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• setup lowcost image storage server with 24x SSD array to get high IOPS?

  - by Nenad

  I want to build let's name it a lowcost Ra*san which would host for our social site the images (many millions) we have 5 sizes of every photo with 3 KB, 7 KB, 15 KB, 25 KB and 80 KB per Image. My idea is to build a Server with 24x consumer 240 GB SSD's in Raid 6 which will give me some 5 TB Disk space for the photo storage. To have HA I can add a 2nd one and use drdb. I'm looking to get above 150'000 IOPS (4K Random reads). As we mostly have read access only and rarely delete photos i think to go with consumer MLC SSD. I read many endurance reviews and don't see there a problem as long we don't rewrite the cells. What you think about my idea? - I'm not sure between Raid 6 or Raid 10 (more IOPS, cost SSD). - Is ext4 OK for the filesystem - Would you use 1 or 2 Raid controller, with Extender Backplane If anyone has realized something similar i would be happy to get Real World numbers. UPDATE I have buy 12 (plus some spare) OCZ Talos 480GB SAS SSD Drive's they will be placed in a 12-bay DAS and attached to a PERC H800 (1GB NV Cache, manufactured by LSI with fastpath) Controller, I plan to setup Raid 50 with ext4. If someone is wondering about some benchmarks let me know what you would like to see.

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• MS Excel 2010 - Using DSN + 32 bit drivers

  - by Kristiaan

  I need some advice as im running into a problem and so far i have been unable to find a solution. We have a set of reports developed in MS Excel that use DSN file to connect to data sources to retrieve data, these work fine on 32 / 64bit systems, however we are moving to a terminal server environment using windows 2008 R2 64Bit. The reports fail to run using the DSN's within this environment if we only have the 32bit drivers installed and configured in the ODBC settings, the minute we install the 64Bit drivers the software works. Is there a way / Method of getting Excel or the DSN file to NOT use the 64Bit driver, but force it to use the 32bit driver. ANSWERED - But due to low user score i cannot "answer" my own question... Sadly there is no way to-do what i want to-do, without a lot of very nasty and not 100% perfect reg hacks. If you need to access 32bit ODBC data sources the application in question has to be 32Bit. here is a link to just one forum post i found relating to this type of problem, it appears the only way i would be able to accomplish this is to remove the 64bit version of office and install the 32bit version instead of it. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/accessdev/thread/5108f337-f06a-4518-afe3-d3c1abd040ef/

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• Centos iptables configuration for Wordpress and Gmail smtp

  - by Fabrizio

  Let me start off by saying that I'm a Centos newby, so all info, links and suggestions are very welcome! I recently set up a hosted server with Centos 6 and configured it as a webserver. The websites running on it are nothing special, just some low traffic projects. I tried to configure the server as default as possible, but I like it to be secure as well (no ftp, custom ssh port). Getting my Wordpress to run as desired, I'm running into some connection problems. 2 things are not working: installing plugins and updates through ssh2 (failed to connect to localhost:sshportnumber) sending emails from my site using the Gmail smtp (Failed to connect to server: Permission denied (13)) I have the feeling that these are both related to the iptables configuration, because I've tried everything else (I think). I tried opening up the firewall to accept traffic for ports 465 (gmail smtp) and ssh port (lets say this port is 8000), but both the issues remain. Ssh connections from the terminal are working fine though. After each change I tried implementing I restarted the iptables service. This is my iptables configuration (using vim): # Generated by iptables-save v1.4.7 on Sun Jun 1 13:20:20 2014 *filter :INPUT ACCEPT [0:0] :FORWARD ACCEPT [0:0] :OUTPUT ACCEPT [0:0] -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p icmp -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 8000 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 465 -j ACCEPT -A INPUT -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited -A FORWARD -j REJECT --reject-with icmp-host-prohibited -A OUTPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT -A OUTPUT -o lo -j ACCEPT -A OUTPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 8000 -j ACCEPT -A OUTPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 465 -j ACCEPT COMMIT # Completed on Sun Jun 1 13:20:20 2014 Are there any (obvious) issues with my iptables setup considering the above mentioned issues? Saying that the firewall is doing exactly nothing in this state is also an answer... And again, if you have any other suggestions for me to increase security (considering the basic things I do with this box), I would love hear it, also the obvious ones! Thanks!

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• How do you notice that the batteries of you wireless mouse are dying out?

  - by hkBattousai

  I have a Logitech M705 wireless mouse. I'm first time using a wireless mouse, so I don't have much experience with the hardware features and behavior. It is rated that it runs for 3 years with the same batteries. I think this "3 year" rating is calculated for a very low usage and activity; like 2 hours a day. I'm using it for about 12 hours a day, so I expect it to run out of batteries in a much shorter time in my case. I have been using it for about half a year. Recently (for the last two weeks), it started to make some peculiar behavior when clicking and drafging objects. - When I click something, it sometimes double click it. - When I drag something from one place to another (or selecting some text), it sometimes drops the object in the halfway (when selecting text, the text which had selected up to that time becomes unselected and it starts to select the rest of the text from that moment), but it goes on being in the "left-button-pressed" state. It is like, the pressed button switches to "unpressed" state for a moment, then returns back to the "pressed" state. When one of these faults occur, it occurs several times sequentially. There is no problem in pointer movement, scrolling or right-clicking. Since the batteries last for a very long time for this device, I don't expect it to stop working in an instance. I expect it to give these kind of syndromes of a time period. My question is; Is this how batteries run out for a wireless mouse? Or, is this another kind of hardware/software problem?

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• Windows VPN for remote site connection drawbacks

  - by Damo

  I'm looking for some thoughts on a particular way of setting up a estate of machines. We have a requirement to install machines into unmanned, remote locations. These machines will auto login and perform tasks controlled from a central server. In order to manage patching, AV, updates etc I want these machines to be joined to a dedicated domain for this estate. Some of the locations will only have 3G connectivity (via other hardware), others will be located on customer premises in internal networks. The central server (of ours) and the Domain Controller will be on a public WAN. I see two ways of facilitating this. Install a router at each location and have a site to site VPN between the remove device and the data centre where the servers are location Have the remote machine dial up and authenticate via a Windows VPN connection to the DC via RAS Option one is more costly to setup and has a higher operational cost. It also offers better diagnostics if the remote PC goes down. Option two works well but is solely dependent on the VPN connection been made before any communication can be made to the remote machine. In a simple test, I can got a Windows 7 machine to dial a VPN prior to authentication to a domain, then automatically login to the machine using domain credentials. If the VPN connection drops, it redials. I can also create a timed task to auto connect every hour in case of other issues. I'd like to know, why (if at all) is operating a remote network of devices which are located in various out of band locations in this way a bad idea? Consider 300-400 remote machines all at different sites. I'd rather have 400 VPN connections to a 2008 server than 400 routers, however I'd like to know other opinions on this.

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• Have it fixed or buy a new one?

  - by Workshop Alex

  My dual-monitor system has just become a single-monitor system again when the older monitor decided it would be nice to just turn to black. It's a Samsung LCD monitor and is over three years old. Not sure if the warranty is still valid but I just wonder what option would me more efficient: 1) Have the monitor fixed for a small amount. 2) Buy a new monitor for a slightly bigger amount. When monitors were still expensive, I wouldn't doubt about this and would just have my monitor repaired. But prices are so low nowadays, (and repairs are expensive) that I wonder if it's worth the trouble... Of course, I'm in no hurry since I still have another monitor. It's just that I liked the dual-monitor setup. Solved! Just ordered a new monitor. A Samsumg Syncmaster T260HD 25,5". Much more than it would cost me if I just had my old one repaired but I noticed that this one has a build-in TV tuner, plus speakers. It's way more expensive than a repair, but it's worth the additional value it provides.

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• Setting up MySQL Linux slave with a Windows master

  - by philwilks

  I'm running a MySQL 5.0 database server on Windows Server 2008. The total size of the database is about 1Gb. I make daily backups, but I'd like to step up to having a slave server for extra protection. My thinking was that I wouldn't need the expense of a Windows machine to do this, and a Linux "cloud server" from RackSpace would do the job well for quite a low cost. However I have little experience with Linux, so I have a few questions... Does this sound like a good idea? Is there anything wrong with linking Windows and Linux MySQL servers? Does Linux have the equivalent of Remote Desktop Connection? If so can I use this from a Windows machine? Would a particular Linux distro be well suited to this task? RackSpace offer ArchLinux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. My immediate thinking is to go with Ubuntu as I've heard it's more friendly for people coming from a Windows background. Any comments you have would be very appreciated! Phil

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• Windows Action Center notification icon says Backup in Progress when no backup is occurring

  - by allquixotic

  How can I get Windows Action Center's little flag in the notification area to stop saying "Backup In Progress" on Windows 8? It's driving me nuts. I disabled the Windows Backup service completely and turned off File Recovery. Nothing that I can tell is using any disk I/O whatsoever, by examining Task Manager's resource monitor. It's just a visual cue that seems totally wrong considering my disk is only using about 50 KB/s of sporadic writes for superfetch etc. This wouldn't be a problem for me, since I rely on the knowledge that the Backup service is disabled and there's no disk activity, but I am trying to support a more traditional user who relies on visual cues from the operating system and trusts them over low-level observations like "...but the Windows Backup service is disabled!" Therefore this user still thinks that the backup is going on, even after the service is disabled. Technically, I think this is a bug in Windows 8. It really should not be displaying "Backup in Progress" if ... you know ... a backup, is not, in progress. Which it isn't. Is there a workaround?

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• nginx: dump HTTP requests for debugging

  - by Alexander Gladysh

  Ubuntu 10.04.2 nginx 0.7.65 I see some weird HTTP requests coming to my nginx server. To better understand what is going on, I want to dump whole HTTP request data for such queries. (I.e. dump all request headers and body somewhere I can read them.) Can I do this with nginx? Alternatively, is there some HTTP server that allows me to do this out of the box, to which I can proxy these requests by the means of nginx? Update: Note that this box has a bunch of normal traffic, and I would like to avoid capturing all of it on low level (say, with tcpdump) and filtering it out later. I think it would be much easier to filter good traffic first in a rewrite rule (fortunately I can write one quite easily in this case), and then deal with bogus traffic only. And I do not want to channel bogus traffic to another box just to be able to capture it there with tcpdump. Update 2: To give a bit more details, bogus request have parameter named (say) foo in their GET query (the value of the parameter can differ). Good requests are guaranteed not to have this parameter ever. If I can filter by this in tcpdump or ngrep somehow — no problem, I'll use these.

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• My Computer hangs for a few minutes just after startup, and then is fine.

  - by EvilChookie

  So I just built myself a reasonably beefy computer, and I installed Windows 7 on it. However, I start the machine up each morning and within a few minutes, the computer will semi hang. That is the mouse is responsive, and most of the time I can open task manager, or a new tab in Chrome. Occasionally windows will be labelled as 'Not responding'. Then, the machine will get over it's problem, and will be nice and quick until I turn it off. Here's my specs: CPU: AMD Phenom-II X4 955 Black (Quad Core, 3.2ghz) RAM: 4GB of DDR3 1300 MOBO: ASUS M4A785T-M (Latest BIOS) HARD DRIVES: 2x1TB Western Digital Caviar Blacks in RAID-0. OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64. GPU: ASUS GT240 1GB. I believe this issue relates to the RAID array, as I didn't have the lockup problem before I created the array. I purchased a second drive and reformatted after creating a RAID array, since the single drive was a little on the pokey side (compared to the rest of the computer). What I have tried: Updated Raid Drivers Malware checks Windows Updates Unecessary Services CPU and Disk activity appears to be low (via Resource Monitor) No strange errors in the error log. Any thoughts?

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• My PC is powercycling, what's going wrong?

  - by Renai

  So here is my sorry story of woe. My PC has been functioning normally for some time. Last week I bought a cheapish powered USB hub and plugged it into my home PC, which runs Windows 7. This weekend I plugged that hub into my home PC. At some stage I hibernated the PC. Then later on I plugged my Kobo eReader into the hub to charge. Later on I started the PC up. Only thing is, it now won’t start up. It just powercycles on for a second and a half with the fans at full, then powercycles off. Then back on for two seconds, then back off. There’s no display at all and it won’t get to the BIOS screen. It looks like anything USB is not functioning — the keyboard and mouse are not lighting up etc. I’ve taken out the BIOS battery and reseated the RAM, reseated the graphics card and so on, but my suspicion is that I have blown the USB section of the motherboard somehow. Suggestions? All else failing, where is the best place to take this machine in Sydney to get evaluated? It’s a fairly powerful beast, all up has cost me about $2500 over the years, including upgrades and a recent new graphics card, so can’t just start from scratch.

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• Why do hosts prefer Linux to Windows Server?

  - by iconiK

  So far I see a HUGE majority of hosts provide only Linux shared hosting, providing Windows only to VPS (or even to only dedicated servers). Why is it so? While Windows is a lot more expensive than Linux (though it depends on a lot of factors, not just initial and support license cost), it also provides ASP.NET, IIS and of course, Microsoft SQL Server. I know in the past it might have been because of cPanel being Linux only but now they have a Windows version. But still, why is Linux predominantly used on shared hosting? PHP works on both systems. IIS can be (and probably is) faster. MySQL runs on both systems as well. cPanel has a Windows version. Python, Perl, Ruby, all run on Windows as well. You even have MS SQL Server Express, which I find more superior than MySQL in both speed and features. Access is there for low usage requirements, as is SQLite (which is so great for quick small stuff). And with PowerShell you have a good alternative to the Unix shell. EDIT: I am looking for common reasons, I realize each hosting company (and/or it's clients) may have different needs. This becomes very important when you get to VPS or Cloud which give you a full operating system to use.

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• Weird PCI bug: lots of missed packets, or data comes in "bursts"

  - by Thomas O

  I have an ABIT KN9 motherboard. It has one PCI-e x16 slot, three PCI-e x4 slots and two legacy PCI. My problem is with the legacy PCI (which I shall just call "PCI".) I currently have an Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT (a low end card) installed in the x16 slot and a TV card in PCI #1; the x4 slots are unused, as is PCI #2. I plan to upgrade the graphics card soon, the current card was spare. I sometimes install a USB expander in PCI #2 but it causes a lot of problems - see below. The problem is under Linux (Ubuntu 10.10, Linux 2.6.35-22-generic), but probably under all operating systems (I have not yet been able to test Windows, but I suspect it will do the same as the problems occur on the BIOS/POST side too, e.g. when using a USB keyboard on the expander the keyboard will not work at all) PCI has an enourmous delay, and packets arrive in large chunks. For example, when using the USB expander, my USB mouse lags and jumps in large steps every second or so, while using the motherboard USB does not present this problem. My TV card will only do one or two frames per second, and the program (xawtv) usually times out and crashes. In dmesg, I'm getting messages like: bttv0: timeout: drop=74, irq=154/100476, risc=31f6256c, bits: VSYNC HSYNC OFLOW RISCI for my TV card, and similar timeout issues for my USB expander with a mouse. I received the motherboard, processor and RAM second hand and have only just got around to building it, so I don't know if this problem has always existed, or if it's a result of my set up. If anyone has any hints or solutions it would be appreciated - this is kind of a show-stopper for me.

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• Forward secrecy in Nginx (CentOS6)

  - by Anil

  I am trying to enable Forward secrecy in CentOS with nginx webserver. What I have tried I have read some tutorials and seems like we should have nginx, openssl latest versions to enable it. So I had installed the openssl latest from source. sudo wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.0.1e.tar.gz sudo tar -xvzf openssl-1.0.1e.tar.gz cd openssl-1.0.1e sudo ./config --prefix=/usr/local sudo make sudo make install Now OpenSSL supports the Eliptic Curve ciphers(ECDHE). I tested this with openssl s_server also. It worked well. Next, I replaced Nginx with latest. sudo wget http://nginx.org/packages/centos/6/x86_64/RPMS/nginx-1.4.2-1.el6.ngx.x86_64.rpm sudo rpm -e nginx sudo rpm -ivh nginx-1.4.2-1.el6.ngx.x86_64.rpm and configured Nginx as described in this link ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; ssl_ciphers EECDH+ECDSA+AESGCM:EECDH+aRSA+AESGCM:EECDH+ECDSA+SHA256:EECDH+aRSA+RC4:EDH+aRSA:EECDH:RC4:!aNULL:!eNULL:!LOW:!3DES:!MD5:!EXP:!PSK:!SRP:!DSS; http://baudehlo.wordpress.com/2013/06/24/setting-up-perfect-forward-secrecy-for-nginx-or-stud/ But now Nginx does not support ECDHE ciphers. It supports DHE ciphers. I tried by just enabling ECDHE cipher in nginx still doesn't work. I am using latest web browser(chrome 29 and it support this cipher) Am i missing anything ? Or Having issues with CentOS or Nginx? I read somewhere that ECC patent issues with CentOS, is this causing problem?

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• How can I write directly to my Zune HD hard drive?

  - by iamgoat

  When syncing photos to the Zune HD it resizes them down to a much lower resolution which means I cannot load a high res picture on it (comic book) and zoom in to read it. This defeats the whole purpose of having a zoom feature. There is a registry hack you can make to get the Zune to display under My Computer. Then if you killed the zune process while it's syncing you'd be able to access it like a hard drive and copy files to it. It seems like the more recent firmware and/or Zune software version now prevents this. How can I treat it like an HDD and copy files to it? I simply want to take my original pictures folder and copy it over the low resolution versions the Zune software resized it to. An alternative option would be to remove the hard drive from it and see if I can connect it to a computer directly, but I just got this and don't want to disassemble it yet. Note to Microsoft: Why do you allow me to set the encoding quality of music, but not photos?

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• Best practices for thin-provisioning Linux servers (on VMware)

  - by nbr

  I have a setup of about 20 Linux machines, each with about 30-150 gigabytes of customer data. Probably the size of data will grow significantly faster on some machines than others. These are virtual machines on a VMware vSphere cluster. The disk images are stored on a SAN system. I'm trying to find a solution that would use disk space sparingly, while still allowing for easy growing of individual machines. In theory, I would just create big disks for each machine and use thin provisioning. Each disk would grow as needed. However, it seems that a 500 GB ext3 filesystem with only 50 GB of data and quite a low number of writes still easily grows the disk image to eg. 250 GB over time. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong here? (I was surprised how little I found on the subject with Google. BTW, there's even no thin-provisioning tag on serverfault.com.) Currently I'm planning to create big, thin-provisioned disks - but with a small LVM volume on them. For example: a 100 GB volume on a 500 GB disk. That way I could more easily grow the LVM volume and the filesystem size as needed, even online. Now for the actual question: Are there better ways to do this? (that is, to grow data size as needed without downtime.) Possible solutions include: Using a thin-provisioning friendly filesystem that tries to occupy the same spots over and over again, thus not growing the image size. Finding an easy method of reclaiming free space on the partition (re-thinning?) Something else? A bonus question: If I go with my current plan, would you recommend creating partitions on the disks (pvcreate /dev/sdX1 vs pvcreate /dev/sdX)? I think it's against conventions to use raw disks without partitions, but it would make it a bit easier to grow the disks, if that is ever needed. This is all just a matter of taste, right?

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• How do I set up an email server that automatically maintains a list of previous recipients?

  - by hsivonen

  I want to set up an email server with the following characteristics. What software (besides bogofilter and clamav that I'm naming) should I use and what HOWTOs should I read? The server should run some flavor of Linux that's as low-maintenance as possible and self-updates for security patches in a timely fashion. (Debian stable?) When email is sent, all the recipients are stored in the list of previous recipients maintained by the server. Scan incoming messages with clamav and treat as spam if it contains viruses. When email arrives (if it passed clamav), if the sender is on the list of previous recipients, bypass spam filter. If the List-Id header names a mailing list on a manually maintained list of known-clean mailing lists, bypass spam filter and deliver into a mailbox depending on the mailing list name. Email that wasn't from previous recipients, manually white listed domains or mailing lists gets filtered by bogofilter. Spam goes into a spam mailbox. Email considered to be ham should automatically be fed to bogofilter training as ham. Email considered to be spam (incl. messages with viruses) should be automatically fed to bogofilter training as spam. There should be mailboxes for false ham and false spam that an IMAP client can move email into so that the server retrains bogofilter appropriately. Email sending requires SMTP over SSL. Email reading requires IMAPS. Should I also want to use SpamAssassin in addition to bogofilter?

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• Flickering dual screens in Virtual Box Ubuntu 13.10 Guest

  - by alexleonard

  I have Ubuntu 13.10 x64 installed as a guest in VirtualBox (under a Windows 8.1 host) and have the settings for the virtual machine setup to run with a monitor count of 2, 128MB video memory and 3D acceleration enabled. In my guest I have the virtual box additions installed (which allowed me to have two 1920x1080 screens). Here's a screenshot of my VM settings. My laptop is an Asus N550JV which has both Intel's HD Graphics 4600 GPU and Nvidia's GeForce GT 750M. By default though I believe the Intel GFX card is being used to render the VM. When I boot up the VM it loads perfectly on dual screens, however whenever I move the mouse from one screen to the other (I have a Dell S2340L running over a HDMI connection as a second screen) the screen flickers. I've tried a variety of settings changes in both Ubuntu and the VM settings, but cannot seem to stop this screen flicker. I also used the NVidia control panel in Windows to force the dedicated graphics card to always be used but found that the display driver sometimes crashed whilst working in the VM, resulting in my VM session being destroyed, so I figured it's better to stick with the Intel GFX as that appears to be more stable. I also tried without 3D acceleration but that was much worse, and if I ran the VM with a low amount of graphics memory it really struggled. Here's my dmesg output: http://pastebin.com/1LJuYWMj (not sure if this is helpful in this situation). I read some posts suggesting changes to /etc/X11/xorg.conf but I don't appear to have an xorg.conf file. There were also a few posts (though related to Synergy) suggesting running xset -dpms but this command doesn't appear to have had any effect for me. As an additional note, I'm finding that window drawing in the guest is a little laggy/glitchy. For example, quickly scrolling through a web page may result in parts of the viewport displaying original content. Certainly I notice drawing issues most in the web browser, but it also impacts other software with parts of the window not being drawn when, say, switching between accounts in thunderbird. Any suggestions greatly appreciated!

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• What's needed in a complete ASP.NET environment?

  - by Christian W

  We have a ASP3.0 application with a few ASP.NET (2.0) dittys mixed in. (Our longtime goal is to migrate everything to ASP.NET but that's not important for this issue) Our current test/deploy workflow is like this: 1 Use notepad++ or VS2008 to fix a bug/feature (depending on what I have open) 2 Open my virtual test-server 3 Copy the fixed file over, either with explorer, or if I can be bothered to open it, WinMerge 4 Test that the fix works 5 Close the virtual test-server 6 Connect to our host with VPN 7 Use WinMerge to update the files necessary 8 Pray to higher powers that the production environment is not so different that something bombs. To make things worse, only I have access to my "test-server". So I'm the only one testing it. I really want to make this a bit more robust, I even have a subversion setup running. But I always forget to commit changes... And I don't even work in my checked out folder, but a copy of what is currently in production... Can someone recommend some good reading on deploying, testing, staging and stuff like that. I currently use VS2008 and want to use subversion or GIT (or any other free VCS). Since I'm the only developer, teamsystem is not really an option (cost-related). I have found myself developing an "improved" feature, only to find a bug in the same feature in the production system. And since my "improved" feature incorporated deleting some old functionality, I have to fix bugs directly in production... That's not a fun feeling... (I have inherited this system recently... So it's not directly my fault that it is like this ;) )

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• Getting rid of your server in a small business environment

  - by andygeers

  In a small business environment, is it still necessary to have a central server? Speaking for my own company (a small charity with about 12 employees) we use our server (Windows Server 2003) for the following: Email via Microsoft Exchange Central storage Acting as a print server User authentication / Active Directory There are significant costs associated with running a server like this: Electricity, first for the server itself then for the air conditioning required (this thing pumps out a lot of heat) Noise (of which there is a lot) IT support bills (both Windows Server and Exchange are pretty complicated, and there are many ways they can go wrong) I've found ways to replace many of these functions with cheaper (better?) alternatives: Google Apps / GMail is a clear win for us: we have so many spam related problems it's not even funny, and Outlook is dog slow on our aging computers You can buy networked storage devices with built in print servers, such as the Netgear ReadyNAS™ RND4210 that would allow us to store/share all of our documents, and allow us to access printers over the network The only thing that I can't figure out how to do away with is the authentication side of things - it seems to me that if we got rid of our server, you'd essentially have a bunch of independent PCs that had no shared pool of user accounts / no central administrator. Is that right? Does that matter? Am I missing any other good reasons to keep a central server? Does anybody know of any good, cost-effective ways of achieving the same end but without the expensive central server?

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• HP Proliant DL380 G4 - Can this server still perform in 2011?

  - by BSchriver

  Can the HP Proliant DL380 G4 series server still perform at high a quality in the 2011 IT world? This may sound like a weird question but we are a very small company whose primary business is NOT IT related. So my IT dollars have to stretch a long way. I am in need of a good web and database server. The load and demand for a while will be fairly low so I am not looking nor do I have the money to buy a brand new HP Dl380 G7 series box for $6K. While searching around today I found a company in ATL that buys servers off business leases and then stripes them down to parts. They clean, check and test each part and then custom "rebuild" the server based on whatever specs you request. The interesting thing is they also provide a 3-year warranty on all their servers they sell. I am contemplating buying two of the following: HP Proliant DL380 G4 Dual (2) Intel Xeon 3.6 GHz 800Mhz 1MB Cache processors 8GB PC3200R ECC Memory 6 x 73GB U320 15K rpm SCSI drives Smart Array 6i Card Dual Power Supplies Plus the usual cdrom, dual nic, etc... All this for $750 each or $1500 for two pretty nicely equipped servers. The price then jumps up on the next model up which is the G5 series. It goes from $750 to like $2000 for a comparable server. I just do not have $4000 to buy two servers right now. So back to my original question, if I load Windows 2008 R2 Server and IIS 7 on one of the machines and Windows 2008 R2 server and MS SQL 2008 R2 Server on another machine, what kind of performance might I expect to see from these machines? The facts is this series is now 3 versions behind the G7's and this series of server was built when Windows 200 Server was the dominant OS and Windows 2003 Server was just coming out. If you are running Windows 2008 R2 Server on a G4 with similar or less specs I would love to hear what your performance is like.

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• Intermittent extrememly long response times when downloading documents

  - by pap

  I have a Java web application running om Tomcat 7 with an Apache httpd 2.2 fronting with mod_jk/AJP. One part of the application is serving files (up to 4mb size). Now, normally this all runs very smooth with stable, low response-times. However, in rare instances (<0.1% of downloads), the downloadtime will go beyond 1 minute. After activating the ThreadStuckValve in Tomcat, I can see that the long responses seem to be stuck at org.apache.tomcat.jni.Socket.sendbb(Native method) i.e network I/O. At most, these long-running downloads take 5 minutes, which I strongly suspect is because of the default 300 second timout in Apache 2.2 (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html, "TimeOut directive"). To me, this looks like network problems. The Apache timeout (if that is what is kicking in at the 5 minute mark) indicates that ACK packets are not being transmitted correctly. My questions are what could be causing this? Closed browser at receiving end but socket not signaled as closed properly? Packet loss or some other network failure in transit? Where would I start troubleshooting this? We're running Tomcat and Apache on Windows server 2008-R2 in a vmware virtualized server.

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• What to look for in a switch with LAN/WAN verses an iSCSI SAN?

  - by Luke

  I'm setting up a VMWare ESXi 5 environment with 3 server nodes. Dell recommended 2x Force10 S60 switches shared (iSCSI SAN, LAN/WAN). The S60 switches are extremely powerful. They have 1.25 GB of buffer cache, < 9us latency. But they are very expensive (online price ~$15k per switch, actual quote a little less). I've been told that "by the book" you should at least have 2 internal switches for SAN, and 2 switches for LAN/WAN (each with a redundant). I know some of the pros and cons of each approach. What I'm wondering is, would it be more cost effective to disjoin the SAN from LAN with less expensive switches? The answer to this question highlights what I should be looking for in a switch for the SAN. What should I be looking for in a LAN/WAN switch, in comparison to the SAN? With the above linked question for the SAN: How is buffer latency measured? When you see 36 MB of buffer cache, is that shared or per port? So 36 MB would be 768kb or 36MB per port? With 3 to 6 servers how much buffer cache do you really need? What else should I be looking at? Our application will be heavily using HTML5 websockets (high number of persistent connections). The amount of data being sent is small; Data sent between client <- server isn't broadcasted (not a chat/IM service). We will be doing some database reporting too (csv export, sums, some joins). We are a small business and on a budget. We'd probably only be able to spend no more than $20k on switches total (2 or 4).

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• Need a place to store a few bytes of meta information on storage media

  - by Jason C

  I'm working on an embedded project. I need a place to store some filesystem-independent meta information on a storage device. The device has an MSDOS partition table. The device also may have unallocated space (depending on its size) but it will be TRIMmed (and also may be blown away by new partitions in the future). I need a location on the device that is not unallocated and that has a low risk of being touched (outside of completely erasing the device). The device is only guaranteed to have an MBR at the point the meta data needs to first be written; meaning there are no EBRs/VBRs present that I could use. There are 446 bytes at the very start of the device available for MBR bootstrap code. Currently my only idea is to store data at the end of this block. However, the device is bootable and I have no way of knowing if I'd be blowing away bootstrap code or not. The sector size is 512 bytes and the MBR is the first sector, I'm pretty sure (correct me if I'm wrong) that that means the second sector is available for use by partition data, so I can't use that either. Does anybody have any ideas? I need 4 bytes of space.

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• Windows 7 hangs with 100% disk activity but only when online

  - by jeremy

  I have the same problem as seemingly many other people here, and I think we might all be experiencing the same issue: a compatibility issue in Windows 7 between hard drive and network controller or drivers. I've tried firmware updates of my entire board, wiping my drive and reinstalling from scratch. And yet the problem persists, which suggests it is an operating system error, as the hard drive checks out 100% physically. Additionally, the only time it does not occur is when in safe mode WITHOUT networking. With networking, there are spikes in disc access every so often and a huge flow of processes accessing the disc simultaneously that literally "stick" the disc, and physically jolting my computer unsticks it. Again, this has been tested for hours in a professional service environment, and without network access on, things are fine. As soon as there's network access available, the disc access occasionally cranks up to 100% and sticks everything. I'm using Microsoft Security Essentials, but this also happened under Norton, then McAfee. Again, this happened again after a complete wipe, so the likelihood of malware causing it seems low. I don't visit unsecure sites anyway, as far as I know. This, to me, narrows it down to a Windows 7 process that is somehow repeatedly corrupted, perhaps a corrupt .dll or driver, causing a conflict at the operating system level and temporary hard drive failure. I would encourage anyone who knows more about this stuff (which is probably most people!) to take a shot at this one, and I would encourage anyone else with a sticking hard drive in windows 7 64-bit to check on whether it occurs during safe mode without networking.

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