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• How to automatically restart Apache service after HTTP 503 error?

  - by Gnanam

  Our production server is running Apache v2.2.4 on CentOS5.2. Mono v1.2.4 is integrated within Apache. Recently, we faced a problem in our production server. From Apache's access_log, I found a HTTP 500 internal server error for one of the HTTP request and all subsequent HTTP requests also failed but with HTTP 503 service unavailable error. From thereafter, none of the requests were successful. Also, only later some time, we realized that our application was not working because of this error and then we restarted Apache service. My questions are, in this kind of situation, how do I automatically restart Apache service when HTTP 503 error is encountered? Is there any Apache directive available to set? in general, what would cause a HTTP 503 error in Apache? NOTE: Mono helps in running applications developed in .NET on a Linux-based OS. EDIT: I agree on finding the root cause of this problem. In fact, we've been analyzing that too. Till we resolve it, am finding whether this could be restarted immediately on its own without having any downtime/service disruption for application users.

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• Syntax error at '{'; expected '}' when using nagios in puppet

  - by jiangchengwu

  It's a big problem to me, because I'm not familiar with puppet. ERROR on the puppetmaster: debug: importing '/etc/puppet/manifests/nodes/group-1.pp' err: Could not parse for environment production: Syntax error at '{'; expected '}' at /etc/puppet/manifests/nodes/group-1.pp:6 ERROR on the puppet client: err: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 400 on SERVER: Could not parse for environment production: Syntax error at '{'; expected '}' at /etc/puppet/manifests/nodes/group-1.pp:6 in group-1.pp: node 'group1' { include ntp class { 'nagios::host': #this is line 6 nodename => $clientcert, appname => 'test', } } nagios::host in module module/nagios/host.pp code are here: class nagios::host($nodename, $hostgroup) { file { '/usr/lib/nagios/plugins': mode = "755", require = Package["nagios-plugins"], } ... @@nagios_service { "${nodename}_check_ssh": ensure => present, use => 'generic-service', host_name => "${nodename}", notification_interval => 60, flap_detection_enabled => 0, service_description => "SSH", check_command => "check_ssh", target => "/etc/nagios3/services.d/${nodename}.cfg", } } and the file module/nagios/init.pp is blank How could I fix it ?

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• Does my Oracle DBA need root access?

  - by Dr I

  I'm currently discussing with my Oracle DBA Collegue that request a root access on our production servers. I'm not so hot to let him use the root access on our production servers. He is arguing that he need it to perform some operations like restarting the server and some other obscure arguments. The point is that I'm not agree with him because I've set him a Oracle user/group and a dba group where Oracle user belong. Everything is running smoothy and without any root permissions for now. I also think that all administrative tasks like scheduled server restart and so one need to be operated by the proper administrator (The Systems administrator on our case) to avoid any kind of issues related to a misunderstanding of the infrastructure interactions. So, I need the help of both, sysadmins and Oracle DBAs to lead me on the correct direction. If my collegue really need this rights I'll give him, but I'm just basically quite affraid of that because of security and integrity concerns. I know that my collegue is really good as a Oracle DBA and he know is work very well, but I also know that I've very few cases where a software and its admin really need root access. Once again, I'm not looking for pros/cons but rather an advice on the way that I should take to deal with this situation.

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• Nginx configuration leads to endless redirect loop

  - by brianthecoder

  So I've looked at every sample configuration I could find and yet every time I try and view a page that requires ssl, I end up in an redirect loop. I'm running nginx/0.8.53 and passenger 3.0.2. Here's the ssl config server { listen 443 default ssl; server_name <redacted>.com www.<redacted>.com; root /home/app/<redacted>/public; passenger_enabled on; rails_env production; ssl_certificate /home/app/ssl/<redacted>.com.pem; ssl_certificate_key /home/app/ssl/<redacted>.key; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X_FORWARDED_PROTO https; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Url-Scheme $scheme; proxy_redirect off; proxy_max_temp_file_size 0; location /blog { rewrite ^/blog(/.*)?$ http://blog.<redacted>.com/$1 permanent; } location ~* \.(js|css|jpg|jpeg|gif|png)$ { if (-f $request_filename) { expires max; break; } } error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root html; } } Here's the non-ssl config server { listen 80; server_name <redacted>.com www.<redacted>.com; root /home/app/<redacted>/public; passenger_enabled on; rails_env production; location /blog { rewrite ^/blog(/.*)?$ http://blog.<redacted>.com/$1 permanent; } location ~* \.(js|css|jpg|jpeg|gif|png)$ { if (-f $request_filename) { expires max; break; } } error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root html; } } Let me know if there's any additional info I can give to help diagnose the issue.

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• Windows Server 2008 - inexplicable system time jumps/glitches/inaccuracies

  - by Nathan Ridley

  I'm running a production web server on Windows Server 2008. On this server I have a database which logs certain user actions, but every now and again I inexplicably get database entries which, according to the record ID and the records immediately before and after, have the wrong time logged against them (7 days+ too old). For example, record ID 1001 will be for Dec 7, 11pm, 1002 will be for Dec 7, 11:01pm, then 1003 will be for Nov 28, 1:38am, then the next will be back on track again. The problem seems to occur in random records (or 2-3 records in a row) and crops up once every few days. This is absolutely baffling because there is only one place in the application that assigns this date/time value and it's simply the system UTC date. I have been synchronizing the system time to time-a.nist.gov (which I read in another article was a bit more reliable than the default time.windows.com) and it seems to occasionally get out of time anyway (3-4 minutes), but I'm speculating that occasionally the time server has a temporary glitch where the date changes to a drastically wrong value for a short space of time, then changes back. Either that, or the motherboard clock battery is screwed and the reason the time momentarily changes is that the motherboard loses the time and then the time synchronization puts it back again. Could either of my suspicions be right? Should I turn off time synchronization for a production server? Assigning dates to an event log where the dates are up to 2 weeks prior to the actual date is a severe problem I can't have when the next version of my application is released. Any suggestions or advice would be appreciated.

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• How to make an x.509 certificate from a PEM one?

  - by Ken

  I'm trying to test a script, locally, which involves uploading a file using a Java-based program to a FileZilla FTPES server. For the real thing, there is a real certificate on the FZ server, and the upload step (tested alone) seems to work fine. I've installed FileZilla Server on my dev box (so it'll test uploading from localhost to localhost). I don't have a real certificate for it, of course, so I used the "Generate new certificate..." button in FZ. It works fine from an interactive FTPES program (as long as I OK the unknown cert), but from my Java program it throws a javax.net.ssl.SSLHandshakeException ("unable to find valid certification path to requested target"). So how do I tell Java that this certificate is OK with me? (I know there's a way to change the Java program to accept any certificate, but I don't want to go down that route. I want to test it just as it will happen in production, and I don't want to ignore unknown certificates in production.) I found that Java has a program called "keytool" that seems to be for managing this sort of thing, but it complains that the certificate file that FZ generated is not an "x.509" file. A posting from the FZ side said it was "PEM encoded". I have "openssl" here, which looks like it's perfect for converting between certificate formats, but I think my understanding of certificate formats is wrong because I'm not seeing anything obvious. My knowledge of security certificates is a bit shaky, so if my title is stupidly wrong, please help by fixing that. :-)

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• Issues connecting to HP ProCurve switches

  - by BriGuy

  We are having a very strange issue trying to connect to our infrastructure switches via SSH. When you first try connecting to them, the switches will prompt for the password - and then just sit there after it is entered. If you create a second SSH session to the switch (while letting the first one remain open and just sitting there) it will let you log right in. The switches are doing the same thing with RADIUS and local authentication. The other strange part to all of this, is that about 10 switches started doing it all at the same time. As far as actual configuration of the switches, nothing has changed. Occasionally, one switch will start working like normal, but then stop again. These are all HP ProCurve managed switches, but all different models/firmware. Some switches that are not working are using the same firmware as others that are working. UPDATE: 20130312 I am also seeing this same behavior when trying to use telnet. The first telnet session just hangs there, and the second telnet session will let me log in. Rebooting the switches seems to get them working, but I still have 5 production switches that cannot easily be rebooted because of their production roles. Is anyone aware of anything else that can be switched on/off that may reset the logon for remote management or something like that?

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• Distributed storage and computing

  - by Tim van Elteren

  Dear Serverfault community, After researching a number of distributed file systems for deployment in a production environment with the main purpose of performing both batch and real-time distributed computing I've identified the following list as potential candidates, mainly on maturity, license and support: Ceph Lustre GlusterFS HDFS FhGFS MooseFS XtreemFS The key properties that our system should exhibit: an open source, liberally licensed, yet production ready, e.g. a mature, reliable, community and commercially supported solution; ability to run on commodity hardware, preferably be designed for it; provide high availability of the data with the most focus on reads; high scalability, so operation over multiple data centres, possibly on a global scale; removal of single points of failure with the use of replication and distribution of (meta-)data, e.g. provide fault-tolerance. The sensitivity points that were identified, and resulted in the following questions, are: transparency to the processing layer / application with respect to data locality, e.g. know where data is physically located on a server level, mainly for resource allocation and fast processing, high performance, how can this be accomplished? Do you from experience know what solutions provide this transparency and to what extent? posix compliance, or conformance, is mentioned on the wiki pages of most of the above listed solutions. The question here mainly is, how relevant is support for the posix standard? Hadoop for example isn't posix compliant by design, what are the pro's and con's? what about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous opeartion of a distributed file system. Though a synchronous distributed file system has the preference because of reliability it also imposes certain limitations with respect to scalability. What would be, from your expertise, the way to go on this? I'm looking forward to your replies. Thanks in advance! :) With kind regards, Tim van Elteren

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• Run a rails server on Amazon EC2 [on hold]

  - by Jashwant

  Context: I've tried rubber gem, but that does not fulfill my requirements ( I needed to deploy on existing instance, so don't recommend me rubber) So, I followed this excellent tutorial http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15535140/installing-ruby-2-0-and-rails-4-0-0beta-on-aws-ec2 Now, I have ruby 2.0 and rails 4.0.0 running on AWS EC2. I successfully ran the server with RDS (mysql) as db and default webrick as server ( Using command rails server ) But, I've read that webrick is a development server and shouldn't be used at production. What I tried: I googled and came up with some alternatives. Capistrano Nginx / apache with passenger Passenger with Capistrano Unicorn Puma My Question: What exactly is capistrano / passenger ? Are they middleware to ease my deployment process ? I don't see any difficulty in doing rails server command. If they are just middleware, nginx with passenger and capistrano does not make any sense ? Why would I add a learning curve ( to learn nginx, passenger and capistrano configs) just to run my server ? I can just use nginx to deploy my app. Can't I ? What combination should I use on Amazon EC2 (or may be at any some other production server).

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• Managing Internal Yum Repository Groups

  - by elmt

  What is the best method for handling yum groups dependencies? For example, take this comps.xml file <comps> <group> <id>production</id> <name>Production</name> <default>true</default> <description>Packages required to run</description> <uservisible>true</uservisible> <packagelist> <packagereq type="default">ssh</packagereq> </packagelist> </group> <group> <id>development</id> <name>Development</name> <default>false</default> <description>Packages required to develop</description> <uservisible>true</uservisible> <packagelist> <packagereq type="default">gcc</packagereq> </packagelist> </group> </comps> which is packaged with createrepo -g comps.xml x86_64. The ssh and gcc rpms are not installed in the x86_64 directory. If I run yum groupinstall development, yum is smart enough to pull the gcc package from the RHEL repo even though the groups are defined in my internal repository. However, is this the proper way of doing this, or should I copy the rpms to my local repository and recreate the repo?

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• Nginx configuration leads to endless redirect loop

  - by brianthecoder

  So I've looked at every sample configuration I could find and yet every time I try and view a page that requires ssl, I end up in an redirect loop. I'm running nginx/0.8.53 and passenger 3.0.2. Here's the ssl config server { listen 443 default ssl; server_name <redacted>.com www.<redacted>.com; root /home/app/<redacted>/public; passenger_enabled on; rails_env production; ssl_certificate /home/app/ssl/<redacted>.com.pem; ssl_certificate_key /home/app/ssl/<redacted>.key; proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header X_FORWARDED_PROTO https; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; proxy_set_header Host $http_host; proxy_set_header X-Url-Scheme $scheme; proxy_redirect off; proxy_max_temp_file_size 0; location /blog { rewrite ^/blog(/.*)?$ http://blog.<redacted>.com/$1 permanent; } location ~* \.(js|css|jpg|jpeg|gif|png)$ { if (-f $request_filename) { expires max; break; } } error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root html; } } Here's the non-ssl config server { listen 80; server_name <redacted>.com www.<redacted>.com; root /home/app/<redacted>/public; passenger_enabled on; rails_env production; location /blog { rewrite ^/blog(/.*)?$ http://blog.<redacted>.com/$1 permanent; } location ~* \.(js|css|jpg|jpeg|gif|png)$ { if (-f $request_filename) { expires max; break; } } error_page 500 502 503 504 /50x.html; location = /50x.html { root html; } } Let me know if there's any additional info I can give to help diagnose the issue.

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• Reusing Raid 5 Drive?

  - by User125

  We have two servers (ML530 G2 and DL380G2) w/ identical HP 10K RPM SCSI drives w/ a raid 5. One is decommissioned and the other will be decommissioned shortly. However, one of the drives on the production server had a drive failure. My hope was to take one of the drives from the decommissioned server and pop it into the production server. Both are running RAID 5. I broke the array on the decomm. server. To my knowledge, that should have wiped out all the volume and partition information. However, I do not know if it is safe to then take a drive from the decomm'ed server and replace the failed drive. Will the existing array see it as a replacement drive, wipe it and rebuild? Or will it fail because it was used in an array before. Are there any remnant data that resides on the drives after deleting a raid 5 array? These servers are 10-15 years old, so we're just trying to keep them alive until we decommission it. I'm not looking to pay a premium to find a vendor that still sells replacement drives for this system.

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• How to install (old) packages for Ubuntu 9.04?

  - by wchrisjohnson

  Based on some excellent feedback by Mark here (http://serverfault.com/questions/285598/should-i-clone-a-physical-server-to-create-a-vm-for-a-staging-server), today I was able to use the vmware converter to clone my production server for a staging server. However the nic won't come up no matter what I do. I attempted to inistall vmware tools, as I suspect that the fact that it is not installed might prevent the nic from working. (I have the nic set as a vmxnet3 card in the vm settings). The install failed because there were several dependencies missing as well as the Linux headers. Given that Ubuntu 9.04 has been EOL'd, the packages I need to install to get the vmware tools to install are no longer available. I doubt the ubuntu 9.04 install CD has the packages on it. What are my options? I'd rather not upgrade the version of Ubuntu yet, as the point of the vm right now is to maintain parity with the production server. Might I have better luck resetting the driver to use vmxnet2 instead of the vmxnet3? Thanks in advance! Chris

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• Sudo won't execute command as another user

  - by TOdorus

  I'm trying to get a unicorn server to start when the server boots. I've created a shell script which works if I log as the ubuntu user and run /etc/init.d/unicorn start Shell script #!/bin/sh case "$1" in start) cd /home/ubuntu/projects/asbest/current/ unicorn_rails -c /home/ubuntu/projects/asbest/current/config/unicorn.rb -D -E production ;; stop) if ps aux | awk '{print $2 }' | grep `cat ~/projects/asbest/current/tmp/pids/unicorn.pid`> /dev/null; then kill `cat ~/projects/asbest/current/tmp/pids/uni$ ;; restart) $0 stop $0 start ;; esac When I rebooted the server I noticed that the unicorn server wasn't listening to a socket. Since I ran the code succesfully as the ubuntu user I modified the script to let it always use the ubuntu user via sudo. #!/bin/sh case "$1" in start) cd /home/ubuntu/projects/asbest/current/ sudo -u ubuntu unicorn_rails -c /home/ubuntu/projects/asbest/current/config/unicorn.rb -D -E production ;; stop) if ps aux | awk '{print $2 }' | grep `cat ~/projects/asbest/current/tmp/pids/unicorn.pid`> /dev/null; then sudo -u ubuntu kill `cat ~/projects/asbest/current/tmp/pids/uni$ ;; restart) $0 stop $0 start ;; esac After rebooting unicorn still wouldn't start, so I tried running the script from the command line. Now I get the following error sudo: unicorn_rails: command not found I've searched high and low to what could cause this, but I'm afraid I've tapped my limited understanding of Linux. From what I can understand is that although sudo should use the ubuntu user to execute the commands, it still uses the environment of the root user, which isn't configured to run ruby or unicorn. Does anybody have any experience with this?

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• ESX 3.5 refuses to update

  - by Speeddymon

  I have a set of ESX 3.5 servers in 2 different datacenters. One is DR, one is production. They are on the same vlan and so I can access any of them on the private network from my vCenter server. Last month, as a learning experience (I hadn't dealt with ESX much before), I updated the DR server. Other than finding out that a couple of bundles had to be installed manually in order to get the rest to install from vCenter, it went off without a hitch. Now, I'm trying to do the same for our production servers and it is not working. I've googled around for the error I get during scan, and investigate loads of different solutions (editing the integrity file, checking DNS, etc) -- I did install the 2 bundles that had to be installed manually already -- but scan from vCenter is just not working. Side note: I did just scan the DR server again and that scan works fine so shouldn't be a problem with vCenter that has cropped up recently -- it has to be something else. The error I get is: Patch metadata for (servername) missing. Please download updates metadata first. Failed to scan (servername) for updates. I'm all out of ideas on how to make this work, so any help would be hugely appreciated.

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• Passenger and ServerAlias not cooperating

  - by Pyzo

  I have a ruby application that runs on a server with multiple IP addresses and mutliple vhosts. Here is the configuration of the problematic virtual host: <VirtualHost 10.0.0.10:80> ServerName realname.example.com ServerAlias alias.example.com DocumentRoot /var/www/sites/example/current/public <Directory /var/www/sites/example/current/public> AllowOverride all Options -MultiViews </Directory> ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/example_error_log CustomLog /var/log/httpd/example_access_log common RailsEnv production RackEnv production </VirtualHost> When I pull up realname.example.com the Ruby on Rails application works correctly. On the other hand alias.example.com just gives me Not Found: / I'm fairly certain the correct vhost is getting used because alias.example.com produces a 404 in the correct log file. I've tried adding logging to the Passenger config and it seems to indicate that Passenger is getting the request. Note: I can't redirect alias.example.com to realname.example.com. realname is accessed using a CDN, whereas alias is directly accessed. Anyone have any ideas why this isn't working? I've been banging my head for days and I've got a similar configuration in QA that works as expected.

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• WebSphere hung threads, how can I track then down?

  - by Puzzled

  We have an application running on WebSphere (unfortunately it is 6.1 which is no longer supported, it has not yet been migrated in production to a later version) which becomes entirely unresponsive because of hung threads. As far as I can tell we entirely exhaust one of the thread pools. I have activated hung thread detection and I get a core/thread dump when hung threads are detected. The server can run for several days without problems but has crashed twice this week. When load the core/thread dump in "IBM Thread and Monitor Dump Analyzer for Java", it tells me that there are a certain number of hung threads (this time it was 2, last time 11) and multiple (usually around 40) threads "waiting on condition" and some running threads. I believe one of the thread pool has around that size (50). Now what I see in there are threads waiting for locks, having locks or in wait. Most of them show a stack track which always ends like this: at java/lang/Object.wait(Native Method) at java/lang/Object.wait(Object.java:231) Now, how can I track this down to either a server configuration problem, application issue, WebSphere problem or something else? How is this supposed to help me track down the problem when almost everything in there refers to IBM code? I cannot ask IBM's help as 6.1 is now an unsupported version of WebSphere and while work has been done to make it work under WebSphere 7 we are not yet ready to switch to it in Production yet.

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• What would prevent the same ActiveX control from downloading on one internal website but not another?

  - by ProfessionalAmateur

  We have two internal webservers for an application at my company, one is the development server and the other is production. This application server will deploy and install and ActiveX control to allow the use of specific functionality. The ActiveX control is the exact same on both servers. Last week suddenly when trying to install and run this ActiveX control from the development server stopped working. IE will still prompt the user to install it, but when select "Install this Add-on for all users on this computer", nothing happens. Another IE window pops open and immediately closes and that is it. It is almost as if a pop-up blocker is running (but it is not enabled). The kicker which has me completely stumped is that if we try the same thing on the Production server, everything works as we would expect. Items of interest: Both servers are in the 'Trusted Sites' No pop-up blocker in IE is activated ActiveX controls for Trusted and Intranet Sites are all enabled. Has anyone experienced something similar? I'm not a Windows administrator so please feel free to explain things as elementary as you see fit.

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• Linux Server partitioning

  - by user1717735

  There's a lot of infos about this out there, but there's also a lot of contradictory infos… That's why i need some advices about it. So far, on the servers i had home for test (or even "home production") purposes i didn't really care about partitioning and i configured all in / + a swap partition, over RAID 0. Nevertheless, this pattern can't apply to production servers. I have found a good starting point here, but also it depends on what the servers will be used for… So basically, i have a server on which there will be apache, php, mysql. It will have to handle file uploads (up to 2GB) and has 2*2TB hard drive. I plan to set : / 100GB, /var 1000GB (apache files and mysql files will be here), /tmp 800GB (handles the php tmp file) /home 96GB swap 4GB All of this if of course over RAID 1. But actually, it's not a big deal if I lose data being uploaded, so would it be interesting mounting /tmp over raid 0 while maintaining the rest over raid 1? Sounds complicated…

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• Compiling examples for consuming the REST Endpoints for WCF Service using Agatha

  - by REA_ANDREW

  I recently made two contributions to the Agatha Project by Davy Brion over on Google Code, and one of the things I wanted to follow up with was a post showing examples and some, seemingly required tid bits.  The contributions which I made where: To support StructureMap To include REST (JSON and XML) support for the service contract The examples which I have made, I want to format them so they fit in with the current format of examples over on Agatha and hopefully create and submit a third patch which will include these examples to help others who wish to use these additions. Whilst building these examples for both XML and JSON I have learnt a couple of things which I feel are not really well documented, but are extremely good practice and once known make perfect sense.  I have chosen a real basic e-commerce context for my example Requests and Responses, and have also made use of the excellent tool AutoMapper, again on Google Code. Setting the scene I have followed the Pipes and Filters Pattern with the IQueryable interface on my Repository and exposed the following methods to query Products: IQueryable<Product> GetProducts(); IQueryable<Product> ByCategoryName(this IQueryable<Product> products, string categoryName) Product ByProductCode(this IQueryable<Product> products, String productCode) I have an interface for the IProductRepository but for the concrete implementation I have simply created a protected getter which populates a private List<Product> with 100 test products with random data.  Another good reason for following an interface based approach is that it will demonstrate usage of my first contribution which is the StructureMap support.  Finally the two Domain Objects I have made are Product and Category as shown below: public class Product { public String ProductCode { get; set; } public String Name { get; set; } public Decimal Price { get; set; } public Decimal Rrp { get; set; } public Category Category { get; set; } }   public class Category { public String Name { get; set; } }   Requirements for the REST Support One of the things which you will notice with Agatha is that you do not have to decorate your Request and Response objects with the WCF Service Model Attributes like DataContract, DataMember etc… Unfortunately from what I have seen, these are required if you want the same types to work with your REST endpoint.  I have not tried but I assume the same result can be achieved by simply decorating the same classes with the Serializable Attribute.  Without this the operation will fail. Another surprising thing I have found is that it did not work until I used the following Attribute parameters: Name Namespace e.g. [DataContract(Name = "GetProductsRequest", Namespace = "AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests")] public class GetProductsRequest : Request { }   Although I was surprised by this, things kind of explained themselves when I got round to figuring out the exact construct required for both the XML and the REST.  One of the things which you already know and are then reminded of is that each of your Requests and Responses ultimately inherit from an abstract base class respectively. This information needs to be represented in a way native to the format being used.  I have seen this in XML but I have not seen the format which is required for the JSON. JSON Consumer Example I have used JQuery to create the example and I simply want to make two requests to the server which as you will know with Agatha are transmitted inside an array to reduce the service calls.  I have also used a tool called json2 which is again over at Google Code simply to convert my JSON expression into its string format for transmission.  You will notice that I specify the type of Request I am using and the relevant Namespace it belongs to.  Also notice that the second request has a parameter so each of these two object are representing an abstract Request and the parameters of the object describe it. <script type="text/javascript"> var bodyContent = $.ajax({ url: "http://localhost:50348/service.svc/json/processjsonrequests", global: false, contentType: "application/json; charset=utf-8", type: "POST", processData: true, data: JSON.stringify([ { __type: "GetProductsRequest:AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests" }, { __type: "GetProductsByCategoryRequest:AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests", CategoryName: "Category1" } ]), dataType: "json", success: function(msg) { alert(msg); } }).responseText; </script>   XML Consumer Example For the XML Consumer example I have chosen to use a simple Console Application and make a WebRequest to the service using the XML as a request.  I have made a crude static method which simply reads from an XML File, replaces some value with a parameter and returns the formatted XML.  I say crude but it simply shows how XML Templates for each type of Request could be made and then have a wrapper utility in whatever language you use to combine the requests which are required.  The following XML is the same Request array as shown above but simply in the XML Format. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <ArrayOfRequest xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/Agatha.Common" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <Request i:type="a:GetProductsRequest" xmlns:a="AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests"/> <Request i:type="a:GetProductsByCategoryRequest" xmlns:a="AgathaRestExample.Service.Requests"> <a:CategoryName>{CategoryName}</a:CategoryName> </Request> </ArrayOfRequest>   It is funny because I remember submitting a question to StackOverflow asking whether there was a REST Client Generation tool similar to what Microsoft used for their RestStarterKit but which could be applied to existing services which have REST endpoints attached.  I could not find any but this is now definitely something which I am going to build, as I think it is extremely useful to have but also it should not be too difficult based on the information I now know about the above.  Finally I thought that the Strategy Pattern would lend itself really well to this type of thing so it can accommodate for different languages. I think that is about it, I have included the code for the example Console app which I made below incase anyone wants to have a mooch at the code.  As I said above I want to reformat these to fit in with the current examples over on the Agatha project, but also now thinking about it, make a Documentation Web method…{brain ticking} :-) Cheers for now and here is the final bit of code: static void Main(string[] args) { var request = WebRequest.Create("http://localhost:50348/service.svc/xml/processxmlrequests"); request.Method = "POST"; request.ContentType = "text/xml"; using(var writer = new StreamWriter(request.GetRequestStream())) { writer.WriteLine(GetExampleRequestsString("Category1")); } var response = request.GetResponse(); using(var reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream())) { Console.WriteLine(reader.ReadToEnd()); } Console.ReadLine(); } static string GetExampleRequestsString(string categoryName) { var data = File.ReadAllText(Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location), "ExampleRequests.xml")); data = data.Replace("{CategoryName}", categoryName); return data; } }

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• Conversation as User Assistance

  - by ultan o'broin

  Applications User Experience members (Erika Web, Laurie Pattison, and I) attended the User Assistance Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. We were impressed with the thought leadership and practical application of ideas in Anne Gentle's keynote address "Social Web Strategies for Documentation". After the conference, we spoke with Anne to explore the ideas further. Anne Gentle (left) with Applications User Experience Senior Director Laurie Pattison In Anne's book called Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation, she explains how user assistance is undergoing a seismic shift. The direction is away from the old print manuals and online help concept towards a web-based, user community-driven solution using social media tools. User experience professionals now have a vast range of such tools to start and nurture this "conversation": blogs, wikis, forums, social networking sites, microblogging systems, image and video sharing sites, virtual worlds, podcasts, instant messaging, mashups, and so on. That user communities are a rich source of user assistance is not a surprise, but the extent of available assistance is. For example, we know from the Consortium for Service Innovation that there has been an 'explosion' of user-generated content on the web. User-initiated community conversations provide as much as 30 times the number of official help desk solutions for consortium members! The growing reliance on user community solutions is clearly a user experience issue. Anne says that user assistance as conversation "means getting closer to users and helping them perform well. User-centered design has been touted as one of the most important ideas developed in the last 20 years of workplace writing. Now writers can take the idea of user-centered design a step further by starting conversations with users and enabling user assistance in interactions." Some of Anne's favorite examples of this paradigm shift from the world of traditional documentation to community conversation include: Writer Bob Bringhurst's blog about Adobe InDesign and InCopy products and Adobe's community help The Microsoft Development Network Community Center ·The former Sun (now Oracle) OpenDS wiki, NetBeans Ruby and other community approaches to engage diverse audiences using screencasts, wikis, and blogs. Cisco's customer support wiki, EMC's community, as well as Symantec and Intuit's approaches The efforts of Ubuntu, Mozilla, and the FLOSS community generally Adobe Writer Bob Bringhurst's Blog Oracle is not without a user community conversation too. Besides the community discussions and blogs around documentation offerings, we have the My Oracle Support Community forums, Oracle Technology Network (OTN) communities, wiki, blogs, and so on. We have the great work done by our user groups and customer councils. Employees like David Haimes reach out, and enthusiastic non-employee gurus like Chet Justice (OracleNerd), Floyd Teter and Eddie Awad provide great "how-to" information too. But what does this paradigm shift mean for existing technical writers as users turn away from the traditional printable PDF manual deliverables? We asked Anne after the conference. The writer role becomes one of conversation initiator or enabler. The role evolves, along with the process, as the users define their concept of user assistance and terms of engagement with the product instead of having it pre-determined. It is largely a case now of "inventing the job while you're doing it, instead of being hired for it" Anne said. There is less emphasis on formal titles. Anne mentions that her own title "Content Stacker" at OpenStack; others use titles such as "Content Curator" or "Community Lead". However, the role remains one essentially about communications, "but of a new type--interacting with users, moderating, curating content, instead of sitting down to write a manual from start to finish." Clearly then, this role is open to more than professional technical writers. Product managers who write blogs, developers who moderate forums, support professionals who update wikis, rock star programmers with a penchant for YouTube are ideal. Anyone with the product knowledge, empathy for the user, and flair for relationships on the social web can join in. Some even perform these roles already but do not realize it. Anne feels the technical communicator space will move from hiring new community conversation professionals (who are already active in the space through blogging, tweets, wikis, and so on) to retraining some existing writers over time. Our own research reveals that the established proponents of community user assistance even set employee performance objectives for internal content curators about the amount of community content delivered by people outside the organization! To take advantage of the conversations on the web as user assistance, enterprises must first establish where on the spectrum their community lies. "What is the line between community willingness to contribute and the enterprise objectives?" Anne asked. "The relationship with users must be managed and also measured." Anne believes that the process can start with a "just do it" approach. Begin by reaching out to existing user groups, individual bloggers and tweeters, forum posters, early adopter program participants, conference attendees, customer advisory board members, and so on. Use analytical tools to measure the level of conversation about your products and services to show a return on investment (ROI), winning management support. Anne emphasized that success with the community model is dependent on lowering the technical and motivational barriers so that users can readily contribute to the conversation. Simple tools must be provided, and guidelines, if any, must be straightforward but not mandatory. The conversational approach is one where traditional style and branding guides do not necessarily apply. Tools and infrastructure help users to create content easily, to search and find the information online, read it, rate it, translate it, and participate further in the content's evolution. Recognizing contributors by using ratings on forums, giving out Twitter kudos, conference invitations, visits to headquarters, free products, preview releases, and so on, also encourages the adoption of the conversation model. The move to conversation as user assistance is not free, but there is a business ROI. The conversational model means that customer service is enhanced, as user experience moves from a functional to a valued, emotional level. Studies show a positive correlation between loyalty and financial performance (Consortium for Service Innovation, 2010), and as customer experience and loyalty become key differentiators, user experience professionals cannot explore the model's possibilities. The digital universe (measured at 1.2 million petabytes in 2010) is doubling every 12 to 18 months, and 70 percent of that universe consists of user-generated content (IDC, 2010). Conversation as user assistance cannot be ignored but must be embraced. It is a time to manage for abundance, not scarcity. Besides, the conversation approach certainly sounds more interesting, rewarding, and fun than the traditional model! I would like to thank Anne for her time and thoughts, and recommend that all user assistance professionals read her book. You can follow Anne on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/annegentle. Oracle's Acrolinx IQ deployment was used to author this article.

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• Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup

  - by constant

  Solaris 11 is here! And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter go to eleven. Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure: Getting Started/Overview A lot of people speculated that the official launch of Solaris 11 would be on 11/11 (whatever way you want to turn it), but it actually happened two days earlier. Larry Wake himself offers 11 Reasons Why Oracle Solaris 11 11/11 Isn't Being Released on 11/11/11. Then, Larry goes on with a summary: Oracle Solaris 11: The First Cloud OS gives you a short and sweet rundown of what the major new features of Solaris 11 are. Jeff Victor has his own list of What's New in Oracle Solaris 11. A popular Solaris 11 meme is to write a blog post about 11 favourite features: Jim Laurent's 11 Reasons to Love Solaris 11, Darren Moffat's 11 Favourite Solaris 11 Features, Mike Gerdt's 11 of My Favourite Things! are just three examples of "11 Favourite Things..." type blog posts, I'm sure many more will follow... More official overview content for Solaris 11 is available from the Oracle Tech Network Solaris 11 Portal. Also, check out Rick Ramsey's blog post Solaris 11 Resources for System Administrators on the OTN Blog and his secret 5 Commands That Make Solaris Administration Easier post from the OTN Garage. (Automatic) Installation and the Image Packaging System (IPS) The brand new Image Packaging System (IPS) and the Automatic Installer (IPS), together with numerous other install/packaging/boot/patching features are among the most significant improvements in Solaris 11. But before installing, you may wonder whether Solaris 11 will support your particular set of hardware devices. Again, the OTN Garage comes to the rescue with Rick Ramsey's post How to Find Out Which Devices Are Supported By Solaris 11. Included is a useful guide to all the first steps to get your Solaris 11 system up and running. Tim Foster had a whole handful of blog posts lined up for the launch, teaching you everything you need to know about IPS but didn't dare to ask: The IPS System Repository, IPS Self-assembly - Part 1: Overlays and Part 2: Multiple Packages Delivering Configuration. Watch out for more IPS posts from Tim! If installing packages or upgrading your system from the net makes you uneasy, then you're not alone: Jim Laurent will tech you how Building a Solaris 11 Repository Without Network Connection will make your life easier. Many of you have already peeked into the future by installing Solaris 11 Express. If you're now wondering whether you can upgrade or whether a fresh install is necessary, then check out Alan Hargreaves's post Upgrading Solaris 11 Express b151a with support to Solaris 11. The trick is in upgrading your pkg(1M) first. Networking One of the first things to do after installing Solaris 11 (or any operating system for that matter), is to set it up for networking. Solaris 11 comes with the brand new "Network Auto-Magic" feature which can figure out everything by itself. For those cases where you want to exercise a little more control, Solaris 11 left a few people scratching their heads. Fortunately, Tschokko wrote up this cool blog post: Solaris 11 manual IPv4 & IPv6 configuration right after the launch ceremony. Thanks, Tschokko! And Milek points out a long awaited networking feature in Solaris 11 called Solaris 11 - hostmodel, which I know for a fact that many customers have looked forward to: How to "bind" a Solaris 11 system to a specific gateway for specific IP address it is using. Steffen Weiberle teaches us how to tune the Solaris 11 networking stack the proper way: ipadm(1M). No more fiddling with ndd(1M)! Check out his tutorial on Solaris 11 Network Tunables. And if you want to get even deeper into the networking stack, there's nothing better than DTrace. Alan Maguire teaches you in: DTracing TCP Congestion Control how to probe deeply into the Solaris 11 TCP/IP stack, the TCP congestion control part in particular. Don't miss his other DTrace and TCP related blog posts! DTrace And there we are: DTrace, the king of all observability tools. Long time DTrace veteran and co-author of The DTrace book*, Brendan Gregg blogged about Solaris 11 DTrace syscall provider changes. BTW, after you install Solaris 11, check out the DTrace toolkit which is installed by default in /usr/dtrace/DTT. It is chock full of handy DTrace scripts, many of which contributed by Brendan himself! Security Another big theme in Solaris 11, and one that is crucial for the success of any operating system in the Cloud is Security. Here are some notable posts in this category: Darren Moffat starts by showing us how to completely get rid of root: Completely Disabling Root Logins on Solaris 11. With no root user, there's one major entry point less to worry about. But that's only the start. In Immutable Zones on Encrypted ZFS, Darren shows us how to double the security of your services: First by locking them into the new Immutable Zones feature, then by encrypting their data using the new ZFS encryption feature. And if you're still missing sudo from your Linux days, Darren again has a solution: Password (PAM) caching for Solaris su - "a la sudo". If you're wondering how much compute power all this encryption will cost you, you're in luck: The Solaris X86 AESNI OpenSSL Engine will make sure you'll use your Intel's embedded crypto support to its fullest. And if you own a brand new SPARC T4 machine you're even luckier: It comes with its own SPARC T4 OpenSSL Engine. Dan Anderson's posts show how there really is now excuse not to encrypt any more... Developers Solaris 11 has a lot to offer to developers as well. Ali Bahrami has a series of blog posts that cover diverse developer topics: elffile: ELF Specific File Identification Utility, Using Stub Objects and The Stub Proto: Not Just For Stub Objects Anymore to name a few. BTW, if you're a developer and want to shape the future of Solaris 11, then Vijay Tatkar has a hint for you: Oracle (Sun Systems Group) is hiring! Desktop and Graphics Yes, Solaris 11 is a 100% server OS, but it can also offer a decent desktop environment, especially if you are a developer. Alan Coopersmith starts by discussing S11 X11: ye olde window system in today's new operating system, then Calum Benson shows us around What's new on the Solaris 11 Desktop. Even accessibility is a first-class citizen in the Solaris 11 user interface. Peter Korn celebrates: Accessible Oracle Solaris 11 - released! Performance Gone are the days of "Slowaris", when Solaris was among the few OSes that "did the right thing" while others cut corners just to win benchmarks. Today, Solaris continues doing the right thing, and it delivers the right performance at the same time. Need proof? Check out Brian's BestPerf blog with continuous updates from the benchmarking lab, including Recent Benchmarks Using Oracle Solaris 11! Send Me More Solaris 11 Launch Articles! These are just a few of the more interesting blog articles that came out around the Solaris 11 launch, I'm sure there are many more! Feel free to post a comment below if you find a particularly interesting blog post that hasn't been listed so far and share your enthusiasm for Solaris 11! *Affiliate link: Buy cool stuff and support this blog at no extra cost. We both win! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'Solaris 11 Launch Blog Carnival Roundup'; var flattr_dsc = '<strong>Solaris 11 is here!</strong>And together with the official launch activities, a lot of Oracle and non-Oracle bloggers contributed helpful and informative blog articles to help your datacenter <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_to_eleven">go to eleven</a>.Here are some notable blog postings, sorted by category for your Solaris 11 blog-reading pleasure:'; var flattr_tag = 'blogging,digest,Oracle,Solaris,solaris,solaris 11'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2011/11/solaris-11-launch-blog-carnival-roundup'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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• Scott Guthrie in Glasgow

  - by Martin Hinshelwood

  Last week Scott Guthrie was in Glasgow for his new Guathon tour, which was a roaring success. Scott did talks on the new features in Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET MVC 2 and Windows Phone 7. Scott talked from 10am till 4pm, so this can only contain what I remember and I am sure lots of things he discussed just went in one ear and out another, however I have tried to capture at least all of my Ohh’s and Ahh’s. Visual Studio 2010 Right now you can download and install Visual Studio 2010 Candidate Release, but soon we will have the final product in our hands. With it there are some amazing improvements, and not just in the IDE. New versions of VB and C# come out of the box as well as Silverlight 4 and SharePoint 2010 integration. The new Intellisense features allow inline support for Types and Dictionaries as well as being able to type just part of a name and have the list filter accordingly. Even better, and my personal favourite is one that Scott did not mention, and that is that it is not case sensitive so I can actually find things in C# with its reasonless case sensitivity (Scott, can we please have an option to turn that off.) Another nice feature is the Routing engine that was created for ASP.NET MVC is now available for WebForms which is good news for all those that just imported the MVC DLL’s to get at it anyway. Another fantastic feature that will need some exploring is the ability to add validation rules to your entities and have them validated automatically on the front end. This removes the need to add your own validators and means that you can control an objects validation rules from a single location, the object. A simple command “GridView.EnableDynamicData(gettype(product))“ will enable this feature on controls. What was not clear was wither there would be support for this in WPF and WinForms as well. If there is, we can write our validation rules once and use everywhere. I was disappointed to here that there would be no inbuilt support for the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) with VS2010, but I think it will be there for .vNext. Because I have been concentrating on the Visual Studio ALM enhancements to VS2010 I found this section invaluable as I now know at least some of what I missed. Silverlight 4 I am not a big fan of Silverlight. There I said it, and I will probably get lynched for it. My big problem with Silverlight is that most of the really useful things I leaned from WPF do not work. I am only going to mention one thing and that is “x:Type”. If you are a WPF developer you will know how much power these 6 little letters provide; the ability to target templates at object types being the the most magical and useful. But, and this is a massive but, if you are developing applications that MUST run on platforms other than windows then Silverlight is your only choice (well that and Flash, but lets just not go there). And Silverlight has a huge install base as well.. 60% of all internet connected devices have Silverlight. Can Adobe say that? Even though I am not a fan of it my current project is a Silverlight one. If you start your XAML experience with Silverlight you will not be disappointed and neither will the users of the applications you build. Scott showed us a fantastic application called “Silverface” that is a Silverlight 4 Out of Browser application. I have looked for a link and can’t find one, but true to form, here is a fantastic WPF version called Fish Bowl from Microsoft. ASP.NET MVC 2 ASP.NET MVC is something I have played with but never used in anger. It is definitely the way forward, but WebForms is not dead yet. there are still circumstances when WebForms are better. If you are starting from greenfield and you are using TDD, then MVC is ultimately the only way you can go. New in version 2 are Dynamic Scaffolding helpers that let you control how data is presented in the UI from the Entities. Adding validation rules and other options that make sense there can help improve the overall ease of developing the UI. Also the Microsoft team have heard the cries of help from the larger site builders and provided “Areas” which allow a level of categorisation to your Controllers and Views. These work just like add-ins and have their own folder, but also have sub Controllers and Views. Areas are totally pluggable and can be dropped onto existing sites giving the ability to have boxed products in MVC, although what you do with all of those views is anyone's guess. They have been listening to everyone again with the new option to encapsulate UI using the Html.Action or Html.ActionRender. This uses the existing  .ascx functionality in ASP.NET to render partial views to the screen in certain areas. While this was possible before, it makes the method official thereby opening it up to the masses and making it a standard. At the end of the session Scott pulled out some IIS goodies including the IIS SEO Toolkit which can be used to verify your own site is “good” for search engine consumption. Better yet he suggested that you run it against your friends sites and shame them with how bad they are. note: make sure you have fixed yours first. Windows Phone 7 Series I had already seen the new UI for WP7 and heard about the developer story, but Scott brought that home by building a twitter application in about 20 minutes using the emulator. Scott’s only mistake was loading @plip’s tweets into the app… And guess what, it was written in Silverlight. When Windows Phone 7 launches you will be able to use about 90% of the codebase of your existing Silverlight application and use it on the phone! There are two downsides to the new WP7 architecture: No, your existing application WILL NOT work without being converted to either a Silverlight or XNA UI. NO, you will not be able to get your applications onto the phone any other way but through the Marketplace. Do I think these are problems? No, not even slightly. This phone is aimed at consumers who have probably never tried to install an application directly onto a device. There will be support for enterprise apps in the future, but for now enterprises should stay on Windows Phone 6.5.x devices. Post Event drinks At the after event drinks gathering Scott was checking out my HTC HD2 (released to the US this month on T-Mobile) and liked the Windows Phone 6.5.5 build I have on it. We discussed why Microsoft were not going to allow Windows Phone 7 Series onto it with my understanding being that it had 5 buttons and not 3, while Scott was sure that there was more to it from a hardware standpoint. I think he is right, and although the HTC HD2 has a DX9 compatible processor, it was never built with WP7 in mind. However, as if by magic Saturday brought fantastic news for all those that have already bought an HD2: Yes, this appears to be Windows Phone 7 running on a HTC HD2. The HD2 itself won't be getting an official upgrade to Windows Phone 7 Series, so all eyes are on the ROM chefs at the moment. The rather massive photos have been posted by Tom Codon on HTCPedia and they've apparently got WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and other bits working. The ROM isn't online yet but according to the post there's a beta version coming soon. Leigh Geary - http://www.coolsmartphone.com/news5648.html  What was Scott working on on his flight back to the US?   Technorati Tags: VS2010,MVC2,WP7S,WP7 Follow: @CAMURPHY, @ColinMackay, @plip and of course @ScottGu

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• Ops Center Solaris 11 IPS Repository Management: Using ISO Images

  - by S Stelting

  Please join us for a live WebEx presentation of this topic on Tuesday, November 20th at 9am MDT. Details for the call are provided below: https://oracleconferencing.webex.com/oracleconferencing/j.php?ED=209834017&UID=1512096072&PW=NYTVlZTYxMzdm&RT=MiMxMQ%3D%3D Meeting password: oracle123 Call-in toll-free number: 1-866-682-4770 International numbers: http://www.intercall.com/oracle/access_numbers.htm Conference Code: 762 9343 # Security Code: 7777 # With Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c, you can provision, patch, monitor and manage Oracle Solaris 11 instances. To do this, Ops Center creates and maintains a Solaris 11 Image Packaging System (IPS) repository on the Enterprise Controller. During the Enterprise Controller configuration, you can load repository content directly from Oracle's Support Web site and subsequently synchronize the repository as new content becomes available. Of course, you can also use Solaris 11 ISO images to create and update your Ops Center repository. There are a few excellent reasons for doing this: You're running Ops Center in disconnected mode, and don't have Internet access on your Enterprise Controller You'd rather avoid the bandwidth associated with live synchronization of a Solaris 11 package repository This demo will show you how to use Solaris 11 ISO images to set up and update your Ops Center repository. Prerequisites This tip assumes that you've already installed the Enterprise Controller on a Solaris 11 OS instance and that you're ready for post-install configuration. In addition, there are specific Ops Center and OS version requirements depending on which version of Solaris 11 you plan to install.You can get full details about the requirements in the Release Notes for Ops Center 12c update 2. Additional information is available in the Ops Center update 2 Readme document. Part 1: Using a Solaris 11 ISO Image to Create an Ops Center Repository Step 1 – Download the Solaris 11 Repository Image The Oracle Web site provides a number of download links for official Solaris 11 images. Among those links is a two-part downloadable repository image, which provides repository content for Solaris 11 SPARC and X86 architectures. In this case, I used the Solaris 11 11/11 image. First, navigate to the Oracle Web site and accept the OTN License agreement: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris11/downloads/index.html Next, download both parts of the Solaris 11 repository image. I recommend using the Solaris 11 11/11 image, and have provided the URLs here: http://download.oracle.com/otn/solaris/11/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-ahttp://download.oracle.com/otn/solaris/11/sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-b Finally, use the cat command to generate an ISO image you can use to create your repository: # cat sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-a sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso-b > sol-11-1111-repo-full.iso The process is very similar if you plan to set up a Solaris 11.1 release in Ops Center. In that case, navigate to the Solaris 11 download page, accept the license agreement and download both parts of the Solaris 11.1 repository image. Use the cat command to create a single ISO image for Solaris 11.1 Step 2 – Mount the Solaris 11 ISO Image in your Local Filesystem Once you have created the Solaris 11 ISO file, use the mount command to attach it to your local filesystem. After the image has been mounted, you can browse the repository from the ./repo subdirectory, and use the pkgrepo command to verify that Solaris 11 recognizes the content: Step 3 – Use the Image to Create your Ops Center Repository When you have confirmed the repository is available, you can use the image to create the Enterprise Controller repository. The operation will be slightly different depending on whether you configure Ops Center for Connected or Disconnected Mode operation.For connected mode operation, specify the mounted ./repo directory in step 4.1 of the configuration wizard, replacing the default Web-based URL. Since you're synchronizing from an OS repository image, you don't need to specify a key or certificate for the operation. For disconnected mode configuration, specify the Solaris 11 directory along with the path to the disconnected mode bundle downloaded by running the Ops Center harvester script: Ops Center will run a job to import package content from the mounted ISO image. A synchronization job can take several hours to run – in my case, the job ran for 3 hours, 22 minutes on a SunFire X4200 M2 server. During the job, Ops Center performs three important tasks: Synchronizes all content from the image and refreshes the repository Updates the IPS publisher information Creates OS Provisioning profiles and policies based on the content When the job is complete, you can unmount the ISO image from your Enterprise Controller. At that time, you can view the repository contents in your Ops Center Solaris 11 library. For the Solaris 11 11/11 release, you should see 8,668 packages and patches in the contents. You should also see default deployment plans for Solaris 11 provisioning. As part of the repository import, Ops Center generates plans and profiles for desktop, small and large servers for the SPARC and X86 architecture. Part 2: Using a Solaris 11 SRU to update an Ops Center Repository It's possible to use the same approach to upgrade your Ops Center repository to a Solaris 11 Support Repository Update, or SRU. Each SRU provides packages and updates to Solaris 11 - for example, SRU 8.5 provided the packaged for Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.2 SRUs are available for download as ISO images from My Oracle Support, under document ID 1372094.1. The document provides download links for all SRUs which have been released by Oracle for Solaris 11. SRUs are cumulative, so later versions include the packages from earlier SRUs. After downloading an ISO image for an SRU, you can mount it to your local filesystem using a mount command similar to the one shown for Solaris 11 11/11. When the ISO image is mounted to the file system, you can perform the Add Content action from the Solaris 11 Library to synchronize packages and patches from the mounted image. I used the same mount point, so the repository URL was file://mnt/repo once again: After the synchronization of an SRU is complete, you can verify its content in the Solaris 11 library using the search function. The version pattern is 0.175.0.#, where the # is the same value as the SRU. In this example, I upgraded to SRU 1. The update job ran in just under 8 minutes, and a quick search shows that 22 software components were added to the repository: It's also possible to search for "Support Repository Update" to confirm the SRU was successfully added to the repository. Details on any of the update content are available by clicking the "View Details" button under the Packages/Patches entry.

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• Hey, Google: It’s Time to Add Multi-Window Multitasking To Android

  - by Chris Hoffman

  In 2012, Google’s Dianne Hackborn threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market if they moved forward with adding “Cornerstone” multitasking to their custom ROM. Samsung has since created their own multi-window multitasking feature. Dianne Hackborn said this “is something that needs to be done at the mainline platform level” so apps wouldn’t break. She was right — Android needs this as a standard feature and it’s time for Google to provide it. Doesn’t Android Have Multitasking? Android originally stood out from Apple’s iOS with its powerful multitasking. Applications can continue running in the background while you’re using another application. This makes Android powerful — you can even have BitTorrent clients downloading files in the background while using another app. Android still kept the design of a single app on screen at a time. This made a lot of sense when Android only ran on smartphones with small screens. Today, Android runs on everything from smaller smartphones all the way up to huge “phablets” like the Galaxy Note. Android has gone beyond phones and runs on 12-inch tablets, convertibles with keyboard docks, laptops, and even Android desktops. Android isn’t just a phone operating system. Samsung’s Multi-Window Isn’t Good Enough Samsung has tried to add value to Android by adding a multi-window feature. When you’re using a high-end phone like the Galaxy Note or Galaxy S, or a Galaxy tablet, you have the ability to run certain apps side-by-side with each other. There are big problems here. This only works on Samsung devices, and only on specific Samsung devices. To add support for this feature in a way that doesn’t break other apps, Samsung’s multi-window feature also only works with specific apps. You can’t just run any app in multi-window view, only the apps on the Multi Window bar Samsung provides. This prevents third-party apps from breaking, which is what Google was worried about with CyanogenMod’s Cornerstone feature. A feature that only works with a handful of apps on specific devices from a single manufacturer isn’t good enough. This feature needs to work on every Android device — or at least ones with suitably large screens and powerful enough internals. It needs to be an Android platform feature so application developers can ensure their apps will work properly with it on every device. Android developers shouldn’t have to add support for each manufacturer’s own multi-window feature if other manufacturers decide to copy Samsung. Floating Apps Are a Dirty Hack Floating apps also enable real multitasking. Remember that Android allows apps to run in the background while you’re using an app in the foreground. These apps can present interfaces that appear floating above the current app — think of it like using “always on top” to make a window always appear over every other app on a desktop operating system. You can install floating apps to browse the web, take notes, chat, and watch videos while using any app. Only apps specifically designed to run as floating apps will work, so you have to seek them out. Floating apps are also awkward to use because they float over the app you’re using, blocking parts of its interface. Microsoft added floating-window support to Skype for Android. You can have a video conversation and the other person’s face will always appear on your screen, even when you leave the Skype app. Microsoft is using more of Android’s multi-window multitasking power than Google is. Custom ROMs and Root-Only Tweaks Aren’t Acceptable Some custom ROMs are adding this feature to Android. Google threatened to revoke CyanogenMod’s access to the Android Market (now known as Google Play) if they added this feature because it could potentially break third-party apps. Today, other custom ROMs are working on split-screen multitasking. Samsung added their own version to their own devices. You can also get this feature by using a root-only Xposed Framework tweak known as XMultiWindow. If you have root access, you can get multi-window multitasking or any app on your device. This shouldn’t require rooting your device or installing a custom ROM. These third-party solutions often have awkward interfaces and bugs. We need an integrated, supported solution that works the same on every device. Why Multi-Window is Important Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 stands out among tablet operating systems for its powerful multitasking support, allowing you to view several apps side-by-side at the same time. Apple is also reported to be working on adding side-by-side apps to the iPad with iOS 8. On every competitor’s operating system, you’ll be able to view a web page while you write an email, watch a video while you browse the web, or chat with someone while you do anything else. But Android’s still remained frozen in time. Despite all Android’s underlying power — and despite the way Android allows apps to adapt to different screen sizes — Google is resisting adding this feature. Large-screen Android tablets like the Nexus 10 (remember that tablet Google hasn’t updated in over 18 months?) need this feature. So do huge phones, convertibles, laptops, and Android desktops. If tablets are the future of personal computing, we should be able to do more than one thing at a time on our tablets’ big screens. Microsoft, Samsung, and even Apple are realizing this — now it’s Google’s turn. Image Credit: Sergey Galyonkin on Flickr, Karlis Dambrans on Flickr

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