></d:FactInstance> <d:FactType>TestSchema</d:FactType> <d:ID>TestPolicy</d:ID> </m:properties> </content> </entry> --changeset_184a8c59-a714-4ba9-bb3d-889a88fe24bf-- --batch_6b9a5ced-5ecb-4585-940a-9d5e704c28c7— Installation: The installation of the BRE Data Services is pretty straight forward. · Create a new IIS website say BREDataServices. · Download the SourceCode from TellagoCodeplex and copy the content from Tellago.BRE.REST.ServiceHost to the physical location of the above created website. · The appPool account running the website should have admin access to the BizTalkRuleEngineDb database. · TheRight click the BREManagementService.svc in the IIS ContentView for the website and wala.. Conclusion: The BRE Data Services API is an experiment intended to bring the capabilities of RESTful/OData based services to the Traditional BTS/BRE Solutions. The future releases will target on technologies like BAM, ESB Toolkit. This version has been tested with various version of BizTalk Server and we have uploaded the source code to our Tellago's DevLabs workspace at Codeplex. I hope you guys enjoy this release. Keep an eye on our new releases @ Tellago Codeplex. We are working on various other Biztalk Artifacts like BAM, ESB Toolkit. Till than happy BizzRuling…!!! Thanks, Vishal Mody

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Emtel Knowledge Series - Q2/2014

From Cyber Island to Smart Mauritius Cyber Island? Smart Mauritius? - What is Emtel talking about? "With the majority of the population living in urban environments today, the concept of "Smart Cities" has become an urgent necessity. "Smart Cities" refer to an urban transformation which, by using latest ICT technologies makes cities more efficient. Many Governments are setting out ambitious plans to build the cities of the future based on massive connectivity, high bandwidth communications, intelligent sensors and analysis of huge volumes of data. Various researches have shown four key enablers for smart city success - Government leadership, suitable technology infrastructure, solid public-private partnerships and engaged citizens. It is around these enabling factors that telecoms companies can play a vital role in assisting governments to deliver on the smart city vision." The Emtel Knowledge Series goes in compliance with Emtel's 25th anniversary celebrations throughout the year and the master of ceremony, Kim Andersen, mentioned that there will be more upcoming events on a quarterly base. As a representative of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC) there was absolutely no hesitation to join in again. Following my visit to the first Emtel Knowledge Series workshop back in February this year, it was great to have another opportunity to meet and exchange with technology experts. But quite frankly what is it with those buzz words... As far as I remember and how it was mentioned "Cyber Island" is an old initiative from around 2005/2006 which has been refreshed in 2010. It implies the empowerment of Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) as an essential factor of growth by the government here in Mauritius. Actually, the first promotional period of Cyber Island brought me here but that's another story. The venue and its own problems Like last time the event was organised and held at the Conference Hall at Cyber Tower I in Ebene. As I've been working there for some years, I know about the frustrating situation of finding a proper parking. So, does Smart Island include better solutions for the search of parking spaces? Maybe, let's see whether I will be able to answer that question at the end of the article. Anyway, after circling around the tower almost two times, I finally got a decent space to put the car, without risking to get a ticket or damage actually. International speakers and their experience Once again, Emtel did a great job to get international expertise onto the stage to share their experience and vision on this kind of embarkment. Personally, I really appreciated the fact they were speakers of global reach and could provide own-experience knowledge. Johan Gott spoke about the fundamental change that the Swedish government ignited in order to move their society and workers' environment away from heavy industry towards a knowledge-based approach. Additionally, we spoke about the effort and transformation of New York City into a greener and more efficient Smart City. Given modern technology he also advised that any kind of available Big Data should be opened to the general public - this openness would provide a playground for anyone to garner new ideas and most probably solid solutions of which no one else thought about before. Emtel Knowledge Series on moving from Cyber Island to Smart Mauritus Later during the afternoon that exact statement regarding openness to and transparency of government-owned Big Data has been emphasised again by the Danish speaker Kim Andersen and his former colleague Mika Jantunen from Finland. Mika continued to underline the important role of the government to provide a solid foundation for a knowledge-based society and mentioned that Finnish citizens have a constitutional right to broadband connectivity. Next to free higher (tertiary) education Finland already produced a good number of innovations, among them are: First country to grant voting rights to women Free higher education Constitutional right to broadband connectivity Nokia Linux Angry Birds Sauna and others... General access to internet via broadband and/or mobile connectivity is surely a key factor towards Smart Cities, or better said Smart Mauritius given the area dimensions and size of population. CTO Paul Valette gave the audience a brief overview of the essential role that Emtel will have to move Mauritius forward towards a knowledge-based and innovation-driven environment for its citizen. What I have seen looks really promising and with recently published information that Mauritians have 127% of mobile capacity - meaning more than 1 mobile, smartphone or tablet per person - it will be crucial to have the right infrastructure for these connected devices. How would it be possible to achieve a knowledge-based society? YouTube to the rescue!Seriously, gaining more knowledge will require to have fast access to educational course material as explained by Dr Kaviraj Sukon, General Director of the Open University of Mauritius. According to him a good number of high-profile universities in the world have opened their course libraries to the general public, among them EDX, Coursera and Open University. Nowadays, you're actually able and enabled to learn for and earn a BSc or even MSc certification on your own pace - no need to attend classed on campus. It was really impressive to see the number of available hours - more than enough for a life-long learning experience! {loadposition content_adsense} Networking in the name of MSCC As briefly mentioned above I was about to combine two approaches for this workshop. Of course, getting latest information and updates on Emtel services available, especially for my business here on the west coast of the island, but also to meet and greet new people for the MSCC. And I think it was very positive on both sides. Let me quickly describe some of the key aspects that happened during the day: Met with Arnaud Meslier and Kellie, both Microsoft to swap latest information on IT events. Hereby, I got an invite to Microsoft Windows Phone 8.1 Dev Camp. Got in touch with Arvin Lockee, Emtel to check our options to meet with the data team, and seizing the opportunity to have a visiting tour at the Emtel Data Centre. Had a great chat with Avinash Meetoo, Knowledge 7, Kim Andersen and Mika Jantunen about the situation of teaching and learning in general and specifically in the private sector here in Mauritius. Additionally, a number of various other interesting chats... Once again, I'm catching up on a couple of business cards in order to provide more background information about the MSCC, and to create a better awareness of MSCC within the local IT businesses. There is more to come soon! Resume of the day The number of attendees during this event has been doubled or even tripled this time. The whole organisation has been improved massively and the combination of presentation and summarizing panel discussions was better than during the previous workshop back in February. Overall, once again a well-organised workshop and I'm already looking forward to join the next workshop in Q3. Update End of July we finally managed to visit the Emtel Data Centre in Arsenal. It was an interesting opportunity for some of our MSCC members.

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Is it possible to run dhcpd3 as non-root user in a chroot jail?

- by Lenain

Hi everyone. I would like to run dhcpd3 from a chroot jail on Debian Lenny. At the moment, I can run it as root from my jail. Now I want to do this as non-root user (as "-u blah -t /path/to/jail" Bind option). If I start my process like this : start-stop-daemon --chroot /home/jails/dhcp --chuid dhcp \ --start --pidfile /home/jails/dhcp/var/run/dhcp.pid --exec /usr/sbin/dhcpd3 I get stuck with these errors : Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Server V3.1.1 Copyright 2004-2008 Internet Systems Consortium. All rights reserved. For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/ unable to create icmp socket: Operation not permitted Wrote 0 deleted host decls to leases file. Wrote 0 new dynamic host decls to leases file. Wrote 0 leases to leases file. Open a socket for LPF: Operation not permitted strace : brk(0) = 0x911b000 fcntl64(0, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl64(1, F_GETFD) = 0 fcntl64(2, F_GETFD) = 0 access("/etc/suid-debug", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) access("/etc/ld.so.nohwcap", F_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb775d000 access("/etc/ld.so.preload", R_OK) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/tls/i686/cmov", 0xbfc2ac84) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/tls/i686/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/tls/i686", 0xbfc2ac84) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/tls/cmov/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/tls/cmov", 0xbfc2ac84) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/tls/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/tls", 0xbfc2ac84) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i686/cmov", 0xbfc2ac84) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i686/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i686", 0xbfc2ac84) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/cmov/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/cmov", 0xbfc2ac84) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3 read(3, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0\3\0\1\0\0\0\260e\1\0004\0\0\0t"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0755, st_size=1294572, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb775c000 mmap2(NULL, 1300080, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0) = 0xb761e000 mmap2(0xb7756000, 12288, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 3, 0x138) = 0xb7756000 mmap2(0xb7759000, 9840, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7759000 close(3) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb761d000 set_thread_area({entry_number:-1 - 6, base_addr:0xb761d6b0, limit:1048575, seg_32bit:1, contents:0, read_exec_only:0, limit_in_pages:1, seg_not_present:0, useable:1}) = 0 mprotect(0xb7756000, 4096, PROT_READ) = 0 open("/dev/null", O_RDWR) = 3 close(3) = 0 brk(0) = 0x911b000 brk(0x913c000) = 0x913c000 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_DGRAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/dev/log"...}, 110) = 0 time(NULL) = 1284760816 open("/etc/localtime", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb761c000 read(4, "TZif2\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\f\0\0\0\f\0\0\0\0\0"..., 4096) = 2945 _llseek(4, -28, [2917], SEEK_CUR) = 0 read(4, "\nCET-1CEST,M3.5.0,M10.5.0/3\n"..., 4096) = 28 close(4) = 0 munmap(0xb761c000, 4096) = 0 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: Intern"..., 73, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 73 write(2, "Internet Systems Consortium DHCP "..., 46Internet Systems Consortium DHCP Server V3.1.1) = 46 write(2, "\n"..., 1 ) = 1 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: Copyri"..., 75, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 75 write(2, "Copyright 2004-2008 Internet Syst"..., 48Copyright 2004-2008 Internet Systems Consortium.) = 48 write(2, "\n"..., 1 ) = 1 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: All ri"..., 47, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 47 write(2, "All rights reserved."..., 20All rights reserved.) = 20 write(2, "\n"..., 1 ) = 1 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: For in"..., 77, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 77 write(2, "For info, please visit http://www"..., 50For info, please visit http://www.isc.org/sw/dhcp/) = 50 write(2, "\n"..., 1 ) = 1 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 4 fcntl64(4, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(4, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"...}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(4) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 4 fcntl64(4, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK) = 0 connect(4, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/var/run/nscd/socket"...}, 110) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) close(4) = 0 open("/etc/nsswitch.conf", O_RDONLY) = 4 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=475, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb761c000 read(4, "# /etc/nsswitch.conf\n#\n# Example "..., 4096) = 475 read(4, ""..., 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0xb761c000, 4096) = 0 open("/lib/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/tls/i686/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/tls/i686/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/tls/i686/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/tls/i686", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/tls/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/tls/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/tls/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/tls", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i686/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i686/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i686/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i686", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/i686/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/i686/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/i686/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/i686", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/i686/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/i686/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/i686", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/i486-linux-gnu/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/lib/i486-linux-gnu", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/i686/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/i686/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/i686/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/i686", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/tls", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/i686/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/i686/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/i686/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/i686", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/cmov/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/cmov", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu/libnss_db.so.2", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat64("/usr/lib/i486-linux-gnu", 0xbfc2ad5c) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) open("/lib/libnss_files.so.2", O_RDONLY) = 4 read(4, "\177ELF\1\1\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\3\0\3\0\1\0\0\0\320\30\0\0004\0\0\0\250"..., 512) = 512 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=38408, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 41624, PROT_READ|PROT_EXEC, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0) = 0xb7612000 mmap2(0xb761b000, 8192, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_FIXED|MAP_DENYWRITE, 4, 0x8) = 0xb761b000 close(4) = 0 open("/etc/services", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 4 fcntl64(4, F_GETFD) = 0x1 (flags FD_CLOEXEC) fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=18480, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7611000 read(4, "# Network services, Internet styl"..., 4096) = 4096 read(4, "9/tcp\t\t\t\t# Quick Mail Transfer Pr"..., 4096) = 4096 read(4, "note\t1352/tcp\tlotusnotes\t# Lotus "..., 4096) = 4096 read(4, "tion\nafs3-kaserver\t7004/udp\nafs3-"..., 4096) = 4096 read(4, "backup\t2989/tcp\t\t\t# Afmbackup sys"..., 4096) = 2096 read(4, ""..., 4096) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0xb7611000, 4096) = 0 time(NULL) = 1284760816 open("/etc/protocols", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 4 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2626, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7611000 read(4, "# Internet (IP) protocols\n#\n# Upd"..., 4096) = 2626 close(4) = 0 munmap(0xb7611000, 4096) = 0 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_RAW, IPPROTO_ICMP) = -1 EPERM (Operation not permitted) time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: unable"..., 80, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 80 write(2, "unable to create icmp socket: Ope"..., 53unable to create icmp socket: Operation not permitted) = 53 write(2, "\n"..., 1 ) = 1 open("/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf", O_RDONLY) = 4 lseek(4, 0, SEEK_END) = 1426 lseek(4, 0, SEEK_SET) = 0 read(4, "#----------------------------\n# G"..., 1426) = 1426 close(4) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 401408, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb75b0000 mmap2(NULL, 401408, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb754e000 mmap2(NULL, 401408, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb74ec000 brk(0x916f000) = 0x916f000 close(3) = 0 socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_DGRAM, 0) = 3 fcntl64(3, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0 connect(3, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/dev/log"...}, 110) = 0 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: Inter"..., 74, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 74 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: Copyr"..., 76, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 76 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: All r"..., 48, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 48 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: For i"..., 78, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 78 open("/var/lib/dhcp3/dhcpd.leases", O_RDONLY) = 4 lseek(4, 0, SEEK_END) = 126 lseek(4, 0, SEEK_SET) = 0 read(4, "# The format of this file is docu"..., 126) = 126 close(4) = 0 open("/var/lib/dhcp3/dhcpd.leases", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_APPEND, 0666) = 4 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=126, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb74eb000 fstat64(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=126, ...}) = 0 _llseek(4, 126, [126], SEEK_SET) = 0 time(NULL) = 1284760816 time(NULL) = 1284760816 open("/var/lib/dhcp3/dhcpd.leases.1284760816", O_WRONLY|O_CREAT|O_TRUNC, 0664) = 5 fcntl64(5, F_GETFL) = 0x1 (flags O_WRONLY) fstat64(5, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=0, ...}) = 0 mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb74ea000 _llseek(5, 0, [0], SEEK_CUR) = 0 close(4) = 0 munmap(0xb74eb000, 4096) = 0 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: Wrote"..., 70, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 70 write(2, "Wrote 0 deleted host decls to lea"..., 42Wrote 0 deleted host decls to leases file.) = 42 write(2, "\n"..., 1 ) = 1 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: Wrote"..., 74, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 74 write(2, "Wrote 0 new dynamic host decls to"..., 46Wrote 0 new dynamic host decls to leases file.) = 46 write(2, "\n"..., 1 ) = 1 time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: Wrote"..., 58, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 58 write(2, "Wrote 0 leases to leases file."..., 30Wrote 0 leases to leases file.) = 30 write(2, "\n"..., 1 ) = 1 write(5, "# The format of this file is docu"..., 126) = 126 fsync(5) = 0 unlink("/var/lib/dhcp3/dhcpd.leases~") = 0 link("/var/lib/dhcp3/dhcpd.leases", "/var/lib/dhcp3/dhcpd.leases~") = 0 rename("/var/lib/dhcp3/dhcpd.leases.1284760816", "/var/lib/dhcp3/dhcpd.leases") = 0 socket(PF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_UDP) = 4 ioctl(4, SIOCGIFCONF, {0 - 64, NULL}) = 0 ioctl(4, SIOCGIFCONF, {64, {{"lo", {AF_INET, inet_addr("127.0.0.1")}}, {"eth0", {AF_INET, inet_addr("192.168.0.10")}}}}) = 0 ioctl(4, SIOCGIFFLAGS, {ifr_name="lo", ifr_flags=IFF_UP|IFF_LOOPBACK|IFF_RUNNING}) = 0 ioctl(4, SIOCGIFFLAGS, {ifr_name="eth0", ifr_flags=IFF_UP|IFF_BROADCAST|IFF_RUNNING|IFF_MULTICAST}) = 0 ioctl(4, SIOCGIFHWADDR, {ifr_name="eth0", ifr_hwaddr=00:c0:26:87:55:c0}) = 0 socket(PF_PACKET, SOCK_PACKET, 768) = -1 EPERM (Operation not permitted) time(NULL) = 1284760816 stat64("/etc/localtime", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=2945, ...}) = 0 send(3, "Sep 18 00:00:16 dhcpd: Open "..., 74, MSG_NOSIGNAL) = 74 write(2, "Open a socket for LPF: Operation "..., 46Open a socket for LPF: Operation not permitted) = 46 write(2, "\n"..., 1 ) = 1 exit_group(1) = ? I understand that dhcpd wants to create sockets on port 67... but I don't know how to authorize that through the chroot. Any idea?

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MySQL Syslog Audit Plugin

- by jonathonc

This post shows the construction process of the Syslog Audit plugin that was presented at MySQL Connect 2012. It is based on an environment that has the appropriate development tools enabled including gcc,g++ and cmake. It also assumes you have downloaded the MySQL source code (5.5.16 or higher) and have compiled and installed the system into the /usr/local/mysql directory ready for use. The information provided below is designed to show the different components that make up a plugin, and specifically an audit type plugin, and how it comes together to be used within the MySQL service. The MySQL Reference Manual contains information regarding the plugin API and how it can be used, so please refer there for more detailed information. The code in this post is designed to give the simplest information necessary, so handling every return code, managing race conditions etc is not part of this example code. Let's start by looking at the most basic implementation of our plugin code as seen below: /* Copyright (c) 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Author: Jonathon Coombes Licence: GPL Description: An auditing plugin that logs to syslog and can adjust the loglevel via the system variables. */ #include <stdio.h> #include <string.h> #include <mysql/plugin_audit.h> #include <syslog.h> There is a commented header detailing copyright/licencing and meta-data information and then the include headers. The two important include statements for our plugin are the syslog.h plugin, which gives us the structures for syslog, and the plugin_audit.h include which has details regarding the audit specific plugin api. Note that we do not need to include the general plugin header plugin.h, as this is done within the plugin_audit.h file already. To implement our plugin within the current implementation we need to add it into our source code and compile. > cd /usr/local/src/mysql-5.5.28/plugin > mkdir audit_syslog > cd audit_syslog A simple CMakeLists.txt file is created to manage the plugin compilation: MYSQL_ADD_PLUGIN(audit_syslog audit_syslog.cc MODULE_ONLY) Run the cmake command at the top level of the source and then you can compile the plugin using the 'make' command. This results in a compiled audit_syslog.so library, but currently it is not much use to MySQL as there is no level of api defined to communicate with the MySQL service. Now we need to define the general plugin structure that enables MySQL to recognise the library as a plugin and be able to install/uninstall it and have it show up in the system. The structure is defined in the plugin.h file in the MySQL source code. /* Plugin library descriptor */ mysql_declare_plugin(audit_syslog) { MYSQL_AUDIT_PLUGIN, /* plugin type */ &audit_syslog_descriptor, /* descriptor handle */ "audit_syslog", /* plugin name */ "Author Name", /* author */ "Simple Syslog Audit", /* description */ PLUGIN_LICENSE_GPL, /* licence */ audit_syslog_init, /* init function */ audit_syslog_deinit, /* deinit function */ 0x0001, /* plugin version */ NULL, /* status variables */ NULL, /* system variables */ NULL, /* no reserves */ 0, /* no flags */ } mysql_declare_plugin_end; The general plugin descriptor above is standard for all plugin types in MySQL. The plugin type is defined along with the init/deinit functions and interface methods into the system for sharing information, and various other metadata information. The descriptors have an internally recognised version number so that plugins can be matched against the api on the running server. The other details are usually related to the type-specific methods and structures to implement the plugin. Each plugin has a type-specific descriptor as well which details how the plugin is implemented for the specific purpose of that plugin type. /* Plugin type-specific descriptor */ static struct st_mysql_audit audit_syslog_descriptor= { MYSQL_AUDIT_INTERFACE_VERSION, /* interface version */ NULL, /* release_thd function */ audit_syslog_notify, /* notify function */ { (unsigned long) MYSQL_AUDIT_GENERAL_CLASSMASK | MYSQL_AUDIT_CONNECTION_CLASSMASK } /* class mask */ }; In this particular case, the release_thd function has not been defined as it is not required. The important method for auditing is the notify function which is activated when an event occurs on the system. The notify function is designed to activate on an event and the implementation will determine how it is handled. For the audit_syslog plugin, the use of the syslog feature sends all events to the syslog for recording. The class mask allows us to determine what type of events are being seen by the notify function. There are currently two major types of event: 1. General Events: This includes general logging, errors, status and result type events. This is the main one for tracking the queries and operations on the database. 2. Connection Events: This group is based around user logins. It monitors connections and disconnections, but also if somebody changes user while connected. With most audit plugins, the principle behind the plugin is to track changes to the system over time and counters can be an important part of this process. The next step is to define and initialise the counters that are used to track the events in the service. There are 3 counters defined in total for our plugin - the # of general events, the # of connection events and the total number of events. static volatile int total_number_of_calls; /* Count MYSQL_AUDIT_GENERAL_CLASS event instances */ static volatile int number_of_calls_general; /* Count MYSQL_AUDIT_CONNECTION_CLASS event instances */ static volatile int number_of_calls_connection; The init and deinit functions for the plugin are there to be called when the plugin is activated and when it is terminated. These offer the best option to initialise the counters for our plugin: /* Initialize the plugin at server start or plugin installation. */ static int audit_syslog_init(void *arg __attribute__((unused))) { openlog("mysql_audit:",LOG_PID|LOG_PERROR|LOG_CONS,LOG_USER); total_number_of_calls= 0; number_of_calls_general= 0; number_of_calls_connection= 0; return(0); } The init function does a call to openlog to initialise the syslog functionality. The parameters are the service to log under ("mysql_audit" in this case), the syslog flags and the facility for the logging. Then each of the counters are initialised to zero and a success is returned. If the init function is not defined, it will return success by default. /* Terminate the plugin at server shutdown or plugin deinstallation. */ static int audit_syslog_deinit(void *arg __attribute__((unused))) { closelog(); return(0); } The deinit function will simply close our syslog connection and return success. Note that the syslog functionality is part of the glibc libraries and does not require any external factors. The function names are what we define in the general plugin structure, so these have to match otherwise there will be errors. The next step is to implement the event notifier function that was defined in the type specific descriptor (audit_syslog_descriptor) which is audit_syslog_notify. /* Event notifier function */ static void audit_syslog_notify(MYSQL_THD thd __attribute__((unused)), unsigned int event_class, const void *event) { total_number_of_calls++; if (event_class == MYSQL_AUDIT_GENERAL_CLASS) { const struct mysql_event_general *event_general= (const struct mysql_event_general *) event; number_of_calls_general++; syslog(audit_loglevel,"%lu: User: %s Command: %s Query: %s\n", event_general->general_thread_id, event_general->general_user, event_general->general_command, event_general->general_query ); } else if (event_class == MYSQL_AUDIT_CONNECTION_CLASS) { const struct mysql_event_connection *event_connection= (const struct mysql_event_connection *) event; number_of_calls_connection++; syslog(audit_loglevel,"%lu: User: %s@%s[%s] Event: %d Status: %d\n", event_connection->thread_id, event_connection->user, event_connection->host, event_connection->ip, event_connection->event_subclass, event_connection->status ); } } In the case of an event, the notifier function is called. The first step is to increment the total number of events that have occurred in our database.The event argument is then cast into the appropriate event structure depending on the class type, of general event or connection event. The event type counters are incremented and details are sent via the syslog() function out to the system log. There are going to be different line formats and information returned since the general events have different data compared to the connection events, even though some of the details overlap, for example, user, thread id, host etc. On compiling the code now, there should be no errors and the resulting audit_syslog.so can be loaded into the server and ready to use. Log into the server and type: mysql> INSTALL PLUGIN audit_syslog SONAME 'audit_syslog.so'; This will install the plugin and will start updating the syslog immediately. Note that the audit plugin attaches to the immediate thread and cannot be uninstalled while that thread is active. This means that you cannot run the UNISTALL command until you log into a different connection (thread) on the server. Once the plugin is loaded, the system log will show output such as the following: Oct 8 15:33:21 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost [] Command: (null) Query: INSTALL PLUGIN audit_syslog SONAME 'audit_syslog.so' Oct 8 15:33:21 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost [] Command: Query Query: INSTALL PLUGIN audit_syslog SONAME 'audit_syslog.so' Oct 8 15:33:40 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost [] Command: (null) Query: show tables Oct 8 15:33:40 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost [] Command: Query Query: show tables Oct 8 15:33:43 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost [] Command: (null) Query: select * from t1 Oct 8 15:33:43 machine mysql_audit:[8337]: 87: User: root[root] @ localhost [] Command: Query Query: select * from t1 It appears that two of each event is being shown, but in actuality, these are two separate event types - the result event and the status event. This could be refined further by changing the audit_syslog_notify function to handle the different event sub-types in a different manner. So far, it seems that the logging is working with events showing up in the syslog output. The issue now is that the counters created earlier to track the number of events by type are not accessible when the plugin is being run. Instead there needs to be a way to expose the plugin specific information to the service and vice versa. This could be done via the information_schema plugin api, but for something as simple as counters, the obvious choice is the system status variables. This is done using the standard structure and the declaration: /* Plugin status variables for SHOW STATUS */ static struct st_mysql_show_var audit_syslog_status[]= { { "Audit_syslog_total_calls", (char *) &total_number_of_calls, SHOW_INT }, { "Audit_syslog_general_events", (char *) &number_of_calls_general, SHOW_INT }, { "Audit_syslog_connection_events", (char *) &number_of_calls_connection, SHOW_INT }, { 0, 0, SHOW_INT } }; The structure is simply the name that will be displaying in the mysql service, the address of the associated variables, and the data type being used for the counter. It is finished with a blank structure to show that there are no more variables. Remember that status variables may have the same name for variables from other plugin, so it is considered appropriate to add the plugin name at the start of the status variable name to avoid confusion. Looking at the status variables in the mysql client shows something like the following: mysql> show global status like "audit%"; +--------------------------------+-------+ | Variable_name | Value | +--------------------------------+-------+ | Audit_syslog_connection_events | 1 | | Audit_syslog_general_events | 2 | | Audit_syslog_total_calls | 3 | +--------------------------------+-------+ 3 rows in set (0.00 sec) The final connectivity piece for the plugin is to allow the interactive change of the logging level between the plugin and the system. This requires the ability to send changes via the mysql service through to the plugin. This is done using the system variables interface and defining a single variable to keep track of the active logging level for the facility. /* Plugin system variables for SHOW VARIABLES */ static MYSQL_SYSVAR_STR(loglevel, audit_loglevel, PLUGIN_VAR_RQCMDARG, "User can specify the log level for auditing", audit_loglevel_check, audit_loglevel_update, "LOG_NOTICE"); static struct st_mysql_sys_var* audit_syslog_sysvars[] = { MYSQL_SYSVAR(loglevel), NULL }; So now the system variable 'loglevel' is defined for the plugin and associated to the global variable 'audit_loglevel'. The check or validation function is defined to make sure that no garbage values are attempted in the update of the variable. The update function is used to save the new value to the variable. Note that the audit_syslog_sysvars structure is defined in the general plugin descriptor to associate the link between the plugin and the system and how much they interact. Next comes the implementation of the validation function and the update function for the system variable. It is worth noting that if you have a simple numeric such as integers for the variable types, the validate function is often not required as MySQL will handle the automatic check and validation of simple types. /* longest valid value */ #define MAX_LOGLEVEL_SIZE 100 /* hold the valid values */ static const char *possible_modes[]= { "LOG_ERROR", "LOG_WARNING", "LOG_NOTICE", NULL }; static int audit_loglevel_check( THD* thd, /*!< in: thread handle */ struct st_mysql_sys_var* var, /*!< in: pointer to system variable */ void* save, /*!< out: immediate result for update function */ struct st_mysql_value* value) /*!< in: incoming string */ { char buff[MAX_LOGLEVEL_SIZE]; const char *str; const char **found; int length; length= sizeof(buff); if (!(str= value->val_str(value, buff, &length))) return 1; /* We need to return a pointer to a locally allocated value in "save". Here we pick to search for the supplied value in an global array of constant strings and return a pointer to one of them. The other possiblity is to use the thd_alloc() function to allocate a thread local buffer instead of the global constants. */ for (found= possible_modes; *found; found++) { if (!strcmp(*found, str)) { *(const char**)save= *found; return 0; } } return 1; } The validation function is simply to take the value being passed in via the SET GLOBAL VARIABLE command and check if it is one of the pre-defined values allowed in our possible_values array. If it is found to be valid, then the value is assigned to the save variable ready for passing through to the update function. static void audit_loglevel_update( THD* thd, /*!< in: thread handle */ struct st_mysql_sys_var* var, /*!< in: system variable being altered */ void* var_ptr, /*!< out: pointer to dynamic variable */ const void* save) /*!< in: pointer to temporary storage */ { /* assign the new value so that the server can read it */ *(char **) var_ptr= *(char **) save; /* assign the new value to the internal variable */ audit_loglevel= *(char **) save; } Since all the validation has been done already, the update function is quite simple for this plugin. The first part is to update the system variable pointer so that the server can read the value. The second part is to update our own global plugin variable for tracking the value. Notice that the save variable is passed in as a void type to allow handling of various data types, so it must be cast to the appropriate data type when assigning it to the variables. Looking at how the latest changes affect the usage of the plugin and the interaction within the server shows: mysql> show global variables like "audit%"; +-----------------------+------------+ | Variable_name | Value | +-----------------------+------------+ | audit_syslog_loglevel | LOG_NOTICE | +-----------------------+------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) mysql> set global audit_syslog_loglevel="LOG_ERROR"; Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec) mysql> show global status like "audit%"; +--------------------------------+-------+ | Variable_name | Value | +--------------------------------+-------+ | Audit_syslog_connection_events | 1 | | Audit_syslog_general_events | 11 | | Audit_syslog_total_calls | 12 | +--------------------------------+-------+ 3 rows in set (0.00 sec) mysql> show global variables like "audit%"; +-----------------------+-----------+ | Variable_name | Value | +-----------------------+-----------+ | audit_syslog_loglevel | LOG_ERROR | +-----------------------+-----------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec) So now we have a plugin that will audit the events on the system and log the details to the system log. It allows for interaction to see the number of different events within the server details and provides a mechanism to change the logging level interactively via the standard system methods of the SET command. A more complex auditing plugin may have more detailed code, but each of the above areas is what will be involved and simply expanded on to add more functionality. With the above skeleton code, it is now possible to create your own audit plugins to implement your own auditing requirements. If, however, you are not of the coding persuasion, then you could always consider the option of the MySQL Enterprise Audit plugin that is available to purchase.

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Bluetooth connection. Problem with sony ericsson.

- by Hugi

I have bt client and server. Then i use method Connector.open, client connects to the port, but passed so that my server does not see them. Nokia for all normal, but with sony ericsson i have this problem. On bt adapter open one port (com 5). Listings Client /* * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates * and open the template in the editor. */ import java.util.Vector; import javax.bluetooth.*; import javax.microedition.midlet.*; import javax.microedition.lcdui.*; import javax.microedition.io.*; import java.io.*; /** * @author ????????????? */ public class Client extends MIDlet implements DiscoveryListener, CommandListener { private static Object lock=new Object(); private static Vector vecDevices=new Vector(); private ServiceRecord[] servRec = new ServiceRecord[INQUIRY_COMPLETED]; private Form form = new Form( "Search" ); private List voteList = new List( "Vote list", List.IMPLICIT ); private List vote = new List( "", List.EXCLUSIVE ); private RemoteDevice remoteDevice; private String connectionURL = null; protected int stopToken = 255; private Command select = null; public void startApp() { //view form Display.getDisplay(this).setCurrent(form); try { //device search print("Starting device inquiry..."); getAgent().startInquiry(DiscoveryAgent.GIAC, this); try { synchronized(lock){ lock.wait(); } }catch (InterruptedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); } //device count int deviceCount=vecDevices.size(); if(deviceCount <= 0) { print("No Devices Found ."); } else{ remoteDevice=(RemoteDevice)vecDevices.elementAt(0); print( "Server found" ); //create uuid UUID uuid = new UUID(0x1101); UUID uuids[] = new UUID[] { uuid }; //search service print( "Searching for service..." ); getAgent().searchServices(null,uuids,remoteDevice,this); } } catch( Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } //if deivce discovered add to vecDevices public void deviceDiscovered(RemoteDevice btDevice, DeviceClass cod) { //add the device to the vector try { if(!vecDevices.contains(btDevice) && btDevice.getFriendlyName(true).equals("serverHugi")){ vecDevices.addElement(btDevice); } } catch( IOException e ) { } } public synchronized void servicesDiscovered(int transID, ServiceRecord[] servRecord) { //for each service create connection if( servRecord!=null && servRecord.length>0 ){ print( "Service found" ); connectionURL = servRecord[0].getConnectionURL(ServiceRecord.NOAUTHENTICATE_NOENCRYPT,false); //connectionURL = servRecord[0].getConnectionURL(ServiceRecord.AUTHENTICATE_NOENCRYPT,false); } if ( connectionURL != null ) { showVoteList(); } } public void serviceSearchCompleted(int transID, int respCode) { //print( "serviceSearchCompleted" ); synchronized(lock){ lock.notify(); } } //This callback method will be called when the device discovery is completed. public void inquiryCompleted(int discType) { synchronized(lock){ lock.notify(); } switch (discType) { case DiscoveryListener.INQUIRY_COMPLETED : print("INQUIRY_COMPLETED"); break; case DiscoveryListener.INQUIRY_TERMINATED : print("INQUIRY_TERMINATED"); break; case DiscoveryListener.INQUIRY_ERROR : print("INQUIRY_ERROR"); break; default : print("Unknown Response Code"); break; } } //add message at form public void print( String msg ) { form.append( msg ); form.append( "\n\n" ); } public void pauseApp() { } public void destroyApp(boolean unconditional) { } //get agent :))) private DiscoveryAgent getAgent() { try { return LocalDevice.getLocalDevice().getDiscoveryAgent(); } catch (BluetoothStateException e) { throw new Error(e.getMessage()); } } private synchronized String getMessage( final String send ) { StreamConnection stream = null; DataInputStream in = null; DataOutputStream out = null; String r = null; try { //open connection stream = (StreamConnection) Connector.open(connectionURL); in = stream.openDataInputStream(); out = stream.openDataOutputStream(); out.writeUTF( send ); out.flush(); r = in.readUTF(); print( r ); in.close(); out.close(); stream.close(); return r; } catch (IOException e) { } finally { if (stream != null) { try { stream.close(); } catch (IOException e) { } } return r; } } private synchronized void showVoteList() { String votes = getMessage( "c_getVotes" ); voteList.append( votes, null ); select = new Command( "Select", Command.OK, 4 ); voteList.addCommand( select ); voteList.setCommandListener( this ); Display.getDisplay(this).setCurrent(voteList); } private synchronized void showVote( int index ) { String title = getMessage( "c_getVote_"+index ); vote.setTitle( title ); vote.append( "Yes", null ); vote.append( "No", null ); vote.setCommandListener( this ); Display.getDisplay(this).setCurrent(vote); } public void commandAction( Command c, Displayable d ) { if ( c == select && d == voteList ) { int index = voteList.getSelectedIndex(); print( ""+index ); showVote( index ); } } } Use BlueCove in this program. Server /* * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates * and open the template in the editor. */ package javaapplication4; import java.io.*; import java.util.concurrent.locks.Lock; import java.util.concurrent.locks.ReentrantLock; import javax.bluetooth.*; import javax.microedition.io.*; import javaapplication4.Connect; /** * * @author ????????????? */ public class SampleSPPServer { protected static int endToken = 255; private static Lock lock=new ReentrantLock(); private static StreamConnection conn = null; private static StreamConnectionNotifier streamConnNotifier = null; private void startServer() throws IOException{ //Create a UUID for SPP UUID uuid = new UUID("1101", true); //Create the service url String connectionString = "btspp://localhost:" + uuid +";name=Sample SPP Server"; //open server url StreamConnectionNotifier streamConnNotifier = (StreamConnectionNotifier)Connector.open( connectionString ); while ( true ) { Connect ct = new Connect( streamConnNotifier.acceptAndOpen() ); ct.getMessage(); } } /** * @param args the command line arguments */ public static void main(String[] args) { //display local device address and name try { LocalDevice localDevice = LocalDevice.getLocalDevice(); localDevice.setDiscoverable(DiscoveryAgent.GIAC); System.out.println("Name: "+localDevice.getFriendlyName()); } catch( Throwable e ) { e.printStackTrace(); } SampleSPPServer sampleSPPServer=new SampleSPPServer(); try { //start server sampleSPPServer.startServer(); } catch( IOException e ) { e.printStackTrace(); } } } Connect /* * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates * and open the template in the editor. */ package javaapplication4; import java.io.*; import java.util.concurrent.locks.Lock; import java.util.concurrent.locks.ReentrantLock; import javax.bluetooth.*; import javax.microedition.io.*; /** * * @author ????????????? */ public class Connect { private static DataInputStream in = null; private static DataOutputStream out = null; private static StreamConnection connection = null; private static Lock lock=new ReentrantLock(); public Connect( StreamConnection conn ) { connection = conn; } public synchronized void getMessage( ) { Thread t = new Thread() { public void run() { try { in = connection.openDataInputStream(); out = connection.openDataOutputStream(); String r = in.readUTF(); System.out.println("read:" + r); if ( r.equals( "c_getVotes" ) ) { out.writeUTF( "vote1" ); out.flush(); } if ( r.equals( "c_getVote_0" ) ) { out.writeUTF( "Vote1" ); out.flush(); } out.close(); in.close(); } catch (Throwable e) { } finally { if (in != null) { try { in.close(); } catch (IOException e) { } } try { connection.close(); } catch( IOException e ) { } } } }; t.start(); } }

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SQL SERVER – Fix : Error 3623 – An invalid floating point operation occurred

- by pinaldave

Going back in time, I always had a problem with mathematics. It was a great subject and I loved it a lot but I only mastered it after practices a lot. I learned that mathematics problems should be addressed systematically and being verbose is not a trick, I learned to solve any problem. Recently one of reader sent me an email with the title “Mathematics problem – please help!” and I was a bit scared. I was good at mathematics but not the best. When I opened the email I was relieved as it was Mathematics problem with SQL Server. My friend received following error while working with SQL Server. Msg 3623, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 An invalid floating point operation occurred. The reasons for the error is simply that invalid usage of the mathematical function is attempted. Let me give you a few examples of the same. SELECT SQRT(-5); SELECT ACOS(-3); SELECT LOG(-9); If you run any of the above functions they will give you an error related to invalid floating point. Honestly there is no workaround except passing the function appropriate values. SQRT of a negative number will give you result in real numbers which is not supported at this point of time as well LOG of a negative number is not possible (because logarithm is the inverse function of an exponential function and the exponential function is NEVER negative). When I send above reply to my friend he did understand that he was passing incorrect value to the function. As mentioned earlier the only way to fix this issue is finding incorrect value and avoid passing it to the function. Every mathematics function is different and there is not a single solution to identify erroneous value passed. If you are facing this error and not able to figure out the solution. Post a comment and I will do my best to figure out the solution. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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