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  • How to block/avoid a particular IP when connecting to websites?

    - by Mark
    I'm having trouble connecting to a particular website. I can view it through a proxy, but not from home. So I ran a traceroute: Tracing route to fvringette.com [76.74.225.90] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms <snip> 2 * * * Request timed out. 3 9 ms 7 ms 27 ms rd2bb-ge2-0-0-22.vc.shawcable.net [64.59.146.226] 4 8 ms 7 ms 7 ms rc2bb-tge0-9-2-0.vc.shawcable.net [66.163.69.41] 5 10 ms 9 ms 9 ms rc2wh-tge0-0-1-0.vc.shawcable.net [66.163.69.65] 6 27 ms 23 ms 22 ms ge-gi0-2.pix.van.peer1.net [206.223.127.1] 7 18 ms 18 ms 20 ms 10ge.xe-0-2-0.van-spenc-dis-1.peer1.net [216.187.89.206] 8 9 ms 11 ms 10 ms 64.69.91.245 9 * * * Request timed out. 10 * * * Request timed out. ... Looks like this "64.69.91.245" is somehow blocking me. Can I tell my computer to avoid/bypass that IP when trying to connect?

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  • Why I cannot copy install.wim from Windows 7 ISO to USB (in linux env)

    - by fastreload
    I need to make a USB bootable disk of Windows 7 ISO. My USB is formatted to NTFS, ISO is not corrupt. I can copy install.wim elsewhere but I cannot copy it to USB. I even tried rsync. rsync error sources/install.wim rsync: writefd_unbuffered failed to write 4 bytes to socket [sender]: Broken pipe (32) rsync: write failed on "/media/52E866F5450158A4/sources/install.wim": Input/output error (5) rsync error: error in file IO (code 11) at receiver.c(322) [receiver=3.0.8] Stat for windows.vim File: `X15-65732 (2)/sources/install.wim' Size: 2188587580 Blocks: 4274600 IO Block: 4096 regular file Device: 801h/2049d Inode: 671984 Links: 1 Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--) Uid: ( 1000/ umur) Gid: ( 1000/ umur) Access: 2011-10-17 22:59:54.754619736 +0300 Modify: 2009-07-14 12:26:40.000000000 +0300 Change: 2011-10-17 22:55:47.327358410 +0300 fdisk -l Disk /dev/sdd: 8103 MB, 8103395328 bytes 196 heads, 32 sectors/track, 2523 cylinders, total 15826944 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0xc3072e18 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdd1 * 32 15826943 7913456 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT hdparm -I /dev/sdd: SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ATA device, with non-removable media Model Number: UF?F?A????U]r???U u??tF?f?`~ Serial Number: ?@??~| Firmware Revision: ????V? Media Serial Num: $I?vnladip raititnot baelErrrol aoidgn Media Manufacturer: o eparitgns syetmiM Standards: Used: unknown (minor revision code 0x0c75) Supported: 12 8 6 Likely used: 12 Configuration: Logical max current cylinders 17218 0 heads 0 0 sectors/track 128 0 -- Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes device size with M = 1024*1024: 0 MBytes device size with M = 1000*1000: 0 MBytes cache/buffer size = unknown Capabilities: IORDY(may be)(cannot be disabled) Queue depth: 11 Standby timer values: spec'd by Vendor R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 0 Current = ? Recommended acoustic management value: 254, current value: 62 DMA: not supported PIO: unknown * reserved 69[0] * reserved 69[1] * reserved 69[3] * reserved 69[4] * reserved 69[7] Security: Master password revision code = 60253 not supported not enabled not locked not frozen not expired: security count not supported: enhanced erase 71112min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT. 172min for ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE UNIT. Integrity word not set (found 0xaa55, expected 0x80a5)

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  • Account Preferences Crashes

    - by Vivek Sundaram
    When I click on System Preferences Accounts, I get a crash [every single time]. Here are a few interesting snippets from the "Problem Report". Any ideas on how to tackle this? Process: System Preferences [607] Path: /Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences Identifier: com.apple.systempreferences Version: 7.0 (7.0) Build Info: SystemPrefsApp-1750100~5 Code Type: X86-64 (Native) Parent Process: launchd [184] OS Version: Mac OS X 10.6.5 (10H574) Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x0000000117547860 Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread Application Specific Information: objc_msgSend() selector name: willSelect objc[607]: garbage collection is ON Thread 0 Crashed: Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread 0 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff80fd211c objc_msgSend + 40 1 com.apple.systempreferences 0x0000000100008426 0x100000000 + 33830 2 com.apple.systempreferences 0x0000000100006fb8 0x100000000 + 28600 3 com.apple.Foundation 0x00007fff84ede23c __NSFireDelayedPerform + 404 4 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff824acbe8 __CFRunLoopRun + 6488 5 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff824aadbf CFRunLoopRunSpecific + 575 6 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x00007fff82ec691a RunCurrentEventLoopInMode + 333 7 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x00007fff82ec671f ReceiveNextEventCommon + 310 8 com.apple.HIToolbox 0x00007fff82ec65d8 BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode + 59 9 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff866c0e64 _DPSNextEvent + 718 10 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff866c07a9 -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] + 155 11 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff8668648b -[NSApplication run] + 395 12 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff8667f1a8 NSApplicationMain + 364 13 com.apple.systempreferences 0x0000000100001cf4 0x100000000 + 7412 ... Thread 0 crashed with X86 Thread State (64-bit): rax: 0x0000000000000001 rbx: 0x0000000200037840 rcx: 0x0000000200058031 rdx: 0x00007fff5fbfe2c0 ... Binary Images: 0x100000000 - 0x10001eff7 com.apple.systempreferences 7.0 (7.0) <30C04F1A-7711-1359-8A0E-D707B8BF2EB4> /Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS/System Preferences 0x100758000 - 0x10076dfff com.apple.frameworks.opendirectoryconfigui 10.6.4 (10.6.4) <4711F2E8-DFA5-4C81-BB2A-B1E39D5B1B91> /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/OpenDirectoryConfigUI.framework/Versions/A/OpenDirectoryConfigUI ...

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  • IP routing Solaris 9 access the internet from local network

    - by help_me
    I am trying to configure the NICS on the Solaris Sparc server. My problem lies in getting out to the "Internet" from the local network. I have requested the NIC to receive a DHCP server address #ifconfig -interface dhcp start. If anyone could guide me as to what I need to do next. I am not able to ping 4.2.2.2 or access the internet. Much appreciated, thank you #uname -a SunOS dev 5.9 Generic_122300-59 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V210 ifconfig -a lo0: flags=1000849<UP,LOOPBACK,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 8232 index 1 inet 127.0.0.1 netmask ff000000 bge0: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 2 inet 10.100.0.3 netmask ffffc000 broadcast 10.100.63.255 bge0:2: flags=1000843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 2 inet 10.100.0.22 netmask ffffc000 broadcast 10.100.63.255 bge3: flags=1004843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST,DHCP,IPv4> mtu 1500 index 12 inet 169.14.60.37 netmask fffffe00 broadcast 169.14.61.255 cat /etc/defaultrouter 10.100.0.254 169.14.60.1 cat /etc/resolv.conf nameserver 169.14.96.73 nameserver 169.10.8.4 netstat -rn Routing Table: IPv4 Destination Gateway Flags Ref Use Interface -------------------- -------------------- ----- ----- ------ --------- 169.14.60.37 169.14.60.1 UGH 1 0 169.14.60.0 169.14.60.37 U 1 18 bge3 10.100.0.0 10.100.0.3 U 1 34940 bge0 10.100.0.0 10.100.0.22 U 1 0 bge0:2 224.0.0.0 10.100.0.3 U 1 0 bge0 default 10.100.0.254 UG 1 111 default 169.14.60.1 UG 1 26 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 UH 10 59464 lo0 bash-2.05$ sudo ndd -get /dev/ip bge0:ip_forwarding 1 bash-2.05$ sudo ndd -get /dev/ip bge3:ip_forwarding 1 bash-2.05$ sudo ndd -get /dev/ip ip_forwarding 1

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  • JVM disappeared on Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8

    - by weisjohn
    I'm working in Eclipse one night, (also using Android's DDMS from the commandline). The next morning, I open the lid... attempt to run Eclipse and get an error. me$ sudo /Applications/eclipse/eclipse JavaVM: requested Java version ((null)) not available. Using Java at "" instead. JavaVM: Failed to load JVM: /bundle/Libraries/libserver.dylib So I then attempt to find out where my JDKs are pointed: me$ ls -la /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/ total 64 drwxr-xr-x 12 root wheel 408 Nov 16 10:44 . drwxr-xr-x 12 root wheel 408 Sep 7 09:39 .. lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 5 Sep 7 17:07 1.3 -> 1.3.1 drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Dec 2 2009 1.3.1 lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10 Sep 7 17:07 1.4 -> CurrentJDK lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10 Sep 7 17:07 1.4.2 -> CurrentJDK lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10 Sep 7 17:07 1.5 -> CurrentJDK lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10 Sep 7 17:07 1.5.0 -> CurrentJDK lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 10 Sep 7 17:07 1.6 -> CurrentJDK drwxr-xr-x 9 root wheel 306 Nov 16 10:44 A lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 1 Sep 7 17:07 Current -> A lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 59 Sep 7 17:07 CurrentJDK -> /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents Everything looks normal so far... me$ ls -la /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/ total 0 drwxr-xr-x 2 root wheel 68 Nov 16 10:44 . drwxr-xr-x 5 root wheel 170 Nov 16 10:44 .. Apparently, my virtual machines have been deleted or moved? I'll probably be able to just re-install Java, but does anyone have any insight into why this may have happened or how to prevent in the future?

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  • Slowdown upon router/modem setup change

    - by Ollie Saunders
    I’ve been using a Belkin FSD7632-4 modem router to connect to my TalkTalk provided ADSL internet connection for some time and been pretty happy with it. Recently, however, the connection has been failing and I decided to get a ASUS RT-N16 instead, which is also a much more capable router generally. The ASUS RT-N16 doesn’t come with a modem built-in so I purchased as Zoom modem as well. I’ve set them both up and am using them to post this message. But I’m a bit miffed to find that I get a significantly and consistently slower downstream rate from the new configuration than with the old Belkin. Belkin modem router: downstream: 3.45 mbps upstream: 0.73 mbps ASUS router + Zoom modem: downstream: 2.71 mbps upstream: 0.66 mbps Any ideas why this is? The really weird thing about this is that the Zoom supports ADSL2 and ADSL2+ but I don’t think the old Belkin does. At first I thought it might be due to the Zoom modem being limited to PPPoE instead of PPPoA, which my ISP supports, but then I tried using PPPoE with the Belkin and that still gave a high speed. I’m using VC-Mux encapsulation with both. VPI of 0 and VCI of 38. I pulled this data off the Zoom: Mode: ADSL2 Line Coding: Trellis On Status: No Defect Link Power State: L0 Downstream Upstream SNR Margin (dB): 12.3 11.8 Attenuation (dB): 43.0 24.9 Output Power (dBm): 12.9 0.0 Attainable Rate (Kbps): 3936 844 Rate (Kbps): 3194 840 MSGc (number of bytes in overhead channel message): 59 10 B (number of bytes in Mux Data Frame): 99 14 M (number of Mux Data Frames in FEC Data Frame): 2 16 T (Mux Data Frames over sync bytes): 1 8 R (number of check bytes in FEC Data Frame): 8 8 S (ratio of FEC over PMD Data Frame length): 1.9833 9.0594 L (number of bits in PMD Data Frame): 839 219 D (interleaver depth): 32 2 Delay (msec): 15 4 Super Frames: 15808 14078 Super Frame Errors: 0 4294967232 RS Words: 513778 111753 RS Correctable Errors: 126 4294967238 RS Uncorrectable Errors: 0 N/A HEC Errors: 0 4294967279 OCD Errors: 0 0 LCD Errors: 0 0 Total Cells: 1920175 237597 Data Cells: 205993 392 Bit Errors: 0 0 Total ES: 0 0 Total SES: 0 0 Total UAS: 34 0

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  • Default IPv6 route on debian squeeze does not come up after boot

    - by Georg Bretschneider
    I have a problem with my default IPv6 route not coming up after boot on a Debian Squeeze system. This is my config (/etc/network/interfaces): # Loopback device: auto lo iface lo inet loopback iface lo inet6 loopback # device: br0 auto br0 iface br0 inet static bridge_ports eth0 bridge_fd 0 address 88.198.62.xx broadcast 88.198.62.63 netmask 255.255.255.224 gateway 88.198.62.33 up route add -net 88.198.62.32 netmask 255.255.255.224 gw 88.198.62.33 br0 iface br0 inet6 static address 2a01:4f8:131:10x::2 netmask 64 gateway 2a01:4f8:131:100::1 up route -A inet6 add 2a01:4f8:131:100::1/59 dev br0 My inet comes up alright, but I have to exec the route command manually after boot to make IPv6 work. Otherwise I can't even reach my gateway. This is the output of ip -6 route show after boot: 2a01:4f8:131:10x::/64 dev br0 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 unreachable fe80::/64 dev lo proto kernel metric 256 error -101 mtu 16436 advmss 16376 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev br0 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev eth0 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 I already tried it with: up ip -6 route add 2a01:4f8:131:100::1 dev br0 up ip -6 route add default via 2a01:4f8:131:100::1 dev br0 in /etc/network/interfaces, but with the same results. If I execute those commands manually on my shell, everything starts working nicely. And yes, I tried with post-up instead of up, too. Only other changes I made was to activate ip forwarding for IPv6, because I want to run some LXC containers on that system.

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  • ipv6 with KVM on debian

    - by Eliasdx
    I have trouble setting up IPV6 on my Proxmox (KVM) server: My ISP sent me this information(xxx=placeholder): IPs: 2a01:XXX:XXX:301:: /64 Gateway: 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 /59 This is the interface setup on the host server: auto vmbr1 iface vmbr1 inet static address 178.XX.XX.4 broadcast 178.XX.XX.63 netmask 255.255.255.192 pointopoint 178.XX.XX.1 gateway 178.XX.XX.1 bridge_ports eth0 bridge_stp off bridge_fd 0 iface vmbr1 inet6 static address 2a01:XXX:XXX:301::2 netmask 64 up ip -6 route add 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 down ip -6 route del 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 up ip -6 route add default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 down ip -6 route del default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 On the guest: auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 178.xx.xx.47 netmask 255.255.255.255 broadcast 178.xx.xx.63 gateway 178.xx.xx.1 pointopoint 178.xx.xx.1 iface eth0 inet6 static pre-up modprobe ipv6 address 2a01:XXX:XXX:301::2:2 netmask 64 up ip -6 route add 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev eth0 down ip -6 route del 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev eth0 up ip -6 route add default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev eth0 down ip -6 route del default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev eth0 Ipv4 works on both host and guest but Ipv6 only works "sometimes". It's up for minutes and then down again until I change something. However I can actually ping the host and the guest from both host and guest. host:~# ip -6 neigh 2a01:XXX:XXX:301::100:2 dev vmbr1 lladdr 00:50:56:00:00:e0 REACHABLE 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 lladdr 00:26:88:76:18:18 router STALE host:~# ip -6 route 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 metric 1024 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 2a01:XXX:XXX:301::/64 dev vmbr1 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev vmbr0 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev eth0 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev vmbr1 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev tap101i1d0 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 metric 1024 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 Does someone know why it isn't working? And is there a way to configure multiple v6 IPs from the same subnet so I can dedicate IPs to websites on a server with multiple virtualhosts?

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  • User http does not have write permissions directory?

    - by dwieeb
    I have a bit of an odd set up, I think. I have groups for each domain my server hosts, and I add the user http to each domain group along with the users that should have access to the groups' domains. In my php script running from a directory 'public_html', I try creating a file: <?php $output = ""; print exec('touch test 2>&1', $output); But I get touch: cannot touch `test': Permission denied and the file is not created. But here, clearly stated, the group has all permissions on the directory: drwxrwxr-x 5 dwieeb example.com 1024 Feb 4 05:19 public_html And here are the permissions on the php file in public_html that is trying to use the exec function: -rw-rw-r-- 1 dwieeb example.com 59 Feb 4 05:19 test.php How is this possible if http is part of the example.com group (as seen from a cat on /etc/group) and the directory has full permissions for the group? ... example.com:x:1000:dwieeb,http I'm stumped. EDIT (since apparently I'm not cool enough to answer my own questions yet): Ah, I found the problem. Yes, I restarted Nginx, but the php-fpm daemon must be restarted as well when http is added to the group for my domain. On Arch Linux: rc.d restart php-fpm

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  • Timely automatic unexpected reboot on ubuntu desktop

    - by ahmad
    We have a remote linux server (ubuntu desktop). The system log indicates the system has been restarted on the timely fashion. Here is a part of the last output: ut pts/0 192.169.50.2-sta Sat Nov 24 22:17 still logged in reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Sat Nov 24 22:04 - 22:17 (00:13) ut pts/0 server.local Sat Nov 24 21:36 - crash (00:27) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Sat Nov 24 15:55 - 22:17 (06:21) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Fri Nov 23 18:02 - 22:17 (1+04:14) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Fri Nov 23 10:39 - 22:17 (1+11:38) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Fri Nov 23 04:18 - 22:17 (1+17:59) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Fri Nov 23 03:57 - 22:17 (1+18:20) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Thu Nov 22 20:38 - 22:17 (2+01:38) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Thu Nov 22 11:13 - 22:17 (2+11:03) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Thu Nov 22 08:12 - 22:17 (2+14:05) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Wed Nov 21 11:16 - 22:17 (3+11:00) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Tue Nov 20 22:36 - 22:17 (3+23:41) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Tue Nov 20 14:12 - 22:17 (4+08:05) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Tue Nov 20 11:32 - 22:17 (4+10:44) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Tue Nov 20 01:52 - 22:17 (4+20:25) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Tue Nov 20 00:22 - 22:17 (4+21:55) reboot system boot 2.6.32-21-generi Mon Nov 19 17:27 - 22:17 (5+04:50) It looks the system is set to be restarted at 22:17. Can anyone guide me why this happens? Thanks in advance.

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  • How to effectively have less php-cgi processes running?

    - by João Pinto Jerónimo
    My server is a Linode 512, and on it I run a Wordpress MU with 3 websites (they don't get a lot of visitors) and a couple of NodeJS apps. I need to switch to Lighttpd because Apache 2 was using about 59% of the server's RAM, and now I have the php-cgi processes taking up about 43.6% of the server's RAM: most often 2 processes use 16.5% of the RAM each, 4 processes use 1.8% of the RAM each, and 4 more processes use 0,8% of the RAM, each How can I have less of these processes ? I'm almost sure they're not all needed for the trafic this server gets... I tried only allowing 2 children, but I still have those 10... This is my fastcgi.server section in lighttpd.conf. fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => ( "localhost" => ( "socket" => "/var/run/lighttpd/php-fastcgi.socket", "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php-cgi", "bin-environment" => ( "PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN" => "2", "PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS" => "4000" ) ) ) ) What else can I do to tune lighttpd to use less RAM ?

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  • Run GUI application via cronjob in Ubuntu?

    - by Christoffer
    Hi, I have a remote server running "Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop". From it I want to run a script that walks through a list of websites and captures screenshots of them. The script is working and thoroughly tested. When I SSH to the server with ssh -X user@ip-adress I can run my script by calling ./myscript.py and everything will work OK. I then modifed my crontab file and added... 59 17 * * * env DISPLAY=:0 /path/to/myscript.py ...as recommended by the Ubuntu WIKI. I can see in the /var/log/syslog that my cron job is started, but it doesn't capture any screenshots. When running env DISPLAY=:0 /path/to/myscript.py from the shell I get No protocol specified myscript.py: cannot connect to X server :0 If I ssh to the server without the -X option I only get the second row of the error: myscript.py: cannot connect to X server :0 What can I try now? More details I have run xhost +local: and checked the output of xhost to see that the option was set correctly. If I run ls /tmp/.X11-unix/ the output is X0 The server only has one screen. Thank you in advance!

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  • On linux, what does it mean when a directory has size 0 instead of 4096?

    - by kdt
    Here's a strange thing I haven't seen before -- a directory whose size is reported by ls as 0 instead of 4096, and I can't create any files within it. # ls -ld lib home drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 0 Feb 7 03:10 home <-- it has zero size dr-xr-xr-x. 11 root root 4096 Feb 4 09:28 lib # touch home/foo touch: cannot touch `home/foo': No such file or directory <-- and I can't create files in it # rm home rm: cannot remove `home': Is a directory <-- look, it really is a dir So what does it mean for a directory to have size 0 instead of 4096? Filesystem is ext4 on fedora core 14. The output of mount is: /dev/mapper/vg_dev-lv_root on / type ext4 (rw) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620) tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,rootcontext="system_u:object_r:tmpfs_t:s0") /dev/vda1 on /boot type ext4 (rw) none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw) sunrpc on /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs type rpc_pipefs (rw) Output of du -s /home: 0 /home Output of stat /home: File: `/home' Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 1024 directory Device: 15h/21d Inode: 34913 Links: 2 Access: (0755/drwxr-xr-x) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root) Access: 2011-02-07 03:45:46.188995765 -0800 Modify: 2011-02-07 03:11:59.980995019 -0800 Change: 2011-02-06 07:58:45.874995002 -0800

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  • ipv6 with KVM on debian

    - by Eliasdx
    I have trouble setting up IPV6 on my Proxmox (KVM) server: My ISP sent me this information(xxx=placeholder): IPs: 2a01:XXX:XXX:301:: /64 Gateway: 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 /59 This is the interface setup on the host server: auto vmbr1 iface vmbr1 inet static address 178.XX.XX.4 broadcast 178.XX.XX.63 netmask 255.255.255.192 pointopoint 178.XX.XX.1 gateway 178.XX.XX.1 bridge_ports eth0 bridge_stp off bridge_fd 0 iface vmbr1 inet6 static address 2a01:XXX:XXX:301::2 netmask 64 up ip -6 route add 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 down ip -6 route del 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 up ip -6 route add default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 down ip -6 route del default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 On the guest: auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 178.xx.xx.47 netmask 255.255.255.255 broadcast 178.xx.xx.63 gateway 178.xx.xx.1 pointopoint 178.xx.xx.1 iface eth0 inet6 static pre-up modprobe ipv6 address 2a01:XXX:XXX:301::2:2 netmask 64 up ip -6 route add 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev eth0 down ip -6 route del 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev eth0 up ip -6 route add default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev eth0 down ip -6 route del default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev eth0 Ipv4 works on both host and guest but Ipv6 only works "sometimes". It's up for minutes and then down again until I change something. However I can actually ping the host and the guest from both host and guest. host:~# ip -6 neigh 2a01:XXX:XXX:301::100:2 dev vmbr1 lladdr 00:50:56:00:00:e0 REACHABLE 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 lladdr 00:26:88:76:18:18 router STALE host:~# ip -6 route 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 metric 1024 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 2a01:XXX:XXX:301::/64 dev vmbr1 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev vmbr0 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev eth0 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev vmbr1 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 fe80::/64 dev tap101i1d0 proto kernel metric 256 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 default via 2a01:XXX:XXX:300::1 dev vmbr1 metric 1024 mtu 1500 advmss 1440 hoplimit 4294967295 Does someone know why it isn't working? And is there a way to configure multiple v6 IPs from the same subnet so I can dedicate IPs to websites on a server with multiple virtualhosts?

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  • bind9 - forwarders are not working

    - by Sarp Kaya
    I am experiencing an issue with bind. If i want to resolve any domain name that is on the zone file. It works fine. However, when I try to resolve anything that does not belong to the zone file. I know that actual DNS servers that are being forwarded are working fine. But somehow bind9 fails to use them. The content of /etc/bind/named.conf.options is: options { directory "/var/cache/bind"; forwarders { 131.181.127.32; 131.181.59.48; }; dnssec-validation auto; auth-nxdomain no; # conform to RFC1035 listen-on-v6 { any; }; }; I have also tried to use only one ip address and it still did not work. also the content of /etc/bind/named.conf is: include "/etc/bind/named.conf.options"; include "/etc/bind/named.conf.local"; include "/etc/bind/named.conf.default-zones"; So there is no problem with including options file. Any recommendations for fixing this problem?

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  • cant remove index.php from url in codeigniter

    - by Ashiq
    iam new in codeigniter frame work,i want to remove index.php from url and tried many times bt its not working..... here is my .htaccess file RewriteEngine on RewriteBase /test/ RewriteCond $1 !^(index\.php|resources|robots\.txt) RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.*)$ test/index.php/$1 [L,QSA] iam also change $config['index_page'] = ''; bt when running this i got an error message... Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator at [email protected] to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. here is my appache error log [Sat Jan 05 16:59:53.265625 2013] [core:error] [pid 3976:tid 1152] [client ] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use 'LimitInternalRecursion' to increase the limit if necessary. Use 'LogLevel debug' to get a backtrace. pls help to solve this........ Thanks

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  • Route web traffic through a separate iterface

    - by tkane
    I'd like to route web traffic through the wlan0 interface and the rest through eth1. Can you please help me with the iptables commands to achieve this. Below is my configuration. Thank you :) Edit: This is about desktop configuration not a web server set up. Basically I want to use one of my connections to browse the web and the other one for everything else. ifconfig: eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1d:09:59:80:70 inet addr:192.168.2.164 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe59:8070/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:33 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:41 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:4771 (4.7 KB) TX bytes:7081 (7.0 KB) Interrupt:17 wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1c:bf:90:8a:6d inet addr:192.168.1.70 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::21c:bfff:fe90:8a6d/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:77 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:102 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:14256 (14.2 KB) TX bytes:14764 (14.7 KB) route: Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 192.168.2.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 1 0 0 eth1 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 2 0 0 wlan0 link-local * 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 wlan0 default adsl 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1

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  • Route web browsing through a separate iterface

    - by tkane
    I'd like to route web browsing through the wlan0 interface and the rest through eth1. Can you please help me with the iptables commands to achieve this. Below is my configuration. Thank you :) Edit: This is about desktop configuration not a web server set up. Basically I want to use one of my connections to browse the web and the other one for everything else. ifconfig: eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1d:09:59:80:70 inet addr:192.168.2.164 Bcast:192.168.2.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe59:8070/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:33 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:41 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:4771 (4.7 KB) TX bytes:7081 (7.0 KB) Interrupt:17 wlan0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1c:bf:90:8a:6d inet addr:192.168.1.70 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: fe80::21c:bfff:fe90:8a6d/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 RX packets:77 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 TX packets:102 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 RX bytes:14256 (14.2 KB) TX bytes:14764 (14.7 KB) route: Kernel IP routing table Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 192.168.2.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 1 0 0 eth1 192.168.1.0 * 255.255.255.0 U 2 0 0 wlan0 link-local * 255.255.0.0 U 1000 0 0 wlan0 default adsl 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 eth1

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  • Mysterious swap usage on EC2

    - by rusty
    We're in the middle of a project to move our infrastructure from a co-lo situation into Amazon EC2 and we've noticed some weird memory characteristics of the processes in our setup. Without going into too much detail about the specifics of our processes, we've noticed that on our EC2 instances "top" will show processes using a lot of swap space -- in fact, much greater than the amount of available swap or (if you add it all up) more than the available disk. Here's a sample top output: Mem: 7136868k total, 5272300k used, 1864568k free, 256876k buffers Swap: 1048572k total, 0k used, 1048572k free, 2526504k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ SWAP COMMAND 4121 jboss 20 0 5913m 603m 14m S 0.7 8.7 3:59.90 5.2g java 22730 root 20 0 2394m 4012 1976 S 2.0 0.1 4:20.57 2.3g PassengerHelper 20564 rails 20 0 2539m 220m 9828 S 0.3 3.2 0:23.58 2.3g java 1423 nscd 20 0 877m 1464 972 S 0.0 0.0 0:03.89 876m nscd You can see, for instance, that jboss is reportedly using 5.2 gigs of swap space which is definitely impossible since there's only 1G allocated and none is being used (probably because there's still 1.8G of RAM free). And here's the results of uname -a: Linux xxx.yyy.zzz 2.6.35.14-106.53.amzn1.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Jan 6 16:20:10 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux We're running an AMI based off of the default Amazon Linux AMI (Amazon Linux AMI release 2011.09, so some RHEL5 and RHEL 6) with not too many customizations and definitely no kernel-level customizations. Something here tells me that on this particular kernel/distribution, the reporting of swap or maybe even total memory usage isn't what it appears to be... Any help would be appreciated!

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  • Route53 only for wildcard subdomain

    - by Philippe Gerber
    We recently moved our web application to AWS. One thing that is still managed by our old hoster is DNS. OLD HOSTER example.com. NS <Old hoster's name server> example.com. A <ElasticIP on EC2 instance> *.example.com. CNAME example.com. ... I'm now trying to setup and play around with Route53 and use it for name resolution of our EC2 instances. ROUTE53 web-01.aws.example.com. CNAME ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com. web-02.aws.example.com. CNAME ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com. ... Now my question: Is it possible to forward DNS queries for *.aws.example.com to Route53 (ns-xxxx.awsdns-59.co.uk.)? What kind of record would I have to add?

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  • Intermittent Could not load file or assembly / PolicyExceptions

    - by Mark S. Rasmussen
    Intermittently we'll get errors like these from our .NET 3.5 web applications: Exception: System.Configuration.ConfigurationErrorsException: Could not load file or assembly 'itextsharp, Version=4.1.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8354ae6d2174ddca' or one of its dependencies. Failed to grant permission to execute. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131418) (C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727\Config\web.config line 59) ---> System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'itextsharp, Version=4.1.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8354ae6d2174ddca' or one of its dependencies. Failed to grant permission to execute. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131418) File name: 'itextsharp, Version=4.1.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8354ae6d2174ddca' ---> System.Security.Policy.PolicyException: Execution permission cannot be acquired. at System.Security.SecurityManager.ResolvePolicy(Evidence evidence, PermissionSet reqdPset, PermissionSet optPset, PermissionSet denyPset, PermissionSet& denied, Boolean checkExecutionPermission) at System.Security.SecurityManager.ResolvePolicy(Evidence evidence, PermissionSet reqdPset, PermissionSet optPset, PermissionSet denyPset, PermissionSet& denied, Int32& securitySpecialFlags, Boolean checkExecutionPermission) at System.Reflection.Assembly._nLoad(AssemblyName fileName, String codeBase, Evidence assemblySecurity, Assembly locationHint, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean throwOnFileNotFound, Boolean forIntrospection) at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(AssemblyName assemblyRef, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean forIntrospection) at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(String assemblyString, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean forIntrospection) at System.Reflection.Assembly.Load(String assemblyString) at System.Web.Configuration.CompilationSection.LoadAssemblyHelper(String assemblyName, Boolean starDirective) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.Web.Configuration.CompilationSection.LoadAssemblyHelper(String assemblyName, Boolean starDirective) at System.Web.Configuration.CompilationSection.LoadAllAssembliesFromAppDomainBinDirectory() at System.Web.Configuration.CompilationSection.LoadAssembly(AssemblyInfo ai) at System.Web.Configuration.AssemblyInfo.get_AssemblyInternal() at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetReferencedAssemblies(CompilationSection compConfig) at System.Web.Compilation.WebDirectoryBatchCompiler..ctor(VirtualDirectory vdir) at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.BatchCompileWebDirectoryInternal(VirtualDirectory vdir, Boolean ignoreErrors) at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.CompileWebFile(VirtualPath virtualPath) at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetVPathBuildResultInternal(VirtualPath virtualPath, Boolean noBuild, Boolean allowCrossApp, Boolean allowBuildInPrecompile) at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetVPathBuildResultWithNoAssert(HttpContext context, VirtualPath virtualPath, Boolean noBuild, Boolean allowCrossApp, Boolean allowBuildInPrecompile) at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetVirtualPathObjectFactory(VirtualPath virtualPath, HttpContext context, Boolean allowCrossApp, Boolean noAssert) at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetCompiledType(String virtualPath) at System.Web.Script.Services.WebServiceData.GetWebServiceData(HttpContext context, String virtualPath, Boolean failIfNoData, Boolean pageMethods, Boolean inlineScript) at System.Web.Script.Services.RestHandler.CreateHandler(HttpContext context) at System.Web.Script.Services.ScriptHandlerFactory.GetHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String url, String pathTranslated) at System.Web.HttpApplication.MaterializeHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() at System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) Inner exception: System.IO.FileLoadException: Could not load file or assembly 'itextsharp, Version=4.1.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8354ae6d2174ddca' or one of its dependencies. Failed to grant permission to execute. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131418) File name: 'itextsharp, Version=4.1.2.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=8354ae6d2174ddca' ---> System.Security.Policy.PolicyException: Execution permission cannot be acquired. at System.Security.SecurityManager.ResolvePolicy(Evidence evidence, PermissionSet reqdPset, PermissionSet optPset, PermissionSet denyPset, PermissionSet& denied, Boolean checkExecutionPermission) at System.Security.SecurityManager.ResolvePolicy(Evidence evidence, PermissionSet reqdPset, PermissionSet optPset, PermissionSet denyPset, PermissionSet& denied, Int32& securitySpecialFlags, Boolean checkExecutionPermission) at System.Reflection.Assembly._nLoad(AssemblyName fileName, String codeBase, Evidence assemblySecurity, Assembly locationHint, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean throwOnFileNotFound, Boolean forIntrospection) at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(AssemblyName assemblyRef, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean forIntrospection) at System.Reflection.Assembly.InternalLoad(String assemblyString, Evidence assemblySecurity, StackCrawlMark& stackMark, Boolean forIntrospection) at System.Reflection.Assembly.Load(String assemblyString) at System.Web.Configuration.CompilationSection.LoadAssemblyHelper(String assemblyName, Boolean starDirective) web.config line 59 being: <add assembly="*"/> When these occur, the sites will YSOD untill we recycle the application pool. The sites may run for days/weeks before this occurs, or it might happen twice within the hour. I have not been able to pinpoint this to any specific request/function in our system. In this case it points to itextsharp, but it randomly points to any assembly referenced by our application, both internal and external. Running caspol verifies that the DLL has full trust permissions: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.0.50727>caspol -rsg D:\...\bin\itextsharp.dll Microsoft (R) .NET Framework CasPol 2.0.50727.3053 Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Level = Enterprise Code Groups: 1. All code: FullTrust Level = Machine Code Groups: 1. All code: Nothing 1.1. Zone - MyComputer: FullTrust Level = User Code Groups: 1. All code: FullTrust Success Our application is running on three servers, two of them are on Server 2008 Web x64 while the third is running Server 2008 R2 Web x64, all have .NET 3.5 installed, no .NET 4.0 installations. The problem only occurs on the first two that are running 2008 non R2. Running depends.exe on all three servers gives equal results for the nonR2 servers: My DLL is shown as x86 (compiled as AnyCPU, running in x64 w3wp), all other modules show as x64. Missing IESHIMS.DLL and LINKINFO.DLL - both of these seem to be red herrings according to Google. The third server shows the same, except it does not miss LINKINFO.DLL All servers are running IIS7 (7.5 for the R2 one) under a custom domain account that has been granted the necessary permissions: aspnet_regiis -ga [user] Load user profile is set to false on all three servers. I've tried setting this to true on one of the faulting servers, according to: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1846816/iis7-failed-to-grant-minimum-permission-requests By running processmonitor I can see that it's now using the C:\Users\TEMP\AppData\Local\Temp directory for various temp files - the other ones are not using any such directory. So far I'll let it run in this way to see if this changes anything. I'm in doubt however given that the third server is not exhibiting the problems, yet still has "Load user profile" set to the same value, false. I've also tried running Fuslogvw on all three servers, logging binding failures to disk. All three servers report the same binding errors for VJSharpCodeProvider and CppCodeProvider, but these seem to be normal as well and can be solved by not defining the DEBUG and TRACE constants during build. We're running about 500 websites on each server (identical, load balanced), of which 50 are under moderate load, the problem has arisen both under heavy load as well as under minimal load however. Right now I'm waiting for the errors to happen again so I can hopefully see a pattern and determine whether "Load user profile" alleviates the issue. Any suggestions in the meantime would be very welcome! Also, I don't understand how the lack of "Load user profile" would cause an issue like this? And even further, how it would seemingly work on R2 but not on plain 2008? Thanks!

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

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

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  • Service Discovery in WCF 4.0 &ndash; Part 1

    - by Shaun
    When designing a service oriented architecture (SOA) system, there will be a lot of services with many service contracts, endpoints and behaviors. Besides the client calling the service, in a large distributed system a service may invoke other services. In this case, one service might need to know the endpoints it invokes. This might not be a problem in a small system. But when you have more than 10 services this might be a problem. For example in my current product, there are around 10 services, such as the user authentication service, UI integration service, location service, license service, device monitor service, event monitor service, schedule job service, accounting service, player management service, etc..   Benefit of Discovery Service Since almost all my services need to invoke at least one other service. This would be a difficult task to make sure all services endpoints are configured correctly in every service. And furthermore, it would be a nightmare when a service changed its endpoint at runtime. Hence, we need a discovery service to remove the dependency (configuration dependency). A discovery service plays as a service dictionary which stores the relationship between the contracts and the endpoints for every service. By using the discovery service, when service X wants to invoke service Y, it just need to ask the discovery service where is service Y, then the discovery service will return all proper endpoints of service Y, then service X can use the endpoint to send the request to service Y. And when some services changed their endpoint address, all need to do is to update its records in the discovery service then all others will know its new endpoint. In WCF 4.0 Discovery it supports both managed proxy discovery mode and ad-hoc discovery mode. In ad-hoc mode there is no standalone discovery service. When a client wanted to invoke a service, it will broadcast an message (normally in UDP protocol) to the entire network with the service match criteria. All services which enabled the discovery behavior will receive this message and only those matched services will send their endpoint back to the client. The managed proxy discovery service works as I described above. In this post I will only cover the managed proxy mode, where there’s a discovery service. For more information about the ad-hoc mode please refer to the MSDN.   Service Announcement and Probe The main functionality of discovery service should be return the proper endpoint addresses back to the service who is looking for. In most cases the consume service (as a client) will send the contract which it wanted to request to the discovery service. And then the discovery service will find the endpoint and respond. Sometimes the contract and endpoint are not enough. It also contains versioning, extensions attributes. This post I will only cover the case includes contract and endpoint. When a client (or sometimes a service who need to invoke another service) need to connect to a target service, it will firstly request the discovery service through the “Probe” method with the criteria. Basically the criteria contains the contract type name of the target service. Then the discovery service will search its endpoint repository by the criteria. The repository might be a database, a distributed cache or a flat XML file. If it matches, the discovery service will grab the endpoint information (it’s called discovery endpoint metadata in WCF) and send back. And this is called “Probe”. Finally the client received the discovery endpoint metadata and will use the endpoint to connect to the target service. Besides the probe, discovery service should take the responsible to know there is a new service available when it goes online, as well as stopped when it goes offline. This feature is named “Announcement”. When a service started and stopped, it will announce to the discovery service. So the basic functionality of a discovery service should includes: 1, An endpoint which receive the service online message, and add the service endpoint information in the discovery repository. 2, An endpoint which receive the service offline message, and remove the service endpoint information from the discovery repository. 3, An endpoint which receive the client probe message, and return the matches service endpoints, and return the discovery endpoint metadata. WCF 4.0 discovery service just covers all these features in it's infrastructure classes.   Discovery Service in WCF 4.0 WCF 4.0 introduced a new assembly named System.ServiceModel.Discovery which has all necessary classes and interfaces to build a WS-Discovery compliant discovery service. It supports ad-hoc and managed proxy modes. For the case mentioned in this post, what we need to build is a standalone discovery service, which is the managed proxy discovery service mode. To build a managed discovery service in WCF 4.0 just create a new class inherits from the abstract class System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. This class implemented and abstracted the procedures of service announcement and probe. And it exposes 8 abstract methods where we can implement our own endpoint register, unregister and find logic. These 8 methods are asynchronized, which means all invokes to the discovery service are asynchronously, for better service capability and performance. 1, OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement, OnEndOnlineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the online announcement message. We need to add the endpoint information to the repository in this method. 2, OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement, OnEndOfflineAnnouncement: Invoked when a service sent the offline announcement message. We need to remove the endpoint information from the repository in this method. 3, OnBeginFind, OnEndFind: Invoked when a client sent the probe message that want to find the service endpoint information. We need to look for the proper endpoints by matching the client’s criteria through the repository in this method. 4, OnBeginResolve, OnEndResolve: Invoked then a client sent the resolve message. Different from the find method, when using resolve method the discovery service will return the exactly one service endpoint metadata to the client. In our example we will NOT implement this method.   Let’s create our own discovery service, inherit the base System.ServiceModel.Discovery.DiscoveryProxy. We also need to specify the service behavior in this class. Since the build-in discovery service host class only support the singleton mode, we must set its instance context mode to single. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using System.ServiceModel; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 11: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 12: { 13: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 14: { 15: throw new NotImplementedException(); 16: } 17:  18: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 19: { 20: throw new NotImplementedException(); 21: } 22:  23: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 24: { 25: throw new NotImplementedException(); 26: } 27:  28: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginResolve(ResolveCriteria resolveCriteria, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 29: { 30: throw new NotImplementedException(); 31: } 32:  33: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: throw new NotImplementedException(); 36: } 37:  38: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 39: { 40: throw new NotImplementedException(); 41: } 42:  43: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 44: { 45: throw new NotImplementedException(); 46: } 47:  48: protected override EndpointDiscoveryMetadata OnEndResolve(IAsyncResult result) 49: { 50: throw new NotImplementedException(); 51: } 52: } 53: } Then let’s implement the online, offline and find methods one by one. WCF discovery service gives us full flexibility to implement the endpoint add, remove and find logic. For the demo purpose we will use an internal dictionary to store the services’ endpoint metadata. In the next post we will see how to serialize and store these information in database. Define a concurrent dictionary inside the service class since our it will be used in the multiple threads scenario. 1: [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode = InstanceContextMode.Single, ConcurrencyMode = ConcurrencyMode.Multiple)] 2: public class ManagedProxyDiscoveryService : DiscoveryProxy 3: { 4: private ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata> _services; 5:  6: public ManagedProxyDiscoveryService() 7: { 8: _services = new ConcurrentDictionary<EndpointAddress, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata>(); 9: } 10: } Then we can simply implement the logic of service online and offline. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOnlineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.AddOrUpdate(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, endpointDiscoveryMetadata, (key, value) => endpointDiscoveryMetadata); 4: return new OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 5: } 6:  7: protected override void OnEndOnlineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 8: { 9: OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 10: } 11:  12: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginOfflineAnnouncement(DiscoveryMessageSequence messageSequence, EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpointDiscoveryMetadata, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: { 14: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata endpoint = null; 15: _services.TryRemove(endpointDiscoveryMetadata.Address, out endpoint); 16: return new OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(callback, state); 17: } 18:  19: protected override void OnEndOfflineAnnouncement(IAsyncResult result) 20: { 21: OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult.End(result); 22: } Regards the find method, the parameter FindRequestContext.Criteria has a method named IsMatch, which can be use for us to evaluate which service metadata is satisfied with the criteria. So the implementation of find method would be like this. 1: protected override IAsyncResult OnBeginFind(FindRequestContext findRequestContext, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 2: { 3: _services.Where(s => findRequestContext.Criteria.IsMatch(s.Value)) 4: .Select(s => s.Value) 5: .All(meta => 6: { 7: findRequestContext.AddMatchingEndpoint(meta); 8: return true; 9: }); 10: return new OnFindAsyncResult(callback, state); 11: } 12:  13: protected override void OnEndFind(IAsyncResult result) 14: { 15: OnFindAsyncResult.End(result); 16: } As you can see, we checked all endpoints metadata in repository by invoking the IsMatch method. Then add all proper endpoints metadata into the parameter. Finally since all these methods are asynchronized we need some AsyncResult classes as well. Below are the base class and the inherited classes used in previous methods. 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.Threading; 6:  7: namespace Phare.Service 8: { 9: abstract internal class AsyncResult : IAsyncResult 10: { 11: AsyncCallback callback; 12: bool completedSynchronously; 13: bool endCalled; 14: Exception exception; 15: bool isCompleted; 16: ManualResetEvent manualResetEvent; 17: object state; 18: object thisLock; 19:  20: protected AsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 21: { 22: this.callback = callback; 23: this.state = state; 24: this.thisLock = new object(); 25: } 26:  27: public object AsyncState 28: { 29: get 30: { 31: return state; 32: } 33: } 34:  35: public WaitHandle AsyncWaitHandle 36: { 37: get 38: { 39: if (manualResetEvent != null) 40: { 41: return manualResetEvent; 42: } 43: lock (ThisLock) 44: { 45: if (manualResetEvent == null) 46: { 47: manualResetEvent = new ManualResetEvent(isCompleted); 48: } 49: } 50: return manualResetEvent; 51: } 52: } 53:  54: public bool CompletedSynchronously 55: { 56: get 57: { 58: return completedSynchronously; 59: } 60: } 61:  62: public bool IsCompleted 63: { 64: get 65: { 66: return isCompleted; 67: } 68: } 69:  70: object ThisLock 71: { 72: get 73: { 74: return this.thisLock; 75: } 76: } 77:  78: protected static TAsyncResult End<TAsyncResult>(IAsyncResult result) 79: where TAsyncResult : AsyncResult 80: { 81: if (result == null) 82: { 83: throw new ArgumentNullException("result"); 84: } 85:  86: TAsyncResult asyncResult = result as TAsyncResult; 87:  88: if (asyncResult == null) 89: { 90: throw new ArgumentException("Invalid async result.", "result"); 91: } 92:  93: if (asyncResult.endCalled) 94: { 95: throw new InvalidOperationException("Async object already ended."); 96: } 97:  98: asyncResult.endCalled = true; 99:  100: if (!asyncResult.isCompleted) 101: { 102: asyncResult.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne(); 103: } 104:  105: if (asyncResult.manualResetEvent != null) 106: { 107: asyncResult.manualResetEvent.Close(); 108: } 109:  110: if (asyncResult.exception != null) 111: { 112: throw asyncResult.exception; 113: } 114:  115: return asyncResult; 116: } 117:  118: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously) 119: { 120: if (isCompleted) 121: { 122: throw new InvalidOperationException("This async result is already completed."); 123: } 124:  125: this.completedSynchronously = completedSynchronously; 126:  127: if (completedSynchronously) 128: { 129: this.isCompleted = true; 130: } 131: else 132: { 133: lock (ThisLock) 134: { 135: this.isCompleted = true; 136: if (this.manualResetEvent != null) 137: { 138: this.manualResetEvent.Set(); 139: } 140: } 141: } 142:  143: if (callback != null) 144: { 145: callback(this); 146: } 147: } 148:  149: protected void Complete(bool completedSynchronously, Exception exception) 150: { 151: this.exception = exception; 152: Complete(completedSynchronously); 153: } 154: } 155: } 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Linq; 4: using System.Text; 5: using System.ServiceModel.Discovery; 6: using Phare.Service; 7:  8: namespace Phare.Service 9: { 10: internal sealed class OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 11: { 12: public OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 13: : base(callback, state) 14: { 15: this.Complete(true); 16: } 17:  18: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 19: { 20: AsyncResult.End<OnOnlineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 21: } 22:  23: } 24:  25: sealed class OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult : AsyncResult 26: { 27: public OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 28: : base(callback, state) 29: { 30: this.Complete(true); 31: } 32:  33: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 34: { 35: AsyncResult.End<OnOfflineAnnouncementAsyncResult>(result); 36: } 37: } 38:  39: sealed class OnFindAsyncResult : AsyncResult 40: { 41: public OnFindAsyncResult(AsyncCallback callback, object state) 42: : base(callback, state) 43: { 44: this.Complete(true); 45: } 46:  47: public static void End(IAsyncResult result) 48: { 49: AsyncResult.End<OnFindAsyncResult>(result); 50: } 51: } 52:  53: sealed class OnResolveAsyncResult : AsyncResult 54: { 55: EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint; 56:  57: public OnResolveAsyncResult(EndpointDiscoveryMetadata matchingEndpoint, AsyncCallback callback, object state) 58: : base(callback, state) 59: { 60: this.matchingEndpoint = matchingEndpoint; 61: this.Complete(true); 62: } 63:  64: public static EndpointDiscoveryMetadata End(IAsyncResult result) 65: { 66: OnResolveAsyncResult thisPtr = AsyncResult.End<OnResolveAsyncResult>(result); 67: return thisPtr.matchingEndpoint; 68: } 69: } 70: } Now we have finished the discovery service. The next step is to host it. The discovery service is a standard WCF service. So we can use ServiceHost on a console application, windows service, or in IIS as usual. The following code is how to host the discovery service we had just created in a console application. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: using (var host = new ServiceHost(new ManagedProxyDiscoveryService())) 4: { 5: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 6: { 7: host.Description.Endpoints.All((ep) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine(ep.ListenUri); 10: return true; 11: }); 12: }; 13:  14: try 15: { 16: // retrieve the announcement, probe endpoint and binding from configuration 17: var announcementEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 18: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 19: var binding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 20: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(binding, announcementEndpointAddress); 21: var probeEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(binding, probeEndpointAddress); 22: probeEndpoint.IsSystemEndpoint = false; 23: // append the service endpoint for announcement and probe 24: host.AddServiceEndpoint(announcementEndpoint); 25: host.AddServiceEndpoint(probeEndpoint); 26:  27: host.Open(); 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 30: Console.ReadKey(); 31: } 32: catch (Exception ex) 33: { 34: Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString()); 35: } 36: } 37:  38: Console.WriteLine("Done."); 39: Console.ReadKey(); 40: } What we need to notice is that, the discovery service needs two endpoints for announcement and probe. In this example I just retrieve them from the configuration file. I also specified the binding of these two endpoints in configuration file as well. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> And this is the console screen when I ran my discovery service. As you can see there are two endpoints listening for announcement message and probe message.   Discoverable Service and Client Next, let’s create a WCF service that is discoverable, which means it can be found by the discovery service. To do so, we need to let the service send the online announcement message to the discovery service, as well as offline message before it shutdown. Just create a simple service which can make the incoming string to upper. The service contract and implementation would be like this. 1: [ServiceContract] 2: public interface IStringService 3: { 4: [OperationContract] 5: string ToUpper(string content); 6: } 1: public class StringService : IStringService 2: { 3: public string ToUpper(string content) 4: { 5: return content.ToUpper(); 6: } 7: } Then host this service in the console application. In order to make the discovery service easy to be tested the service address will be changed each time it’s started. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: var baseAddress = new Uri(string.Format("net.tcp://localhost:11001/stringservice/{0}/", Guid.NewGuid().ToString())); 4:  5: using (var host = new ServiceHost(typeof(StringService), baseAddress)) 6: { 7: host.Opened += (sender, e) => 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("Service opened at {0}", host.Description.Endpoints.First().ListenUri); 10: }; 11:  12: host.AddServiceEndpoint(typeof(IStringService), new NetTcpBinding(), string.Empty); 13:  14: host.Open(); 15:  16: Console.WriteLine("Press any key to exit."); 17: Console.ReadKey(); 18: } 19: } Currently this service is NOT discoverable. We need to add a special service behavior so that it could send the online and offline message to the discovery service announcement endpoint when the host is opened and closed. WCF 4.0 introduced a service behavior named ServiceDiscoveryBehavior. When we specified the announcement endpoint address and appended it to the service behaviors this service will be discoverable. 1: var announcementAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["announcementEndpointAddress"]); 2: var announcementBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 3: var announcementEndpoint = new AnnouncementEndpoint(announcementBinding, announcementAddress); 4: var discoveryBehavior = new ServiceDiscoveryBehavior(); 5: discoveryBehavior.AnnouncementEndpoints.Add(announcementEndpoint); 6: host.Description.Behaviors.Add(discoveryBehavior); The ServiceDiscoveryBehavior utilizes the service extension and channel dispatcher to implement the online and offline announcement logic. In short, it injected the channel open and close procedure and send the online and offline message to the announcement endpoint.   On client side, when we have the discovery service, a client can invoke a service without knowing its endpoint. WCF discovery assembly provides a class named DiscoveryClient, which can be used to find the proper service endpoint by passing the criteria. In the code below I initialized the DiscoveryClient, specified the discovery service probe endpoint address. Then I created the find criteria by specifying the service contract I wanted to use and invoke the Find method. This will send the probe message to the discovery service and it will find the endpoints back to me. The discovery service will return all endpoints that matches the find criteria, which means in the result of the find method there might be more than one endpoints. In this example I just returned the first matched one back. In the next post I will show how to extend our discovery service to make it work like a service load balancer. 1: static EndpointAddress FindServiceEndpoint() 2: { 3: var probeEndpointAddress = new EndpointAddress(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["probeEndpointAddress"]); 4: var probeBinding = Activator.CreateInstance(Type.GetType(ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["bindingType"], true, true)) as Binding; 5: var discoveryEndpoint = new DiscoveryEndpoint(probeBinding, probeEndpointAddress); 6:  7: EndpointAddress address = null; 8: FindResponse result = null; 9: using (var discoveryClient = new DiscoveryClient(discoveryEndpoint)) 10: { 11: result = discoveryClient.Find(new FindCriteria(typeof(IStringService))); 12: } 13:  14: if (result != null && result.Endpoints.Any()) 15: { 16: var endpointMetadata = result.Endpoints.First(); 17: address = endpointMetadata.Address; 18: } 19: return address; 20: } Once we probed the discovery service we will receive the endpoint. So in the client code we can created the channel factory from the endpoint and binding, and invoke to the service. When creating the client side channel factory we need to make sure that the client side binding should be the same as the service side. WCF discovery service can be used to find the endpoint for a service contract, but the binding is NOT included. This is because the binding was not in the WS-Discovery specification. In the next post I will demonstrate how to add the binding information into the discovery service. At that moment the client don’t need to create the binding by itself. Instead it will use the binding received from the discovery service. 1: static void Main(string[] args) 2: { 3: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 4: var content = Console.ReadLine(); 5: while (!string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(content)) 6: { 7: Console.WriteLine("Finding the service endpoint..."); 8: var address = FindServiceEndpoint(); 9: if (address == null) 10: { 11: Console.WriteLine("There is no endpoint matches the criteria."); 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: Console.WriteLine("Found the endpoint {0}", address.Uri); 16:  17: var factory = new ChannelFactory<IStringService>(new NetTcpBinding(), address); 18: factory.Opened += (sender, e) => 19: { 20: Console.WriteLine("Connecting to {0}.", factory.Endpoint.ListenUri); 21: }; 22: var proxy = factory.CreateChannel(); 23: using (proxy as IDisposable) 24: { 25: Console.WriteLine("ToUpper: {0} => {1}", content, proxy.ToUpper(content)); 26: } 27: } 28:  29: Console.WriteLine("Say something..."); 30: content = Console.ReadLine(); 31: } 32: } Similarly, the discovery service probe endpoint and binding were defined in the configuration file. 1: <?xml version="1.0"?> 2: <configuration> 3: <startup> 4: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0"/> 5: </startup> 6: <appSettings> 7: <add key="announcementEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10010/announcement"/> 8: <add key="probeEndpointAddress" value="net.tcp://localhost:10011/probe"/> 9: <add key="bindingType" value="System.ServiceModel.NetTcpBinding, System.ServiceModel, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/> 10: </appSettings> 11: </configuration> OK, now let’s have a test. Firstly start the discovery service, and then start our discoverable service. When it started it will announced to the discovery service and registered its endpoint into the repository, which is the local dictionary. And then start the client and type something. As you can see the client asked the discovery service for the endpoint and then establish the connection to the discoverable service. And more interesting, do NOT close the client console but terminate the discoverable service but press the enter key. This will make the service send the offline message to the discovery service. Then start the discoverable service again. Since we made it use a different address each time it started, currently it should be hosted on another address. If we enter something in the client we could see that it asked the discovery service and retrieve the new endpoint, and connect the the service.   Summary In this post I discussed the benefit of using the discovery service and the procedures of service announcement and probe. I also demonstrated how to leverage the WCF Discovery feature in WCF 4.0 to build a simple managed discovery service. For test purpose, in this example I used the in memory dictionary as the discovery endpoint metadata repository. And when finding I also just return the first matched endpoint back. I also hard coded the bindings between the discoverable service and the client. In next post I will show you how to solve the problem mentioned above, as well as some additional feature for production usage. You can download the code here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Part 2&ndash;Load Testing In The Cloud

    - by Tarun Arora
    Welcome to Part 2, In Part 1 we discussed the advantages of creating a Test Rig in the cloud, the Azure edge and the Test Rig Topology we want to get to. In Part 2, Let’s start by understanding the components of Azure we’ll be making use of followed by manually putting them together to create the test rig, so… let’s get down dirty start setting up the Test Rig.  What Components of Azure will I be using for building the Test Rig in the Cloud? To run the Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Compute and to enable communication between Test Controller and Test Agents we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect.  Azure Connect The Test Controller is on premise and the Test Agents are in the cloud (How will they talk?). To enable communication between the two, we’ll make use of Windows Azure Connect. With Windows Azure Connect, you can use a simple user interface to configure IPsec protected connections between computers or virtual machines (VMs) in your organization’s network, and roles running in Windows Azure. With this you can now join Windows Azure role instances to your domain, so that you can use your existing methods for domain authentication, name resolution, or other domain-wide maintenance actions. For more details refer to an overview of Windows Azure connect. A very useful video explaining everything you wanted to know about Windows Azure connect.  Azure Compute Windows Azure compute provides developers a platform to host and manage applications in Microsoft’s data centres across the globe. A Windows Azure application is built from one or more components called ‘roles.’ Roles come in three different types: Web role, Worker role, and Virtual Machine (VM) role, we’ll be using the Worker role to set up the Test Agents. A very nice blog post discussing the difference between the 3 role types. Developers are free to use the .NET framework or other software that runs on Windows with the Worker role or Web role. Developers can also create applications using languages such as PHP and Java. More on Windows Azure Compute. Each Windows Azure compute instance represents a virtual server... Virtual Machine Size CPU Cores Memory Cost Per Hour Extra Small Shared 768 MB $0.04 Small 1 1.75 GB $0.12 Medium 2 3.50 GB $0.24 Large 4 7.00 GB $0.48 Extra Large 8 14.00 GB $0.96   You might want to review the Windows Azure Pricing FAQ. Let’s Get Started building the Test Rig… Configuration Machine Role Comments VM – 1 Domain Controller for Playpit.com On Premise VM – 2 TFS, Test Controller On Premise VM – 3 Test Agent Cloud   In this blog post I would assume that you have the domain, Team Foundation Server and Test Controller Installed and set up already. If not, please refer to the TFS 2010 Installation Guide and this walkthrough on MSDN to set up your Test Controller. You can also download a preconfigured TFS 2010 VM from Brian Keller's blog, Brian also has some great hands on Labs on TFS 2010 that you may want to explore. I. Lets start building VM – 3: The Test Agent Download the Windows Azure SDK and Tools Open Visual Studio and create a new Windows Azure Project using the Cloud Template                   Choose the Worker Role for reasons explained in the earlier post         The WorkerRole.cs implements the Run() and OnStart() methods, no code changes required. You should be able to compile the project and run it in the compute emulator (The compute emulator should have been installed as part of the Windows Azure Toolkit) on your local machine.                   We will only be making changes to WindowsAzureProject, open ServiceDefinition.csdef. Ensure that the vmsize is small (remember the cost chart above). Import the “Connect” module. I am importing the Connect module because I need to join the Worker role VM to the Playpit domain. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect"/> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg and note that settings with key ‘Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.%%%%’ have been added to the configuration file. This is because you decided to import the connect module. See the config below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>             Let’s go step by step and understand all the highlighted parameters and where you can find the values for them.       osFamily – By default this is set to 1 (Windows Server 2008 SP2). Change this to 2 if you want the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. The Advantage of using osFamily = “2” is that you get Powershell 2.0 rather than Powershell 1.0. In Powershell 2.0 you could simply use “powershell -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted ./myscript.ps1” and it will work while in Powershell 1.0 you will have to change the registry key by including the following in your command file “reg add HKLM\Software\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell /v ExecutionPolicy /d Unrestricted /f” before you can execute any power shell. The other reason you might want to move to os2 is if you wanted IIS 7.5.       Activation Token – To enable communication between the on premise machine and the Windows Azure Worker role VM both need to have the same token. Log on to Windows Azure Management Portal, click on Connect, click on Get Activation Token, this should give you the activation token, copy the activation token to the clipboard and paste it in the configuration file. Note – Later in the blog I’ll be showing you how to install connect on the on premise machine.                       EnableDomainJoin – Set the value to true, ofcourse we want to join the on windows azure worker role VM to the domain.       DomainFQDN, DomainControllerFQDN, DomainAccountName, DomainPassword, DomainOU, Administrators – This information is specific to your domain. I have extracted this information from the ‘service manager’ and ‘Active Directory Users and Computers’. Also, i created a new Domain-OU namely ‘CloudInstances’ so all my cloud instances joined to my domain show up here, this is optional. You can encrypt the DomainPassword – refer to the instructions here. Or hold fire, I’ll be covering that when i come to certificates and encryption in the coming section.       Now once you have filled all this information up, the configuration file should look something like below, <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Next we will be enabling the Remote Desktop module in to the ServiceDefinition.csdef, we could make changes manually or allow a beautiful wizard to help us make changes. I prefer the second option. So right click on the Windows Azure project and choose Publish       Now once you get the publish wizard, if you haven’t already you would be asked to import your Windows Azure subscription, this is simply the Msdn subscription activation key xml. Once you have done click Next to go to the Settings page and check ‘Enable Remote Desktop for all roles’.       As soon as you do that you get another pop up asking you the details for the user that you would be logging in with (make sure you enter a reasonable expiry date, you do not want the user account to expire today). Notice the more information tag at the bottom, click that to get access to the certificate section. See screen shot below.       From the drop down select the option to create a new certificate        In the pop up window enter the friendly name for your certificate. In my case I entered ‘WAC – Test Rig’ and click ok. This will create a new certificate for you. Click on the view button to see the certificate details. Do you see the Thumbprint, this is the value that will go in the config file (very important). Now click on the Copy to File button to copy the certificate, we will need to import the certificate to the windows Azure Management portal later. So, make sure you save it a safe location.                                Click Finish and enter details of the user you would like to create with permissions for remote desktop access, once you have entered the details on the ‘Remote desktop configuration’ screen click on Ok. From the Publish Windows Azure Wizard screen press Cancel. Cancel because we don’t want to publish the role just yet and Yes because we want to save all the changes in the config file.       Now if you go to the ServiceDefinition.csdef file you will see that the RemoteAccess and RemoteForwarder roles have been imported for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceDefinition"> <WorkerRole name="WorkerRole1" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> <Import moduleName="Diagnostics" /> <Import moduleName="Connect" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteAccess" /> <Import moduleName="RemoteForwarder" /> </Imports> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> Now go to the ServiceConfiguration.Cloud.cscfg file and you see a whole bunch for setting “Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.%%%” values added for you. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="WindowsAzureProject2" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="2" osVersion="*"> <Role name="WorkerRole1"> <Instances count="1" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Diagnostics.ConnectionString" value="UseDevelopmentStorage=true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.ActivationToken" value="45f55fea-f194-4fbc-b36e-25604faac784" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Refresh" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.WaitForConnectivity" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Upgrade" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.EnableDomainJoin" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainFQDN" value="play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainControllerFQDN" value="WIN-KUDQMQFGQOL.play.pit.com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainAccountName" value="playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainPassword" value="************************" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainOU" value="OU=CloudInstances, DC=Play, DC=Pit, DC=com" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.Administrators" value="Playpit\Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.Connect.DomainSiteName" value="" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.Enabled" value="true" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountUsername" value="Administrator" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountEncryptedPassword" value="MIIBnQYJKoZIhvcNAQcDoIIBjjCCAYoCAQAxggFOMIIBSgIBADAyMB4xHDAaBgNVBAMME1dpbmRvd 3MgQXp1cmUgVG9vbHMCEGa+B46voeO5T305N7TSG9QwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQAEggEABg4ol5Xol66Ip6QKLbAPWdmD4ae ADZ7aKj6fg4D+ATr0DXBllZHG5Umwf+84Sj2nsPeCyrg3ZDQuxrfhSbdnJwuChKV6ukXdGjX0hlowJu/4dfH4jTJC7sBWS AKaEFU7CxvqYEAL1Hf9VPL5fW6HZVmq1z+qmm4ecGKSTOJ20Fptb463wcXgR8CWGa+1w9xqJ7UmmfGeGeCHQ4QGW0IDSBU6ccg vzF2ug8/FY60K1vrWaCYOhKkxD3YBs8U9X/kOB0yQm2Git0d5tFlIPCBT2AC57bgsAYncXfHvPesI0qs7VZyghk8LVa9g5IqaM Cp6cQ7rmY/dLsKBMkDcdBHuCTAzBgkqhkiG9w0BBwEwFAYIKoZIhvcNAwcECDRVifSXbA43gBApNrp40L1VTVZ1iGag+3O1" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.AccountExpiration" value="2012-11-27T23:59:59.0000000+00:00" /> <Setting name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteForwarder.Enabled" value="true" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <Certificates> <Certificate name="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Plugins.RemoteAccess.PasswordEncryption" thumbprint="AA23016CF0BDFC344400B5B82706B608B92E4217" thumbprintAlgorithm="sha1" /> </Certificates> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration>          Okay let’s look at them one at a time,       Enabled - Yes, we would like to enable Remote Access.       AccountUserName – This is the user name you entered while you were on the publish windows azure role screen, as detailed above.       AccountEncrytedPassword – Try and decode that, the certificate is used to encrypt the password you specified for the user account. Remember earlier i said, either use the instructions or wait and i’ll be showing you encryption, now the user account i am using for rdp has the same password as my domain password, so i can simply copy the value of the AccountEncryptedPassword to the DomainPassword as well.       AccountExpiration – This is the expiration as you specified in the wizard earlier, make sure your account does not expire today.       Remote Forwarder – Check out the documentation, below is how I understand it, -- One role in an application that implements a remote desktop connection must import the RemoteForwarder module. The two modules work together to enable the remote desktop connections to role instances. -- If you have multiple roles defined in the service model, it does not matter which role you add the RemoteForwarder module to, but you must add it to only one of the role definitions.       Certificate – Remember the certificate thumbprint from the wizard, the on premise machine and windows azure role machine that need to speak to each other must have the same thumbprint. More on that when we install Windows Azure connect Endpoints on the on premise machine. As i said earlier, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you the manual process so i won’t be scripting any star up tasks to install the test agent or register the test agent with the TFS Server. I’ll be showing you all this cool stuff in the next blog post, that’s because it’s important to understand the manual side of it, it becomes easier for you to troubleshoot in case something fails. Having said that, the changes we have made are sufficient to spin up the Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent VM, have it connected with the play.pit.com domain and have remote access enabled on it. Before we deploy the Test Agent VM we need to set up Windows Azure Connect on the TFS Server. II. Windows Azure Connect: Setting up Connect on VM – 2 i.e. TFS & Test Controller Glad you made it so far, now to enable communication between the on premise TFS/Test Controller and Azure-ed Test Agent we need to enable communication. We have set up the Azure connect module in the Test Agent configuration, now the connect end points need to be enabled on the on premise machines, let’s have a look at how we can do this. Log on to VM – 2 running the TFS Server and Test Controller Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network Click on Virtual Network, if you already have a subscription you should see the below screen shot, if not, you would be asked to complete the subscription first        Click on Install Local Endpoints from the top left on the panel and you get a url appended with a token id in it, remember the token i showed you earlier, in theory the token you get here should match the token you added to the Test Agent config file.        Copy the url to the clip board and paste it in IE explorer (important, the installation at present only works out of IE and you need to have cookies enabled in order to complete the installation). As stated in the pop up, you can NOT download and run the software later, you need to run it as is, since it contains a token. Once the installation completes you should see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray.                         Right click the Azure Connect icon, choose Diagnostics and refer to this link for diagnostic detail terminology. NOTE – Unfortunately I could not see the Windows Azure connect icon in the system tray, a bit of binging with Google revealed that the azure connect icon is only shown when the ‘Windows Azure Connect Endpoint’ Service is started. So go to services.msc and make sure that the service is started, if not start it, unfortunately again, the service did not start for me on a manual start and i realised that one of the dependant services was disabled, you can look at the service dependencies and start them and then start windows azure connect. Bottom line, you need to start Windows Azure connect service before you can proceed. Please refer here on MSDN for more on Troubleshooting Windows Azure connect. (Follow the next step as well)   Now go back to the Windows Azure Management Portal and from Groups and Roles create a new group, lets call it ‘Test Rig’. Make sure you add the VM – 2 (the TFS Server VM where you just installed the endpoint).       Now if you go back to the Azure Connect icon in the system tray and click ‘Refresh Policy’ you will notice that the disconnected status of the icon should change to ready for connection. III. Importing Certificate in to Windows Azure Management Portal But before that you need to import the certificate you created in Step I in to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on ‘Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN’ and then ‘Management Certificates’ followed by Add Certificates as shown in the screen shot below        Browse to the location where you saved the certificate earlier, remember… Refer to Step I in case you forgot.        Now you should be able to see the imported certificate here, make sure the thumbprint of the certificate matches the one you inserted in the config files        IV. Publish Windows Azure Worker Role aka Test Agent Having completed I, II and III, you are ready to publish the Test Agent VM – 3 to the cloud. Go to Visual Studio and right click the Windows Azure project and select Publish. Verify the infomration in the wizard, from the advanced settings tab, you can also enabled capture of intellitrace or profiling information.         Click Next and Click Publish! From the view menu bar select the Windows Azure Activity Log window.       Now you should be able to see the deployment progress in real time.             In the Windows Azure Management Portal, you should also be able to see the progress of creation of a new Worker Role.       Once the deployment is complete you should be able to RDP (go to run prompt type mstsc and in the pop up the machine name) in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM from the Playpit network using the domain admin user account. In case you are unable to log in to the Test Agent using the domain admin user account it means the process of joining the Test Agent to the domain has failed! But the good news is, because you imported the connect module, you can connect to the Test Agent machine using Windows Azure Management Portal and troubleshoot the reason for failure, you will be able to log in with the user name and password you specified in the config file for the keys ‘RemoteAccess.AccountUsername, RemoteAccess.EncryptedPassword (just that enter the password unencrypted)’, fix it or manually join the machine to the domain. Once you have managed to Join the Test Agent VM to the Domain move to the next step.      So, log in to the Test Agent Worker Role VM with the Playpit Domain Administrator and verify that you can log in, the machine is connected to the domain and the connect service is successfully running. If yes, give your self a pat on the back, you are 80% mission accomplished!         Go to the Windows Azure Management Portal and click on Virtual Network, click on Groups and Roles and click on Test Rig, click Edit Group, the edit the Test Rig group you created earlier. In the Connect to section, click on Add to select the worker role you have just deployed. Also, check the ‘Allow connections between endpoints in the group’ with this you will enable to communication between test controller and test agents and test agents/test agents. Click Save.      Now, you are ready to deploy the Test Agent software on the Worker Role Test Agent VM and configure it to work with the Test Controller. V. Configuring VM – 3: Installing Test Agent and Associating Test Agent to Controller Log in to the Worker Role Test Agent VM that you have just successfully deployed, make sure you log in with the domain administrator account. Download the All Agents software from MSDN, ‘en_visual_studio_agents_2010_x86_x64_dvd_509679.iso’, extract the iso and navigate to where you have extracted the iso. In my case, i have extracted the iso to “C:\Resources\Temp\VsAgentSetup”. Open the Test Agent folder and double click on setup.exe. Once you have installed the Test Agent you should reach the configuration window. If you face any issues installing TFS Test Agent on the VM, refer to the walkthrough on MSDN.       Once you have successfully installed the Test Agent software you will need to configure the test agent. Right click the test agent configuration tool and run as a different user. i.e. an Administrator. This is really to run the configuration wizard with elevated privileges (you might have UAC block something's otherwise).        In the run options, you can select ‘service’ you do not need to run the agent as interactive un less you are running coded UI tests. I have specified the domain administrator to connect to the TFS Test Controller. In real life, i would never do that, i would create a separate test user service account for this purpose. But for the blog post, we are using the most powerful user so that any policies or restrictions don’t block you.        Click the Apply Settings button and you should be all green! If not, the summary usually gives helpful error messages that you can resolve and proceed. As per my experience, you may run in to either a permission or a firewall blocking communication issue.        And now the moment of truth! Go to VM –2 open up Visual Studio and from the Test Menu select Manage Test Controller       Mission Accomplished! You should be able to see the Test Agent that you have just configured here,         VI. Creating and Running Load Tests on your brand new Azure-ed Test Rig I have various blog posts on Performance Testing with Visual Studio Ultimate, you can follow the links and videos below, Blog Posts: - Part 1 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 2 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate - Part 3 – Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Videos: - Test Tools Configuration & Settings in Visual Studio - Why & How to Record Web Performance Tests in Visual Studio Ultimate - Goal Driven Load Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate Now that you have created your load tests, there is one last change you need to make before you can run the tests on your Azure Test Rig, create a new Test settings file, and change the Test Execution method to ‘Remote Execution’ and select the test controller you have configured the Worker Role Test Agent against in our case VM – 2 So, go on, fire off a test run and see the results of the test being executed on the Azur-ed Test Rig. Review and What’s next? A quick recap of the benefits of running the Test Rig in the cloud and what i will be covering in the next blog post AND I would love to hear your feedback! Advantages Utilizing the power of Azure compute to run a heavy virtual user load. Benefiting from the Azure flexibility, destroy Test Agents when not in use, takes < 25 minutes to spin up a new Test Agent. Most important test Network Latency, (network latency and speed of connection are two different things – usually network latency is very hard to test), by placing the Test Agents in Microsoft Data centres around the globe, one can actually test the lag in transferring the bytes not because of a slow connection but because the page has been requested from the other side of the globe. Next Steps The process of spinning up the Test Agents in windows Azure is not 100% automated. I am working on the Worker process and power shell scripts to make the role deployment, unattended install of test agent software and registration of the test agent to the test controller automated. In the next blog post I will show you how to make the complete process unattended and automated. Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Hope you enjoyed this post, I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. See you in Part III.   Share this post : CodeProject

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  • Node.js Adventure - Storage Services and Service Runtime

    - by Shaun
    When I described on how to host a Node.js application on Windows Azure, one of questions might be raised about how to consume the vary Windows Azure services, such as the storage, service bus, access control, etc.. Interact with windows azure services is available in Node.js through the Windows Azure Node.js SDK, which is a module available in NPM. In this post I would like to describe on how to use Windows Azure Storage (a.k.a. WAS) as well as the service runtime.   Consume Windows Azure Storage Let’s firstly have a look on how to consume WAS through Node.js. As we know in the previous post we can host Node.js application on Windows Azure Web Site (a.k.a. WAWS) as well as Windows Azure Cloud Service (a.k.a. WACS). In theory, WAWS is also built on top of WACS worker roles with some more features. Hence in this post I will only demonstrate for hosting in WACS worker role. The Node.js code can be used when consuming WAS when hosted on WAWS. But since there’s no roles in WAWS, the code for consuming service runtime mentioned in the next section cannot be used for WAWS node application. We can use the solution that I created in my last post. Alternatively we can create a new windows azure project in Visual Studio with a worker role, add the “node.exe” and “index.js” and install “express” and “node-sqlserver” modules, make all files as “Copy always”. In order to use windows azure services we need to have Windows Azure Node.js SDK, as knows as a module named “azure” which can be installed through NPM. Once we downloaded and installed, we need to include them in our worker role project and make them as “Copy always”. You can use my “Copy all always” tool mentioned in my last post to update the currently worker role project file. You can also find the source code of this tool here. The source code of Windows Azure SDK for Node.js can be found in its GitHub page. It contains two parts. One is a CLI tool which provides a cross platform command line package for Mac and Linux to manage WAWS and Windows Azure Virtual Machines (a.k.a. WAVM). The other is a library for managing and consuming vary windows azure services includes tables, blobs, queues, service bus and the service runtime. I will not cover all of them but will only demonstrate on how to use tables and service runtime information in this post. You can find the full document of this SDK here. Back to Visual Studio and open the “index.js”, let’s continue our application from the last post, which was working against Windows Azure SQL Database (a.k.a. WASD). The code should looks like this. 1: var express = require("express"); 2: var sql = require("node-sqlserver"); 3:  4: var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=tcp:ac6271ya9e.database.windows.net,1433;Database=synctile;Uid=shaunxu@ac6271ya9e;Pwd={PASSWORD};Encrypt=yes;Connection Timeout=30;"; 5: var port = 80; 6:  7: var app = express(); 8:  9: app.configure(function () { 10: app.use(express.bodyParser()); 11: }); 12:  13: app.get("/", function (req, res) { 14: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 15: if (err) { 16: console.log(err); 17: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 18: } 19: else { 20: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 21: if (err) { 22: console.log(err); 23: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 24: } 25: else { 26: res.json(results); 27: } 28: }); 29: } 30: }); 31: }); 32:  33: app.get("/text/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 34: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 35: if (err) { 36: console.log(err); 37: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 38: } 39: else { 40: var key = req.params.key; 41: var culture = req.params.culture; 42: var command = "SELECT * FROM [Resource] WHERE [Key] = '" + key + "' AND [Culture] = '" + culture + "'"; 43: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 44: if (err) { 45: console.log(err); 46: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 47: } 48: else { 49: res.json(results); 50: } 51: }); 52: } 53: }); 54: }); 55:  56: app.get("/sproc/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 57: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 58: if (err) { 59: console.log(err); 60: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 61: } 62: else { 63: var key = req.params.key; 64: var culture = req.params.culture; 65: var command = "EXEC GetItem '" + key + "', '" + culture + "'"; 66: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 67: if (err) { 68: console.log(err); 69: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 70: } 71: else { 72: res.json(results); 73: } 74: }); 75: } 76: }); 77: }); 78:  79: app.post("/new", function (req, res) { 80: var key = req.body.key; 81: var culture = req.body.culture; 82: var val = req.body.val; 83:  84: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 85: if (err) { 86: console.log(err); 87: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 88: } 89: else { 90: var command = "INSERT INTO [Resource] VALUES ('" + key + "', '" + culture + "', N'" + val + "')"; 91: conn.queryRaw(command, function (err, results) { 92: if (err) { 93: console.log(err); 94: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 95: } 96: else { 97: res.send(200, "Inserted Successful"); 98: } 99: }); 100: } 101: }); 102: }); 103:  104: app.listen(port); Now let’s create a new function, copy the records from WASD to table service. 1. Delete the table named “resource”. 2. Create a new table named “resource”. These 2 steps ensures that we have an empty table. 3. Load all records from the “resource” table in WASD. 4. For each records loaded from WASD, insert them into the table one by one. 5. Prompt to user when finished. In order to use table service we need the storage account and key, which can be found from the developer portal. Just select the storage account and click the Manage Keys button. Then create two local variants in our Node.js application for the storage account name and key. Since we need to use WAS we need to import the azure module. Also I created another variant stored the table name. In order to work with table service I need to create the storage client for table service. This is very similar as the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. As the code below I created a new variant named “client” and use “createTableService”, specified my storage account name and key. 1: var azure = require("azure"); 2: var storageAccountName = "synctile"; 3: var storageAccountKey = "/cOy9L7xysXOgPYU9FjDvjrRAhaMX/5tnOpcjqloPNDJYucbgTy7MOrAW7CbUg6PjaDdmyl+6pkwUnKETsPVNw=="; 4: var tableName = "resource"; 5: var client = azure.createTableService(storageAccountName, storageAccountKey); Now create a new function for URL “/was/init” so that we can trigger it through browser. Then in this function we will firstly load all records from WASD. 1: app.get("/was/init", function (req, res) { 2: // load all records from windows azure sql database 3: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 4: if (err) { 5: console.log(err); 6: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 7: } 8: else { 9: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 10: if (err) { 11: console.log(err); 12: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 13: } 14: else { 15: if (results.rows.length > 0) { 16: // begin to transform the records into table service 17: } 18: } 19: }); 20: } 21: }); 22: }); When we succeed loaded all records we can start to transform them into table service. First I need to recreate the table in table service. This can be done by deleting and creating the table through table client I had just created previously. 1: app.get("/was/init", function (req, res) { 2: // load all records from windows azure sql database 3: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 4: if (err) { 5: console.log(err); 6: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 7: } 8: else { 9: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 10: if (err) { 11: console.log(err); 12: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 13: } 14: else { 15: if (results.rows.length > 0) { 16: // begin to transform the records into table service 17: // recreate the table named 'resource' 18: client.deleteTable(tableName, function (error) { 19: client.createTableIfNotExists(tableName, function (error) { 20: if (error) { 21: error["target"] = "createTableIfNotExists"; 22: res.send(500, error); 23: } 24: else { 25: // transform the records 26: } 27: }); 28: }); 29: } 30: } 31: }); 32: } 33: }); 34: }); As you can see, the azure SDK provide its methods in callback pattern. In fact, almost all modules in Node.js use the callback pattern. For example, when I deleted a table I invoked “deleteTable” method, provided the name of the table and a callback function which will be performed when the table had been deleted or failed. Underlying, the azure module will perform the table deletion operation in POSIX async threads pool asynchronously. And once it’s done the callback function will be performed. This is the reason we need to nest the table creation code inside the deletion function. If we perform the table creation code after the deletion code then they will be invoked in parallel. Next, for each records in WASD I created an entity and then insert into the table service. Finally I send the response to the browser. Can you find a bug in the code below? I will describe it later in this post. 1: app.get("/was/init", function (req, res) { 2: // load all records from windows azure sql database 3: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 4: if (err) { 5: console.log(err); 6: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 7: } 8: else { 9: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 10: if (err) { 11: console.log(err); 12: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 13: } 14: else { 15: if (results.rows.length > 0) { 16: // begin to transform the records into table service 17: // recreate the table named 'resource' 18: client.deleteTable(tableName, function (error) { 19: client.createTableIfNotExists(tableName, function (error) { 20: if (error) { 21: error["target"] = "createTableIfNotExists"; 22: res.send(500, error); 23: } 24: else { 25: // transform the records 26: for (var i = 0; i < results.rows.length; i++) { 27: var entity = { 28: "PartitionKey": results.rows[i][1], 29: "RowKey": results.rows[i][0], 30: "Value": results.rows[i][2] 31: }; 32: client.insertEntity(tableName, entity, function (error) { 33: if (error) { 34: error["target"] = "insertEntity"; 35: res.send(500, error); 36: } 37: else { 38: console.log("entity inserted"); 39: } 40: }); 41: } 42: // send the 43: console.log("all done"); 44: res.send(200, "All done!"); 45: } 46: }); 47: }); 48: } 49: } 50: }); 51: } 52: }); 53: }); Now we can publish it to the cloud and have a try. But normally we’d better test it at the local emulator first. In Node.js SDK there are three build-in properties which provides the account name, key and host address for local storage emulator. We can use them to initialize our table service client. We also need to change the SQL connection string to let it use my local database. The code will be changed as below. 1: // windows azure sql database 2: //var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 10.0};Server=tcp:ac6271ya9e.database.windows.net,1433;Database=synctile;Uid=shaunxu@ac6271ya9e;Pwd=eszqu94XZY;Encrypt=yes;Connection Timeout=30;"; 3: // sql server 4: var connectionString = "Driver={SQL Server Native Client 11.0};Server={.};Database={Caspar};Trusted_Connection={Yes};"; 5:  6: var azure = require("azure"); 7: var storageAccountName = "synctile"; 8: var storageAccountKey = "/cOy9L7xysXOgPYU9FjDvjrRAhaMX/5tnOpcjqloPNDJYucbgTy7MOrAW7CbUg6PjaDdmyl+6pkwUnKETsPVNw=="; 9: var tableName = "resource"; 10: // windows azure storage 11: //var client = azure.createTableService(storageAccountName, storageAccountKey); 12: // local storage emulator 13: var client = azure.createTableService(azure.ServiceClient.DEVSTORE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT, azure.ServiceClient.DEVSTORE_STORAGE_ACCESS_KEY, azure.ServiceClient.DEVSTORE_TABLE_HOST); Now let’s run the application and navigate to “localhost:12345/was/init” as I hosted it on port 12345. We can find it transformed the data from my local database to local table service. Everything looks fine. But there is a bug in my code. If we have a look on the Node.js command window we will find that it sent response before all records had been inserted, which is not what I expected. The reason is that, as I mentioned before, Node.js perform all IO operations in non-blocking model. When we inserted the records we executed the table service insert method in parallel, and the operation of sending response was also executed in parallel, even though I wrote it at the end of my logic. The correct logic should be, when all entities had been copied to table service with no error, then I will send response to the browser, otherwise I should send error message to the browser. To do so I need to import another module named “async”, which helps us to coordinate our asynchronous code. Install the module and import it at the beginning of the code. Then we can use its “forEach” method for the asynchronous code of inserting table entities. The first argument of “forEach” is the array that will be performed. The second argument is the operation for each items in the array. And the third argument will be invoked then all items had been performed or any errors occurred. Here we can send our response to browser. 1: app.get("/was/init", function (req, res) { 2: // load all records from windows azure sql database 3: sql.open(connectionString, function (err, conn) { 4: if (err) { 5: console.log(err); 6: res.send(500, "Cannot open connection."); 7: } 8: else { 9: conn.queryRaw("SELECT * FROM [Resource]", function (err, results) { 10: if (err) { 11: console.log(err); 12: res.send(500, "Cannot retrieve records."); 13: } 14: else { 15: if (results.rows.length > 0) { 16: // begin to transform the records into table service 17: // recreate the table named 'resource' 18: client.deleteTable(tableName, function (error) { 19: client.createTableIfNotExists(tableName, function (error) { 20: if (error) { 21: error["target"] = "createTableIfNotExists"; 22: res.send(500, error); 23: } 24: else { 25: async.forEach(results.rows, 26: // transform the records 27: function (row, callback) { 28: var entity = { 29: "PartitionKey": row[1], 30: "RowKey": row[0], 31: "Value": row[2] 32: }; 33: client.insertEntity(tableName, entity, function (error) { 34: if (error) { 35: callback(error); 36: } 37: else { 38: console.log("entity inserted."); 39: callback(null); 40: } 41: }); 42: }, 43: // send reponse 44: function (error) { 45: if (error) { 46: error["target"] = "insertEntity"; 47: res.send(500, error); 48: } 49: else { 50: console.log("all done"); 51: res.send(200, "All done!"); 52: } 53: } 54: ); 55: } 56: }); 57: }); 58: } 59: } 60: }); 61: } 62: }); 63: }); Run it locally and now we can find the response was sent after all entities had been inserted. Query entities against table service is simple as well. Just use the “queryEntity” method from the table service client and providing the partition key and row key. We can also provide a complex query criteria as well, for example the code here. In the code below I queried an entity by the partition key and row key, and return the proper localization value in response. 1: app.get("/was/:key/:culture", function (req, res) { 2: var key = req.params.key; 3: var culture = req.params.culture; 4: client.queryEntity(tableName, culture, key, function (error, entity) { 5: if (error) { 6: res.send(500, error); 7: } 8: else { 9: res.json(entity); 10: } 11: }); 12: }); And then tested it on local emulator. Finally if we want to publish this application to the cloud we should change the database connection string and storage account. For more information about how to consume blob and queue service, as well as the service bus please refer to the MSDN page.   Consume Service Runtime As I mentioned above, before we published our application to the cloud we need to change the connection string and account information in our code. But if you had played with WACS you should have known that the service runtime provides the ability to retrieve configuration settings, endpoints and local resource information at runtime. Which means we can have these values defined in CSCFG and CSDEF files and then the runtime should be able to retrieve the proper values. For example we can add some role settings though the property window of the role, specify the connection string and storage account for cloud and local. And the can also use the endpoint which defined in role environment to our Node.js application. In Node.js SDK we can get an object from “azure.RoleEnvironment”, which provides the functionalities to retrieve the configuration settings and endpoints, etc.. In the code below I defined the connection string variants and then use the SDK to retrieve and initialize the table client. 1: var connectionString = ""; 2: var storageAccountName = ""; 3: var storageAccountKey = ""; 4: var tableName = ""; 5: var client; 6:  7: azure.RoleEnvironment.getConfigurationSettings(function (error, settings) { 8: if (error) { 9: console.log("ERROR: getConfigurationSettings"); 10: console.log(JSON.stringify(error)); 11: } 12: else { 13: console.log(JSON.stringify(settings)); 14: connectionString = settings["SqlConnectionString"]; 15: storageAccountName = settings["StorageAccountName"]; 16: storageAccountKey = settings["StorageAccountKey"]; 17: tableName = settings["TableName"]; 18:  19: console.log("connectionString = %s", connectionString); 20: console.log("storageAccountName = %s", storageAccountName); 21: console.log("storageAccountKey = %s", storageAccountKey); 22: console.log("tableName = %s", tableName); 23:  24: client = azure.createTableService(storageAccountName, storageAccountKey); 25: } 26: }); In this way we don’t need to amend the code for the configurations between local and cloud environment since the service runtime will take care of it. At the end of the code we will listen the application on the port retrieved from SDK as well. 1: azure.RoleEnvironment.getCurrentRoleInstance(function (error, instance) { 2: if (error) { 3: console.log("ERROR: getCurrentRoleInstance"); 4: console.log(JSON.stringify(error)); 5: } 6: else { 7: console.log(JSON.stringify(instance)); 8: if (instance["endpoints"] && instance["endpoints"]["nodejs"]) { 9: var endpoint = instance["endpoints"]["nodejs"]; 10: app.listen(endpoint["port"]); 11: } 12: else { 13: app.listen(8080); 14: } 15: } 16: }); But if we tested the application right now we will find that it cannot retrieve any values from service runtime. This is because by default, the entry point of this role was defined to the worker role class. In windows azure environment the service runtime will open a named pipeline to the entry point instance, so that it can connect to the runtime and retrieve values. But in this case, since the entry point was worker role and the Node.js was opened inside the role, the named pipeline was established between our worker role class and service runtime, so our Node.js application cannot use it. To fix this problem we need to open the CSDEF file under the azure project, add a new element named Runtime. Then add an element named EntryPoint which specify the Node.js command line. So that the Node.js application will have the connection to service runtime, then it’s able to read the configurations. Start the Node.js at local emulator we can find it retrieved the connections, storage account for local. And if we publish our application to azure then it works with WASD and storage service through the configurations for cloud.   Summary In this post I demonstrated how to use Windows Azure SDK for Node.js to interact with storage service, especially the table service. I also demonstrated on how to use WACS service runtime, how to retrieve the configuration settings and the endpoint information. And in order to make the service runtime available to my Node.js application I need to create an entry point element in CSDEF file and set “node.exe” as the entry point. I used five posts to introduce and demonstrate on how to run a Node.js application on Windows platform, how to use Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Cloud Service worker role to host our Node.js application. I also described how to work with other services provided by Windows Azure platform through Windows Azure SDK for Node.js. Node.js is a very new and young network application platform. But since it’s very simple and easy to learn and deploy, as well as, it utilizes single thread non-blocking IO model, Node.js became more and more popular on web application and web service development especially for those IO sensitive projects. And as Node.js is very good at scaling-out, it’s more useful on cloud computing platform. Use Node.js on Windows platform is new, too. The modules for SQL database and Windows Azure SDK are still under development and enhancement. It doesn’t support SQL parameter in “node-sqlserver”. It does support using storage connection string to create the storage client in “azure”. But Microsoft is working on make them easier to use, working on add more features and functionalities.   PS, you can download the source code here. You can download the source code of my “Copy all always” tool here.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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